William felt for the small lump in his back pocket, beneath the address book, and fished out the little Aqualad figurine. One final time he studied. He liked to think it was part of some thirteenth art piece that she’d never gotten to make. He liked to think it would have had something to do with him. Only then he thought that, really, as much as all the pieces had to do with death and disappointment and her friends, they also had something to do with him, her last love. Gently, he set the little superhero down on the altar beside the candles, and said a quiet prayer for Chongso Kim.
William moved through the apartment, half expecting some dog or husband to appear and kill him. He had hoped—he didn’t know. That he’d walk in and find Irene there, sitting on the couch beside Grandma Fiona, book on her lap, twirling her hair, paint on her arms. That she would ease her body around his as he lay down and touch his hair. That he would call her No Ears and they would talk about Yesterday and Today, with no mention of that foul uninvited guest Tomorrow. If he could have just one more day, he thought, like the first one. Before she’d heard back from the doctors and begun dying. If he could just have one more day when nothing was wrong, when time could be wasted, because there had still been so, so much of it out there.
And then he saw, through the window in what was now a room filled with old boxes. It was the exact view painted in the back of his old book. The Brooklyn Bridge. Cables arching up like the frame of a great harp, vibrating with the whispered secrets of its crossers. This was the window she’d looked out of each night as she fell asleep and each morning when she’d woken up. As he lay there, he imagined he could hear voices traveling up the strings and through the steel, flickering between the cars and in the thump of the bicycle wheels against the wood. He saw the roadway rising and falling, like a wave out on the sea.
It took him a moment to remember that he hadn’t smoked anything all morning. This wasn’t that. All those voices, all those wheels and feet were coming together into a harmony. A simple, perfect note that resonated with the bridge itself and the churning river beneath. Echoing with the cries of the captains of the great wooden ships, just setting sail from South Street, casting off for the seven oceans, to journey in dreams. William watched in awe as the notes moved through the roadway like a sine curve, an octave that caused bricks to detach one at a time from the towers, a flat foot on each shore.
Into the blue sky, cars and people flew like a peppering of seagulls, up and up and never down. Up into the crystal cotton of the clouds. Light gleamed off their wristwatches and hubcaps and handlebars. They became fins in the ocean of sky. Brick by brick, the bridge rose into the air, pulling the river with it, drop by drop. Atlantis rose. Land of tomorrows and yesteryears. Once there was a continent that sank into the sea. Farewell! he cried to the people as they vanished. Trillions of them, it seemed, as the entire bridge fell into the sky.
THE WEDDING OF SARA SHERMAN AND GEORGE MURPHY
Sara Sherman ran between the rooms of the bridal suite, lifting her dress so it wouldn’t sweep the Waldorf’s tapestry rugs. The dress was still an eighth of an inch too long, even after she’d told the lady at Nelson’s to shorten it at both the six-week and the one-month fittings. So now the lace along the edge had accumulated a faint grayness as she rushed from the front door—where she’d just received an update from Zacharie, the hotel’s event coordinator, about the situation with the chairs—back into the bedroom where her sisters, Adeline and Eddy, were converging on George’s mother, intent on taking down the hair that the stylist, Erikah, had spent two hours putting up that morning.
Barely had that been handled when she caught her own mother plucking “excess” baby’s breath from the bouquets. Sara redirected her into checking on whether the Krazy Glue was setting properly on George’s Grandma Pertie’s snapped heel. And did anyone have an approximate GPS location on his older brother, Clarence? Who, despite having strict orders to stay in Midtown, had sneaked off that morning to visit the Cloisters near Fort Tryon Park, only to wind up getting stuck in a cab on the West Side Highway behind some kind of gubernatorial motorcade? For all Sara cared, Clarence could rot on the asphalt overlooking the Boat Basin, but of course, this actual Mensa member had decided it would be a good idea to take the two wedding bands with him.
