The Scenic Route

by Devan Sipher

  “We’ve been talking about selling the entire company,” Naomi said as she stuffed Jacques Torres chocolate bars in glossy black swag bags for Noah’s wedding. Steffi had already eaten three of the bars, which were definitely not on her diet.

  “But we decided not to,” Steffi reminded her.

  “You and Dov decided. My vote didn’t count, and the more I think about it, the more I’d like to be doing something with food.”

  “You’re doing something with food. You’re in charge of all the gourmet food vendors.”

  “I want to get back to doing something hands-on. Splurge was always more your dream than mine.”

  “And you’re taking it away from me!” Steffi was trying not to sound as desperate as she felt. She wasn’t succeeding.

  “I’m not taking anything from you. If anything, I’m giving it back to you.”

  “You’re not giving me anything,” Steffi seethed. Like Naomi was offering her charity or something. “You’re asking me to buy you out. Just where am I going to get that kind of money?”

  Naomi didn’t have a response to that. Obviously, she hadn’t thought that part through. Typical.

  “I bet you could get a loan,” Naomi finally said.

  “With what collateral? Am I going to give away my company in order to save it?”

  “I’m sure Dov would be willing to—”

  “Then it becomes his company. He already owns sixty percent. I worked too hard to let him take what I created.”

  “What we both created.”

  Steffi didn’t respond. She wasn’t going to say Naomi didn’t contribute to Splurge. But it was Steffi’s concept that had gotten it started and Steffi’s drive that had made it happen. Though it might have been Naomi’s tits that had helped reel in Dov. Steffi sometimes wondered if their roles would be reversed if she’d been the one rocking the low-cut DVF wrap dress at their pitch meeting.

  “This is what you always do,” Steffi said, unable to disguise her resentment.

  “What are you talking about?” Naomi asked. “I’ve never started or sold a company before.”

  “You get bored,” Steffi said. “You get frustrated.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  Of course it was what she was doing. She’d been doing it since they were children. “We used to make beaded bracelets when we were kids. And if the beads in your pattern got out of order, rather than go back and fix it, you’d toss the beads back in the box and start over with something else.”

  “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “Ask my mom if you don’t believe me. Everyone always carries on about what a free spirit you are, flying off on a moment’s notice to live in Rome or Paris. But usually it’s the moment someone asks you to make a commitment.” Naomi’s jaw dropped open. “You have walked away from every job and every boyfriend since I’ve known you. And now you’re doing it to me.”

  “I’m not ‘walking away’ from you.”

  “No, you’re running away. But this time you’re keeping the tycoon boyfriend. And your castle in Sherwood Forest.”

  “I don’t live in a castle,” Naomi bristled.

  “No, you live in fucking Fantasyland!”

  Steffi raced out of Naomi’s apartment, fearing she was about to burst into tears. But the tears didn’t come. Just waves of anger. She was angry at Naomi. She was angry at herself for trusting Naomi. And she was angry about becoming an angry person. She gulped water from the bottle of Evian she had gotten in the habit of carrying everywhere. But even after finishing it off, she was still thirsty. She was always thirsty lately. Overcome, really, with an intense parched sensation. It was like she was dehydrated on a spiritual level. No wonder she couldn’t cry. She was becoming a brittle person. Who would ever want to be with a brittle person with a dehydrated soul?

  She must have looked particularly forlorn, because a taxi pulled over right away. Or maybe that’s the way karma worked. When something major is going wrong in your life, something small and inconsequential goes right. She knew she should be grateful for even small amounts of good karma, but she would have preferred ruining her heels walking all the way across town to worrying about Naomi going AWOL.

  When the taxi pulled up at her apartment, there was someone sitting on the stoop of her Upper East Side brownstone. As soon as she saw who it was, she knew she had been premature in thinking there was any good karma coming her way.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked Stu as she pushed past him to the front door of the building.

  “Nice to see you too,” Stu said.

  She was thirsty again. Maybe she had some kind of kidney disease. Her father had his first kidney stone at thirty-five. He said it was like giving birth to a stone pea. When Steffi said that didn’t sound all that bad, he had laughed and said, “Wait until you try it.” She wanted to call her parents. They would know what she should do about Naomi, but it was still too early on the West Coast.

  “I’m not in the mood for games, Stu,” she said, shoving the key into the hole.

  “Neither am I. I need a job.”

  “Do I look like Monster.com?”

  She tried to close the door behind her, but he had already jimmied his way into the open doorway. She headed upstairs. She wasn’t going to fight with him. She just wanted to get home and get some fluid into her system. She would have killed for a bottle of Gatorade. Fuck the diet.

  “I’m good at what I do,” Stu said, “and no one knows that better than you.”

  It seemed that everyone drinking from her gravy trough had unfettered belief in their own abilities and little in hers. “If you’re so good at what you do, why am I the one with a potential job to offer?”

  “Because I was the one who invested in you when your only talent was spending money.”

  They had reached the door to her apartment and the end of her patience. “If this is your idea of flirting, it’s not working.”

