Wedding Cake for Breakfast (15 page)

At half past two, I turned off the TV.

Why did we have to be so different from everyone else?
I thought.
Maybe if we'd had a normal wedding and a normal honeymoon, this wouldn't be happening to us.

I wondered if this was what our future looked like. Smelled like.

My wedding ring didn't glint in this light.

Just before I crawled into bed next to him, I looked out the window. Across the street, lighted by a single country streetlamp, was a sign that said,
Welcome to the Devil's Playground, day passes $5.

• • • • • • • •

We woke the next morning to sunshine and birdsong, to a magical reprieve from the illness—a potent flu bug, it turns out—that would strike our growing baby and me the moment we set foot back in our home in Massachusetts. Both of us had welts up and down our legs from the then-apparent infestation of bedbugs in the mattress, but we smiled at each other. It was our first morning as husband and wife, and after a night like the previous one, that meant something to both of us.

We had weathered our first storm, and we were all right.

All of the fears we shared and didn't share about marriage seemed to dissipate while we lay in that bed together, occasionally scratching our welts, wishing for a bulk-size bottle of calamine lotion, and eating stale Twizzlers. Despite a botched trip to get rings, a wedding with lilac vows, and a bout of violent illness, we were still us.

During our first year together and all the years thereafter, we've never given that up, which is the main reason I believe we have a successful marriage. It's how we've been able to endure (often out-endure) bitter arguments, financial hardships, and great loss. Other people we know love each other; we love us, and it's made all the difference.

Later that day, my husband played the banjo beautifully, and our friends were married beneath a bright June sun. I piled my plate with lobster tails and prime rib, and we danced under a strand of paper lanterns late into the night. It was lovely.

Did we deserve all that trouble for monkeying with tradition? Some people would say yes. Some would say no. Would we have stayed at the charming motel up the road if we could have? Absolutely.

But it's the Devil's Playground that we took pictures of before we drove home: a nature park complete with a creek and fish and mud.

That morning, we paid our five dollars and walked along the gravel drive to the water. My husband took a picture of me, and I took one of him.

In them, we look ragged but happy. We look like us.

Just before we put the camera away and dipped our toes into the murky water, we hesitated on the bank of the creek for the slightest moment.

“Do you think it's cold?” I said.

“Refreshing,” my husband said.

I smiled. My husband reached for my hand. All at once we sprang forward.

The Last Honeymoon

SUSAN SHAPIRO

Since Aaron wasn't into travel adventures, I planned our first vacation as husband and wife myself, expecting Jamaica to be as romantic and exotic as I remembered. Unfortunately everything went wrong from the moment we landed. As we toted huge duffel bags I'd overpacked through slow-moving customs, a tall, skinny blonde ran up to hug my new husband. Laura was his best pal's old girlfriend. What a coincidence—she was also honeymooning here! Ignoring her new bald spouse, she glommed onto Aaron, asking him about his ex-fiancée (they used to double-date). This taller, thinner, younger, lighter female from Aaron's past reminded me that at thirty-five, I was no longer a babe. Especially in ninety-five-degree heat after a four-hour flight into this rickety foreign airport.

In the cab to our hotel, I scanned Ocho Rios, which the travel agent had suggested. It was filled with fancy hotels, not my scene. You couldn't walk to a mango stand or art fair here like in the cooler city of Negril, where I'd previously stayed. I felt claustrophobically marooned at our four-star resort—where suntan lotion was twenty dollars and everything closed at 9 p.m. Our tiny room had a not-so-king-size bed, too small for a six-foot-four giant and his five-foot-seven bride. Switching to a suite on a lower floor, we were awoken at 8 a.m. with Bob Marley blaring at the pool right outside our room.

The buffet meals and luaus with roasted pigs included in the room rate felt hokey, filled with tourists my parents' age. I wanted to stick to my Atkins eating plan and exercise. But Aaron didn't want to go hiking, snorkeling, or waterskiing. He preferred to relax, read, drink banana rum punch, and indulge in meals of codfish fritters, fried sweet plantain chips, coco bread, rice bread, and Jamaican bread pudding—all taboo on my diet. I smoked more, since cigarettes were an appetite suppressant. Aaron knew I was a nicotine addict during our entire six year off-and-on courtship. But now he complained about the smell of my cigarettes. Constantly. I took to puffing away outside, at the beach.

“Come in the water with me,” I begged.

“I don't swim,” he said, his pale face hidden by the
New York Times,
a bunch of books under his chair.

Comparing it to my last trip here made it clear: I'd chosen the wrong groom.

• • • • • • • •

“This is like a honeymoon,” I'd told my boyfriend George, seven years earlier.

We were lying on the white sand during our ten picturesque days on the cliffs of Jamaica in a ten-dollar-a-day cabin with no electricity he'd found. George put away my books, took me snorkeling and waterskiing, and taught me to swim the butterfly. We were twenty-eight-year-old Greenwich Village rebels obsessed with art (I was a poet; he was into theater), escaping our day jobs. George was a tan, lean, athletic globe-trotter with dark hair and thick glasses, a Jewish Clark Kent. He made me feel younger, lighter, casually chic, like a Ralph Lauren magazine spread. Our last night in Negril we drank Red Stripe, smoked ganja on the beach. In a mock ceremony, he placed a bone ring on my finger in front of a blazing fire. Then we went skinny-dipping in the ocean. George was a torpedo in the water; I couldn't keep up with him.

