London Is the Best City in America (22 page)

She sat up taller, almost as if she’d reached a new resolution. And I wondered how many times she’d been in this position before. Knowing what she knew, and pushing it away. Waiting until she calmed down enough to keep going. To do what she thought she needed to do.

And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t only seeing her anymore. I was seeing myself also. All of this time, I had seen similarities between Josh and me, which was part of the reason that I felt so mad at him, so angry and upset thinking he was screwing up his life too. But similarities were right here as well. Between Meryl and me. If I had stayed with Matt, this could be my wedding day too. I could just as easily be the one pushing aside what I didn’t want to know, so I could move toward where I wanted to be. With him.

In how many hours was I going to see Matt again? And, just like that, was I going to fall back in? What made me think it would be any different this time? Because he said so? Or because—still like Meryl—I wanted to believe what I needed to believe? That this time, he wouldn’t stop loving me. He wouldn’t start seeing someone else or get distant or disappear on me in all the ways that really mattered most. He wouldn’t make it all about him.

Meryl started to stand up.

“How can I help you?” I said.

“I have to finish getting ready,” she said. “I should go and start putting my dress on.”

“There’s about five million buttons in the back of it,” she said, heading toward the bedroom. “Of the dress. It looks beautiful done up, but it’s a total nightmare getting there. I’m going to need your help. It’s a nightmare like you wouldn’t believe.”

I stood up to follow her. “Just show me what to do,” I said.

Statistics from a ten-year Princeton University study on the nature of modern marriages and domestic partnerships indicate that over 75 percent of the time it is the woman who ends a marriage or a long-term living situation. The man may do something to make her want to leave—he may be unfaithful or lie to her or push her away—but ultimately, if she doesn’t leave him, he will stay also. After time, he will want to work it out and be good to her again, and try to make things better. And if that’s what the woman really wants—if she just stays still long enough—in the end, she’ll get her wish. Psychologists who conducted the study said the reason for this was the same across the board: men don’t want to be the bad guy. They don’t want to make a mistake they can’t unmake. They want, only, for someone else to decide.

I couldn’t help but think of this while I waited in the living room for Meryl to finish getting ready. Wasn’t that precisely what was going on here, after all? She had waited it out, and she and Josh had made it. They were about to more than make it, actually, embarking on the next big step together.

Meryl called out to me, for the third time, that she needed just a couple more minutes.

“I’m getting nervous to show you,” she said.

“Maybe that means you’re supposed to,” I said.

I had no idea if this was true, but it sounded good. And I was getting a little tired of sitting in the living room by myself. I had turned all the fans off so they wouldn’t blow on her, but even with the air-conditioning set on full blast, it wasn’t exactly comfortable in there—the air more milky-warm than anything else. I was ready to go downstairs, where Bess and my mom and Mrs. Moynihan-Richards were waiting, and where, hopefully, everything was a little cooler.

I went into the kitchen to get our bouquets out of the refrigerator: small white lilies for me, one long orchid for Meryl. It was then—a bouquet in each hand—that I heard a knock on the suite door. I assumed it was Bess, who I could only imagine didn’t at all like being relegated to the downstairs waiting area for so long.

But when I got to the door, standing there before me with his tuxedo on—his white bowtie already tied around his neck—was Josh.

“It’s you,” I said in disbelief.

“It’s me.” He smiled down at me, putting his hand on my shoulder tentatively. He had a line of small sweat beads right above his mouth, running slowly down the sides of his face. “You look nice,” he said, which I knew was also his way of saying we were okay.

In spite of everything—or maybe because of it—I couldn’t ever remember feeling so relieved. I smiled at him, a genuine smile, and told him that he did too. I didn’t say anything about the sweat on his face.

I did feel compelled to say something about it being bad luck, Josh seeing Meryl before the wedding. I couldn’t help it. As far as I was concerned, at this point, they really needed some good luck on their side.

“It just doesn’t seem wise,” I whispered. “To take any risks. You know what I’m saying?”

