Wedding Season

by Darcy Cosper

  “Friends, here we are, to celebrate the unimaginable.” James holds his glass aloft. “I thank my mother and Mr. and Mrs. Winslow for organizing this event, as Joy and Gabe’s nearest and dearest truly need some assistance adjusting to the idea of them getting married. And we’ll be holding an engagement party once each month until the wedding, for those who need further acclimation to the concept.” The crowd laughs uproariously and I find myself wishing them all swift and painful karmic reprisals. “So.” James waves his hands for silence. “To help you along, we’re going to try a guided visualization of—”

  “Joy! Help!” A scream comes from the hallway. It’s Henry. Luke appears in the door to the living room, panting.

  “Get an ambulance. Someone call now.” He looks wildly around the room.

  “What happened? What’s wrong?” Gabe asks, as five or six people pull out their cell phones and my mother rushes for a phone on a side table.

  “It’s Joan.” Luke turns to me. “She’s out cold. On the floor of the bathroom in that bedroom. We can’t wake her up. She’s barely breathing.”

  I run for the master bedroom with Gabe, Ora, Luke, and a handful of other people hot on my heels. I skid into the bathroom to see Henry crouched beside Joan, who is askew on the floor, her face waxy, her eyes half-lidded. Vomit trickles down her cheek and into her dark curls, and forms a pool beside her head.

  “What do we do?” Henry sounds hysterical. Her eyes are wild. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Oh, for god’s sake.” Ora pushes past us into the bathroom and looks down at Joan. She suddenly seems unaccountably competent and assured. “She just passed out. Gabe, get those people out of here. Tell them not to bother with the ambulance.” She drops to her knees beside Joan and shakes her by the shoulders. “Joanie. Joan, wake up. Wake up. Wake up!” Ora lifts a hand and slaps Joan’s face, hard. After a moment, Joan’s eyes flutter open, and she struggles to focus on Ora. I slump against the sink, my body weak with relief. Henry lets out a gasping sob and flees.

  “Joy.” Ora turns to me. “Wet that washcloth for me. Let’s clean you up a little,” she tells Joan. I have a sudden memory of something from a review of Ora’s memoir, something about her brother having died of an overdose while she was in the next room. I pass her a damp washcloth, and very gently, Ora wipes the spray of saliva and bile from Joan’s face and hair.

  “My head hurts,” Joan tells her.

  “You probably hit it on something when you fell.” Ora stands up and brushes at her skirt. “Think you can move, Joan? I’m sure she’s fine,” Ora turns to Gabriel, “but I’m going to take her to the emergency room anyway, so they can check her out. Can you help me get her up? Luke, could you run out and hail a taxi for us?”

  Gabe and Ora, with Joan between them, make their slow way out; I trail behind. The apartment is deserted except for my mother and her husband, the living room littered with sad half-empty cups and little soiled plates. It seems that the party is over.

  At the curb, Luke stands beside a taxi, holding the door open. Ora and Gabe ease Joan into the backseat, and Ora climbs in after her.

  “You want me to come with you?” Gabe asks her. “Or meet you at the hospital?”

  I catch a pale glimpse of Ora’s face; for the briefest of moments her green eyes lock with mine. We are the same, I think to myself. We both want the lie to be true. Ora looks back to Gabe, shakes her head, pulls the taxi’s door shut. The car pulls away, and we stand on the curb and watch them disappear down the street.

  MUCH LATER, SOMEWHERE ALONG the dark, bleary trajectory between midnight and dawn, I am sitting on the couch, staring into the dim living room. I have been here, sleepless, for an hour or so, when the light in the bedroom goes on. A moment later, Gabe shuffles down the hallway and squints at me from the doorway.

  “Hi,” he says, his voice thick with sleep.

  “Hi.”

  “Why are you out here?” Gabe pads across the room.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” I move over and he flops down on the couch beside me.

  “Was I snoring?”

  “No, you weren’t. But—”

  “Was I drooling?”

  “Gabe, did you—would you—are you having an affair with Ora?”

