Wedding Season (37 page)

“Red, I don’t know where you got an idea like that. If I gave you any reason to doubt me, I’m really sorry. But how could you think I’d want anyone else when I have you?” He lifts me up, his hands gentle on my shoulders, and turns me to face him. “We’re made for each other, right? We’re getting married. Come on, now. No more talk. Let’s go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

I’
M AT MY DESK
in the study with my old friend the laminated six-month calendar spread out in front of me, and many, many scraps of paper (which I continue to accumulate, Palm Pilot notwithstanding) heaped on the desktop and around my feet. Morning light comes slanting across the room, and the voices of departing churchgoers drift in through the window, along with the occasional prematurely yellow leaf.

Years ago, somebody sent me a poem whose opening lines read
“Distrust everything, if you have to / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?”
It must have made sense to me at the time, because I copied it out and put it up on the refrigerator, where it eventually disappeared under shifting strata of postcards and
New Yorker
cartoons. But today, there’s nothing I trust less than the hours, the weeks unreeling before me. The blank days on my calendar that might erupt into anything, produce any manner of surprise. And as everyone knows, I don’t like surprises.

One thing, though, looks blessedly certain: Except for Henry and Delia’s wedding next week, I will not be attending a single wedding this season. Unless—it suddenly occurs to me—my mother and future mother-in-law set their hearts
on a winter ceremony. It could easily happen. My gorge rises and my stomach jumps.

“Hey, calendar girl. You’re up early.”

I turn to see Gabe leaning against the doorway. He rubs his eyes, a sleepy child, pajamas rumpled, hair on end. When I woke up the two of us were curled into a knot of limbs at the center of the bed. It took me an age to extricate myself without disturbing his sleep. Gabe doesn’t seem to have been adversely affected by my restlessness. He has an irritating in-the-pink look about him that throws my own peevish, restive mood into a deeply unflattering light. I adore him. I ignore him. He laughs and pads away, Francis at his heels. I stare at my calendar’s bands of white, am visited by a gruesome vision of myself in a wedding dress, followed by an even more gruesome vision of Joan on my mother’s bathroom floor. (She’s fine, more or less. She e-mailed me this morning to apologize, and to tell me she was leaving this afternoon for rehab upstate.) I consider returning to bed for the rest of the year, and have nearly convinced myself that this is the wisest of all possible options when Gabe returns with a cup of coffee, which he sets on a few square inches of bare wood that he somehow finds on my desk.

“Drink,” he instructs. “In exactly one half hour, we are walking out the front door, and you will escort me to Central Park, as promised. And we will eat pretzels and get heartburn and ride the carousel.” He assumes the Olympic victory pose, salutes me, and marches out. Francis sits down among the piles of paper, unwagging, and gives me the eye.

A
N HOUR OR SO LATER
, Gabe and I push off the little pier of the Central Park lake in a dented rental boat. Gabe rows us out into the murky green water, and I watch the
boathouse and the dirty banks of the lake recede. Sun fractures into bright daggers on the water. From the far shore, snatches of music drift toward us, and the singsong voices of people walking the dappled shade of the woods, lolling on the park’s wide and trampled lawns.

When we’ve achieved a respectable distance from the boathouse, Gabe pulls in the oars, runs a hand through his hair, and looks around. Oblongs of reflected light shiver across his face.

“Perfect day,” he says. I hold my hand out and he takes it, and we float like that for a long time. We brush through some picturesque canopies of weeping willow, drift into the shadow of a footbridge and out into the main part of the lake. If only it could always be like this, I think, looking over at his still profile. Nothing spectacular, just this. I watch the dark silhouette of the Bethesda Fountain slip into view, its great, grave Angel of the Waters towering at the lake’s edge, her wings raised, her arms stretched wide.

I’m staring over the side of the boat at my wavering reflection, when I hear Gabe’s voice, ascending in question.

“Sorry. What?” I turn to him.

“A date. I was thinking we need to set a date for the wedding. Most people pick one before they have the engagement party. My mother pointed this out to me
again
last night.”

