You Don't Love This Man (16 page)

“Do you see?” Sandra said to me, weeping. I nodded, unable to speak.

The doctor examined the baby's eyes and ears, ran his finger through her mouth, and took each of her limbs in his hand. He
announced numbers that the nurse copied into a chart, and when he was satisfied, he stood back, smiled, and said, “This is all very good. But I'm afraid I don't know this young lady's name. Or have you decided yet?”

I looked at Sandra and she nodded, smiling, as she lowered her face to the child's and murmured in a tone I'd never heard from her before. Miranda's eyes remained tightly closed, as if she were concentrating intently upon that voice, in hopes of understanding it.

“We've known for a while,” I said. “Her name is Miranda.”

 

T
HE
S
YCORA
P
ARK
S
UITES
is a ten-story, atrium-style hotel located in the heart of Sycora Park, a vibrant neighborhood that features upscale shopping, many of the city's finest restaurants, and numerous popular coffeehouses and bars. Those, at least, were the claims made by the brochure Miranda had brought me eight months before the wedding, and which I had examined at my dining room table with the seriousness I bring to any business or legal document. I suppose I thought repeated examinations of the item might at some point reveal an inconsistency in its story, or uncover suppressed information: a broken vending machine beyond the cropped edge of the swimming pool photo, perhaps, or an overlooked sentence acknowledging that the fire alarm will go off inexplicably at three
A
.
M
., forcing disoriented guests into the parking lot in their pajamas. But there was nothing to find. And my review of the brochure was just a formality, really, because the decision had already been made: Miranda and Sandra had decided that the Sycora Park Suites would be the reception site, and I was to write my check, please. So I did.

When I entered the hotel on the day of the wedding, a black signboard on an easel announced in handwritten fluorescent script that one of the hotel's three ballrooms would host Miranda's reception, while the other two would be the site of a bar mitzvah and a thirtieth high school reunion, respectively. The news pleased me: I once attended a wedding reception in a hotel where those of us taking a break in the lobby late in the evening were treated to the sight of brides from adjacent receptions walking past each other on their way to and from the restroom. The sight had provoked a psychic shiver in me exactly like one I'd experienced upon seeing a publicity photo from a filmed version of the gospels, in which both the leading man and his stand-in were present and in full costume, attentively listening to their famous director. Two brides crossing paths in a Holiday Inn, two Jesuses taking orders from a man in blue jeans: images like these are best forgotten. The illusion of a wedding's uniqueness is probably as false as the illusion of a marriage's permanence, but still—one bride is enough.

The large oak door to our assigned ballroom stood wide open. I assumed that inside I would find a regiment of linen-covered tables standing in silent readiness, but instead I discovered not only that the room wasn't empty, but that one of those people was an altered version of my ex-wife. Sandra had hired a professional stylist—toiling away in a room somewhere among the dozen or so identical floors that rose overhead like stacked billiard racks—to charm the hair of each woman in the wedding party into exotic weaves and tangles, and Sandra's hair was now pulled up and held tightly against her head by what I could only assume was a hidden superstructure of clips or bands. A number of curls on top had been woven into a garland of tresses that seemed inspired by sylvan tales of giggling sprites or fairy princesses. The transformation, how
ever, was not complete: beneath the imaginative fairy-tale locks, Sandra remained strictly middle-class in a white V-neck T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and sandals. She frowned at the other person present, a teenage boy pushing the heavy leaves of a fake-parquet dance floor into place at the front of the room. Sporting the khaki slacks and white dress shirt of someone trying to be promoted out of manual labor, the boy kicked at the edges of the floor as if they disgusted him, though I soon realized he was just tightening the gaps between the pieces. After a final, especially vicious kick, he raised his eyes, saw me standing in the doorway, and seemed about to address me—but Sandra beat him to it. “Do you think the ten-foot dance floor, or the fifteen?” she asked.

