She Poured Out Her Heart (5 page)

“I don't care if you believe me or not. I was thinking about my very first boyfriend, well not very first, but the first important one, and how we really did love each other but we were too young and I guess angry to know it.”

“What a woman means by ‘love' is ‘give me all your money,'” he pronounced, sneering.

“That is so unfair. And I'm sorry, I don't believe you. You wouldn't be
so”—so criminally vicious?—“upset if you and whoever she is hadn't started out with some kind of love.” The crying had clogged up her nose. She reached for another paper towel and honked into it.

“She sure didn't seem to mind driving my car. Emptying out my wallet.”

At least he was having an actual conversation, not just muttering grievances. Bonnie said, “Well, I never took anybody's money. I never went out with anybody for their money.”

Sneering again. “Then somebody got himself a good deal.”

“Wait, I get it. You think women trade sex for money! That is totally, totally insulting!”

“Yeah,” he said, but it was as if he was losing patience with talk. Maybe she should not have said “sex.”

“So you're mad because things didn't work out, and because it cost you money.”

“None of your business.”

“I'm just trying to figure things out,” Bonnie said, and then there was a silence. She would scream, if she had to. Scream and scream. He rubbed at his eyes, yawned. Maybe he was just sleepy? Or on some kind of crazy-making drugs? She should have thought of drugs right away. She watched his head nod lower, hoping he'd just nod off.

But he jerked himself awake and said, “I allow that a mother loves her child. But that's the whole of it.”

“You are so, so wrong.”

“It's all about what a woman wants to get off a man. And what a man wants to get off a woman,” he said, looking Bonnie over in a nasty way, which she pretended not to notice.

“All right, so, there's no such thing as unselfish love. There's just greed and lust and narcissism.”

“What the hell's that mean.”

“Narcissism? That's basically when you're in love with yourself.”

“You learn that in college, huh?”

Ignoring him, Bonnie said, “According to you, everybody who thinks they're in love is either a liar or a fool. That's nice. That's real healthy.”

“You can shut up any time now.”

“No, see, I get it with all you guys, love is unmanly! Because it involves loss of control, sure! Think of all the crazy things you do when you're in love, you like, humiliate yourself and talk baby talk and, well, I'm not even going to tell you some of the things I've done. It's so much easier to say it's all about sex, because that involves these fantasies of conquest and domination—”

He actually put his hands over his ears then. Bonnie went on, half inspired, half just making noise. “—and I guess that's why you go looking for women you can victimize, because there's not any emotional component, the part that's so difficult if it's a true peer relationship. I don't suppose you have any gay male friends?”

“Who you calling gay?” he said, the blurry look coming into his eyes again, and right then the door to the apartment opened and Jane and Jonah came in.

“Hey,” Jane began, and then the two of them stopped short, taking things in. They had been to the Karmelkorn shop and they were both holding bags of popcorn, as if they had just walked into a movie.

Bonnie grabbed the mildew remover, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The bottle sputtered. A little foam dribbled out and over her rubber glove, and they all stared at that.

The man cleared his throat. “OK if I use your bathroom?”

“Sure,” Bonnie said. “Thataway.”

He got up and squeezed past Jane and Jonah, who shuffled together to give him room. He left the knife on the kitchen table.

The bathroom door shut behind him. “Really?” Jane said. “I mean, he's kind of on the scabby side. Where did you meet him?”

Bonnie hissed at her to shut up. The toilet flushed. “Open the front door, stay out of his way.”

The man came back into the room, looked around at the three of
them as if he'd asked a question and was waiting for the answer. “Bye,” Bonnie said melodiously. “Take it easy.”

He took his time leaving. When he was gone, Bonnie said, “Shut the door, lock it!”

Jane looked out into the hallway, then closed the door and turned the latch. “No offense, but I kind of hope you broke up with him.”

