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Sparkle (2)
I’m not one of those girls who grew up imagining her wedding. I was always a lot more concerned with what being a wife would entail and hoped I could find someone who’d support me without getting in my way. By thirteen, I was well-versed in what a prenuptial agreement entailed and how to negotiate it, what the laws were regarding marriage in my state, and I could easily identify the advantages of such a union. My parents’ marriage was excellent, but I knew its inner workings, too, so I knew firsthand that it was far harder to make a marriage work than it was to put together a wedding for 700 guests, as they had.
I didn’t want marriage for myself any more than I wanted my dream start-up to go public. That’s how I saw it: a public offering where you lose control of a percentage of your dream. I knew it would happen to me the way most start-up founders imagine they’ll one day have to deal with an IPO. But it’s not like I went into life looking for marriage -- I went into life looking for life.
It’s a little dire for a kid, I know. But that’s the kind of kid I’ve always been. Even so, I was amazed and horrified when, a year into my marriage, I found myself attracted to a man that was not my husband. In all my computations of what it would require to keep the marital organism working, I’d completely forgotten that I was a human being, complete with all the wirings that made desire possible. I was shocked at my naiveté -- had I expected my wedding band to act as a sort of amulet against desire?
Photo by Mr. Thomas.
My ex-husband Richard made every effort to introduce me to his friends when we first settled in to life in California. People were always coming and going, but time and time again, Richard noticed I failed to make a connection with executives and people in the mortgage industry, opting instead for the less flamboyant types – his aunt’s partner, Peter, who was a veteran of WWII and history buff, and our neighbor’s uncle, Harry, a mathematician.
Richard was only mildly annoyed by what he called my “little club of intellectuals.” And then one day he reconnected with an old friend of his, Stephen, a genius according to my husband. Richard offered Stephen to me like a prized stamp for a collection -- at last, a contribution! I was as welcoming to Stephen as I was to any of the friends Richard invited to play poker once a week, but I didn’t think my husband really understood what I was looking for in a friend. His circle was composed of honest and not-so-honest hardworking people whose American Dream was best expressed in the cars they drove and the square footage of their various properties. My circle was defined by people who knew that the real toys and most valuable real estate were in the mind.
Life is a funny thing. When Stephen started looking for a writer for some projects, Richard referred him to me. And so Stephen and I finally had a more in-depth conversation.
My ex-husband, it turned out, had been right. Stephen did get me. He was a marginal man, too, living with one foot in suburbia’s expectations and the other firmly planted in the wonderland of his mind. The first time we sat down to discuss the project, we became so sidetracked talking about theoretical physics that we had to schedule a second meeting to actually get around to the project. It’s hard to describe what a big deal this was for me at the time. This level of discussion was completely unheard of in the suburban landscape of SUVs and McMansions.
We started working together. Not long after I’d drafted an initial report for him, Stephen came over one morning to go over some inconsistencies in his data and, as usual, we got off topic when he noticed a book I was reading about the importance of color in dream interpretation.
“Are you familiar with color magic?” he asked.
“No,” I responded, wrinkling my nose. “Stephen, that’s so New Age.”
“No, no,” he responded laughing. “It’s psychology, let me show you.”
“Seriously?” I asked, laughing. “OK.”
“First, what’s the color that comes to mind when you think of creating, like when you’re writing?”
“Yellow,” I responded. I don’t know why I said yellow. But I did and it still seems fitting.
“Stretch out
