This Was Not the Plan Page 15

  I, however, do not. I never have. I was, am, and always will be a planner. I liked to think it was one of the reasons Mira and I worked well together. I planned moments. She lived in them.

  It took me six weeks to organize my proposal. I was terrified Mira was going to say no, so I channeled all my nervous energy into logistics. Originally, the plan was to pop the question in Central Park with a picnic basket and a bottle of champagne. By the end, I had booked us the Presidential Suite of an outrageously expensive hotel in Cabo San Lucas, chartered a sailboat for a sunset cruise, and hired a mariachi band to greet us on the dock playing “Solamente una vez” (“You Belong to My Heart”).

  We never made it to Mexico. Somewhere over Texas, the pilot announced that we were experiencing technical difficulties and would have to make an emergency landing at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. What appeared to be lightning flashed past the window as he spoke. Then the plane dropped three stories and passengers began to cry and scream. I was too pissed to cry; all I could think about was the nonrefundable deposits I’d laid down on the sailboat and the mariachi band. It wasn’t until the flight attendant crossed herself and began to mutter the Lord’s Prayer that it occurred to me that I might never see a band—mariachi or not—play ever again. I reached out and took Mira’s hand.

  “I don’t particularly want to die at a Republican airport,” she said through a tight smile. The plane lurched back and forth, causing another round of panicked screams.

  “I don’t want to die as your boyfriend,” I said, and pulled the ring out of my pocket. Figuring we were well past seat belts anyway, I unclicked mine and dropped to one knee.

  I still remember the look on her face. She always looked so beautiful when she was surprised. Her blue-green eyes got wide and her perfect mouth dropped into a little O and for a fleeting second I thought to myself: This is it. This is all I need right here, and if she says yes, I’ll die a happy man.

  “I never thought I’d ever say this to anyone, but yes,” she said. “Yes, I would love to marry you, Charlie Goldwyn. Oh my God, yes!” She fumbled with the buckle of her seat belt. “Goddamn it!” she said. Her hands were shaking and I had to grab them and hold them steady to get the ring onto her finger. I worried that it was a little tight, but Mira said: “It’s perfect.”

  “He’s proposing!” one of the flight attendants shrieked. “Oh my God!” For a brief second everyone around us forgot they were dying. Then one guy started clapping, and soon everyone was applauding and shouting “Bravo!”

  Mira’s seat belt buckle finally snapped open and she fell into my arms. The plane lurched again and we tumbled into the aisle, her hair falling into my mouth and her knee slamming into my crotch.

  “My balls,” I croaked, curling up into the fetal position. “Oh, fuck, my balls.”

  “Christ, Charlie!” Mira’s tears turned to laughter. She reached out and stroked my face. Through watery eyes, I noticed how beautiful the emerald-cut stone I had agonized over looked on her finger. It glittered beneath the plane’s garish track lighting. “I’m so sorry about your balls!”

  “I guess I’ll never be a dad.”

  “You’ll never be anything if you don’t get back into your seat!” the flight attendant shouted. The plane lurched again, and suddenly the cabin was plunged into darkness.

  “At least we can say we were engaged,” Mira whispered to me as I helped her back into her seat. “At least we went out together.”

  “If I’m going to die, I want to do it next to you.”

  • • •

  Later, at the La Quinta Inn next to the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, we had our first go at fiancé sex. Our nerves were still rattled from our recent brush with death, and the sex was explosively fast, almost violent. Mira bit and clawed at my flesh as though she couldn’t get enough of me, and when she came, she screamed so loudly I wondered momentarily if security was going to show up at our door. Afterward we drank tiny bottles of tequila from the minibar and laughed about how ridiculous we were to have said such dramatic things on the plane.

  “Did you really think we were going to die?” Mira said with a giggle. We couldn’t stop laughing; suddenly the whole experience felt ridiculous and hilarious instead of terrifying. “You got so calm when the plane started lurching around. It was actually sort of freaky.”

  “I wasn’t calm! All I could think about was how, despite two hundred man-hours of meticulous planning, I was going to end up proposing to you on a goddamn broken airplane.”

  “Did you see how they had to foam the runway for us? It looked like we were landing on a pile of shaving cream! When I saw that, I thought it was curtains for sure.”

  “I know. I kept thinking I was seeing lightning outside the window, but when I saw that—”

  “You realized the wing of the plane was on fire?” We dissolved into hysterical laughter.

  “I think this has to be the worst-executed proposal in the history of time,” I said, shaking my head. “I tried, I really did.”

  “Charlie, it was perfect.”

  “Mira, it was about as unromantic as you could get!”

  “I totally disagree. It was utterly, heart-stoppingly romantic. What you said about not wanting to die as my boyfriend? That was, like, out of a Nicholas Sparks movie!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Exactly what I was going for. Ryan Gosling will play me in the movie about our life.”

  She swatted at me with a pillow. “I’m serious, Charlie! Sometimes the best moments in life are unscripted. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that all the best moments in life are unscripted.”