Jonah wandered over to the kitchen table, munching popcorn. His cheeks bulged as he chewed. Bonnie supposed she ought to be grateful to him, since only a male presence had scared her visitor away. But he was so perfectly and willfully dull, such a well-kept animal. Was it wrong to expect so much more from a man? He picked up the knife. “Hey, what's this?” he said, through crumbs.

Bonnie said, “Would one of you knuckleheads call the police? Never mind. I'll do it myself.”

This was how she came to work in the field of crisis intervention.

T
hat May, for some number of days, if Jane woke at a certain time and the weather was clear, the bedroom walls were lit with her own private sunrise. The house was a rental, but the landlord allowed them to paint, and Jane had chosen this pretty cream color for the room. Now, on these mornings, the cream took on shades of apricot, rose, and gold, one melting into the other, washes and tints of unnerving beauty, the colors of heaven. Jane watched from bed, as still as if she had sighted a rare bird on a tree branch. Because it was for a few moments only, this gift of light, nothing you could hold in place. Even as she tried to fix it in her mind, make a memory of it, the sun brightened and flared, or went behind a cloud, and then it would be time to get up and go about her day.

Eric would already be up and gone, making his early hospital rounds. He was a first-year resident and he worked punishing hours. Jane had the house to herself a lot, which she understood was necessary, given the high seriousness of medicine. She was bored rather than resentful; they had not had any other kind of married life together so there was nothing else to compare it to. They were trying to put together some time off next month, a break from everything hasty and rushed and undone.

This was now her life, her world, herself. So much had changed. Even the air in her lungs felt different, breathing in so much busy newness.

T
hey had been married in cold December, the week before Christmas. December was the only free time she and Eric had to get married and move seven hundred miles away, given all the complications of Eric's work schedule. The date was the closest they could come to obliging everyone else's travel and holiday plans. Still, their families greeted the invitation with an undercurrent of exasperation. No one said it quite this way, but a wedding was one more claim on their time during this busy season.

“Don't come if you can't fit it in,” Eric told his relatives, meaning it. One of the things Jane admired about him: he said what he thought, he wasn't forever worrying about what people thought of him, like she did. Jane assured her family that it was only a little old wedding, nothing grand, and would not seriously inconvenience anyone. They were paying for everything themselves. Jane was twenty-five, Eric twenty-six. It had not seemed right to ask her parents for a wedding at this age, although it was true they did not have much money. Eric's medical school loans were going to be around for a while. But Jane did not want battles over what things cost, or her many mistaken choices regarding dress, music, food, and so on. It was surely not the last occasion her family would feel entitled to boss her around, but one of the big ones. Eric, like most grooms, just wanted to get things over with.

In the end, everyone came. They found a Methodist chapel that was available to the unchurched, along with a pastor who made the most tactful references to God, along the lines of God equals universe. There were not enough guests to fill the sanctuary, so they were seated in the choir stalls on both sides of the altar, and eyed each other like the fans of two opposing football teams. A guitarist and a fiddler, friends of theirs, served up winsome Appalachian tunes. Eric wore a suit, Jane a lace skirt and a frilled blouse. She carried a bouquet of evergreens and Christmas roses. She had one attendant, a nineteen-year-old cousin.

Bonnie had been emphatic about not standing up at the wedding. “I'll do whatever else you want. I'll laugh at your dad's jokes. I'll dance the Hokey Pokey—”

“No one will be dancing the Hokey Pokey.”

“—but I'm sorry, you know weddings make me itch. People should just go to the courthouse and recite the ordinance. Weddings are all about the commodification of women, with these awful subtexts of submission and subordination. I'm really happy for you, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Jane said. “Just show up, OK?” It was actually something of a relief not to have Bonnie as a member of the wedding party, since now she would not have to worry about Bonnie drinking too much, or wearing something with fringe or feathers, or flirting with a randy old uncle, or rather, she might still worry about such things but they would not have official, ceremonial status.

