The Water Tank Proposal

Okay, so before anything else, you should know I was twenty-nine last October, and my wife Zahra was twenty-six, and we had been married three whole years by then. We met at a first aid course, of all places, when I was twenty-six and she was twenty-three. She passed the CPR dummy test on the first go and I dropped the fake AED pads on the floor twice, and she laughed at me, and that ended it. Or I thought that was that. Turns out marriages keep going after the credits roll, who knew?

Anyway, our third anniversary was coming up and I had a plan. A big plan. A plan with a centerpiece, which should have been my first warning, honestly.

The centerpiece was a spelling bee trophy. Mine, from when I was at university the first time, before I dropped out and went back. Zahra called it my participation award from a competition I actually won, which is her whole sense of humor in one sentence. I polished it up. I put it in a little glass case thing I bought off a guy on Trade Me. I was going to stand it on the table between our two place settings like it was the most romantic object in Auckland.

Stop laughing. I can hear you laughing.

The venue was this rooftop place on a converted old industrial building downtown. The whole gimmick was a giant water tank on the roof that they'd gutted and turned into a private dining pod. You climb this skinny metal staircase, all forty-something steps, and you're inside this round steel room with a window cut into the side, and the whole city glitters at you like someone spilled jewelry. It's ridiculous. It's wonderful. It cost me more than our couch, our bed, and my car combined, but don't tell Zahra that part either.

And the server I'd arranged everything with was Mavis, who I knew from uni. We dated for about two months when I was twenty-one and she was twenty, and it fizzled out the way those things do, no drama, just two people who ran out of things to say and went back to being mates. She was twenty-eight now and working the rooftop while she figured out what came next, and Craig, the head chef, was her fella. They had some open arrangement, which Mavis explained to me once at a barbecue with way more detail than I needed. Good for them, honestly.

So. The evening in question. Thursday, our actual anniversary, six o'clock.

I got there early, because of course I did. I came up the stairs from the street level into the rooftop proper, and the wind was doing that Auckland thing where it can't decide if it's spring or an argument, and there was Mavis at the bar polishing glasses and grinning at me like I was a walking punchline.

"There he is!" she called out. "Mr. Anniversary himself. Lionel, tell me the truth, do you have a clipboard?"

"I have a run sheet," I said.

"A run sheet."

"It's a timeline of the evening. Courses, music cues, when I do the toast."

She set down the glass she was polishing and looked at me with both eyebrows up. "You wrote a timeline. For dinner. With your wife."

"It's not for her, it's for me! So I don't mess it up!"

"Okay, okay." She came around the bar and grabbed the printout off me before I could stop her, and she read it, and her face did this thing. This slow, terrible, delighted thing. "Lionel. There's an entry at eight-fifteen that just says 'emotional beat.'"

"That's the toast."

"It says emotional beat in brackets."

"The toast is the emotional beat. I wrote it out, I'm going to say it from memory, I practiced in the shower."

She handed it back to me, patting my arm like I was her gran. "Babe. I love you. You are the most prepared man I have ever served a bottle of pinot gris to, and I once served a guy who brought his own decanter and a foldout chart of the vineyard."

"I just want it to go right," I said, and I meant it so hard it came out quiet, and Mavis's face went soft for a second, which was nice of her.

"Come on, let me show you the pod." She led me across the roof, our shoes loud on the decking, and there it was, the old water tank, all riveted steel and that round little window glowing in the late sun. She'd done it up lovely, I'll give her that. Table for two dead center, the trophy case already set out, candles in jars because open flames and a steel drum would be a fire warden's nightmare, little LED jobbies that actually looked decent. Two place settings. A bottle of the Central Otago pinot noir I'd picked, breathing on the sideboard.

"You see?" I said. "Perfect."

"Mm," said Mavis, which should have been my second warning.

I climbed the staircase to check the sightlines, which took a while, because skinny staircase plus a man carrying a trophy case does not go quickly. I came back down sweaty and happy. Mavis was leaning on the tank wall watching me with her arms crossed.

"She's going to say yes to all of it, you know," she said. "Whatever you ask. She'll say yes and she'll smile and she'll have a lovely time."

"Isn't that the point?"

"Sure," said Mavis, and let it hang there, and I was too excited to catch it.

