The Romantics (11 page)

Weesie turned to her husband in shock, as though he, not Chip had been the one to utter the insult.

“Don’t worry, Weesie,” Chip concluded. “He never got anywhere.”

Surprise turned to anger as Weesie registered the public attack. Mortified, she attempted to inch her chair away from her husband.

“As far as Tom is concerned. He ain’t so shabby himself. Lila’s best friends can attest to that. Let’s just say those were not tears of joy when they heard he and Lila had gotten engaged.”

Laura, unlike Weesie, had forecast this kind of behavior from Chip. Still, it was a challenge to retain a look of detached amusement as heat rose from her neck to her cheeks.

“Tom,” said Chip. “Congratulations. You’ve social-climbed your first Everest.”

The guests gasped audibly.

Augusta sat, braced for an emergency removal. Every muscle in her face clenched with anticipatory panic. Lila glared hatefully at her brother. Tom grasped her elbow with a firm grip. Chip smiled proudly at the shocked guests, thriving on the tension.

“Mom, Dad, I know it’s been hard to embrace the new in-laws. But don’t worry, we only have to see them on Thanksgiving and Christmas.” He lowered his voice to resemble a horror-movie demon. “Every year. For the rest of our lives.”

A rebellious chirp of laughter emerged from the increasingly somber audience.

“Wait a second. Do Irish people celebrate Christmas or Chanukah?”

His quip was met with grave silence.

“Anyway, here’s to a perfect couple. A perfect C cup-ple.” He grinned and waited for his punch line to sink in.

Every guest looked to Lila, mouths agape.

“No? Nothing?” Chip asked. “I thought it was punny.” He stood for a moment, scanning the crowd in utter bewilderment, like a valedictorian whose index cards have blown away in the breeze.

The guests looked back with unabashed shame. Chip had put them in the uncomfortable position of having to hide their amusement.

“In closing, let me just say one last thing: Tomorrow is going to be perfect.”

He paused, riding the crest of his well-earned comic crescendo.

“If it’s not, my mother’s going to bust a nad.”

Another pause, this time to laugh at his joke.

“That is, if they even make it to the altar.” At this, he whipped his head around to face the wedding party, singling out Laura with his gaze.

She returned the gaze with her best impersonation of disinterest as Chip fell onto his chair.

A hacking cough and the clearing of throats punctuated the silence that followed the toast. The arrival of the dessert course offered welcome relief. It was not until the fourth, even fifth bite of chocolate cake that conversation resumed its previous volume.

A
ll in all, the wedding festivities had been very disappointing so far. The rehearsal dinner was mediocre at best. The food had been fair to poor. The toasts, with the exception of Chip’s, were predictable. And whatever fun was to be gleaned from so much praise was canceled out by Chip’s little outburst. As Lila poked at her slice of cake, watching the umpteenth relative enumerate her attributes, she couldn’t help but suppress a yawn. There were only so many times a girl could be paid the exact same compliment.

Certainly, Chip had not done the evening any favors. After twenty-six years of destructive behavior, he had finally crossed the line from stupid to sociopathic. What aspect of his charmed childhood had caused him to snap? And more importantly, why had years of therapy failed to cure this bug? These and other similar questions consumed Lila for the duration of dessert. By the time coffee was served, she had absentmindedly eviscerated her cake.

She did all she could to rise to the occasion and join her guests’
collective effort at denial. Somehow, they had managed to pretend Chip’s speech had never happened. But the forced frivolity and excessive praise of the closing toasts felt gratuitous and defensive, overcompensations for Chip’s attacks, and somehow seemed to dignify his outrageous claims. Furious, Lila tuned out the accolades and resigned herself to anger. She spent the final hour of the event composing a kiss-off to her brother. She relished the chance to deliver it the first moment she could corner him in private.

