What We Have (2 page)

Once I’d found love, though, I was good to go. I was thirty-one when Jacques and I got married. The way I saw it, we had four years—two per baby.

The trick was not to lose focus. I’m a born planner—I love thinking ahead. Jacques, on the other hand, thinks planning and over-planning are more or less the same thing. By the time I realized how great a premium he puts on spontaneity, we were already in love, and what could we do? Forget that he’s from South Africa and I’m from Detroit, or that he loves numbers and newspapers, and I love poetry. The real difference between us is how we deal with the future. It’s like the Montagues and the Capulets, and as long as we’re together (which given that we’ve promised each other “till-death-do-us-part,” I hope is for many, many years), this aspect of our life together will drive us both to distraction.

Jacques and I may live together, but we inhabit different time zones. Say it’s twenty to eight, for instance, and we’ve got dinner reservations downtown at eight. Jacques will be upstairs dreamily flipping through the pages of the
Boston Globe
, still in his sweats, languid, oblivious to any sense of impending deadline. Whereas I’ll have been ready, pacing, fingers tapping, for at least half an hour. Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, Jacques feels early and I feel late. He claims it’s a northern hemisphere/southern hemisphere issue. We grew up with different frames of reference—when I think north, he thinks south; when I think winter, he thinks summer; the constellations that show up in his dreams are unfamiliar to me.

Maybe it’s geographic or genetic. Maybe it’s just who we are. All I know is, Jacques likes letting things unfold, and I like pinning them down. He likes to “wait and see”—his personal motto—and I like to plan. I
like
knowing where we’re going on vacation next August or how it feels, all air-conditioned and unpressured, getting to the airport an hour before you have to. Time to buy Lifesavers, to browse the magazines. It’s the
pre
in me.

Jacques is more
post
than
pre
. Maybe even
anti
.

We didn’t know this about each other right away. I was actually running late when we met, and Jacques was early. Friday afternoon traffic had kept me trapped in a taxi three blocks from Boston’s South Station while he, fresh from the Red Line, fell into one of the last available seats on the southbound
Yankee Clipper
.

It was a strange period for me. I was anxious about the job market, and to compensate, I’d been trying to adopt a devil-may-care approach to the whole process. Whenever anyone asked me about it, I was offhand, blasé. But it felt unnatural, like trying to tell a joke in another language. After long discussions with my advisors, I sent off applications for jobs in every English department hiring in my field—thirty in total. There were no jobs in Boston. Most were west of the Mississippi, in obscure locations like Lubbock, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona. I pictured myself, the lone single woman, making my way through Safeway with a cartful of prewashed lettuce.

Georgetown, near my sister Julie and her husband, Jon, seemed like the ideal option on the eastern seaboard, and it happened to be the only place I knew a single soul. Right from the start, that was the job I wanted, even though I knew it was wrong to fixate on one position. My advisors were always reminding us not to be “bicoastal.” We were supposed to be like missionaries, grateful for any crumb. Who cared where you lived if you got to teach seventeenth-century literature three days a week?

Actually,
I
did, but I tried to keep this to myself. Maybe it was time for a change. I was sick of the Northeast. I was recovering from a bad relationship with a graduate student in history who used to make me listen while he read out loud to me from his dissertation on war. I figured I could use a fresh start.

If I got the job in Tempe, I could buy southwestern pottery, wear turquoise. I’d reinvent myself, save up for a pony.

Bolstered by my feigned open-mindedness, I sent my applications off Express Mail and headed down to Philly to visit Annie. Friday, five o’clock, Amtrak. Rumpled and irritated, I fell into the last seat as the train was lurching away from the station—no time for Lifesavers, let alone magazines. I didn’t notice Jacques, half dozing against the window, until I’d finished stuffing my book bag under the seat. Then I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Dark beard, beautiful gabardine suit. He was half asleep, and I had to do a lot of throat clearing and elbow bumping to wake him up.

Once he opened his eyes, I was transfixed. He was like a magnetic field; I felt this extraordinary pull in his direction. I know this sounds crazy, but it’s true: I looked at him and thought,
This is it. This is the man I’m going to marry.

