365 Nights Read online

  Does a woman think that her husband loves her more because he buys her diamonds? Probably not. Is money spent at a jewelry store proof of love that’s not shown in other ways? Maybe. Do we hope a diamond really is forever and that it will carry over to our marriage? It’s funny, but not one of my girlfriends has ever said, “I got the best gift ever—the most amazing night of jaw-dropping sex from my husband in honor of Valentine’s Day.” Not one. And I don’t believe it’s because my girlfriends are shy about talking about that sort of thing either. I just don’t think it happens. It certainly wasn’t my experience with Brad—I wasn’t racing home with fingers crossed hoping for a wonderfully memorable tryst. So now I can say, “I got this ring when I got married and these earrings when I turned forty.” And I also had a wonderful intimate evening with my husband of nearly ten years.

  I wouldn’t decline baubles, trinkets, cards, and flowers, mind you, but they’re not required. Perhaps that’s because Brad scores high in the communications department (for a guy), and is generous with notes, cards, and phone calls, and even an occasional bouquet throughout the year. Gift giving aside, we’ve never had to lean on the most important romantic holiday of the year to connect.

  Valentine’s Day is overrated. Well, when you’re single, it’s overrated, because you loathe seeing everybody paired up like they’re headed for Noah’s Ark, and you feel the rain pouring down. When you’re married, it feels redundant—romance is so yesterday. We’re together now, and don’t have to jump through hoops with each other, right? Or is it because once you’re married, every day is Valentine’s Day? (I know, I’m giggling, too.) Well, that’s what I used to think when I was a young, brash newlywed. I thought every day would be one giant lovey-dovey of a day—full of sweet murmurings, indulgent glances, and lusty embraces. This can be added to the abysmally long list of things that I didn’t know about the real world of marriage.

  Even so, after ten years together, Valentine’s Day is a holiday that does require a thoughtful nod and a sweet embrace—so that I don’t seem like a heartless wench and Brad doesn’t seem like a total cad. Then, we’re done. Besides, at this stage in our lives, it’s a challenge to celebrate Valentine’s Day in a manner that’s befitting of Hallmark, FTD, and every romantic bistro drumming for business. Is it even possible to get a babysitter on the most important romantic holiday of the year ? Nope. Is it even possible to get a reservation at those cute restaurants on the most romantic holiday of the year ? No. Is it even possible to deliver roses that won’t wilt within hours of receipt on the most important romantic holiday of the year ? Of course not.

  Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the sentiment of Valentine’s Day and the idea of reaching out to those you love. But these days, I spend upward of fifty bucks on cards for grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousin, babysitters and other folks who might drift onto the radar during the most important romantic holiday of the year. So, yes, for me the holiday—which for some reason seems to last a week at my kids’ schools—is a bit overrated. The artificial nature of forcing everybody to be romantic and loving on Valentine’s Day, along with the logistics of doing anything on this one anointed day, has forced Brad and me to be creative. For example:

  Before kids, we took turns cooking for each other. Romantic? Sure. But in reality, this was because on one occasion Brad waited too long and couldn’t land us a reservation anywhere in town. Thus, a tradition was born for the Mullers.

  We go out to dinner on a night other than Valentine’s Day. Practical and romantic! We can avoid the crowds and the cheesy gestures—like the restaurant laying a red rose next to your mint when you pay the bill.

  We go out to dinner with another couple. Weird, but true. All two-tops in town are booked on the fourteenth, but try for a four-top or an eight-top and, voilà, you’re in! Plus, most of our friends find the holiday to be as contrived and corny as we do, so we make fun and have a good time.

  We stay home and cook with our kids, and feast on a dessert of their candy. Valentine’s Day rivals Halloween in the amount of candy my kids receive—it’s so weird—whatever happened to giving just plain Scooby Doo cards at school? Now half the kids attach red-hot hearts, candy hearts, chocolates, Tootsie Pops—you name it and it’s now repackaged in pink and red. And like Halloween candy, much of it I eat or it goes bad and I throw it out while the kids are at school.

