Beautiful Day (13 page)

She said, “I’m not going to call you, Griff. I can’t, you know I can’t.”

He said, “You signed me off. Why not start over?”

She smiled sadly, then weaved through the bar traffic for the door.

The bouncer said, “Have a good night!”

Ha!
Margot thought. It was far too late for that.

When Margot got home, the house was dark and quiet. Jenna must have sent Emma Wilton
home. Margot checked on her children. The boys were two lumps in the attic bunk beds,
and then Margot spied a third lump in another of the beds, an adult-sized lump, snoring
loudly. She pulled back the covers to find the shaggy golden head of her brother Nick.

Nick!

Nick, in general, was completely useless except when it came to procuring tickets
to baseball games. He was the in-house counsel for the Washington Nationals, he was
a confirmed bachelor, he partied his ass off and ran through women the way Margot
ran through sandwich bread. He had never offered a single
emotional insight that Margot could recall, and yet at this instant she was tempted
to wake him up and spill her guts. He might have some useful advice; it was possible
she wasn’t giving him enough credit.

But no. Nick wasn’t the answer.

Downstairs, in her own room, she checked on Ellie, who was spread-eagled in the bed
meant for them both. She was still in her clothes (since she had packed no pajamas)
and had a smear of chocolate around her mouth from the Fudgsicles Margot had bought.
She probably hadn’t brushed her teeth. On the dresser was a pile of twigs, stones,
acorns, and three blue hardy geraniums, chopped off at the head. These were the flowers
that Beth Carmichael had worried about the tent guys trampling. They had survived
the tent guys, but not Ellie the hoarder, who had felt the need to add the flowers
to her collection of backyard detritus.

Margot swept the stones and sticks and flowers into her palm, hoping that by morning
Ellie would have forgotten about them and would not wake up wailing over her missing
treasure. Margot checked Jenna’s room—lights out—and then headed downstairs. She tossed
the handful of collected nature out the back screen door, poured herself a glass of
water, and picked up the house phone.

She dialed the number; she had called it so often during the past few months that
she had it memorized. It was late, she knew, but this couldn’t wait.

He picked up on the second ring. Of course he did.

“This is Roger.”

“Roger, Margot Carmichael,” she said. “The branch has to come down.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know it does. I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

“You have?” Margot said.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Roger said. “There is no other way.”

“No other way,” Margot repeated. “You’re sure?”

“I’ll see you bright and early,” Roger said.

Jim Graham (father of the groom):
I am a man who has lived and learned. I married the right woman, but I didn’t know
it, I married the wrong woman and I did know it, I married the right woman a second
time. My advice to all four of my sons has been “Look before you leap.” This may be
a cliché, but as with most clichés, it contains a hard kernel of truth. I like to
think that advice was what kept Stuart from making a mistake several years ago. But
he’s got the right idea now. Jenna is a beautiful girl and she brings out his best
self. Really, what more can you ask?

H.W. (brother of the groom, groomsman):
Open bar all weekend long.

Ann Graham (mother of the groom):
I was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, I attended Duke University, I have
served in the North Carolina General Assembly for twenty-four years. When Jim and
I take vacations, we go to Savannah or the Outer Banks or Destin. Once to London,
once on a cruise in the Greek islands. But I can’t tell you the last time I crossed
the Mason-Dixon Line. It might have been New York City, 2001, when Jim and I went
to the funeral of one of his fraternity brothers who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.
It will be nice to head north this time for a happier occasion.

Jethro Arthur (boyfriend of the best man):
Unlike Martha’s
Vineyard, Nantucket is no place for a black man. I told this to Ryan and his response
was that Frederick Douglass spoke on the steps of the Nantucket Atheneum in 1841.
Frederick Douglass? I said. That’s what you’ve got? Yes, he said. And you know who
else spent time on Nantucket? Who? I said. Pip and Daggoo, he said. Pip and Daggoo?
I said. You mean the characters from
Moby-Dick
? Yes! he said, all proud and excited, because literary references are usually my
territory. I said, Pip and Daggoo are fictional black men, Ryan. They don’t count.

