Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (32 page)

His words bounce off me.

“The love, the sense of family, the kids, the house. I thought: that's the price I have to pay for freedom. Then I met you, and it just, you know . . .” His speech falters; he takes my hand. “. . . grabbed me. That I
can
go back to that dream. It's just . . . the most clear, the most compelling . . .” His voice trails, regroups. “. . .
vision.
As though I can be forgiven everything.”

His words scatter among the embroidered pillows and crocheted throw blankets until they're silenced by my parents' return.

My father settles onto the sofa opposite me. His gray, curly hair is silver in the firelight, his face kind. Concerned. “Tracy,” he says.

Slowly I blow across the scalding surface of the cocoa. “Have you considered mutual funds?”

“This is where the bride would come down,” says the assistant events coordinator as she strides along the bare pavement between the dark, barbed-looking shrubs of the Botanical Gardens. I slow, falling behind Yolanda, who has locked step with our hostess.

This foray was, needless to say, Yolanda's idea. “We'll have our walk today,” she said this morning. “I promise. We'll just do it someplace else that I have in mind. It'll be like homeopathy. Try a teeny dose of wedding planning. You'll see it's not toxic. You might even start to imagine yourself walking down the aisle with him.”

“And here,” continues our hostess breathlessly—she of shining
countenance, the sort of girl who loses sleep worrying that she'll cry at her own wedding and she's not sure waterproof mascara really holds—“is where the guests would sit.”

We stand in a paved clearing. Silvery tree trunks and bare metal trellises surround us, the winter beauty of an urban garden. One might almost forget the city bristling a few hundred yards away—except for the beeping of a truck, backing up somewhere beyond the circular drive.

I have to be at a faculty meeting in fifty minutes. “What about the traffic noise?” I say.

Yolanda rolls her eyes. I'm not opening my heart to the wedding spirit.

Our hostess's smile is all sweetness: I've made her day by asking. “In the spring,” she breathes, “when the leaves are put on, they really break the sound barrier.”

WhhhooooooshhhBOOM!
Here comes the bride.

“That'll be perfect,” says Yolanda.

“Congratulations,” I say to Jeff. “Richard must be thrilled. And I hope the department there is as good as it sounds.”

He purses his lips. “Mad at me for leaving?”

I sigh.

“How's your work, O bride?”

I shrug.

He raises his coffee for a toast. “Keep your pecker up, as the Brits would say. You're going to get tenured. I'll fly up from Atlanta to lead the voting parade next month.”

I nod my thanks. “I hope you can persuade them. I suspect you've lost a bit of political clout.”

“Don't be absurd. Yes, I've lost clout—I turned into a ghost the instant I announced my resignation. No one's going to invest in camaraderie if they know you won't be around to reciprocate. But my status isn't going to hurt you. You never needed my help for tenure.”

Eileen appears outside Jeff's office doorway. “
Good
afternoon,” she sings. “I thought I'd hand-deliver these.” In her hand is a stack of photocopies.

Jeff sips his coffee without glancing at her. “You know,” he says to me sotto voce, “how Thomas Pynchon's never been photographed, or seen in public? America's mystery author? Well, I've solved the mystery.” Almost imperceptibly he tilts his head toward Eileen. ”It's
her.
”

Eileen approaches his desk. And then, as if she's just noticed me, “Oh, Tracy!”

Jeff leans back in his chair, arms folded.

“So have you set a date yet?” Eileen prods, still holding Jeff's photocopies.

“Not yet, Eileen.”

“
Really?
” She plants her broad bottom on the edge of Jeff's desk and, hugging the photocopies to her bosom, faces me. “Why not?”

Jeff laughs aloud.

Yolanda leads me into the photographer's apartment. “She's supposed to be the best,” she whispers. “I had to call in a favor to get this appointment, so behave yourself.”

“You said we were going to your yoga class.”

“We are. After.”

