Wedding Season (3 page)

The fact that Gabe’s little jewelry box might have contained something quite different—a certain item that most young women rabidly desire—didn’t cross my mind until I spoke with Henry the next day and she brought it, not without considerable mockery, to my attention. I don’t know why she was surprised. Things like that never register with me. They’re just not on my radar, for one very good reason: I don’t believe in marriage. I don’t want to get married. Yes, Gabe seems to be my ideal mate. Some days I’m still taken aback by how much I like him. And yes, I hope to continue on with him, ad infinitum, until we’re doddering and drooling and infirm and incontinent, and I believe this hope is mutual. But I don’t want to marry him.

It seems silly that I should have to explain or justify my resistance to marriage at this late date in history, but I usually
do. Part of it can be explained by the fact that I, like everyone else, fancy myself an independent thinker. Social conventions, the weight of those expectations and assumptions, give me a kind of metaphysical claustrophobia. They make me feel squashed and breathless, flattened out like a paper doll. Why do that to a relationship? Everything else in my life is institutionalized anyway; why should I voluntarily offer up to the preconceptions of church, state, and society one element that isn’t?

Also, and more to the point, I have no empirical evidence that marriage is really all useful or effective these days, that it does anything good for relationships and the people in them. To the contrary, from the moment divorce became relatively legally simple a few decades back, all over the country it’s been sayonara, sayonara, sayonara. Who even needs statistics to make the point? How many happily married people do
you
know, honestly? I know of almost none—neither in my generation nor in our parents’. They’re either newlyweds, grumpy and/or discontented and/or unfaithful, or divorced. Which makes a pretty strong statement about the efficacy of modern wedlock.

The reasons people get married in this era—in the last fifty to seventy-five years, say—are fundamentally different from the reasons for which marriage was conceived and which it served for the last twenty-odd centuries. So why bother? Getting married these days is like, I don’t know—using leeches or bloodletting to correct an imbalance of the humors, instead of taking a rational twenty-first-century antibiotic.

To forgo marriage seems so clearly the sensible, the intuitive, the obvious option that I really don’t understand why people react with such disbelief to my position. But they do, and since being treated like a reactionary crank whenever
the subject comes up is irritating, I prefer to avoid the issue.

That, apparently, is not possible.

I
ARRIVE AT PANTHEON
before Henry. The restaurant is quiet, just a few customers at the tables for an early Sunday dinner. Waiters cluster and lean against the banquettes, murmuring to one another at the back of the dim, dozing, lofty room. Luke, my favorite bartender, is on duty.

“Hey, little gal. You’re a sight for sore eyes.” He comes from behind the bar to hug me. His flat, soft Oklahoma accent, flaxen hair, and ever so slightly hayseed manner always make me picture him as one of those wholesome, broad-shouldered, lightly freckled soda fountain attendants featured in Norman Rockwell posters. He’s also extremely tall, and as always, his embrace lifts me half a foot off the floor. “What’s shaking, Joy?”

“The foundations of contemporary society,” I tell him, my legs dangling.

“Bad day?” He returns me to earth and slips back behind the bar. “Tell the bartender your troubles.”

“My troubles.” I watch him uncork a bottle of wine, the tips of his long fingers permanently stained by oil paints. “Well, I have seventeen weddings to attend between now and September.”

“Aw, you’re making that up. April fool, right?”

“I wish.” I accept the glass of wine he offers, and toast him.

“Well, that’s just a hell of a thing. You of all people. How’d that happen? Hello, Blondie.”

“Hello, barkeep.” Henry slides onto the stool next to me, flicks her fingers dismissively at Luke, and kisses me on the cheek. “Why so glum, chum?” She takes off her coat and
throws it over the stool beside her. She’s wearing a yellow T-shirt that reads
Slippery When Wet.

“She has to go to seventeen weddings between now and the end of September.” Luke sets up Henry’s usual, a dirty gin martini with four olives.

“Including mine,” Henry chortles.

“Including hers. Henry loves weddings. I’ll get no sympathy from her.”

“That’s great,” Luke tells Henry. “Congratulations.”

“You get all decked out, drink free booze, and watch people French kiss in front of an audience.” Henry lifts her glass to us. “What’s not to like?”

