Wedding Season (7 page)

“Little Mo. I still can’t believe it.” Gabe’s youngest sister, Maureen, goes by Mo; the other, Christina, a tall, lumpen young woman who shares her father’s tendency to speak without moving his lips, is known to the family as Teeny.

“Believe it,” I tell him. “Then three in July, two in August. And Henry in September, if we’re still alive.”

“Don’t worry, Red. Maybe some of them will get jitters and pick fights and call the ceremonies off.”

“God, are you ever romantic. One of the many things I love about you.”

“It’s the Connubial Summer Tour, USA. We should have roadies.” Gabe laughs. The little oil-burning candle on our table flickers and goes out. Gio, noticing, waddles tableside.

“Look,” he tells us. “This candle has gone out.”

We exchange glances and nod at him.

“Oh, no,” Gio says. “You do not understand. Look, all this oil, it is gone. The candle has burned here for eleven years. No candle has ever finished since I have been working in this place.” He gives us an important smile. “Tonight I will light a new candle for the first time. This is an occasion. Marco, look! A candle has gone out.”

“A candle has gone out,” I tell Gabe. Marco, the elderly host, comes to our table. Together he and Gio examine the candle as reverently as if it were a holy relic.

“We light a new candle for you, my friends.” Marco regards us with a benevolent smile as Gio waddles away. “You must celebrate with us. I bring you wine.” He leaves, and returns with two brimming glasses. Gio waddles back, cradling a new candle in his hands, sets it gently on the table, and pulls a book of matches from his pocket.

“Raise your glasses,” Marco exhorts, and we obey. Gio strikes a match and touches it to the new wick. It sparks, crackles, and then the flame steadies and rises.

“To those things that burn long!” Marco makes a triumphant sort of flourish. Gabe and I toast him. Marco claps a hand to each of our shoulders and returns to the bar.

“What was that all about?” I ask Gabe, when the Italians are out of earshot. “Vatican nostalgia?”

“Longing,” he says. “Mortality, maybe. The comfort of continuity.”

“What do you want to be doing in eleven years?” I whisk my finger back and forth through the candle’s flame.

“I don’t know.” He gives me a lazy smile, and puts his hand over mine to stop me from fidgeting. “This. Something like this.”

“I’ll pencil you in,” I tell him.

T
HE DAY OF
E
RICA’S WEDDING
, I loll around the apartment, trying to pretend I have nothing more strenuous in store for me than reviewing the outline for “Mountain of Desire,” the snowboarding installment of the
Extreme Romance
series. Gabe comes and goes industriously, picking up his suit from the cleaner’s, getting a shoe shine. He pauses in the apartment between errands and watches me shuffle from room to room.

At noon Henry calls. She is in a spitefully good mood. When I answer the phone she is singing “Going to the Chapel” at full volume and off-key.

“Henry, stop or I’ll hang up.”

“Come on, my little bridesmaid!” Henry drawls. “All the Veuve Clicquot in the world awaits your ruby lips, and all you have to do to earn it is take a little teeny walk down a little teeny aisle. You’re still in your pajamas, aren’t you, Joy?”

“Um.” I stalk toward the bathroom, shedding pajamas as I go, the cordless phone cradled between my shoulder and cheek. “No.”

“Good. Because I’m about to walk out the door and hail a cab. I’ll be outside your building in five minutes.” She hangs up.

I stand naked before the bathroom mirror and take inventory: item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two gray eyes
with lids on them. One jaw line, squarish; one forehead of average height and width. Hair: by virtue of my apathy, medium length; by the dictates of my father’s DNA, wildly curling and of a very dark rust color known in polite society as auburn. Physique: on the tall side, angular to bony, no cleavage to speak of, knees still knobby, elbows still lightly scarred from excessive tomboy activity in my callow youth; overall pale and very freckled. Nothing new. Not much to brag about, but not much to complain about, either.

Calculating for Henry Standard Time, I estimate that I have fifteen minutes to spare. I get into the shower, where I remain, thinking of nothing and humming advertising jingles to get “Going to the Chapel” out of my head. At last, I hear the front door shut. Gabe calls my name, and I turn off the water, cursing quietly. I dress at a leisurely pace, collect the garment bag that holds my bridesmaid’s dress, and shuffle into the living room, where Gabe lolls on the sofa with the dog, reading the newspaper.

