The proposal became like a spill of red wine on new carpet, gasp-worthy in the moment, then a fading stain you winced at only when you made yourself notice.
Perhaps because we were so in sync about everything else, it didn’t seem to matter in the grand scheme. Like a needle scratching across a record, the evening came to an abrupt halt. I tried not to cry when he said it was I who’d asked him. Yes.” Afterward, we went to the Dresden Room – a lounge next door – to toast our future over Manhattans.īut five months later, while talking with friends about our impending nuptials, he denied he’d been the one to say the words. We were sitting in a red leather booth when he turned to me and said the very words: “Will you marry me?” The night he proposed, we were having dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, a kitschy Italian place on Vermont where the waiters served thin-crust pizza on tall table stands and sang opera. Even that first weekend when I’d waited for an inevitable awkwardness – when surely we would realize we needed our own space – but that moment never came.
From the start everything was easy with Brad. Sunday night led us to Monday morning carpooling to work. Saturday biking in the Santa Monica mountains turned into slow dancing in his living room that led to Sunday brunch that led to the late show of Blade Runner at the Rialto – on a school night, no less. The first time we went out was a Friday night dinner, which turned into breakfast the next morning. We good-morninged him and the rest of the neighbors in the determined but naïve belief that being neighborly was all it would take to get past the recent Rodney King riots. There was a guy we thought might be homeless who sat on a nearby wall drinking tallboys, his belly hanging over his pants. Rival gangs tagged the apartments along his street. Brad lived in a neighborhood I’d never known existed – a barrio recently discovered by a few hipsters from nearby Hollywood.
after my breakup and was happy to be home again claiming my city. In the beginning, our love for each other and for the city of angels was entwined. Brad and I met making get-out-the-vote calls for an aspiring California State Assemblyman.