I Married A Man. There, I Said It.

Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium

MIDWESTERN LOVE
The second in our series.
I Married a Man. There, I Said It.
By Mrs. Peperium

IT was happening again. I was at a garden party on the East Coast. The hosts were people I wished I had never met, people I never wanted to become friends with and I was drinking straight vodka just to get through it when an exceptionally-educated, bony, flat-chested, prune-faced, dead ringer for a female Episcopalian bishop said, "Oh...next door!...he's...a..." she paused and lowered her voice, "...Man."

Immediately hearing her words, all the other exceptionally-educated, bony, flat-chested, prune-faced dead ringers for female Episcopalian bishops at the party immediately grimaced. Their husbands, sensing their cues, grimaced too. A few of the more purebred ones went as far to wrinkle up their noses as if two or more of the exceptionally-educated, bony, flat-chested, prune-faced dead ringers for a female Episcopalian bishop had just passed gas in their vicinity. The conversation quickly turned from which organic wines were on sale that week at Whole Foods to complaints about the man next door. Before long the scope of their wrath had expanded from bashing him to bashing all men.

I stood there nodding, keeping my secret totally secret. The secret to how I kept the bounce in my step, the blood coursing through my veins, and my desire to remain attractive even though the ship of youth had sailed and was set to run aground on the Rocks of Age in the oncoming years.

A woman I never wanted to see again looked at me with big paranoid eyes and shook her close-cropped head. Her sterling silver and turquoise peace sign dangle earrings gave a little dance not unlike one they might have given, had they ever been allowed the pleasure of experiencing an orgasm. She said "Can you imagine? A man right next door!"

"No? Not next door!" I said, pretending to be completely aghast and evincing only the slighest of shudders. I understood the pleasure of experiencing an orgasm and never had a desire to fake one whatsoever.

Not only could I imagine a man as my neighbor, I could imagine one in my bed. Every night. You see I’m a woman who is married to a...Man.

Thank God.

And I am not just an average woman. I lean way, way feminine. The all-girl's college on the North Shore of Boston I attended didn't even glance at my SAT scores; They just looked at my father's salary and called his broker. Once safely nestled in there with my college trousseau put away in the drawers, hung on the hangers, and placed in the shoe racks, I studied art, never taking a math or science course again. There, my feminist professors (both male and female) instructed me daily that I was everything a man was and, most of the time, much more. After graduation I went to art school in Boston. Though it was co-ed there were no men around. Lots of pretty guys named Scooter, Chad, and John-John though. Again the lessons in the equality of men and women continued unabated except for a timeout during figure drawing classes. Unfortunately our professor had been unable to find hermaphrodites among Boston's available pool of nude models. After graduation, I found the door held open for me, (figuratively) because I was an ambitious young woman with talent and those were all the rage (literally) back then. I went to work in Boston's finest ad firm which was well-known for employing only attractive and well-dressed women. It took only a few months among those women before 'the something more than men' about me reared its beautiful head. All my underthings were now silk, French-made, and came from a boutique on Newbury Street. My shoes, all heels and all Italian came from another boutique 3 doors down. My last love before Mr. P, if you could call him a love, (lovey certainly) was an antique dealer from a long line of antique dealers. He grew up summering at the old family place in Provincetown. He was so in touch with his feminine side, his underthings, all Hessian-made with Battenburg lace embellishments, made me look androgynous.

On my first date with Mr. P over oysters and ales, I ranted about how it was perfectly acceptable for men to get manicures and even eyebrow waxes if they felt they needed a more well-defined arch. I did, however, draw the line at bikini waxes.

"Wow," he said. "You’re passionate."

If Mr. P had said, "Wow, you must be a woman," would I have ended our date? Maybe. I had never had an actual relationship with a man before. Men scared me. I didn't trust myself alone with one. Who knew what would happen? Wisely, Mr. P did not confess to being a man that night. But after a few more dates where I ranted some more, I had a strange feeling that he might just be different.

"You’re a man, aren't you?" I asked him.

Mr P has a gorgeous face. Right then he leaned his face right into mine and said: "I like women. A lot. More than that, I like my women to look like women. I like them to smell of perfume made from real extracts of real flowers, herbs, and spices. Nothing chemical for them. I like to hold the door open for them, pull their chairs out for them and buy them big bouquets of flowers and big boxes of imported bon-bons with those little gold tongs so they can recline on their sofas enjoying their sweets without having to move. I like my women to speak so softly so I have to get real close to hear them. And I like to hold them really tight when I kiss them. But, only if they want me to."

