PART 25 TAKING THE PLUNGE

I turned thirty in the summer of 1968. It was not a traumatic birthday for me, as was, say, fifty.  Unlike Nick Carraway, in The Great Gatsby, my thirties didn’t seem to me “a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” Thanks to my maternal genes, I had a fine thick head of hair; I had many male friends; and instead of the unreliable Jordan Baker, I had Nancy.

But “having Nancy” called for a period of reflection. She was my third serious girlfriend; the other two had wanted to marry me, and I had withdrawn both from them and from the prospect of marriage itself. But I had now sown what wild oats I possessed, and it seemed began to seen the right time to change course before I became one of those middle-aged bachelors whose life consists of a series of carbon-copy affairs with ever younger women. I had been too immature and unformed to consider marrying Sue, and Adrianne was too conventional even for me. But the prospect of forming a lifelong alliance with Nancy didn’t provoke an automatic flight response. Living together helped; I realized that my deepest instincts were monogamous and domestic. I was as at home with Nancy, the two of us settled in my little garden apartment with the shade tree in the back. I came to a decision: I would ask her to marry me.

But I didn’t do it.  And the longer I kept on not doing the more difficult it seemed. Being who I was, I sought literary analogues for my predicament. Alexander the Great, according to Kafka, “might have remained standing on the bank of the Hellespont and never have crossed it, and not out of fear, not out of indecision, not out of infirmity of will, but because of the mere weight of his own body.” Is he talking about physical inertia? A body at rest tending to stay at rest? That wasn’t what was wrong with me. I turned to Hamlet, a pedant and a waffler like me, who was confronted with the same kind of problem: he’s made a decision but he can’t carry it out. At one point the prince asks himself the same question I’d been asking myself for days: “Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do / Sith have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do ‘t.”

These literary commentaries didn’t help. Alexander did cross the Hellespont; Hamlet did take his revenge, but I was still suffering from temporary paralysis – and not for the first time.  When I was ten years old my Edgewood class and I were taken to an amusement park called Rye Playland, where there was a pool with a ten-meter diving platform. Just out of curiosity, without any intention of leaping off it, I climbed the rungs of the ladder to the top and thought, no one in his right mind would jump. Another literary analogue sprang to mind: as a special project I had just read King Lear and I thought of Gloucester, poised on the edge of what he thought was the cliffs of Dover, the unseen waves crashing beneath him. Then I became aware that my classmates were all ringed around the pool, waiting for me to jump. And I realized I would have to, or the humiliation of climbing back down the ladder would follow me until I graduated. So, here goes: a-one and a-two and . . . I’m still on the platform. I try again: just put one foot in front of the other until there’s no more deck beneath me. But as soon as my lead foot reached the edge, my trailing foot stopped moving. How do you get your muscles to move? Talking to them is no help; you do something by just doing it. But I wasn’t doing it.

Eventually, after what seemed like half an hour, one of my friends below yelled “Chicken!” and it startled me into jumping. It was indeed a long way down. I fell like a rag doll, landing on my belly with a huge splash, but when I surfaced, there were cheers; no one else jumped that day. Like Gloucester, I wasn’t dead. This memory came to me one evening after dinner, Nancy and I standing at the sink of our tiny pullman kitchen, she washing and I drying. And it was as if someone had yelled “Chicken!” I put the dish down, turned to Nancy and said, “Call your parents.”

Not the most romantic proposal ever, and certainly I was taking her response for granted in a callous-sounding way, but she understood what I was saying and why, and she replied not “Oh, yes!” but “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said, and we fell into each other’s arms. I was flooded with relief. I had taken the plunge. And I knew as soon as I said it that it was the right thing to do; there was no residue of doubt or hesitation. Nancy called her parents and told them, “Dick and I are getting married.” Nancy handed me the phone, and Joe said, with studied formality, “We’re very pleased to welcome you into the family,” as though I were suing to him for his daughter’s hand and he was bestowing his gracious consent. And then Beulah got on – tears in her voice – and said, “Oh, Dick, you’re the son we never had. Will you call us Mom and Dad?”

I was unprepared for this request. I’d been calling them Beulah and Joe since I’d left Grand Rapids on that first visit, and that was what I was comfortable with. I still had a mom whom I called Mom, and Dad had been my dad. But this didn’t seem like the time to get into an argument about nomenclature, so I just muttered something about looking forward to being their son-in-law, and handed the phone back to Nancy. Her mother wanted to discuss a date, but Nancy wasn’t ready to steep herself in the minutiae of wedding planning, so she said a quick goodbye. What now? We both wanted tell other people – to cry the bans, as it were. But who would be most reliably jubilant and approving? We called Tom Jackson and Ciba, who was now his girlfriend. “Come over here!” Tom insisted. We bought a chilled bottle of champagne at the liquor store on Broadway and took a cab to his apartment on East 74th Street. Two other couples whom we knew were there, and Tom opened some of his own champagne to serve everyone, and it was a lovely little impromptu party at which we were the center of attention – which is why we had gone there. I wondered, on the way home, whether and when I’d start second-guessing myself, but I never did. When we were home, we made love, pulled the covers up, and I fell instantly and deeply asleep. You don’t have conquer the world or kill your uncle to feel exhausted.