Wedding Season (6 page)

M
Y PHONE RINGS
.

“Good morning, baby girl,” my older brother James says when I pick up.

“Good morning, big girl.”

“Can we have lunch this week? We need to get a present for Charlotte.”

Charlotte is our favorite aunt, my mother’s younger sister. She’s getting married later this month—for the first time, at the age of forty-eight, and to the very lucky Burke Ingerson, a man fourteen years her junior. Both my family and Burke’s are more than a little upset about the whole thing. The wedding should be interesting.

“I thought we were going to get them a gift certificate for sex toys.”

“Joy. That was a joke. Mom would have an aneurysm.”

“And this is a problem for you?”

“We don’t need to add to the misery, baby. She’s already in such a tizzy about the whole thing.”

“Only because Bachelor Number Three isn’t as young and handsome as Burke. Why should I humor her competitive streak?”

“Baby.” James puts on his stern eldest brother voice. “I’m trying to be a good boy for once. How about if we make nice? For the sake of novelty.”

“Oh, fine. But I can’t do it this week. I’m booked.” I wave through the window to Miss Trixie, who is on the fire escape, reeling in her stockings and singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

“You busy professional. Next Monday?”

“Nope. What about Tuesday?” I look up at my calendar.

“Mmm. No. I have student meetings all day.” James is an
associate professor at NYU; he followed our father’s footsteps to the shady groves of academe.

“Wednesday?”

“Next Wednesday. That’s perfect,” he says. There’s a silence, and I can picture him writing it down in his beautiful leather-bound teacher’s agenda, in his beautiful handwriting. I scratch a note onto the back of a receipt and tape it to the calendar. “I’ll call you that morning,” he says. “Love you, baby girl.”

“You, too.” I set the phone down gently, and look out the window.

F
ROM TIME OUT
of mind, or at least since my parents’ divorce, the family assumption was that I’d become a lawyer, like my mother. There was no apparent reason for this beyond parental vanity; I was a shy child, and possessed nothing particular in the way of character or aptitude—except bookishness and a kind of adolescent moral rigidity—that would have made it an obvious career choice. But by the time I was in college, a future defending the spirit and letter of the law was beyond questions of desire, beyond questions of any kind. It had been assumed for so long as to become doctrine, an article of absolute faith. After the implosion of my mother’s second marriage, she decided, possibly out of sheer perversity, to specialize in divorce law. She began to make a name for herself by winning high-profile cases and obscenely large settlements for the ex-wives of wealthy men, and by the time I got to law school even my fellow students knew her as Goldfinger. I had a legacy to uphold.

I received my undergrad degree in prelaw with an English Lit minor to keep all the parental units happy, after which I was accepted by Columbia University’s law school.
But from that point things went downhill with a certainty equal and opposite to all hopes and expectations that had come before. After my first year, in particular, I had something like a crisis of faith. My aforementioned moral rigidity, and perhaps some feeling of self-importance—which were initially nurtured on the bracing rigors of law school and throve on ethics classes and tomes of theory—had begun to dissipate. The sense that I was aligning myself with the Good and the True slipped away. My studies became haunted by the specter of subjectivity: There is no Good, no True, and as far as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is concerned, in any given instance each of us has only a
version
of what we believe to be true, and each version is merely a question of perspective. As this notion took hold, the idea of representing under oath another person’s truth began to seem like not such a fabulous idea. It sat badly with me. I started to lose sleep over it. One of these sleepless nights, deep into the spring semester of my second year, I was in the library studying. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and found, scrawled in fat black strokes across the mirror above the sinks, the
cri de coeur
of some fellow-sufferer: “Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.” I read the scrawl once, eyed my reflection through the text, read it again, and then bent over and threw up into a sink.

I suppose I should have seen this as a bad sign. But I pushed on through that term to the bitter end, and bitter it was, though amusing, in retrospect. The professor of my trial advocacy class set up a mock courtroom situation as our final exam. Each of us was assigned a hypothetical case that we had to win twice—first as the prosecution and then as the defense—in order to get a passing grade. For a week in the
last humid days of May, I sat by day on the jury, watching my classmates shift sides with the effortless flexibility of Chinese acrobats, and by night at my window, staring out past my haggard reflection at the parades of drunk, more or less innocent undergraduates rollicking down the street toward one another’s narrow dormitory beds. I was sleep-deprived and ill-prepared when my number came up, and went to class that day looking only slightly less miserable than I felt. And there, mere minutes into my trial, I paused, looked around at the woman who was acting as my client; at my professor, who was presiding as judge; at the jury of my peers—and fainted onto the floor of the classroom.

I thought it ranked pretty high in the annals of courtroom drama. But after meetings with various advisers and teachers, and a significantly less than stellar report card, the heads of my department suggested, reasonably enough, that it might be inadvisable for me to forge ahead toward a law career. So I fled from the halls of truth and justice. My mother threw fits and claimed a broken heart; I think it was something more along the lines of profound humiliation, but either way I could do nothing to remedy the situation.

Back in the real world, without the maternal legacy or familial expectation to guide me, I wandered vaguely for a couple of months, a shade in the American purgatory of the unemployed, trying to find some professional direction. Henry got me what was supposed to be temporary employment while I uncovered my true calling: I took a position writing headlines, photo captions, blurbs, and such at the magazine where she and Joan worked at the time. But the path of least resistance has a gravitational pull of its own, and down that path I continued as circumstance became habit, habit became experience, and experience became profession. And here I am.

“J
OY
.” M
YRNA’S HEAD
appears around the door frame. “May I have a word?”

“Just one?” I wave her in.