T
here were only a few ills in life that a five-star hotel on a bright, sunny day couldn’t
fix. This was what Ann Graham told herself at ten o’clock on Friday morning when she
and Jim arrived at the White Elephant resort on Nantucket Island. Ann had personally
seen to it that they would be able to check in right away; nothing would have driven
her battier than having to sit around—possibly for hours—waiting for their room to
be ready. And so, less than thirty minutes after arriving on Nantucket, Ann was standing
on the balcony of their suite, overlooking the harbor, which was as picturesque as
she had imagined. The sailboats, the ropes, the bobbing red and white buoys, the two
blond teenagers in a rowboat with fishing poles, the lighthouse on the point. This
was the real thing. This was East-Coast-Yankee-blue-blood-privilege-and-elitism at
its very finest.

Jim came up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Should we order up
champagne and get naked?”

Ann willed herself not to shrug him off. He was being funny; he wanted her to relax.
He did not want her to become the woman she was dangerously close to becoming: a woman
who
alternately expressed bitterness and hysteria because her son was getting married
in a place where she exerted no influence.

The groom’s side of the family, Ann had learned over the past thirteen months, were
second-class citizens when it came to the planning and execution of the wedding ritual
in America. Maybe it was different in some far-flung tribe in Papua New Guinea or
Zambia, and if so, Ann would gladly move there. She was the mother of three sons.
She would have to endure this humbling social position at least twice—with Stuart
now, and later with H.W. She had no idea what would happen with Ryan.

She and Jim weren’t even throwing the rehearsal dinner, which it was customary, in
the wedding ritual in America, for the groom’s parents to do. Jenna had insisted on
holding the rehearsal dinner at the Nantucket Yacht Club—apparently this was a suggestion
drawn straight from the blueprints her deceased mother had left behind. The Carmichaels
had been members of the yacht club since forever; Ann and Jim couldn’t have paid if
they’d wanted to. They had, initially, offered to do just that, however—Doug Carmichael
could let the Grahams know the cost of the yacht club party, and Jim would write Doug
a check to cover it. Doug had graciously refused the offer, and Ann was glad, not
because of the expense—she and Jim could easily have afforded it—but because if Ann
was going to host a party, she wanted to put her stamp on it. She wanted to pick the
location and the flowers and the menu. If the rehearsal dinner had to be held at the
Carmichaels’ club, she agreed that the Carmichaels should pay. After Ann’s insistence
that she and Jim do
something,
Jenna had suggested that the Grahams host the Sunday brunch. This felt like a consolation
prize to Ann. The Sunday brunch? Half the guests would skip the damn thing because
of early departing flights or boats, and the other half would show up exhausted and
hung over. Ann nearly rejected the Sunday brunch idea, but then
she realized that doing so would make her seem like a spoiled child who hadn’t gotten
her way, rather than the six-term North Carolina state senator, devout Catholic, and
mother of three that she was. So she said yes and made up her mind that the Sunday
brunch was going to be the best part of the whole weekend. Ann had arranged for the
White Elephant to set up a tent on the lawn facing the water, and under this tent
would be a little piece of the Tar Heel State. The menu would include barbecue flown
in from Bullock’s in Durham, as well as two kinds of grits, hush puppies, collard
greens, coleslaw, buttermilk biscuits, and pecan pie. Ann had asked the head bartender
at the White Elephant, a guy named Beau who actually hailed from Charleston and had
worked at Husk, to make ten gallons of sweet tea and order Kentucky bourbon for juleps
and whiskey sours. Ann had hired a Dixieland band, who would wear straw boaters and
candy-striped vests. They would show Stuart’s new family some genteel southern hospitality.

Still, Ann felt like the runner-up in this particular beauty pageant, and it brought
out the worst in her—much the way a nasty campaign did. During her third term, when
the scandal with Jim was breaking at home, Ann had battled against the reprehensible
Donald Morganblue. She had been sure she was going to lose. The race was close, Morganblue
had gone after Ann about a certain failed development project near Northgate Park
that had cost Durham County millions of dollars and nearly five hundred promised jobs,
and Ann had spent a string of months convinced that both her personal life and her
professional life were going to go up in flames. She had, very nearly, become addicted
to Quaaludes. The pills were the only way she had made it through that period in her
life—the victory by the narrowest margin in the state history of the Carolinas (requiring
two recounts) and her divorce from Jim. Ann remembered how the pills had made
her feel like a dragonfly skimming over the surface of these troubles. She remembered
more than one occasion when she had held the pill bottle in her sweating palm and
visualized an easy descent into sweet eternity.