“I hear you,” Josh said, wiping at his face with the back of his hand. “But I don’t think Meryl’s big on bad luck right now. She wanted me to walk her down there. I’m just doing what I’m told.”

I handed him her orchid, making sure he took it tightly, from the middle, so it didn’t sag. “She’s all yours,” I said, already moving out of the suite to give them some time alone.

But then, as if on cue, Meryl appeared in the living room doorway in full attire. I had helped her get ready, but I hadn’t seen her completely ready. Her dress was beaded and mermaid-shaped, flipping out, in a circle, on the floor. She was wearing these long, sparkling earrings that fell down all the way to her shoulders, a soft lace veil falling loosely behind her ears.

She looked like an absolute dream. I could hear Josh breathing in, a sharp intake—his hand, with the orchid in it, moving instinctively to his stomach. And I wish—I really wish—that I could begin to describe what it was like seeing her being seen that way by him. It was like watching a memory.

“You look amazing,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, looking right back at him.

I looked back and forth between them. They didn’t take their eyes off each other, not even for a second. Eye to eye, unblinking.

It made me think of a story that I’d read about Quaker weddings: how if you looked at each other a certain way, for a certain period of time, you married yourselves. That
that
was the whole of it. The deal done and sealed. It was so intimate a moment—so intimate a thing to watch—I wished I could disappear instantaneously, leaving the two of them alone. It was also hard not to look.

But before I could make my exit—before Josh could move closer to Meryl or Meryl could move closer to him; before Josh even said hello to Meryl, really—there was a loud noise in this glamorous hotel room, the loudest of noises, almost like someone had dropped a two-ton brick right above us. Or two hundred of them.

Then—in the quickest succession—the lights started to flicker brightly, and then less brightly, and there was a loud
whoosh
and the water spurted out of the air conditioner and the dimmers stopped being dim and everything all around us went completely out and off.

And everything went black.

One of my very first nights in Narragansett, a storm came in off the water, and the entire town lost its power. I was sitting downstairs at the Bon Vue, a local oceanside bar that—with the exception of college Thursdays—was exclusively frequented by town natives: carpenters and fishermen and store owners, the people who lived nearby. When the lights went out, everyone got quiet for a second, one lone voice calling out, “Here we go again.” Then the candles were pulled out, the battery-radio turned on high, and everyone went back to drinking. Not so in one of the most prestigious hotels in New York City. First came the screeching, almost in harmony, coming out of almost every guest room. Doors were opening and closing, opening again. It wasn’t so much the loss of light, but the loss of cold air—the air-conditioning reserve already starting to soften, heat coming up and in from the outside.

From up in Suite 2401, there was no way to know exactly what was going on downstairs: people running through the lobby and out onto the street to see if the power outage was widespread or exclusive only to the Essex House. Someone would say it was definitely all of Central Park South, someone else arguing that the Plaza, down the block, was fine. Hotel staff were gathering candles and towels in preparation for the night, starting to empty out the refrigerators. Thirty-four pounds of fresh fish were put on ice and then thrown away. For good measure, one hotel guest fainted center lobby, announcing she had heat stroke. Then she asked for a better room.

Upstairs, where we were, people were walking outside onto the balconies, into the natural light, talking to each other. What had happened? Where was the power? The guy on the balcony next to us announced that he was a scientist, and he was certain this had something to do with “overexertion of the main air-conditioning mechanism” downstairs.

“That takes a scientist?” Meryl whispered to me, walking back inside.

She took the hotel freesia candles out of the bathroom, and we sat in a semicircle around them on the living room floor.

“Aren’t you worried your dress is going to wrinkle?” I said. “Let me get you a towel to sit on.”

She waved me off. “Don’t worry about it. In a couple of minutes, this dress is going to be stuck to me like glue anyway.” She started to smile at me, her eyes lighting up. “It’s kind of amazing though, isn’t it? My mother is literally going to have a nervous breakdown.”

