by Darcy Cosper
“What took you so long?” Gabe asks when I come back into the bedroom. “I missed you. Get over here.” He holds the blankets up for me, and I crawl in next to him. He wraps an arm around my waist, pulls me onto his chest, kisses my neck, and reaches over to set his book and glasses on the nightstand. “So, how are the girls? Any news?”
What a question. Let’s see. Well, Gabe, Joan will probably require heavy-duty animal tranquilizers to get through her wedding without murdering her groom, I behaved like Joan Crawford, Maud is no longer speaking to me, and Henry almost beat up our special dinner guest. And are you planning to leave me for Ora Mitelman?
I can’t do it. I just can’t. Naturally, I want to ask. But more than even the worst answer I might receive, I am afraid of becoming the kind of woman who would ask that kind of question. A woman like my mother, who toward the end of their marriage waited up nights for my father when he stayed out late, and pounced on him as he came in the door, dive-bombing him like a flock of querulous birds. I would listen from behind my bedroom door to their arguments, which made me think of the ones I saw men and women have in the movies. As in the movies, the fights were almost identical from night to night. Night after night, they ended with the same scene: My mother ran weeping down the hall to their bedroom and slammed the door, while my father stood looking after her, smiling wryly. And every night, shaking his head and chuckling, he would comment to some invisible audience, “Women!” It was as though they were fighting by agreement, accepting out of sheer exhaustion the roles assigned to them, and playing out a scenario with only one possible outcome. It seemed to me that if only they could change something, some little thing, if one of them could just manage to alter a line of dialogue or a gesture, then another story, some other version of their lives might suddenly open up and unfold before them, an undiscovered country.
No, I promise myself. Absolutely not. You will not ask Gabe about her. You will not do anything of the kind, you will not say anything of the kind. Not for any reason, not ever. Not on your life.
Wednesday, May 9, 200—
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON and I’m in the office, answering e-mail while Charles paces in circles around my desk and gives me the weekly status report of standing and incoming jobs. All over the office the windows are open wide to let in the late spring air, and the whole staff is a little giddy; periodically I hear bursts of hysterical laughter from the front room.
“The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ website is done,” Charles tells me, “and they want to retain us for ongoing work, but I spoke with Jones and he said we should drop it.”
“Why?” I ask. Jones is our lawyer.
“He says the company has high lawsuit potential, and it’d be better to distance ourselves from it now.”
“What, someone’s going to sue if the Apocalypse doesn’t come on schedule?”
“Littering fines from all those flyers, maybe? Oh, also on the litigious front, BabyDoll is dropping their account. I got a call on Monday from the editor’s secretary.” Charles slurps the dregs of his coffee. “I guess Tulley’s date with him didn’t go as he had hoped.”
“I guess not. Well, good riddance. We’ve got plenty of work.” I wave through the window to Miss Trixie, attired in a minuscule yellow bikini and giant dark sunglasses, who has pulled a lawn chair out onto her fire escape and is preparing to sun herself.
“Hollywood was very happy with the rewrite Damon did on The Senator’s Son, and they want to retain him in case anything comes up.” Charles perches on the edge of my desk. “Hey, you’ll like this. I got a call from a company called the Transgression Enterprise. They’re doing this new retail chain based on the seven deadly sins.”
“Is there anything in this great green world that can’t be commodified?”
“Apparently not. Vanity is going to be a spa—they’ve recruited some of the nation’s top plastic surgeons and lipo specialists for it. Lust is a cocktail lounge and dance club, with on-site matchmakers and private rooms. All very sophisticated and upscale, they promise me.”
“Better get that in writing.”
“Anger’s a rage therapy facility. Boxing gym and primal scream sessions on one side, yoga and meditation workshops on the other. Gluttony’s a prix-fixe restaurant with a ten-course-meal minimum, and Greed’s custom jewelry-nothing less than five carats—but the client’s thinking about repositioning the store as ’Rapacious.’ Sounds better, doesn’t it?”
“Very wily of them. What’s Sloth?”
“A resort on a private island. With a ratio of something like eight employees to every guest. Rickshaws. All service is room service. Stuff like that.”
