Stepdog Page 5

  “Fuck off,” I said. We laughed.

  “Ach, and Sara comes out and tells him he can’t play his guitar,” Danny continued in his sickeningly sweet accent, “so instead he pulls out his tin whistle from his back pocket, and starts playing that, and wee Sara, she’s so nice, she says she loves the sound but if the security comes, you can’t play that either, and he says, what about a few tunes on the fiddle, then? And she says, no, but tell me, do you just play Irish music on that, or what’s your repertoire?—and that’s when the chancer starts bullshitting, and the rest is history.”

  Having never before spoken so many consecutive words to strangers, he then downed the rest of his ale and glanced longingly toward the refrigerator. I got up and played barman.

  “He didn’t say the fiddle, he said the violin,” Sara corrected him. “He knew what he was doing.”

  “Violin is museum-speak for fiddle,” I said in a stage whisper to Danny, handing him the ale.

  “And you really had no American or classical repertoire?” Elliot asked. About every six weeks, Elliot asked me afresh to tell him the story of my bluffing my way into a guest lecturer gig at the MFA when I’d left school at fourteen (and according to my arts visa, was officially in the U.S. only to do Beckett plays and new Irish works). In his world, everyone stuck to whatever they’d been trained for, and he was star-struck by my resourcefulness.

  “That’s right,” I said. Danny seemed relieved that I might take over the narrative duties, and gazed deeply into his ale. “She asked if I could play tunes that fit the eras of the paintings, for when they had tours. So of course I said yes I could, even though I couldn’t, and then I spent the weekend cramming on YouTube videos of Ravel and all them.”

  Delighted guffawing around the table at a story they’d all them heard several times before but still found charming, because to be honest, it is a charming story. I opened my mouth to continue with my favorite part, about how I conned Sara into thinking I was expert on Thomas Jefferson’s favorite compositions . . . but the mirth of the table had roused the dog.

  Abruptly, almost out of her sleep, she leapt straight upright into the air, instantly upstaging me. Upon landing, she rested her chin heavily on my knee, looking up at me adoringly, for all the world as if she were waiting for me to continue. Gales of human amusement encouraged her. I didn’t.

  “Naughty,” I hissed, and pointed my finger.

  She lifted her head obediently—and then, as I opened my mouth to resume my tale, she immediately planted her chin even more firmly on my knee, and wagged her backside with defiant affection.

  Everyone laughed.

  “I’ll sell you to the North Koreans,” I warned. Immediately she sank to the floor and showed me her submissive tarty-dog belly, as our audience protested gleefully in her defense.

  By the end of the evening, the dog appeared in twice as many photos as did I.

  “Only an actor would care about that,” said Sara, when I voiced my sentiments.

  But I have to admit, although they were mostly Sara’s friends, it was a great night, with lots of laughs. I really enjoyed them, and not just because they applauded the chef several times and there were no leftovers. Above all, it was mission accomplished: we had supportive friends and a dinner party all on official record before our wedding.

  OUR WEDDING. WHICH was not, we re-agreed every day and every night, any kind of declaration of anything between us. It was simply a piece of paper to be filed away under “favor.” It meant nothing. It changed nothing. Not that there could be much to change, anyhow: we were getting married after dating for about a week. (We were mad about each other after dating for about a week, too, but that was a coincidence.)

  Massachusetts had a three-day waiting period, and Rhode Island didn’t. So Sara took a sick day and we drove the forty-five minutes to Providence. She told no one. I told no one. Not even Danny. Lena, Elliot, and Steve might try to treat it as an actual marriage, and give us gifts (or dire warnings), which would be ridiculous since we weren’t even living together. And too many of my mates . . . well, I hadn’t seen many of my mates in the past few years, since I’d stopped drinking my paychecks. Danny would get a chuckle, but he’d only really met Sara the one time, and he’d spent half the evening playing with the dog.