Back in New York, we slept together on my gray futon, lodged on the wooden bed frame he gave me from his
Hamlet
set. Frustrated with work, he planned more exotic trips. I had bigger Manhattan ambitions and urged him to do theater rather than just teach at the Brooklyn college close to where he grew up. I hooked him up with producers from the Kitchen and La Mama. All that came of it was his best compliment: “If I'd met you in high school, I would have been a Broadway director.”

At literary events I'd take him to, George was shy. In bed, he was aggressive, preferring his place and the lights on. Fooling around one night, he asked why I'd shut the lamp and my eyes. I admitted that I was getting hot picturing him ravishing a female stranger.

“Then you're not really with me,” he accused. “It's like you're not here.”

From then on I kept my eyes open—but only literally. It turned out my fantasy was prophetic. When I learned he was sleeping with a student actress from his school play, I left him, feeling betrayed. He was still calling when a girlfriend fixed me up with Aaron, a TV writer she called “a major mensch.”

Aaron was big, sweet, smart, messy, easygoing, and warm, wearing jeans, sneakers, and untucked flannel shirts—the anti-George. He reminded me of my burly brothers in the Midwest. He had a handsome face and bushy head of salt-and-pepper curls I liked running my fingers through. But he was eleven years older, four inches taller, and thirty pounds heavier than the slighter-built George, whom I was still hung up on. I wondered if, like the Joni Mitchell song, Aaron would take me like I was, “strung out on another man.”

Aaron said his old girlfriend still phoned him and he wasn't ready either, no pressure, no rush to bed. Turned out he was a great kisser and bear hugger who made so many dark hilarious jokes about decapitation and serial killers I had to tell him to shut up or I couldn't concentrate on making out. He called me gorgeous; I joked that our age difference made me eleven years hotter than I was. Both fast-talking obsessive readers and newspaper addicts, we spent Saturday night lying around with four New York papers on the couch at midnight, only our feet touching. He loved my freelance paperback column, which George had barely noticed. Every weekend, Aaron took me to dinner, mentioning which book sounded fascinating. I'd keep the advance galley, giving him the hardcover copy on our next date.

I'd grown up with a Jewish doctor dad in West Bloomfield, while Aaron grew up with a Jewish judge father in Westchester. We were from the same family, we joked. Still, Aaron seemed too old, staid, slow, and conservative. He wouldn't work out with me, didn't like healthy food, traveling, or beaches. After a few months of dating, I complained that he wasn't my type.

“Your type is neurotic, self-destructive, and not interested in you. Keep seeing Aaron,” said the (happily married) friend who'd set us up. So I did. Aaron was honest, loyal, and kind. But I talked, wrote, and walked fast, while he was so snail-paced, a crony had ironically nicknamed him “Flash.”

When he took a television job in L.A., I realized I didn't want to lose him and jumped his bones. After several years of bicoastal dating, I asked, “What are you waiting for, Social Security?” By the time he proposed, I was thirty-five. I wanted to tie the knot in a black gown at a late-night bohemian soiree surrounded by poet and artist friends. My mother had traditional ideas for her only daughter that Aaron said we should honor. So I was married twice the summer of 1996, in two weddings with two dresses in two different cities. The black wedding was officiated by Aaron's father, the judge, in a SoHo loft. The white wedding was led by my parents' rabbi at their Michigan country club.

For our honeymoon, I chose Jamaica because it wasn't too far away or terribly expensive. I had poignant recollections of my trip there with George. Maybe subconsciously I hoped to trump those memories with a real honeymoon beside a faithful guy who'd given me a real ring and commitment. Alas, my honeymoon with Aaron seemed like a bad sitcom and left me with more doubts.

There was room for the new seashells I'd gathered in the handmade box I'd bought last time. But for the first year of our union, nothing else fit. Aaron and I argued about his messiness, his crazy TV/film hours, about having children. Aaron wound up traveling the globe when he was sent to Japan, Korea, and Toronto for animation projects—without me. I left my day job to be a full-time journalist who taught popular classes at night, but I was lonely.

When I was asked to speak at the Brooklyn college where George taught, I wanted to remeet him. Was he still youthful and athletic? Luckily I was nothing like the chain-smoking mess George had last seen crying hysterically on the street corner, after he said he was sleeping with Diana, the wannabe actress.

I feared I'd become more bourgeois, heavier, made up, wearing the diamond ring and watch my husband had bought me. (Had I worn Aaron's gifts to remind me of his generosity, or that I was taken?) I asked a student where the journalism department was. She looked at me, pointed, and said, “That way, ma'am.” I felt old and sweaty.