“You can’t be serious,” Annie said, when I told her that later. “He was
asleep
.”

“I’m telling you how I felt,” I said, unapologetic. I’d been reading Petrarch that week and was steeped in neo-Platonic longing.

Besides, Jacques hadn’t stayed asleep. We talked all the way from Boston to Penn Station—his stop; he was on his way to a conference in New York for the weekend. Four and a half heavenly hours. Time felt slowed down, then speeded up; everything seemed both to matter and suddenly not to. Jacques has a beautiful, lilting South African accent, and I was enchanted by his voice.

“He could’ve been saying anything,” Julie objected, going over the encounter with me later on the phone. “He could’ve been talking about the weather! You’re smitten with an
accent
.”

But the accent was only part of it. Mostly, I was spellbound by the sense between us of same and different. In one way, Jacques and I seemed like opposites. He worked downtown—computers and finance—and owned his own house, complete with a small yard and a pear tree. I was still in grad school, living in a dorm in exchange for writing fellowship letters for scholar-athletes. But we had an instant sense of shared values—what Malcolm Gladwell calls a “blink” moment. Jacques couldn’t believe I was writing a children’s book about a boy named Mordecai. Mordecai! He had an uncle named that!

We both had grandparents from Lithuania. We’d both had Labrador retrievers as children. We both loved Thai food, and political cartoons, and were both down at the Charles River early every morning—Jacques to ride his bike, me to go running.

Our birthdays were one day apart in May. A year and a day, to be exact, since he’s a year older. 366 days. “Do you know what three hundred and sixty-six is?” I asked Julie, who still sounded skeptical.

“I think you’re going to tell me,” she said.

Three hundred and sixty-six happens to be the number of love poems Petrarch wrote to Laura in
The Canzoniere
. One for each day of the year, and then one more, to represent perfection. Perfection
plus
.

I was smitten, and it wasn’t just Jacques’s accent. I loved everything about him. I loved how tender he sounded when he talked about taking care of his tiny house, with its postage stamp of lawn and its burnished pears. It reminded me of the Little Prince swabbing out his miniature volcano each night, and in fact, Jacques looked to me like a dark-haired version of the Little Prince, a mop of curls and eyes an extraterrestrial shade of blue. By the time we reached New York, we’d exchanged phone numbers. When he got off at Penn Station, we waved passionately, like Yuri and Lara in
Dr. Zhivago
. The next week, back in Boston, he called me up, sounding shy, and asked me to meet him in the Square for dinner. The next night, too. By the following week, we were spending almost every evening together. “That was fast,” Annie observed dryly, when I spent half my time at the English job fair that December phoning Jacques to report how my interviews had gone, and by January he was coming with me to visit universities where I had callback interviews. I didn’t even pretend to be open-minded anymore. I didn’t want to be in Tempe or Lubbock. I wanted to stay as close to Boston as possible. Georgetown, a short flight away, was by now my clear first choice. It also happened to be the best place for Jacques, if he were to leave Boston and come with me. That was a big if—it was way too soon for planning, as I reminded my mother and my sisters, one at a time. Sara, in a different time zone and preoccupied with Geoff and her daughters, was long out of this phase of life. But Julie zeroed right in.

“It’s too soon for any of that,” I said.

“Hah,” Julie said back.

She was on to me. Of course I was planning—I couldn’t help myself.

I could see two different versions of the future. One was craggy and dim, hard to make out, and it scared me.

The other was lit up from underneath, sparkly. Later that spring, in a bay in St. Kitts, Jacques taught me how to snorkel. I’d never done this as a child—my father doesn’t swim, and my mother hated getting her hair wet. At first I kept spluttering to the surface, afraid I was running out of air, but Jacques just held on and tugged me through the shimmery water, squeezing my hand every once in a while to signal whenever there was something just ahead. We saw fish of every gem-like hue: yellow, vermillion, sapphire blue. If you didn’t think about it, if you just kept scissoring forward through the water, trusting your snorkel, there was this whole breathtaking world.

That’s how I pictured the future I hoped for, being with Jacques. Luminous, shot through with sparks of unexpected color.

