I tried those labels on myself, labels that four years ago would have fit like a collar of spikes and a hat of ashes. You are a Husband, Richard. You are Married. You will spend the rest of your life with one woman only, this one at your side. No longer can you live your life exactly as you please. You have given up your independence. You have given up your freedom. You are legally Married. How does that feel?
Any one of those would have been a holly-stake in my heart, any one a steel arrow point-blank through my armor. Beginning today, they were true, every one, and it felt like an attack of sweet butter-creams.
We drove to my parents' house in the suburbs, the place I had lived from the time I was a kid until the day I ran away to fly. I slowed, parked the car on the one driveway that was familiar to me-thens as far back as I could remember.
Here the same dusk-green cloud of eucalyptus overhead; here the lawn I used to mow as little as humanly possible. Here the flat-topped garage where I set my first homemade telescope toward the moon, here the ivy on the wall around the yard, here the same white smoothwooden gate, with its eyeholes bored for a dog long dead.
"Won't they be surprised!" Leslie reached forward, her fingers touched the gate.
In that instant I froze, time stopped. Her hand on the wood, new ring gleaming gold, the sight of it burst down through my mind, vaporized thirty years in the blink of an eye.
The kid, had known! The kid I was had stood at this gate and known that the woman that he was born to love would one day be here. Not a gate in space, that moment, the white wood was a gate in time. For the flash of an instant I saw him, standing in the dark of that deep past, standing open-mouthed at the sight of Leslie radiant in the sunlight. The kid had known!
My wife pushed the gate open, ran to hug my dad and stepmother.
The boy went transparent and vanished, eyes goggling wonder, mouth still open, and the moment was gone.
Don't forget! I shouted wordless, across decades. Never forget this moment!
forty-two
WE undressed that night in our hotel room, I told her about the gate, about how my life had been shaken those years ago by her lightest of touches on that wood. She listened, smoothing her blouse neatly to a hanger.
"Why did you have to hold me away for so long?" she said. "What were you afraid of?"
I laid my shirt on a chair for a moment, nearly forgetting to be as neat as she, then reached for a hanger. "Afraid I'd change, of course. I was protecting my known, my almost-right routine."
"And so the armor?" she said.
"Well, the defenses, yes."
"Defenses. Nearly every man I knew, buried in defenses," she said. "That's why even the beautiful ones were so damned unattractive!"
"They drove you away. I did, too."
"You didn't," she said, and when I protested with facts, admitted. "You almost drove me away. But I knew the cold thing I saw wasn't you."
I drew her into bed, breathed her golden hair.
"What a lovely body! You're so ... impossibly lovely, and you're my wife! How can those fit together?"
I kissed the corner of her mouth, ever so lightly. "Goodbye, hypothesis!"
"Goodbye?"
"I had an hypothesis, almost a theory, well on its way before you stopped my research: beautiful women, they don't much care for sex."
She laughed in surprise. "Oh, Richard, you're not serious! Really?"
"Really." I was caught in contrary pressures. I wanted to tell her, and I wanted to touch her, too. Time for both, I thought, time for both.
"Do you know what's wrong with your hypothesis?" she said.
"Nothing, I don't think. There are exceptions and you're one, thank the Maker, but generally it's true: beautiful women get so tired of being seen as sex-things, when they know they matter so much more than that, their switches turn off."
"Nice, but no," she said.
"Why not?"