PrettyFakes

Yea verily! Today is Contessa’s birthday! Come lay your tributes at her feet!

“Come take a chance with me tonight my contessa;
If it don’t work out, I ain’t lame, I can walk.”—Bruce Springsteen, “Santa Ana”

Yeah, so the nonchalant suavitude that Bruce is channeling there—well, I guess he channeled it all up, because there sure wasn’t any left for me on the first date Contessa and I had, way back in 1994. When I asked her out, I didn’t know a thing about her besides that she was attractive, that she could make a hat look great, and, most importantly and perplexingly, that she was somehow indefinably different from the other girls at our Southern Baptist college, a place which, it was already becoming apparent to me after half a year there, functioned as a kind of ritual bonfire into which students—especially female students—flung themselves to have their idiosyncrasies burned away as though they were impurities.

So, her difference from that norm was compelling, but it also made me anxious as all get-out. Let’s see: I took her to a Robin Williams movie. That she’d seen. We ate at Applebee’s. I know. I flop-sweated all night, even though it was February. She already knew the joke I like to tell at dinner where I take a salt shaker and a knife and say “Hey, do you know what this is?” and the answer is “a salt with a deadly weapon!” And to cap the night off, she told me that she thought I seemed a little shallow and that I used humor to mask my insecurities. Which was true, of course, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I thought I’d have to deal with on a first date. It was more the sort of insight I was prepared to hear after we’d been drifting apart for a decade, our marriage on the verge of collapse, each of us glaring sullen and silent in a therapist’s office.

Although Contessa’s frankness made for an awkward first date (our second date wouldn’t be for three more years), it’s one of the things I love most about her, and one of the things that’s been so great for our marriage: just an absolute refusal to skate silently along a placid surface, to defer or deflect tough, complicated, or uncomfortable truths or conversations for the sake of preserving some illusion of how things are supposed to be. It was quite a shock to me at first, growing up as I did in a house of clearly audible sighs and tightly pursed lips. And please, don’t think her insistent frankitude means she’s lacking in sweetness, kindness, charity, or generosity, because if you were to think those things, you’d be very, very wrong.

Those are only some of Contessa’s dozens of delightful and surprising qualities. For instance: give her five minutes and a used Fodor’s and she’ll plan the swellest week in New York you could ask for. There’s her love of the practical, of doing things and having them done and believing that we can probably do it ourselves—again a drastic shift for me, having grown up thinking that the local handyman lived in our attic. There’s the smarts she adds to that flair for the practical in a combo that makes her indispensable wherever she goes; she’ll try to tell you that when her colleagues said her job interview presentation was the best they’d ever heard, they were just being nice, but believe me, she’s just being modest. There’s her intense love of all creatures great (horses) and small (goats, cats, dogs), a love so great that it may in fact be an affront to God. There’s her astounding capacity for faith and patience and encouragement, without which I would have settled for a job and a marriage that I merely tolerated but didn’t really involve myself in in any meaningful way—for the sort of life that, when I was 19, I thought was obligatory and inevitable, the sort of life that I didn’t have the good sense to be afraid of yet. And I haven’t even mentioned the chocolate chip-pecan pie she made at Thanksgiving.

So, I never do one of those Thanksgiving posts where you say what you’re most thankful for, but if I did, it would be the same every year: Contessa, Contessa, and Contessa again. Happy birthday!

In the continuing PF spirit of blurry/cool anonymity:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 7:14 am and is filed under In Mississippi, In the South, Professor Fury, Red Stick, Springsteeniana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.