  But for Brad’s very special year, we had to do something, right? So we opted to battle the masses and use a gift card Brad had received at an upscale steakhouse in town. So steakhouses aren’t romantic bistros, but the food is outstanding, and hey, we had a gift card. And the Force was with us because we scored a sitter (my mother-in-law). So we set out for a romantic dinner for two, along with everyone else in the city.

  This was my first time at the Steakhouse That Shall Remain Nameless. While lots of women enjoy ordering dainty salads of mixed mesclun (which is code for lettuce weed that gets stuck between your teeth), I not only eat to live, but eat to enjoy. And I always enjoy a good piece of rare red meat.

  So we’re sitting at a table for two, next to a salon-coiffed high school couple in their prom duds (which makes me feel quite old) and the rest of the motley assortment of people who thought it was a good idea to go out to dinner with the thousands of other people going out to dinner on the most romantic holiday of the year. And we order our steaks. Which come à la cart, so we order some asparagus—which is really five freakishly fat stalks of asparagus for fourteen dollars.

  Then our waiter casually asks: “And would you like to add on a lobster tail with your steak, sir? We have one petite tail and three jumbo tails left. I would be happy to reserve one for you . . .” “No thank you,” says Brad. But after every menu exchange, our waiter deftly inserts again, “And would you like to add on a lobster tail with your steak, sir? We have one petite tail and three jumbo tails left. I would be happy to reserve one for you.” He does this three or four more times. He is very smooth. To which, I finally coo, “Oh, honey, why not? You love lobster and it’s just an add-on. Let’s do it. We have a gift card and all!” And so he does. And the petite tail add-on is a nice, little four-ounce chunk of lobster. It’s about four or five bites, but it’s perfectly cooked.

  And do you know what? After our bill arrives, we find out that sweet little lobster tail add-on, which the waiter so kindly reserved on our behalf, costs forty-five freakin’ dollars! It’s more than our pan-seared at 1800 degrees filet mignon! Clearly, we have been had. I do not doubt the sincerity of our waiter, but shame on me for not asking the price and shame on him for not offering. I think there should be a rule—if a waiter is trying to upsell you an item that costs more than the most expensive steak on the menu, then he should be required to tell you the cost.

  Well, it doesn’t matter, as that restaurant is Officially Dead to Me. I will never step one well-pedicured toe in there ever again. It doesn’t really matter to Brad, because he goes there all the time with customers. He can get his fix on a steak seared at 1800 degrees and I don’t even have to know.

  To conclude our night, and get over the lobster tail debacle, we go home and have a roll in the hay. And I have to say that is the highlight of the most important romantic holiday of the year. And as well it should be.

  We had kind of promoted ourselves out of predictable “mile-stone” sex by having sex every day. Milestone sex is the pressure to have sex on birthdays, anniversaries, and other romantic times such as Valentine’s Day.

  But for those not dipping their toes into the pool of intimacy as often, some clever person (hey, it could be me!) could promote sex considerably by encouraging people to have sex on major holidays. You know, instead of “The Jeweler’s Mother’s Day Heart Pendant,” we could market the Mother’s Day Quickie. In fact, an entire campaign could be developed celebrating trysting on all major and minor holidays. January: New Year’s Eve Day and Martin Luther King Day. February: Valentine’s Day and President’s Day. March: St. Patrick’s Day and March Madness. April
: Easter and Administrative Professionals Day. May: Mother’s Day and Memorial Day. June: Father’s Day and Summer Solstice. July: Canada Day and Independence Day. And so on.

  You get the Tryst Gist . . . my point is you could feasibly have sex twice a month simply celebrating holidays. Toss in two birthdays and two anniversaries (come on, doesn’t everyone celebrate their engagement anniversary, per those marketing geniuses at Hallmark?) and you’ve just added one more session every quarter. For a total of twenty-eight sessions of intimacy a year. Prior to The Gift, Brad would have thought that number agreeable. I’ll bet a lot of husbands would.