“Magical thinking on an epic scale?” I put a finger to my chin. “Let’s see, now: shameless kowtowing to outdated traditions. A total lack of imagination and foresight. Mass delusion, did I mention that? Oh, and perjury.”

“Whatever.” Henry rolls her eyes at me, unfazed. She doesn’t take it personally. We’ve been through all this before.

“Perjury?” Luke scratches his jaw. “How do you mean?”

“The usual. Lying under oath. Anyone who gets married knows the divorce rate is higher than fifty percent. The occurrence of adultery is even higher, of course. So these people vow until death do us part, forsaking all others, and so on—knowing full well these are promises that they have less than a fifty percent chance of keeping. In essence, they’re willfully lying to their lucky new spouses, and to themselves.”

“That is a staggering leap in logic, Jojo.” Henry sloshes down the dregs of her martini. “I applaud your bold disregard for nuance. Barkeep! Another round for me and this, this, this
ridiculous
creature I call my best friend.”

“Who’s the lucky girl?” Luke asks Henry.

“Delia Banks. You remember her?”

“It would be a miracle if he did, you slut,” I tell her.

“No, no, I do,” Luke says. “Pretty African-American girl. The composer, right?”

“Yes! And Luke, guess who’s going to be my best man?” Henry turns a beatific smile on me.

“You’re kidding, right?” I shake my head at her.

“Not kidding.” Henry gets down on her knees and grabs my hand. “Little bundle of Joy, please, please be my best man? I can’t get married without you.” She covers my hand with kisses. “You can’t say no to me anyway. You’ve already agreed to be a bridesmaid for everyone else.”

“Henry, I’d be honored. Please get up now. You’re making a scene.”

“It’s what I do best!” Henry hops up and throws her arms around me.

“Hello, darlings!” Joan, who has appeared beside us, takes off her coat and makes kissing faces in our direction. “Don’t want to get lipstick on you, girls. Luke, darling, be a doll and make me a Manhattan. What’s new, all?”

“Joy is going to be Henry’s best man,” Luke says. Joan laughs her hoarse laugh and pulls up a bar stool. She’s a classic Tough Broad, raven-haired and hourglass-shaped and possessed of this very 1940s quality that she plays up to great effect. Joan is not an especially good-looking woman, but by sheer force of will, and that preternatural sexual confidence usually seen only in European women, she’s brought the world around to a general consensus about her desirability. She carries an air of sexual allure around with her like a formidable designer handbag with which she might whack anyone at any time. We met when I was in law school and she and Henry were working together as editorial assistants at some fashion magazine. (This was before Henry quit to become a Latin teacher, of all things, at a private high school in the West Village.) Joan kept her shoulder—and her sharp
tongue, and her ferocious ambition—to the squeaky wheel of journalistic endeavor, and now works as the executive editor at
X Machina
, an online magazine of literary erotica.

“I can hardly wait to hear your wedding toast.” Joan lights a cigarette and gives me her wicked grin. Her incisors stick out a little, and they give her smile a predatory aspect.

“Oh. God.” I feel myself go pale. I am very much less than fond of public speaking. Very much less. In a subzero kind of way. In my family I’m known as Silent Silverman. To see me with my friends you might not guess it, but I’m shy. Or socially anxious. Whatever. I get pathologically self-conscious and awkward in the company of people I don’t know well, or in situations where attention is focused on me, or at large public functions. Weddings, for example. “Henry, I can’t—”

“No backsies, Joy. You promised.”

“Oh, sweets,” Joan says. “You’ll be marvelous. Cheer up. Watch me tie the cherry stem into a knot with my tongue. You always like that.”

Someone grabs me around the waist, and I turn to see Miel, and Maud skipping up behind her. Miel is a wispy girl, slender and small with a narrow, sallow pixie face and pale, lank red hair. She’s an artist, the very picture of an artist, in fact: fey and dreamy, with a tubercular-orphan quality that makes us covetous and protective of her. Maud calls herself our diversity quota girl; she’s Korean—second-generation Korean-American, I think. She’s round and cheerful and sanguine as a farm wife in a Victorian novel, part hip-hop tomboy and part Hello Kitty kitsch princess. Tonight she has a dozen rhinestone barrettes holding her hair so that it sticks out in little tufts, and when she speaks, the tufts quiver like antennae.

