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One reason to marry: so you don't have to date, waiting to see when men would deign to call, or come. All through the animal kingdom, males worshipped at the throne of Estrus. But humankind? Let a woman bat a lash and the man ran. She tried to keep herself from twirling, like her son's spin-top ballpoint pen, in widening gyres over these doubts. In another time zone there was a mouth, attached to a man. Below there were other parts which would also fit, or not. This was all she knew, all she was going to know. Now ditch script, go w/flow.
Yet! The options were finite, as any woman of sound mind knew (and she surely qualified, even if walking around the office greased up like a cake pan). She could survey the options, from best to worst:
- They turn out to be as fantastically matched as instinct had suggested. Since a major new client brings him to her city regularly, they are able to see each other often with logistical ease — virtually a bonus marriage, continuing to unfold and delight without hindering their responsible enjoyment of their respective primary families.
- They screw, ecstatically at first then with decreasing degrees of satisfaction, until they cease and desist, having "learned something."
- While they love each other, one or both fails to properly compartmentalize — probably her. One or both marriages breaks up — probably hers. She becomes that common casualty, the single mother in middle age.
- After many lonely years, to the delight of her children, she and her husband reunite, their bond all the stronger for the travail.
- After many lonely years of nobly focusing on her childrens' emotional health, she meets and marries
- A craggy but kind film star
- Charles, the Prince of Wales (Camilla is deeply disappointed, but used to it)
- She and Camilla fast friends
- Her daughter marries Camilla's son (does Camilla have children?)
- A partner in the firm who was in the background always, it turns out, longing for her.
- She and ex-wife fast friends
- The sex is bad. From this bad sex she gets AIDS, and dies. Lifestyle improved by the insurance money, her husband remarries starlet. Her children don't miss her at all.
- She takes the plane and stands at the gate like an idiot. He never shows up, never even calls.
As a student she had hated making outlines, hated the way they boxed you, but aside from the jokey cameo appearances by the rich and famous this list did, in fact, prognosticate likely outcomes.
While you could choose to meander without a map, the road did, in fact, go somewhere, and your willingness to be luggage-free did not generate additional destinations; it just meant you had less to carry, and also that you might be stranded without a change of clothes. She thought of her son with his Gameboy, manically pressing buttons. Or Menu Column A and Menu Column B on old-fashioned Chinese menus, marriage like sweet-and-sour pork or moo shu pork or even escalating to something more gourmet like pork in black bean sauce — still just pork, which is why, at Chinese restaurants, one so often said Someone else order, even realizing that the success of the meal is in the harmony of the combinations; that marriage, like cooking, requires freshness, attention to detail, imagination.
Probably, she thought, he had made a similar outline. She saw him in a leather chair, trying not to think of her, trying to relax by reading a computer magazine while his wife got the kids to bed. One ad trumpeted a new software program that allowed you to write your own interactive fiction. You could name the characters, choose their pasts, send them to war or outer space. You could be sociological (she's from the wrong side of the tracks) or surreal (she's a toaster oven). Then why, with so many choices, was everything so predictable?
Because a character ordered from a Chinese menu, one trait from Column A, one from Column B, is not a person. A person is presented to you whole, immutable and unknown. You don't get to turn a person upside down and shake them to erase, as on an Etch-a-Sketch.
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©2000 Lisa Zeidner and Nerve.com, Inc.
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