"Really?" I said. I didn’t know anyone who did that. I remember thinking when I met Mr. P soon after my career had moved me out to the midwest, that he, even though he was midwestern, was a good person, a fair person, even a better person than I, with my inconsistent values derived from my inconsistent East Coast upbringing. But I soon learned Mr. P was something more. He was something an East Coast girl had only read about in novels published before the 20th century. Mr. P was a man. East Coast girls had to turn to 19th century novels (and earlier) to learn what a man was because the exceptionally-educated, bony, flat-chested, prune-faces who had come of age at the turn of the 20th century and been unable to land a man, had, as their spinsterhood advanced, turned bitter. So behaving like the bitter, frustrated spinsters they were, and, borrowing a page from the indians that had come before them, they made men the target of their collective wrath. They killed them off. Remember the Deerfield Massacre? Well those old flat-chested prune faces did the indians at Deerfield one better. They made Deerfield Academy co-ed and, eventually, all-girls. A few men did survive here and there, usually in public school system or in the sanctuary of Catholic Churches. However, as the end of the 20th century drew to a close, men on the East Coast had become nearly as extinct as the dodo bird.

Here's how manly Mr. P was: in the 80's, Mr. P, attended an East Coast mental institution posing as an institution for high learning (I'm privy to the amounts of prescription meds the *student body* at the the *school* consumes on a daily basis as well as the amount of free psychological counseling alloted to each *student*. Trust me, the joint is a posh sanatorium for the troubled youth of the educated set). Mr. P decided he didn't require their treatment so he transferred to a midwestern university. There, he arranged dates with girls who would show up for his poetry readings wearing black berets, black nail polish, and black opaque tights. Afterwards, he took them back to his dorm room (one at a time, I think). He baked them chocolate chip slice-n-bake cookies in his toaster oven and served the cookies while still warm with ice-cold milk from his little refrigerator. But here is how open-minded Mr. P has always been: It didn't matter to him one bit if the girls fell for his lines or not. (lines of poetry that is).

Whatever Mr. P's current estrogen levels were, it was too late: I had already fallen in love with his combination of steadfastness and kindness, his ability to bench press, (pressing me to the bench as well as using me as a barbell), his scent by the end of the day, and his dusty library. It didn't even matter that I was allergic to dust. After we were engaged, he gave me a duster made from real turkey feathers.

What can I say? They say love can sidetrack a person. In my case, I was derailed. I wanted to marry this man so badly, I not only agreed to live in the midwest with him but bear his children too. His midwestern children. Still, it did not feel good when I told myself: I love a man. It felt, in fact, like I was betraying someone. Or something. Had absolutely no clue what. Most of the time, I didn't care.

Slowly, my close friends from out East met my new husband. And slowly, one by one, they took me aside. "Mrs. P," they would hiss, "he’s a man."

"Don't you think I know that?" I would say, affecting a tired, almost exasperated tone, "Why he reminds me of that every day, usually 4 times. The man is killing me. He's insatiable. "But," I would say, "there's still hope for him yet. He loves flowers, dining out, and silk stockings as much as I do." I did neglect to tell my friends that Mr. P liked me to wear the silk stockings, me to receive the flowers and order my meal for me when we dined out.

"It's your funeral," they would say, shaking their heads and feeling sorry for me.

At the time, blackened salmon with orange beurre blanc was all the rage at seafood restaurants on the East Coast. Our first dinner party as a married couple with Mr. P's three oldest friends and their wives as our guests, I prepared them the dish. Imagine my surprise when, instead of raving about the culinary prowess of the chef who invented blackened salmon, Paul Prudhomme, or the sublety of Auguste Escoffier's orange beurre blanc, the men raved about their homemade salmon jerky? Who could love homemade salmon jerky, much less rave about it? Well, I put my fork down and mused to myself. I guess if you caught, cleaned, and hung the fish in the smoker yourself and, then, changed the wood chips religiously, what was there not to love?

Everyone I knew felt optimistic about the sexes back then. True gender equality was just around the corner. But Mr. P didn't believe this. Neither did his friends. They saw a brave new world hurtling uncontrollably towards us where a man had no idea what a woman was. And vice-versa. A world where there would be no gender at all. I stared at their faces, faces I knew I would have to see for the rest of my life. They fell from medium manly to very manly — all of them masculine. How had I ended up here?