“Hector wants us to woo his mistress. This is not good business.”

“No?”

“Doesn’t it seem rather shady to you?”

“Compared to what? Helping crisis management firms do spin control on felonious movie stars? Writing naughty letters for porno magazines? How about those politicians you write speeches for? Not exactly spotless little lambs.”

“There’s something about the individual versus the institution that seems more dubious to me this morning.” Myrna wraps a strand of hair around her finger.

“Persuading the anonymous masses is more comfortable, of course.” I push the assignment book around on the desk. “Look. We’re in business, Myrna. We don’t represent our clients, per se. We don’t speak for them. All we’re doing is giving them more eloquent ways of saying what they’re going to say anyhow.”

“But shouldn’t we attempt to maintain some modicum of personal integrity?” Myrna starts on another strand of hair, twisting it so tightly around her fingers that the tips turn purple.

“Sure. You think that infidelity is wrong. So don’t do it. You can’t take on the sins of every philanderer in the city. And Hector will be cheating on his wife whether or not we write the letter.”

“Aiding and abetting. Knowledge of a crime. You attended law school.” One section of Myrna’s hair is now standing nearly on end.

“Dropped out of law school. We’re not really in criminal
territory here. The stakes aren’t quite as high as you’re making them out to be.”

“For whom, exactly, are they not high?” Myrna looks out the window and sighs. “Don’t you have a personal philosophy about lying?”

“Yes, I do, about not making promises that I can’t keep, not misrepresenting myself, not deceiving people in that way. But it’s personal. I certainly can’t impose it on my clients. The entire advertising industry would become obsolete.” I wait for a laugh. I don’t get one. “It’s not like we’re condoning what they’re doing, or participating in it. We’re just hack writers. Says so right on the front door.”

“I suspect this conversation is in vain.” Myrna releases her hair and spreads her arms wide, martyred. “You’re determined to take the assignment, aren’t you, Joy?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” I let out a sigh. “If we turned away every job that seemed morally questionable to one of you, we’d be out of business.”

“Very well.” Myrna gets up and heads for the door. “I have registered my opinion.”

“Duly noted.” I watch as she stomps out. “Thanks. Myrna?” I make a screaming Munch face at the place where she was standing and pick up the phone, which is ringing again. It’s Charles, calling from a taxi.

“We are going to make
so much
fucking money off of Modern Love,” his voice crackles through the cell phone. I think briefly of Myrna, and of my mother, and of the prostitutes who show up at dusk in the meatpacking district ten blocks or so from our office. “We are the proud producers of the
Extreme Romance
series, baby,” Charles laughs. “Love for a new generation of glamour slackers. An eco-tourism installment. Radical disc jockeys in Eastern Europe. A love affair on snowboards. The turbulent passions of a couple opening a trend-spotting company in Iceland.”

“They’re only about ten years behind the curve,” I tell him. “It could be worse.”

“Oh, fine. What would you propose? Something a little more timeless?”

A story about a woman who has to attend seventeen weddings in six months, I think to myself. A bildungsroman. A picaresque. A comedy of errors. There are no original plots.

A
FTER THE USUAL
postwork debriefing at our kitchen table, Gabe and I decide to have dinner at Café Paradiso, a restaurant on a little street off Washington Square Park. It’s one of our favorites, both for historical reasons (we had one of our early dates here) and because it’s nearly perfect: nice but not too nice, quiet but not too quiet, and the food is good, but not too good. I don’t have a particularly refined palate, and anything gourmet is pretty much wasted on me. Fine dining makes me feel guilty and skittish, and foodies—those people who get completely obsessed and collect olive oils infused with saffron and talk about heirloom tomatoes and moan ecstatically about the hints and tensions of this or that ingredient in what is, as far as I can ascertain, a tasty but ordinary entrée—suffice it to say that I don’t understand them. The first couple times we went out, Gabe took me to dinner at these incredible, multi-star-reviewed, celebrity-chef restaurants, and I was concerned that he might be one of the gourmet evangelists. In reality, he was just trying to be nice, and to impress me, I guess; after a few dates, he figured it out and brought me to Paradiso. I think that was the night I really fell for him.

Tonight Gio, a rotund waiter who has developed a slightly proprietary relation to us, seats us at a table in a bay window overlooking the street; we order and watch him wobble back to the kitchen.

“Mom called today,” Gabe tells me. “She wants to know if we’ve decided about spending Labor Day with them. Are you up for it? They’d really like to spend some more time with you.”

“Labor Day? It’s not even Memorial Day yet.” Somehow I doubt very much that Gabe’s family wants to spend more time with me. Or if they do, it’s probably just to confirm their suspicions that I am not the girl for their beloved only son, and to demonstrate as much to him.

“You know my mother,” Gabe says. “She’s big on advance planning.”

“Will we be on the boat again?”

“Nope. Maine. My uncle’s place. I think it’ll be nice.”

“Ah.” Funny how the way Gabe says it, his uncle’s place sounds like some sweet little ramshackle cabin, when it is, in fact, a compound that occupies an entire island. I mean, a small island, but still. I really have to get over my Winslow phobia, sooner rather than later. As Gabe’s spousal equivalent, it’s likely I’ll be seeing quite a lot of them; although he resists certain of their values and demands, Gabe is deeply, surprisingly family-oriented.

“Hey.” Gabe snaps his fingers. “Speaking of schedules. When you have a second, could you get me the dates and details for all these weddings? Is it really seventeen?”

“It really is. Three this month, four in May, four in June—one of those I’m going as arm candy with Charles and you don’t have to come. But Max and Miel. And my brother’s wedding. And your sister’s wedding.”