When Violet and I finally decided to get married, I was in the middle of a depression so deep it had developed into something more like psychosis. I felt like I was pretending to be myself. I don’t mean I was playing “the role” of the husband-to-be, the good son, the whatever. I mean I was going around thinking, What would I do right now if I were Malcolm?
I didn’t feel like myself, but I wasn’t inhabiting—I don’t know—a persona or anything. I was a glitchy, mutating thing, a vague C.G.I. blur from the last act of a late-nineties blockbuster. I felt like multiple selves at once and also like maybe I didn’t exist.
We were hungry for joy. “Joy” was not the kind of word either of us had used unironically in the past, but some of our irony had been scoured off by loneliness and terror. We were having trouble being funny, except in abrupt, gallowsy ways. Violet’s emergency medical instructions, taped to the refrigerator in March, included a funeral “do not play” list that was just “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “Takin’ Care of Business,” and “any version, rendition, or interpolation of ‘Forever Young.’ ” It was offensive at that time to aspire to happiness, at least out loud, but people still seemed O.K. with the abstract idea of joy, as long as it was private, temporary. Fugitive.
We weren’t capable of being all that happy, anyway. It was December. We were in the city. Over the past year, many of Violet’s patients had died, were still dying. We did not wear sweatpants or binge anything besides alcohol. We weren’t allowed in anybody’s “pod,” because Violet was a hospital physician with a consequently high risk of exposure. So we worked and we worried and we walked. We saw our friends in the park sometimes, six feet apart in the spring but creeping closer over time until we were practically on top of one another, desperate for proximity. We saw our parents on their porches, wore masks when we went inside, peed on their lawns when case counts were bad. We made and saved money by working all the time and not going anywhere and by investing in stocks that profited from the world’s pain.
The classes I taught weren’t helping with my despair. My little window in the corner of the screen looked like a lesser Morandi painting, the blobby brown bottle of me against a thick beige background. I always looked farther away than the people I was talking to. Filling the screen with my gigantic face did not improve matters.
It was a hard time for knowing whether one was experiencing a psychiatric event or responding normally to what was happening. Violet, indefatigable through the most desperate early months, had started showing signs of exhaustion in June, when she was charged with simultaneously starting a long-COVID recovery unit and a COVID hospice service. I became concerned when she started complaining about a dying patient’s “entitled attitude.”
On the Saturday the election was finally called, we briefly danced in the street to marching-band covers of songs from the seventies. Cases went up. One rainy night in late November, we ate takeout jerk chicken in our friend Kenny’s apartment with all the windows open, in our coats, because he was moving out of the city forever in the morning and it was my birthday. When we got home, Violet tied me to the bed and brought out all the stuff, but gave up when I couldn’t stop sobbing.
We were afraid of each other and even more afraid of ourselves. I wanted to exist in other times. I wanted to be a footloose, promiscuous woman in the early two-thousands. I wanted to just be sick already, or on a goat farm in New Zealand, or dead.
So why not get married?
I didn’t have strong objections to our specific marriage. The institution is politically objectionable, of course, and intellectually bankrupt. And it did seem absurd to me, given my current emotional and/or psychiatric disposition, that I was allowed to consent to such a thing as being legally committed to another person. But I also knew, in some squirming, buried part of my brain, that being married to Violet was what past-me, and probably future-me, assuming I eventually returned to myself, would want.
In sex, at least, we’d got closer to some kind of mutuality, taking turns wielding authority over each other, allowing whole days and nights to become wide-ranging Stanford prison experiments. We both preferred being compliant to giving instruction, but I found things to enjoy about both. Taking turns being in charge seemed like good practice for our future together, and for our professional lives, too. To wit: even if it was easier to simply let the world have its way with you—getting stiffed on predatory adjunct contracts, enduring the condescension of older male doctors—it was worth remembering that other people might share the impulse to be put in their place, might even accept you demanding centrality if it gave them the chance to perform submission.
Well. On further reflection, reluctantly tying up your partner and summoning the courage to ask your boss for a raise might not have very much in common.