The boy returned to his task, grimacing as he pulled another slab of flooring from atop a stack balanced over a wheeled flatbed cart. The pieces were so long as to render the cart a mere fulcrum over which they bent, the ends touching the ground on either side like the drooping wings of an exhausted cartoon airplane. “If this doesn't look right, it's not too late to switch,” he said, and then dropped, from waist-level, the next piece of flooring. It struck the carpet with a meaty thud, raising a faint plash of dust.

The Busby Berkeleyan imagination required to mentally transform the half-assembled dance floor into a fully realized and polished surface onto which I could project an estimated number of dancers was beyond my capacity. I had just left Catherine and the chairs behind at the Quad, and had no desire to enter a new story problem. Avoiding interminable indecision and speculation was one of the reasons I'd left the decisions to Miranda and Sandra in the first place, so all I said was “We're not big dancers.”

“No, it's too small,” Sandra said. “Let's go with the fifteen-foot.”

The boy bent and began slowly to undo his work as the hotel's event coordinator walked briskly into the room. The sunny smile she wore to every interaction with us—along with her sober-colored pantsuits and designer glasses and immaculately painted red nails—decayed into a perplexed look as she noticed the boy engaged in a process the opposite of what she had expected. When she asked if everything was all right, though, and the boy told her Sandra wanted the fifteen-foot dance floor, she said, “Absolutely,” and then moved swiftly into her intended business, a show-and-tell presentation meant to demonstrate how everything in the room was being set up in accord with the arrangements we had requested, and which were detailed in our contract. Her presentation was as polished as any that someone gives multiple times per week: the dais for members of the wedding party was a certain size and in a certain location; each of the guest tables featured an exact shade of off-white tablecloth, an exact number of place settings, an exact number of candles, and an exact arrangement of flowers; the deejay's area was clearly marked with yellow electrical tape, and the umbilicus of power-delivering cables that snaked from the wall to the taped area, she warned us, was “hot.” In her business couture she looked thirty, but I assumed she was younger-playing-older, trying to do well. As she moved us through a door at the back of the room, I wondered if she might be younger, even, than Miranda. It was impossible to tell.

We entered the kitchen, a long galley of stainless steel counters and oversized ovens and industrial sinks and huge refrigerators and freezers that ran the full length of the three ballrooms. Somewhere from the far end of the room an unseen radio suffering incredibly fuzzed reception played a rap song whose melody had been lifted from another decade, though I couldn't immediately name the
original. A handful of employees were present, unhurriedly chopping vegetables or pushing large rolling carts of covered trays or sorting dishes and silverware. Our coordinator, whom I felt confident was named Lisa, though it was also possible she was Laura, led us to a small counter where a number of already prepared dishes had been arranged. She picked up two of the plates and placed them in front of us: one featured a bloated piece of herbed chicken bounded by shiny slices of summer squash, and the other held a dry-looking piece of whitefish whose congealed cream sauce managed not to touch the glossy green beans and carrot slices to its side. Lisa explained that the two dishes represented the entrees we had chosen and which would be served to our guests. “And they'll look like this?” I asked, alarmed.

“Oh no,” she said. “These aren't real, they're wax. They're just to show you how we're going to plate things.”

Embarrassed by the stupidity of my question, I nodded with all the gravity I could muster, and when Lisa stepped away to ask someone about the location of the desserts, I reexamined the counterfeit food.

“I hope we're not signing off on a meal that's not going to be served,” Sandra said as she looked down on the wax food with disdain. “Or even if Miranda doesn't show up, maybe we should invite everyone to come over here and sit down for a wax dinner. After dinner we can play music but not allow dancing. It will be a theme.”

“It's probably too late to get a hundred and fifty wax chickens,” I said. I considered not telling Sandra I'd spoken to Miranda, but it felt like a concealment that would take more energy to pull off than it was worth. So I said, “Besides, I talked to her. She said she'll be here soon.”

“You spoke to her?”

“On the phone.” There. That was the lie that felt right.