  “Why would I be flirting?” he asked.

  “Because you obviously want to get back together.”

  “Are you smoking crack?”

  She was so close to socking him. “You want me to believe that you came and sat outside my building, waiting for me like a twelve-year-old, solely to get me to hire you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That tells you how desperate I am.”

  “No one is that desperate.”

  He banged his fist against the door. “You know what? You’re right. This was stupid. Stupidest thing I ever did.” He was leaning over her, his face flushed with anger. “No, the stupidest thing I ever did was propose to you.”

  “The stupidest thing I ever did was say yes.”

  “Then there’s something we agree on.”

  “The one and only thing.”

  “Do you want to fuck?”

  “God yes.”

  She couldn’t get the door open fast enough. Their clothes were half off before they made it to the kitchen, where she guzzled half a bottle of cranberry juice, but it didn’t even begin to quench her thirst.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Naomi dreamed she was drowning in her swimming pool, and each time she came up for air, Dov told her how much he loved her. She didn’t know what it meant, but it couldn’t be good.

  Her natural impulse was to conclude that she needed to get away from Dov and from Splurge. But she didn’t want to hurt him. And she didn’t want to hurt Steffi. And she didn’t want to “run away.”

  She was deeply troubled by what Steffi had said to her and had tossed and turned most of the night, which was probably why she was having bad dreams. Well, that and Noah’s wedding, which was in T minus five hours. He had made her his combination “best woman” and “maid of honor.” But really, she was just his all-purpose slave.

  Noah had made it clear her primary job was keep
ing their parents from doing bodily harm to each other (until after the reception), but he had also assigned her a myriad of other tasks, including taking his and Godwin’s Cole Haan shoes for polishing and their matching Dolce & Gabbana suits for one last pressing. Then there were Noah’s custom-dyed shirt and socks, which required schlepping to a dye shop in Queens, before hightailing it back to Manhattan and making her umpteenth trip to the nineteenth-century West Village town house that Noah had chosen for the wedding.

  There was no elevator, so she had to climb up to the “bridal” room, on the third floor of the four-story building, which was designed around a square-shaped central atrium, with a grand stairway wrapping around the atrium on each floor. The first time she climbed it, she felt like a character in a Henry James novel. By the twelfth time, it was Les Misérables that came to mind.

  “Where have you been?” Noah asked, practically ripping the package out of her hands.

  “You do know that Queens lies across a body of water, right?”

  “Never mind. Happy thoughts. Only happy thoughts.” He shooed her away, and she was halfway out of the room when he emitted an unearthly screech.

  “What is this?” He was holding up a purple shirt that he had taken out of the box from the dye shop.

  “A shirt?” she asked, wondering if it was a trick question.

  “And what color is it!?”

  She strongly suspected purple was the wrong answer.

  “It’s supposed to be lavender,” he said. “Does it look lavender to you?” She couldn’t say that it did. “I can’t get married in a purple shirt. Who gets married in a purple shirt?”

  Naomi couldn’t think of anyone, but she wasn’t aware of anyone who wore a lavender shirt either.

  “Didn’t you look inside the box?” Noah demanded.

  “You asked me to pick it up, and I picked it up.”

  “The color scheme is lavender, black and white,” Noah said. “Purple is not part of the equation.”

  “But purple’s what you have,” she said, trying to calm him.

  “Not everyone spends their life going with whatever happens to be in front of them! Some people invest time and effort in their choices.”

  Where the hell did that come from? She invested time and effort in everything she did. Almost everything. Seventy-five percent of everything. “You think I just go with what’s in front of me?”

  “If the purple sock fits . . . Never mind. Happy thoughts. Only happy thoughts.” She was tempted to tell him where he could put his happy thoughts. Instead, she trudged back downstairs, where her mother was rearranging floral arrangements that Naomi was fairly certain Noah had calibrated down to the last petal.

  “Is that what you’re wearing to the wedding?” Lila asked.

  Naomi was in a halter top, shorts and flip-flops. “Obviously not,” she said, trying to recall precisely when she had signed up to be everyone’s punching bag.

  “I don’t take anything for granted anymore in this family,” Lila said, in the aggrieved voice Naomi was getting weary of hearing. “Is he here?”

  “Do you mean your husband?”

  “I believe he gave up the right to be called that, and now it’s only a matter of making the legal documents match the disgraceful reality.” She had been making pronouncements like that for the past six months. This was the first time they were under the same roof. Fortunately, there were lots of rooms in the town house, and Naomi hoped for her father’s sake that he was taking cover in one of the more distant ones.

  “You know he’s here, Mom,” Naomi said, and then using her most patient voice, she added, “And it would mean a great deal to Noah and Godwin if you could be civil to him.”

  “I’m always civil.” Lila fussed with a gargantuan lavender flower arrangement in the front hall. “Is your father’s concubine with him?”

  The notion that Naomi could mitigate her mother’s behavior was preposterous. She had tried for thirty-five years without success.