She told herself now that she had never seriously considered suicide back then. Stuart
had been ten years old, the twins barely six, Jim had moved to the loft in Brightleaf
Square; the boys needed Ann to pack their lunches and transport them to the Little
League fields. At night that year, Ann had read the boys
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. Their addiction to that book (at the kids’ behest, Ann had ended up reading it three
times in a row) was the only outward reaction they had to their father’s departure.
Or possibly they were addicted to the quiet minutes with her, curled up on the sofa,
her voice always evenly modulated despite her inner turmoil.

There could be no killing herself. Plus, Ann was Catholic, and suicide was a sin for
which there was no repenting.

Every once in a while, however, she still yearned for a Quaalude.

Now, for instance. She could use one right now.

She let Jim kiss the side of her neck, a move that always preceded sex. What if they
did just as he suggested? What if they ordered up champagne, and strawberries and
cream? What if they slipped on the white waffled robes and tore open the scrumptious
bed and laid across the ten-thousand-count sheets and enjoyed each other’s bodies?
Even now, fifteen years after their reconciliation, Jim’s sexual attention felt precious,
like something that could be, and had been, stolen away from her. What if they drank
champagne—the more expensive, the better—then ordered another bottle? What if they
found themselves giddily drunk by noon, then fell into a languorous sleep with the
balcony doors open, sunlight streaming over them in
bed? What if they treated this not like their eldest son’s wedding weekend but like
a romantic getaway?

“Let’s do it,” Ann said, pivoting to kiss her husband full on the lips. “Call for
the champagne.”

“Really?” he said, his eyebrows lifting. He was fifty-six years old, a senior vice
president at GlaxoSmithKline but just under the surface was the boy Ann had first
married—president of Beta at Duke, the ultimate bad boy, for whom fun would trump
responsibility whenever possible.

She was surprising him. He thought she would be in anal-Ann mode, spinning with the
hundred things she thought she had to do, the thousand thoughts whirling through her
mind. But instead she unbuttoned her crisp white blouse, bought at Belk’s for her
arrival on Nantucket. She slid off her navy-and-white gingham Tory Burch capri pants.
In just her bra and panties, Ann threw herself across the bed.

“Wow!” Jim said.

“Call!” Ann said.

She was surprising herself.

It was only later, after they had enjoyed the kind of sex particular to really good
hotel rooms—Jim had actually clamped his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries—that
Ann let herself admit the real reason for her anxiety. She didn’t care about the wedding
hierarchy or her position in it; she was too big and too busy a woman to worry about
such things. She was only concerned about how she appeared, about how she and Jim
appeared as a couple, because Helen was coming.

Helen Oppenheimer—who had, for a period of twenty-nine months, been Jim’s wife.

Ann’s best friend, Olivia Lewis, had nearly inhaled her
cell phone when Ann informed her that Helen was on the invite list.

“But
why?
” Olivia said. “Why why
why?
Why did you let Jim talk you into it? You’re a strong woman, Ann. Why didn’t you
stand your ground?”

“Jim was dead set against it,” Ann said. “It was my idea.”

“What?”
Olivia said.

“Stuart asked Chance to be a groomsman,” Ann said.

“So?”
Olivia said. “That does
not
require you to invite Helen to the wedding.”

Ann didn’t know how to explain it to Olivia, or to Jim or to anyone. When she was
sitting on her sunporch the previous summer, composing a list of people to invite
to the wedding, she had simply added the name Helen Oppenheimer, and it had felt…
right. It had felt
Christian
—but if she told Olivia or Jim this, they would cry bullshit. Jim had cried bullshit
anyway. When he saw Helen’s name, he said, “No way. No fucking way.”