  Which is worse, I wonder, as I hear the words slipping from my mouth, to say these things or not to say them? Which represents the deeper betrayal? To betray what I believe, or what I feel?

  “What are you talking about?” Gabe laughs, then frowns. “An affair? With Ora? Are you completely insane?”

  “Yes. I think we’ve determined that conclusively. Are you?”

  “Am I insane?” He reaches over and turns on the lamp on the side table.

  “No. Are you having an affair?”

  “No.” Gabe shakes his head, genuinely aghast. “Are you serious? I—no.”

  “Were you? Do you want to?”

  “No. God, no. What even gave you that idea, Joy?”

  “You’ve been spending so much time with her.”

  “I have? I guess I have been. But for work. Just work. I mean, she’s a pleasant, relatively intelligent, not unattractive woman. She’s a good client. But beyond that—”

  “What about Friday? I saw you with her. I saw you go into Café Paradiso together.”

  “I ran into her on the street, between shoots. She was depressed, and she asked me to have lunch with her. She’s been very generous about connecting me with new jobs. I had an hour free, and I figured I owed it to her.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that she might have some motive for getting you work, beyond the kindness of her heart?”

  “Nope. But if she does, what’s that to me?” He looks down, reaches over and touches my engagement ring, looks back up at me. “I’m spoken for, remember?”

  I believe him. I am suddenly exhausted and find that I have neither the energy nor the will to not believe him. Doubts are there, waiting to be entertained, but I’m too tired to think about whether he might be lying to me, or himself; to consider how I might have betrayed him, or myself, or anyone else; to confess anything further, to cry anymore, to feel ashamed or even relieved. I decide to just believe, and the tension binding me slackens and the white noise in my head fades to a whisper. I lay my head down on Gabe’s knee. He strokes my hair.

  “Red, I don’t know where you got an idea like that. If I gave you any reason to doubt me, I’m really sorry. But how could you think I’d want anyone else when I have you?” He lifts me up, his hands gentle on my shoulders, and turns me to face him. “We’re made for each other, right? We’re getting married. Come on, now. No more talk. Let’s go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  Sunday, September 16, 200—

  I’M AT MY DESK in the study with my old friend the laminated six-month calendar spread out in front of me, and many, many scraps of paper (which I continue to accumulate, Palm Pilot notwithstanding) heaped on the desktop and around my feet. Morning light comes slanting across the room, and the voices of departing churchgoers drift in through the window, along with the occasional prematurely yellow leaf.

  Years ago, somebody sent me a poem whose opening lines read “Distrust everything, if you have to / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” It must have made sense to me at the time, because I copied it out and put it up on the refrigerator, where it eventually disappeared under shifting strata of postcards and New Yorker cartoons. But today, there’s nothing I trust less than the hours, the weeks unreeling before me. The blank days on my calendar that might erupt into anything, produce any manner of surprise. And as everyone knows, I don’t like surprises.

  One thing, though, looks blessedly certain: Except for Henry and Delia’s wedding next week, I will not be attending a single wedding this season. Unless—it suddenly occurs to me—my mother and future mother-in-law set their hearts on a winter ceremony. It could easily happen. My gorge rises and my stomach jumps.

  “Hey, calendar
girl. You’re up early.”

  I turn to see Gabe leaning against the doorway. He rubs his eyes, a sleepy child, pajamas rumpled, hair on end. When I woke up the two of us were curled into a knot of limbs at the center of the bed. It took me an age to extricate myself without disturbing his sleep. Gabe doesn’t seem to have been adversely affected by my restlessness. He has an irritating in-the-pink look about him that throws my own peevish, restive mood into a deeply unflattering light. I adore him. I ignore him. He laughs and pads away, Francis at his heels. I stare at my calendar’s bands of white, am visited by a gruesome vision of myself in a wedding dress, followed by an even more gruesome vision of Joan on my mother’s bathroom floor. (She’s fine, more or less. She e-mailed me this morning to apologize, and to tell me she was leaving this afternoon for rehab upstate.) I consider returning to bed for the rest of the year, and have nearly convinced myself that this is the wisest of all possible options when Gabe returns with a cup of coffee, which he sets on a few square inches of bare wood that he somehow finds on my desk.