Zahra was due at seven. She texted at six fifty that she was still at work, something about a manuscript with a comma problem, and I texted back a series of enthusiastic emojis and then turned my phone off, because I wanted her full attention, because I am, as previously established, an idiot.

She arrived at seven forty.

I heard her before I saw her, the clatter of her flats on the stairs from the street, and then she came out onto the roof with her work bag still on her shoulder and her cardigan half off one arm, and she stopped dead, and she looked at the water tank, and her face did something I had never seen it do before.

She frowned at it.

Not a confused frown. A tired frown. A here-we-go frown, which is a frown I did not know my own wife had in her repertoire, aimed at a thing I had paid actual money for.

"Surprise," I said, because I had planned to say that, and my run sheet said to say it, and I said it.

"Lionel." She came over, kissing my cheek, smelling of the bus and her office and that hand cream she likes, and she looked past me at the pod. "What is all this?"

"It's our anniversary. I booked the tank. The whole pod is ours, there's a menu Craig worked up, there's wine, there's..."

"The trophy." She had spotted it through the window. "You brought the spelling bee trophy."

"It's a joke. It's our joke."

"It's a display, Lionel." She said it gently, which was worse than if she'd shouted. "It's a, a diorama of us. Like a museum exhibit of our marriage. Look, here's us, curated."

I stood there holding my little run sheet and I felt it go soft in my grip. "I thought you'd like it. You always say I never plan anything."

"You never plan anything real." She laughed, but not the good laugh. "You plan gestures. Flowers, sure. Dinner, sure. A whole steel room with a choreography, sure. But then Monday comes and I ask you what you actually want out of, I don't know, the next ten years, and you say, oh, whatever you want, love."

"That's not fair, I..."

"Is it not?" She sat down on the bench by the bar, dropping her bag at her feet, and rubbed at her eyes, and I saw how tired she was, properly tired, the kind from the inside. "I'm sorry. I'm being awful, you did all this, you climbed a staircase with a trophy."

"I did climb a staircase with a trophy," I said, weakly, and she laughed the good laugh for a second, one little burst, and then it folded away again.

Mavis appeared at that exact moment with a glass of the pinot, because she has the timing of a stage magician, and she set it by Zahra's hand without a word and withdrew to a polite distance that fooled nobody.

Zahra looked at the wine. She looked at the tank. She looked at me.

"Can we just sit on this bench for ten minutes before dinner?" she said. "Just here. Not in the pod. Just on the bench, like people."

"Okay," I said. "Yeah. Of course."

And that's what we did, the two of us on a bench with the wind pushing at us and the city starting to light up, and I remember thinking, well, the run sheet's ruined, and also, weirdly, that this was the first honest ten minutes we'd had in months. That should have been my third warning.

Behind the bar, Mavis watched us both, and I didn't read her face right at all.

I went up the staircase one more time to check the candle situation, because I am the sort of man who checks candles, and from inside the pod, through the round window, I could see straight down onto the bar. Zahra had gotten up from the bench and drifted over there while I climbed. Mavis was wiping glasses. I thought nothing of it. I want that on the... No, actually, to be honest, I thought a little of it, the way you think a little about weather. Then I got busy fussing with napkins.

Here's what I could see, and later, piece by piece, what I got told, and the two versions don't match perfectly, which I've decided is fine, because whose ever do?

Zahra sat at the bar. Not the bench, the actual bar, on a stool, which she never does, she says stools make her feel like a child at a milk bar, her word, milk bar, she's got a whole vocabulary I adore. Mavis brought her water without asking because Zahra doesn't drink much and everyone who knows her knows that.

"Rough anniversary?" Mavis asked her, and Zahra laughed that folded-away laugh again.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Love, I watched you frown at the tank from the pass. You frowned at it like it owed you money."

"It does owe me money. It cost more than our car." Zahra turned her glass a quarter turn, which she does when she's composing herself, I've watched her do it at her mother's. "Can I say a thing to you, Mavis? You knew him at uni, you know him, but can I say it anyway?"

"Say anything you like. I'm being paid to stand here."

"You're being paid to refill water and stand elsewhere."

"Well then, double reason."

Zahra looked out at the city and I watched her shoulders, which is a thing I do, I admit it, her shoulders tell the truth even when her face is doing diplomacy. They were up around her ears.

