I Am Having So Much Fun Without You by Courtney Maum Page B

Anne against my chest as she fell asleep. I ran my finger along the smooth gold band that had warmed from the heat of her own finger and traced circles around her knuckles and listened to her breathe. I fell asleep smiling, fully at ease with the ludicrous prospect of spending the rest of my life with this one, single person. It’s not quite right what they say: love doesn’t make you blind, it makes you optimistic.
    I hadn’t invited my parents to our wedding, or rather, I hadn’t gone out of my way to insist that they be there. Edna and George Haddon had always taken a laissez-faire approachto my existence, and their way of showing their love for me was by trusting my life choices. We agreed that we’d have an informal celebration with family and friends in Hemel Hempstead whenever we got back, and in the meantime, they wanted postcards, phone calls, photographs.
    I didn’t find out that Anne had kept our marriage a secret from her own family until about ten days after our wedding when she broke down in tears over lunch. I thought she was upset because we’d had a dinner party the night before, and someone had smoked a cigarette in the bathroom, an indiscretion she considers adverse with good hygiene. She also dislikes eating leftovers (she finds them “disheartening”), and as our meal consisted of cold chicken from the previous night’s dinner, I attributed her distressed conduct to the food. But no, it was because she had neglected to tell her family—a bastion of bourgeois refinement—that she’d up and married a man of modest means who aspired neither to be a banker nor a consultant (not even a directeur marketing !), but who simply wanted to be happy, live richly, drink well, and make love often to their precious, only child.
    I was furious. For several months, Anne had led me to believe that she’d been carrying out a series of phone conversations acclimating her family to our approaching nuptials and her eternal union to a British commoner. In fact, these phone conversations had only taken place between herself and Esther, with whom she had concocted a complex plan that included a monthlong orientation period preceding my presentation as a serious suitor with respectable intentions, her father’s subsequent acquiescence, and finally, our wedding, to be (re)carried out in their summer house in Brittany with all her friends and family in attendance.
    Not only was I infuriated with Anne for keeping it a secret,I was disgusted by the bourgeois stench of the entire thing. I’d always found Anne’s snobbery charming and sexy; it amused me to think of her filthy-rich family whose perfect little princess was living a double life in Boston: exemplary paralegal by day, whiskey-drinking suceuse by night. But this was different. This was geographical. This was going to touch upon our life. If we did move back to Paris as we’d been discussing, her parents would be something else entirely, no longer a foreign entity to be mocked over mimosas, but legal in-laws: phone-calling, Sunday-­visiting, snooty, noisy in-laws with influence and authority over my new wife.
    Initially, I loved the fact that we got married in a silo without giving the slightest thought to her family, my family, my country, hers. We were in love and we got married and the rest of the world could go shove it. But while I watched Anne sniffle over her untouched plate of chicken, I realized that our bubble was more fragile than I thought. We couldn’t shut out the external factors forever. I started to wonder what would happen if and when we crossed the ocean. What side of Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud would greet me on her home turf?
    After several tearful phone calls with her mother, two perforated round-trip plane tickets to Paris appeared, courtesy of the Bourigeauds. It was time to meet the in-laws.
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    We planned our first official visit for a long weekend