  “The script in this case was pretty perfect. Did I tell you about the mariachi band?”

  Mira sighed and laid her head in my lap. “You did. But tell me again. I want to hear about the rose petals on the bed and the champagne on the balcony.”

  So I described for her, in as vivid detail as I was able, the planned proposal. I told her about the hotel with the magenta bougainvillea dripping down the walls and the balcony overlooking the crystal-blue ocean. I told her about the chilled champagne and strawberries that would be delivered to us upon arrival. I described the thirty-three-foot beauty of a sailboat I had chartered for us for the evening, fittingly named Sol Mate, and the pink-streaked western sky, and how the sun would slip below the horizon line just as I was dropping to my knee with the ring. It was all so perfect that I got swept away in it myself, and suddenly I was angry again—angry for being robbed of what could have been.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again, feeling defeated. “It should have been different.”

  Mira didn’t respond. I looked down and realized she was fast asleep.

  • • •

  We arrived in Mexico two days later, grateful to be alive and engaged and no longer sleeping on twin beds at an airport hotel. As she slumped back in a hammock on the beach, a margarita in one hand and a book in the other, Mira sighed and said, “This is heaven.”

  “The beach?” I asked.

  “The beach. You. Everything.” She pushed her giant turquoise-framed sunglasses down onto her nose, and let her arm loll out of the hammock, her fingers brushing the sand.

  “Do you want to get married on a beach?” I asked, trying to sound casual about it. We’d been engaged less than forty-eight hours, but I was already itching to get the planning under way. If left to her own devices, it was possible Mira would allow us to live in a state of perpetual engagement, and that was something I knew I couldn’t tolerate.

  “Actually, yes,” she said. “And I know just the place. I can’t wait to pick out the flowers and the cake. Oh, and my dress! I know exactly what I want it to look like.” She paused, catching herself, and gave me a small, sheepish smile. “Don’t laugh at me, but I’ve had the whole thing planned out in my head since I was ten. I’m such a cliché, right?”

  “You have? That’s so not you.”

  “Mortifying, but true.” She paused, studying my face. “
You look relieved,” she said.

  “I am! You never mentioned getting married before. To be honest, I wasn’t sure you’d be that into the idea.”

  “The idea of marrying you? Or just marrying, generally?” Her lips twitched in amusement.

  “Both. Either.”

  “Why? Because I’m some crazy hippied-out yoga teacher? You thought I’d be all, like”—and here she switched into her best stoner voice—“ ‘Man, we don’t need a piece of paper. All we need is the love in our hearts.’ ” She threw her head back and laughed.

  I shrugged, a little embarrassed. “Well, yeah. That was a distinct possibility. Also, you’re not exactly the best at advanced planning.”

  “Ahhh,” she said, nodding in agreement. “I see. So you were worried I’d never get around to it, right? Like the way I say every year that I’m going to have a Christmas party, but then December rolls around and I just can’t get it together, so then it becomes a Valentine’s Day party and then it’s like a spring equinox party and then the idea just dies out all together until the next year when I do it all over again?”

  “You do that? Wow, I never noticed.”

  “Shut up, Charlie. I bet you’ve been sweating a little, thinking I’d drop the ball and we’d end up just being engaged forever.” She grinned at me, knowing she was right.

  “Of course not,” I said, busying myself with the sunscreen. “You’ll do an amazing job with our wedding.”

  “Oh, please. You’re going to micromanage this thing, I can see it already. Your tolerance for ambiguity is, like, zero.”

  “That is absolutely not true. I’m just organized. Really organized. Really really organized.”

  “You’re going to be a groomzilla!” Mira cackled. “We could be on that reality show on WE tv! It would be hilarious. They’ll show you running around with seven Excel spreadsheets two years before the wedding, and I’ll barely make it to the rehearsal dinner on time. The lawyer and the yogi get married. The ultimate Odd Couple.”

  “Hey, opposites attract. Our differences are why we’re great together. We balance each other out. And we’re not waiting two years to get married, FYI.”

  “But finding the perfect monogrammed cocktail napkin takes time, Charlie. You can’t rush these things.”

  “I ordered those once. For your Christmas party. Which, by the way, never happened.”

  “See, I knew that was bothering you! Admit it, you’re going to freak out if I plan this, aren’t you? You’re going to take all the fun away from me and then you’re going to whine to all your colleagues about how your wife burdened you with the minutiae of wedding planning.”

  I raised my palms in surrender. “You know what? I can’t win here. You plan it. This one’s all yours. You just tell me where and when to show up and I’m there.”

  “Wow!” Mira lowered her sunglasses and raised one eyebrow. “You sure? That’s a lot of trust right there.”

  “If I can’t trust you to plan a party, we’re going to have a pretty rough go at this whole shared-life thing.”

  Mira clapped her hands together with glee. “Oh, yay! I’m super-excited. It’s going to be amazing, Charlie, I promise you. Everything you would have dreamed of and more.” She tapped her temple. “I told you, I have the whole thing planned out in my head.”

