The Bride Wore Dead

by E M Kaplan

  “Hmm. Blowfish? A thrill seeker, you are. Perhaps I shouldn’t have guessed any East Asian cuisine. But I will stay away from French. I know you are well-versed there—I have read your column for some time now.”

  “You’re stalling,” she said. “Are you giving up already?”

  He leaned forward until they were almost nose to nose. His breath was warm and alcoholic from more than just wine. Maybe he had drunk more than she, but he seemed to be holding himself better. She felt like maybe she should kiss him. “Fruit cake from a previous year’s Christmas holiday?” he asked.

  “Pshaw. When I was a child.” She laughed. Before she could blink, he kissed her. It was a somewhat misfire of a kiss—their teeth hit, and her lip was pinched in the process. It lasted only a second.

  She laughed again to cover her confusion but this time found herself laughing alone. She fanned a napkin at her flushed face. “Now you answer my question. Arizona?”

  “I assume you mean where Peter and her are going. I have a winter house near there. That’s where I hunt and shoot and do manly things.” He leaned back in his chair nursing his glass. She followed his eyes to the dance floor where the bridal party was dancing to the Village People “YMCA” song. His mood had changed so abruptly that she was caught off guard and barreled ahead playfully.

  “Peter and she, you mean. I never pass up a chance to correct one of you lit-tri-chure types. Where are they going?” Josie’s head was pounding to the beat. Her eyelids were starting to feel heavy.

  “The Castle Ranch,” he said. He’d seemed annoyed that she corrected his grammar. “Where my brother and his wife are going on their honeymoon. Isn’t that what you were asking?”

  “I’m thinking of going there,” she said, amazed. Her mind seemed to be playing tricks on her with the strange coincidence. With the heat and the wine, though, she let her confusion go.

  “It’s not the kind of place to which one simply can go. You can’t just throw your sandals into a plastic grocery sack and climb on a bus. You kind of need a reservation ahead of time. Kind of have to plan it out.” He smiled, but it was not a very friendly smile. She felt, suddenly, as if she were being patronized, but was having trouble deciding. He was acting snooty with his steel pedigree, long fine fingers, and his family who socialized with dignitaries. What an ass. He gestured toward the dancing newlyweds, “They’ve been on the Castle Ranch waiting list for a year. Are you on that list?”

  She made a dismissive sound. “List schmist,” she said.

  “Oh, so your media connections must give you special privileges,” he automatically concluded.

  She suddenly felt as if she were very drunk and that he was not. Her discomfort made her want to get away from him immediately. The imbalance of power made her almost nauseated.

  “Nothing gives me special anything,” she said. “Everything that I have, I’ve earned.”

  He blinked at her, then looked bored and turned away. When he next took a drink, it looked as if he were rolling his strange, green eyes to himself.

  #

  Irritated, she got up to look for a door. What she needed was some fresh air to clear her head and to get away from this rich jerk. He had the grace to look startled when she abruptly stood up. More like a flinch, actually, when his heavy-lidded eyes widened for an instant. But, like a cat’s eyes, his soon flicked away and rested on the moving dancers. His moods were harder to follow than the drunken contortions in progress on the dance floor.

  She found a door, and miraculously, it led to the parking lot. “What a complete waste of flesh and bones,” Josie grumbled to herself—or thought it was to herself. It turned out that Susan was directly behind her.

  “I told you so. He’s a major douche…basket,” said Susan. “And what are you trying to do, ditch me?” Another person was following Susan—one of the young girl cousins from their table. Shadowed by the cousin, the two of them stumbled toward Susan’s SUV, clutching their tiny teal bags. Josie had managed not to lose her handbag over the course of the evening. Wasn’t that always the case for ugly purses with nothing important in them? Fishing around in her purse, it took Susan five long minutes to get her fingers around her keys and pull them out.

  “You’re not driving,” said Josie.

  “You’re right,” said Susan. “She’s driving us.” She gestured to the young cousin who’d been following them. “Drop you off first. Drive me home. Park the car. That’s 110 Andover Avenue #B. Turn off the ignition. Set the alarm. Then I’ll get her a cab home.”

