The Scenic Route

by Devan Sipher

  “Naomi.” Her mother grabbed hold of her arm. “You look a wreck.” She always knew what to say.

  “I know,” Naomi said, trying to reclaim her appendage.

  “Have you been outside? Your makeup is running. You look like a raccoon. Doesn’t she look like a raccoon, Ben?”

  “A very lovely raccoon,” he said with an attempt at fatherly sensitivity that sounded a whole lot more like tipsiness.

  She didn’t know which one of them was more annoying. How had they managed to spawn her? But at least they were agreeing on something.

  “I need to go.”

  “Go?” her mother said. “What do you mean go? It’s the middle of a wedding.” As if that fact had somehow escaped Naomi’s notice.

  “Mother, please—”

  “Please what? I’m worried about you. Now, I try not to say that. But this seems a good time to tell you that I’m—”

  Naomi fled. She raced up the remaining steps to the room where the bridal party had put their belongings. Found her purse under the settee, where she had stuffed it. Did an about-face and froze in her tracks.

  There, staring at her with a transfixed look on his face, was Austin. A very wet Austin. Dripping from head to toe. They both stood there looking at each other. For eons.

  “I was looking for someone,” Austin finally said, a small pool forming beneath him.

  “Did you find them?” Naomi said.

  Austin stared at her again. “I think so.”

  He came toward her so suddenly and with such intense force, she thought he was angry with her. But instead of yelling something at her, he took her in his arms and kissed her, the way he did on a train platform many lifetimes ago.

  Seconds later they were on the settee, pushing shoe boxes and garment bags aside as they lunged at each other. Who knows how far they would have gone if Noah hadn’t appeared in the doorway.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I just needed to get a mint out of my bag. Can you believe I forgot to have mints? How do you have a wedding without mints?”

  Austin and Naomi stood up and straightened out their clothing. There was a large wet spot across her periwinkle blue dress.

  “Congratulations,” Austin said, extending his hand. “I’m Austin Gittleman.”

  “Oh,” Noah said. “Hope’s date,” he added meaningfully.

  “I’ve been looking for her,” Austin said.

  “Under the settee?” Noah asked. Austin looked abashed. Noah stood there, taking them both in and seeming to deliberate how he wanted to respond.

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but Hope seems to be thoroughly enjoying the company of a young Israeli venture capitalist.” Naomi felt a twinge of anger mixed with relief and gratitude.

  Noah picked up a knapsack from the floor and started rummaging through it. “Now, this is just me conjecturing here. But I’m thinking that Hope might enjoy her conversation all the more if she got a text saying her date was . . . rain delayed. But that’s just a guess on my part.”

  “Sounds like a good guess,” Austin said quietly. “Thank you.”

  “Oh, just call me a fairy god-brother,” Noah said. “And if I’m ever asked, this conversation never happened.” Then he closed the door behind him.

  “We should talk,” Austin said. Naomi nodded. “Maybe somewhere else?” Naomi nodded again. “Is there a back exit?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  They stood like that for several moments, pondering their options.

  “Shall we do a walk of shame?” Austin asked.

  “You first.”

  Austin headed out of the room and down the stairs, keeping his head down and avoiding eye contact. Naomi followed a few feet behind, doing the same. She couldn’t imagine what she looked like in her wet dress. Please let me not pass by my mother, she prayed. Or Dov, she added. When they reached the front hall, they ran for the entrance like two children being let out of school early.

  They were laughing and panting when they got outside, even as the wind and rain whipped around them. They dashed across the street, her clingy, long silk dress and strappy shoes terribly suited for the inclement weather.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.

  “No idea,” he responded. They laughed as they tried to catch their breath. And then they were all over each other again.

  “We should stop,” he said.

  “You’re right,” she agreed.

  “We should talk. We should date.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We should get out of the rain.”

  “Kiss me!” she told him. And he did. On her mouth. On her neck. As the rain came down from the heavens.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Naomi was a beautiful bride. Lila told her so over and over all morning. She wanted to make sure Naomi heard her say it. And didn’t try to claim later that she hadn’t.

  The wedding was going to be everything that Lila wanted it to be, because it was pretty much precisely what Lila wanted it to be. While it had been fun for her to help plan Noah and Godwin’s wedding, Noah had very strong opinions about what he wanted and how many orchids should be in each centerpiece. Lila loved her son, but there was such a thing as too many orchids. If there was an argument to be made against gay marriage, it was that men made terrible brides. Noah knew how to throw a wonderful, or how they say, fabulous party. But there was something about a wedding that required a more delicate and—politically correct or not—a more feminine hand. Fortunately, Naomi had been willing, or, more likely, resigned, to letting Lila have her way. There were times Lila almost believed Naomi didn’t care about the details of the wedding. Partly because she kept saying “I don’t care about the details.”