“A date. Oh. Okay.” I drag the heels of my shoes around on the bottom of the boat. A small puddle has formed there, and I wonder briefly how deep the lake is.

“Gabe,” I say, “I need to tell you something.” And without any previous intention of doing so, I do. I make a full confession: all my alarms and speculations regarding Ora, the nights with Topher at the wedding upstate, in Los Angeles, at Pantheon. I confess to the snooping, to the stalking, to the desperation, the anxiety behind my long silences, the justifications, the moments of spectacular failure to
my ideals. The words spill from my lips and into the air around us.

At first Gabe tries to interrupt, to stop me. After a while, he gives up and sits motionless, looking out over the lake toward the enormous angel in the distance. When I have lapsed into stammering and then into silence, he turns back to me and nods.

“I know,” he says.

“You know?” I feel like the bottom just dropped out of the boat. “You know what?”

“I knew about what happened at Ben and Marilyn’s wedding. Topher talked to me when he got back from driving you to the hotel. He was worried about you. And I knew about what happened at Theo and Angelina’s wedding. Damon told me when I was trying to find you. He thought it was funny. Which it was. And I figured you were out with Topher the other night. He called looking for you, and he said he was hoping to see you that evening, which is perfectly fine. He’s a stand-up guy, you’re old friends. Why would I want to interfere with that? I just couldn’t figure out why you said you were with Henry.”

I stare at him. He reaches out and with one finger lifts my bottom jaw to its full upright position.

“Joy, it’s okay. I assumed that if there was anything going on that I needed to know about, you’d tell me. I have faith in you. Some things—there’s just no need to discuss them. We don’t need to talk about this anymore.”

“But—”

“Hush.” His hands slice through the air above our knees, smoothing away the ruptures, the stains between us. “Case closed. All right?”

Usually, this would suit me perfectly. I should feel relieved. I do not.

“So?” Gabe tilts his head at me.

“So, what?”

“So how about a date for our wedding?”

I stare at him, lovestruck. I have just tipped my hand, shown the worst of myself—faithless, foolish, weak as any woman has ever been accused of being—and still he wants me.

“Gabe, I can’t marry you.”

I look around to see who made this pronouncement. Apparently, it was me.

“You… what?” Gabe laughs, then frowns. “What?”

“I can’t. Marry you.”

“I—you’re breaking our engagement? Joy, what’s going on? Are you leaving me?”

“No! No, no, no. I want to be with you. I do. I just don’t want to get married. I don’t even not want to. I just can’t.” I shake my head. We sit staring at each other for a few long, silent seconds. A flock of ducks paddles by, quacking at the top of their little lungs.

“Yes, you can,” Gabe says, at last. “Of course you can. Why can’t you?”

“Because.” Interesting. Why can’t I? Oh, yes. Now I get it. Because Henry was right. And my brother was right. How irritating. “Because I believe in marriage too much.”

“I don’t know what the
hell
you’re talking about.” Gabe shakes his head.

“It took me a while to understand it, myself. But listen, you said you have faith in me. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. I love you. I really do. But we can’t get married.”

“Joy, I thought we had worked all this out. I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife. I want to be your husband. I want
that.”
“I
don’t even know how to explain this.” I cover my face with my hands. “I think—if we get married, it won’t be about
you and me and just what we are together. It’ll be about Marriage. The idea of it. And about everything I want it to do that it can’t possibly do. There’s this fear, and it’s why I said yes in the first place. But what I have to do is live with the fear instead of letting myself believe there’s anything that can keep me safe. Which is what I’ll be doing if I marry you.”

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Some part of me believes, deeply believes, that marriage will makes things perfect and keep us safe and in love and happily ever after—it’s beautiful, but it’s not true. It’s a lie. And I don’t ever want to lie, to you or to myself. The extent to which I want those lies to be true is exactly how far I should stay away from marriage.”

“I just don’t get it.” Gabe’s voice is tight with anger.

“Try. Please. Try harder.”

“No, I mean—I understand what you’re saying, but it’s just a lot of talk. It doesn’t have anything to do with you and me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does, though. It does to me.”

“Marry me, Joy.”