  As you may have noticed, Valentine’s Day is no longer a big romantic time for me—instead it’s more of a hurdle I have to clear. But as I sat next to that big-haired high school couple at the expensive steakhouse that is now Dead to Me, it stirred a longing for those feelings of anticipation, angst, and sweaty palms that that couple probably had. As much as we like to think that boys and girls aren’t even interested in one another until puberty hits, that was not true for me. I knew a cute boy when I saw one—hello, Chris Higgins, in Mrs. Hopkins’s first-grade class! And then desires escalate through middle school, high school, college, and into the work world. It’s impossible for me to deny that the early days of falling in love were pretty spectacular, and while I’m thrilled to be out of the dating scene and was very happy to “settle down,” don’t you just miss it sometimes?

  That’s why I think women are suckers for the old standbys: romance novels, movies, and all the scuttlebutt about work colleagues—we like to vicariously relive those feelings through the stories of other people. But we’re always a bit crestfallen when our romantic leads actually get together and settle down: I mean, Cheers was never really the same after Sam and Diane got together, was it? Jane Austen was very smart to have the marriage of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice end the book. And watercooler gossip is always about the single people (or people who are having affairs)—because the chase is more exciting than the contentment that comes after “I do.”

  Young love is inherently crazy and passionate and unpredictable. Old, married love is dependable, without drama, and probably very predictable. What is there to talk about if you’re happily married? Yes, he’ll probably call. And yes, he’ll probably come home tonight. Yes, you’ll probably see him over the weekend. And yes, he’ll want to have sex because husbands always do. But life was full of drama back in the single days—not life-or -death stuff, but for a single girl, there’s a lot of self-involved drama. Will he call and wish me a Happy Birthday? Will he send flowers or a card? Should I call him? (The answer is most always no.) My girlfriends would call to see if he called me, and then we would spend hours dissecting whether he did or didn’t. And if he didn’t, I would turn to my brilliant friend Julia.

  Julia would take hours—hours!—out of her life to help you psychoanalyze a romantic situation (or a situation that you wanted desperately to recount as romantic). She would ask very detailed questions. She would take notes. She would look at your situation from every angle. She would bring to bear her great analytical skills to help you figure out whether that casual “Hey, how you doin’?” at the Pub that night was fraught with great meaning and import, and could be translated into: “I feel this incredible connection over a Miller Lite. I must have you and I will not be denied!”

  Julia was great at reading body language, verbal cues, and eye movement. Seriously, she should have been a Crush P.I. with all the time she spent as a behavior expert. But I’ve come to realize that she gave the male gender way too much credit and, as a result, I believed that I might have actually had a chance with any number of crushes I developed over the years, which turned out to be just a “Hi, how are ya?” God bless her, she is a very good friend to single women. We should all be so lucky to have a Julia. But now, more than ever, is when I need her help and counsel. Because I feel like dating was the minor leagues. Staying happily married is the big leagues.

  Those thrilling feelings of newness, a first-day-of-school anticipation about what might lie ahead, dreaming about how wonderful my life will be when Mr. Terrific and I finally bump into each other, are gone. I’ve met him, we fell in love, and now we’re married. Those luxurious dreams never included bleach sticks, broken garage doors, and sick cats. There seems to be a statute of limitations on new love and you can never recapture the giddy anticipation that comes with it. The cycle runs its course from meeting to falling in love to commitment and then to contentment and to . . . what now?

  Giddy anticipation aside, dating for me really did stink; I just remember it with fondness. Much like I remember my freshman year with fondness—without any details—just blurry, slightly out-of -focus recollections. Such as how I smelled like bacon my first semester because my roommate cooked all her food in our dorm room, claiming she “was poisoned by some ham in the dining hall.” To remember dating in Technicolor would require me to remember all the dorky things I did/said/thought while hoping to run into the Right Guy. Like the time I was a full-time employee and went out a few times with a college intern and the whole department found out. In my defense, he was only a few years younger and we were just having fun at the Paul Simon concert in Central Park. Man, I never lived that down.

