Wedding Season

by Darcy Cosper

  “Darling, I’d love that,” Joan tells Ora. “I’ll call and give you the details.”

  “Wonderful! You must! Then I’ll see you all next month. I have to dash, honey. Great to meet you, ladies!” She waggles her fingers at us and trips off across the dining room.

  “Isn’t she adorable?” Joan beams. “What a doll.”

  “She’s sure something.” Henry nods.

  “You guys, hey, you guys, let’s take a picture.” Miel rummages frantically through her purse and pulls out a little camera. “To commemorate our last single night.”

  “Luke!” Henry yells. “Come be our photographer!”

  Luke lopes over and Miel gives him the camera. Henry grabs my hand across the table, and I turn to survey them, the brides-to-be, my old, my dear old friends.

  “Smile,” Luke calls, and I look, we lift our glasses, and the light blinds us.

  IT’S A MILD MIDNIGHT and I’m walking home, having waved and kissed and bundled the other girls into cabs and watched them disappear into the dark. The buds on the trees are swelling, and a few stars strain through Manhattan’s luminous halo to make themselves known. On the corner across from the building where I live with Gabe there is a Unitarian church, a dark, neo-Gothic number; we can see it from our kitchen and on Sunday mornings sometimes we have breakfast by the window to watch the hats and the children climbing on the iron fence and the kisses of peace traded on the front steps. As I pass tonight it occurs to me that we’ll soon be seeing a parade of weddings there, too. Resistance is futile, I think to myself. Beside the church’s front door is a glass case holding a sign, black felt with movable white letters, like the menus in diners that feature blue-plate specials. Tonight the sign announces that the theme of this morning’s sermon was the power of loyal friendship. Below this is a quotation from the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; whither thou stayest I will stay; your people will be my people, and your God, my God.” I turn and look up toward my apartment. The light in the bedroom is on, and I see Gabriel’s silhouette. He’s at the window; he’s waiting for me.

  Monday, April 2, 200—

  I ARRIVE AT WORK at a reasonable hour—that is, a not unreasonable hour, for a Monday morning. My company’s office occupies the top floor of a very narrow brownstone building on Greenwich Avenue. We have decent views but pay daily for the privilege with a breathtaking march up several flights of steep and crooked stairs, through dim, grimy hallways, past the suites of our fellow tenants: a real estate broker, a small socialist press, a psychologist, and, in the ground-floor storefront, a New Age bookstore. At the uppermost landing is the entrance to our quarters. The front door has a cracked, frosted piece of glass set into it, upon which my partner, Charles Vernon, in the spirit of the genre, hired a graphic designer friend to paint the name of our company, Invisible Inc., with the words hacks at large below it, and a very nice illustration of an old Underwood typewriter.

  Invisible Inc. is a slightly odd proposition, a loose consolidation of writers founded one evening a few years ago. Charles and I met while working as content providers on a project developing toddler-friendly software content for Baby’s First Palm Pilot. We bonded as fellow dropouts, he out of a doctoral program in philosophy and I out of law school. One day we went out after work and were discussing the dubious pleasures of the freelance life and the difficulties of navigating the commercial world solo. It began as a joke, the notion that we could pool our resources and form a merry band of ghostwriters and copy slaves to feed the maw of the market and its appetite for a well-turned phrase. But by evening’s end we had signed declarations of intent on a cocktail napkin, toasted to Necessity, the cunning, desperate mother of invention, and not even formidable hangovers the following day could convince us of the follies of an enterprise so born.

  And here we are, four years later. Our hunch paid off and the captains of industry embraced us: a collective of poly-specialized scribes for hire, easy to track down, more reliably talented than temps, asking lower fees than recruitment agencies. We provide an uncomplicated relationship. We’re on call, we do the job right and get out, we’re available without rancor or complication whenever our services are required. We’ve done everything: billboards and brochures, grants and guerrilla marketing projects, autobiographies and ad campaigns, photo captions and political speeches and pornography, leaflets and love letters. Our work is everywhere—simple, nameless, blameless. Occasionally someone calls with a legitimate journalism assignment, and occasionally we’ll take it, but most of our staff have grown so accustomed to and fond of anonymity that they’ll furnish the pieces with anagrammatic bylines. This pleases me; it seems proof that we’re offering a valuable service not only to our corporate clients but also to the strange flotsam of humanity that drift through our doors to offer their writerly talents in exchange for a little filthy lucre, a little camaraderie scarce and avidly sought among our breed of semiprofessionals: grad students moonlighting, novelists with writer’s block, journalists looking for an income supplement, and so on. A few have stayed, our little brood of invisibles.