  PROVIDENCE CITY HALL was a great ol’ building, like an old-fashioned post office mushroomed out of control. I half expected to see bubble-gum-ball dispensers around each corner. Marble floors and a broad wooden staircase in the center; the upper corridors were all open, balcony-like, down to the lobby, so everything echoed in a muffled, serious way, like you imagine a sepia photograph would sound. There was something old-school-romantic about the idea of getting married there.

  We filled out paperwork, which we then presented, along with our birth certificates and other documents, to our Bartleby-ish clerk (sound track: John Cage, 4’33”), who was tragically immune to all attempts at levity.

  “But I bet I can make him crack a smile,” I whispered to Sara as we were in line to return our forms to him. She bit back a smile.

  “No bet,” she whispered.

  “No, c’mon, bet me,” I insisted. She shook her head. “I’m taking that as a yes,” I whispered. “Bet’s on.” And then we reached the counter. “We’re getting married,” I said to Bartleby, grinning. (Having established that we were not really “getting married,” it was great fun to pretend we were.)

  “Yes, sir, that’s what this form is for,” he said in an uninflected voice, referring to whatever form Sara had just given him.

  “Am I not the luckiest man in the world?” I beamed, grabbing Sara round the waist and fiercely kissing her cheek. She yelped with pleased surprise.

  He blinked uncomfortably. “Congratulations, sir. I hope you’ll be happy.”

  “I’m already happy!” I assured him. “I’m so happy, I could dance. In fact—”

  “Oh, no,” muttered my bride-to-be.

  “—in fact, I think I will.” I took a step back from the counter to make sure he could see me, and began a hornpipe—nothing fancy, just my threes and sevens, basic steps they teach us all in school at about the same age American kids are being taught the birds and the bees (something we were never taught because the Church wanted us to think emergent breasts were miraculous gifts from God, which I for one easily believed).

  “Rory,” Sara said, with a pained grin for the poor bemused clerk. “He’s a little excitable,” she explained.

  For the record, I am actually very shy. I would never have done that hornpipe if I weren’t compelled by Sara’s insisting we make that daft bet.

  The clerk balefully handed us a list of judges and attorneys qualified to marry us. Standing on the outer steps of City Hall, I called each number in turn, getting bland voice-mail greeting after bland voice-mail greeting. Finally, two names from the end, an older-sounding gentleman answered the phone:

  “Joseph Brown. May I help you?”

  I hesitated, having given up expectation of reaching a human being. “Yes, em, yes . . . that is, yes.” I looked at Sara with wide eyes; she mirrored the expression back at me. I pointed to the phone as if this would elucidate something; she nodded as if elucidated. “My, em, fiancée and I would like to get married. We’ve filled out all the forms and . . . we got your name from—”

  “Are you in the city of Providence right now?” he asked in a tired voice.

  “Yes, sir,” I chirped. “We’re right outside City Hall.”

  “If you come to my office on Dorrance Street, I can marry you now,” he said, as if telling me where to catch a cab.

  I was a bit disappointed that we weren’t going to get married actually in City Hall, but I liked his unromantic, just-a-formality attitude. I got the address from him—and the hitherto unmentioned detail that we’d need to pay him a hundred bucks, cash, off the record—and we hurried to a bland office building round the corner.

  It was that solid, old-building blandness that smells of dust a
nd papier-mâché, subtle but insidious. My stomach started fluttering, although I told it there was no reason to—hadn’t it been along for the ride all week during all our conversations about how this meant absolutely nothing? Because really, even though I was madly in love with this woman I was about to marry, it meant absolutely nothing. That was the agreement. We weren’t even dressed up for it; she was wearing the same green sundress from our first date, I was in my usual cotton pants and collarless shirt.

  We—Sara, myself, and my stomach—took a rumbly elevator up to the third floor, where we were met by a deserted corridor of industrial carpet, asbestos ceiling tiles, and fluorescent lights. We wandered cautiously while my stomach kept suggesting we go back downstairs and outside for some fresh air.

