“Every night?”
“That's what she says.”
“Even when she's sick?”
“I'm sure there are exceptions,” she conceded. “But the basic pattern is every night.”
Dave gave a small shiver of disgust that was only partly for Julie's benefit. Paul was a 240-pound furniture salesman who collected baseball cards and believed that Hotel California was one of the high points in the history of human civilization. Margaret was a formerly pleasant person whose personality had been ruined by constant dieting; Dave couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her when she wasn't carrying around a plastic baggie full of carrot slivers. The thought of the two of them having sex was almost as difficult to get his mind around as the thought of his parents getting it on in a motel room while vacationing at Colonial Williamsburg.
Julie pulled down her bottom lip and inspected her gum line in the mirror. Then she pulled up her top lip and did the same.
“He claims he can't get to sleep without it. If she says no he whimpers and thrashes around until she finally gives in just to get it over with.”
“Aren't there laws against that?”
“Every night,” Julie said, her voice touched by wonderment. “Imagine watching the news with that hanging over your head.”
A life-sized Cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock greeted them as they entered the mall, the normally expressionless Vulcan smiling enigmatically as he extended the live-long-and-prosper salute to the earthlings who drifted past, “MEET SCOTTY!” said a cardboard poster attached to Leonard Nimoy's cardboard shirt. “2 P.M. TODAY.”
It wasn't yet eleven-thirty, but a large contingent of Star Trek buffs had already begun forming a line in front of an empty table in the mall's central plaza. The table was surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Captain Kirk, Bones, and Lieutenant Uhura, who looked as sexy as ever in her skintight, probably somewhat itchy polyester uniform.
They had to cut through the line on their way to the escalator, drawing a surprisingly huffy response from a man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt who must have thought they were trying to usurp his position. Most of the people in line were nerdy-looking men, though Dave did notice a sprinkling of obese women and a number of people in wheelchairs, some of them severely disabled. It made sense, now that he thought about it, that Star Trek, and especially Scotty, might hold a special appeal for people who found themselves at odds with their own bodies.
They stepped onto the escalator and began their slow, effortless ascent. Julie gazed down at the Trekkies and shook her head.
“It's sad,” she whispered.
“What?”
“That,” she said, gesturing at the lower level. “All of it.”
Dave didn't answer. He had never cared for Star Trek and wouldn't have wanted to spend the better part of a beautiful Saturday stuck inside the mall, but he'd stood on enough lines for concert tickets in all kinds of weather—sometimes even camping out for really important shows—to feel an instinctive sympathy for the people below. They didn't seem particularly sad or strange to him. They were just waiting for Scotty.
“With diamonds,” Kevin explained, “you got four basic variables to consider. You got size, you got cut, you got color, and you got clarity. Within each of these categories, you got separate variables to consider.”
Kevin was a pixieish man in a brown suit, maybe forty years old, with curly gray hair slicked back behind his ears and an orangey tan whose origins could probably be traced to somewhere other than New Jersey. Dave made an effort to look fascinated as he droned on about point size, empire cuts, and the alphabetical grading scale for color, but his mind had already begun to wander. He almost wished he were downstairs, standing in line. At least then he'd have something to look at besides pale pink walls, diamond rings, and Kevin's tropical explosion of a necktie.
“The range is enormous,” Kevin said, in response to a question from Julie. “The vast majority of diamonds aren't even precious stones per se. They're used for industrial purposes.”
Kevin paused for a reaction, so Dave dutifully pretended to be impressed by this information, though he really didn't give a shit about it one way or the other. The whole concept of engagement rings struck him as an enormous scam perpetrated by the jewelry industry to force you into making the single most expensive useless purchase of your entire lifetime just to avoid looking like a cheapskate to your future wife, her family, friends, and co-workers.
“But let's face it,” Kevin said, finally bringing his filibuster to a close, “unless you have a lot of money to spend, most of what I just told you isn't going to be directly relevant to your purchase. You're not going to be in the market for some flawless oval-cut diamond of exceptional luster. You'll be looking for a decent-quality round-cut stone, maybe in the H-I-J range.”
“What do you mean by a lot of money?” Julie asked.
This question appeared to cause Kevin a certain amount of difficulty. His face cycled through a number of contortions before settling into its default mode of enthusiastic sincerity.
“It's all relative, you know what I'm saying? I mean, you can get a ring like these here for four, five, maybe six hundred bucks.” He caressed the air above the left side of the display case; the rings below were sad-looking specimens with stones that resembled pumped-up grains of salt. His hand drifted to the other end of the case, where rocks the size of molars glittered smugly in elaborate settings. “Or you could spend upwards of five grand on one of these.”
“We're somewhere in the middle,” Julie told him.
Dave paid closer attention as Kevin removed individual rings from the case—insurance regulations didn't permit him to exhibit more than one at a time—and quoted prices in the range of fifteen hundred dollars. They had entered the store committed to paying no more than a thousand, but their threshold seemed to have risen in the meantime.
“I really like this one,” Julie said, referring to a round-cut sixty-pointer that would run in the neighborhood of sixteen hundred transferred to a plainer setting. “There's something about it.”