  “Do I get to know the details? Or do I have to wait for the invitation like everybody else?”

  “Depends on how nice you are to me.”

  I reached over and ran my finger up her calf, then pushed her pareu up, exposing her gorgeous legs. “I can be very nice,” I said, and kissed her just inside the knee.

  “Oh, my,” she said, fanning herself. “Why, yes, you can.”

  “So, where’s our wedding, love?” My words came out muffled as I pressed my nose to the inside of her thigh and worked my way up, kissing as I went.

  “I was thinking we could do it at my dad’s house in Sag Harbor,” she said dreamily, stroking my hair. “I haven’t been there in ages, but it was my favorite place in the world when I was a kid. I always thought I’d get married there, right on the beach, and then have dinner on the lawn beneath the stars. What do you think?”

  I looked up. “I love the idea.”

  “Just family, close friends. Nothing fancy.”

  “It sounds perfect,” I said, because it did.

  “It will be,” Mira said. “But it will be perfect no matter where we do it. I just would like it to be somewhere personal. You know, somewhere that means something, not just a cookie-cutter venue where someone gets married every other Saturday.”

  “How about the La Quinta Inn at the Houston Airport? That’s personal. We practically got engaged there. And I bet no one’s ever gotten married there before.”

  Mira flicked me on the shoulder. “I was saving that for our honeymoon,” she said, and we laughed. Then she leaned over and pulled me into the hammock with her. We stayed there until sunset.

  Family Emergency

  Forty-eight hours later, Caleb, Norman, and I are cruising east on the Long Island Expressway, bound for East Hampton. I should be thrilled: the sun is out, the traffic isn’t terrible, and Caleb is dying to be reunited with Zadie. Zadie claims the house she’s staying at is incredible, with room enough for everyone. Just a stone’s throw from the beach, too. But what I’m most looking forward to is all of us being under one roof again. I hadn’t realized how lonely the apartment would feel without her.

  Still, it’s hard to ignore the gnawing sensation in my gut that tells me this trip isn’t going to be all sunshine and rainbows. Maybe it’s the shotgun timing of this wedding that feels wrong. Maybe it’s my stress level about work. Or maybe it’s just being in the Hamptons: I haven’t been there in years, not since my own wedding. Mira and I kept saying we’d go visit her father in Sag Harbor after we were married, but there was never a good time. On our first anniversary, a work crisis kept me trapped in the office all weekend. For our second anniversary, we were dealing with the reflux situation, and the idea of spending three hours in the car with a wailing infant was more than either of us could bear. On our third anniversary, there was another work crisis. We never had a fourth anniversary.

  Since Mira died, I’ve gotten plenty of invitations, mostly from couples who were friends of Mira’s and mine who didn’t quite know what to do with me. Should they invite me to Saturday brunch, but as a third wheel? Do they seat me next to a single girlfriend at a dinner party? Worse still, do they wedge me between couples, the ninth chair at a table clearly meant for eight? Meals come with seating arrangements, and seating arrangements for the recently widowed are complicated. So, instead of shoehorning me into a table where I don’t belong, they all invite me to the Hamptons.

  It’s an easy invitation, too, because I always decline. I’m sure they breathe a sigh of relief when I do, because, really, who wants a mopey widower and his kid rattling around their beach house for more than an hour or two? We are, when it comes right down to it, kind of a buzzkill.

  One of the many unfortunate side effects of losing someone you love is that the places you once most enjoyed together suddenly become the most painful. That little Italian joint around the corner that you used to go to every week? Yeah, you never want to eat there again. The spot in Central Park where you picnicked on your second date? Definitely to be avoided. Even something as ridiculous as a fruit stand where Mira used to buy her strawberries can set me off, transforming what could have been a perfectly pleasant Saturday afternoon into a dark and miserable one. Our neighborhood is filled with these emotional land mines. For a while I thought it would be better if we moved somewhere new entirely, but Dr. Frank, Caleb’s pediatrician, convinced me that it was better for us to keep Caleb’s world as intact as possible. I understood that, and so I’ve learned to cope. But I’m not going to willingly wander into land mine territory unless absolutely necessary, which is why I’ll probably never again see Mexico and I had very much hoped to permanently avoid the Hamptons.
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  And yet, here I am, stuck in the cheapest rental car I could find on short notice, an ancient white Corolla with Florida plates and an interior that smells strongly of nursing home. Not exactly the sweet ride I pictured myself in for my first weekend getaway with Caleb, but then, nothing about this trip is as I pictured it. A suitcase packed with turquoise Jeggings and ballet flats rattles around in the trunk. Norman, who is still emotionally recovering from a recent fray with Monica’s cat, is riding shotgun. He keeps arranging and rearranging himself on the seat, unable to get comfortable. Norman is not built for car trips. His limbs are unusually long, and he’s prone to both motion sickness and incontinence. I flirted with the idea of putting a diaper on him for the drive but decided against it. Given that the cat peed in his dog bed right before we left, I figured Norman had been humiliated enough for one day.