CHRISTINE and I had been friends in high school — but only friends. Voted "Loveliest Lady" at the Coronation Ball, the signature social event of the Class of 1968, she was clearly out of my league. Plus, she already had a boyfriend. Tom was a suave older man of 21 who had graduated to that "real world" for which we high schoolers were being prepared via the manipulation of our slide rules, the firing up of our Bunsen burners, and our allemande-lefting and do-si-do-ing during the square dancing unit in gym. Two years later, Christine was Tom's bride. I was a guest at their wedding.
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Several years later, Christine and I were both guests at another couple's wedding, and she was recently divorced. We were still a mismatch. She was an elementary school teacher who owned a home in suburbia that had wall-to-wall shag carpeting, the fibers of which she perked up with a little plastic rake. She drove a new Toyota Celica which she washed and vacuumed every week. I was an impoverished graduate student with shoulder-length hair, a wardrobe that skewed toward T-shirts and bib overalls, and a wheezing Studebaker with hot pink dashboard lights and floor mats obscured by beach sand and fast-food refuse. Musically, I was into Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols and, to my horror, she owned albums by John Denver and Olivia Newton-John.
We began dating anyway. When she invited me to dinner at her place, I brought a bottle of the terrible wine a grad student could afford. I petted her hyperactive cocker spaniel, Mandy, who shed so profusely that dog fur danced wraithlike in the air between Christine and me as she cooked.
The meal that night consisted of baked potatoes, green beans and London broil — a slab so thick that when Christine put it in the broiler at the bottom of her stove, it curled up, horseshoe-like, as it cooked. Then, strangely, it disappeared. Where had it gone, we both wondered. The answer: When Christine opened the drawer, it had dropped behind the broiler and onto that section of the linoleum floor where no vacuum cleaner ever goes.
On my hands and knees, I reached in, burned my arms in the name of love, and retrieved the steak, which now sported a coat of Mandy's fur. (Hey, even a guy in bib overalls can be gallant!) "It's O.K.," I said. "Let's just order Chinese." Christine looked at me as if I were crazy. Then she stabbed the steak with a fork, rinsed it under the tap, finished cooking it, and served it on her wedding china. It was delicious.
Thirty-five years and three sons later, Chris and I eat a lot less beef than we used to. Happily married, we're still a mismatch. Retired from teaching, she volunteers in the schools, gardens, handles our finances and runs marathons while I sit on the couch, eating Pringles out of the tube and playing with my imaginary friends — those characters who populate my novels.
Here's my recipe for a sustainable marriage to someone who is your polar opposite:
STEAK À LA MANDY
1. Slather a two-inch-thick cut of London broil with butter. Broil until it curls up, disappears and then reappears coated with dog fur. (Dust tumbleweeds and lint may be substituted.)
2. Rinse and serve.
3. Slather your burned arms with Unguentine.
4. Do not, under any circumstances, tell Martha Stewart.
Wally Lamb is the author, most recently, of the novel "We Are Water."
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