Sure enough, the next morning Jonny shook Pandy awake.
“What?” Pandy gasped, suddenly afraid. Jonny was glaring at her as if she’d committed some heinous crime.
“I can’t keep doing this,” Jonny said, with real irritation or fake, Pandy couldn’t remember. Because all she could remember was what he said next: “I think I’m in love with you. We’re too old to live together, so we’re going to have to get married.”
“My son is marrying Monica!” MJ proclaimed to everyone and anyone who would listen.
* * *
The next few months were a whirlwind of bliss.
For once, the man in her life was saying and doing exactly the right things. Without her having to prompt him! It was a miracle, Pandy exclaimed.
Indeed, she never tired of reminding people of the wondrous fact of Jonny. “I was convinced that since I’d been so lucky in my career, I didn’t deserve true love as well. I never dared to hope that I could have both; that true love could actually happen to me.” And on and on she went, proclaiming herself one of the converted. Love did conquer all, after all.
Once again, Pandy was the toast of the town. And so, too, was Monica. “Monica” was finally getting married.
There was only one person, it seemed, who disapproved. Henry was being a real Eeyore about the whole marriage, insisting that she and Jonny were sure to end up like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Pandy brushed this away, reminded of Jonny’s comment regarding Henry’s being old-fashioned.
And so, at ten o’clock on a cloudless morning in late September, Pandy and Jonny got married. The mayor performed the ceremony. Pandy wore a chic white lace suit with three-quarter-length sleeves and gorgeous white patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Then they all had a long, boozy lunch at Chou Chou.
Only sixty people were invited.
The wedding was exactly what MJ had promised it would be: small, discreet, intimate, and very meaningful.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PEOPLE ALWAYS said the first year of marriage was the hardest, but for Pandy and Jonny, the opposite was true.
There was the sex, of course. A wink, a stare, a nod of the head, and off they’d be, in the bathroom at a party or in the alley behind the restaurant. Once, they did it in the back of some billionaire’s car.
Sometimes it was shameful and downright tawdry. Like when the taxi driver made them get out of the cab. Afterward, they’d gone home and made love contritely, unable to look each other in the eye.
It was, as Pandy explained sheepishly to her friends, “One of those things. You try to stop, of course, because it’s so embarrassing. But then you can’t.”
“Is it unseemly?” she’d ask Jonny.
“Babe,” Jonny would reassure her, “they’re just jealous. We’ve got something they never will.”
This went on for weeks. Once again, Henry was not a fan. “You’re not writing,” he reminded her sharply. “You’ve written no new Monica pages since you got married.”
This was true, and Pandy didn’t know how to justify it. Jonny seemed to think he actually had married Monica, at least in the sense that he expected Pandy to stay out late with him several nights a week. He had yet to comprehend that in real life, “Monica” had to work. But it was too early in their marriage to disappoint him.
So she disappointed Henry instead.
“Monica, Monica, Monica,” she’d say with a sigh. “I’m so sick of Monica. Can’t I live my life as me for a moment?”
“Just give me twenty pages of Monica. Please,” Henry would beg.
And, feeling guilty, Pandy would promise to deliver pages by the end of the week.
But then her love for Jonny would once again get in the way, and forgetting about her promises to Henry, she’d put her energies into her husband instead.
For at last, just like in a fairy tale, after all those long years of uncertainty about marriage, career, and money, it seemed her life had actually worked out. Gone were the nights when she would wake at four a.m., tossing and turning and fretting about her future. Now, if she awoke at all, she’d feel the glorious heat from Jonny’s naked body and remember that all was well.
Indeed, even when they weren’t together, Jonny was like Peter Pan’s shadow, sewn onto her shoe by Wendy. She couldn’t shake him; at times it felt as if she had truly absorbed some of his molecules. She couldn’t pick up a lemon in the supermarket without wondering what Jonny would think of it; couldn’t pass a cute puppy on the street without wishing Jonny were there to admire it with her.