The Magician

I notice you when you’re noticing me
Breaking the habit, you’re watching me sleep
Oh, give me some time, let me learn how to speak
I’m a maze to you

– Manchester Orchestra, “The Maze”

 

“You gotta join the pussy club”!

I was a regular at Yard House’s bar and it wasn’t the most obnoxious thing anyone had said to me there, but it was close.

Despite that occasional crap, I enjoyed hanging out there playing my lonely-guy-going-through-a-divorce routine, straight out of a Toby Keith song.

I went there for the games, and by games I mean these modern vestiges of primal courtship behavior between men and women that were always on full display and were endlessly fascinating when one really pays attention.

Like Darwin at the Galapagos, I scrutinized the subtleties of pickup artistry and gleefully called out the males that stood zero chance of passing on their genes, at least on that particular night. On a typical Tuesday night at Yard House, I saw more men shot down than there were during the London Blitz.

It was a busy Friday night a few years ago. This guy was some kind of magician and judging by the laughter emanating from his corner of the bar and catching the attention of half the restaurant, his tricks were pretty good. But Rodney Reyes, magician and self-proclaimed “mentalist,” was quite human. He drank too much, and as the night wore on, his skills diminished with his audience.

I had been trying to play it cool since my future wife arrived. Accompanied by two other women, they sat across the corner of the bar from me only a few feet away.

A subtle aloofness signaled this wasn’t her element. She was quiet and paid passive attention to the woman on her left who dominated the conversation among the three.

It would later prove to be quite ironic that Mairead sat in the middle of her sisters as I formed my first impressions of her, as she insists that she “suffers” from middle child syndrome.

She noticed me too, and later would say she thought I was waiting for someone, presuming (generously, but incorrectly) that there was more to this pathetic sight.

Now, three attractive women drinking at a bar with no accompanying male(s) in sight, have about the same odds of remaining unbothered by would-be mating partners, as would three gazelles nonchalantly cruising through a lion pride unmolested.

Reyes, now so drunk that his sloppy tricks had made him the second Filipino to be alone at the bar (I’m actually only half Filipino), elbowed into the small space between me and Mairead’s sister, Marianna.

Putting his arm around me, Reyes leaned into my ear and uttered his club comment that I took as a suggestion I should not waste my now-prime bar real estate and hit on these women.

I never initiated bar conversation as it was kind of my rule, a very practical one that was easy to follow given that I was a complete chicken shit.

I understood that my profession piqued curiosity in most people. A then-single colleague of mine was once asked what it was like to hit on women at bars when you had a job like ours. “It’s like fishing with dynamite,” he answered.

Reyes began to converse with the three. Eventually, my visible annoyance with his intrusion into my personal space prompted Mairead’s other sister, Catriona, to rescue me with an invitation to join them on the other side of the trio, so I did.

In the ensuing conversation, I said little to Mairead, other than to sheepishly suggest that I thought she resembled Katie Holmes.

I was incredulous when they told me they were sisters, each with a different father, as they look nothing alike. I was fascinated to know more about this, not least because of the Maury Povich shit going on in my life, but it felt weird to press the topic just then.

After an hour or so of intermittent conversation, I dropped some dynamite and ran out the door. I gave Katie Holmes my number and, terrified of personal rejection, promptly split. The worst case scenario now became that I wouldn’t hear from her, but at least I could imagine that she had wanted to call me before losing my number.

She sent me a text a few days later and we wasted no time in showing our cards; first making that sure that our kids were not non-starters and that we had no patience for games. On our first date, after dinner we returned to Yard House and closed down the bar.

While Mairead liked to hear stories about my work, she had a realistic impression that was apparently not influenced by the often ridiculous pop culture depiction of my profession. She betrayed not the slightest hint of a positive or negative pre-conceived notion about me based on my job, something to which I was especially sensitive. She was just curious and I found that refreshing.

Mairead told me about the anxiety of starting a new career in her late 30s, and the frustrations of attending graduate school with students 10 years her junior. I never achieved a doctorate in anything, but I could relate. Like Tommy Boy, I took 10 years to finish college.

In an anecdote I would later incorporate into our vows, Mairead asked me that night if I believed there was a “one true love” for everyone. I told her no. I said that statistically you could be happy with thousands of people. Some real Hallmark shit.

As our relationship progressed, what became front and center, revealed by many painful conversations, was the fact that each of us was traveling a road of self-reckoning that only the other could fully recognize and understand.