  The office, when we found it, could have been a dentist’s waiting room: more fluorescent lighting, asbestos ceiling tiles, industrial carpeting. The aging, bored-looking Mr. Joseph Brown, Esquire—complete with red necktie, otherwise colorless—got up from his comfortable chair behind his suspiciously-bereft-of-paperwork desk. There was nothing else in the office but a couple of file cabinets and his framed diplomas. It all looked like a stage set for an amateur theatrical.

  “You must be Mr. O’Connor and party,” he said, with a tired, unenthusiastic smile. I was glad that we weren’t getting married-married, as this bloke was a buzzkill if ever I met one. I considered another hornpipe, but now that we were here, I just wanted to get it done. He shook our hands, asked for our paperwork, and said, without expressing the slightest interest in us, “You need two witnesses.”

  Sara and I exchanged looks. I could see her mentally ticking off the pros and cons of telling Lena, or just Elliot and Steve (Lena had loose lips), or maybe Danny . . .

  “There’s a jeweler in the next office,” Mr. Brown, Esquire, continued in the same dispassionate tone. “He could probably spare a moment to come over here and be a witness for you. His wife spends most of the day with him, so she might be willing to come as well.”

  “Do we have to bribe them?” I said. As a joke.

  He made a noncommittal shrug, and I realized: yes, we have to bribe them.

  “They probably wouldn’t mind ten dollars for their time,” he said impassively.

  “Each?”

  Again, the noncommittal shrug.

  So as Sara stood biting back a nervous grin, I went next door to the equally-dentist’s-waiting-room-esque office to invite the nonagenarian jeweler, who sported glasses as thick as the Boston phone book, and his heavily jeweled octogenarian bride, to be our witnesses. They seemed to be expecting me. For a tenner each, they were happy to be witnesses. Not a bad racket, really.

  “Is this the deluxe package?” I asked. “Will you be throwing rice at us and playing Lohengrin on kazoos and all that?”

  They both stared at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then the husband—pleased with himself—declared, “Say! You’re from Ireland, arntcha?”

  “Explains a lot, doesn’t it?” I said.

  So there we were in a bland room with our bland witnesses and a bland minister administering a bland oath about taking each other to husband and wife, honoring and obeying and having and holding in sickness and health, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, to love and to cherish, from this day forward until death do us part, and so on and so forth, none of which I paid attention to because we weren’t really getting married.

  Although we certainly giggled like newlyweds as we said the vows.

  Finally we got to the point: we signed a piece of paper—that fateful, magical, elusive piece of paper that was going to let me get a green card and therefore join the Screen Actors Guild and therefore finally have a legitimate career, including a touching Oscar acceptance speech in which I gave heartfelt thanks to the beloved and extremely sexy Sara Renault, my soul mate, for making all this possible.

  I felt full of bubbles even though this was not personal. We were each going back to our own separate lives, and apartments, and schedules, and social circles. To one side, the jeweler’s wife took photos on Sara’s smartphone; to the other, the jeweler himself grinned for the camera, to make sure we got our tenners’ worth.

  “. . . By the power vested in me by the state of Rhode Island, I now pronounce you husband and wife,” Mr. Brown, Esquire, was saying. And because he was old-fashioned under all that boredom, he added, with an unexpected wink: “You may now kiss the bride.”

  Chapter 4

  So. We were married, which changed nothing at all, and would continue to change nothing at all, except for certain appearances intended to convince Uncle Sam: I left some clothes in Sara’s closet, a few instruments in her living room, a toothbrush in her bathroom. But otherwise, nothing changed.

  Well, to be honest, that’s not exactly true. I had a mad crush on her, and I was secretly tickled we were married, although I wasn’t sure I should admit it, since that seemed a violation of our agreement. I know it was a marriage of convenience, but I had genuinely fallen for her. I had to keep shaking my head and reminding myself: Rory, this is for practical reasons. And then I’d see her looking at me and I’d think, I’m married to her!—and I’d get so excited I had to tickle her to have a good excuse to squeeze her. She seemed to like the excuse to squeeze me back.