She was interrupted by George’s little niece, Beth, the seven-year-old daughter of George’s younger brother, Franklin (who at sixteen had been absentminded about protection at a post-prom party). Sara liked Beth immensely, for she was apparently the only other responsible human being in the entire bridal suite. Beth had been fully set in her flower-girl dress, with hair done and shoes on, for over two hours now. Now she held Sara’s phone in the air calmly and said, “It’s ringing.” Beth was in charge of fielding calls and beating level twenty in Plants vs. Zombies.
Sara looked at the phone: it was Minister Thaw, who had already left two messages that morning. He had conducted their required premarital counseling sessions, where they’d had plenty of time to delve into the minutiae of Episcopalian dogma and how it differed from George’s Catholicism and “What about the children?”—and now he was bringing up reordering all the readings, even though the programs had already been printed and the whole thing had been successfully rehearsed the night before. Stay the course! she wanted to yell into his fuzzy little ears. We’re almost through this! Instead she rejected the call, handed the phone back to Beth, and called out to the bridal suite, “Does anyone have the chalk?” Again, only Beth knew the location of the Crayola box and began helpfully whitening the gray hem of the wedding dress.
“Thank you, sweetie. And do you know where Adeline is?”
Beth didn’t. No one nearby knew. Perfect. Not only had their mother guilted Sara into asking her uptight older sister to fill the maid of honor post, and not only had Adeline then thrown a spectacularly dull bachelorette party (appletinis and feather boas), but she had already abandoned Sara and the day’s proceedings.
As unhappy as Adeline was to leave the safety of Gloucester for even one weekend, their younger sister Eddy (short, since always, for Edwina) was being no better about being away from her ashram. Eddy had come to town with the uninvited George-Harrison Zimmerman (first name, legally, “George-Harrison”), whose hair was both longer and shinier than Sara’s had been at any point in her life and who had brought his guitar “just in case.”
Sara had a hard time not fixating on how much easier all this would have been with Irene at her side. She didn’t trust anyone else’s opinions on jewelry, decorations, or invitations. At every turn in the planning, she’d wanted to call up Irene about the wisdom of champagne-colored heels, or get her input on calligraphers. And of course, here she had two perfectly good sisters, only the two of them combined couldn’t begin to fill the opening left by her absent best friend. “I hope you don’t think you’re wearing Grandma’s pearls” was Adeline’s only contribution, while Eddy wanted only to remind Sara that the tuna on the reception menu was being dangerously overfished. Sara had found herself talking, half to herself, half to the absence of Irene, all throughout the planning process—and now that it was over, and the wedding was happening, it seemed inconceivable that Irene wasn’t there to see it all through.
Irene’s aesthetic was the driving force behind the whole event. In going through her things, Sara had found a few of the old guidebooks they’d bought in college when first planning their trip to the Côte d’Azur. Boom—here was the color scheme: the turquoise waters off St. Tropez, and the rose rooftops of Monaco. Bam—there was the font: a vintage script used by the Hotel Negresco on its dinner menu.
Sara found it impossible to believe that she and George would be there, for real, in just twenty-four hours: reading under the bold-blue-striped beach umbrellas at Cannes, climbing the spiral stairs of the elegant fairytale castles of Antibes, tossing a pair of dice at a craps table in Monte Carlo. All of the Shermans had chipped in to send them first class. Sara tried hard to remem
ber this, and to let her gratitude balance out Irene’s absence. She had already planned out every detail of the trip, from what she would order for dinner at Le Chantecler in Nice, to where she could rent a sun umbrella in Théoule-sur-Mer, and the rules for baccarat when they visited the Place du Casino in Monte Carlo. And up on the very top of a mountain, in a sun-drenched spot called Pointe Sublime, she and George would scatter Irene’s ashes as she’d asked them to, and it would be done at last. Sara couldn’t stop dreaming about it.
Adeline called from the next room, “The photographer says he’s ready for you!”
“Is George up there already?” Sara shouted back.
“He didn’t say!”
“Has anyone heard from him yet?”
Silence.