Because of the plague, the marriage bureaus in the city were all closed. You could do the license part by video easily enough, but city clerks were booked through January for the virtual ceremonies, and we didn’t want to wait. We had been to many weddings where friends had empowered other friends to say the special words, but we were opposed to doing this, for reasons we couldn’t articulate. Our weird parents, or maybe just the Catholic upbringings we’d endured at their behest, had given us a fetish for institutional legitimacy. Violet would have liked a church wedding, even in an empty church, but almost as soon as we started dating I told her that such a thing was never going to happen. It felt politically commendable at the time to have everything handled by the state, to receive the same mediocre treatment as everybody else.
And so, to obtain the bureaucratic indifference I desired, we had to travel upstate, to the land of the custom and the rustic. We chose a town where we were able to find a relatively cheap rental house and a clerk available to marry us in two weeks, when Violet had a few days off. Despite our best efforts, we were going to be, in the end, two more thirtysomethings from Brooklyn getting married in the Hudson Valley.
“Are you sure you’re O.K. with all this?” Violet said, as we filled out the marriage-license application online.
“I think so,” I said. I tried to think of the things one was supposed to think about when getting married. “Oh, do we know what are, like, the money laws in New York? With marriage? Like . . . do we get each other’s money if we get divorced or die and all that?”
“I guess so,” she said. “I mean, in some capacity, probably. That sounds good to me.”
“Which part?”
“Oh, just . . . I don’t know, that we just kind of get each other’s stuff. Like, now—and later. Are you going to be a jerk if we have to get divorced?”
“Not any more than I already am,” I said. “Maybe if you did something really bad I would . . . I don’t know . . . be very mad at you, I’m sure. But I’m not going to demand your money. That doesn’t seem right.”
“Right, that’s how I feel. We’ll just figure it out like regular people.”
“I’m sure I’m going to die before we can get divorced, anyway,” I said.
“Cool. Love that,” she said.
Our parents were not thrilled that there would be no wedding for them to cry at, but we had conditioned them to have very low expectations, having been together for five years and refused even to discuss marriage before now. They probably would have bet on “break up in a sea of recrimination” over “randomly elope during a horrifying wave of illness,” but it was good to keep them on their toes. We promised to FaceTime them before and afterward, and said that we’d all have some champagne and celebrate together “when it was safe.”
I worried, of course, that I was going to bring Violet down. Her parents worried about that, too, because she was, objectively, great, and also their precious only daughter, which was still a thing in some quarters. My parents worried about what would happen to me if we broke up. They’d urged me to propose since the day after we met. Her miraculous attachment to me had persisted, and I was never, ever going to do better.
From a certain angle, though, I wasn’t so bad. I’d managed to write and publish a novel. Violet’s parents had graciously chosen not to read it, which had spared us all a few embarrassing conversations, but their abstention had also deprived me of a cathartic victory over them for not believing in me. My father expressed a generalized pride. My mother ventured that she wished there wasn’t quite so much drug use and bad language, but she was pleased she’d been able to solve the mystery at a satisfying point in the narrative, before it was revealed. (It was the headmaster.)
Now, when I managed to write, I felt like an archeologist working on a minor site, excavating the past just to keep busy. I wrote about the people I knew, had known. I tried to tell myself that what I was writing would make some kind of sense eventually, given the times, the state of things. Maybe the traditional novel was dead. Maybe I would help kill it! My students did not think the traditional novel was dead, and I did not work very hard to convince them otherwise. The traditional novel would probably always be with us, like Republicans.
That year, we’d spent a lot of time with Patrick and Jocelyn, a couple who lived down the street from us, sane, decent people with whom we shared tastes and an outlook on life, though they generally seemed much more . . . “settled” is the word, I suppose, than we were. They had a generously proportioned stoop and access to the building’s back yard, so we passed many hours together outside, in all kinds of weather, drinking heavy beers and worrying.
Patrick and Jocelyn talked openly to us about their dissatisfactions with each other, their conflicts with their parents, their worries about their careers, and they did so in a way that didn’t feel burdensome. Rather, these subjects were presented as interesting conversational gambits, giving them the opportunity to riff and expand on certain preset themes, as if they were podcast hosts. Being around them loosened us up, though we couldn’t quite shed our deep-seated aversion to sharing our actual feelings out loud. We saved that for passive-aggressive text messages.