"You told me you were friends with women." I said to Mr. P later.

"I am," he answered. "They just happen to be married to men."

Angry with him for being a man and more angry with myself for loving a man, I began to argue with him while I dressed for work and he, already showered, dressed, and shaved, ate the breakfast I had prepared him and read the morning paper I had retrieved from the front walk for him. It wasn't long before I ran all my silk stockings by yanking them up in anger. When I destroyed my last pair, I did the only thing I could do. I cried. Mr. P did not scold me for being so careless with my possessions. He quietly went out and bought me more silk stockings. Lots more. Boxes and boxes of them. I loved receiving them too. But was this enough? Yes, dammit, it sure as hell was.

I quit my job the next day and never pulled another silk stocking up in anger again.

Whenever we were with friends, I would silently tally who was wearing silk stockings and who was not. Inevitably it was always my friends wearing the knee-highs underneath their pant suits and the wives of Mr. P's friends wearing silk stockings underneath their dresses and skirts. Almost without exception, his friends loved silk stockings, and my friends did not.

Tired of holding my tongue at dinner when his friends debated which was better; walleye, perch, or whitefish or did corn-fed beef have a more developed flavour than Black Angus and who would ever feed a cow beer and give it a massage to marble the fat? — I began to fight back. One night, during an endless dinner at a country club, I argued Atlantic bluefish baked in a true Dijon mustard sauce was delicious, that Long Island Bluepoints poached just until their edges curled and served on toast with a Pernod-scented cream were not only delightful, but deeply satisfying, and Block Island swordfish cut in 1 1/2'' thick steaks, sauteed in butter and finished off with a Madeira demi-glace and morel mushrooms was indiscernible from beef, corn-fed, Black Angus, Kobe or not. Then, I cringed at their typical mid western responses of "How could anyone eat a bottom feeder? Fish taste like beef? Pshaw!!" What was far, far worse, I saw genuine pity for me in all of their eyes. At least Mr. P isn’t as midwestern as these people, I told myself. But that offered little solace until we got home. There, in the privacy of our first little home, Mr. P reminded how very midwestern he really was. Again I became happy, so very happy he was so midwestern.

Then it came time for me to host to my monthly Oprah's Book Club meeting. A friend who was a member had agreed to help me. She thought it might be fun to allow Mr. P and her husband to forage for the nuts and berries at the green grocer's to accompany the wines, cheeses, and pate we had already selected.

"They could discuss the book and gather their thoughts together for the meeting", she said.

I swallowed hard. "Mr. P doesn't read Oprah's books."

"Is he too busy with work?" she asked, her face so innocent, so open and so very empty.

I shook my head, avoiding her eyes. "No. He reads for the other team." I managed.

"Huh?"

"He doesn't lift his pinkie when he raises his teacup?" I tried.

Now she was frowning at me. I had no choice. "He's not like your husband. At all. He’s not in touch with his feminine side...he's only in touch with my feminine side." There, I finally said it. It was nicer, I thought, than telling her the truth. I was married to a man and she wasn't. Even so, my pussyfooting around her husband's true status had rendered her speechless. Our friendship changed.

The day of the Oprah's Book Club meeting at our home, Mr. P and I had an argument about whether he could go curling. "How can you expect me to tell them where you are?" I asked, imagining me trying to explain to everyone how he was not only strong enough to heave a 40 pound stone of polished Canadian granite with porcellian embellishments down the ice but heave it with amazing precision. Mr. P did end up going curling. During the Oprah Book Club meeting, I kept quiet about Mr. P's development into a champion curler on both sides of the Detroit River by hiding all of his trophies in the guest room shower. Maybe, only maybe, I imagined the looks of non-genuine pity my fellow Oprahites had in their eyes for me? Or had they all been peeking in the shower?

At the end of our Oprah Book Club meeting, we decided our next book would be Al Gore's 'Earth in the Balance'. In the next few weeks I poured over the pages absorbing Al Gore's pure mental genius. Then it happened. On page 14,765, I discovered Al Gore believed the internal combustion engine was our greatest threat to civilisation. A-ha I thought. Finally Mr. P would see the error of being a man. Rather than gloat, I decided to forgive him at once. I pointed to page 14,765 and asked him to read it. When he finished it, I said "Now that we know that this-..." but my eye saw his bulging forearm clearly distinguishable beneath his Egyptian cotton pajamas (he had just finished his nightly bench pressing of me about 15 minutes earlier) and stopped. "You're still going to keep driving the International Harvester Scout aren't you?”