Sara gathered her gown and moved slowly toward the front door, with the sisters and mothers all rushing over to send her off enthusiastically, to tell her she looked beautiful, to remind her how lucky she was. Sara made sure Beth had the folder with the marriage license in it and headed to the freight elevator (the only one with roof access). She was sure her sisters were already pulling bobby pins out of Mrs. Murphy’s hair and her mother was back to editing the bouquets. She turned back to the crowd of turquoise-satin bridesmaids at the door. “I need everyone else up there in ten minutes. Moms, aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters. Both families. Bouquets and boutonnières. Shoes on.” That one was for Eddy, who seemed to feel that wearing closed-toed heels somehow made her a party to systemic gender marginalization.
“Aye-aye, captain!” Eddy saluted back. “Go, go, go!”
Sara did a last check of her hair and makeup in the reflection of the closed elevator doors. Who was this girl in the cold steel with the cupid’s bow lips and the Clara Bow eyebrows? It was all wrong. Why had she let the lady do it that way?
The elevator doors opened. Inside, a small Hispanic woman hid behind a cart filled with fresh towels and cleaning products. A little radio was blaring some sort of sermon on a tinny Spanish station. “¿Dónde está, oh muerte, tu aguijón? ¿Dónde, oh sepulcro, tu victoria?”
“Oh!” the maid screeched happily, covering her mouth with both hands, in the universal language of bride excitement. “¡Eres tan bella!”
“Gracias,” Sara managed.
In just an hour Sara would be standing up there, holding George’s hands in front of Minister Thaw and listening to him read from First Corinthians. Love is patient, love is kind. And she would nod mindfully as Thaw rattled off his list, of all the things that Love Was Not: envious, boastful, proud. And with her wearing the most beautiful dress she’d ever worn, on the most expensive single afternoon of her entire life. The rest of the verse was practically a checklist of how Sara had been feeling all year. Love was not: dishonoring others, being self-seeking, or angering easily. Check, check, and check. Love keeps no record of wrongs? Sara had a whole spreadsheet of them. Who hadn’t sent a gift, and who had brought a plus-one without asking, and who had demanded that they be married in a church in the first place, and which cousin wasn’t coming despite living less than three hours away, and which aunt had to be cut off after two by the bartender and . . . Love doesn’t delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
The radio piece ended, and soon a commercial began. Sara recognized it from the first somber piano chord. She had been hearing it everywhere all week: in cabs, at her dentist’s office, at the gym. At this point she could practically recite it from memory. “At Mount Sinai Cancer Center . . . the patient is the center of our universe. Like Sue, who thought it was all over when her liver cancer came back. ‘I came to Mount Sinai, and right away I was working with a team of specialists in my type of cancer. Providing the very latest options, including personalized therapies, just for me.’ Today Sue is cancer-free, thanks to specialists like Dr. Atoosa Zarrani . . . ‘We live for the chance to help people like Sue. My colleagues and I worked hard and together . . . we cured her.’”
Well, good for fucking Sue. Sara wanted to snap the antenna off the piece-of-crap radio and drive it through the speakers.
Then there was a hand on hers. “No cry,” the maid was saying. “You look so beautiful! Happy day!”
Sara coughed as the elevator came to the twentieth floor at last, and the maid pushed the cart away, smiling and crossing herself and wishing her well in Spanish. The doors closed, and as Sara went alone up the last few floors, she tried to fix her mascara in the reflection of the emergency call box. Steadily she felt the elevator easing its ascent, and she looked up expectantly at the sound of its cheerful ding. The doors stayed shut as things settled. She held her breath. Crazy how, after almost ten years together, just a day away from George, and she was as excited to see him again as she had been that first day, waiting for him to come down from his dorm to pick her up for the movies.
At last the doors opened onto the roof of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. For the first time all morning, she smiled, as she scanned the wide blue cloudless sky and all the rooftops of midtown Manhattan for George.