I started to tell her not to worry about it—not to worry about any of it—that they’d get the power back on before the ceremony. But on a Sunday afternoon, during a holiday weekend, I seriously doubted that was true.

“You’re not upset, Mer?” Josh said.

“Not at all.” She shook her head. “Are you? At least now this wedding is going to be memorable. Not just another hotel wedding with the same hotel band and hotel flowers. Everyone at
our
wedding will be too busy standing around all hot and miserable. We might actually get to have a good time watching them.”

Josh smiled at her, as an answer. It was weird, though, the smile—I didn’t know how to read it. It was like all of a sudden he was watching her, watching all of this, from a great distance. I tried to make him look at me, make eye contact, and remind him he needed to focus. But he wouldn’t turn my way.

“You know what?” I said, standing up. “I’m going to try to head Bess off at the pass. Make sure everything’s going okay down below.”

“Things are definitely not okay down below,” Meryl said. “You’re better off up here with us until absolutely necessary.”

“It’s going to be a long walk down,” Josh added.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “You guys just hang out up here a little longer and try to stay cool. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even have the elevators running by the time you have to go down.” I figured it didn’t hurt to be hopeful.

“I’m betting they won’t,” Josh said, not so hopeful.

I started heading to the door and then thought of something. “How are you going to get in touch with us down there?” I said. “If there’s some type of problem or something?”

“Some type bigger than this?” Meryl said.

It was a good point.

“I’ll tell you what, Emmy,” Josh said. “If there are any more problems, I’ll just scream really loud.”

“Good idea,” I said before leaving them alone, closing the door behind me as I went.

It was a very unhappy thing trying to walk down twenty-four high flights of stairs in a pair of strappy three-and-a-half-inch heels. I could feel them becoming a part of my feet: nail hitting heel, heel hitting calf. Around floor eleven, I decided to try a different tack, and take on the rest of the walk barefoot, especially after I saw a group of very blond sorority sisters from the University of Texas-Austin doing the exact same thing: whipping off their pumps, flipping them four flights below.

“Go for it,” one of them whispered to me, holding up her own sandals as evidence that I should. Her nails were bright pink—the exact same shade as the heels in her hand. I almost admired this. “It’s totally allowed in these situations.”

It was also apparently allowed to use the hotel blackout as an excuse to get rip-roaring drunk in the middle of the afternoon—not that I would normally be one to judge for making such a decision. I could have used a drink myself right about then, and maybe would have asked for one, except that one of the girls, the whisperer of shoe-advice, happened to drop and break her bottle of Amstel Light as I took my left shoe off and stepped, newly barefoot, right on top of it.

“Oh, my God!” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

“Yes,” I said, moving down a few more steps and trying to remove the several small slivers of beer glass wedged into my big toe, down the entire length of my sole. “Glass will do that.”

It felt like one of the sole pieces hadn’t come out—or at least a sliver of a piece hadn’t come out—my skin tightening around whatever was still caught inside. I stood up anyway, ready to hobble the rest of the way down alone, and try to figure out a way to warn Meryl and Josh not to step into the same thing.

“Can I help?” she said.

I shook my head. “You know what?” I said. “I think I’ll take it from here by myself.”

By the time I made it to the Grand Salon, the hotel was really starting to boil. The air on reserve had drowned in the massive space. I tried to search for my mother in the midst of the chaos. The hotel staff was weaving in and out of the several hundred folding chairs set up for the ceremony. They were holding tiny paper fans—the kind that little kids would carry around— putting one on each chair. The one I’d had when I was younger was bright pink, and as I remember, Josh used to make fun of me for trying to use it. “Don’t you know that the energy you use to fan yourself makes you hotter than just doing nothing at all?”

He was going to
love
having those here.

“Emmy! Thank God!”

I looked over to see my mom running toward me. She was in such a state—so preoccupied and consumed—that even when she reached me, she didn’t notice how I was standing on the ball of my foot. One blessing.

“Emmy,” she said again. “The Moynihan-Richardses are smoking a doobie with Bess in the back room.”