We invited them to come upstate with us for the weekend and bear witness, and at first they enthusiastically agreed. But hesitation quickly crept in as we tried to make plans. They were supposed to see their parents the week after and didn’t want to infect them; cases were going up again; Jocelyn had an unspecified medical condition (the severity of which fluctuated with the news) that put her at particular risk. Maybe they could just drive up for the afternoon, toast us outside, and then go back to the city? The kindest thing to do was to gently disinvite them, telling a white lie about other friends who lived closer “feeling left out.” Would they be terribly upset if we celebrated with them when we got back, instead? This probably saved the friendship.
We felt sheepish about asking other, similarly cautious city friends. We thought about some combination of our siblings, but we had six between us, and we knew it would make our parents feel even more neglected if we chose some favored assortment over them. Then I thought of Grant and Chelsea. They were, fundamentally, both game and chill. They had moved upstate three years ago—not terribly close to where we were getting married, but still—and we’d seen them only sporadically since then. Grant and I had gone to college together, and we texted frequently, mostly about books and movies and, incidentally, our lives. He liked things that I liked, though he leaned a bit toward the normie end of the spectrum: handsomely made, widely released movies by Tarantino, Lynch, and Nolan; somewhat unfashionable New Journalists like Mailer and Wolfe; and the more theatrical members of the alternative-music canon (Nick Cave, Tom Waits). He made his money as a remote I.T. specialist (I did not ask questions), but he was also the co-owner of a small craft distillery called Blind Love Spirits, natch.
Chelsea was more of a wild card, a sculptor who specialized in small molded-plastic figurines engaged in hardcore, sometimes physically impossible sex acts. These had the look of action figures from children’s cartoons, except they were often naked or decked out in fetish gear and contorted into alternately abject and dominant positions. In the time I’d known her, these pieces had gone from being an eyebrow-raising hobby to a full-time career. At an exhibition of hers that Violet and I had attended years before, Chelsea had greeted us with a gag in her mouth and her hands cuffed behind her back, in the company of a very tall woman in a pink latex dress. “What do you say?” her minder said, tugging Chelsea’s hair, and Chelsea sputtered something that sounded like “Thank you for coming,” before giving a curtsy and being led away. The action figures—some photographed, some painted, some there in the plastic flesh—did their things, and halfway through the evening Chelsea was uncuffed and “allowed” to serve us drinks on a metal tray. It was impossible for me to tell whether any of this made for good art or was just very hot as an over-all situation. Chelsea, when not in artist mode, was quiet and even shy, a dichotomous phenomenon I’d encountered in performers often enough that I didn’t find it all that surprising. She was slight, with very long blond hair and unremarkable features that were transformed when “in character” by heavy mascara, eyeliner, and black or blood-red lipstick. Grant presented as a generally vanilla person, but surely there was something more going on under the surface, given that he was with her.
Violet didn’t know whether she wanted this unlikely pair to be our only wedding guests, but I was energized by the possible infusion of chaos. We always had fun with them, I reminded her. They’d given us just the right amount of acid at that experimental-music festival. Grant was a good cook, and he would bring us nice booze from his distillery. They would serve as a kind of carbon offset to our participation in an insidious bourgeois institution. Sure, they weren’t our “best friends,” but so what? The apparent randomness of their selection would make our actual best friends, who lived in Seattle and Virginia, feel less excluded—clearly, they would understand, there were other criteria at work besides all-time belovedness. Violet, probably because I hadn’t been this animated about anything in at least a year, agreed.
I called Grant, who was down, “absolutely.” He and Chelsea were “pretty over” COVID. They didn’t not believe in it, he clarified, they just didn’t care that much about getting it. I wondered whether I should mention this to Violet, but it was, in truth, closer to her own perspective on the situation than mine. It wasn’t that she didn’t care but rather that she was tired of worrying and talking about it, having spent the past nine and a half months doing so. I had more anxiety, most of it centered on the fairly nebulous idea of “getting other people sick,” but I was easily swayed by the confidence of others.
We started north on Friday morning. I’d found a binder full of CDs that I’d been carting around the country since I was sixteen. “We’ll listen to these in the car!” I said. “Maybe the house will have a CD player!” Making an abrupt life-altering decision was giving me a major infusion of energy. We should have got married years ago! Violet had cut my hair, ineptly but with great enthusiasm, a month earlier, and it had grown out enough that it now looked almost normal. She hadn’t had a haircut of any kind since February, but I liked the added length. She looked like a member of Bon Jovi before they got big or of the Replacements after they did.