  NO MATTER HOW early I make it to the office, Pete is already here, as he is this morning, stuffing a filter into the coffee maker. He ducks his head in greeting and gives me his sweet, sheepish smile. Pete has been with us for over three years; he came as an undergrad and remained after being granted his degree in medieval literature (he did a thesis on something about the troubadours). He still has the look of a child about him, the child you don’t set a play date with. He’s pale and thin, with straggly brown hair that hangs over his face and large dark animal eyes. Tattoos peek from under his garments, a perpetual outfit of solid black and T-shirts featuring the names and slogans of fearsome-sounding punk groups, including his own band, Road Rage. He is a soft-spoken, tender-hearted, and unfailingly polite young man, specializing here as our Cyrano, writing love letters and poetry for the romantically challenged. He has also consulted several times on marriage proposals, all of which were accepted. Naturally, then, he has very little personal success with women.

  Our office is just a couple of rooms filled with desks and file cabinets and battered couches that we found on the street; there’s a large main work area up front, and the office I share with Charles is in a smaller room at the rear. Charles has a framed vintage poster for The Sweet Smell of Success above his desk, and a photograph of Nietzsche; I have my calendar. My desk is next to the windows at the back of the building, which offer a view of our neighbors in their bathrooms and kitchens, engaged in the serious business of daily life. The fire escape across from our own serves as a balcony for Miss Trixie, a drag queen of some local renown. From time to time, when she hasn’t been up all night performing, Trixie and Charles and I will take our morning coffee together and converse over the dank gully between our buildings like country gossips at a picket fence. This morning, though, the only sign of our lady is a row of fishnet stockings in shocking neon colors, doing a breezy, ghostly cancan on the clothesline.

  AS I SETTLE at my desk, Charles drags himself into view and leans heavily, dramatically against the door frame that separates the two rooms. He’s an odd-looking man, in a compelling way: pale brown hair, dark olive skin, and light hazel eyes that could put a snake charmer into a trance. On the short side but sans Napoléon complex. His features are perfect, but slightly askew, as if he had slept on them funny and everything got a little bit rearranged. As usual he’s dressed to kill, but this morning he looks like he’s been backed over by a gallon of vodka. Pete slips a cup of coffee into his hand and puts another on my desk. I thank him, and he eyes Charles sympathetically.

  “Want some aspirin?” Pete ducks his head.

  “Don’t speak.” Charles places a hand over Pete’s mouth. “It does me harm.”

  Pete bobs and departs.

  “You are setting a very bad example for our employees,” I tell Charles, who lowers himself into our prized leatherette recliner, trying to move his head as little as possible. He
takes a swallow of coffee.

  “Good morning, Vern.” He tries a smile on me, which turns into a wince, and puts his face back into the coffee cup.

  “Good morning to you, Vern. You look like hell. Have a nice weekend?”

  “Please kill me now.”

  “Nope. You have a client meeting today. Nice suit, by the way. And here come the troops.” Noises from the next room indicate that the rest of our staff is arriving. “Vern, how about you suffer in silence, and I handle the assignment meeting?”

  “Bless you. Job book’s over there,” he gestures to his desk with his empty cup. “Try to get all of your notes on the same piece of paper, not sixteen Post-its, okay? Refill, please?”

  “Waitressing. Not in my job description.” I pluck the assignment book from his desk and head into the front room.