  “Drink,” he instructs. “In exactly one half hour, we are walking out the front door, and you will escort me to Central Park, as promised. And we will eat pretzels and get heartburn and ride the carousel.” He assumes the Olympic victory pose, salutes me, and marches out. Francis sits down among the piles of paper, unwagging, and gives me the eye.

  AN HOUR OR SO LATER, Gabe and I push off the little pier of the Central Park lake in a dented rental boat. Gabe rows us out into the murky green water, and I watch the boathouse and the dirty banks of the lake recede. Sun fractures into bright daggers on the water. From the far shore, snatches of music drift toward us, and the singsong voices of people walking the dappled shade of the woods, lolling on the park’s wide and trampled lawns.

  When we’ve achieved a respectable distance from the boathouse, Gabe pulls in the oars, runs a hand through his hair, and looks around. Oblongs of reflected light shiver across his face.

  “Perfect day,” he says. I hold my hand out and he takes it, and we float like that for a long time. We brush through some picturesque canopies of weeping willow, drift into the shadow of a footbridge and out into the main part of the lake. If only it could always be like this, I think, looking over at his still profile. Nothing spectacular, just this. I watch the dark silhouette of the Bethesda Fountain slip into view, its great, grave Angel of the Waters towering at the lake’s edge, her wings raised, her arms stretched wide.

  I’m staring over the side of the boat at my wavering reflection, when I hear Gabe’s voice, ascending in question.

  “Sorry. What?” I turn to him.

  “A date. I was thinking we need to set a date for the wedding. Most people pick one before they have the engagement party. My mother pointed this out to me again last night.”

  “A date. Oh. Okay.” I drag the heels of my shoes around on the bottom of the boat. A small puddle has formed there, and I wonder briefly how deep the lake is.

  “Gabe,” I say, “I need to tell you something.” And without any previous intention of doing so, I do. I make a full confession: all my alarms and speculations regarding Ora, the nights with Topher at the wedding upstate, in Los Angeles, at Pantheon. I confess to the snooping, to the stalking, to the desperation, the anxiety behind my long silences, the justifications, the moments of spectacular failure to my ideals. The words spill from my lips and into the air around us.

  At first Gabe tries to interrupt, to stop me. After a while, he gives up and sits motionless, looking out over the lake toward the enormous angel in the distance. When I have lapsed into stammering and then into silence, he turns back to me and nods.

  “I know,” he says.

  “You know?” I feel like the bottom just dropped out of the boat. “You know what?”

  “I knew about what happened at Ben and Marilyn’s wedding. Topher talked to me when he got back from driving you to the hotel. He was worried about you. And I knew about what happened at Theo and Angelina’s wedding. Damon told me when I was trying to find you. He thought it was funny. Which it was. And I figured you were out with Topher the other night. He called looking for you, and he said he was hoping to see you that evening, which is perfectly fine. He’s a stand-up guy, you’re old friends. Why would I want to interfere with that? I just couldn’t figure out why you said you were with Henry.”

  I stare at him. He reaches out and with one finger lifts my bottom jaw to its full upright position.

  “Joy, it’s okay. I assumed that if there was anything going on that I needed to know about, you’d tell me. I have faith in you. Some things—there’s just no need to discuss them. We don’t need to talk about this anymore.”

  “But—”

  “Hush.” His hands slice through the air above our knees, smoothing away the ruptures, the stains between us. “Case closed. All right?”

  Usually, this would suit me perfectly. I should feel relieved. I do not.

  “So?” Gabe tilts his head at me.

  “So, what?”

  “So how about a date for our wedding?”

  I stare at him, lovestruck. I have just tipped my hand, shown the worst of myself—faithless, foolish, weak as any woman has ever been accused of being—and still he wants me.

  “Gabe, I can’t marry you.”

