parts of rural America, Valerie and I were off to Paris. In Paris, our love was respected. These were the Clinton years, and two young, leftist Americans in love, ambling along the Seine, were a sight to behold. We took in the knowing nods and warm smiles of the French, we acknowledged the silent accord we had with them—they would continue to provide us a place of rest and higher culture, and we would continue to come there and spend our money; we would beam all of the American earnestness and heartfelt wonder that we could muster and they could feel superior to our lack of urbanity and sophistication.
We stayed at a cheap hotel in the heart of Paris; it was near nothing famous but in the center of everything, and while the neighborhood is something I can scarcely remember, the hotel was family-owned. It was called the Hotel Cambrai and it was clean and friendly and a place to ravish each other with the sort of recklessness foreign travel brings into one's sex life. In the morning, there were bread and croissants. I drank the coffee, Valerie the hot chocolate. We returned to our room after breakfast for more love. One morning, we shattered the innocence of a young Albanian cleaning woman, having forgotten to latch our door.
On our last night, sitting in the courtyard of the closed Louvre, I decided to ask Valerie to marry me. Lacking a ring, or any preconceived ideas of a grand gesture, I led her to the edge of the fountain, and we sat there on the half wall. I said, "Valerie, I am going to ask you something and when you have an answer, please tap me on the shoulder and let me know."
She leaned in, laughing. "What is it, my sweet?"
"Will you marry me?" I said, then quickly plunged my head down into the fountain's murky water. It was cold, full of sediment. I heard her screaming and laughing above the water's surface. Then, I felt her frantic slapping of my shoulder.
I surfaced and gasped and spit.
"Yes!" she shrieked. "God, yes, you're crazy!"
For the rest of the spring semester, we jokingly and annoyingly (to our friends) referred to each other as
Jean-Claude
and
Amelie
and drank only French wine. We did not have the money for an engagement ring, so we bought the cheapest wedding bands we could find at a Montgomery Ward that was going out of business, and we wore them on our right hands as engagement symbols. Our friends shuddered about this, too. Yuck! Fuck! But despite the strong protests of our peers, we were married at Ann Arbor's city hall during the week of final exams. I still had one year of college left, and so we decided to stay put in Ann Arbor. Our friends thought it odd, crazy, in fact, that we would, in 1995, decide to marry so young. But there was something oddly alternative about it—revolutionary. To be married young was so square and unexpected that it was cool. I felt as if we had warded off the end of the century and its inherent uncertainty. We had been
grounded.
We rented a tiny efficiency apartment, on the third floor of an old Victorian on North Thayer Street, and we slept in a Murphy bed. We bought dishes at Goodwill, had our friends over for dinner parties, opened a joint checking account, and shared a closet. We wrote letters of lofty prose to our families, telling them what we had done. I loved the new intimacies of marriage, the shame-free birth control pills on the nightstand, the merging of morning routines and sets of towels and CDs. We each owned the Bruce Springsteen box set, for instance, so we traded one in at a used record shop and came home with Serge Gainsbourg and Edith Piaf! Aha! With marriage, we were suddenly more interesting!
Then it was summer and the apartment was sweltering. One night I went to Meijer's at two A.M. and bought us a window air conditioner. I had installed it by three and I felt so heroic as we made love in the factory-chilled air. In July, Valerie was off on her long-planned canoe trip with Jeanette. She had ignored Jeanette, somewhat, after we had
We stayed at a cheap hotel in the heart of Paris; it was near nothing famous but in the center of everything, and while the neighborhood is something I can scarcely remember, the hotel was family-owned. It was called the Hotel Cambrai and it was clean and friendly and a place to ravish each other with the sort of recklessness foreign travel brings into one's sex life. In the morning, there were bread and croissants. I drank the coffee, Valerie the hot chocolate. We returned to our room after breakfast for more love. One morning, we shattered the innocence of a young Albanian cleaning woman, having forgotten to latch our door.
On our last night, sitting in the courtyard of the closed Louvre, I decided to ask Valerie to marry me. Lacking a ring, or any preconceived ideas of a grand gesture, I led her to the edge of the fountain, and we sat there on the half wall. I said, "Valerie, I am going to ask you something and when you have an answer, please tap me on the shoulder and let me know."
She leaned in, laughing. "What is it, my sweet?"
"Will you marry me?" I said, then quickly plunged my head down into the fountain's murky water. It was cold, full of sediment. I heard her screaming and laughing above the water's surface. Then, I felt her frantic slapping of my shoulder.
I surfaced and gasped and spit.
"Yes!" she shrieked. "God, yes, you're crazy!"
For the rest of the spring semester, we jokingly and annoyingly (to our friends) referred to each other as
Jean-Claude
and
Amelie
and drank only French wine. We did not have the money for an engagement ring, so we bought the cheapest wedding bands we could find at a Montgomery Ward that was going out of business, and we wore them on our right hands as engagement symbols. Our friends shuddered about this, too. Yuck! Fuck! But despite the strong protests of our peers, we were married at Ann Arbor's city hall during the week of final exams. I still had one year of college left, and so we decided to stay put in Ann Arbor. Our friends thought it odd, crazy, in fact, that we would, in 1995, decide to marry so young. But there was something oddly alternative about it—revolutionary. To be married young was so square and unexpected that it was cool. I felt as if we had warded off the end of the century and its inherent uncertainty. We had been
grounded.
We rented a tiny efficiency apartment, on the third floor of an old Victorian on North Thayer Street, and we slept in a Murphy bed. We bought dishes at Goodwill, had our friends over for dinner parties, opened a joint checking account, and shared a closet. We wrote letters of lofty prose to our families, telling them what we had done. I loved the new intimacies of marriage, the shame-free birth control pills on the nightstand, the merging of morning routines and sets of towels and CDs. We each owned the Bruce Springsteen box set, for instance, so we traded one in at a used record shop and came home with Serge Gainsbourg and Edith Piaf! Aha! With marriage, we were suddenly more interesting!
Then it was summer and the apartment was sweltering. One night I went to Meijer's at two A.M. and bought us a window air conditioner. I had installed it by three and I felt so heroic as we made love in the factory-chilled air. In July, Valerie was off on her long-planned canoe trip with Jeanette. She had ignored Jeanette, somewhat, after we had
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