The Romantics (12 page)

Lila held her tongue when Weesie insisted on ordering her dress a size too small, a strategy that she claimed would motivate her to lose weight in time for the wedding. Though Lila had bristled at the notion, she did not oppose her at the atelier nor call and arrange for the larger size to be ordered behind her back. As a result, she had suffered terrifying nightmares until this past Thursday night,
envisioning a hideous bridal procession in which bridesmaids waddled down the aisle like overstuffed sausages.

But of all her generous acts as a bride, Lila felt her greatest was her treatment of Laura. From the moment she got engaged, she had been highly sensitive to Laura’s prickly spots. She had delayed telling Laura about the engagement as long as humanly possible and, when she did, downplayed her excitement an enormous amount. She might as well have been saying she had finally found the perfect winter scarf—she was that nonchalant. She had made a special effort not to bother her with any of the frivolous girly stuff. She was unbelievably forgiving when Laura flubbed the bachelorette party. And even after Lila found out how little Laura contributed to the planning of the bridal shower—Weesie and Tripler did the invitations, for God’s sake, and they were just regular bridesmaids—still, she said nothing. In her humble estimation, she had been more selfless than a saint.

Incredibly, Laura’s behavior had worsened in the last twelve hours. She had arrived a day late, making absolutely no apology for her tardiness. The comment about the bridesmaids’ dress was passive-aggressive to say the least. Was it Lila’s job to attend to the needs of her bridesmaids? No, it was their job to attend to hers. And her toast, though sweet, had been unmistakably downhearted. She had seemed downright unhinged by the end. It was not like Laura, valedictorian of her high-school class, to fold in front of a crowd. No, Lila decided, she had spent too long denying the truth about her friend, shielding herself from the thing that had roiled their ten-year relationship. Even when she told Laura the news of her engagement, it was obvious she was perplexed. The tone of her voice was forced—congratulatory, but not truly happy. Her jealousy, though hardly a new thing, had finally gotten out of hand.

It would be one thing if Laura were just a measly bridesmaid, the title Lila forked out to everyone in the rooming group. But the “maid of honor” title was the venerable post given to one’s best friend, and it was given not only to acknowledge the friendship but to ensure a certain amount of work. It was one thing for her to fall short during the preliminary phase, but to be so distracted the day before her wedding was horribly insulting. For a maid of honor to be so remiss was truly unacceptable.

Now that she focused on the subject, Lila wondered if she had appointed Laura her maid of honor expressly for this reason, to provide Laura with a means of participating in Lila’s happiness, to draw Laura’s attention away from her own bad luck. Certainly, she could sympathize with the fact that Laura was put off by weddings. Her lack of marital prospects and her own parents’ troubled marriage justified an aversion to the institution. But still, she felt, had the roles been reversed, she would have put on a good face. She would have set aside her needs for the sake of the bride. It was just good manners.

And so it was this, Lila realized, that was riling her tonight. She took some comfort in this realization—at least the bad mood did not reflect some horrible defect in her. But there was another yet more insidious component to Laura’s jealousy. Any friendship between two women might suffer when one of the two graduated to a new phase, especially if the other trailed so far behind. This specific situation somehow exceeded the limits of healthy rivalry. It was not simply that Laura resented Lila for getting married first, but rather—why not be completely honest—that she resented her for marrying Tom.

That Laura still harbored feelings for Tom was not a revelation. To be fair, she had dated him long enough to justify a proprietary
attitude, at least in the beginning. Laura and Tom shared a portion of their youth and a bank of memories, and they referred to them with the same easy familiarity with which you might quote a movie you’ve seen too many times. Lila had never been threatened by this—not when she first started dating Tom, nor as their romance progressed. In some strange way, it was comforting to know that Laura seconded her opinion. Subconsciously, competition made him more precious.

Not that her love for Tom needed any augmenting. Tom was, of course, unanimously considered to be a superlative catch. But truth be told, their rapport was not the most effortless she had ever enjoyed with a man. Occasionally, she wondered if all couples struggled so much to understand one another, spoke so little at dinner together, spent so much time camped out in front of the TV. Did all women sometimes feel distanced from their man while they were making love? Just last week, she had looked up at Tom while they were having sex and forgotten, for a split second—it was the strangest thing—who in God’s name he was.