  I look around to see who made this pronouncement. Apparently, it was me.

  “You… what?” Gabe laughs, then frowns. “What?”

  “I can’t. Marry you.”

  “I—you’re breaking our engagement? Joy, what’s going on? Are you leaving me?”

  “No! No, no, no. I want to be with you. I do. I just don’t want to get married. I don’t even not want to. I just can’t.” I shake my head. We sit staring at each other for a few long, silent seconds. A flock of ducks paddles by, quacking at the top of their little lungs.

  “Yes, you can,” Gabe says, at last. “Of course you can. Why can’t you?”

  “Because.” Interesting. Why can’t I? Oh, yes. Now I get it. Because Henry was right. And my brother was right. How irritating. “Because I believe in marriage too much.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Gabe shakes his head.

  “It took me a while to understand it, myself. But listen, you said you have faith in me. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. I love you. I really do. But we can’t get married.”

  “Joy, I thought we had worked all this out. I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife. I want to be your husband. I want that.” “I don’t even know how to explain this.” I cover my face with my hands. “I think—if we get married, it won’t be about you and me and just what we are together. It’ll be about Marriage. The idea of it. And about everything I want it to do that it can’t possibly do. There’s this fear, and it’s why I said yes in the first place. But what I have to do is live with the fear instead of letting myself believe there’s anything that can keep me safe. Which is what I’ll be doing if I marry you.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Some part of me believes, deeply believes, that marriage will makes things perfect and keep us safe and in love and happily ever after—it’s beautiful, but it’s not true. It’s a lie. And I don’t ever want to lie, to you or to myself. The extent to which I want those lies to be true is exactly how far I should stay away from marriage.”

  “I just don’t get it.” Gabe’s voice is tight with anger.

  “Try. Please. Try harder.”

  “No, I mean—I understand what you’re saying, but it’s just a lot of talk. It doesn’t have anything to do with you and me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does, though. It does to me.”

  “Marry me, Joy.”

  “No. Live with me.” I reach for his hand. He pulls away.

  “No.” He shakes his head. We stare at each other some more. At last, Gabe picks up the oars and rows us toward the bank by the fountain, where a set of mar
ble steps descends into the water.

  “I’m going to go now.” He bangs the boat against the steps.

  “Wait. That’s it? You’re just leaving?” I can’t believe this. I start to laugh hysterically.

  “I’m glad you’re amused.” Gabe stands up fast and the boat tilts and rocks. “You told me the night I proposed that you believed in me more than anything else you believed in. Obviously that was a lie.”

  “Gabe, please don’t leave. It wasn’t a lie. At that moment, I truly meant it. But—”

  “Look, I’ll get out of the apartment for a while, and give you a couple of weeks to move your things out. Maybe you could stay at your mother’s until you find something else.”

  “Gabe. Please. Don’t do this.” I could burst into tears and cry for the rest of my life. “We don’t have to do this now. We don’t have to do this ever. I want to be with you. I love you. Why can’t we just go on?”

  “I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I think it’s more important for you to be right than to be happy.”

  I feel as if he’s slapped me across the face.

  “You know that’s not true, Gabe. It’s not about being right. It’s about being true to myself.”

  “Oh, right. Your principles. How could I forget?”

  “Would you really want me to just toss out everything I believe?” I’m shaking with fear and fury.

  “Joy, I wouldn’t. I don’t want that. I want you to marry me.”

  “Look, when you proposed, you said it wasn’t my place to impose my beliefs on the rest of the world. What about when the rest of the world tries to impose its beliefs upon me?”

  “You’re in the minority, Red. Maybe the majority of the world disagrees for a good reason.”

  Who is this man? Is this the same man who just forgave me everything, the man who wasn’t afraid to let me lead?

  “Maybe,” I tell him. “And maybe not.”

  Gabe doesn’t look at me again. He climbs out of the boat and onto the steps. I watch, dizzy with disbelief, as he turns and walks away, disappears into the crowd. For some longish additional period, I stare at the place where he vanished from my sight.