LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Right in the middle of'Like a Virgin.’ I'm not sure if it was a stroke or coronary or what.”

      “God, Dave. That must have been awful. Why didn't you tell me?

      “I don't know. I guess I didn't want to spoil the mood.”

      “That was sweet of you.” She sounded vaguely perplexed.

      Dave didn't answer. He just sat there, staring at the nutritional information on the side panel of a box of Cheerios, marveling at his own cowardice.

      “I love you,” she said.

      “Yeah.” He massaged an eyelid with two fingers. “Same here.”

      “Oh, by the way,” she said. “You're invited for supper tonight. My parents want to celebrate.”

      He forced himself not to groan. “What time?”

      “Seven?”

      “Okay.”

      “There's so much planning to do,” she said happily. “I'm overwhelmed just thinking about it.”

      “Yeah, me too.”

      “By the way,” she added, “what do you think of September?”

      Dave had two courier runs that afternoon—a quick in-and-out to Wall Street, followed by a trip to Morristown to drop off some X rays at a doctor's office. He liked driving for a living, especially since it meant he got paid for time spent listening to tunes on his car stereo. There was no better way to experience music, cranking the volume as high as it could go in an enclosed space, singing at the top of his lungs as he zigzagged like a stuntman through slow-moving traffic on the Pulaski Skyway. He could never understand how people managed to survive entire days cooped up in an office, with nothing to listen to but ringing phones and hushed voices. Even worse, a few of the places he visited had piped-in Muzak, the sound track of living death. Just thinking about it gave him the willies.

      Another cool thing about his job was that it brought him into the city two or three times a week. Manhattan was always a jolt of crazy energy, a reminder that life wasn't meant to be safe or easy, the way it was in the suburbs. Dave even appreciated the stuff that gave most drivers headaches—the insane cabbies and squeegee men, the pedestrians who swarmed around his car at red lights like ants around a piece of candy, the whistle-tooting bike messengers and Rollerbladers who zipped past his windshield in suicidal blurs. Just making it in and out of this mess in one piece qualified as a triumph, an achievement he could carry around for the rest of the day.

      Sometimes he wondered if things would have turned out differently if he'd moved into the city after dropping out of college instead of drifting back to his parents’ house and the routine of familiar places and faces that had consumed his life ever since. Maybe it would have sharpened him somehow, having to live in a dingy, roach-infested shoe-box apartment, eating canned soup and SpaghettiOs, following in the footsteps of Dylan and Lou Reed and Talking Heads and the zillions of wannabes who'd journeyed to the city to test themselves against the myth Sinatra sang about. It wasn't something he brooded about, just a possibility he turned over in his mind every now and then when he found himself trying to answer the thorny question of how it was he'd ended up a Wishbone instead of a star.

      In the car, he was able to consider his predicament more clearly, without the edge of panic that had clouded his morning thoughts. The first thing he realized was that it wasn't the idea of marrying Julie that frightened him; it was the idea of being married, of joining this big corny club of middle-aged men that included his father, Julie's father, his uncles, and every scoutmaster, Little League coach, and volunteer fireman he'd ever known. There were some exceptions—Bruce Springsteen and Buzzy came to mind— but in general, marriage seemed to require that a man check his valuables at the door: his dreams, his freedom, all the wildness that had defined the secret part of his life, even if, like Dave, he wasn't all that wild in reality.

      It was easier if you were a woman. Women were supposed to want to get married, to go through life with a husband and children. A man's job, as far as Dave could see, was simply to resist for as long as possible before surrendering to the inevitable. You didn't have to play guitar in a wedding band to know that there was something at least slightly pathetic about a bridegroom.

      Beyond his personal fears, though, he identified a deeper, more philosophical question: Was marriage something you chose, or was it something that happened whether you wanted it to or not, one of those mysterious, transforming events on the order of birth and death? The no-brain answer, of course, was that you chose. You were an adult in a free country; there were no arranged marriages in America. You didn't have to do anything you didn't want to.

      He accepted all that, but on another level, it was hard to say that he and Julie had actually chosen each other in some rational, adult way. Fifteen years ago—half their lifetime—she had walked up to him in the hallway of Warren G. Harding Regional High School and told him that Exit 36 had put on a great show at the spring dance and predicted that they would someday be famous. A week later he took her to see Midnight Express. Two months after that they split a six-pack purchased by her older sister's boyfriend and had sex for the first time. It just happened, in some urgent hormonal haze that had little to do with concepts like choice or intention, and they hadn't been free of each other since. And now, apparently, unless he thought of something fast, they were going to get themselves married.

      Dave's father Sat at the table in his Mr. Speedy baseball cap, reading the Daily News with the almost religious thoroughness he devoted to every edition. It seemed to Dave that he pored over every word of it—the advertisements, the classifieds, the bridge column, all twelve horoscopes. Reading the newspaper filled most of Al Raymond's spare time; it was his version of a hobby.

      “Hey,” he said, looking up with a smile that was surprised and satisfied at the same time. “Congratulations. Your mother told me the good news.”

      “Word travels fast.”

      “You had her worried there for a while, Dave. She didn't think Julie would stick around long enough for you to make up your mind.”

      “It wasn't a matter of making up my mind. I just didn't feel ready.”

      “No one feels ready. It's the same with having kids. You just jump in and start treading water. If everybody waited until they were ready, we wouldn't need express lines at the supermarket.”

      Since his retirement, Al had emerged as something of an armchair philosopher, full of cryptic insights into the workings of the world. It was a development that surprised the whole family. Dave still came home half expecting to find the old Al lurking behind his paper, the grumpy exhausted chief of maintenance at the county courthouse, the human jukebox of grievances.

      “So what do you think about marriage?” Dave asked, sorting through the junk mail on top of the microwave.

      “About what?”

      “Marriage.”

      “Julie's great,” his father replied. “I hope you'll be happy together.”

      “I didn't ask about Julie. I asked what you thought about marriage.”

      “What? The institution in general?”

      “Yeah. I mean, you've been married for thirty-six years. I figure you might have formed an opinion by now.”

      His father studied him for a few seconds, apparently trying to decide if he was serious.

      “Come on,” he said, chuckling uncomfortably. “Quit pulling my leg.”

      Until that evening, Dave had never given serious consideration to the matter of inlaws. He'd known Jack and Dolores Müller for a long time—almost as long as he'd known their daughter—and paid them the wary respect due the parents of the girl you're sleeping with, but it hadn't occurred to him, except in the vaguest, most fleeting way, to think of them as relatives, people whose lives might one day be intimately and inextricably caught up with his own. Inlaws were people you were required to visit on

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