  The only concessions were place and time. Naomi and Austin wanted to get married at the Crystal Cove. And as far as Lila was concerned, they couldn’t have made a better choice. The timing was another story. Not only did they want to get married on New Year’s, a social faux pas, but they wanted to get married on New Year’s Day. Lila had pointed out that an evening wedding was more elegant and sophisticated. She also pointed out that guests tended to give better gifts. But Naomi was insistent. “This isn’t the end of something,” she said. “It’s the beginning.”

  It was hardly the beginning, since they had known each other for almost thirty years. However, Naomi was intransigent, and since she didn’t object or even question any of Lila’s other suggestions (and since Lila herself had to admit that a daytime wedding outdoors at the Crystal Cove would look spectacular), Lila had dropped the topic with unusual alacrity.

  Her initial plan was for the ceremony to be on the beach, but she had trouble figuring out how to transport the guests up and down the bluff. There was a gently sloping path that snaked its way down the mountainside, making for a lovely but circuitous route and turning the one-hundred-foot distance into a mile-and-a-half trek. It would take an eternity to get the guests up and down. There was also a stairway, which was less attractive but more efficient. However, Lila couldn’t see the groom’s mother making it up the 140 stairs. Lila considered looking into an airlift but then thought better of it.

  So the beach was out, and the ceremony instead took place under a Venetian-domed gazebo on an expansive grassy bluff. The wedding party walked down an aisle lined with treelike arrangements of white roses and pink peonies with the Pacific beckoning on the horizon. As Austin and Naomi exchanged their vows, Lila noticed the breeze blowing through the chiffon panels hanging from the side of the gazebo, and it made her heart race a bit.

  “I fell in love with you the day I first saw you,” Naomi said, holding both of Austin’s hands in hers. “I don’t believe in destiny. But I believe in you. And I believe in the path that brought us together, no matter how much it twisted and turned.”

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bsp; “Naomi,” Austin said, “I try to imagine my life without you, and it’s impossible, because when I found you I found myself. My sister once told me that ‘love takes practice.’ I want to practice with you for the rest of my life.”

  Lila teared up. She had promised herself she wouldn’t cry. Her makeup wasn’t waterproof. She hoped Austin and Naomi would be happy together. Happy like her and Ben. She took her husband’s hand, and he smiled at her. The same goofy smile he’d had at their own wedding. In the cramped social hall of her parents’ Los Angeles synagogue. It seemed impossible that Lila had once been a young bride with so many plans for the future. Plans to live in New York and be a clothing designer. She had been applying for a job as an assistant buyer at Macy’s when she found out she was pregnant. She remembered how much she’d resented Ben at the time. She had felt it was his fault, and technically it was, though that didn’t stop his mother from accusing her of trying to entrap him. Lila could have chosen to have an abortion, but it would have destroyed her mother. “They kill enough Jews,” she had spat at her; “you don’t have to help them.”

  She had blamed Ben for having to give up the Macy’s job. But the truth was the thought of moving to New York by herself had terrified her. She lacked Naomi’s confidence and had feared failing in the cutthroat fashion industry and humiliating herself in the process. For all the women’s lib rhetoric she spouted to Ben at the time, she’d been relieved when he proposed.

  It was easy for her to forget that. So easy to forget how happy she had been to marry the man she loved. She wanted Naomi and Austin to be even happier than she and Ben. She supposed that’s what every parent wanted for her children. To be happier. To be richer. To be wiser. Though if it truly worked that way, the world would be an increasingly bountiful place. And Lila didn’t see that as a realistic possibility.

  But maybe Naomi did. She had never been a very realistic person. Something she seemed to go out of her way to prove. A year ago she was in the New York Times business section, and now she was baking cookies again, in a “shop” that made an ATM lobby seem spacious. Lila couldn’t even pretend to understand her daughter’s choices. But Naomi was indeed a beautiful bride. And she would have been even more beautiful if she would just stand a little straighter.

  Austin and Naomi were saying good-bye already. How was that possible? There was a too-hurried kiss. And a heartfelt hug. Lila was crying again. The day had gone by so quickly. Too quickly. Stu and Steffi were taking pictures. And so was Penelope. Was it Lila’s imagination or did Naomi’s hug of Penelope last longer than their own? Noah and Godwin helped the newlyweds get into a convertible red Miata, festooned with those silly ribbons and soda cans. They were going on an African safari for their honeymoon. Lila didn’t see anything romantic about sleeping under mosquito netting, but far be it from her to criticize.