“No. Live with me.” I reach for his hand. He pulls away.

“No.” He shakes his head. We stare at each other some more. At last, Gabe picks up the oars and rows us toward the bank by the fountain, where a set of marble steps descends into the water.

“I’m going to go now.” He bangs the boat against the steps.

“Wait. That’s it? You’re just leaving?” I can’t believe this. I start to laugh hysterically.

“I’m glad you’re amused.” Gabe stands up fast and the boat tilts and rocks. “You told me the night I proposed that you believed in me more than anything else you believed in. Obviously
that
was a lie.”

“Gabe, please don’t leave. It wasn’t a lie. At that moment, I truly meant it. But—”

“Look, I’ll get out of the apartment for a while, and give you a couple of weeks to move your things out. Maybe you could stay at your mother’s until you find something else.”

“Gabe. Please. Don’t do this.” I could burst into tears and cry for the rest of my life. “We don’t have to do this now. We don’t have to do this ever. I want to be with you. I love you. Why can’t we just go on?”

“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I think it’s more important for you to be right than to be happy.”

I feel as if he’s slapped me across the face.

“You know that’s not true, Gabe. It’s not about being right. It’s about being true to myself.”

“Oh, right. Your principles. How could I forget?”

“Would you really want me to just toss out everything I believe?” I’m shaking with fear and fury.

“Joy, I wouldn’t. I don’t want that. I want you to marry me.”

“Look, when you proposed, you said it wasn’t my place to impose my beliefs on the rest of the world. What about when the rest of the world tries to impose its beliefs upon me?”

“You’re in the minority, Red. Maybe the majority of the world disagrees for a good reason.”

Who is this man? Is this the same man who just forgave me everything, the man who wasn’t afraid to let me lead?

“Maybe,” I tell him. “And maybe not.”

Gabe doesn’t look at me again. He climbs out of the boat and onto the steps. I watch, dizzy with disbelief, as he turns and walks away, disappears into the crowd. For some longish additional period, I stare at the place where he vanished from my sight.

I’
M SITTING ON
the porch of a lumbering rustic old hotel in deepest darkest Vermont, in a little town that has been taken over for the week by the friends and families of Henry and Delia. In the chilly morning light, the surrounding hills are already on fire with all the colors of autumn, the air laced with the smell of bruised apples, dry leaves, early frost. It’s beautiful, but though we’ve been here since Wednesday evening I haven’t been able to appreciate it, because I haven’t been able to stop crying since I arrived on Henry’s doorstep Sunday evening. Between then and now, I’ve cried so much I don’t even know when I’m crying anymore. I’ll start crying in the middle of a conversation and won’t notice until I recognize the concerned expression of the person with whom I’m talking. Henry has taken to calling me The Waterworks. She tells me it’s the return of the repressed, and finds it unbearably funny; when she sees me crying she gets the giggles, throws her arms around me, covers my face with kisses, and says things like “The ice queen melteth!” I’ve humored her. I know she means well. She knows I do, too.

This morning, though, it feels like the deluge may be at an end. My pillow was dry when I woke up, the heavy pressing in my chest had eased, and I clambered out of bed and into the shower feeling something like cheerful—or at least
not crushingly miserable. And now, perched on a phenomenally uncomfortable wooden chair with a paper cup of coffee clutched in one hand, I catch myself humming “My Girl,” with which Delia serenaded Henry last night at the rehearsal dinner—a reprise of their early courtship. My musical interlude is cut short by the revving engine and screeching tires that announce Henry’s arrival; she rented a vintage convertible Cadillac for the week, and if the car survives her unique approach to driving, we’ll all count it as a miracle.

“Off your ass and into the vehicle, freak,” Henry yells. “Get a move on.” She’s wearing a red cowboy hat, a skirt almost too short to qualify as clothing, and an orange T-shirt that reads, in neon yellow block letters,
Who’s Your Daddy?

“Good morning to you, Hank.” I eschew Henry’s preferred method of hopping the door and get into the Caddy the traditional way. “You’d better have a good reason for getting me out of bed at six. The wedding doesn’t start for at least twelve hours.”