“Where’s our table?” Maud pulls at one of my curls. “I’m starving.”

“Where’s Erica?” asks Miel.

“Maybe she and Brian decided to elope.” Joan smirks. The idea of Erica—that quintessential Upper East Side debutante currently making her modest entrance—on the connubial lam is unlikely and amusing. Erica roomed with me and Henry our first year at Vassar; the other girls on our floor called us The Odd Triple, which was apt. Henry, being Henry, adored Erica, and made us a team for the year. I was more ambivalent; it wasn’t until several years after graduation and a good year after the founding of our girls’ night that I was able to take Erica on her own terms. Finally, Erica was just so obliviously and unapologetically and sweetly her blonde, blithe, sweater set-wearing, single-strand-of-pearls self that to judge her for it seemed to miss the point completely, and I gave in to just liking her. She surprised me by becoming a very successful literary agent at a large commercial firm, and has since used her contacts to incredibly kind and generous ends for many of her friends, including me. Erica is simply a happy girl, and perhaps the only perfectly self-accepting person I know. Tonight, however, she is the locus of my anxiety and irritation, for the simple and only reason that she is the first wedding on my list; next weekend I will be her bridesmaid.

Erica, who has been in consultation with the maître d’, waves us toward a table. The girls collect their coats and march. Henry brings up the rear, singing “Here Comes the Bride” loudly enough for the other customers to take notice, swiveling their heads around and peering at the group. I raise my hands helplessly to Luke, who laughs.

“I remember the first time you came in here.” He touches my wrist with one finger.

“That was almost six years ago. You’ve been here too long.”

“You’ve
been here too long. Find another goshdarn bar. And keep those ladies quiet, will you?”

My table has just erupted into squealing laughter. I nod at him and go to join my noisy, my old, my dear old friends, with whom I’ve been coming to this goshdarn bar once a month for almost six years. Which is kind of nice.

E
RICA IS SANDWICHED
between Joan and Henry on one side of the table, flushed and giggling. Maud and Miel shift over to make room for me, and Miel knocks over a full water glass. No one misses a beat; we just grab napkins and keep talking. Miel is as dependable as a national park geyser in this respect, guaranteed to make at least one mess per meal, and on the scale of things, this is minor. Once, getting up to go to the bathroom, she knocked over the entire table. Henry always says that what Miel lacks in coordination, she makes up for in clumsiness.

Erica reveals to me the source of their uproar a moment before; she holds up a cat’s-cradle tangle of leopard-print string that, after close inspection, Maud swears to be a negligee. The outfit seems tame compared to what they’ll dredge up for Joan, but it’s entertaining to think of Erica working it on her sturdy fiancé, who wouldn’t even consent to live with her until they married.

“But wait, there’s more!” Maud hands over a little gift bag. Erica digs into the tissue paper, comes up with a pair of leopard-print thigh-high stockings, and flushes ever pinker with excitement.

“Model it for us,” Henry says. Erica giggles. Our waiter comes to the table and eyes the stockings without expression.

“Let me guess,” he says. “Bridal shower.”

We nod. Erica giggles.

“Congratulations,” the waiter tells her wearily. “Want to hear the specials?”

A
FTER THE ORDERS
have been placed and the drinks have been handed around, our conversation makes its inevitable turn to the wedding. Or, I should say, to the weddings, plural, because each and every one of the women at this table, except for me, is wearing an engagement ring. Every one of them figures among the brides who comprise my seventeen.

Erica will marry Brian, just the kind of boy you’d expect her to marry, a ruddy-complexioned, hale and hearty, solid and good-natured entertainment lawyer, whom she’d known for all of three months before he proposed. You just know when you meet the right person, she told us when she announced the engagement. You just know. You just
know.

Maud will marry Tyler, a lean, Scottish-born and broody-melancholy hipster in his early forties, who happens to be the lead singer of a quite successful rock band known as The False Gods. They’ve been a couple for more than ten years; they met while Maud was interning on a documentary project about the band. At the time Tyler was in the midst of a divorce that subsequently turned nasty and got quite a bit of public attention, which is at least in part why he and Maud waited this long before making it legal.