Sandra seemed stunned by this. So much so, in fact, that I'll admit it hurt my pride that she found it so unlikely my daughter would speak to me. “What did she tell you?” she asked.

“She's just taking some time to herself, and she'll be around soon,” I said.

“So why doesn't she answer the phone when
I
call her?”

“Because she knows it's you. I called her with Catherine's phone, and she only answered because she thought it was Catherine.”

“There is something wrong. She's completely out of touch on her wedding day.”

“She's not completely out of touch,” I said. “She said not to worry, she'll turn up. You should just go up to your room and have a glass of wine. Let the stylist finish your hair or do your nails.”

She mimed surprise. “I should get tipsy and paint my nails? How chivalrous of you.”

“If your plan is to wait here in the hotel and worry, then yes, I'm suggesting you get tipsy and paint your nails. Unless you know something I don't know.”

“What do you mean?”

“She told me she's taking some time to herself, but she'll be here. Maybe you know something more about why she's taking this time to herself than I do, but I assume that means she'll be here.”

“You're the one who's talked to her today, Paul,” she said. “Not me.”

Lisa returned then, telling us that though the wax desserts had been misplaced, their disappearance would in no way compromise the kitchen's ability to confect the actual items, and she was en
tirely confident that the staff understood the menu and our wishes, and that everything was in hand.

“I think Sandra and Miranda tried all of these things a few months ago,” I said. “They drank the wine and ate the entrees and desserts and said it was all fine, right?”

“We did,” Sandra said. “I'm sure everything is fine.”

“So I doubt we need to worry about any of this,” I said. “I, at least, am not worried.”

Lisa smiled. “Some people just like to triple-check things,” she said. “Overpreparation makes them feel secure. But as you can see, everything is swinging into motion here.”

When we stepped from the kitchen and passed back through the ballroom, it was empty. It seemed like we had only been gone for a minute, but in that brief interval, the dance floor, and the boy who had been working on it, had somehow ceased to exist.

After Lisa wished us a wonderful ceremony and headed down an unmarked hallway to what I assumed was the safety of a hidden office, Sandra continued across the lobby, straight past the fountain, and toward the main doors. “I'm going out for some fresh air,” she said. “Come with me.”

When we moved through the doors and stepped outside, though, it began to rain. Clouds did not build or gather, thunder did not rumble, and no scalpels of lightning sliced the horizon. The sky appeared simply to have crumpled, wearily. A mist floated in under the concrete apron covering the drive outside the lobby entrance, and I watched it roll forward to where we stood. Brief showers visited regularly on summer afternoons—warm air moving eastward shed its moisture as it rose to cross the hills to the west of town, and that moisture would become a phalanx of impressively dark storm clouds. At some point on most summer af
ternoons, the clouds would break free of the hills and descend on the city to deliver what often appeared, from the dark wall of water overhead, to be a storm of serious consequences. The shower usually lasted no more than twenty minutes, though, before the clouds dissolved or moved on, and this pattern was precisely the reason Miranda had scheduled her ceremony for six o'clock. So the pin-pricks of mist against my face, the scent of camphor and ozone in the air: a case could have been made that things were proceeding exactly according to plan.

“And now it's going to rain,” Sandra said. “This wedding is going to kill me.” She had told me she wanted some fresh air, but her true motivation became clear as soon as we exited the lobby: a portly, sunburned gentleman in khaki shorts and a wrinkled oxford was stepping from a white airport van, and Sandra, without the slightest bit of hesitation, asked him for a cigarette. He fumblingly responded in the manner of someone authentically stunned, working to extract a pack from his chest pocket. Having scored her cigarette and then a light from the man, she and I moved down the sidewalk and away from the valets and bellboys. She hugged herself with one arm while the other remained upright, the cigarette poised before her lips. The practiced manner with which she was holding her cigarette implied it wasn't the first she'd enjoyed recently.

“When did you start smoking again?” I asked.

“Five minutes ago,” she said. “And I'm quitting again five minutes from now. Did you want one? I can ask the guy for another.”