I’m a miserable cynic (a newer development) and a dreamy romantic (always have been), and it’s such a terrible combination that I don’t know how to tolerate myself. If I were only one of those things, perhaps I would be nodding and agreeing with Nicholas, smiling brightly, rather than drumming up one of my favorite daydreams to focus on when I don’t want to live in reality. In this dream, it’s my wedding day and I’m standing at the altar next to Nicholas. The priest asks if anyone objects to this union and someone in the audience stands up, boldly proclaiming, “I do.” Everyone gasps. It’s Jake Pavelka, controversial season 14 star of The Bachelor.
In real life, Jake Pavelka isn’t going to interrupt my vows, and Nicholas and I will be stuck with each other. I revisit my mental calendar and feel sick at how little time I have left. Right now, the thought of saying I do makes my pulse gallop like a runaway train.
I am falling apart and Nicholas doesn’t even notice.
This is happening with snowballing regularity. Just when I think the odd feeling’s gone and I’m complacent again, all feelings of dissatisfaction suppressed, the pendulum swings back at me. Sometimes the feeling hits me when I’m about to fall asleep. It happens when I’m driving home from work and when I’m eating dinner, which means I lose my appetite immediately and have to make up an acceptable explanation as to why.
Because of my excuses, Nicholas thinks I have a sensitive stomach and my PMS lasts three weeks. We frequently discuss my gluten intake and I pretend to consider cutting sugar out of my diet. This is what happens when you date a guy for eleven months, then get engaged six hours before finally moving in together and learning who the other person truly is on a day-to-day basis. Signing up for Boyfriend Nicholas and inheriting Fiancé Nicholas later on was some legitimate bait-and-switch business, let me tell you. I thought I’d won big-time when I landed him, but after sliding a ring onto my finger he relegated me to Eternal Second Place.
When I’m alone or when I might as well be because he’s ignoring me in favor of spending quality time with his computer, I at least have the reprieve of letting my smile fall. I don’t have to waste energy pretending I’m fine. I don’t let myself indulge the dark, intrusive thoughts for too long, even though I want to, because I’m afraid once I start going full Morrissey, fixing the wall with a thousand-yard stare and reflecting on what exactly makes me unhappy, it will become impossible to fold those thoughts up and put them neatly in a drawer to reexamine another day.
I tune in to Nicholas’s tangent long enough to grasp a few keywords: Stacy, khaki ban, gas gauge. He has found a way to combine his three favorite gripes into one blustery rant. He hates the new uniform policy his coworker Dr. Stacy Mootispaw is trying to implement, which is black slacks only and forbids his darling khakis. He hates Stacy. He hates his fancy car’s gas gauge, which has been wrongfully blamed for not warning him when he ran out of gas last week while driving out of town.
I make a sympathetic expression and assure him Stacy is the scum of the earth and the khaki ban is discrimination. I’m a loyal fiancée, indignant on his behalf, ready to go into battle against his every grievance.
I think about how actress is another way of saying professional liar.
I’m lying to both of us all the time now, and I don’t know how to stop. Our wedding is in three months and if I spill my guts to Nicholas about these mini bursts of panic he’ll attribute them to cold feet, which is said to be normal. He’ll write off everything I’m feeling with those two words. I haven’t been excited about this wedding since it was taken away from me, all the decisions yanked from my hands, and knowing I’m not excited makes me anxious. If I’m not excited to get married, then what the hell am I doing?
But my problem is bigger than his interfering mother now; more than the age-old argument about where to go on our honeymoon and the size of the cake, which I no longer care about because I didn’t get my way with lemon. No one likes lemon, Naomi. I’ve been stewing in all the ways I’ve been wronged for so long now that my simmering resentment has outgrown itself to taint everything about him, even the innocent parts. In spite of everything, I’m such a caring person that I bottle up my negative feelings and don’t share them with him. He’d never understand, anyway.
If he asks me what’s wrong and my issue isn’t one he can make go away with a few reassuring words, Nicholas gets frustrated. It reminds me of my mother once saying that you can’t tell men about your unfixable problems, because they’ll want to fix them and not being able to do so fries their wiring.
Is my problem unfixable? I don’t know what my problem is. I’m the problem, probably. There are a lot of good things about Nicholas, which I have typed up in a password-protected document on my computer. I read it whenever I need to be reminded that Everything Is Okay.
I want to swallow a magic pill that makes me feel perfectly content. I want to gaze lovingly at Nicholas while he haplessly searches the bowels of our kitchen cabinets. We’ve cohabited for ten months and he still doesn’t know where we keep anything.
Our names look so romantic together on paper. Nicholas and Naomi Rose. Have you ever heard anything lovelier? We’d give our children romantic N names, too, and make it a theme. A son named Nathaniel. His grandparents will call him Nat, which I’ll hate. A daughter named Noelle. Her middle name will have to be Deborah after Mrs. Rose, because apparently it’s a tradition going back exactly one generation. Nicholas’s sister has been told the same thing, so if we all fall in line there’s going to be a dynasty of small Deborahs someday.
I close my eyes and try to imagine growing up as that woman’s biological daughter, and the picture is so horrific that I have to bleach it with happy thoughts of another contender for my heart—Rupert Everett in character as Dr. Claw from the 1999 Inspector Gadget movie—bursting through the doors of St. Mary’s and fighting Jake Pavelka to decide who gets to marry me. One of them has a robotic claw, so it isn’t a fair fight. “Not so fast!” shouts another voice. I look up to see Cal Hockley, Titanic’s misunderstood hero, rappelling down from the ceiling with the Heart of the Ocean clamped between his teeth. “This is for you, Naomi! The only woman worthy of it!” Nicholas shouts in protest, turning away from the altar, and promptly falls through a trapdoor.
With conscious effort, I look at Nicholas and try to make myself feel butterflies. He’s responsible. We like the same movies. He’s a good cook. I love these things about the man.
“Naomi,” he’s saying now, banging cupboards. “Where do we keep the Tupperware? I’m going to run to the store and get some cookies to drop off at the office tomorrow. How nice is that? I’m not even working. Nobody else swings by just to drop off snacks.” Rise and Smile is usually closed on weekends, but once a month on a designated Saturday a few of them have to come in. To take out the sting of working on their day off, they all bring in snacks. “I want to make it look like I baked them myself,” he continues, “or I’ll never hear the end of it. Stacy says I never go the extra mile. I’ll show her an extra fucking mile.”
I do an unforgivable thing here and privately agree with Stacy. Nicholas does not go the extra mile, especially when it comes to me. He didn’t get me flowers this past Valentine’s Day, and that’s okay because flowers are stupid, I guess. He reminded me that they’re just going to die. On Valentine’s Day we sat in separate rooms and tagged each other in gushing Facebook posts. We don’t need to say sweet words in person because we know what Real Love is.