Eat the Damn Cake

The first time I called Bear my husband was on the phone with Roberto, the sound and lights guy from the venue. I was asking him if he’d seen Bear’s blood kit. A little black bag with the blood machine and the test strips, the finger pricker*, a syringe, and a vial of insulin.

“I think that we—that my husband—forgot his blood kit.”

“You said it,” said Bear, from beside me. He was driving. And laughing at me a little. “Nice. The first time. Remember how the first time you called me your fiancé was to the computer repairman?”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

“What?” said Roberto. “Can you hold on a second? Wait– I’ll call you back.”

He didn’t call me back. Which was fine. Bear could stick his finger with a needle. He kept telling me how he’d gotten really good at it. I kept averting my eyes when he did it. We were on our honeymoon. We drove through the Hamptons (well, some of them, anyway), and out to Montauk. Everything was closed. There were no celebrities or really rich people to be seen. But then, the really rich people have a habit of disguising themselves as not-so-rich people in windblown rustic couture in that area. So who knows.

“Ground zero, baby,” said Bear, “for the Pottery Barn revolution!”

It really was. There were these little weatherworn beach shanties that were selling for a million dollars, and a confused looking yoga center sprouting in between the old general store and the bait and tackle shop.

At our hotel, there was a blanket on the bed that I’d definitely registered for at Pottery Barn. In fact, unbeknownst to me at the time, the same blanket was waiting for us back in the city, in a box by our door.

We were on our honeymoon. The wedding was over. The vomiting was over (see the last post). The planning was over. We were alone in the windblown, gently rustic quiet of Montauk (which the sweatshirts refer cheerfully to as “the end,” because it is located at the very tip of Long Island). We drove to a beach and we sat on the sand in our jeans and sweaters. It was just us. Even the ocean was respectfully softspoken. The beach backed up to dunes that mounded thickly and were packed into bluffs with sharp, untamed edges. Stretches of coarse, reddish scrub brush grew low and defensive over the sandy earth. We were tiny and the world was too big to ever even come close to comprehending.

I was reading Pride and Prejudice aloud. Mr. Fitzwilliam (what a name!) Darcy was proposing to Elizabeth Bennet in the parlor of the Collins’s comfortable little home at the edge of Rosings Park. She would have none of it, and understandably so. Bear and I thought Mr. Darcy was hilariously awkward. He never knew what to say. That’s what makes the love story so charming. He’s a dork. And that is what the Texan woman who wrote Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (the amazingly terrible romance novel written in the last decade or so as an imagined sequel to the classic) clearly does not understand. She keeps describing him as dashing and confident and bold. And also with giant muscles and a disarming suaveness and a decided mastery of the bedchamber and all of its secrets. I’m offended, just thinking about it. But I wasn’t thinking about it there, on the autumnal deserted beach on my honeymoon. I wasn’t really thinking about anything.

Back in the hotel room, we found ourselves watching some guys on the History Channel describe in great detail how the arches of the many impressive, ancient cathedrals of the world were made possible by the invention of flying buttresses. And then we watched different men on the History Channel describe which of the world’s airports were the most “extreme.” The one at the base of Mount Everest won first place. A guy there was saying, “Oh yes, it is very extreme.” We believed him unhesitatingly.

Then I felt like reading Stephen King for the first time in my life. So we got a sample of It on Bear’s Kindle, and we read that until the battery died. Can you believe that this guy basically created our widespread cultural fear of clowns? That is impressive.

“Having a good honeymoon?” asked Bear.

“Yeah, it’s great!” I said. “How about you?”

“Yeah! It’s really good.”

“I’m bored,” I said.

“Me too.”

We were oddly quiet with each other. The hotel was oddly quiet in the off-season. The restaurant was closed. The beach was oddly quiet, with no one on it. The whole place felt as though it had taken a big breath and was holding it, listening with all its might.

The thing was, we were married, but suddenly neither of us knew what being married meant. It wasn’t that we’d known beforehand. It was that we hadn’t had to think about it very diligently or thoroughly. And now, we were it, so we had to think about it. But we didn’t know what to think. Because the wedding is really such a vanishingly small part of being married. And we had just agreed to forever, without having any way of knowing what forever would contain. We had agreed that it would contain one another, but it was a little like being two little boats, floating in the sound, brushing sides. Really, we could end up anywhere.

And lying in bed, late at night, I suddenly thought about dying. Something else I can’t even come close to understanding. And the only thing that made the thought of death bearable was, well, Bear. It was like an infinite emptiness was opening in front of me, and I was standing on the very edge, holding on to him. I wondered how I could concern myself with things like whether or not I should cut my hair and if that might be a pimple growing on the side of my nose, when life was so terrifyingly huge and excruciatingly brief.

By the time we got back to the city, I was thinking about how much I wanted to eat a cheese steak. And how many things I’d promised myself I’d do “after the wedding.” And we were back to laughing at the things we do together that are too immature and embarrassing to relate.

But for a moment, standing on a bluff by the ocean, I had felt strangely connected to humanity. I tried to imagine the Native Americans who’d been here. And then the frightened, dogmatic, determined settlers. What their lives must’ve been like, on the edge of this silent blue emptiness. I thought that they probably also fell in love.

*  *  *  *

Un-roast: Today I love the way I look small next to Bear, but big next to plenty of people, so I can always go any number of ways.

P.S. Check out AlisonM at Running From, Running To.  She’s doing regular un-roasts on her blog!

P.P.S. Awesome post about weight gain and, you know, having a body, from Virginia at Beauty Schooled.

*When I asked the pharmacist at Rite Aid if there was a better name for the “finger pricker,” he said, “Not really. I think it’s called ‘the lancing device.’” Someone needs to come up with something better, there.