We Could Be Beautiful (11 page)

“No. Well, maybe. Sorry. I guess I’m just upset you and Susan didn’t hit it off.”

“We had so little time together. Don’t worry, Catherine. Any friend of yours is a friend of mine. I just want you to be happy.”

•

The next morning, right after he left for work, I called Susan. “Well?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know with him yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“I haven’t spent enough time with him to draw any conclusions.”

I didn’t believe her. “Are you sure?”

“Does he kind of look like a newscaster? He looks like a newscaster whose name should be Jay or something, right?”

“Are you serious? He’s gorgeous!”

“I know! He seems fine. He seems great, okay? I just want you to be happy.”

“God, everyone says that. I am fucking happy!”

“Good,” Susan said, “because you should be.”

8

W
e’d been living together for about a month when I woke up one morning to find William contemplating my face in silence. It was so sweet. Elbows on the bed, chin resting on his fists. His eyes soft at the corners, his full head of gray hair adorably puffed up. His chiseled face wore a youthful expression.

“Good morning,” he said. I wondered how long he’d been waiting to say that.

“Hi.” My voice was sleepy. I touched his hair.

“I’d like to tell you something.”

Fuck, I thought, here it comes: This isn’t working, I have to move out, I can’t do this, I hate your friends, your shop is stupid, I’ve met someone. I had never been dumped in bed before, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen now.

“I have come to a conclusion.”

He touched my arm with his fingertips. If he was going to break up with me, this was a pretty twisted message to send first. He looked right into my eyes when he said it.

“I have come to the conclusion that I love you.”

I may have stopped breathing. I may have wanted not to trust it, to assume he was lying. This was too good to be true. This was too good to be my life. But then I thought, Oh my God, Catherine, you deserve this, so take it.

Instead of blurting out the words and grabbing his dick—I’d done that with so many men—I said it in parts, like all of it mattered.

“I love you, too.”

We made love quietly. At least until the end, when his moan rose and rose, louder and louder, and he screamed my childhood nickname. “Kitty!”

I didn’t come, but I had gotten closer. A lot closer. At some point, I knew, it would happen. If it was going to happen with anyone, it would be with William.

Afterwards I wrapped myself around him. I put my ear on his chest. I heard his heart beating. Fast, fast, and then slower. He touched my hair, stroked my back. I wanted to say it again. Maybe I wanted to make sure it was something we would keep saying to each other. I turned to rest my chin on his chest, looked up at him. “I love you,” I said. My voice sounded sure and real.

•

We went to the café on the corner for brunch. Somehow they managed to have good coffee and good food, which William thought was a real anomaly. We were rosy-cheeked; we held hands. We moved together easily, like we were part of the same machine. When we were together like that, I lost concept of time. It stretched out and contracted and didn’t exist.

When he would leave, even for a second, like now, to go to the bathroom (or the loo, as he called it), I missed his presence. I thought about him all the time. During my sessions with Chris, I would think, Does William know what a burpee is? And my eyebrows. Would he like the new shape the aesthetician and I had agreed on? I’d be at a store picking out dresses based on what I thought he would prefer.

When he returned from the loo, wearing the new jeans I’d bought him—they looked so good—he gave me a peck on the lips like he had missed me, too. We sat there, so in love, drinking the good coffee, lost in each other’s faces. We sat in the sun, our sunglasses on. The air was thick with the start of summer. It was a heat I normally would have called oppressive, but today it felt manageable. I even welcomed it.

“I think the house is done, don’t you?”

If it had been up to me, I could have kept finding things to fix and redo forever, but William was more logical than that. He understood endpoints.

“Yes,” I said, “I think it’s almost done. I’m going to have Lucia reorganize some stuff in the hallway cabinets, but other than that, I think it looks good, don’t you?”

“I do. Our belongings are officially integrated.” He raised his eyebrows twice.

“It’s true.”

“I love you.”

Three times in one morning. I was giddy. “I love you, too.”

At the end of our meal we ordered the chocolate mousse; it had become one of Our Things. William was talking about how the island of Malta was not a place worth visiting when the waiter brought the mousse to the table and set it down incredibly carefully, as if it were a thing that could break. I actually thought this waiter had a mental problem, or was going blind.