As it happened, Bonnie was no problem. She wore a printed jersey dress, drank her portion of domestic champagne from a plastic glass, and did indeed laugh at Jane's father's jokes. True, she did ask Jane, as she was making herself ready in the church basement, “Want me to talk you out of it?” But that was just another joke, ha ha, meant to steady Jane as she was being fussed over by her female relatives.

“Now Bonnie, don't even say such a thing,” said Jane's mother, dabbing at Jane's face with a Kleenex. “What was that horrible movie? With what's-her-name?”

“
Runaway Bride
,” Bonnie said. “Julia Roberts. It's all right, she really did get married in
Steel Magnolias
. Of course, later she died.”

“You're not helping,” Jane's mother said. “Don't mind her, Jane dear. She's only trying to be funny to soothe your nerves.”

Jane lifted her forearm to deflect the Kleenex. “Please don't do that, unless I have dirt on my face.” In fact Jane was, if not entirely nerveless, distracted. The day after tomorrow she and Eric were renting a U-Haul truck, loading it with their boxed belongings, and moving themselves from Chicago to Atlanta, where Eric had already begun his residency,
and Jane would start the job that had been found for her at Emory. Any honeymoon would have to be deferred. So that instead of approaching her vows in the proper bridal swoon, a part of Jane's attention was still given over to checklists with subheadings like Bank, Utilities, and Packing Tape.

Jane's mother and the attendant cousin and the cousin's mother, Jane's aunt, did their best to prod at her and perfect her, but there was no veil or train, no borrowed pearls or something blue, just Jane in her pieced-together costume, wishing, mildly, that she was not the center of attention. “Do you want a 7UP to settle your stomach?” Jane's mother asked, and Jane said no thanks, and her mother took this to mean that Jane needed something else instead, a Diet Coke? Perhaps her mouth was dry? It wouldn't do to get up there and not be able to recite her vows. “Cough drop? Maybe just an ice cube to suck on?”

“Xanax?” Bonnie offered, wriggling an eyebrow to show that she had some on her. Jane shook her head.

“Go on upstairs and tell them I'm ready.” Bonnie gave her a finger wave and headed out.

“I wish I'd thought of Xanax,” the aunt said. “It really hits the spot. All I have is aspirin. Alex, it's time to put that thing away,” she said to her daughter, who was still hooked up to her iPod.

“I'm fine,” Jane said stolidly. In her mind the fuss of getting married was just that, because the hard part of things, finding Eric, the two of them finding each other, had already been accomplished. But she did feel a tug of anxiety, wanting to see him, wanting to make sure that in spite of everything, plighting their troth, buying rings, signing leases and all the rest, he had not somehow decided he'd made a mistake and changed his mind. “Let's move,” she said, getting a good grip on her bouquet.

They passed through a hallway filled with stacks of retired hymnals. Up the stairs. Jane and the cousin hung back while their mothers took their seats. Jane tried to see around her cousin's now-unencumbered ear, saw nothing but the half-lit sanctuary and its rows of vacant pews. The
musicians took up a new tune, not “The Wedding March,” but some Scotch-Irish stand-in. Jane gave the cousin a nudge and they moved forward. And there Eric was, all dressed-up and handsome in his gray suit, outright grinning at her. Jane grinned back. The rest would be easy. A walk in the park. “Dearly beloved . . .”

Later, at the reception (pizza and homemade cake at a friend's apartment), Jane and Eric stood, arms entwined, happy, tired, gamely smiling. There was a sense that perhaps they had done something extraordinary and important, but that they would have to wait until they were alone to be certain. Eric's parents—her in-laws! She had in-laws!—kept drifting up to them and attempting conversation. Eric was their only child, and they felt bereft. “I can't believe we're going to have to spend Christmas without you,” the mother-in-law said.

“Mom, it can't be helped. Anyway, it's practically Christmas now.”

“Well it's not Christmas Christmas,” the mother-in-law said, tearily, giving Jane an aggrieved look. Jane, mortified, smiled harder.

