Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg Page A

on, swooning accordions, the sweet bray of horns. It was late fall and chilly, but the celebrants stood outside, drinking from bottles of beer. They were small, stolid people who didn’t smile much, and then only shyly, baring the fugitive glint of gold teeth. Under their work coats, the men wore clean white shirts, the women, dresses in hot reds and greens. Their shyness passed to us. We said hello but little more. We didn’t ask them what they were celebrating. To me, it looked like a wedding, and I would have said, “Felizidad,” if I hadn’t been afraid it would sound condescending. They might just have been partying for the hell of it.
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    The first time I realized I wanted to marry F., I shrank back in dismay. We’d only been seeing each other six months. What was six months? My therapist said it was half a year. I said that couldn’t be healthy. Well, what did I think was healthy? In the moment he uttered it, the word “healthy” became moronic: a brussels sprout was healthy. I said I didn’t know. Shouldn’t I get to know F. better? I don’t remember his answer. Being a therapist, and one who’d been analytically trained, he probably asked me another question. I was so afraid of being wrong; I’d been afraid most of my life. Whenever I’d broken up with someone, it was because I was scared I was making a mistake, and if I hadn’t actually fallen out of love with her, I could foresee a time when I would, like the dim halo that wavers in the
darkness of a country road at night, obscured by a curve in the road, that in another moment brightens into the doom of oncoming headlights. And what happens then? my shrink may have asked, meaning, I suppose, what happens if you fall out of love with her? Thinking of F., I would have said, Then I’ll still be interested in her, because I already knew that to be true; she would hold my interest. But I’m still thinking of my metaphor, the one of headlights, because the answer that comes to me—not then, but now, at this moment—is, Then we crash.
    A few weeks later, I went to the safety deposit at my bank and, after checking my box out of the vault, took it into one of the closets where people pore over their valuables, some gloatingly, some fretfully, the way my mother used to, muttering the names of her holdings to make sure every certificate was still there, some in despair at how little they have to their name, a few documents engraved with allegorical goddesses, jewelry nobody wants to wear, some old coins from a country that no longer exists. My box didn’t have much in it. I took out a smaller—a very small—box, covered in blue velvet, and opened it a crack, out of the exaggerated caution that sometimes comes over me as if to make up for the years I spent walking around with my money in my hands, looking for someone to give it to for nothing. I snapped the box shut, put it in my shoulder bag, and then transferred it to my trouser pocket, one of the front ones. By the time I was walking out of the bank, I’d begun to worry that the box was making a bulge, but I could hardly take it out in the middle of a street in lower Manhattan, which at the time was not yet so rich that there was nothing you could possibly take out of your pocket that anybody in the
vicinity would want because everybody already had more of it than you did. Though I guess someone still might take it from you out of greed, for which there is always a more beyond more, or spite.
    Inside the box was my mother’s engagement ring, a modest but very clear diamond set between two sapphires. It had come to me when she died three years before. I’d decided to take the ring up to the country the next day and present it to F. at the right moment, trusting that the moment’s rightness would be revealed to me before it passed. It would be only the second time in my life that I’d proposed to someone, and the