Without asking, William spoon-fed me the first bite, and—what? What was this metal thing jabbing me in the mouth? My first thought was, Get the manager! But then, when I saw William’s face, I put it together pretty quickly. The metal thing had to be a ring. He hadn’t gone to the loo. He had gone to find the waiter to make this happen.

Even just feeling it with my tongue I could tell the rock was huge, and when I spit it primly into my open palm (the sunlight seemed to make a spotlight just exactly there), I saw that it was. I licked the chocolate off and William dipped it in his seltzer—huge smile, those brilliant teeth; those teeth were mine now—and when it was clean, he got on his knee and said, with so many people watching, “Catherine West, will you be my wife?”

9

T
he definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, but if the person you are dealing with is not medically sane, does this definition apply?

On Monday I went uptown to try again with my mother. I hoped again that today would be different. The biggest thing I had going for me was that my mother now adored Evelyn after months of hating Evelyn’s guts for allegedly stealing her comb. If she stonewalled me again, I planned to tell her that she had to stop. She had to make peace with my future husband. She had to accept this. She had to accept me and my choices and my life. I got worked up in the cab with a heated inner monologue: You have to accept my choices, Mom! I am an adult! Accept my choices! Accept this! Accept me, Mom! Fuck!

My ring. It was huge. It was an ice cube. I’d moved all the other jewelry off my left hand to make room for its presence. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

When Mom and I got to Da Castelli—a particularly arduous walk; she kept stopping to ask where we were—and sat down in our regular booth, I laid my palm flat on the table in front of her. “Mom, look.”

She didn’t look down but straight at me instead. Was there distance in her eyes? Or was this how my mother had always looked? She seemed to float in and out of herself. She was there and then not there and then maybe there again. Her hair was tied back in a severe chignon like a schoolmarm’s today; her makeup was a little heavy. Were those fuchsia accents in her eye shadow? She wore a royal-blue silk blouse and a pearl necklace. She ran her fingers back and forth along the pearls.

I flapped my sad hand on the table. “My ring, Mom, look at my ring.”

She looked down, and tapped the diamond once. She said nothing to me, but when the waiter appeared with her prosecco (impressive—she hadn’t even ordered it yet), she said, “Thank you very much, kind sir,” which was a lot more than she usually said to waiters.

“Mom, I’m getting married.”

She looked at me like I was a moron. “Catherine, I am aware of that.”

“You are?”

“Of course I am.”

My face twisted up in the mirror behind her. “Really?”

“What do you take me for?” This was one of Mom’s stock one-liners. She had said it to my father all the time: “What do you take me for, Bruce?” (My father’s reply: “Certainly not an idiot, Elizabeth!”)

“Okay,” I said. It was hard not to keep looking at myself in the mirror. Not because I was obsessed with my reflection, not because I was a narcissist, but just because it was there. “Do you know who I’m marrying?”

“Fernando Delarus.”

“No, Mom,” I said, “no.”

“Who then?”

I braced myself. “William Stockton.”

“Who?” She looked confused, like she had never heard the name. I thought this was good. I thought I might be getting a new reaction.

“William Stockton.”

Then her face changed. She was still looking at me, but her gaze had turned inward. Her eyes went blank; she was no longer there.

“Mom,” I said, “I’m so sorry William broke your vase.” I tried to sound like I really was sorry. Intonation was important. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it. I’m sure he’d be happy to buy you a new one now.”

“It’s
voz,
Catherine, not
vayce
.”

“You’re right, Mom.” I looked distressed in the mirror. “I’m sorry William broke your voz.”

“I don’t understand anything you are saying to me, Catherine.”

“William broke your voz and he is very sorry.”

“William Stockton?” She said this as though she had just thought of the name herself, as though I hadn’t just said it.

“William. Stockton. Yes.”

For a second this seemed to register, and I thought I could feel my mother, the old version of my mother, sitting there with me at the table. She took a long inhale through her nose. One nostril turned into a slit and the other one didn’t. This was a side effect left from the nose job. “He…”

“What? What?” I looked distressed in the mirror. “What?”