  So it turned out not to be as casual as I’d thought. That’s why, in part, I agreed with Sara that we just shouldn’t tell anyone, not until we were settled into it ourselves more. My family was mostly back in Ireland now, lured home by the economic boom called the Celtic Tiger and then trapped by the meltdown that followed. Sara’s family was mostly in New York or Chicago—as with me, her parents had already passed. She had an older brother lately moved to Milwaukee who would “probably flip out,” so there was no family to tell yet.

  So we didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t wear rings. We never considered actually living together. We continued on with our new-romance buoyancy, enchanting and nauseating all our mates by finishing each other’s sentences, eating food off each other’s plate, practicing our secret handshake in public. We threw lots of little dinner parties in Sara’s apartment (the dog loved this, of course), taking photos for reasons we never told anyone, but the parties themselves were such great fun, and it was lovely to be toasted with equal heartiness by everyone from art-history professors to Trad musicians to plumbers. We had the honey-est of honeymoon periods. It really was romance, we agreed once the marriage certificate was stowed away in her bedroom desk. Romance is a glorious thing.

  Not at all like being married.

  But now what? The “marriage” was just a piece of paper, but a crucial one: the inaugural drop in a cascade of required paperwork. Sara was great with paperwork, from all those years of writing grants and convincing her bosses to hire impertinent fiddlers. A fortnight after the “wedding,” she printed out a load of government documents, as well as absurd bits of advice from advisory websites, warning us we’d be asked what color our spouse’s toothbrush was at the immigration interview.

  That weekend, we huddled together at her coffee table over takeout Chinese. (Weekends I would always stay at Sara’s place because her neighbor was away, so there was nobody to feed the dog.)

  When I saw all the paperwork I was terrified. I knew to expect it, but my brain just shut down. I couldn’t understand bureaucratic lingo. It was a foreign language I couldn’t penetrate.

  The goal, this first night, was just to get an overview of what was ahead of us. The dog lay stretched out beneath the coffee table on her side. To avoid getting stiff, Sara and I shifted all evening up and down, now sitting on the floor (best for moo shu), now on the sofa (fine for egg rolls). The dog, whose priorities did not match ours, made it clear that when we were on the floor, Sara existed to rub her belly; when we were on the couch, I was nudged into taking over this activity with my foot. I was less compliant than Sara.

  Sara read over the forms and commentaries in concentrated quiet, and I pretended to do likewise. The phraseology was a
load of mundane shite. Then it occurred to me that maybe some lonely government bureaucrat was an undiscovered poet, and had secretly encoded a complex rhyming scheme into the directions, so obscure and obfuscated that only a close reading of the text would reveal the scansion. I devoted myself to such a process for a good half hour, seeking rhythm where Sara sought meaning.

  She had more success than I did.

  “. . . evading any provision of the immigration laws,” I tried under my breath, then huffed in disgust and gave up. “This is shite,” I said, tossing the form down onto the table.

  “Are you reading it closely?” Sara asked.

  “Of course,” I said, without defining what I considered “close.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Every man dreads when a woman asks that.

  “I’m thinking this crowd will not be writing for the New Yorker.”

  She gave me a look. Then she said, quite grim, “Rory. I think we might actually have to live together for a while to pull this off.”

  What? Panic. Slack face. I hadn’t lived with anyone, not even a roommate, for years. I talked out loud to myself too much. I didn’t want my morning routine of espresso-and-crossword messed with, it was the only thing that kept me from smoking. I didn’t like anyone touching my laundry. “Why would we have to do that?” I asked.

  “If we’re married, we need the same address, for starters,” she pointed out.

  “We knew that. The plan was to use one address and pretend we both live there.”

  “And we should have the same health insurance, the same doctors—who’s your doctor?”

  “I don’t have a doctor,” I said, feeling defensive. “The Irish don’t get sick, we just drop dead from alcoholism or existential melancholy.”

  “Well, you need a doctor because according to Form . . . hang on . . .” She wiped her left pointer finger on a napkin and poked at the papers. “Form 693 says you have to get a complete physical.”