“And Envy?”
“A clothing boutique—one-of-a-kind items and limited editions only. They’ll start the whole thing in Los Angeles, naturally, then bring it to New York next year. They want us to write all the peripherals and brainstorm a PR campaign. And they’re offering a pile of money. The wages of sin!”
“It sounds amusing, I guess. Give the sins to Damon?” I delete several e-mails promising that I can get rich working part-time from my home.
“Sure,” Charles says. “And Tulley—her mother was a devout Catholic, she has all this doctrine memorized from childhood. She can help out with the research.”
“Did we hear anything about the Extreme Romance business?”
“They loved the last installments. Loved them. They’re commissioning a dozen more, and they also want to discuss developing a line of erotica.”
“Great.” I delete a pyramid scheme, a promotion for a cybervirus detector, and an e-mail entitled “Top 20 Lies Men Tell.” “We’ll have Petey keep on with the love, and I’ll call Joan about the sex. Maybe we can do some cross-branding with X Machina.”
“Clever girl. Speaking of which, Talent Agency’s corporate sponsorship program. It’s looking really good for us.”
“What’s that?” I ask, distracted, noticing that an e-mail from Maud has just arrived.
“The thing I told you about a couple of weeks ago.” Charles gets up and starts pacing again. “Erica’s agency is developing a program to broker individual sponsorships between their hot young artist clients and big corporations. The Medici Project. I took a meeting, and they really want us on board from the ground up. Huge commission—website, ad campaign, events, the works. They’re going to hire an ad agency, but they want us to be the creative leads, coordinating with their strategic planners and marketing department. We may have to bring on a couple of additional people if we take it. Hello? Vern?”
Charles’s voice comes to me faintly through a sudden wave of nausea. I’ve opened Maud’s e-mail, expecting to find one of the information queries she usually sends out when she’s doing research on a new film, and have found something quite different.
Joy,
We’ve been friends for a long time now. You know I value your friendship and your ideas about the world, which often get me to think about my own, and challenge me to figure out what I believe. I know that when you said what you said at dinner the other night you were angry, and didn’t mean it the way it came out. And I know that whole thing with Joan’s friend must have been awful for you, and I’m sorry for that. But I’ve thought a lot about it since then, and I keep coming back to the same thing. It’s hard for me to say, but given how you feel about marriage, I just can’t have you as a bridesmaid. Of course I want you to be there when Tyler and I get married because I want to be surrounded that day by all the people I love, and I love you. But I hope you’ll understand that it just doesn’t feel right for me to have you as a part of the wedding ceremony. If you need to talk about this with me, we can get together—just call.
Truly,
Maud
“Joy, are you okay? What is it?” Charles circles the desk and puts his hands on my shoulders. “You look like someone died. Oh, damn, I’m sorry. No one died, did they?”
“Nope.” I put my head down on the desk. “Nothing like that. It’s okay.”
“What happened? Did you get bad news?”
“Maud’s angry at me.” I lift my head. “She recused me of bridesmaid duties.”
Charles looks at me, agog, and then begins to laugh.
“Vern, you brilliant little thing! How did you engineer that?”
“It’s not funny.”
“Of course it is! You were joking about how to get out of service just last week, remember? Burning your bridesmaid’s draft card, fleeing to Canada?”
“I didn’t do this on purpose, Vern.”
“Well, look, she’s not mad at you.” Charles reads the e-mail over my shoulder. “You haven’t been disinvited to the wedding or anything catastrophic. It’s the best possible scenario. Or did you want to be disinvited?”
“You’re not listening. I feel bad about this.”
“Honey, I am listening, I just don’t understand. I know you’ve been going crazy with this wedding marathon, and just a couple of weeks ago you were chafing at the girdle to me over how many of them you had to be in.” He sits on the edge of my desk and gives me a stern look. “Now you’re out of one, and there’s no irreparable harm done between you and Maud, as far as I can tell from the e-mail. Just get her an extra nice present, and go to the wedding wearing something besides another horrible orange bridesmaid’s dress. It’s not like you don’t have any others to wear this summer. So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know.” I sigh and put my head back down on the desk. “I feel left out, I guess.”