“And you said you just needed my company on a quick errand of
yours.
”

“That's right. This is my errand. It's my
mission.
It's not like I have much else going on in my life these days anyway.” Patently untrue—
Why the Flower Loves the Rod
is a week into its second run, and Yolanda has had a surge in audition callbacks for other projects. Still, since my engagement she's never been too busy to let me trail her, miserable company though I've been. “I'm going to show you,” she says, “that wedding planning isn't too clichéd for an intellect like you. And it
doesn't
have to be terrifying. And this way if you like this photographer's work, you can call her the minute you set a date.”

On the walls of the photographer's apartment are large color wedding portraits and soft-focus hilltop picnic scenes. Most are shots of the photographer's own family—the women straight-backed and tailored, the men trim-bellied and hair-gelled. The photographer—a woman in her mid-fifties with frosted hair, designer glasses, an impeccable mauve suit and matching manicure—settles her sample album on the table.

Glancing to my right, I indicate a photo hanging on the wall:
a generously sized portrait of a bride and groom surrounded by a half-dozen others, including the photographer herself in a gold lamé dress. “Your children?”

“That's my son,” says the photographer with pride. Her fingernails click briskly against the tabletop. “He's divorced now. But we all look so good in that portrait I couldn't discard it.” She smiles fondly at the picture. “So I lasered in one of my cousin's daughters. The body in the wedding dress is Steve's ex-wife, but the face is his cousin Emma.”

Emma's plump, freshly scrubbed face looks somewhat disoriented atop a slim, lovely figure, about to be wed to her second cousin. And it is under Emma's glazed smile that I am led, page by page, through the perfect pictorial story my wedding could be. Price tag: $4,200.

Yolanda, doggedly attentive, looks like she's in pain.

“
Everyone
marries under false pretenses.” The deli cook slams down her heavy pot. “Why do you think they bother making the vows so binding? Doesn't matter if you've known the person your whole life, you're still in for a rude shock.”

“So what?” Her husband brandishes a cleaver. “After a few years your spouse is just a force you maneuver around.” He takes aim at a chicken breast.

Stepping out of the deli onto the sidewalk I take refuge in my headphones. The radio is tuned to an R and B station. “
Wedlock,
” Laura Lee wails into my ears,

is a padlock
when you're married to a no-good man.

I try to cross the street, find the traffic signals unintelligible, freeze amid the flow of pedestrians.

Girl, when you cut the cake don't make a big mistake
Make sure of who you love
Honey, I'm telling you it's easy to get into
But hard to get out of

A sledder whizzing down the snowless avenue slows to offer me a lift. It's Ethan Frome.
Hop on,
he says.

Adam strides along Riverside Park, bare hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket.

“Thanks for meeting me in the middle of the day,” I say.

He shrugs, then blows on his hands and slaps them together. “What's going on? I've only got twenty minutes 'cause we've got some damn meeting.” Pulling a pair of drumsticks from his back pocket, he breaks stride and raps a sharp riff on the metal-pipe fence. “How's the fiancé? He still the man?”

“I'm not sure, Adam.” I slow my words: a vain attempt to steady my voice. “The way I fell in love with him was just different, from everything else before. But so much feels just
wrong
now.” It's the last of November, the air snappy. I shiver despite my gloves and coat. “And there's a ton, a ton I don't know about him. And I wasn't ready to get engaged. And now this last month has been Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Suddenly I'm supposed to just leap into a wedding gown, beaming. Nobody's acting normal. Including me.”

Without glancing at me, Adam drums along the fence.

“I just don't get why he proposed so soon,” I add.

Adam strikes a sharp chime on a post, then resumes a tattoo on the top rail. “He thought you two had an understanding.”

“But listen—” The mountains laid low, the valleys upraised: I am turning to Adam Freed for advice. “How could he have missed the fact that I wasn't ready to get engaged yet?”

“He thought you were just being shy.”