  “I know you think I’m acting ridiculous,” Lila said. “But he didn’t just cheat on me. He humiliated me. He could have had sex with some tramp at a hotel bar, and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, once he got a clean bill of health from Dr. Rosenberg. But he did it in our house. In our bed. And with someone from the neighborhood. So that everyone knows. Everyone knows. If I don’t divorce him, I become a laughingstock.”

  “So you’re better off being alone?”

  “Oh, Naomi, I’ve been alone for a long time.”

  Naomi was putting that statement high on the list of things she wished her mother had never said to her. Naomi wanted to comfort her mother. But she also wanted to chastise her. Why would her mother say something like that on the day of her son’s wedding? Why would she say something like that ever? There was such a thing as oversharing. Naomi feared her mother’s chronic disappointment was contagious, or, worse, something she had inherited.

  She found her father hiding out in a room on the top level of the building, near the French doors leading to a roof garden, and, more relevantly, next to an unmanned bar.

  “How many of those have you had?” she asked, pointing to his tumbler of bourbon.

  “Not nearly enough,” he said.

  Standing over him, she noticed how the silver hairs had vanquished the last of his dark ones, and how his cheeks were hanging lower on his strong-boned face. She sat down beside him on a purple antique sofa. “It’s very nice of you to be walking Godwin down the aisle.”

  “Well, his parents are dead, and he doesn’t have much family,” her father said, swirling his drink. “So what am I going to do? He’s like the shvartze son I never had.”

  “Daddy!”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “You just lost all the PC points you got for being here.”

  “Aw, kiddo, I never had any. I’m here because your mother asked me to come.” Naomi gasped. “Or should I say commanded me to come.”

  “She told me that—”

  “Your mother says a lot of things. One of them was that she would never forgive me if I didn’t show up. Okay, she also said that Noah would never forgive me.”

  Sometimes Naomi wished she came from a family of repressed WASPs. If no one talked about their personal problems, her life would be much less confusing.

  “What the hell is going on with you two?”

  “She wants to get divorced.”

  “And just because she wants it, you’re going to do it?”

  “That’s pretty much how it worked when we got married.”

  “That’s not the version of events I’ve heard for the last thirty-five years,” Naomi said, crossing to the window. It looked like rain. Noah was not going to be so “happy” about that.

  “You are not the reason we got married,” her father said, waving his hand in front of his face like he was swatting at a persistent fly. “I was going to marry your mother either way. Just not at that moment.”

  “Really?” Naomi asked.

  “Well, probably.” He took a gulp of his drink.

  “What about this woman?”

  “Shirley?”

  “I thought her name was Concubine.” Her dad laughed. “Do you love her?”

  “Love,” he said, like he was encountering the word for the first time. “Do you love Dov?”

  She hadn’t anticipated his turning the tables on her. It was a question she’d been asking herself a lot. Since Dov had started hinting about proposing. More than hinting. She could easily come up with a hundred things she loved about him. But the pressure he was applying wasn’t one of them. “I think so.”

  “Well, I think I love Shirley. But I also think that when it’s really love you don’t think. You know. But a lot of times by the time you know, it’s too late. Or it’s not enough. Or you’re just not willing to fight anymore. Naom
i, honey, your mother’s a fighter. I know it comes from what happened to her family in Europe. I get it. But I don’t like it. I’m tired of it. I’m entitled to some peace and quiet before I die.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but I think peace and quiet is what you get after you die.”

  He smiled and took another gulp of his drink. She watched him swallow. Then she took the glass from him and took a gulp herself.

  “Hey!” he objected.

  She grimaced as she swallowed the medicinal amber liquid. “Were you disappointed I wasn’t a boy?” she asked, giving him back his drink.

  “Where’d you get such a crazy idea?”

  “It’s how I felt when I was a kid. That you wanted a boy.”

  “I have a boy.”

  “Before Noah was around. I always felt that you didn’t know what to do with me. That you wanted a boy to take to hockey games.”

  “I stopped going to hockey games.”

  “That’s kind of my point.”

  “Naomi, you’re being ridiculous.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous. I’m telling you how I felt.”

  “Well, your feelings are ridiculous.”

  “You can’t tell someone their feelings are ridiculous.”

  “Of course I can. If you’re saying things that are baloney, I’m gonna call it baloney. I didn’t want a son. I didn’t want anything. Jesus, Naomi. I didn’t want kids. We were still kids.”

  Naomi’s parents weren’t going for warm and fuzzy wedding memories. Maybe the question wasn’t why they were getting a divorce, but why it had taken so long.

  A caterwaul erupted from the third floor. Either someone had died, or there was purple soap in the bathrooms.

  Naomi ran to the bridal room, hoping she wasn’t to blame for the latest calamity, but this time Noah’s wrath was being directed at Godwin.

  “All I said was I don’t remember signing off on a purple shirt,” Godwin said.

  “Well, I don’t remember signing off on plus ones,” Noah barked.

  “Just plus one,” Godwin said. “One close friend asked as a special favor to bring a date, and I said she could.”