Aside from shorter hair, George looked startlingly the same. When we'd dated, I'd become thinner, tanner, more athletic, turning into him, wearing his uniform: faded jeans and crisp white shirts. Someone once stopped us on the street to say what a beautiful couple we made. Not a compelling reason to pledge your life to somebody. Yet for a cerebral girl usually locked in her mind, our year together still seemed dazzling.

“Time for coffee?” I asked him after my talk.

“You don't drink coffee,” he remembered. “How about a campus tour?”

“Sure, why not?” I said casually. He didn't have to know that every morning for a year after he left, I opened my eyes, saw he wasn't there, and started crying. That was why it took me so long to sleep with Aaron; there had been a love overlap.

I learned that George's wife was Melissa, a Brooklyn teacher my age, not the Diana Slut of my old diaries. Aaron and I had beaten them to the altar. George took a picture from his wallet of his son. Aaron and I were childless; George's baby seemed to trump me. George asked about my parents, who didn't like him since his visit to the Midwest, where he'd slept in a tent on our lawn. He was continuing on to the Belize jungle and wanted to test the equipment he'd carried with him in his backpack.

I recalled that when Aaron first came to Michigan, he'd schlepped Katz's Deli pickles, pastrami, and chopped liver on the plane as a present for my parents—who'd adored him from the start. My three brothers, who'd seen Aaron's TV shows, joked that they liked him more than they liked me. Since unlike me, Aaron would eat anything, they took him for Michigan food delicacies, from Detroit's Coney Island hot dogs to Lebanese baba ghanoush to Mongolian barbecue.

“Did you notice I quit smoking?” I asked George.

“I stopped five years ago,” he said.

I had been smoke-free for only six months; he'd won that one, too.

I felt competitive and kept comparing my old boyfriend with me and my new husband. When I'd said “I do,” I was following my brain, my friends, my family, my therapist. But I'd never fully recovered from the George heartbreak. I told myself I was the overly sensitive type who never got over anything. When I had last-minute doubts, I got down the aisle by realizing that if it didn't work out, I'd rather my obituary said “divorced” than “never been married.”

I felt like I'd never see George again. Yet seven years after our split, there was unfinished business. “So what really happened between us?” I asked.

“Oh, Sue,” he said. “I was so immature and stupid and incapable back then.”

That felt better than his previous final words, after he'd found Diana, lost his Jane Street sublet, and called to say, “I want my bed frame back.” Enraged that he'd cared more about twenty dollars' worth of wood than me, I'd said, “I'll burn it on your lawn.”

Now I added, “In retrospect, we were too different,” wishing I had a cigarette.

Before I left, George threw out nice images. The black bikini I wore in Negril. The poem I'd written where George was a bronzed fish, fluttering around the deep. He leaped off white cliffs, shouted, “Eels! Barracudas!” and brought back treasures: striped shells, brain coral. I was sunburned, hiding in the shade with a stack of books, reading too much, the way Aaron did.

“Aaron and I went to Jamaica on our honeymoon,” I let slip.

“Yeah, I've been back a million times,” George retaliated.

Right before we split up, I'd visited George at work. Hand in hand in the moonlight, he'd shown me a line of houses on the water and said, “Wouldn't it be amazing to live in a brownstone here someday?”

“I didn't leave Michigan to live in Brooklyn,” I'd said, without thinking. Now I understood what my words meant. George was from Brooklyn; his wife was, too. So was Diana, whom he'd given a role in his play. If I'd wanted to be in Brooklyn drama, could I have wed George? Suddenly it seemed my choice to move on, not his. Maybe it was the feeling of being a young, athletic hippie-artist-rebel that I missed more than I missed him.

“It's nice to see you back in Brooklyn,” George said.

I was glad to reconnect, with the benefit of time, wisdom, and a wedding ring. When the car service arrived I hugged him good-bye, then boarded my black chariot back to Manhattan.

“The campus is on the water,” I told Aaron later that night, sliding next to him on the couch, wishing he liked to swim. “It's kind of pretty.”

Aaron put his arm around me, kissed me on the lips. “Can't see you in Brooklyn,” he said.

• • • • • • • •

Last night, reading the newspapers with my feet on Aaron's lap as he gave me a blissful foot massage with his warm hands, I suggested a foreign vacation for our upcoming fifteenth anniversary.

“Work is too busy in July,” he mumbled.

About to be upset, I remembered that Aaron had accompanied me on the Los Angeles leg of my book tour when I'd needed him, even though he hated L.A. We'd flown to Chicago when I was worried about my youngest brother, Michael, leaving his job. Aaron canceled work commitments last second to hop a plane to Michigan when my father had a heart attack, the same way he'd rushed to Westchester when his father was in the hospital. To take care of people he loved, he'd travel, fast, with no hesitation. Meanwhile I was the one who had taken my time to fall madly in love and lust with my mate.

Now I looked around our Manhattan apartment, filled with joy. Pictures of us lined the shelves next to Aaron's TV/film scripts and my books, which he'd help me go from reading to reviewing to writing. I felt so thankful that I'd wound up with the right husband, a man who flunked honeymoons but aced marriage.