Stuck in traffic in upper Manhattan, I grew restless with my collection of high-school-era emo and switched to the radio. We heard the end of Bob Dylan’s “Gates of Eden,” followed, without commentary, by “Mississippi” and then by “Blind Willie McTell.”
“Wait, did Dylan die?” I said. “Check your phone. We can’t get married if Dylan died.”
“Seriously?” she said. “You don’t really mean that.”
“Just check. I don’t know if I mean it or not yet.”
“I’m not going to check if you actually mean that. I won’t seal my own fate.”
“Would you actually still want to? Wouldn’t that cast a shadow over everything?”
“There’s already a shadow over everything. What’s one more shadow? Brittany Murphy died on the day of Carla’s wedding.”
“Right, and they got divorced. Please just check. I’m really worried.”
The radio was playing “I Want You.” Less death-haunted than the others, but there was still that line about the undertaker.
“There’s no indication on the internet that he died,” she said. “Maybe it’s his birthday?”
“His birthday’s in May,” I said.
“Well, it sounds like someone is just playing your favorite recording artist on your favorite radio station. Seems like a good sign to me.”
It seemed, to me, like a trap. All my enthusiasm for the trip was gone. What were we doing? There was no way it could ever be a good sign to hear “Mississippi” on the radio.
Eventually, the d.j. came on the air—not the regular Friday-morning d.j., I noted, some fill-in—and explained that she “just felt like hearing some Bob on this beautiful, sunny December day. Don’t worry, he is A-O.K., as far as I know, at least, but thank you for all of your concerned calls and messages.”
“Well, at least I wasn’t the only one who was worried,” I said.
“Are you really that nervous?” Violet said. “I don’t want to feel like I’m making you do something.”
“I just want to reserve the right to respect signs and portents,” I said. “This is how people have decided things since the dawn of time.”
“Well, I think we can also make decisions based on what we actually want to do.”
We listened to the radio until we lost reception, then switched to a podcast about the runoffs in Georgia. If we’d lost the Presidential election, I realized suddenly, there was no way we’d be getting married now.
The farther we got from the city, the better I felt. Like everyone who has ever lived in New York, every time we drove even an hour north, we started imagining how much happier and calmer we’d be if we lived upstate. And every time we returned we felt immediate relief to be back among the sirens and the floridly insane.
The house we’d rented was, typically, much closer to the road than it appeared in the listing but otherwise moderately charming and lived-in, which placed it above many of the barely decorated, instructions-festooned places we’d booked in the past. This one did have two troubling paintings, in the kitchen and living room, of dogs with sexy human-lady bodies, or perhaps they were sexy human ladies with dog heads. But there was also a working turntable with at least a couple of listenable records (“Something Else by the Kinks,” an intriguing late-seventies Grace Jones) and a “welcome” bottle of wine. So, on the whole, a win.
We went upstairs and Violet fucked me forcefully in the small, undecorated bedroom there. An hour of that and we both felt secure in ourselves again, ready to take on the project of being legally bound.
Grant and Chelsea were due at four, so we showered and tried to look like people who sometimes interacted socially with others. Violet was better at this than I was. I needed to shave but couldn’t summon the mental strength such an act would require. Violet assured me my beard looked fine, but I could tell she didn’t really think so. This was a problem that we had sometimes, my not believing what she said, despite her insistence. Sometimes this was because she said the opposite of what she actually thought.
Twenty minutes past their expected arrival time, I heard tires on the gravel driveway. I went out to the front porch and waved like an imbecile, to indicate excitement. Chelsea emerged from the driver’s seat, unsmiling in black sunglasses, a leather jacket, and a spiked dog collar. Grant came out from the passenger seat, lugubrious at first, then putting on a showy grin through his beard when he saw my own exaggerated enthusiasm. He was dressed in an almost militantly preppy way—a gray blazer, partially unbuttoned pink shirt, boat shoes with no socks. The weather was unusually—or maybe not so unusually, now—mild for December, but still. Maybe this was just his idea of “wedding casual.” He slung a couple of bags over his shoulders while Chelsea removed a small cardboard box from the back seat.
“Can I give you a hug?” Grant said, inches from my face.
“Oh, I suppose!” I said, and embraced him.
“Hey, dude,” Chelsea said. “Congratulations on everything.”