  “Boy, you’re lucid. You never get this drunk.”

  “Damn. I really must be two, three sheets to the wind.” But Susan’s tongue stumbled over the word “sheets”.

  “Is she old enough to drive?” Josie asked, fastening her seat belt. Somehow, she got herself into the back of Susan’s SUV. She watched the young girl take the keys from Susan. Josie was sitting on something. She pulled the box of tissues, now hopelessly crushed, from underneath her.

  “Beats me,” said Susan. “But at least she isn’t drunk like me.”

  “Relax, you're in good hands,” the girl said. Theresa, that was her name. “I’m a valet at Green Hill Inn on the weekends. I’ve parked your car for you a few times. You’ll get home safe and sound, Ms. Tucker.”

  Josie sighed and leaned back. “So solicitous. Four stars for service.”

  They had to wake her up by the time they reached her apartment.

  CHAPTER 5

  A well-meaning person had given Josie a framed print of the painting, “Still Life of Dessert” by the Dutch painter, Jan Davidsz de Heem—the original of which was probably hanging in the Louvre. It was an opulent, dark-colored depiction of an overladen table, food and wine about to topple over. Glassy white grapes hung off silver platters. Some kind of pie was eviscerated in the center. Jewel-encrusted goblets and pitchers were over-wrought with stems and bodies shiny and twisted. The heavy white tablecloth was pushed back as if it were an operating table. When Josie first got the print, she had hung it in her bedroom with appreciation.

  During the hours after the wedding, she spent most of the night greenly staring at the print between bouts of violent sickness during which her stomach and intestines seem to all be spasming at once. Near dawn, she could barely walk back and forth between her bed and the bathroom. Even her usual trick of visualizing cool, melting ice cubes did nothing to cure her nausea and roiling bowels. She’d had to wait out each wave of sickness with helpless patience, resting her cheek on the tile of the bathroom floor.

  Bert watched from afar, keeping a concerned distance. He was a strange dog. Part lab, she figured. When she first saw him in the Pound, he was full-sized but malnourished in the extreme. Amid the cacophony of barking—a mixture of startling high-pitched squeals and low growls—he had sat in his cage, silent, tapping only the very tip of his tail at her. She’d never to this day, heard him bark—not even at another dog, bird, passing car, or doorbell.

  At home after the wedding, she’d stripped off her satin encasement—by now salty with dried sweat—and added it to Bert’s bed of laundry on the floor. She fed him, slid on a t-shirt and jeans, and took him outside, walking several times up and down the street until he was serviced. She cleaned up after him with a plastic bag, and then took him and his mess home.

  She had hoped to go to bed then, to sleep it off. Too late. Her stomach revolted from the food she’d been forced to push down her throat as much as from the alcohol. By morning, she was a few more pounds lighter, and “Still Life of Dessert” was off its hook, facing the wall. Her head throbbed with a strange metallic sound. The repetitive clanking went on and on, and then stopped. She drifted in and out of a lugubrious sleep in which she dreamed of both kissing and vomiting on Michael Williams.

  #

  The sticky sunlight raked across the room, making everything seem just a little worse. The day’s heat was cranking up already. Bugs were flying. She could hear cicadas—nature’s miniature buzz saws—in the
trees that lined the street below. Then, she fell asleep for a while. Her stomach was at peace for the moment, and the sun had shifted away from her room, which cooled off. She dreamed of her father and the time that he bought her a telescope. He showed her where to look for the North Star and told her some of the stories behind some of the easy star clusters—Orion’s Belt and the Ursas, Major and Minor.

  She woke with an incredible thirst. Miraculously, there was a glass of water on her night table. She barely had the wits to notice that it was still cool enough to have beads of condensation on it. Filing that thought away for a more lucid moment, she drained the glass, and drifted back to sleep.

