“Then I guess we’ll dance,” he said, and he took one last drag of his cigarette. He has this way of tilting his head down and looking up at me as he inhales; I get why 12-year-olds think it’s cool to smoke.
So we went back into the reception and danced to every song. Sort of danced. It was mostly holding each other and swaying and Eskimo kissing.
Remember when I was obsessed with that little Lithuanian restaurant downtown? And it was only ever open when the grumpy old woman who ran it felt like opening? I’d stop by every day for a week with no luck. And then, when I’d pretty much given up on ever tasting Napoleonas torte again, I’d drive by and see the open sign in the window.
Well, being with Chris is like trying to date that restaurant. I never know when he’s going to be there and how open he’ll be to me. Almost never is he all there, all in. Almost never do I get the Chris that I got the night of Kiley’s wedding—open sign, cold cucumber soup, rouladen, poppy seed kolaches.
I found myself thinking that this is how I would want to dance at my own wedding. (Minus all the Dixie Chicks and Alan Jackson songs.) The kind of dancing that’s more like touching to music. That’s more like closing your eyes and trying to think how you would tell someone that you loved him if you didn’t have words or sex.
Chris had one arm around my waist, and he was winding his fingers in my hair. He kissed my forehead, smiling. He looked at me, straight into me, and I felt like I was in love with the sun.
And then—it will be impossible for you not to laugh at me now—the deejay played the song “Rocky Mountain High.”
I fucking love “Rocky Mountain High.” I don’t much care for eagles or lakes or Colorado. But “Rocky Mountain High” is what euphoria sounds like. When you hear John Denver sing, “He was born in the summer of his 27th year …” how can you not feel your heart open to the cosmos?
So “Rocky Mountain High” came on, and I started kissing Chris like I couldn’t wait to get to the chorus, all adoration and vulnerability and “I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky.” And Chris kissed me right back. And when he pulled away—about the time that the songwriter is admitting to a life that’s full of wonder, but a heart that still knows fear—Chris said, “Beth, I love you. I love you more than I ever meant to. More than I ever say.”
And I started to tell him that I loved him, too, but he stopped me, kissed me and said, “Wait, I’m not done. This is important.”
Will you think I’m foolish if I tell you that I thought he might be getting ready to propose? I wasn’t sure of it. I probably would have bet against it. But if he were ever going to propose to me, there could never have been a more likely—a more perfect—moment.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I love you so much that I can’t stand it. Sometimes, I just don’t have the energy for it, to have something this big coming out of me. And I can’t stop it or turn it down.
Sometimes, I get tired just knowing that I’m going to see you.”
I wasn’t ready to let go of my reverie. I was thinking, “Good tired, right?”
“I’ll always love you,” he said, “but I need you to know that I am never going to marry you.”
I must have looked like I wasn’t getting it because he repeated himself. Emphatically. “Beth. I am never going to marry you.” He was still looking at me with soft, loving eyes. If you were watching us from a few feet away, and you saw his face, you might think that he did just propose to me.
What I found myself thinking, at least immediately, was that there was a certain violence to putting it the way he did. That he wasn’t going to marry me. Couldn’t he have said that we were never going to get married? Couldn’t he have implied that it would be a shared decision? Wouldn’t that have been a bit more polite?
And then he tried to kiss me, to continue our kiss actually, with all the love and passion and John Denver that we were sharing before his pronouncement. But I felt like there was more to talk about. So I pulled back and said, “Do you mean that you’ll never get married? Or that you’ll never marry me?”
He thought about it. “Both,” he said, stroking my hair, “but mostly the latter.”
“Mostly that you won’t marry me.”
He nodded. “But not because I don’t love you. I do love you. I love you too much. You’re too much.”
I pushed away from him then, and started to walk in a weird circle around the dance floor. I kind of wandered through the dancers and eventually out the front door. I walked around the parking lot for a minute before I realized that I didn’t know where Chris had parked and that he still had my keys. (If I were the sort of person for whom falling in love meant eventually getting married, I would let my bridesmaids wear dresses with pockets.) I looked back and there he was, standing in the VFW doorway. “Don’t do this,” he shouted.