“But out of something you don’t want to be included in anyway.”
“Right, okay. But I’m being punished for my position, which seems unfair.”
“I don’t know about that, Vern. It doesn’t sound like Maud’s punishing you. You have the courage of your convictions, and she has hers. You can’t expect to believe something counter to the norm—or anything at all, really—and not have to deal with the consequences. You know what Saki says, don’t you? ’Never be a pioneer. It’s the early Christian who gets the fattest lion.’”
The phone rings, and I pick up to hear my father’s voice singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
“Hi, Daddy.” I raise my eyebrows at Charles.
“Hello, sweetheart,” my father says. “How’s my little capitalist?”
“Exploiting the proles, as usual. How’s life on the mesa?”
“Ah, the mesa.” He chuckles. “A dry heat. Kiddo, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
Last year my father took a sabbatical from Columbia and moved to New Mexico to live amid the New Age prayer beads and southwestern kitsch of Santa Fe with his fiancée, Desiree, an interior decorator who applies a concoction of feng shui and ostensibly Native American design principles to the homes of wealthy urban expats living in the Southwest. How a man like Daddy could fall for a woman like her is perplexing, but there it is: love, the eternal mystery—or the perennial hoax. And, frankly, my father no longer seems to me the cool and clever hero he once appeared to be. I have begun to suspect, in fact, that he is a perfectly ordinary, average, predictable man.
“Sweetheart, listen,” my father says. “We’ve had a little change in plans for the wedding.”
“What’s up?” I allow myself the brief, bright hope that Dad is calling off the ceremony and ditching Desiree.
“Well, we’ve had to change the date. Do you have a calendar nearby?”
“Yes.” I eye the calendar over my desk, oracle of my season’s agony.
“We’re switching the ceremony from that first Saturday in July to the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-second.”
“Daddy. You can’t. That’s the same weekend as—” I stop to draw breath. “That’s one day after Mom’s wedding.”
“It is?”
“Daddy. You knew that. Josh told me you guys coordinated it. Him, then you, then Mom. Why you all had to do it in a month and a half I’ll never understand.”
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do,” my father quotes.
“Yeah, well. Mom’s ceremony is on the evening of the twenty-first. The evening. As in probably up until midnight.”
“Honey, I guess it just slipped my mind. I didn’t exactly have your mother’s wedding in my date book. But we’ve already switched everything. It’s too late to change back.”
“Oh, Dad. Why did you change it in the first place?”
“Joy, I know this won’t make sense to you. Nor does it, particularly, to me. But—the things we do for love. Desiree’s… well, her astrologer advised against it. The date. Extremely inauspicious, apparently. Star-crossed.” He chuckles.
“Ha, ha,” I tell him. “Ho, ho. How about if your loving children just astrally project themselves to your wedding, then?”
“I’d recommend the red-eye.”
“Better,” I tell him. “I’ve sold my soul to Extreme Romance and the Transgression Enterprise anyway. There’s nothing to project with.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Never mind, Dad. Never mind. We’ll figure it out.”
“What was that all about?” Charles asks, as I set the phone down.
“That was the fattest lion,” I tell him.
“Joy Naomi Silverman!” I hear Henry howl from the front room. “I know you’re in there! The mountain has come to Muhammad!”
“That would be the fattest lion, actually,” Charles stage-whispers.
“Henry.” I get up from my chair as she flings herself through the door and onto our leatherette recliner. “Come on in. Have a seat.”
“Holy toledo, girl, your desk is a disaster. This area should be condemned. Charles.” Henry narrows her eyes at him. “Did this young lady get the several messages I left for her, or did she not?”
“I delivered them personally.” Charles begins to edge out of the room. “I’ll just be leaving the two of you alone, now.”
“Oh, Vern, you can stay. Stay.” He doesn’t. “Well, Hank. What a nice surprise. What brings you here?” I know very well what brings her here: I have not spoken with Henry since Sunday—the night of the Ora debacle—though not through any fault of hers. She’s left multiple messages for me at home, on my voice mail at the office, and with various members of the staff here. I have failed to return her calls.
