read to Granny, and who, as it turned out, had back problems.
Daniel and I set up a tent in one of the rooms and lived in it while we worked on the at. We broke down wal s, retiled the floor, plastered and painted. Daniel was good with his hands, and he engraved smal angels in the molding along the ceiling. The wal s were replaced by arched passages: Daniel didn’t like doors.
When the at was ready we folded up the tent and bought a bed and olive green sofas and a faded olive and pink Turkish carpet for the living room. Then we invited everyone we knew to celebrate our marriage. My father arrived without Git e, who had lost her parents in an air crash and was afraid of ying. She sent profuse apologies and a charming tapestry of tiny happy people enjoying themselves in a park.
The wedding party lasted al night: over three hundred guests crowded into the two empty apartments on the third oor, which we had il egal y taken over for the evening. Eventual y the party spread to the beach, where we danced to live music and stu ed ourselves with catered food until sunrise.
In the early morning, after al the guests had left, Daniel and I walked slowly back to our at and opped down onto the new green sofas.
The caterers had tidied up, more or less, but gifts lay scat ered everywhere, a sea of boxes and packages. The smel of grass and hashish and ordinary cigaret e smoke hung heavily in the air.
“The emperors of hash and grass have fled,” I said, “leaving a trail behind them.”
“You’re more stoned than I thought.”
“I’m not. I didn’t smoke.”
“It’s enough to breathe in the air here.”
“It’s childish to humanize objects. I read that somewhere. But I can’t help it. You’ve married a childish person, Daniel.”
This was Daniel’s cue to say something a ectionate and reassuring, but he didn’t answer. It was the rst time he used silence against me, and I understood that we were moving toward a fight, though I was stil hoping to stop it.
We were not used to discord. Until then we had only wondered, day after day and night after night, at how alike we were: the coincidences were almost alarming, and had we been inclined toward mysticism we might have posited fantastic phenomena: twins in another lifetime, carriers of sibling souls. We had the same hairbrush and toothbrush; we owned the same scarf, which we had both picked up at the same street stal . Our handwriting was nearly identical. In high school we had both given oral presentations on manipulation in the media, and a week before we met we had clipped the same cartoon from the newspaper. We even had male and female versions of the same name.
And now, married, exhausted, trying to hold on to my happiness, I said, “I wonder how a person knows. I wonder how you know when you see someone that this person is right for you, just by watching them sing and tel dumb jokes onstage.”
“You must have a sixth sense, Dana. I had no clue at al .”
“I know.”
“I barely noticed you at the wedding.”
“Don’t rub it in!”
Again, Daniel said nothing. “You told me you thought I was cute,” I reminded him, stil hoping to recapture the bliss I’d felt only seconds before. But it was no longer possible to avoid the tension in the air, which was sliding and slipping around us like a filament of barbed wire.
“I just wondered why you’d come in your uniform—I thought you were probably one of those people who wanted to show o that they were in the army.”
“I didn’t have a dress!”
“Yes, but I didn’t know that during the wedding.”
“What else? What else did you think?”
“That’s it.”
“And what about when I came up to you? What did you think then?”
“I figured you were horny.”
We’d had this conversation before—lovers always go back to the first innocent moments that spawned their love—but he had said kind and flat ering things. “Weren’t you at al at racted to me as a person?”
“I didn’t know you.”
“You thought I was some sort of desperate, pathetic loser?”
“No, I just thought you wanted sex.”
“So … when were you sure?”
“Wel , I’m sure now, of course.”
“Wel , I’m sure now, of course.”
I got up from the sofa and stared at him. I felt the fury rising in me. “Now! You weren’t sure until now? Can I ask why you suggested get ing married three days after we met?”
“You’re the one who suggested it, Dana. And I agreed, partly to help you get out of the army. I gured we could always get divorced if things didn’t work out.”
