Free Getting Married by Theresa Alan Page B

anyway? Except for skin treatment for rashes, isn’t all medicine pretty much internal?), but the way he asks me this makes me think of a psychiatrist trying to determine whether I’m fit for society.

    “I’m an independent management consultant.”

    “Do you like your job?”

    “Most of the time.”

    “What do you do for fun?”

    “Well, this isn’t going to make me sound very exciting, but the way I like to relax is to read.”

    “What do you read?”

    “I read a lot of nonfiction. Mostly history. I got my undergraduate degree in history.”

    “I loved my history classes.”

    “Yeah? I was lucky because in high school, every history teacher I had was really good. They got me excited about the subject. And so I studied it in college, along with some anthropology and sociology classes, and it just opened up the whole world to me. I think sometimes we think the world we live in now is ‘just the way things are’ naturally. But then when you look at various cultures over the eras of time, you realize that the culture we live in now is very different than the culture we lived in a very short time ago or even other modern cultures. Like the differences between the Europe of today and the America of today are pretty staggering. Even the gap between America and Canada in terms of things like how news is covered is really different. In America, the news is all murder and mayhem all the time. The nightly news isn’t like that in Canada at all. Anyway, I’m babbling. What about you, what do you do for fun?”

    “I’m a bit of a film buff,” he says.

    “Ahh, just like Gabrielle.”

    Gabrielle’s undergraduate degree is in film. She likes to go to movies that are utterly dark and depressing. After she dragged me to enough movies in which I left the theater longing to slit my wrists, I realized that whenever she recommended a film, I should never agree to accompany her, and instead I should run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. Gabrielle notices things in movies like what the camera angle “signifies” and how who was in the foreground versus the background of a shot has some kind of metaphoric importance. When she tells me this stuff, I nod as if I know what the hell she is talking about, but secretly I haven’t a clue.

    She and Jeremy are talking about some movie they saw together (in which all the characters are either dead or in jail at the end, very uplifting stuff), discussing metaphor and meaning and what the director’s intent was with such and such a cutaway shot (whatever that is), and I smile as I listen to them talk. When you’re as smart as Gabrielle, you clearly need a guy who is your intellectual equal, and Gabrielle has had a hell of a time finding guys who challenged her intellectually. It looks to me like, with Jeremy, she has found a match.

    The waitress comes by to take our dinner orders. I’m already full from the nachos and beers, but since Gabrielle and Jeremy are ordering meals, I order a chicken breast sandwich, swapping the fries for a salad. We all order another round of beer.

    We spend the evening talking and laughing, and after getting to know Jeremy, I’m feeling better about Gabrielle going crazy over him. I can see why she would. He is handsome, and smart, and successful.

    It’s not until we stand to leave that I feel how uncomfortably full I am from all the beers, the nachos, and a full dinner. I feel grotesquely fat and bloated and I’m mad at myself for not showing even the slightest bit of self-control. When I was a kid we had a dog named Happy who would gorge himself and then be forced to puke because he’d made himself so sick from overeating. You’d think I’d have a little more self-control and self-awareness than a schnauzer, but no, apparently I don’t.

    I’m officially in a crappy mood when I get to Will’s place. It’s about 9:30, too early for bed, so after we kiss and hug for a minute or two, we park our asses on the couch and