But even the comfort she took from this plan was soon replaced by a new irritation: The breeze rustling her cashmere shawl bore a distinct, undeniable dampness. She entertained an irrational thought: Chip had somehow planned for this—he had found a way to ensure rain on her wedding day. It was an absurd notion, to be sure, but at the moment, seemed entirely plausible. Rattled, Lila gave up on the pretense of contentment and waited for the first acceptable moment to leave. Finally, after a toast by a fifth cousin of Tom’s—had he ever even mentioned this person?—she bolted from her seat and made her way out of the tent. She made only the necessary good-byes to those relatives who stood between her and the exit.

Just before leaving, she stopped by the table where her wedding party was seated to commiserate about Chip’s toast—it was hilarious, they assured her; the perfect antidote to the grandparents, permission to get totally trashed. And indeed, every one of them seemed hopelessly drunk. Annoyed, she blew a collective kiss at the table and offered a brusque thanks for their tributes, then secured a promise from her bridesmaids that they would honor their commitment to meet in her bedroom at midnight. At the strike of twelve, the five friends would reunite for a sacred, if saccharine, rite of passage during which the bridesmaids would treat the bride to a
last outpouring of tears and nostalgia before tucking her into bed. The overwrought dramatization of the “end of innocence” was one in a series of nuptial rituals Lila intended to observe even if it was quickly becoming clear that each was more overrated than the next.

With new resolve, she uttered a hasty thanks to Tom’s parents for the party. She made a public show of kissing Tom good night and reluctantly tearing herself away. Then, she hurried away from the yacht club, gaining speed as she cut across the seventh tee. As she walked, she hopped to remove her shoes. She dangled them between two fingers in one hand in a manner that conveyed lightheartedness—the opposite of what she was actually feeling. Thankfully, distance from the tent restored her spirit slightly. The cool, wet grass was comforting, as was the fading sound of laughter.

Weeks ago, Lila had decided to heed the old-fashioned superstition that required a bride and groom to spend the night before their wedding in different beds. It just seemed wise to honor those customs designed to instill good luck, particularly in light of her abundance. Oddly, she was not entirely daunted by the prospect of a night away from Tom. After the emotional drain of the rehearsal dinner, she was all too happy to be alone. She needed to process the experience by spending at least an hour in complete silence.

How could she have known how tiring it would be to be the object of so much attention? She had spent every day since the age of two owning the spotlight of every room she occupied, so the idea of consolidating the focus of so many people simply seemed efficient. To her surprise, it had been tiresome, uncomfortable even, to be stared at and talked to by so many people. She finally understood why celebrities complained about being recognized
and signing autographs. It was exhausting to sustain a smile for that long; it was difficult to assume a look of curious intrigue during dull conversations. It took a certain talent to appear interested in a fool.

In fact, by the end of the night, she had begun to feel strangely toward her guests. And she could imagine that celebrities felt the same way about regular people. There was something tragic about her guests’ ignorance of their redundancy. Wouldn’t they cringe, Lila wondered, if they knew how many before them had complimented the fit of her dress? Wouldn’t they bristle to learn how many people had gushed about the color of her eyes? Wouldn’t they die to find out that they all conveyed the same desperate anxiety, that their nervous obsequiousness was as distinct and repellent as the spray of a skunk?

Their repetition couldn’t help but ignite a measure of her disdain. And disdain, on a night designed for delight, was a tremendous burden. The eve of her wedding should not be cluttered with an emotion as ugly as pity. It should be spared from all pettiness, secured exclusively for lovely sentiments. To this end, Lila decided on a strict schedule for the rest of the night. Upon her return to Northern Gardens, she would do the following: edit the choice of clothes she had packed for her honeymoon, decide on the departure dress between the two she was debating—an audacious red shift and a classic honeymoon suit in a demure shade of blue. She would take a hot bath, soak until she was fully renewed, and, afterward, apply every potion in her cabinet to faded and future blemishes. This would leave just enough time to receive her friends at midnight. If all else failed, they would succeed in restoring her good mood.

Lila’s room provided a measure of soothing, if superficial, relief.
Despite her gripes with her mother, there was no denying the house had benefited from Augusta’s impeccable taste. Lila’s room had been redone during the most recent redecoration, a triennial occurrence as reliable as the return of gypsy moths. The makeover was characterized by Augusta’s usual staples: Clarence House chintz, Rosecore carpets, Brunschwig and Fils wallpaper. But it diverged delightfully from earlier interpretations of the perfect seaside mansion, incorporating a color palette that could only be described as Archipelago Chic.