  “Are you alive now?” she heard later, coming out of her sleep coma. Drew was leaning over her, his dark eyes peering down at her full of…concern. She thought she was dreaming. She often dreamed of him, but never looking quite so nurse-like. Usually she was playing the nurse. Maybe she was hallucinating. Although now her stomach had quieted down. She was awake, and Drew was really in her bedroom scratching his stubbled chin at her mountain of laundry. Bert was sitting on Drew’s foot, staring at Drew not unlike a bride gazing at a new husband. Total adoration.

  Josie sat up in her rumpled t-shirt and panties, no bra. She rubbed her dry eyes, feeling thirsty again. “What are you doing here?” she managed to croak. Whoa, was that really her voice?

  “You were dying, remember?” He looked around her room with a wrinkled forehead—bemused disgust at her slovenliness. He looked sweaty. In her groggy state of mind, she almost asked him if he’d enjoyed himself at the wedding, confusing sweat and heat with the night before.

  “What do you mean, dying?” she asked. Her parched mouth reminded her that she was dehydrated. She found the empty glass on her night table.

  “You paged me this morning at 4:30. You said you were dying and you told me to bring a priest.”

  “I’m not Catholic.” Josie got up, carrying the glass to the kitchen, padding across the linoleum in her bare feet. Her bathrobe was draped over the top of the fridge, which reminded her that she wasn’t wearing anything but a thin t-shirt and bikini underwear. She pulled the robe off the fridge meaning to put it on, but first got herself some water. Drew had followed her into the kitchen. He leaned against the doorframe, watching her.

  “I know that,” he said. He gestured at the bench press in the middle of her living room—his bench press, actually. “I’ve been here working out since about 5:00.” The rhythmic clinking sound that Josie had been hearing earlier made sense now.

  “And you fed Bert, too.”

  “I still had your key from the last time I took care of him. He seemed to expect food when I came in.” Bert, who had followed Drew into the room and sat on his foot, looking up at him. More adoration from the traitorous mutt. All talking ceased as Josie guzzled two full glasses of water, stopping only to refill at the faucet. She was seriously considering putting her mouth on the faucet and sucking water straight from it.

  Drew was watching her with a strange expression on his face. Of course, she probably looked like an idiot. She was drinking so desperately that some of it spilled down the front of her t-shirt. Ah, oops, wet shirt meant transparent shirt. He looked away and rubbed the side of his neck. “So what’d you eat this time? Are you still keeping that food diary you started?”

  “Don't you have to go do your rounds?” Slipping on her robe and belting it at the waist, she made her way to the couch.

  “Nice try,” he said. “I have the day off. Brooks checked in on my hospital patients this morning. C'mon, tell me what you ate. Fess up.”

  She groaned. He never took a day off. Never. When he could have been sleeping in, she had selfishly—albeit unconsciously—awoken him at an ungodly early hour. “Are you going to absolve me if I confess?…What did I eat? It would be easier to narrow last night down with what I didn’t eat. Or drink,” she said. “Yes, yes. I was stupid. As my dad used to say, ‘And fifty for the insult.’ Whatever that means.” Strange to think of her dad, dead now for 11 years, at a time like this. She was becoming morbid.

  “Oh no.” She suddenly remembered the previous evening and how despicably mean she’d been to Benjy, their faithful friend. Their dim-witted, but lovable fourth musketeer.

  Drew looked alarmed. “What’s the matter?”

  “I screwed things up with Benjy last night.”

  Drew sighed and rubbed his head making his sweat-dampened hair stand up. “What did you do this time?”

  “I said something really nasty. Total bitchification.” She was about to explain how she'd run into Joe Armstrong, but clamped her mouth shut, feeling uncomfortable. Maybe because in trying to find a stand-in for Drew, Joe Armstrong had fallen way far from the mark. Maybe it was euphoria from waking up to find that she had not actually died during the night. Maybe it was pure pheromones, but something was coming off Drew right then that made her want to jump on top of him. Then again, how was that any different from normal?

  He looked at her, and she could tell he was trying not to roll his eyes. “Well you know,” he said as patiently as he could, “as always, this is between you and Benjy. You have to work it out with him.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, twiddling the corner of a couch pillow with her finger. At least it was a relief to know that no matter how much of a jerk she’d been the night before, Drew was still the same Drew.