"Hell yes." he drawled, "with 10lbs out of each tire so I can use more up more gas each time I drive it. Now move a little closer..."

As luck would have it, we had dinner the next night with a group of his old friends. His friends had always seemed to be warm and caring. But whenever we discussed things like automobile manufacturing, they suddenly became insane, rabid, and even, unreasonable. That night they all agreed the Big Three needed to build cars people wanted to drive if the Big Three hoped to survive all the new global competition. But then I heard myself screaming at them, "Who cares about global competition? It's the globe I care about. Detroit shouldn't build cars people want to drive! People don't know what's good for the environment. Detroit should be building cars that get 85, 95, even 105 miles per gallon! If they refuse to do this, we need to pass laws to force them do this. Who's our senator? I'll call his office right now and leave a message on his machine."

Now I knew I was the insane, rabid, and unreasonable one. If a rift was going to happen in our marriage, it was not Mr. P who was going to cause it, it would be me.

On the way home, I vowed to myself to stop treating Mr. P's friends so horribly. They were good and decent people. So was Mr. P. As we sped through our big midwestern state, I looked at over at him. The dashboard lights showed his big strong and solid arms firmly grasped to the steering wheel. Mr. P was a man. I was a woman. We were not the same. I now knew the truth : We never could be the same no matter what they had tried to teach me at school. We were different and that difference was a real barrier. Could our marriage survive such a barrier? How many heterosexual couples had I known? Absolutely none. Except for Mr. P's friends. And they were lovely couples.

Suddenly, I knew what I wanted right then for the rest of my life. I asked Mr. P to pull over. He did. I spoke, "Mr. P, I want to be a lovely couple like your friends are. I'm sorry. They don't teach those things out East anymore. I don't know how to be a lovely couple."

Mr. P smiled. "It's ok bun, I'll teach you. Now move a little closer and let's let class begin."

"Right here? Right now?"

"I'm a man. You're a woman. We are married."

"You are so smart. Did I ever tell you how much I admire your intelligence?" I said moving much closer to him.

"Telling me is very nice but it would be lovely of you to show me."

"Sure thing, Teach."

While there may be a barrier between the two sexes, men have always known how to penetrate it.

Thank God.

This was a most deliberate mocking of both the New York Times' article "I Married A Republican, There I Said It" and the illiberal mindset of the woman who wrote it.

Comments

[Christine]

I don’t think bony, flat-chested, prune-faced, dead ringer-for-a-female-Episcopalian-bishop women exist here in France. If they do, I haven’t seen them.

Yes, I married a man, too. The fact that he’s both a real man AND a mathematician just takes the cake for me...

[Old Dominion Tory]

Delightful post, Mrs. Peperium. I see the time in Bermuda was good for you!

[Lorraine]

Welcome back Mrs. P.!

Have you read "The Virginian"? While you meet Evelyn Waugh at the Savoy Grill in heaven, I will be out riding with the Virginian.
Speaking of men:
"Lounging there at ease against the wall was a slim young giant,
more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed
back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his
throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt
that slanted across his hips. He had plainly come many miles from
somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed.
His boots were white with it. His overalls were gray with it. The
weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the
ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season. But no
dinginess of travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the
splendor that radiated from his youth and strength."

[MCNS]

Whoa, there, pilgrim! Is the Duke up there checkin' for tan lines?

Your description of the women at the party called to mind Miss Jane Hathaway -- and sure enough, here she is, dressed like an Episcopal lady bishop!

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/photopost/data/749/medium/beverlySharonTateBeverlyHillbillies.jpg

[Mrs. Peperium]

La! Miss Jane Hathaway was positively oozing va-va-voom compared to real female (HA!) priests and bishs:

Feast your eyes on the Rev. Marilyn McCord Adams, formerly of Yale and now at Oxford sitting in the most pretigious academic, religious chair, The Regius Chair :

http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/03_11/images/adams.gif

And then there's the most delectable Grand Poohba bish, Herself:

http://geoconger.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/imgp0965.jpg

Enough to make you turn back to the Old Testament and cut your eyes out, huh?

Lorraine, That Virginian was no plain horseman, huh?

Christine, they could be in Paris...avoiding the chocolate shops and shopping at Hermes....