Unhappily Ever After
A Novel
by
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We kissed and hugged a lot, but the one thing we didn’t do was sleep together. Not that I wanted it so badly. But that was what guys wanted, and I was prepared to give it. JJ simply didn’t ask. In high school, the boys I knew were hormonal excess in motion. Erections by the bushel basket. As near as I could tell, sex was what they thought about every waking moment. And while they slept, too, from what I understand. College guys were a little less obviously, shall we say, aroused. They didn’t always walk around with sailboat masts in their pants. They might be spending as much as 2 percent of their time thinking about something other than sex. I wondered if JJ were like Sam Adams. Would I have to make the first move? Was it possible that JJ didn’t desire me that way? I remembered Dev’s homosexual boyfriend. I thought maybe I ought to advertise my availability. I started wearing blouses that were open halfway down to my belly button. I trotted out the shortest skirts I owned. I actually went out and bought several pairs of sexy bikini panties—in red and sapphire and aquamarine. And I made sure he saw them. Rachel Rothschild, girl temptress, a new incarnation. I might as well have been wearing a sandwich board saying “fuck me.” Finally one night when we’d finished dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and were driving back to Berkeley, JJ said with some irritation in his voice, “Look, Rachel. I’m not blind. I know what you’re doing. I have to ask you, please, don’t do it any more. Don’t try to seduce me. I’d hate myself if I slept with you before things are settled between us.” I was dumbfounded. “What do you mean ‘settled between us’?” “You haven’t guessed that I want to marry you?” “What am I, a fucking mind reader?” I said. I was the one who was irritated now. “I know you like me, but you haven’t said anything about getting married. You haven’t even told me you love me.” “Well, I do. I love you, and I intend to marry you.” “Did I miss something? Aren’t you supposed to ask?” “Yes. I plan to.” “When?” I was getting angry. I’d never been angry at JJ. “When I graduate law school.” “And then will things be ‘settled between us’?” “No, they won’t. I don’t intend to sleep with you until after we’re married.” “Pardon me?” “You heard me right. I don’t intend to sleep with my bride until after the wedding.” I said, “Oh?” I thought maybe I’d wandered into the middle of a Victorian novel. “Nobody abstains from sex before marriage.” “You will, my love, assuming you’ll say yes when I ask you to marry me.” “This is the craziest thing I ever heard, JJ. You want to marry me, but you’re not going to ask me for another four or five months. And we’re not supposed to sleep together because you haven’t asked me. And when you do ask me to marry you, we’re not supposed to sleep together because we won’t have been married yet.” “That’s the plan, sweetheart.” I started laughing, though I didn’t find it funny. “Do we sleep together after we get married?” “Oh yes,” he said. “Yes, indeed we do.” He was utterly serious. “I don’t understand. I really don’t understand. Have you looked at a calendar? This is the 1980s.” “You don’t need to understand. It’s a pact I made with myself. I don’t intend to sleep with the woman I marry until after the wedding.” “And when’s that going to be? Since you’ve cast me as the bride, don’t you think you ought to let me in on the secret?” I was really angry now. “Not for a couple of years. After I finish law school, I’m going to get an MBA. We’ll be married when I’ve got the MBA.” “Just like that? You’ve planned my life for me. You haven’t told me. And I’m supposed to just agree to it? I don’t think so.” I started crying. Partly from anger. Mostly from frustration. He was right. I was in love with him. But except in my little fantasies right after I’d met him, we weren’t at the getting married stage. Not yet. He hadn’t even told me he loved me. Not in those words. And now he was informing me that we were going to be married but not for a couple of years. Weren’t those the kinds of things that people in love discussed and decided together? The truth, I realized, was that now I wanted him to take me to bed. That was what people our age did when they were in love. I was in love with JJ, and I wanted him to make love to me. But I let it be all right, though it certainly wasn’t. He loved me, and we were going to be married. That was the main thing. So I bowed to his will. It would have been better if I’d forced the issue. Our lives together would have been different. But for possibly the first time in my life, I was completely spineless. It wouldn’t be the last time.
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About the Book
“Unhappily Ever After” employs three different narrative techniques to tell the story of Rachel Rothschild, her family and friends, the wealthy young man who will become her husband and their children. Seeking to establish her own identity, other than as her rich husband’s consort, Rachel works hard at becoming an investigative journalist, and she is succeeding.. But then she experiences a trauma that threatens to destroy her sanity and marriage. Trying to recover her balance, Rachel, who had always been a star student, enters graduate school – in large part as a retreat from life and emotions she cannot control.
