I missed her point at first. She stopped speaking and looked at me expectantly, and I said, “What an idiot.”
“He would ask me to palpate a swollen gland,” she said after a pause, “or he’d wonder what his backache meant, a perfectly normal backache he got from lifting weights, or he’d want me to write a prescription for his migraines.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous!” I said. “He was your roommate, not your patient.”
Another pause. Then she said, “Actually, he was more like a … We were more like a couple, actually.”
This shouldn’t have come as a shock. She was a woman in her thirties; you would wonder what was wrong with her if there’d never been a man in her life. But somehow I had flattered myself that I was the very first one to appreciate her properly. I said, “You were a serious couple?”
She was following her own tack. She said, “I see now that he probably thought I wasn’t enough of a … caregiver.”
“Ridiculous,” I said again.
“So I said to myself, ‘I have to learn from that experience.’ ”
She still wore her expectant look.
This time, I got it.
I said, “Oh.”
“I wouldn’t want a person to think that I’m not … concerned.”
I said, “Oh, sweetheart. Dearest heart. I would never need you to be concerned for me.”
And I cupped her face and leaned forward to kiss her, and she kissed me back.
I could tell that people found Dorothy an unexpected choice.
My father said she was “interesting”—the same word he used when he was confronted with one of my mother’s more experimental casseroles.
My mother asked how old she was.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said.
(In fact, Dorothy was thirty-two. I was twenty-four and a half.)
“It’s only,” my mother said, “that I was thinking Danika Jones would have been closer to your own age.”
“Who?”
“Danika at work, Aaron. What do you mean, ‘Who?’ ”
Danika was our designer, the designer preceding Irene. My father had hired her as his final act before handing over the business, and all at once I thought I saw why. I said, “Danika! She wears toenail polish!”
“What’s wrong with that?” my mother asked.
“I always feel uneasy about women who polish their toenails. It makes me wonder what they’re hiding.”
“Oh, Aaron,” my mother said sadly. “When will you understand how attractive you are? You could have any girl you wanted; someday you’re going to realize that.”
My sister said Dorothy was okay, she guessed, if you didn’t mind a woman with the social skills of a panda bear. That just made me laugh. Dorothy was a bit like a panda bear. She had that same roundness and compactness, that same staunch way of carrying herself.
Only I knew that underneath her boxy clothes, she was the shape of a little clay urn. Her skin had a burnished olive glow, and there was a kind of calm to her, a lit-from-within calm, that made me feel at rest whenever I was with her.
We were married in my family’s church, but just in the minister’s private office, with my parents and my sister as witnesses. Surprisingly, Dorothy had told me that it would be all right with her if I wanted something fancier, but of course I didn’t. The simpler the better, I felt. Simple and straightforward. And we didn’t take a honeymoon, because of Dorothy’s work schedule. We just went back to our normal lives.
It was early July when we married. We had known each other four months.
My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. “I mean early marriage,” he said. “The very start of a marriage. It’s like a whole new beginning. You’re entirely brand-new people; you haven’t made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this ‘we’ that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.”
Dorothy still had her old name, and we were living temporarily in my old apartment, but in all other respects, what he said was true. Everything we did together in our new life was a first-time event, as if we had been reborn. On weekends, especially, when we didn’t go to work, I felt almost shiny, almost wet behind the ears, as we ventured forth upon the day. We ate breakfast together, we went to the supermarket together, we discussed whether we could afford to buy a house together. Could this really be me? Gimpy, geeky Aaron, acting like a regular husband?
And if I was surprised by myself, I was surprised even more by Dorothy. That she would consent to go shopping for something so prosaic as a vacuum cleaner, for instance — that she deigned to consider the merits of canister over upright — came as a revelation. As did the fact that she made a point of using the phrase “my husband” when speaking to strangers. “My husband thinks our vacuum should have a hypoallergenic filter.” That tickled me no end.
Also, she turned out to be a cuddler. Who would ever have guessed? She stayed nestled within the scoop of my body all night long, although you might suppose she’d be the brisk type once the sex was over. She kept close to me in crowds, often taking my hand surreptitiously as I stood talking with someone. I would feel those rough, pudgy fingers slipping stealthily between mine and I would have to struggle not to break into a smile.
I’m not saying that we didn’t encounter a few little bumps in the road. Every couple has to make some adjustments, isn’t that so? Especially when they’ve been accustomed to living on their own. Oh, we experienced our fair share of misunderstandings and crossed signals and faulty timing. On any number of occasions, we disappointed each other.
For one thing, I hadn’t completely comprehended before that Dorothy had zero interest in food. Zero. Not only did she almost never cook, which was fine with me, but she failed to appreciate what I cooked, which wasn’t fine at all. She would arrive at the table with a sheaf of mail that she opened and read between mouthfuls. “What do you think of the fish?” I would ask her, and she would say, “Hmm? Oh. It’s good,” without lifting her eyes from the letter she was reading.
And she lacked sufficient respect for physical objects. She gave no thought to their assigned places, to their maintenance and upkeep. She didn’t — how can I put it? She didn’t properly value things.
If she had properly valued me, for instance, wouldn’t she have taken more care with her appearance? It was true that I had been charmed at first by her lack of vanity, but now and then it struck me that she was looking almost, well, plain, and that this plainness seemed willful. As the months went by I found myself noticing more and more her clumsy clothes, her aggressively plodding walk, her tendency to leave her hair unwashed one day too long.
And Dorothy, for her part, seemed to find me unreasonably prickly. She’d say, “You’ll probably bite my head off, but …,” and then she’d finish with something innocuous, such as an offer to take a turn driving when we were on a long car trip. I’d say, “Why would you think that, Dorothy? Why would I bite your head off?” But unintentionally, I would be using a biting-her-head-off tone as I asked, because it irritated me when she tiptoed around my feelings that way. So, in fact, I’d proved her right. I could see it in her expression, although she would carefully not say so. And I would observe her not saying so, and I would feel all the more irritated.
It kills me now to remember these things.