 

JACQUES CAME DOWN TO DC
with me for my callback interview. The night after I gave my job talk at Georgetown, we met Julie and Jon for dinner in Adams Morgan. Halfway through the appetizers, Julie pulled me into the bathroom to tell me what she thought of him.

Julie had never liked anyone I’d gone out with before. She’d actually threatened to have me committed if I kept seeing the history grad student, who’d once spent a whole Thanksgiving dinner lecturing her on Stalin. Jacques, though . . . I waited, nervous. Julie was the first family member to meet him.

“His accent is nice,” she said slowly, head to one side, as if deliberating.

I grabbed her arm. “Come on! What do you think?”

She burst out laughing. “I think he’s great,” she said.

She liked his twinkly eyes. And his sense of humor.

“That’s important,” she reminded me. “You have to have a sense of humor to survive Mom and Dad.”

I nodded, afraid to agree. I didn’t want to jinx this.

Julie, on the other hand, was in fast-forward mode. “You guys
have
to move here,” she said. “You have to teach at Georgetown!” She’d been living in DC since law school, and she was sure we’d love it. It was a great city! Completely livable! Everything she said seemed to end in an exclamation point. They’d help us get settled! We could live with them while we were looking for a house!

Julie has always been ahead of me, planning-wise. If I’m type A minus (my mother’s term), she’s type A plus. “You guys can get married and get a place near us and we can raise our kids together!” she added under her breath, halfway back to the table.

To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind. But I was trying to put the brakes on. I was only here for a callback, I reminded myself. Jacques and I had only been seeing each other since October. Things couldn’t happen that fast. Could they?

Sometimes, life goes your way. Miracle of miracles, I got
two
job offers. And one was from Georgetown. I was euphoric.

Back in Cambridge, one of my thesis advisors told me I had to turn Georgetown down. She closed her office door, paced back and forth, and explained that the other offer—not Lubbock, not Tempe, but a research university in the Northwest—was more prestigious. It had PhD students! She explained to me how it worked: You trained your PhD students and they went off and made a name for themselves, which reflected well on you. That was what I was supposed to be doing now—reflecting well on
her
after all her years of training me. It should have been clear to me that the bigger university was the better option. She seemed irritated with me, like I’d failed an important test. But I still had time to take the right offer and make up for it.

Up until this point, I’d always done whatever my professors told me. But I didn’t want to move out West. I didn’t want the big university with the lecture classes. It seemed like another planet to me: cold and distant, rimmed with phosphorescent highways.

I didn’t just want a job—I wanted a whole life.

I took the Georgetown job. My first advisor stopped talking to me, but I still had my other advisor, who—her own office door closed—told me to take the job that I thought would make me happy.

Bit by bit, Jacques and I started making plans. Moving speeded everything up.

By March he was talking about coming with me, and by summer he’d sold his house (pear tree and all) and we were on our way.

We crammed a lot into a short period of time: flying to Michigan so he could meet my parents; renting a sweet, mildewy cottage on Buzzards Bay so we could practice living together; flying to South Africa and spending a week on his parents’ farm north of Johannesburg, trying not to step on scorpions and watching baboons run in the hills behind their rondavel.

In August we drove down to DC, everything we owned squashed in the rented U-Haul behind us, Dave Brubeck booming on the stereo. I had a real estate agent lined up waiting to show us houses. We were in our honeymoon phase, though technically we weren’t married yet, and Jacques still found my efficiency endearing. He didn’t realize I was just in warm-up mode. I was only thirty—we still had lots of time.

 

FOR THOSE FIRST MONTHS, WASHINGTON
felt charmed to us. It was a place of lucky, unasked-for coincidences—we could get good seats to shows last minute, it was easy to find parking, the people who dropped by turned into friends. The luck had to be coming from Jacques, since my family has never been lucky. But who could tell? Some of my natural anxiety seemed to be lifting. Maybe Jacques’s expansive, spontaneous worldview was rubbing off on me. Moving to a new city without a place to live . . . “
Wow
,” was all Julie could say. (She and Jon, for one thing, were putting us up until the perfect spot turned up.) For my family, “last minute” has always been tantamount to chaos. Jacques, for his part, just assumed things would go our way.