And as we gathered once again around the kitchen table, I realized we did know one thing.
Now, more than ever, we had to be there for each other. And we would be.
The End
epilogue
Happily Ever After After All?
The inevitable happened. Time passed. And suddenly it was almost a year and a half that MNB and I had been dating. Somewhere along the way, we’d entered coupledom.
We didn’t technically live together, but we knew one another’s patterns and did couple things, like going out with other couples and traveling together and creating a family adjacent scenario in which my two dogs, Pepper and Prancer, were sort of our kids. But mostly we’d
developed a routine that worked. A way of being around each other in the same space. Because what is a relationship really but two bodies orbiting each other in space and time?
And like planets, it’s hard to resist the pull of partnering. Once you enter into the relationship phase it’s like being inside one of those Russian dolls or Dante’s Inferno or maybe just Mario Brothers—you reach one level and you just have to try to get to the next. In other words, for the first time, after nearly a year and a half together, I found myself asking, what if MNB and I got married and he became MNH?
I didn’t know why I was asking the question. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see myself growing old with MNB in some vague and fuzzy future, but at this moment, irl, it would only make our lives much more complicated.
And yet, there was something about later-life marriage that was in the air. These days, when people ask what I’m writing about and I tell them, they all have a story. It’s a story, they promise, that will be unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.
“Try me,” I say.
Then they tell me a convoluted tale about two people who suddenly find themselves single and finally, after all these years, discover each other (usually again) and fall in love and get married and have a wedding with a hundred of their friends. And there is nothing new about this story except for the age of the participants. They are always over seventy. Sometimes they are eighty-three. Sometimes they are ninety-four. In any case, when these weddings happen they’re apparently really beautiful because what is more beautiful than showing the world that true love does work in the end. And everyone cries.
Then the wedding bug hit Tilda Tia.
She called me up. “You won’t believe what’s happened,” she said.
I already knew what had happened from Kitty and Queenie. As of one month ago, Tilda Tia had a new boyfriend and he was a real MNB. He had a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side and a regular job in finance, and, since he was a really nice guy, he was helping Tilda Tia move into her new apartment.
“I met someone,” she announced.
“I heard,” I said.
“No, but I mean, I met someone. I mean, I would not be surprised if I have a ring on my finger by this time next year.”
“Really?”
“Seriously. And when I say ring, I mean my wedding ring. My engagement ring I’ll probably get in six months.”
“So you’ll be married in a year?” I said.
“Yes. Why not?” she said.
“Are you going to have a wedding?”
“Of course I’m going to have a wedding,” she said. “What is wrong with you?”
“And bridesmaids?”
“Yes. And they are all going to match,” she said.
I tried to envision this phenomenon of middle-aged people getting married with all the fixings. Like dance floors and eighties music. With some super middle spinning around on his back in a long-forgotten break-dancing move. Getting teary-eyed over “St. Elmo’s Fire” and pointing fingers at each other as everyone boogied. Sure, it was embarrassing. But if you didn’t care, it could be fun.
“Hello?” Tilda Tia said. “Are you there?”
“Are you going to play Michael Jackson?” I asked. “And what about ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’?”