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Of course, it wasn’t completely perfect.
There were some things they’d never be able to do together—like swim in the ocean. Jonny, it turned out, had never learned to swim, which seemed inexplicable to Pandy but perfectly reasonable to him. Lots of the kids he’d grown up with couldn’t swim—he hadn’t even seen a real pool until he was sixteen, when a hot older waitress had invited him for the weekend to her house in Hampton Bays.
Nor did they share similar tastes.
Jonny had come with a storage locker full of contemporary furniture, along with twenty or so plastic containers of his junk. The furniture was the kind of cheapish high-end box store stuff that a bachelor would buy, perhaps anticipating that when he married, he would get rid of it in deference to his wife’s tastes.
But Jonny didn’t want to part with one piece of it, and when Pandy asked him to and he refused, she realized she was already beginning to take on the dreaded “nagging wife” role. Vowing not to become a fishwife, she turned a blind eye to the furniture.
Unfortunately, what couldn’t be ignored were some of the matters of basic housekeeping. It turned out that along with his other masculine qualities, Jonny possessed that male propensity to completely overlook his own mess. You’d think with all the space in her loft, Jonny could have chosen one corner in which to dump his
dirty laundry. But he couldn’t. Instead, he spread it all around like a dog marking his territory.
She’d tried scolding him, and once even picked up all his laundry and dumped it on his side of the bed. But Jonny feigned ignorance and lay down on top of it, making her feel that she was being petty. And so, instead of complaining, she reminded herself that love was about how you framed your partner in words. She decided that the words “Jonny” and “flaw” would never appear in the same sentence—even if that sentence was only in her mind. And so, when married friends expressed dismay with their husbands, Pandy affected a sort of astonishment, followed by the sentiment that she must be incredibly lucky, because Jonny was not like that at all.
This didn’t stop her from complaining to Henry, however.
“Does that dirty sock stuff still go on in marriages?” Henry asked over the phone. “How incredibly dull. How’s Monica coming?”
“I’m feeling a little boxed in,” Pandy said, eyeing a stack of plastic containers.
“Boxed in? How is that possible? You have nothing but space in that loft.”
“You know how men are. They come with stuff,” Pandy whined.
“Perhaps you should have considered that before you married him,” Henry said sharply.
“That’s not how a woman thinks when a man—a man like Jonny, by the way—says he’s in love with her and wants to get married,” Pandy replied.
Henry laughed. “My god, girl. What has happened to your brain?”
Little did Pandy know that she would soon be asking herself this very question.
* * *
Jonny wanted a restaurant-quality kitchen in the apartment, and Pandy agreed. She wanted him to be happy; after all, he was Jonny Balaga, the world-famous chef. Of course they must have one.
She assumed that the term meant high-end appliances. Only when the plans were drawn did she understand that for Jonny, “restaurant-quality kitchen” meant the kind of kitchen you would find in an actual restaurant.
The kind of kitchen that cost four hundred thousand dollars.
“But so what?” Pandy said to Henry when she stopped by his office to sign some papers. “What’s money, when it comes to love?”
“And is Jonny paying for his kitchen?” Henry asked.
Pandy blushed. “Jonny is paying for half. I’m paying the other half. I mean, really, Henry,” she said, reacting to his horrified expression. “It is my loft.”
“That’s exactly the point. Jonny moved into a space you’ve already paid for. Therefore, he should be paying for the renovations.”
“Everyone says the biggest mistake in marriage is keeping track. It’s not going to be fifty-fifty all the time,” Pandy admonished him.
“That’s exactly what worries me. Please tell me you had him sign a prenup.”
“Of course I did!” Pandy exclaimed.
She had never lied to Henry before. And certainly not about something so important. On the other hand, it wasn’t Henry’s business. And if she ever, for one minute, believed that Jonny would screw her over financially—well, she never would have married him! Besides, Jonny’s career was booming. Some men from Vegas had contacted him, and wanted to meet him in LA the next month.
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to Vegas?” Pandy had asked.
