The fourth time she breaks things off, it’s so traumatic she quits her job and disappears for weeks. Her friends won’t tell Ray anything. He begs them for news, a phone number—anything. He tasks them with long letters, which they say they can’t deliver. Then a note from her, neither apologizing nor cruel. She won’t say where she is. She simply lays out the deathly claustrophobia, the killing panic she feels at signing a legally binding document determining the bearing and conduct of the rest of her life.
I want to be with you. You know that. That’s why I keep saying yes. But a legal business deal? Rights and ownership? Oh Ray, if only you were a discredited doctor or a bankrupt businessman. A shyster real estate agent. Anything but a property lawyer.
He writes to the return address—a post office box in Eau Claire. He tells her that slavery is outlawed everywhere in the world. She’ll never be anyone’s property. He won’t change his career for her; and patent law is what he knows. It’s necessary work, the engine of the world’s wealth, and he’s good at it. Maybe better than good. But if he must choose between giving up the idea of marriage or giving up the idea of acting in another amateur theatrical production with her, well, nolo contendere.
Just come back, and we’ll live together in sin with two separate cars, two separate bank accounts, two separate houses, two separate wills.
Shortly after he mails the letter, she shows up on the doorstep of his bungalow, late at night, with two tickets to Rome. It raises some questions at his office, but he leaves with her on a non-honeymoon two days later. On the third night in the Eternal City, with the prosecco flowing freely and all the pretty lights, and the crumbling antiquities, and the damn street music, and the lime trees with their glorious crowns and white lights strung all through their graceful boughs, she asks him—“What the hell, hey, Ray?”—if he will be her lawfully acquired chattel, contractually bound to her forever. They end up chucking coins over their left shoulders into the Trevi Fountain. Not an original idea, and they probably owe someone royalties.
They make it back to St. Paul in time for Octoberfest. They swear to each other never to tell anyone, to deny everything. But their friends guess, the moment the couple steps out smirking in public together. What happened to you two in Rome? Nothing special. No one needs any superpower in reading facial muscles to know they’re lying through their teeth. Did you get thrown in jail or something? Did you get married? You two got married, didn’t you? You’re married!
And it makes no earthly difference in the world. Dorothy moves back in. She insists on scrupulous bookkeeping, splitting every shared expense down the exact middle. But something in the back of her brain thinks, as she drifts through his lovely library and dining room and sunroom: When it happens, when it’s time to brood, when I turn all weird and hot to propagate, then all of this will belong to my babies!
On their first anniversary, he writes her a letter. He puts some time into the wording. He can’t possibly speak the words, so he leaves them on the breakfast table when he goes to work.
You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”
He says there’s nothing on Earth he can give to her, for their anniversary, to thank her for what she has given him. Nothing, except for a thing that grows. Here’s what I propose we do. He doesn’t know where he gets the idea. He has forgotten the slow, heavy, outside prophecies that came over him on his first amateur theatrical outing, when he had to play a man who had to play a tree.
Dorothy reads the words while driving herself to the courthouse for an afternoon of transcribing hearings.
Every year, as close to this day as we can, let’s go to the nursery and find something for the yard. I don’t know anything about plants. I don’t know their names or how to care for them. I don’t even know how to tell one blurry green thing