“There was a message from Henry on the machine.” He looks up. “I think her exact words were ’Stop dawdling in the goddamn shower or you’re going to make us late.’”

“Thank you.” I sit down next to Gabe. He puts an arm around me and continues to read. Francis licks sympathetically at my hand. “This is going to be a shameless orgy of conventionality,” I tell them.

“Don’t you start, Red.” Gabe gives me a little push off the sofa. “I’ll see you at the church at four.”

Gabe may be on my side when it comes to marriage, but in other ways he can be quite traditional. His adherence to social customs, and his occasional impatience with my critiques of and resistance to same, is largely a function of his upbringing—his breeding, as his mother might say.

Growing up in New York, I had wealthy friends, but I didn’t believe in the existence of people like Gabe’s family
until I went to college and met some of my friends’ families: America’s version of the aristocracy, the Pips and Serenas and Edmunds, with their summers abroad and colonial winters in the tropics, their stables and tennis courts and marinas, family jewels and heirloom china and New England estates. The Winslows are of that variety, the rich who are different from you and me. His mother, a Mayflower-family descendant, has never held a job. His father, following in the footsteps of his father before him, was president of some bank before retiring at the age of forty-five. Gabe’s youngest sister is getting married this summer, at the age of twenty-three, to a banker. Her marriage announcement will read something like: “Until recently, Mrs. So and So was an executive assistant at the Ladies’ Aid Society,” which means that she will not malign her husband’s ability to provide by continuing on in the workforce.

The Winslows are regular attendees of charity balls and society teas. They are museum donors and country club members. They are Episcopalians. Several generations of Harvard men were grossly affronted when Gabe chose Yale instead; aunts and cousins were shocked, shocked, when he didn’t pledge a fraternity. And most devastating of all, he dropped his poly-sci major to study photography. The family might never recover from this blow.

I think Gabe’s parents are a little horrified by me, though of course they’re much too well-mannered to ever let on, at least in any direct sort of way. I just have a hunch. My background must seem terribly “bohemian” to them. Both of my parents come from working-class backgrounds; both are first-generation college graduates. As I mentioned before, my mother is a divorce lawyer, twice-divorced. My father is in academe, which has some redeeming dignity to it, but he doesn’t really treat it as a gentleman’s profession, the way a gentleman should. I don’t know how much of this
Gabe’s family actually knows, but sometimes it seems they just sense it. Their radar identifies me as other, not quite nice, not ladylike—Not Our Kind, Dear.

That’s the family, though, not Gabe. As far as I can tell, he’s his own man—as much as anyone can be. He seems to like me despite my inappropriateness. For all I know, he could like me
because
of it; he’s never smoked, he doesn’t have any tattoos, and while Yale may not be Harvard, it’s not the Hell’s Angels, either. It may be, then, that I am Gabe’s rebellion, which I find funny and weirdly gratifying. Compared to my flamboyant, fantastic friends, I know I seem quite average, so the idea that to Gabe I appear eccentric, offbeat, attractively odd, is flattering. Gabe makes me feel unique, and (ironically) who doesn’t like that?

I
WAIT ON
the sidewalk for fully five minutes before Henry pulls up in a taxi. She is wearing a black T-shirt with red lettering that reads
Come to Where the Flavor Is.
I climb in next to her, and no sooner have I closed the car door than she begins to sing “Going to the Chapel” again.

“Don’t make me hurt you,” I tell her. Henry is silent for a moment, and then starts in on “Get Me to the Church on Time.” I punch her arm, and we proceed to sing every wedding-related song we can think of on our way up to Erica’s parents’ apartment. When we get out of the cab, humming “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the driver gives us a look of pure hatred and screeches away down Fifth Avenue.

A maid shows us into the apartment. The other bridesmaids have already arrived, and the living room is a frenzy of blonde. Arrayed across the tasteful sofa sets are Erica’s three sisters, blonde; one childhood friend, very blonde; and the maid of honor, Melody, a peroxide-blonde actress whose wedding we will be attending later this summer. Erica’s
mother, an angular, face-lifted blonde, strides through the apartment, talking soothingly into her cell phone. Erica, blonde and pink-cheeked as a china shepherdess, comes out of the bathroom and runs to us squealing with pleasure, wearing nothing but a lacy ivory garter belt and her string of pearls. She reminds me, in a nice way, of a little pink piglet. I decide against passing on this observation and hug her back, murmuring vague flattering things toward the little pink ear that is crushed against my face. We round the room, exchanging tiny air-kisses as we go.