“
Shy?
Why would I be shy about my own engagement?” But even as I protest I see Adam is right. I
was
shy. George raised the issues of children and long-term commitment for weeks, and I kept myself ignorant for fear of overreaching. I was afraid—this a full generation after feminism was declared victorious—to break the magic by being too assertive. I was cowed by love, terrified I'd want more than he was willing to give, terrified I'd want less.

With a whirl, Adam brings down his sticks and crashes them on the roof of a trash bin; this proves so satisfying that he braces his sneakers against the bin's broad base and executes a solo loud enough that two patrolling police officers stop to listen from a distance.

I raise my voice. “He's acting just . . . not like George.”

It's hard to make out Adam's words over the din. “Something must be up.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Suddenly he says he's self-doubting or something. He's afraid he won't be good at supporting us, or some damn thing. It makes no sense. Plus, all of a sudden he's wrapped up with his father again—he's got this icy fundamentalist father he'd given up on, only now George seems to care what he thinks.”

Adam shrugs without missing a beat. “All that could flip a guy out,” he says. “Married guys think they have to know how to run the farm. And fight off intruders. And do CPR on the manual transmission. The dinner check's gonna get handed to them for the rest of their lives. They think they have to be action heroes. That's why I'm marrying”—a crash on the metal bin—“a weightlifter millionairess.”

“But why wouldn't—” My words are drowned out.

“Is the deal that you're not sure about George altogether”—three enormous crashes followed by a drumroll crescendo—“or is it that you know he's your guy, but you just don't want the whole marriage deal yet?”

My voice deflates. “I don't even know,” I say shakily, doubtful Adam can hear. “All of a sudden he's like another person. He gets where he's not even talking to me . . . it's like he's talking to this . . .
agenda.
I can barely remember who he is.”

Adam stops drumming. “Then you should break off the engagement.”

I search his face: he's not kidding. “I don't want to,” I shoot back, surprising myself. “I don't want to lose him. I don't know what to do.”

“Jeez, Trace, you sound fucking scared. You seem to be under the impression that George can just
marry
you.”

“Can't he?”

“Not without you marrying him back. You have power. What's this with the sudden wet-noodle act? You can tell him you want an eight-year engagement, and you want to get married on Lake Serenity on the moon, and”—his eyebrows bounce—“you want
me
to perform the ceremony. You can tell him anything you like. I mean, he'll either go for it or not, but you get some say in this too. This is
your
damn engagement, right?”

I hesitate, then nod.

“What does George say about this freak-out of yours?”

“He doesn't exactly know how bad it is.”

Adam looks appalled. “You're joking.”

“Everybody said not to push him too hard, or he'd bolt. Everybody said it would leave a scar.”

“Everybody. You mean, women?”

I nod, suddenly embarrassed.

“You mean my sister?”

Another nod.

“Crapola. My sister's smart but she's also a moron. She thinks men are made of glass. If this guy loves you, it's not going to break him in half to hear you're fucked over by the engagement. I mean,
he'll
be fucked over, but he'll deal. And if he doesn't, you're better off knowing that's the kind of life you'd of been signing on for. Besides, if you don't tell him what's up, you're doomed. Either you'll start foaming at the mouth and you'll break off the engagement the day before the wedding, or else you'll be, like, Mrs. Robot Wife.”

I start to cry, but it feels like relief. I feel like hugging Adam. He seems to know this, and resumes walking. I say, “This is the most helpful conversation I've—”

He flings out his arms to form a great Y, drumsticks piercing the heavens in acknowledgment of the multitudes' adulation.

George meets me at the entrance to the park. He wears a navy sweater under his black wool jacket. His shoulders are broad, his cheeks rosy, his breath a white plume in the new-hatched cold. He looks indisputably, wondrously solid. I tell myself: trust this man.

He takes my gloved hand. Our fingers, too thick to interlace, settle into a loose, insensate hold. We set off along the edge of Sheep Meadow, past a scattering of pedestrians dressed in dark colors, collars raised against a chill deep enough to make your ears glow with pain.