But this was surely a common symptom of wedding preparation, a casualty of the heightened stakes built up around one single day. What relationship wouldn’t buckle slightly under the pressure? What couple would not be strained by so many inconsequential disputes? Over the past several months, she herself had reached her breaking point at least seventeen times. It seemed fair to multiply that number by ten to approximate Tom’s annoyance.

For the most part, he had been a very good sport. He had indulged her “suggestions” about the engagement ring, procuring a substantial stone, if not the one she had in mind. He had pacified Augusta at her planning sessions, supplying the right mixture of submission and scorn. He had behaved affably at the parties, attended
his fittings without too much grumbling—had helped just enough to seem interested but not so much as to seem effete. In short, he had showered her with all the love and attention befitting a princess, displaying a tasteful amount of affection when they were in public and ravishing her when they were alone. Yes, if there was one thing in which to take solace, it was that Tom had been a good boy.

Then why was she suddenly gripped with doubt about the merits of their union? She cursed her moronic brother for putting these thoughts in her head. Still, as she sat, staring at herself in her grandmother’s white lacquer vanity, she couldn’t help but obsess over the very themes Chip had touched upon. Was it possible there was some fatal flaw in their matching, that they were ultimately, impossibly different—dissimilar enough to fall in love, but too fundamentally distinct to stay together?

She had heard it said once by an aging aunt at a Christmas party when she was a child that marriages cannot work unless both members are from the same class. Instinctively, she had bristled at this notion. Even by the age of five, she understood the small-mindedness of certain relatives. Still, Aunt Caroline’s comment took root in her mind. She remembered her parents’ conversation in the car on the way home from the party. Aunt Caroline was rude and provincial, they had hissed, an embarrassment to the family. But they never said Aunt Caroline was wrong.

Now Lila dared to consider the validity of Aunt Caroline’s thesis. Certainly, things had changed since Grandmother Westfield’s time. Even Gussie described a time when Hayeses, Bayers, McCarthys, and Kennedys played doubles together at the club. No Rosensweigs or Rosenfelds were present. But perhaps one day, even they might be inducted, or at the very least, invited as guests. Whether Gussie realized that the road to that club was paved for the McCarthys and
Kennedys by a president by the same name was of little consequence anymore. Just as Bouviers had married Kennedys, Hayeses would marry McDevons. Much to Aunt Caroline’s confusion, all these families were indistinguishable now. They had blended and mixed as compatibly as horses and donkeys. Only people like Gussie and Lila could tell which ones were mules.

In some way, Lila relished the opportunity to botch the bloodline, to exercise the power bequeathed to her by Darwin. It would be unfair to call her a snob. She was not a reactionary either. She was simply happy to view the world from the enviable position of membership. She welcomed her friends as guests to her club, so long as they remembered who was the member.

The subtleties of her choice of husband were not lost on her. Marrying Tom was a safe rebellion, much like smoking from the window of her childhood bedroom or sneaking out of that same window to meet Charlie Bayer at the dock. She could not count the times she had sat on that ledge, her feet dangling dangerously as though she might propel herself onto the lawn at any moment. Reforming from within was Lila’s preferred mode, a strategy that allowed her to change the rules of the club while retaining membership. Even she could not deny the intricacy of her maneuver: She was marrying a McDevon who passed for a Hayes, a trick of camouflage that allowed her simultaneously to fulfill and flout everything she held dear.

Inspired, she moved from her seat at the mirror and crossed the room with purpose, determined to indulge in this favorite childhood pastime. She walked to the window at the side of her room closest to the ocean, parted the rosebud curtains, and pushed it open as far as it would go—not quite to the top—fighting the rigidity of fresh paint and infrequent use. Refreshed by the air, she
removed the screen and placed it on the floor. Then she lifted one leg to the sash, drew the other through the open window, and shimmied head and torso under so that all but 5 percent of her body was in open air. In the ten years since her last perch, her body had not changed, but her stomach had, making the distance to the ground seem suddenly like a much greater drop. Still, she felt slightly calmer, even without the aid of cigarettes. She stared out at the black bay and focused on the sound of waves. Their arrival was louder and more frequent than usual, clear evidence of an approaching storm.