• • •
In George’s dreams he saw a spinning wheel of hydrogen gas, thirty-six billion miles across, beginning to collapse under its own immense weight. Though it had been spinning for over one hundred thousand years, its end had come. Seismic shocks ripped through the icy disk, just ten degrees above absolute zero. He watched it radiating microwaves and great streams of plasma—solar winds that emanated in all directions at once. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of these rays traveled on through emptiness forever, reflecting off no other planets or asteroids or matter of any kind, being sucked into no black holes or other gravitational fields, crossing paths with no other particle. Turbulent storms moved along the circumference at speeds greater than sound, as the wheel contracted like a great iris in space, years passing in moments, the core becoming hotter and brighter as it shrank. Faster and faster, the humongous orbit of gaseous molecules, ten times larger than our whole solar system, caving further and further in on itself—until in one spectacular and sudden stabilizing moment, it all stopped. And everything became still in the space around this new, glorious star. And then George woke up alone on an unfamiliar couch, vaguely aware of being completely naked.
Feathers of all colors drifted through the air. Hot pinks, neon greens, and bruised purples danced a lazy pas de trois around the martini glasses on the coffee table, sticky with the day-old residue of sour apple Pucker. The television was on, but muted. George’s arms were wrapped around a gray lamp that seemed to belong on the side table. He’d heard of waking up with lampshades on your head but never cuddling with the lamp itself. Slowly he remembered that he was in the hotel room that Sara and her sisters had used the night of the bachelorette party. After their spa day, they had come back here to throw on their slinky dresses and high heels and feather boas before the big bar crawl. The boys had thrown George’s bachelor party that same night down in Atlantic City and had been so late getting back the next day that they had gone directly to the rehearsal dinner without stopping into the room to see that it had, clearly, never been cleaned.
George set the lamp down on the ground and looked around the room, to the extent that he could without moving his head. Clarence and Franklin, his two brothers, weren’t in view—presumably they’d taken the bed in the next room. And Sara’s sister’s boyfriend George-Harrison, whose idea it had been to go out for a few more after the rehearsal dinner, had his own room down the hall.
Which left only Jacob. Had he gone home, or was he around somewhere? George still couldn’t shake the feeling that Jacob was only acting as if nothing were wrong, but maybe nothing was wrong. Supposedly he was turning over a lot of new leaves. He was taking night courses at Pratt on Tuesdays and Thursdays to earn his master’s in art therapy. Sara claimed he was writing again; she had been badgering him to read something at the
wedding, but he insisted he had nothing new.
Taking a deep breath, George lurched up from the couch—just like ripping off a Band-Aid, he thought. As with a Band-Aid, he immediately felt a searing pain. It was behind his eyes, in his ears, and climbing up his brain stem. The entire room pulsed and blurred. It took almost everything he had to keep himself from lying back down again—but no, he had to get up. This was his wedding day. Everything would finally change. Sara would ease up on the interval training. He’d be able to focus his energies on the future—their real future—and make mornings like this (was it morning?) a distant memory. Tomorrow they would be on their honeymoon, and afterward these yesterdays would be well behind him.
Yesterday. What an odd kind of hell that had been, to return from three sweaty hours in traffic on the Garden State Parkway, smelling vaguely of the baby powder that the strippers (apparently) used to keep themselves from sweating on the poles, finding glitter that had once been attached to the nipple of a woman named Roxxxy and was now somehow (he knew how) inside his left nostril. Man truly was a disgusting animal. He’d never felt more so than he had that afternoon, changing in the moving car in front of George-Harrison and walking directly into a Michelin-starred restaurant to dine with his parents, for whom a racy evening was watching a Robert Redford movie on cable, and all his soon-to-be in-laws, and to look the woman he loved right in her lovely, dark eyes as she asked with a knowing smirk just what exactly he’d gotten up to. Bless her. Absent any shred of doubt that the debauchery would mean anything to him. Knowing that whatever occurred couldn’t touch what they shared.
He watched a purple feather creep along the ceiling and get caught in a downdraft near the balcony and go surfing down the drawn shade toward a corner on the floor. He took a deep breath and tried to walk. Amazingly, he didn’t fall over. Now he could see the clock in the kitchenette—and that he had just under forty minutes to clean himself off and get to the roof for the photographers. He grimaced. Not a lot of time—but he just needed to put one foot in front of the other. Sip some of the ginger ale from the minibar. Maybe eat a cracker if he could. Keep a couple of aspirin down. Get to a shower.
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