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: : : THEY'RE STILL DISCUSSING IT.
—So, wait a second, Jakob says. —You're saying—well—would you want to get married?
Freya wrinkles up her nose. —I don't know, she says. —Marriage is—it's so—well, it's not like I couldn't see myself married to you.
This is news to Jakob and it must show on his face because Freya says: —Well, think about it, we've been involved for three years now?
—Three years this May.
—Three years this May. And we live together—and I think that's been going well—don't you?
—I do, Jakob says. (He does.)
—So—yeah—I mean, I know it's weird to hear me say this, it feels really fucking weird to say it, but—but yeah, I can see you and I married, somewhere down the road. I can.
Jakob nods, almost imperceptibly.
—That said, Freya says, —I don't think it's like mandatory for us to get married before we have a kid.
—Really? Jakob says.
—Yeah, sure, says Freya. —I mean, marriage, it's, pff, it's whatever. I mean I don't feel any particular pull towards it. I don't see how it'd be that different from the way things are now. And I don't want to blow a huge chunk of money on a big wedding and all that; I don't want to lose a whole year planning it all—that just seems like a waste, to go through all that just to get a piece of paper that says OK, bang, you're married. You know?
—I guess, Jakob says. He frowns.
She watches.
—So you want to have a baby, he says, trying to make it tabulate, —but you don't want to get married.
—Yeah, Freya says. —I guess. I mean, I don't know. But I guess that's what I'm saying. She looks at him; he's still frowning. —What? she says.
—I'm just trying to figure out how that'd go over with my mom.
Freya sighs, presses her fingers into her temples. —Now you sound like Fletcher, she says.
Jakob can't say he's particularly pleased by the comparison. —How so? he says.
—I don't know, Freya says. —He's dating this woman, right, who has a son—
—Right, Jakob says.
—And he was all freaked out about telling his mom. I mean, he's thirty-one years old—you both are. At thirty-one it seems like you should be able to make decisions without your first thought being how your mom's going to react.
—Maybe if you thought a little bit more about how your mom was going to react to things you wouldn't have such a rough relationship with her.
—Yeah maybe, Freya says. She jams a cigarette into her mouth and lights it. Drags hard. —So, she says—she exhales—Are you saying you want to get married?
—I don't know, says Jakob, exasperated. —I don't know what I want. But I can say that this isn't exactly how I saw myself proposing.
—Fair enough, Freya says. She smiles wryly. —So how did you see yourself proposing?
Jakob grins, realizing that the question represents a certain backing-off. —Well—he begins, and he rifles through the mental files, looking for the saved-up mental image, the one where he proposes to Freya, and then he realizes that it's not there, that it's not something he has actually ever envisioned. He's thought about the two of them ending up married, sure, but he's imagined it only as an abstraction, a sort of distant point that they'd somehow end up at in the future. When he remembers an imagined image of himself proposing it's not Freya who's playing the part of the woman, it's Melissa Flaum, from high school, and the scene—it involves a single rose—is romantic in a very high school sort of way. He thinks for a second about slicing Melissa out and pasting Freya in, but he realizes that that won't really work; the whole damn scene is a well over a decade out of date.
—Actually—he says. —Actually I never really thought about how exactly I'd go about it.
: : :
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