“’Fess up, Jojo. What’s going on?”
“Oh, you know. The usual. Really busy here. Just working on—”
“Uh-uh. No. The last time you went incommunicado on me was when you got the honorable discharge from law school. I don’t buy it. What’s going on?”
“Hank, nothing. Everything’s fine. Maud asked me to step down as bridesmaid, but whatever.”
“She did? Wow. Bold move. Is she that mad?”
“No, I don’t think so. She says she just feels weird having me in the wedding, seeing how I’m anti-marriage and all.”
“You okay with that?”
“I see her point, if that’s what you mean. I’ll just sulk about if for a couple of days, and then I’ll be okay.”
“That’s my girl.” Henry claps her hands together lightly. “And what about Gabe? Did you talk to him? What did he say?”
“Talk to him about what?” I begin to type an e-mail, addressed to myself, which reads: help I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory. “Oh, the thing with what’s-her-name. No. No, I decided not to.”
“You decided not to.” Henry gives me her X-ray-vision look. “Any particular reason?”
“Just seemed like a bad idea.” This is, strictly speaking, the truth. “My dad always says, don’t go looking for trouble…”
“Because you’re certain to find it.” Henry rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. But—”
“I appreciate your concern, Henry. Thank you. And don’t worry, okay? I’ve got it under control.”
“But—”
“No buts. End of discussion.”
“But out, is what you’re saying?” Henry laughs. “Kiss your but?”
“You sound like Gabe. Hey
, Hank, are you having an affair with my boyfriend?”
“Eeeew. What a totally hideous thought. No offense.”
“Right, okay. None taken. You skanky bitch.”
This sends Henry off into a gale of laughter. When she recovers, panting for breath, she turns to me.
“Listen, I have to run. I still haven’t got a wedding present for Joan. Or Maud. Or Miel. I’m on a mad bridal scavenger hunt. Want to come?”
“Gosh, that sounds like loads of fun, but I think I’ll pass.”
“Call me tonight, okay?” Henry stands and stretches. “Okay.”
“You promise?” She gives me a wink. “Yes, Henrietta. I promise.” I wave and she flounces out, blowing kisses to the Invisible staff in the front room.
May into June 200—
A MONTH GOES BY IN a white blur of weddings.
Joan and Bix are married in an old prewar building downtown, in a ballroom lined on three sides with arched windows that reach from the polished wood floor to the twenty-foot ceiling, and through which the upper reaches of the Manhattan skyline look close enough to touch. The couple exchanges vows as the sun sets and the city recedes into gray twilight, reemerging slowly from the darkness as a crazy skeleton of itself etched in bright lights. The bridesmaids, including me, wear strange, stiff, architectural dresses made of deep red-orange fabric. Joan is unusually calm throughout the evening; when I comment on it, she opens her clutch and shows me a sleek little pillbox—platinum, engraved with her initials, a gift from her new husband—containing enough Vicodin to tranquilize the population of Lower Manhattan. A semifamous actor, several times a nominee for awards at independent film festivals, gives a wedding toast so long that guests begin departing and the groom’s father has to intercede. As if by divine intervention, Ora Mitelman is called out of town for an appearance on a television talk show, and is thus unable to attend.
My friend Chloé—half-Dutch, half-Italian, raised in Belgium, and schooled in France and England before coming to the States for law school, where we met—marries her Argentine fiancé, Ricardo, in a very formal ceremony at a Catholic church. The wedding is attended by people from no fewer than seventeen countries; the reception is held at Ricardo’s restaurant (wildly popular last year when it opened, but declining in favor since a celebrity diner was stricken with a terrible case of food poisoning on a night when both a noted food critic and a gossip columnist were present). There are a great many clumsy attempts at tango made by the American guests; there are an abundance of loud, laughing, weeping, gesticulating toasts given in broken English; there are a staggering number of relatives; there are orange bridesmaids’ dresses. There is some tension over the attendance of some half-sibling who is the out-of-wedlock child of someone’s father’s mistress, but no one, as far as I know, gets food poisoning.