“He’s not good enough for you,” she said finally.

“Why? Because he doesn’t come from money?”

“Catherine,” she said.

“Why? Tell me why.”

She closed her eyes—her lids were like tissue paper now, her eyelashes like black lace ripped apart—and when she opened them again, I could see even before she spoke that she was gone again. She was no longer my mother. She was just another parent who had been taken away from me, and I felt very sorry for myself.

“Where is my veal with rosemary?” she said.

I didn’t have the energy to explain that this wasn’t Silvano’s or that the dish she would be having was salmon pasta, or that it was very good here. I didn’t tell her that she lived in a home now that was all fucking yellow, or that she had Alzheimer’s, and that it was so hard to deal with, so incredibly hard, and that sometimes I didn’t know if her life was worth living.

In the mirror I looked so honest that I almost believed it myself. “Don’t worry, Mom,” I said. “Your veal is coming.”

10

I
t was a small engagement party.
An Intimate Gathering of Friends and Family,
the invitation said. I wore pink chiffon. William wore a blue blazer. Dierdre who was married to Russell who worked with William said, “You two look like you belong on the top of a wedding cake!” She was drunk, but she was right.

It was a pretty afternoon, sun-dappled and not too hot. Crisp champagne and well-dressed people, smiling and laughing, and my heels were even comfortable. At least they were a little more comfortable than usual. I checked the doorway for my mother—no, still not here.

The jazz band wore cream suits with bright green handkerchiefs and played just loud enough, and all the caterers with their little trays looked like models. I had chosen the very best canapés: smoked salmon with dill crème fraîche on sesame lavash, tequila prawns with bacon, cucumber with whipped feta and sun-dried tomatoes, roasted cinnamon pear bruschetta, olive crostini. These were presented on glimmering silver trays with green napkins that matched the handkerchiefs on the band.

Jeff had done a spectacular job of improving the roof garden with not much notice. He had modeled it after the plants on the High Line that William and I liked so much—long grasses and purple wisteria in ten-foot-long gray wooden beds. Bouquets of baby’s breath lined the entire perimeter of the roof in ascending tiers. Jeff had installed a surrounding staircase just for that. It gave the impression that we were on a cloud, a dreamy little slice of heaven, albeit a rectangular one.

A dozen people from William’s work were there. He was so likable. In just a few months he’d gotten this many people to come to his engagement party. Besides Russell and Dierdre, there was a blond guy named Kurt from Arizona, who looked more like an actor than a banker, and Stellan, a short Swedish man with too-wide lapels and a buzz cut, and Fiona, William’s assistant, who was pleasant and frumpy (I was glad about that) and who spoke in an even more overly articulate way than William did, with the separated syllables of a GPS machine.

Stan and Max had come with their mothers, Beatrice and I had forgotten the name of Max’s mom. Both women were stylish and trim. Beatrice was Australian, and oddly pale for being Australian, and wore a large straw hat with a purple bow on it. Max’s mom was slight—her big blue Birkin miniaturized her even further—and when she lifted her sunglasses at one point to remove something from the corner of her eye, I noticed the worry lines on her face. They seemed natural and permanent. It was hard to imagine that face asleep.

The two of them were blending in nicely. Beatrice got into an animated conversation with William’s boss, Michael, and Max’s mom nodded politely as my architect, Carl, who was such a Chatty Cathy (he never shut up), explained something with his hands. I did wonder where their husbands were, and felt a small sense of pride about William being a sturdy male figure in their lives.

Max and Stan were hanging out in the far corner drinking orange juice and taunting Herman with branches of baby’s breath they’d pulled from the pots. They wore dress shirts and blazers: Max in navy and Stan in red, which had definitely been a poor choice on his mother’s part. Redheads can’t wear red. It never works.

Maya’s short yellow dress was working. She gave me a heartfelt hug and said, “Hey William,” as though they were already friends, which was so sweet. For maybe the first time ever, her hair was not in its doorknob bun. It hung down to her ass instead.