She gave me a tight squeeze with her free arm and then handed me the box.
“It’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s head,” she said.
“Surprisingly light!”
“Yeah, it just has some goop in it or whatever her thing is called.”
“You know it’s goop,” Grant said.
“I’ll open it inside,” I said.
Once in the house, I was momentarily overwhelmed. I’d been in domestic spaces with other people so rarely in the past year that Grant and Chelsea’s bodies seemed huge, their faces and gestures hyperreal. I felt crowded but also comforted. People! These were people. Inside the box was a tiny store-bought cake, with “Congratulations” written in shaky minuscule script.
“Aw, you guys,” Violet said. “Was the drive O.K.?”
“Sure, when I was driving,” Chelsea said. “When I was allowed to drive.”
“Right, I was imposing Sharia law,” Grant said.
“No, you were just being really aggressive about controlling the vehicle, with no clear reason for it.”
“I just thought that maybe since you were very, very stoned and I was not, it would make more sense for me to ‘control the vehicle.’ In your totally normal words.”
I didn’t offer an opinion on the matter. I always preferred for Violet to drive when I’d been drinking or drugging even a little bit, and occasionally she was annoyed by this, thinking I was using a minor technicality to avoid a task I didn’t like doing regardless of my chemical consumption. But I was a bad enough driver that it really was best to play the margins.
“Let’s have some champagne,” Violet said. “No more travelling for a while.”
We showed them to their room on the first floor—spartan, yes, but this wasn’t a luxury wellness retreat—then opened one of the expensive bottles my father had had delivered to our apartment door. Fancy champagne was his default response to life news, a habit I certainly appreciated, even though I could hardly tell André from the decent stuff. But who doesn’t like expensive things?
To that end, Chelsea produced some cocaine, which she dubiously referred to as her “dowry,” and, though it was not our drug of choice, we did a couple of lines, Violet skimming hers so lightly as to be mostly gestural. Depression, it was dawning on me, might simply be the absence of champagne and drugs, and friendly acquaintances with whom to share them. It soon became apparent that no one would be cooking, so we had a forbidding number of mediocre pizzas delivered, of which we collectively ate about a half-dozen slices. We needed to save room for other things.
“Honestly, I was pretty surprised when you said you were getting married,” Grant said, leaning back on the couch.
“We’ve been together for many years,” I said.
“Exactly. I thought you’d just ride it out, keep things a little ambiguous.”
“I can’t remember,” Violet said. “Are you guys married?”
“For the insurance,” Chelsea said. “But we’re not ‘married’ married.”
“She’s married to the scene,” Grant said.
“I’d say more like ‘devoted to the community,’ ” Chelsea said.
“You mean art?” Violet said.
“Art, kink, the intersection. It’s all very, you know, involved. Physically, emotionally. Grant’s into it but not in, like, an official capacity, so he has to let me go where I need to go. So classic-formula marriage is kind of out.”
“You guys are kind of kinky, right?” Grant said.
I couldn’t remember what I’d told him. I’d probably been trying to seem like less of a square after one of Chelsea’s events, and disclosed more than I should have about our sporadic pegging and bondage sessions. Violet was hardly a prude, but she tended to prefer that the details of our sex life—our intimate life in general—be parcelled out at her discretion.
“We do our best,” Violet said, without evident distress. “Wouldn’t want to claim any stolen valor. And it’s all pretty monogamous. You’re putting in the real work.”
Chelsea nodded vigorously, took a sip of champagne.
“It is work, really—not the activity, that’s the fun part, but the staying open, staying sensitive to what you want and need. It’s discipline but also the opposite of discipline, you know? Because, if it becomes routine, then what’s the fucking point? You might as well be pushing a stroller in Park Slope.”
This was, of course, more or less our assumed end point, regardless of whether or not we “wanted” it.
“So how do you stay open?” Violet said.
“Risk?” Grant said after a pause.
“Yes,” Chelsea said. “You have to not be afraid of losing things.”
This shouldn’t have been profound—there was nothing original about the idea—but, in that particular moment, I understood that it was true. I was afraid, yes. I endured, through my unhappiness and through historical disruption, and I took pride in that, but I had not actually risked anything besides, arguably, through sheer physical inactivity and alcohol consumption, my health. Everything I did, artistically and romantically and otherwise, was oriented around simply not losing what I already had.