As she sat, she continued an honest assessment of her relationship with Tom. The crux of the problem was this: He was at once everything and nothing she needed. Seen from afar, they were picturesque, a symphony of superior genes, a study in storybook promise. But when they were alone together, they were curiously ill suited, sometimes mortifyingly lacking in secrets to share and things to talk about. But common wisdom condoned this, did it not? Was this not the basis of a great partnership: opposition, difference of opinion. Pairing up with someone as practical as she would be terribly boring, just as coupling Tom with another dreamer would result in incompetence; that pair would never make it out of the house. Both combinations would amount to deadening and impractical redundancy. But what if it was equally dangerous to pair up two people who were so different? Were they not signing up for a lifetime of silent dinners or, worse, after-dinner spats?

No, she had settled this debate long ago. Their differences were essential to their attraction. And when these differences created repulsion, there were solutions for that as well. In some way, this was the reason that Lila tolerated Tom’s friendship with Laura. It was like a daily cigarette for a former smoker; just enough to ensure
the addict did not regress to several packs a day. Laura quelled Tom’s thirst for drama and dysfunction, the part that his Irish heritage made him crave, the part his upbringing made familiar. Conversely, Lila was perfectly happy to discuss literature in bed, but she had absolutely no interest in re-creating its drama in her life. The compulsion to live out this chaos, she felt, was a weakness of the lower classes. And it was a weakness that Tom and Laura shared.

And so she adopted a permissive policy toward the friendship, allowing it to thrive so long as it never grew out of hand. She monitored it sporadically like a mother does a child in a fenced yard, comforted by her knowledge of the fence and yet still suspicious of its height. She resisted the urge to break into Tom’s e-mail account, refrained from checking the phone bill too closely. Instead, she looked to other more meaningful markers of Tom’s devotion. She paid close attention to the tone in his voice when he greeted her at the end of the day. She counted the number of times he said “I love you” or told her she was beautiful. She measured his energy in bed, his eagerness to please her family. And throughout, she took comfort in her understanding of Tom’s psyche; Tom wanted beauty more than he wanted art in his life. This knowledge made it easy for Lila to tolerate his vagaries. There was no use concerning herself with the minutiae of battles. At the end of the day, she would win the war.

But tonight she had witnessed something that caused her to doubt this assertion. To see Tom and Laura in her milieu was to recognize a sacred bond they shared—something she had overlooked until this very moment. They were both outsiders, torn between two equally strong forces: desperation to be included and disdain for the institution. She had been naïve to think their only tie was a decade-old crush. They were glued by something far more
intrinsic to their personalities. Both were terrified of spending their lives just beyond the trimmed hedges of the club, trapped in the shadows of their contempt and aspiration. And both were equally panicked by the prospect of being trapped within.

Now, as she sat, perched on the ledge of her bedroom window, she felt dangerously unstable. She was overwhelmed by vertigo and it threatened to pull her to the ground—or was it a reckless urge to leap to the grass and sprint toward the ocean? Alarmed by both alternatives, she shimmied back through the window and retreated to the safety of her bedroom, anxious for her friends to arrive and spare her from this silly mood.

A
fter some debate, the wedding party decided to migrate to the Hayeses’ dock. Despite the interminable toasts, it was early yet, and they were eager to begin more concerted celebration. There had been some talk of ghost-hunting in Augusta’s attic, but this motion was quickly defeated by a vocal majority who felt the need to purge themselves after the rehearsal dinner.

Before leaving the yacht club, Pete and Jake stopped at the bar to replenish their resources. Jake distracted the bartender while Pete raided his cache, stuffing bottles into sleeves and pockets until he looked like an inflatable toy. They emerged with an impressive stash of smuggled wine and tequila, enough for every pair to split its own bottle and for the singletons to enjoy one to themselves. This meant Laura, Chip, and Tom were allotted twice as much as everyone else. Bottles were opened even before the group emerged from the parking lot. As a result, they were unanimously drunk as they made their way down to the water.