“The Wall Street poem wasn’t political,” Rae said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. “It was personal.”
“Well, I’m just saying, all yourIndyStarfans would be wanting my autograph if they only knew I was your muse. Your pseudonym is really keeping me from being a household name, I’m not sure I like it anymore.”
“Har, har. You could always submit your own poems.”
Stu snorted. “You know I don’t speak that language,” he said, and Rae felt a sad kind of truth in his words. “I leave that up to my multitalented girlfriend. Wheeling and dealing deals one day, publishing poems the next. She’s unstoppable.”
“Hardly,” Rae said. She had a foot in both worlds, but it felt like her soul had stopped being in either one.
They ordered two desserts and split them both. Stu took the bigger halves for himself, but he made fun of himself as he did it so Rae couldn’t get annoyed. She charged the meal to her corporate credit card and left a 50 percent tip, wondering how the waiter would do with the unexpected cash, remembering back to how an extra hundred dollars had once left giddy.
“You know,” Stu said, looking at Rae with his open adoration. “Some guys might have their masculinity threatened knowing their girlfriend makes way more money than them, but not me. I know I’m dating a rock star and I’m perfectly happy being your trophy husband.”
“Is that so?” Rae said with a sly smile that made her forget that he’d offended her at all. It was impossible to resist Stu’s uplifting aura, and she’d stopped trying to. Life with Stu had a golden hue cast over it, like it was always summer. His optimism was an inflatable tube she could sit on to keep from sinking into the murky seaweed water of her own overly deep contemplations. “Well, if you play your cards right, that just might come true,” she teased.
“I like my odds,” Stu said. “But for real, I’m proud of you. I know you’ve been grinding and you don’t exactly love your job, but who does, honestly? And all things considered, you have it pretty good.”
Rae felt ashamed of how she hesitated to agree with him. Here she was, with all the privilege in the world, making a grotesque salary, and yet she still felt like she was coming up short, like her destiny was something bigger, something more vibrant than this black-and-white-suit reality.
If someone had told her, back when she was an intern, that she’d be closing a multi-billion-dollar deal before she was thirty, shewould’ve looked at her future self with total awe. Now the awe was directed at her past self, all the youth and innocence she’d had back then, the spunk in her step that made her so sure she wasn’t going to get sucked into something that didn’t light her on fire.
But shehadgotten sucked in. She didn’t regret the decision to stay at her firm—she was proud of how she’d proven herself, in a strong-jawed kind of way—but she did regret the dreams she’d never truly let fly in the daylight, and now it seemed it was too late. Even if she set them free now, their wings wouldn’t work right. They’d flop right onto the pavement and get run over by greasy tires.
“Yeah,” Rae finally replied, willing herself to feel the satisfaction that she knew she should. “I have it pretty good.”
She’d closed a high-profile deal at work, one that had the potential to accelerate her whole career. Now, as she and Stu walked out of the restaurant together, his arm draped over her shoulder, she tried to turn her thoughts to the other deal that had been on her mind, a far more meaningful one that would impact the rest of her life.
You used to leave dandelions at my door,
now I want you as my husband forevermore.
Rae scribbled the rhyme on a sticky note as she lay in the spacious bathtub of the Wilcox Box. Immediately, she balled up the pale yellow paper square and tossed it onto the tile floor, along with a dozen other rejected opening lines.
She’d been in the tub so long that the hot water had lapsed to lukewarm and the suds had fizzled into nothing. The dusky sun sloped through the bathroom’s single skylight. A wine glass, empty with just the residue of a red ring, was propped beside the tub. Rae’s prune-like fingers gripped a blue pen as she reached for a fresh note from her dwindling pad.
It was a couple weeks after the big deal at work had closed, and Rae was trying to write a proposal poem for Stu. They’d been dating a yearnow, and her grandpa had spilled the beans that Stu had asked him for Rae’s hand. When Rae found out, she’d made Stu go back and ask her mom too. She was annoyed he hadn’t thought of doing that in the first place, but she supposed that was just how things were done around here. It wasn’t exactly Stu’s fault for breathing in the inequality tinged air.
Rae had decided she’d say yes, of course. They’d have a short engagement and a small autumn wedding on Elmer Lake shortly before her thirtieth birthday, just over a hundred days from now. She’d walk down the foliage-lined aisle and they’d exchange short, humorous vows that got the guests laughing, and then they’d take a cruise around the lake, the pontoon adorned with a homemadeJust Marriedsign. It was all coming together, as if it had been planned out for her whole life, which perhaps it had been. After so many years of her life veering off course throughout her twenties, Rae found this very soothing, like she could simply go along for the ride and be led in the right direction.
Still, it made her jumpy not knowing when Stu might pop the question, if she’d be having a frizzy hair day or wearing a dress that photographed like a parachute, so she’d decided to preempt the process and close the deal early. She liked the idea of subverting the gender norms of a typical proposal, and she was sure Stu would like it too, once he got over that initial jolt of masculine conditioning that said the man should be the one to get down on one knee. It would set their marriage off on the right note, a note that proved she wasn’t just going to become like every other Midwest housewife.
She’d never quite had that when-you-know-you-know moment that told her Stu was the one, but she figured that most people just embellished their own love stories to get more likes on social media. Or maybe Rae had too much of an analytical side to ever make such an important decision without turning it over in her head a hundred and ten times.
She chalked any lingering hesitations up to scar tissue from her parents’ divorce. It was natural that she’d have fears about gettingmarried, and caution wasn’t correlated with poor decision-making. If anything, it was the opposite.
In emotional markets, just like in financial markets, trade-offs had to be made. It was impossible to get sky-high returns without the risk of crater-deep lows. For a lifetime investment horizon, she wanted a more reliable return. DSMB was the acronym she’d half facetiously patented—Date Stocks, Marry Bonds.
And logic aside, she loved Stu, with a love that was easier than anything she’d experienced in her life. It was a simple kind of love, but Rae now had the perspective to understand that didn’t mean it was simplistic. It just meant their relationship wasn’t weighed down with irrational anchors or ornamented with unimportant things. It was sewn from a single strand of golden thread from the local hardware store, the same thread that had tied them together as kids and back together as adults.
She thought about putting all of this into the proposal poem, but she was determined to come up with catchier couplets for Stu, since he preferred rhymes to free-verse rambling. She wanted him to know that she always heard him, even if she didn’t always agree with him.
She racked her brain, willing a worthy rhyme to appear, even wiggling her nose to try to work up a sneeze. She didn’t sneeze, but she did get a tickling sensation that made its way into her chest, then down her legs.
She ignored it until she couldn’t. Getting out of the tub, she pulled on theTeam Bridebathrobe she’d had made for Ellen’s wedding. Traipsing wet footed into the kitchen, she refilled her wine glass, taking a few sips to keep it from sloshing as she walked.
Then, following the fidget that had a heart of its own, she went into her bedroom and opened the desk drawer, where she picked up a palm-sized notebook.
It was the Stall Street Journal, recently sent by mail from Ellen, who’d apparently snagged it from the “sell” pile, along with Rae’s old Santa hat, before Rae had left New York. Ellen had refound themwhen she and Aaron were packing up to move apartments (they were looking for a bigger place to start a family) and decided it was time to return them to their owner.
