“I’m sorry the diamond is so small,” I said.
“It’s perfect,” she said, putting the ring on. “You picked it out for me, and so it’s perfect.”
“I can’t believe I get to be married to you.”
“No, I’m the lucky one. I know I’m not an easy person.”
“I love your difficulty.”
“Oh, you’re perfect, you’re perfect, you’re perfect!” She kissed me all over my face, and we made love again. The ring on her finger had magical powers. I was fucking my betrothed, there was a new dimension to the joy of it, an immeasurably deeper chasm into which to throw my self, and no end to the falling. Even when I finished, I kept falling. Anabel cried softly — with pure happiness, she said. What I now see is a pair of kids who’d been snorting the powder for a year, losing their connections to reality one by one and becoming (at least in my case) depressed about it. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein? But in the moment all I was aware of was the rush the ring brought. While it lasted, I gathered my courage and asked Anabel to come with me to Denver for Christmas, announce our engagement, and give my mother another chance. To my delight, Anabel not only didn’t resist but smothered me with kisses, saying she’d do anything for me now, anything, anything.
In her own way, she tried. She was prepared to like my mother if my mother would appreciate her. She even bought her own separate Christmas presents for her — a volume of Simone de Beauvoir, some fruit-scented soaps, a lovely old brass pepper mill — and when we got to Denver she was good about offering to help my mother in the kitchen. But my mother, still traumatized by “A River of Meat,” declined the offers. She seemed determined to play the role of martyred working mom — she’d gone back to her job at the pharmacy, Dick Atkinson having married someone else — to Anabel’s indolent rich girl. She also, though I’d been explaining it to her for months, refused to grasp that Anabel had become a vegan and I a vegetarian. For our first dinner, I caught her making baked whitefish for me and macaroni and cheese for Anabel.
“No flesh for me, no animal products for Anabel,” I reminded her.
She was still somewhat moonfaced, but we were getting used to it. “It’s nice fish,” she said, “not meat.”
“It’s dead animal. And cheese is an animal product.”
“Then what is ‘vegan’? Does she eat bread?”
“The macaroni is fine, the problem is the cheese part.”
“So, she can just eat the macaroni. I’ll cut away the crust.”
Fortunately my sister Cynthia was there, too. After I’d introduced her to Anabel, she’d pulled me aside and whispered, “Tom, she’s beautiful, she’s wonderful.” Cynthia took up the defense of our dietary restrictions, and when I announced our engagement, at the dinner table, she ran to the kitchen for a bottle of pink champagne that my mother had bought in expectation of an Arne Holcombe victory. My mother herself simply stared at her plate and said, “You’re very young to be doing this.”
Anabel evenly asked her how old she’d been when she got married.
“I was very young, and so I know,” my mother said. “I know what can happen.”
“We’re not you,” Anabel said.
“That’s what everyone thinks,” my mother said. “They think they’re not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.”
“Mom, be happy,” Cynthia called from the kitchen. “Anabel’s fantastic, this is great news.”
“You don’t need my blessing,” my mother said. “All I can give you is my opinion.”
“Noted,” Anabel said.
Somehow we got through the holiday on civil terms. I slept in the basement so that Anabel could have her own bedroom. We assented to this maintenance of propriety to keep the peace, but every night, in the basement, as if to show my mother who was boss, Anabel gave me a blow job. This was probably the all-time peak of her carnality with me, the only time I remember her getting down on her knees. My mother was less than fifteen feet away from us, as the gamma ray flies; we could hear her footsteps, the toilet flushing, even the sounds of her bowel. After Cynthia left, Oswald came over from Nebraska for two nights, and my mother was so pointedly affectionate to him that Anabel remarked to me, “She’d rather you were marrying Oswald.”
On our last day, alone with my mother, we made our favorite stir-fry for dinner, and she began to drone on about money. She could understand our living on Anabel’s assets and doing something socially beneficial, she said, and she could understand our finding responsible jobs and supporting ourselves, but she could not understand our living in voluntary poverty and pursuing unrealistic dreams.
“We still have some savings,” I said. “If we run out, we’ll get jobs.”
“Have you ever had a job?” my mother asked Anabel.
“No, I grew up obscenely rich,” Anabel said. “It would have been a joke to have a job.”
“Honest work is never a joke.”
“She works incredibly hard on her art,” I said.
“Art isn’t work,” my mother said. “Art is something you do for yourself. I’m not saying you have to work, if you’re lucky enough not to have to. But if there’s money coming to you, you should accept the responsibilities that come with it. You need to do something.”
“Art is something,” I said.
“Part of my artistic performance,” Anabel said, “is not to touch money that has blood on it. To be the person who rejects it.”
“I don’t understand that,” my mother said.
“There’s such a thing as collective guilt,” Anabel said. “I didn’t personally keep farm animals in hellish conditions, but as soon as I found out about the conditions I accepted my guilt and decided to have nothing to do with it.”
“I can’t believe McCaskill is any worse than other companies,” my mother said. “It’s helping feed a hungry world. And what about wheat? And soybeans. Even if you don’t like the meat business, your money isn’t all bad. You could take some of it for yourself and do something charitable with the rest. I don’t see what you gain by rejecting it.”
“The Nazis improved the German economy and built a great highway system,” Anabel said. “Maybe they were only half bad, too?”
My mother bristled. “The Nazis were a terrible evil. You don’t have to tell me about the Nazis. I lost my father in Hitler’s war.”
“But you don’t have any guilt yourself.”
“I was a child.”
“Oh, I see. So there isn’t such a thing as collective guilt.”
“Don’t talk to me about guilt,” my mother said angrily. “I left behind a sister and a brother and a sick mother who needed me. I don’t know how many letters I wrote to apologize, and they never wrote back.”
“Neither did six million Jews, I guess.”
“I was a child.”
“So was I. And now I’m doing something about it.”
My own brand of collective guilt had to do with being male, but I could see that my mother had a point about work. When Anabel and I returned to Philadelphia and I again faced the impossibility of The Complicater, I was seized with a new plan: write a novella. Begin it in secret and surprise Anabel with it on our wedding day. It would give me new work to do, solve the problem of a wedding present for Anabel, prove to her that I was interesting and ambitious enough for her to marry, and maybe even reconcile her with my mother — because the novella I envisioned was a Bellovian treatment of the only good story I knew: my mother’s guilty flight from Germany. I already had the first sentence of it: “The fate of the family on Adalbertstraße was in the hands of a raging stomach.”