Jane's father and brother sat on the couch, watching a basketball game while her mother roamed the kitchen, looking for things to clean. The musicians were off-duty, and someone had put on a hip-hop tape, probably trying to get rid of the parents. Bonnie strolled up to them, glass in hand. “Why don't you do the cake thing?”

The cake was chocolate, and the baker had aspired to three layers but settled for a lopsided two. Some of Eric's old soccer club friends had procured a cake topper in the shape of a soccer player fleeing, being tackled by a bride in full dress. Good old Jane laughed along with everyone else. But why was it assumed that she was the one catching Eric? Even if he was a doctor, even if that was how everybody saw it. Wasn't there some more refined tradition, in which the gentleman pursued the lady, paid her court, won her hand, and then was congratulated on his good fortune?

“We're not going to feed each other cake,” Eric announced, in case anyone was expecting it. No one seemed to be. Their friends were all
smart, modern. Not that many of them had married yet themselves, but they were not inclined to follow a lot of used-up customs like smashing cake into each other's faces, or the groom taking off the bride's garter, even if Jane had worn such a thing as a garter. Jane supposed she might have to throw her bouquet, though there wasn't much clearance in the apartment. She would worry about that later, along with everything else she had to worry about. Now she concentrated on cutting an acceptable slice of cake, Eric's hand on the knife alongside her own. The cake was delicious, everyone agreed, and if it was a bit crumbly, that didn't interfere with taste.

The family members ate their cake and began to migrate doorward. “Call us,” Jane's mother said, kissing her. “Oh, I wish you weren't going so far away!”

Oh, but she was glad she was. She was ready to be someone else, not the focus of everyone's worry and exasperation, Jane the difficult, the delicate, the droopy. Someone she could only be in her new estate, one half of this new and splendid creature, a married couple.

The parents, both sets of them, shook hands with each other and said they'd be seeing each other again before too long, and then retreated to their own cars to nurse their private opinions of each other. Behind them, the party loosened up, grew louder. Jane took off her shoes, Eric his tie, and when a slower, smokier song came on, they danced in the center of the small living room, to general applause.

They collapsed onto the couch, breathless, happy, beginning to think about the end of the evening, of going home together to the packed-up apartment and making love. They squeezed hands, meaning they wouldn't stay that much longer.

The best man, one of Eric's med school friends, said that he guessed he should propose a toast. That was what you did at weddings, even one as marginally traditional as this one. “To Eric and Jane,” he announced, holding his plastic cup on high. He was a little drunk, as were they all. “They go together like, wait, I got this. Like . . .” He shook his head owlishly.

“Like Bonnie and Clyde,” someone suggested.

“No, not them.”

“Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. And maybe Trigger.”

“You guys, just let me finish, OK?” The best man lowered his glass to take a drink, then stopped himself and raised it again. “Eric, Jane, the two of you are meant to be together, because who else would put up with Eric? Jane, don't let him get away with any shit. I know you think he's a nice guy, but soon the scales will fall from your eyes. Jane, I don't know you that well, but there's probably something wrong with you too.”

Somebody said, “What exactly are we drinking to here?”

“Alcohol and happiness,” the best man declared, but the group voted to edit that to just happiness.

“To happiness!” They toasted, drank, and cheered. The maid of honor had departed along with her mother, but Bonnie stood up next.

“I'd give you guys advice, but you can sum it all up as: ‘Men are stupid, women are crazy!'”

And they all drank to that too. Bonnie sat down next to Jane on the couch. She'd been dancing and she smelled of cologne and sweat. Her hair had broken loose from any gels or sprays and assumed its default position, falling into her eyes. “So how does it feel?”

“Brand new,” Jane said. But it was more than that; she felt as if she were carrying something both heavy and fragile, and if she lost her grip, it would shatter. “God, I wish we weren't moving right away,” she said, because she didn't want to talk about what was closest and keenest, so she fell back into perfunctory complaints. “There's still so much to do.”