“That's a quality stone,” Kevin said quickly. “You have a really good eye.”
Julie spun her swivel chair to face Dave, the ring cupped like an offering in the palm of her hand, her expression a complicated blend of excitement and apology.
“What do you think?”
Dave took the ring and held it up to the light. The diamond was small but radiant, shooting off pinprick flares of brilliance.
“I know it's expensive,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn't rush into anything.”
He could've told her to hold off, to shop around and compare prices, but that would've just been prolonging the ordeal. She had found a ring she would be proud to show off to her friends, a ring that would reflect well on him as part of the union it symbolized. Compared to that, a few hundred dollars didn't seem worth quibbling over, even if it meant he'd have to kiss good-bye any hope of buying the vintage Telecaster he'd been eyeing over at Riccio's Music.
“Get it,” he told her.
“Really?” She seemed almost disappointed by the ease of his surrender. “You mean it?”
She started to smile, but something happened to her face before she got there. She made a sudden gulping noise, and the next thing he knew she was sobbing against his face, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Pinned against his chair, Dave realized he was choked up as well. If making her happy were so easy, why had he gone out of his way to disappoint her for so long? Why had they wasted all those years?
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “It's so beautiful.”
“Jules.” His fist closed around the ring as he rubbed his knuckles up and down the back of her neck.
“Congratulations.” Kevin reached across the display case to give him a friendly squeeze on the shoulder. “You made an excellent choice.”
“So tell me,” Kevin said, making salesman's small talk as he wrote up their order, “how long have you two been going out?”
Dave groaned to himself. This wasn't a subject he felt comfortable discussing with strangers.
“A long time,” he said.
“How long is long?”
He shot a quick warning glance at Julie, but it was too late.
“Fifteen years,” she said.
Kevin looked up from the paperwork, smirking like a guy who appreciated a little good-natured kidding around.
“Come on,” he said.
“It's true,” Julie insisted. “We've been going out since our sophomore year of high school.”
Kevin turned to Dave for confirmation, looking at him for the first time as though he were an actual human being, rather than a Visa card with legs.
“On and off,” Dave told him. “Fifteen years on and off.”
“That's amazing,” said Kevin.
Julie put her arm around Dave's waist and planted a quick kiss on his cheek.
“We didn't want to rush into anything,” she explained.
Dave took Julie's hand as they stepped off the escalator, something he almost never did in public, especially since they'd had a fight about it a few years earlier. (“Would it kill you to hold my hand once in a while?” she'd asked. “Yes,” he'd replied, after devoting some serious consideration to the matter. “I think it would.”) She seemed so grateful for the gesture that she passed up the opportunity to comment upon his courage in the face of near-certain death.
“I'm really happy about the ring,” she told him. “I know you think it's silly, but it means a lot to me.”
“I'm happy too,” he said, and was pretty sure that he meant it. “You deserve something nice after putting up with me for fifteen years.”
“On and off,” she said, cheerfully supplying his favorite disclaimer. “Fifteen years on and off.”
He never meant for the phrase to sound as grudging and nitpicky as it apparently did; it just seemed important to remind people that they hadn't actually been seeing each other for fifteen years without interruption. Some of the gaps in their relationship were minor and forgettable, but others were of a different order of magnitude—-Julie's last two years of college, for example, which she'd spent practically living with this jerk who dumped her when he got accepted to law school, and the ten-month affair Dave had had a few years back with a married woman whose husband traveled a lot. In Dave's mind, these two episodes divided up his history with Julie into three separate eras —in effect, three separate relationships: Young Love, The Post-Brendan Reconciliation, and Everything after Maryanne. That was what he meant by on and off.
They were halfway to the exit when someone called his name. He turned toward the line of Trekkies—it had nearly doubled in size during their time in the jewelry store—unsuccessfully scanning the crowd for a familiar face.
“Over here.” A hand waved through the air. “Dave.”
Once he spotted Ian, Dave wondered how he'd missed him. Surrounded by people not particularly distinguished by their good looks or the care they'd devoted to choosing their clothes that morning, he stood out like a swan among the pigeons. Tall and always well dressed, Ian had the kind of physical presence that often led strangers to mistake him for some kind of minor celebrity—a bit player on soap operas, or maybe a second-string professional athlete.
“Hey,” he said. “Talk about coincidences. What are you guys doing here?”
“Engagement ring,” said Dave.
Ian looked at Julie's hand. Julie shook her head.
“We just picked out the stone. The actual ring won't be ready for a week or so.”
“Well, congratulations,” he told her. “You're marrying one of the finest rock trivia minds in the Tri-State area.”
“I know,” Julie said. “All the other girls are jealous.”
“What about you?” asked Dave. “Since when are you such a big Star Trek fan?”
“I'm not. I was just shopping for some summer clothes. But then I saw the line and thought, what the hell? Might as well meet Scotty.”
“He's not showing up for another couple of hours,” Julie warned him. “That's a long time to wait.”
Ian shrugged. “I didn't really have anything planned for this afternoon anyway. It's either this or help my dad clean out the gutters.”