“And how do you do that?” I said.
Chelsea stared deep into my eyes for a moment, then laughed. “That’s what separates the champs from the tramps, boyo!”
She rummaged through her oversized purse, all traces of her earlier annoyance gone. “Another very small line, perhaps? Because marriage?”
I shrugged a “Why not?” as Violet shook her head. I knew this was not the kind of risk we were talking about. Doing semi-hard drugs when offered them was not, as I sometimes allowed myself to fantasize, showing up on a leash in a leather dress to a sex rave, or finding out where the nearest sex rave was, or even shyly asking someone whether sex raves really existed. Someone else’s cocaine was a pretty good synecdoche for all the non-life-expanding risks I’d been taking my whole life. But: it was what was available.
We drained the good champagne and a much cheaper bottle that Chelsea and Grant had brought. We had some beer and whiskey in the kitchen, and a special “rare batch” of Grant’s distillery’s bourbon, but we were going to have to replenish our supply soon if we kept up this pace. The session with the justice of the peace wasn’t until the next afternoon.
Chelsea told us about a video project she was working on, a kind of updated, role-reversed riff on the old Vito Acconci thing, in this case with Chelsea tied up under the floorboards and visitors encouraged to masturbate in the gallery space to a live video feed of her. She wasn’t sure whether she was reclaiming power or “ceding the last of it,” she said.
Violet, after listening to this, became uncharacteristically candid about her desire for “a less mediated sexual existence,” arguing, with somewhat wandering logic, that there was no reason this shouldn’t be compatible with “a classic marriage.”
“There can’t be good sex without secrets,” she concluded. “And marriage is all about secrets.”
It was the first time she’d said that, though it wasn’t an inaccurate read of our relationship. Maybe she was fucking around with her co-worker Akhil, or somebody new, on her phone again. I didn’t mind what I didn’t know, really, but, now that she’d said that, it wasn’t really a secret.
“I used to think that,” Chelsea said. “But now I wonder if it’s kind of reactionary. Like, the most radical position is just total honesty, right? Why should you have to hide? It just abets the people who want to cover up actually fucked-up shit and make it seem cool and transgressive.”
Violet’s eyes were wide with attention, which I knew meant she disagreed completely.
“I guess I’m not interested in policing people’s relationships,” she said.
Chelsea rolled her eyes.
“I got my ass kicked in June for screaming in a cop’s face,” she said. “Fuck the police. Hard.”
Violet cackled, and the tension broke. She’d already had more to drink than usual, by quite a lot, and I’d worried things were going to get ugly. But she just nuzzled up to me gently as Grant described the laborious process of getting his liquor into various stores and bars. When talk of another round started up, she declared that she was going to bed.
“Don’t stay up all night, boychik,” she said to me. “You gotta be at least a little bit lucid for the legalities.”
“Oh, I’ll be sharp as a button,” I said. “Of that you can be sure.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Chelsea, you’re in charge. I’m not saying no more cocaine and alcohol, but . . . use your judgment.”
“Yes, mistress,” Chelsea said. When we heard her door close, Chelsea silently set out three more thin lines, which we handled with professional efficiency, and Grant replenished our glasses with bourbon.
“So,” Chelsea said. She fixed her significant blue eyes on me.
“Malcolm. What is it you actually want.”
“What’s that?”
“Why did you invite us here? For your wedding. What exactly is it that you’re trying to get out of this?”
I turned to Grant, hoping he might give me a hint as to what to do, but he just raised his eyebrows, implicitly echoing her questions.
“I like you guys?” I said. “You’re fun. You’re reliable. I knew you wouldn’t make an undue fuss about things.”
“We’re fun,” Chelsea said, deadpan. “What makes us fun?”
I shifted in my seat. The dog-woman painting stared down at me in judgment.
“Well, you, uh, are very generous with your substances, obviously. And you’re, you know . . . liberated. Open to possibilities. Like you were saying earlier.”
“Yes, exactly,” Chelsea said. “It’s about sex. That’s what we represent to you. Or what I do, at least. So. What do you want?”
I was too fucked up for this line of questioning.
“You mean . . . now?”
She cracked up, then covered her mouth with the back of her hand. I hadn’t realized how crooked her bottom teeth were until she did that.