The story is told in four chapters or “books.” The first book is an autobiography, begun when Rachel is expecting her first child. It starts with Rachel’s tomboy childhood in Santa Monica, California, moves on to the development of a tight circle of girlfriends in junior high and high school and the angst and the sexual experimentation of teen-dom. As in real life, the first book surrounds Rachel not just with her girlfriends but with parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, each of whose stories is an element in Rachel’s own story.
After entering the University of Colorado to room with her cousin, Yalie Goodman, Rachel is expelled following a drunk driving accident. She undergoes several months of difficult community service back in the Los Angeles area. Then she reenters college as a beginning freshman at UCLA and the following year is permitted by her parents to transfer to the University of California at Berkeley. There she pursues her goal of becoming a journalist and meets the young man, JJ Weiner, whom she will marry.
But the marriage will not take place until JJ completes his law degree and obtains an MBA. Meanwhile, he insists that Rachel complete her senior year at Berkeley, return to her hometown and begin her career. He also refuses to have sex with her until they are married, adding up to more than two years of frustration and bafflement for Rachel. Unwillingly, Rachel accepts JJ’s edict because she is not strong enough to stand up to him.
It is not until after they are engaged that Rachel realizes that JJ comes from an extremely wealthy family and that their life together in Colorado will be luxurious, but also restrictive. Although she intends to keep her name, her identity will depend on him, not on her own achievements. Following the birth relatively early in the marriage of their first child, Rachel, at her husband’s suggestion, goes to work at a local magazine and soon carves out a place for herself, building a reputation for tackling challenging issues.
However, a miscarriage and the difficult birth of her second child mire Rachel in post-partum depression. She is just beginning to regain her footing when she experiences the trauma that forever changes her life. The trauma is described in the present tense in the second book. That is, it is taking place in real time while it’s being read.
The third and fourth books are told in the familiar third person past tense. The two books cover Rachel’s efforts to overcome the emotional consequences of her experience, partly with professional help but also with the support of a cousin, Dev Goodman, who lives nearby in Denver, and Jessica Sherman, a rock-solid girlfriend back home in Santa Monica, California. As her young relatives begin to experience professional success, Rachel feels left behind, a damaged person who has retreated to academia to avoid real life in which she considers herself a failure as a mother and wife.
Over a period of almost four years, ever reliant on her cousin and girlfriend, Rachel begins to understand the underlying source of her discontent, which has roots extending beyond her trauma. Unexpected developments accumulate and eventually explode into a crisis leading to a startling denouement.
This is an ambitious novel with a large cast of characters, each of whose lives is intertwined with Rachel’s. She, her family and friends gather year after year, season after season at her family’s home in Santa Monica and at the ski lodge she and her husband own in Vail. Each of the major characters has a distinctive personality and an individual narrative that is threaded throughout the novel and closely connected to Rachel’s own story.
About the Author
Norman I. Gelman is a professional writer and public policy consultant with extensive experience. This is his first novel. Born in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill district, Gelman spent his first 17 years in the area before moving to San Francisco where he graduated high school. He worked at the San Francisco Examiner before college. When his family moved to Denver, Gelman entered the University of Colorado in Boulder, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors and graduating with two degrees. He and his wife, Esther, married while he was in graduate school and she was a senior. After two years in the Army, Gelman took a job with the St. Petersburg Times. In his year and a half with the paper, he was on a fast track training program, doing everything from covering the police beat to writing editorials. He then was chosen as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, which took him to Washington working in a professional capacity first in the House of Representatives and then in the U.S. Senate. Following the fellowship program, Gelman worked for an affiliate of Congressional Quarterly Inc., then returned to the Senate on the professional staff of the Senate Commerce Committee. He was on the research staff of the Kennedy-Johnson campaign in 1960 but declined a job with the new administration to go to work for Newmyer Associates, Inc., then considered Washington's premier public policy consulting firm. In his 35 years with Newmyer Associates, Gelman consulted on foreign economic policy and later managed client accounts with IBM, the Ford Motor Company, Citicorp and others. He retired as executive vice president of the firm. He is currently chairman of the Maryland Commission on Human Relations and was president of the American Jewish Committee's Washington chapter as well as a long-time member of AJC's board of governors. Gelman and his wife live in Potomac, MD. They have two grown daughters and three grandchildren.