Al’s heart is beating in his throat. His dream is liquid in his fingertips, threatening to slip away.
“Susie,” he manages, “who wouldn’t want you?”
All day he had wandered Los Angeles’s vapid modernity and hideous perfume of gasoline and marijuana, wondering whether this was just atest. If it was, he couldn’t blame her; Susie grew up in a home where love was an uncertain thing. She required a grand gesture.
So, he had flown on the horrible, turbulent plane and booked the hotel room with the romantic view and the dinner tonight, which she hardly ate (so nervous was she to meet that man—Mark? Mack?), because he knew he needed to communicate to her, powerfully, his devotion. His pocket is heavy with the weight of his intentions, the string of words which were now—
“Let’s get married.”
None of it matters. Not the job offer or the strange ocean crashing into the night or the other guests who may or may not be watching from their windows. He is thinking only how much he needs her, this woman who makes him feel essential and unlike himself. He digs his hand into his pocket and pulls out an expensive velvet box.
Susan drops to a squat on the ground, clutching her face. “Oh God,” she says. She looks at the large yellow diamond, which he had chosen for its sparkle, because it made him think of her and them together, because it was not obvious but it was beautiful. Her face is open, an orchestra of feeling.
“You’re right, I should be down on one knee,” he says, kneeling nervously into the wet grass.
She pulls her hand away from her face. “You would move here?”
The box sits in his hand like a dead animal. He is trying to fix his face, to look reasonable and supportive, but how would that possibly work? This is a town of typecasting. Every hedonist here—New Agers, punk rockers, surf bums—eyes him like he’s a square. Next month he will turn thirty, and somehow, he has passed the point of reinvention. He knows what he is: a scholar who has staked his reputation on colonial America. How could he live here, bereft of museums or primary sources, lost for the ideals that founded this country: efficiency, thrift, intellect. He can imagine the glassy-eyed coeds mooning up at him, resentfully fulfilling a requirement, the deep training of his mind lost in an academic wasteland. How could he be confronted with it daily andmaintain his sense of worth? It stung him beyond admission, that she could want something so far from him.
“You don’t want to keep going for more roles? You know you don’t have to jump at the first opportunity, Susie. You could do anything you set your mind to. You could be… Lady Macbeth.”
“I could still be Lady Macbeth!”
“I just think. People see you in a certain way…”
What is he doing?There will be no talking her out of this. Framing it as an ultimatum will only agitate her. She is rocking onto the balls of her feet, grappling.
“That’s not the point,” he says. “The point is, this assistant professor role is tenure track. It’s not like they just hand these things out. I can’t just leave.”
“Right,” she says. “No, of course not. But maybe eventually—”
“Sure, Susie, we can talk about it—”
“You know because at some point we’ll want a family.”
“You are going to be such a gorgeous mother.”
“And you are going to be a very paranoid but ultimately lovable father.”
“Susie?”
“Yes?”
“You haven’t said yes.”
If you look very closely, history is not a straight line. It is full of the punctures of accident, plagues, and coincidence. But if you zoom out, it is more or less straight. Tending toward advancement, toward civilizations civilizing, toward people living longer and better and more enlightened lives.
“Yes,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
He slips the ring from its bed and places it onto her long, beautiful finger.
2004
You can hardly call this music, the garble of noise emerging fitfully from the preteens itching to break free from this: the last day before summer vacation. On the horizon are elastic days, new flirtations, the promise of bikinis and parties and other people’s cars, of mixtapes and MSN messenger, a wild and terrifying world without structure. But until then, it’s one last rehearsal, all together now, as we play theStar Warstheme.