“Yeah, like, ‘You want one last premarital threesome before you take the plunge?’ No, dude, I mean, I feel like when you get fucked up you’re always trying to tell us in these oblique ways that you’re a freak. I don’t think you’re just being prurient. But I think you’re kind of afraid, or embarrassed, and hoping I’m going to give you some kind of dispensation or something.”
“O.K.”
“Am I on to something?”
“Maybe. But I think you could say that about anybody.”
“Why are you getting married?”
She had a not-unkind smirk on her face, echoed, apologetically, it seemed to me, by Grant. I didn’t find it as rude as I might have. I believed she was sincerely curious, which counts for a lot, and I’d also hardly been indoors unmasked with anyone besides Violet in months. It would have taken a lot for me to shut down a conversation.
“Devotion?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Violet wants joy.”
“Ah. And are you feeling joy?”
“I mean, as much as I ever do. Do you have, I don’t know, some advice or something?”
“I just wonder why you don’t try to get whatever it is you want. Like, why you don’t do what would make you happy.”
“What, so you’re a therapist?”
“Everybody’s a therapist now, bro. Especially after this many drinks. Come on, drink with me, think with me.”
She poured all three of us another slug of whiskey and motioned for me to drink up. She left hers untouched. Grant hadn’t said a word in what felt like an hour. This was the Chelsea show, and it was apparently on until closing time.
“Look, shit can get pretty weird in the context of a long-term monogamous relationship, for sure,” Chelsea said. “Or so they say. I think things have been way more exciting for us”—Grant nodded enthusiastically—“when we’ve been willing to be more, like, out with our desires and interests.”
She caught Grant’s eye. There was a brief pause before he snapped his fingers crisply. She immediately got up from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor at Grant’s feet, her hands on her knees, facing forward.
“She can be really well behaved,” Grant said. “She just needs rules.”
“Oh,” I said.
Chelsea maintained a neutral expression, but I could see the hint of a smile in her eyes, which were studiously not meeting mine.
“She likes to be out of commission sometimes. It gives her a chance to reflect, to want things. It’s good for her. Definitely good for me.”
“This is, like, your party trick?” I said.
He shrugged.
“We’re both really evangelical about not repressing things. We’ve had a lot of time this year to get the dynamic right. Life doesn’t have to be so hard.”
“Everything in the world is going to hell,” I said.
“Yes. So we’re seizing the opportunity to be happy while we still can.”
He turned his gaze to Chelsea, who was sitting perfectly still with her hands on her knees, waiting for further instruction. She did indeed look happy. Beatific, even.
“Isn’t that right, baby doll?” Grant said.
She gave a shiver of a nod, stared straight ahead.
“Hey, do you want to kiss her?” Grant said. “That’s allowed, on our side at least. Chelsea’s always thought you were cute.”
“Really?” I said. Chelsea widened her eyes slightly, raised her eyebrows. Risk, right. But still.
“What if I just . . .” I said. “Would it be O.K. if I just, um, gently ran my hand through your hair a little bit instead, Chels? I think that might be more where I’m at right now.”
She shifted her attention to Grant in query.
“Sure,” Grant said. “I don’t see why not. That seems like a very nice thing to do.”
I sank to the floor and got on my knees facing her. At this distance, I could see how thick her makeup was, and I caught a sharp hint of her garlic-and-peppermint smell, surprisingly hippieish, given the punk vibes. Now that I was here, I wished I had accepted the offer to kiss her, but it felt too late to change my mind. I lifted my hand and registered a minute flinch, terrible and intimate, from which she quickly recovered. She closed her eyes, and I gently ran my hand over the back of her skull. Her hair was thin and feathery and dry. She leaned her head back into my hand like a cat, and I felt, or imagined, her body vibrating in a light purr. When I reached the bottom of her mane, I rested my hand softly on her back. I could have sworn I felt her heartbeat.
I stumbled off to bed a half hour later, after we’d shared a skinny spliff to settle ourselves. Grant held the joint for Chelsea, who remained silent and still, and instructed her on her intake and exhale. When I told them I needed to sleep, Grant promised that they’d clean up before they went to bed. When I glanced back, I saw Chelsea gathering the bottles in her arms while Grant remained seated, watching her.
In the bedroom, I was surprised to find the bedside lamp still on and Violet with her eyes closed but, to my trained eye, not asleep.
“What’s up?” I said.
