The Xylophone

As the lacy white garter reaches the top of its arc against the blue Napa sky and the other groomsmen and single dudes jockey for position and elbow into Roger’s ribs, it hits me that this ritual is exactly wrong. It’s wrong for the bride — she just got married moments ago in a solemn ceremony, but now she’s stripping a sexy lure just inches from her crotch and casting it into a den of bachelors as if fishing for an affair in her first nanosecond of marriage. But it’s mainly wrong for us bachelors: Why would catching the garter symbolize that we’re the next to get married? Single guys who go on dates are balls-deep in garters. Getting married puts an end to those days, says goodbye to the hot date seducing you with a lacy reveal along the slit of her dinner dress, it really means no more garters for you — just yoga pants and mom jeans from here on out. A more accurate ritual would be for the bride to disappear the garter into her vagina in a ceremonial corking and then to heave-ho a ball-and-chain to see who catches that.

But now I’ve got an even bigger problem: this chain-in-garter’s-clothing is arcing straight for Roger, who’s the tallest guy here, so it’s going to take a tremendous feat to not catch it. I bet the bride, Jessica, even aimed for him, so she and her groom Noah could be followed in matrimonial shackles by Roger the best man and Colette the maid of honor, the Fab Four, matchy-matchy, with Colette and Roger even having met for the first time at their house four years ago -- a mitzvah!

Not on my watch. I hotwire Roger’s adrenal medulla until it screams fight-or-flight. Roger locks elbows with the bachelor pushing in from behind, and, using his force against him jiu jitsu-style, we execute a perfect whirligig spinneroo move to switch places. The bachelor’s so spun silly that, after all this hubbub, the garter plops lifelessly onto the top of his head like a bird turd. I’m congratulating myself on my smooth move until Roger locks eyes with the bride and groom, who are aghast that their proud marriage example was so deftly… ~avoided~? Behind Jessica fumes Colette in her purple bridesmaid dress, her face that same color.

Oops.

Which is why the next day Roger’s giving Colette the royal treatment. On the way back to San Francisco he stops by the Oakville Grocery and drops $150 on a chi-chi picnic basket with every last artisanal goat cheese and fig and a baguette tail sticking out of its checkered cloth like in a French tourism pamphlet. He’s picked out the ideal picnic spot with strategic views, a perch up in the Marin headlands with the full San Francisco skyline in the distance and, way down below, the zaggy wave lines of the bay shimmering in the late afternoon sun like in a Van Gogh painting. He’s even got the perfect yarn spun up that he’s long nurtured for just such a desperate moment as this.

He traces his finger across the city skyline. “Notice there’s no iconic building that’s the symbol of San Francisco — no Empire State Building or Sydney Opera House or Great Wall. We don’t do monuments here.” He pauses to let it sink in. “We do nodes.”

Colette contracts her eyebrows. “Nodes?”

“Connections. Neurons linking with each other. Bridges.” Roger points to the right at the Golden Gate Bridge. “That’s the symbol of where we live.” The bridge poses like a postcard shot, cloaked in red, swooping across the final gaping asshole of the continent. “And then there’s the Richmond Bridge behind us. And of course — that.” He smiles and points to the Bay Bridge with its enormous length double-jumping first to Treasure Island and all the way to Berkeley. “~Our Bridge.~”

There you go — when you’ve fallen into a chasm, trot out Our Bridge, which links San Francisco where he lives with Berkeley where she lives — their little relationship symbol connecting their different worlds and flowing a traffic of life force between them. They point it out giddily on the sidewalk whenever it peeks at them between city buildings. Roger makes me crazy, always aiming to please and say the right thing, but I have to admit, he really does feel and believe this one.

“So the D-School people…”

That’s Stanford’s Design School. You hear about the D-School everywhere these days. If you’re designing a physical product like a car jack, I get that. But it’s become larger than that — a whole way-of-life philosophy. You can’t even go to a museum around here without hearing about how they’re doing a $20-million-dollar renovation to infuse the place with “~design thinking,~” which no one wants to admit is just a circle jerk for “capital campaign.”