“It's a beautiful day,” she told him. “We're thinking of having a picnic up at Watchung.”
She said this as though extending a tacit, no-pressure invitation for Ian to tag along, but he didn't seem to notice the offer.
“I've got to get out of that house,” he said, more to himself than to Dave or Julie. “My parents are driving me nuts.”
“Join the club,” said Dave.
“Tell me about it,” said Julie.
“Yeah,” said Ian, “but you guys can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel. I don't even think I'm inside the tunnel yet.”
Dave patted him on the arm and said he'd see him at the wedding that night.
“Five o'clock at the Westview, right?”
Dave nodded.
“See you then,” said Ian. “Have a good picnic.”
“Say hi to Scotty,” Julie told him.
On the way out of the mall, Dave saw that Mr. Spock had been knocked over and trampled, probably by some unruly teenagers. He lay flat on his back, still smiling gamely despite the waffles of dirt that covered his face and body with a thoroughness that could only have been intentional. Dave thought about propping him up, but decided it was none of his business.
“Do you think he's gay?” Julie asked, as they exited the parking lot, merging with the traffic on Route 1.
For a split second, he thought she was referring to Leonard Nimoy, who seemed more asexual than anything else, at least on Star Trek. But then the fog cleared.
“Who?” he said. “Ian?”
“No.” She rolled her eyes. “Leonard Nimoy.”
Dave ignored her sarcasm and pondered the question. He wanted to say, “Of course not,” but realized the moment he thought about it that he didn't know very much about Ian's personal life. In the two years they'd been Wishbones together, Ian had mentioned a couple of ex-girlfriends. He didn't seem to be actively searching for a new one, though, nor was he more than mildly flattered by the number of women who came on to him at weddings (including the legendary mother-of-the-bride). Dave had always assumed that this was because he was used to the attention and accepted it as his due, the way a beautiful woman got used to being stared at every time she walked down the street. But now he wondered.
“I don't know,” he said. “Do you think he might be?”
She shrugged. “He's just so different from the rest of you.”
“How so?”
“Well, for one thing, he's really handsome. And he's got such good taste in clothes.”
“Thanks a lot.”
She patted his knee. “You know what I mean.”
Dave didn't argue. He knew exactly what she meant. Ian was better-looking than the rest of the Wishbones. That was why he was the front man. Generally speaking, people didn't go for ugly singers. The rest of the band could look like a bunch of space aliens and burn victims for all anyone cared, but the singer had to meet certain minimum standards of attractiveness.
“It doesn't matter to me one way or the other,” she assured him, “but if he's not gay and he's not going out with anyone, I'm wondering if he might hit it off with Tammi.”
“Ian and Tammi?”
“It's just an idea. She hasn't gone out with anyone for a long time now. I think she's ready for someone new.”
Dave liked Tammi a lot, but he couldn't quite see her with Ian. Tammi was funny and cute in a tomboyish sort of way, the kind of person who knew how to make a joke at her own expense. The longer Dave knew her the more attractive she had come to seem to him, but her appeal was subtle, often lost on people meeting her for the first time. Dave figured Ian to go for someone a little more eye-catchingly glamorous, more like Zelack's new girlfriend, Monica.
“It's never a goo
d idea to fix up your friends,” he pointed out. “Somebody always ends up with hurt feelings.”
“We just have to find some natural way to introduce them,” she mused. “That's the trick with these things. It can't feel like a blind date or it's doomed from the start.”
He pulled up to a tollbooth on the Parkway entrance ramp and tossed in thirty-five cents. The exact-change basket was plastered with decals for local bands he had never heard of—the Eggheads, Screaming Willie, Storm Drain. They just kept popping up, these bands, mushrooms of suburbia. Everyone and his brother chasing after the same old dream.
“You know what you could do?” She smiled at the beauty of what had just occurred to her. “You could ask him to be your Best Man. Then they'd have to sit at the same table and dance together and all that. They wouldn't even know they were being fixed up.”
“I told you,” he said, “if I ask anyone in the band to stand up for me, it'll be Buzzy.”
“No way.” She was adamant. “Buzzy is not going to be your Best Man. Not unless he gets a haircut.”
“I can't ask him to do that.”
“Why not?”
“It's just not done.”
“Well, I don't want the first toast of our married life to be delivered by a forty-year-old man with a ponytail. That's not how I envision my wedding.”
Dave sighed. “It doesn't matter. I'll probably just ask my brother.”
“You and your brother don't even talk to each other.”
“We don't have to. We're brothers.”
“If I were you, I'd pick Glenn before I picked your brother.”
“Me too,” he said. “I'd pick Glenn in a minute if I thought he'd be willing to do it.”
“He'd do it. He wouldn't say no.”
“I know. But he'd probably hate every minute of it.”
“Well, you better make up your mind,” she advised him. “September's going to be here before you know it.”
Dave felt a headache coming on. Faster than he'd ever imagined, the wedding had installed itself as a dominant presence in his life, this giant looming cloud of unmade decisions. It turned out to be far more pressing and complicated than the smaller cloud it had displaced, the one emblazoned with the single, no-longer-eternal question: Marriage?