  MY FLOCK OF BARTLEBYS is settling at our proud alternative to a conference table: a lovely pink 1950s Formica kitchenette set with matching chairs. Besides Pete, there’s Myrna, a Rubenesque, very serious young woman with a mass of dark curly hair and pretty blue eyes set so wide that it seems as though she can look in both directions at once, like a guppy. She has ghostwritten autobiographies, political manifestos, and speeches for some of the nation’s most prominent politicians, but she likes the variety here. And Damon, beloved by advertising agencies and PR firms city-wide for his pithy copy. Damon’s a lanky, hunky ex-surfer with sun-streaked blond locks and a sloth-like Super Dude manner so convincing that I routinely forget he’s actually very bright. He has a background in science, went to grad school for sociology—unlike Charles and me, he actually completed a postgraduate degree, and then, just like Charles and me, found himself with absolutely no idea of what to do next. So here he is, and has been for the last three years. Finally, there’s Tulley, a tiny, perky, pink-cheeked English girl with a high and tiny voice, chestnut hair that she usually wears in two shiny braids, sparkly eyes the color of maple syrup, and a predilection for profanity that would put a longshoreman to shame. She’s a diplomat’s daughter, speaks seven or eight languages fluently, and has a degree in international finance or something like that, but she was bored out of her mind in the corporate world, and someone referred her to us a couple of years ago. She handles translations, helps out with accounting, and does most of our pornography, including her regular assignment writing the so-called letters from readers for a nudie magazine called BabyDoll.

  IN THE FRONT ROOM, Damon is stooping around the table, pouring coffee for everyone.

  “Hey, boss,” he greets me with his trademark hair flip, a world-class move that would, I’m sure, cause a swooning epidemic if deployed in the vicinity of any American high school. The other Invisibles turn from their conversations to wave and nod greetings.

  “Damon, could you do me a huge favor and go give Vern a warm-up?”

  He lopes off, and I put another filter in the coffee maker.

  “Everyone survive the weekend?” I ask over my shoulder. A collective grumbling is my answer. Damon comes back into the room and hands me the coffee pot.

  “I think Charles is dead,” he tells me, as we sit down at the table.

  “We’ll make funeral arrangements after the meeting. Status updates, please.” I feel, as I always do when I preside over these meetings, like an imposter. The idea that I’m the head of a company—that I’m a grown-up, that I have any legitimate claims to authority—seems patently absurd to me. I’m certain that at any moment someone will discover I’m merely posing as an adult, and expose me for the fraud that I am. Also, as I’ve said, I loathe being the center of attention; it makes me extremely nervous.

  “The BabyDoll letters are done,” Tulley says. “Could you please have Charles tell the editor that we’re going to drop the account if he doesn’t stop asking me to dinner? And someone from another skin mag got my name and called to ask if I’d do a sex advice column.”

  “That was Cosmo,” Pete reminds her.

  “I’ll do it,” Damon says. “Could be cool.”

  “Could be actionable.” Tulley shakes her head. “False pretenses.”

  “Right.” I wave my hands. “Okay. Focus, please.”

  “I’m nearly finished with the materials for the day spa,” Myrna announces. “They’ve extended an offer of complementary oxygen therapy facials to all our staff members.”

  “I’ve always wanted to try one of those.” Pete brightens at this news. “Oh, and remember Hector? He wants something new.”

  “What does he want? An anniversary poem?” I ask. Hector was one of the marriages assisted by Pete’s literary talents.

  “Sort of. He wants some kind of love letter for his mistress.”

  “That lout,” Myrna snaps. “He was married just a year ago. This is insupportable. Joy, we can’t possibly be party to his dalliances.”

  “Hey, who are we to judge?” Damon flips his hair. “We’re just the writers, guy, not the Moral Majority.”

  “Enough,” I tell Damon and Myrna, who are glowering at each other. “Pete, let’s talk about this later today.” I run my finger along a column in the assignment book. “Damon, we have a screenplay that needs overhauling. Myrna, someone from City Hall needs a speech for some celebrity fundraiser. I’ll give you the notes when we’re done here. Pete, Tulley, Charles is meeting with the people from Modern Love Press in an hour. They want us to help produce this new twentysomething romance series. I’ll put you guys on that if it comes through.”

  Pete and Tulley give each other high fives across the table.

  “All set?” I stand, and the group begins to shuffle up. “I’m going to check on Vern.”

  CHARLES IS LOLLING in the recliner with one hand to his brow.

  “Hey.” I slap lightly at his face. “Rise and shine.”

  He bats my hands away and glares.

  “What did you do to deserve this?” I settle at my desk.

  “The road to romance is paved with good intentions and many martinis.” Charles closes his eyes. “I took Derek out for dinner. And drinks. And drinks. Did I mention drinks?”