  “But the two of you really should stop bickering and admit that you’re insanely in love with each other,” he continued.

  She froze and started to gather her powers of denial together in a huge cloud, but then caught the impish grin on his face. He had nice teeth. How could she have never noticed that before? Maybe because she was always staring at his lips, the rough line of his jaw, his dark, playful eyes. She cleared her throat. “Bully,” she told him. “You’re a big bully.”

  “Why don’t you relax,” he said. “I’ll make you breakfast.” He’d borrowed a towel from her. Probably the last clean towel that she owned. He wiped down his arms and neck.

  Food didn’t sound so good to her, but she figured that he knew best. He was the doctor.

  “Oh, now he’s nice,” she muttered. “Since when do you cook?” She scratched her head trying to stimulate her brain into working better. She set her water glass on the table, planning to stretch out on the couch, but it, like every other surface in her apartment, was piled with papers and discarded sweaters and junk mail, dropped there after long days at work. She shoved detritus on the floor and lay down in the cleared space, her feet resting on more junk at the end. Why is it you never notice the clutter until someone else is there to see it? Still in a mental fog, she wondered about that.

  “I can cook,” he said. Bert followed him into the kitchen wagging his tail, hitting the walls and cabinets percussively, certain that another feeding was imminent. Funny dog. He never barked, but in spite of that, he managed to be one noisy sucker.

  “As good as my mom?” she said, feeling drowsy. The sounds of pots and utensils drowned out her question. She dozed and woke to the aroma of warm food. Scrambled eggs. She sat up and started salivating. He brought her a small plate.

  “No butter or milk in that,” he said. “And I threw out most of the stuff in your fridge. You probably give yourself food poisoning every time you cook something. You know, you’re kind of a mess.”

  “I have trouble thinking about what to eat when my own stomach is trying to kill me,” she said. She cut a tiny morsel of egg with the side of her fork and put it in her mouth with caution.

  He stood in front of her, watching her eat.

  “I haven’t really cooked in a while,” she admitted through her second bite, which was a big mouthful. The eggs were light and fluffy. Nicely salted. The perfect color. And at that moment, they were the best thing she’d ever tasted.

  “I can tell. You had about twelve take-out boxes in there.” He frowned at her. In truth, she wondered when she had stopped cooking. She’d even stopped going to
the market. When had that happened?

  She took her third bite and knew she was going to have to rest before she had more. But she’d been distracted by the food and realized that he was still standing there watching her. She patted the couch next to her and only then realized that her robe had fallen open over her t-shirt and bikinis. She pulled it closed, trying to ignore the flush that crept up into her face. Friends, for crying out loud, she told her libido, which whimpered. “You want to sit? You’re not eating, too?”

  He gave a lop-sided grin. “Nope. I have to go get cleaned up. Breakfast date.”

  She felt a pang. Maybe it was jealousy. All right, yes, it was definitely jealously. Her stomach was feeling better and she’d wished that he would linger a little more. Even if she fell asleep, it was nice to know that there was someone else in the apartment. But she knew he was busy. She didn’t even have the heart to tease him about his date as she habitually did.

  “Well, enjoy it,” she said.

  He squinted at her. “Have you even looked at those materials that I gave you at the office?” At her confused look, he said, “The brochures on food allergies. You know, the thing that might be making you sick as a dog.”

  “Haven’t had time,” she lied. In truth, she’d forgotten about them after tossing them down on her desk. Or maybe they were in the kitchen. She quickly changed the subject, not wanting to wreck a nice moment, “And thanks for coming over. I don’t really remember calling you at all.” She walked him to the door.

  “Maybe it was Bert on the speed dialer.” Drew had emptied her trash and put it in a large bag by the door. Bert was copping a sniff. At her finger snap, he backed away from it, showing his teeth and pink tongue in a submissive smile at her.

  “Darn dog. You’re mine, you hear me? Not his.” She sighed as Bert wagged, not at her, but at Drew.