“Girls, into your dresses, please. The stylists are on their way.” Mrs. Stevenson sweeps through the room clapping her fine-boned hands together like a headmistress directing a spring pageant. The flock of bridesmaids churns in her wake. I bob along, a dark decoy on a sea of blonde.

The Stevensons’ master bedroom is outfitted with a massive picture window that overlooks Central Park, and a bed approximately the size of an Olympic swimming pool. I put my face close to the window, fogging a patch of the glass with my breath, and look out over the park to the distant buildings on the other side. I wonder briefly about how many other apartments up and down this avenue enclose how many other brides, how many hysterical, half-naked bridal entourages, at this very moment.

One of Erica’s sisters, coming in with the bridal gown, claps her hands in perfect imitation of her mother, and we all turn obediently to the serious business of primping. Out froth the bridesmaids’ dresses, which struck me from the very beginning as a dubious proposition and seem even more so en masse. They are elaborate affairs, consisting of long, tangerine-orange satin sheaths—which are viciously fitted and produce a lot of stomach sucking and groaning and assistance with zippers—and creamy chiffon overslips with Empire waists and puffy cap sleeves. Fully arrayed, we
look like a chorus of Greek maidens from a
Disney on Ice
spectacular. I am staring blankly into a full-length mirror when Henry comes up behind me.

“I am Creamsicle Girl,” she whispers to me, and strikes a runway pose. Melody, who is standing nearby, overhears and snorts.

“I was just thinking I look like one of those Christmas oranges wrapped in tissue paper,” she says, sotto voce. “You know, my bridesmaids are going to be in orange, too, and I’m wondering now if it’s just too cruel.” Henry grabs Melody’s hand and twirls her around the room, singing, “Orange you lovely, orange you wonderful,” to the tune of an old Stevie Wonder song, until Erica emerges from the dressing room in her gown, and everything stops.

There is an involuntary moment of silence in the presence of The Dress, The Bride. Even I am not immune, though I can’t ascertain whether my personal hush is a response to the iconic image or group-think or simply to Erica, who looks beautiful and, clichés notwithstanding, radiant.

Before I have time to sort it out, the moment passes, and we proceed to spontaneously enact the ritual reserved for such occasions, and probably performed through the ages by our ancestral mothers: We surge forward, emitting those little pitched, chirping sighs as we swarm around Erica. Her sisters fuss over her like rodents over a store of acorns, fluffing the long train of her skirt, and then there’s a knock on the door and yes, everyone’s decent, and in come Hair and Assistant Hair and Makeup, plucked by Erica’s mother from some elite salon where a haircut would cost my weight in narcotics. The style crew pounce and circle around Erica, cooing and squealing, just as we had done a moment earlier. I wonder briefly if folk dancing had its origins in this impulse.

“Who’s ready to be beautiful?” asks Hair, a gaunt, pony-tailed man, turning from Erica and beaming at us. Assistant Hair and Makeup, two lithe young women in stretchy black pants and enormous sneakers, begin unpacking little metallic cases and setting up their glamour altars. Two of the Stevenson sisters wave their hands and flutter forward. Hair pounces on Henry, and reaching up, runs his hands through her blonde mane.

“Darling,” he says to her, “this is fabulous, fabulous hair. Where did you get this fabulous hair?”

“Black market,” Henry tells him.

“Serge is going to do fabulous things with this hair. How do you feel about an updo, darling?”

“Serge,” says Henry, “I feel just fabulous about it.”

“Fabulous!” enthuses Serge. “Erica,” he calls over his shoulder, “come over when your war paint’s on, darling. And you, sit that shapely behind down right here.” He draws a chair up in front of the window seat for Henry, and she sits her shapely behind down, tossing her head and sweeping dramatically at her skirt like a concert pianist. Serge rummages through the case Assistant Hair has set up for him, and gets to work. Henry makes faces at me. One Stevenson sister, whose hair has become an elaborate mass of loops, seed pearls, and tiny white flowers, cedes her place to another sister, whose mouth sports a hideous orange-red lipstick. I watch as Makeup takes Erica’s face in her hands and turns her head this way and that, gentle as a lover.