“…they say these symbolic bridges aren’t just beautiful structures, they’re who we are here in the Bay Area. We connect. It’s no coincidence that the iPhone was created here — the window through which the world’s billions connect to each other — the ultimate bridge. And there…” He pointed to the San Francisco downtown that’s become the new center of gravity for Silicon Valley, “that’s where they make the apps and websites and bots and networks that weave together the millions of nodes of humanity like neurons in the collective brain.”

We connect — the perfect yarn for an injured relationship. And the view’s perfect, as are the breads and spreads and figs. The only thing Roger hasn’t counted on is the slope of the hill. There’s hardly a flat spot in the Marin Headlands, so despite the view, the picnic blanket rests on a downward slope. Their bodies slide down and their clothes ride up, holding them in suspended tension like an ongoing wedgie.

Colette squirms in her recline. “For someone who’s all about connection, you really seem to avoid it. Oh my god, the best man…” She puts her thumb and forefinger to her brow and waits several long seconds to let the memory pass.

“Let me try and wrap my mind around this… You truly love me — I know this, I feel it with every fiber of my being — and we fit as well as two people have ever fit.

Roger nods. “Yes, each moment together feels just right. As well as our circle of friends.

“And yet at the same time, you also really, really don’t want to take the next step with me.

Roger’s silent.

Colette gasps, “It’s such a mind-fuck!”

As far as marry-me chicks go, Colette’s actually pretty cool — she never even brought it up the first couple years. But now it’s been four years since she and Roger first met. She just turned thirty-three. They finish each other’s sentences, have a whole community of intermingled friends, travelled to three continents together, but they still live five miles apart across those enormous spans of the Bay Bridge. Even I feel for her. But not so much that I could let Roger get married. I’ve been held hostage in here for 37 years, and we finally come to an age where we can swipe right to tinder up a sex firestorm at whichever spot of the planet we’re horny upon, and he instead cocooned us into the wrappings of a four-year monogamous relationship — and now wants marriage for more of the same forever?! No fucking way. Sympathetic as she may be, Colette is my Enemy Number One.

Now Roger’s even more pissed at me. The electric fence of neurons sizzles with surging high voltage all around me.

“You’re right — I know, it’s frustrating to me, too, but we’ve been through this…” he continues, bemoaning most that his perfect yarn is coming back to strangle him. “Loving you and getting married, they’re two separate ideas. They’re… orthogonal.”

Colette sits up. “Orthogonal?!”

Oh dear, he’s using Silicon Valley speak on her. “Orthogonal” is how engineers and venture capitalists say “unrelated.” I’ve been staring at the books Roger reads long enough to know it’s a physics concept meaning perpendicular, as in, the downward force of gravity is orthogonal to the side-to-side motion of the hockey puck — it’s approaching from a perpendicular dimension and therefore doesn’t affect the other forces. The weird part is when they use it to talk about non-technical, human situations: “Sure we have some workplace-culture issues, but they’re orthogonal to missing our Q1 revenue goals.” The engineers do it because they can’t think any other way. The venture capitalists do it because they want to exude that they’re not just the moneymen but also have tech cred: ~We think from physics first principles like Elon Musk!~

“You know… not related. Like, I can be crazy for gelato and at the same time not want to travel to Italy…”

“That doesn’t make sense to me. They’re entirely related. If you’re in love with me then getting married would be the logical next step.”

“My struggles with getting married don’t have anything to do with you.”

Colette peers expressionless into Roger’s eyes. Even pissed off she looks cool in sunglasses, all Audrey Hepburn with her precise facial features surrounding them and the late sun sparkling off the dark lenses. “If this were any other relationship I would so be out of here. It’s only because I know how rare this is…” She points back and forth between their faces. “…this connection, this chemistry, this once-in-a-lifetime completion.” She lets out a heavy exhale and lies back flat, gazing up at the sky away from Our Bridge and the ~design thinking~ surrounding it. “Tell me again about The Wheel.”

Oh man, she’s desperate if she’s willing to go back around on this ride, hashing and rehashing the past until it makes sense, but I guess that’s what psychologists do. Roger ought to be the one reclined in the therapist’s chair, but he’s on the hook sitting up straight, using his fingernail to scrape the fig jam off the lid as he tries to scrape his way past this one.