  They inched the car forward with the family trailing alongside them, cheering and throwing rice. Lila had never thrown rice before. Or thrown anything else for that matter. She would never be accused of being a tomboy, but throwing rice at weddings had always seemed a particularly strange custom to her. She didn’t understand the reason for it and didn’t see the benefit of rice raining on a bride’s hairdo and down her décolletage. But as she reached over and over into the box of Uncle Ben’s Noah had handed her, she discovered there was something surprisingly liberating about flinging handfuls of grain into the air. Tossing them with abandon and watching them scatter in every direction.

  As Austin and Naomi reached the end of the Crystal Cove driveway, they veered to the right at the exit. But the highway was to the left. “They’re going the wrong way,” she said to Ben. He nodded.

  “You’re going the wrong way!” she shouted, but they didn’t seem to hear her.

  Then Lila did something she hadn’t done in years. Not since school days. She ran. In three-inch heels. On a dirt road. She ran. She sprinted the few yards to the Miata, then was running alongside them. Her heart was pounding in a way she didn’t remember it doing since possibly her wedding night. No, since the night she gave birth for the first time.

  “You’re going the wrong direction!” she called out. “You’re taking the long way around.”

  Naomi turned to her with an amused expression on her face. Then she looked at her husband and smiled. “We know.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Books are like children. It takes a village to make them strong. I’m fortunate to have many people to thank for keeping this book—and its author—out of harm’s way. They are: Danielle Perez, Deborah Schneider, Stacey Luftig, Anne Newgarden, Badria Jazairi, Frank Basloe, Stephen Gaydos, Idra Novey, Robert Woletz, Tina Fineberg, Nicola Wheir, Heidi Giovine, Daniel Jussim, Shifra Diamond, Scott Sher, Eileen Fine, Darol Sipher, Sandy Sipher, Angelo Pacella, Jami Bernard, Jeff Nishball, Megan Gillin-Schwartz, Ami Angelowicz, Tasha Gordon-Solmon, Mort Milder, Rhonda Goldstein, Cathy Gleason, Victoria Marini, Loren Jaggers, Joseph Cortes, Sandra Engelson and Bruce Yaffe. And I’d like to thank Lisa Krieger for inspiring me with her strength and courage.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Early in the book, Naomi tells Austin that there’s no such thing as a wrong turn. Do you agree or disagree and why?

  2. How would you describe a “manstrosity”? Do you know any?

  3. Mandy theorized that the flawed choices humans make in their romantic pursuits are a genetic trait rather than a personal failure. Do you think that’s likely true or wishful thinking? Were Mandy’s flawed choices an implicit part of who she was?

  4. Have you ever seen the Lumière film Sortie d’Usine? One version (of three) is viewable at the Institut Lumière Web site: http://www .institut-lumiere.org/english/frames.html. (Go to the “Lumiere Museum” section and click on “Films.”) What stands out for you in the film? Do you think the film depicts something literal, metaphoric or both? Why do you think Naomi watched it over and over?

  5. When Naomi told Austin she loved him, what should he have done? Was he morally obligated to be faithful to Dallas? Or was he being unnecessarily self-sacrificing?

  6. Is Lila on to something with her plan to run away from home in her fifties? What are the advantages to waiting to sow your wild oats until your middle-age years? What are the disadvantages?

  7. Do you believe there are “red-light people” and “green-light people”? What do you think are the characteristics of each? Do you believe a person can change from one to the other? And what did Dallas mean when she said Austin was yellow?

  8. Why did Austin lash out at his mother while Mandy was in the hospital? Do you think Austin truly believes his father had a choice in his death? Why would Austin believe that?

  9. Is Noah right about romantic partners each playing yin to the other’s yang? Have you ever felt like you were locked in an unintended role in a relationship?

  10. Austin starts the book wanting to follow a safe and cautious path in life. Was his problem that he chose an impossible goal or that he didn’t do a good enough job of pursuing it? And in a world where we can’t count on hospitals—or even cities—remaining solvent, what remains a safe bet?

  11. Tad’s title for Mandy’s dissertation is “The Evolution of Love.” Would that have been a good title for the novel as well? Why or why not?

  12. If Austin had told Naomi he was falling for her when they first met, the trajectory of their lives for the remainder of the book would be significantly different. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that they ended up taking “the scenic route”?

  PHOTO © TINA FINEBERG

  Devan Sipher is a writer of the New York Times’s “Vows” wedding column and the author of The Wedding Beat. He graduated from the University of Michigan, where he also attended medical school, and he received a master of fine arts from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Southfield, Michigan, and lives in Manhattan.

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