We were lonely and exhausted from a kind of self-imposed exile; ashamed and trudging along through some sad place that divorce instigators go while enduring pelting judgment. These stones were both imagined and real; the former surely born by our own wearying guilt, and the latter wrought a terribly hurtful sense of abandonment by family and friends. It was a cutting silence whose palpableness they were either wholly blind to or had severely underestimated.

Choosing to divorce, to ignite a conflagration of pain so unsparing that it scars every relationship that it doesn’t completely incinerate, will lend one few genuinely sympathetic ears, even from other married people however close they are. It brought us close to each other.

From the very start, we centered our new relationship on old familiar shortcomings: forthrightness, acceptance, realistic expectations; requiring a kind of pure, unbridled honesty that prodded heated arguments but through uncomfortable, sometimes painful self-reflection, seeded a growth of understanding. We recalibrated, as the incredibly painful demise of our 15-year marriages demanded no less.

We dwelled on our kids, parenthood, relationships, divorce, and through the lenses of our own upbringings, those conversations provided our clearest windows into each other.

While our pieces came together where they counted, we did have some edges to round out.

Mairead is a segregationist. I regularly turn white towels gray, causing her endless exasperation. I tell her that whites are not better or deserving of special treatment, and that I dream that one day she will judge my laundry based on its character rather than its color. She rolls her eyes, apparently unmoved by Dr. King’s ideals.

She endures the daily Mets games I watch on TV (and my accompanying mood swings), and I endure her hippyesque affinity for homeopathy; each, ironically, are our own products of an utterly unfounded faith in shit that will never work nor make us feel better.

Mairead took me, as a 40-year-old, to my first concert where we saw Passenger. And I brought her and all the kids, costume-clad, to The Last Jedi premier.

I put Pop Tarts in the pantry next to gluten-free rice cakes… You get the picture.

Two years after our first date I proposed at the very spot we met, on the same corner of the bar. I gave her a simple, diamond-less ring.

Bare of the ostentatious romantic trappings of proposal sites in movies and magazines – where the divorce rate applies equally – that bar symbolized our different approach for our second go-around. It was simple, direct and meaningful.

So of course when we made our new vows, we chose Vegas. Into the Belly of the Beast we went, where you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting some marriage-destroying vice offered with “in-room service” emblazoned on a mobile neon billboard. So much fake nonsense can strangely, counter-intuitively, serve to imbue one of the primacies of truth and authenticity in a relationship.

It was a 20-minute ceremony on The Strip. Much of Mairead’s family came, to include her two sisters as well as two of my sisters. And to my sister Laura’s delight, Elvis greeted us in the adjoining room because the following couple paid the extra $100. We also went to Yard House and saw a magician the next day.

 

The stakes are raised in a re-marriage even further when children are involved. Like everyone who remarries (I hope), we’ve resolved that it will be different this time, and not just to avoid the searing pains of divorce, because we’ve learned some tricks.

Looking back on my ideas about love, I would pity any 40-year-old who wouldn’t slap the face of their naïve, 20-year-old self if somehow given the chance. Life experiences through such dynamic years can induce the type of change that is much to bear for a marriage and can only be happily endured through prodigious amounts of communication, patience, understanding and some luck.

Our divorces, like many, were such an emotional cataclysm that our recovery has sometimes felt like clawing back onto a cliff overlooking sheer insanity. All of that pain, confusion, reflection and acceptance, have crystallized into a foundation of truth on which we’ve built our new commitment.

And what to make of Rodney Reyes?

Ask me and I’ll tell you he was just another drunken guy at a bar hitting on women, and happened to annoy me at the right time, forever altering lives to degrees that he could not have possibly imagined.

Ask Mairead and she might tell you that the ring she put on my finger was engraved with the phrase, “loving you is magic.”

I’ve come to believe that you’ll find the answers to a lot of things in the middle. It’s a place to which you’re pulled off your lazy ass because you never did your own laundry. It’s a path to shine a light so another can find their way through darkness. It’s a place to which you sometimes fall and sometimes climb on your way to discover new meanings for love and marriage.

Mairead kept a souvenir from that night. She picked up from the floor one of Reyes’s playing cards that had a woman’s name written on it from one of his tricks that apparently went awry.

I keep it on the shelf next to our Las Vegas wedding photo; a gentle reminder of my incredible luck and the greatest magic trick I never saw.