  I do not remember meeting my own husband. Had I written it like the start to a Lifetime movie, it might have happened like this:

  “Oh, we met at a Starbucks! He was smitten with the way I ordered my tall, skim, decaf latte.”

  “We met at the wine store. He knew me from the gym but thought it was just too cheesy to approach me over there.” (That one’s true and he was right.)

  “I picked him up on an airplane. He was 6A, and I was 6C, with nobody in 6B.”

  “My mother set him up with my sister and then he met me.” (This actually happened to my father’s two sisters and it was bad, bad, bad, I tell you, and it would make a great Lifetime movie.)

  But back to the real story. We met at work, like so many couples do. I interviewed Brad, took him to lunch, and perhaps even returned him to the airport, where he flew home to DC to a job, an apartment, and a girlfriend. I have no recollection of any of this. (He’s reminded me.) I don’t even know whether I recommended we hire him or not. However, I do remember that I had good hair at the time, a closet full of amazing designer handbags, and I worked out regularly, so you can see I remember the important things.

  For our second meeting (which appeared to me like the first time), it was Brad’s first day at the agency. Interestingly, we didn’t go to lunch—the first lunch was so dang memorable, why chance it? He seemed nice to me as he got settled into our morning briefing, but sad. You know, kind of quiet and remote. As an off-the-charts extrovert, I don’t get quiet, remote people, so I just assume they’re sad . . . certainly they’re not this way all the time.

  It turned out he was sad. He took a job in Charlotte for a clean start from an old life that hadn’t worked out. New city, new job, new life. He knew not a soul in Charlotte, but had a sister in South Carolina. He rented a dingy apartment on Albemarle Road because no one counseled him that one should never ever rent a dingy apartment on Albemarle Road.

  He was overqualified for the job, but he claimed that this new start had presented itself at a key time and he took a risk. I would find out later that he was a quiet and studied risk taker and that most, but not all, of the risks he had taken had worked out quite well to his advantage.

  I found out more about him as I took the lead and shopped his tall, eligible self around to my cute, single girlfriends. He worked for the State Department during the first (and much better) Bush administration. He interviewed with the CIA but opted out when they questioned his ability to go for days without sleep and to survive in the wild (he’s from Cleveland, after all). He had traveled to a dozen foreign countries, and he enjoyed Aruba much more than Pakistan. He was smart, deliberate, and handsome, and I was not remotely interested in him. I had been throug
h that whole dating in the workplace drama once and it had ended as they always do—with lots of tears, painful work meetings, and us doing “rock, scissors, paper” to see who would look for another job. Since I worked there first, we didn’t really “rock, scissors, paper” for it; he left for St. Louis and I swore off dating guys from work. Once bitten, twice smart, or so I thought.

  Vowing not to get burned again, I had adopted Brad as a project. I had some fun girlfriends, an active social life, and a desire to “help.” I set him up with friends, I took him along to the Pub, I invited him to sporting events, I offered some fashion advice (he was from Cleveland, after all), and I gave him obnoxiously detailed updates on my love life with the hope that he might give some advice on the opposite sex.

  “So, do you think he’ll call?”

  “Who?”

  “You know, my Crush! I decided not to penalize him for wearing a turtleneck with a sport coat to a basketball game. Do you think he’ll call?”

  “I have no idea. Does he know you’re interested?” he asked patiently.

  “Of course not! That would ruin everything!”

  Brad indulged me in hearing about my neurotic immature Crushes and mind-numbingly boring tirades about whether the Crush du Jour would call. And I made sure he got on the invite list for some great parties, and strongly counseled him against wearing high-top basketball shoes without socks. It was more than a fair trade-off, I’d say.

  Brad helped me move into my first house. Brad helped me with a particularly challenging work colleague (code for she was a heinous witch and I wanted to claw out her eyeballs every time we passed in the hallway). Brad coached me through some more lame Crushes. And on his own time, he made his own friends, nabbed his own invitations to some great parties, trained for a marathon, and blossomed into this incredibly interesting person. My friend Christy contended that he was this incredibly interesting person all along, but that I had my head too far up my rear end to notice. So true, Christy, so true.