The combination of the two styles—Classic Wasp and Indonesian—was surprisingly agreeable, reinvigorating the ancient summerhouse aesthetic with the feel of a thatched-roof hut. A citrus yellow pillow infused a white linen eyelet duvet with a welcome shot of color; a brown throw made an otherwise dainty pink floral chintz sofa seem suddenly sumptuous; a woven straw wallpaper provided a seamless segue from an indoor dressing room to an outdoor terrace; a sisal rug provided a welcome antidote to the formal carpeting downstairs, while batik pillows dotting the bed and settee gave the room an inviting whimsy. Every corner of the room offered a new and more pleasing vignette. It was no surprise that the house had been photographed by
House and Garden
three times.

But even this pastoral refuge failed to revive Lila’s mood. She was plagued with a vague inexplicable feeling as she settled into the room. It was the same feeling that she had when she left the house at the end of August every summer, that nine months of dreariness stood before her next breath of bright sunny air. Discouraged, she took a seat at her vanity and hastily unzipped her dress. She eyed herself in the mirror as though challenging her mind to reveal the source of her discontentment. It was always this way, she decided, with something you’ve awaited too eagerly. It was simply impossible
for the world to live up to one’s expectations. She had spent her life trying to challenge this notion—to match expectation and experience—but this was no small feat given the standards set by such a lovely childhood.

She had intended, for example, to look a certain way on her wedding day. Her dress fit her best when she was 120 pounds. It clung to her hips just enough, her collarbones protruded the ideal amount, and best of all, her bust at that weight was a perfect 32-C. Here, she had pulled off a clear victory. When she weighed herself earlier this morning, she was 117 pounds, three pounds less than she had weighed the summer after senior year. But herein lay the problem: Unfortunately, she could not control the rest of the world as precisely as she could her weight. Tonight was proof, if anything was, that the world will always—it can only—disappoint.

Lila’s mood improved slightly as she studied her reflection in the mirror. There was no denying this was the right weight for her. Her collarbone formed a dramatic line just underneath her neck, as though to underline the incredible beauty of her face. Her waist had never been smaller; her stomach had never been more taut. But she had not gone too far and become annoyingly skinny. Her legs, as always, descended from her hips like pulled taffy, decreasing their circumference at a constant gradation down to her ankles. Her hair was the same honeyed blond it had been when she was two years old. But she had recently made the jump from elegant to sexy with a cut inspired by Brigitte Bardot. It almost made her wish she’d experimented with bangs sooner. All in all, Lila had never looked better. So why did she feel so gloomy?

When she got engaged, she had made a vow never to become one of those brides. And she was proud to say she had kept her promise. She had not bored her friends with endless discussion of
her dress. On the contrary, she had been astonishingly blasé about the whole endeavor, selecting her dress from the very first batch she tried on. She had not asked her bridesmaids to suffer through an inordinate number of parties. There had only been two bridal showers, one of which Letty Bayer had insisted on throwing for Augusta’s friends and the older relatives, and one bachelorette party which, in all candor, was not terribly well planned. Furthermore, Lila had been very understanding about the slipshod party—the lack of reservations, the nonexistent schedule, the misguided episode with the stripper—never once scolding the maid of honor, whose duty it was to plan these things.

She had not asked her bridesmaids to wear something that compromised their dignity. Rather, she had gone out of her way to choose something that satisfied everyone in the group. She had been admirably tolerant when Tripler demanded that they switch from a strapless to an off-the-shoulder style, and very sympathetic to Annie’s request to change to a color that was more flattering to her skin tone. She had decided on “sterling silver” only after everyone had weighed in with her personal preference, an exercise that had every single bridesmaid demanding a different color of the rainbow. Even silver had been a selfless choice; it promised to accentuate the many blue eyes in the group, pick up the metallic glint of the ocean, and was the most forgiving, second to black, to the girls’ varying physiques.