  “Get lucky?”

  “Not even a good-night kiss.” Charles sighs.

  “Are you sure he’s gay?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “Wonder on your way uptown. You have half an hour to get to Modern Love.”

  “Anything fun come up at the meeting?” Charles struggles to his feet.

  “Porno. Adultery. A little infighting.”

  “I love this job.” He straightens his tie. “You’ll have to fill me in when I get back.”

  “Good luck,” I tell him. He waves and heads out the door.

  MY PHONE RINGS.

  “Good morning, baby girl,” my older brother James says when I pick up.

  “Good morning, big girl.”

  “Can we have lunch this week? We need to get a present for Charlotte.”

  Charlotte is our favorite aunt, my mother’s younger sister. She’s getting married later this month—for the first time, at the age of forty-eight, and to the very lucky Burke Ingerson, a man fourteen years her junior. Both my family and Burke’s are more than a little upset about the whole thing. The wedding should be interesting.

  “I thought we were going to get them a gift certificate for sex toys.”

  “Joy. That was a joke. Mom would have an aneurysm.”

  “And this is a problem for you?”

  “We don’t need to add to the misery, baby. She’s already in such a tizzy about the whole thing.”

  “Only because Bachelor Number Three isn’t as young and handsome as Burke. Why should I humor her competitive streak?”

  “Baby.” James puts on his stern eldest brother voice. “I’m trying to be a good boy for once. How about if we make nice? For the sake of novelty.”

  “Oh, fine. But I can’t do it this week. I’m booked.” I wave through the window to Miss Trixie, who is on the fire escape, reeling in her stockings and singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. Presi
dent.”

  “You busy professional. Next Monday?”

  “Nope. What about Tuesday?” I look up at my calendar.

  “Mmm. No. I have student meetings all day.” James is an associate professor at NYU; he followed our father’s footsteps to the shady groves of academe.

  “Wednesday?”

  “Next Wednesday. That’s perfect,” he says. There’s a silence, and I can picture him writing it down in his beautiful leather-bound teacher’s agenda, in his beautiful handwriting. I scratch a note onto the back of a receipt and tape it to the calendar. “I’ll call you that morning,” he says. “Love you, baby girl.”

  “You, too.” I set the phone down gently, and look out the window.

  FROM TIME OUT of mind, or at least since my parents’ divorce, the family assumption was that I’d become a lawyer, like my mother. There was no apparent reason for this beyond parental vanity; I was a shy child, and possessed nothing particular in the way of character or aptitude—except bookishness and a kind of adolescent moral rigidity—that would have made it an obvious career choice. But by the time I was in college, a future defending the spirit and letter of the law was beyond questions of desire, beyond questions of any kind. It had been assumed for so long as to become doctrine, an article of absolute faith. After the implosion of my mother’s second marriage, she decided, possibly out of sheer perversity, to specialize in divorce law. She began to make a name for herself by winning high-profile cases and obscenely large settlements for the ex-wives of wealthy men, and by the time I got to law school even my fellow students knew her as Goldfinger. I had a legacy to uphold.

  I received my undergrad degree in prelaw with an English Lit minor to keep all the parental units happy, after which I was accepted by Columbia University’s law school. But from that point things went downhill with a certainty equal and opposite to all hopes and expectations that had come before. After my first year, in particular, I had something like a crisis of faith. My aforementioned moral rigidity, and perhaps some feeling of self-importance—which were initially nurtured on the bracing rigors of law school and throve on ethics classes and tomes of theory—had begun to dissipate. The sense that I was aligning myself with the Good and the True slipped away. My studies became haunted by the specter of subjectivity: There is no Good, no True, and as far as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is concerned, in any given instance each of us has only a version of what we believe to be true, and each version is merely a question of perspective. As this notion took hold, the idea of representing under oath another person’s truth began to seem like not such a fabulous idea. It sat badly with me. I started to lose sleep over it. One of these sleepless nights, deep into the spring semester of my second year, I was in the library studying. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and found, scrawled in fat black strokes across the mirror above the sinks, the cri de coeur of some fellow-sufferer: “Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.” I read the scrawl once, eyed my reflection through the text, read it again, and then bent over and threw up into a sink.