“Best or worst?” There was no way. There was absolutely no way. I would think later,You wanted this.You wanted to kick the hornet’s nest.It was too good to be true. “Okay. In grad school, this writer from India went into labor early. Her husband was in surgery, not having it, doing it, and we were in a class. I drove her to the hospital, going a hundred miles an hour, so the police would pull me over, which they did, and I was calling the police at the same time. And they delivered the baby, right there on a rubber sheet on the ground. The baby was fine,” I said. “Now you.”
“A guy from Iran was charged with shoplifting a kids’ watch. He was buying the watch, but his wife called for him and he walked outside still holding the watch, and the owner took a photo. The guy offered to pay three times what the watch was worth, but the owner pressed charges. The owner’s sister-in-law had died in 9/11. The guy with the watch was a surgeon in the US on a special visa, and he would have lost that and been deported. The jury found him guilty.”
“So how...?”
“The judge overruled the verdict. She said it was an unreasonable verdict. That almost never happens.”
The doctor and his family were crying; Sam’s mother was crying; Sam was nearly in shock. He’d been a lawyer for about fifteen minutes. A few weeks later, the doctor and his family sent Sam a watch, a Baume & Mercier watch, a modest model that was worth only five thousand dollars. Sam said he wanted to return it, but his mother told him that would be ungracious.
“Do you wear it?”
“At first, I was too scared to. Now I wear it every day.” He didn’t ask me what the worst thing was. Still, the longing to tell him and be judged thrummed in my chest like an extra heartbeat. Sam said, “What’s the best thing about you?”
“I have good manners,” I said. “What about you?”
“I’m fair.”
We danced in the kitchen to Marvin Gaye while the bread baked. The bread was very good, its crispy crust achieved by spraying the loaf with olive oil and sliding a cake tin of boiling water into the oven. He had majored in biology and knew all kinds of weird things about face blindness and why sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia (a “brain freeze”) is really a dangerous warning. When he asked about my top-five favorite movies, he didn’t interrupt with his own list. He asked to see a picture of my sister, Nell, and I had to struggle to find one in which she didn’t look prettier.
We couldn’t wait to go back to bed.
A little worn-out between the legs the next morning, really closer to afternoon, I took a bath in the big claw-foot tub, beneath two vast skylights, staring up at the steep blue sky as if it was a sea I could fall into. He washed my hair for me, like ascene from a movie based on a Hemingway novel. I had to remind myself that even if it lasted, and it probably wouldn’t, it could not always be like this.
I wanted to be clear on one thing. There was a cartoon devil on my left shoulder jumping up and down—Ask him, ask him, dare you—while the cartoon angel on my right shoulder wagged a cautionary finger and counseled restraint.Just don't ever ask me a question unless you really want to know my answer.
He said I could ask him anything.
The devil always wins.
I asked, “Are you attracted to Felicity?”
Sam didn’t answer, a beat of silence more revealing than any answer. Finally, he said, “Yes.”
“If I weren’t a factor. If she weren’t on trial for murder...”
“If she weren’t on trial for murder, I would never have met her.”
“If you had.”
“Okay. Sure. Felicity is intelligent and beautiful and unusual. She has a unique way of listening. I wouldn’t have been a fan of her work in the slightest. But in another world, under other circumstances, I might have fallen for her. Reenie, wouldn’t most men? Wouldn’t women be drawn to her too? In other ways? You said so yourself, in so many words.” He added, “That’s not a factor now. Now that you are here.”
He was right, but his being right didn’t temper the need for what I wanted him to say. I wanted him to say that the moment he saw me, all other images of all other women exploded like an ice sculpture to a mallet blow and melted away.
“Do you want to get married?” he asked.
Ah-ha, I thought, as the other shoe hit the floor.He’s crazy. Well, good, at least now I know.Experimentally, I told him, “I haven’t really given it a lot of thought.”
“Sure, you have.”
“You mean, all women do?”
“I mean, all people do. All normal people.”
“Okay, so do you mean generally or specifically?”
“Generally,” he said. So, he wasn’t asking me to marry him. Realizing this, I wished he were crazy enough to have asked. “I want to get married. I want to be happy. Do you know any happy marriages?”
“My parents are happily married.”