She didn’t respond, so I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her hip. “Did you hear all that?”
“What?” she said. “Oh, no. I couldn’t really hear you. I mean, I heard voices but not words. Was there drama?”
No good sex without secrets.
“Just more of the same,” I said. “Have you been up this whole time?”
“On and off,” she said. She sat up against the headboard and slid gently away from me. “Just thinking. Overthinking.”
I was afraid to say it out loud but forced myself to do it. “Are you having . . . second thoughts?” I said.
“No!” she said. It sounded genuine. “I mean, I don’t think so. Not about us, at least. But I think . . . I don’t know.”
“What? Tell me.”
She put her head in her hands and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,” she said softly into her hands, “and I just . . . I don’t think I want to be a doctor right now. I’m really, really tired, and I don’t think I can keep doing it. I’m so sick of all of it. But we need the money. And the hospital definitely needs people. So. I feel really stuck.”
I experienced the most significant surge of joy—actual joy—I’d felt since long before the pandemic started. It was relief, but it was more than that. It was a way forward.
“Oh, God,” I said. “You’ve done your part.”
She shook her head. “It’s cowardly. I know I’m just burned out. And we’d be so broke. How would we be able to afford a kid?”
We had not, officially, decided we were going to have a kid. Or had we?
“Lots of non-doctors manage to have kids, somehow,” I said.
“Not ones with six-figure medical-school debt.”
I paused, trying to determine the correct angle of approach. It was true that I would not be of significant help paying down her debt—our debt, probably, after tomorrow, once we looked into how the money thing worked—anytime soon. A lot seemed to depend on my response.
“I know I haven’t been good at making money,” I said. “Or saving money. Anything to do with money. But I want to be. Some people liked my book. Regular people. Maybe it should be a series. I’ll write another one. A trilogy! People fucking love trilogies. And we can, um, budget. I’ll buy fewer books. And drinks.”
She sighed, but there was a softening in her face. Her jaw unclenched, at least a little bit.
“I know you want to do all those things,” she said. “That’s not the problem.”
I got in the bed, and we curled up into each other.
“Maybe I just need a break,” she said. “A sabbatical.”
“You know what gets you a paid sabbatical,” I mumbled into her hair.
“Right,” Violet said. “The government says I get a baby vacation!”
She turned to face me and touched my cheek gently, something I could not remember her ever having done before.
“I know you’re miserable,” she said. “I think it’s going to get better once I figure out my shit.”
It somehow came as a surprise that she knew how unhappy I was. Or rather, since I was always unhappy, I thought I had successfully disguised the fact that I was currently more unhappy than usual. But maybe I was not, contrary to my recent assumptions, invisible.
“Maybe we should stick together and also change everything about our lives,” I said. “Chelsea and Grant had some good ideas.”
“Oh?” she said.
“Risk,” I said. “And discipline.”
“Right. Which comes first?”
“Well. Whichever you want.”
“You want me to be more like Chelsea?” Violet said.
“You know I want to be the Chelsea,” I said.
“Hmm,” she said. “Maybe once you bring in that money you’ve been talking about.”
I knew she didn’t think I was serious, but I was. I could do it, I thought. Or, well. Either that or we’d get divorced.
In all the pictures from the twenty-minute marriage ceremony, you can see a bright-green exit sign and a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall—such, I suppose, are the perils of municipal regulations. The light in the town hall was dim, but at least it was an old building, with lots of polished wood everywhere. My jacket was wrinkled, my hair a mess, but Violet looked fantastic in the distinctly nontraditional yellow sweater dress she’d insisted on wearing, and I managed to get a few good shots of her outside, on her own, holding some expensive flowers we’d bought in Hudson. The justice of the peace, a tall, bald, white-bearded man named Clive, performed his duties with kindness and efficiency, and he let the two of us take our masks off for the ceremony. We each said a few heartfelt sentences, Violet’s much more articulate than mine. It’s possible that I am capable of being sincere only extemporaneously. Whatever I said was true, but I’m also glad it wasn’t recorded for posterity. In the pictures, Grant is wearing a well-cut navy suit, Chelsea a revealing white (Chelsea!) lace thing that looks like expensive French underwear. You can’t make out the ball gag under Chelsea’s face mask, unless you know to look. ♦
This is drawn from “Down Time.”
