Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [62]
So here I was at my brother’s wedding and they asked me to put Abbie in the photo, I paused. Later that night, when we got home, Abbie said, “Michael, what was that pause?”
“That didn’t mean anything,” I said. “It was just a pause. I’m a pauser.”
“Michael, if this isn’t serious—”
“Of course it’s serious. I love you.”
“If you’re not ready to get married, I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Abbie, I do want to marry you.”
“When?”
Now, what I should have said was “Can we talk about this next summer?” What I did say was “Next . . . summer.”
And that’s how I got engaged, without actually getting engaged. I should have paid a little more attention to those episodes of Wedding Story. When you agree to get married “next summer,” it is game on.
Abbie called everyone we knew and told them we were getting married. We started planning the wedding. I started having trouble breathing again, like when there was something in my bladder. I also began sleepwalking more frequently. I thought, Maybe I should tell Abbie the truth, and then I thought, Maybe I’ll eat dinner. And I went with dinner.
A few months later I was asked to host the World Travel Awards at the Sandals Resort in St. Lucia. I had never heard of the World Travel Awards. I don’t believe they are televised. Or even webcast. Or even really attended. Basically it’s this completely made-up event where resorts reward themselves for being the best resort: “This year the award for best resort goes to . . . Sandals resort in St. Lucia!” Oh, that’s funny. We’re at Sandals Resort in St. Lucia. I hosted the event and the awards were presented by a cavalcade of minor celebrities, the most exciting of whom was Lydia Cornell, star of the eighties sitcom Too Close for Comfort.
But the reason I was most excited was that Abbie and I had never been on a vacation together and they were going to pay our way to this tropical resort. My whole life I had seen those commercials for the Caribbean where the water is unimaginably clear and as warm as bathwater and that voice says in a local accent, “Caaahmmm to Jamaaaaaiiccaa!” I’d watch these commercials and think, I want to caaahm to Jamaica, but I can’t afford it.
Abbie and I had never been on a vacation partly because flying was the thing that terrified her the most. And partly because we had no money and the idea of a vacation is very strange when you have no money, because you’re like, My life usually costs a hundred dollars a week, but on vacation it’s going to cost two or three thousand dollars a week. So when I found out that I could take my girlfriend on one of these trips for free, I thought, This is going to fix everything.
Abbie had just started planning our wedding, but she could sense that I wasn’t entirely invested in it. Thus I was going to smooth things over in St. Lucia.
We were picked up at the St. Lucia International Airport in a limousine. That seemed like a nice touch, until we started the driving part. St. Lucia is made up of beaches, high peaks, and rain forests. Which are all beautiful, but maybe not the best terrain for a Buick stretch limousine. We really could have used a Ford Explorer or Subaru Outback or even just a regular car with shocks. Abbie and I bounced up and down for the duration of a thirty-nine-mile drive from one end of the island to the other that ended up taking two and a half hours. In the course of this drive, Abbie and I started by picking apart the skills of the driver and then, eventually, each other. For two hours we criticized each other’s jobs, families, even clothes. A lot of sentences started with “Well, if you’re going to bring that up . . . ,” and ended with something toxic. The phrase “Well, if you’re going to bring that up” never ends with “I’m going to tell you I love you.”
At the resort the bellman took our bags. Our room wasn’t ready yet, so they sent us to the beach, where they gave us free drinks while we waited. We sat down at a table, inches from the soft, perfect sand, and Abbie said, “I think we should break up.”
She only had to say it once.