"I feel like a prop," she said. "That's the thing. In his story. The wife who gets surprised. And I do love him, God, I love him, he once drove two hours in the rain because I said I felt sad on a Tuesday, but I want..." She stopped and turned the glass again. "I want to be asked things. Actual things. Not which restaurant. I want him to want something and say it out loud, and instead I get a choreography."

"Has he ever asked you what you'd want?"

"He'd do anything I asked. That's the maddening bit. He'd do it beautifully and I'd feel like a client." She laughed, horrified at herself. "Listen to me. It's our anniversary and I'm complaining about excellent service."

Mavis set down the glass she was polishing. Now, everything after this I saw from above, through a round window, at a bad angle, with a candle in my hand, so the dialogue I'm giving you is the version they both told me later, tidied up, and I'll flag the bits where their versions fight.

Mavis said, quietly, "Can I say a thing back?"

"Please."

"I've always thought you were electric."

Zahra went still. I know that stillness. It's the stillness she does before she corrects a comma that turns out to change the meaning of a whole paragraph.

"Oh," she said.

"Yeah, oh." Mavis shrugged, casual as anything, but her ears went red, and I know that because Craig told me later that her ears go red and he finds it useful. "Since the first night you came in here. You and Lionel, and you asked me if the fish was truly line-caught or just narrated that way, and I thought, there. That woman. Something in her."

"She's very charming, my wife," Zahra said, to her water glass, and I could see from the angle that her face had gone pink down the front of her throat.

"I'm not fishing, I promise. I've a fella. Craig. You'll meet the food."

"I know. I read the menu bio. He sounds..." Zahra waved a hand. "What I'm saying is I believe you, and thank you, and nobody's said a thing like that to me in about two years, and it's landed in a very strange spot on a very strange night."

"Have I made it worse?"

"You've made something. I'm not sure what."

And then, and here their versions genuinely disagree, Mavis says Zahra turned toward her first, and Zahra says the bar stool swiveled and it was physics, but they agree on this next part, which is that Mavis leaned in, slowly, slow enough to be stopped, slow enough that Zahra had all the time in the world, and kissed her.

Zahra kissed back.

I watched it from the window of a water tank I had paid too much money for, holding a candle, and my whole understanding of Thursday arranged itself into new furniture. They kissed for maybe four seconds. Four seconds is nothing and it's also a geological era, apparently. Then they came apart and both of them said something at once and both of them laughed and stopped and stared at each other.

"I'm married," Zahra said.

"You are," said Mavis. "I noticed the trophy."

"I kissed you back."

"You did. Startling, that."

"Why did you do that?"

"Because you said the word prop, and it was making me insane, and because I've wanted to for two years and tonight you looked like someone who'd say yes." Mavis put her cloth down. "I should have asked with words. I'm sorry. I just... the look on your face."

"No, it's..." Zahra pressed her fingers to her own mouth, which is a gesture I've seen a hundred times and never once understood until that moment through a window. "Don't apologize. I'm not upset. I'm the opposite of upset, which is a word I should know, I edit for a living."

"Relieved?"

"Worse. Awake." She laughed, a real one, loud enough that I heard it up the staircase, forty-some steps, straight into the pod. "Oh no. Oh no, Lionel's upstairs in a tank."

"Right. Yes. Him."

"I can't..."

"Can't, or aren't sure yet? Because those are different and I'd like to know which, for my own managing of expectations."

"I don't know. Both? I've never..." Zahra stopped and started again. "I've never even thought about it, Mavis, and now I've thought about it and I can't unthink it, and my husband is up there with a run sheet."

"He showed me the run sheet."

"He showed you the..."

"There's an entry at eight fifteen. 'Emotional beat.'"

Zahra put her head down on the bar, on her own arms, and made a sound into her sleeves that I want described as laughing, and will describe as laughing, for the health of this marriage. Or this former marriage. We'll get there.

And then Craig came up from the kitchen.

I saw him before she did, this big calm man in whites with a towel over his shoulder, and he stopped at the end of the bar and he looked at the two of them, both still pink, Zahra's hands still halfway to her mouth, and I braced, through a window, holding a candle, for the explosion. Restaurant kitchen, head chef, his girl, another woman, you can write that scene yourself, I certainly had it drafted in my head.

Instead the man grinned. Enormously. Ear to ear, towel and all.

"Well," he said. "About bloody time."

"Craig." Mavis yelped. "You saw nothing."