London Is the Best City in America (15 page)

I imagined them sneaking off into the night, with only their keys, thinking better of subjecting themselves to the scrutiny of all the unspoken questions certain to fly their way later this evening—everyone wanting to understand why two relatively successful professors chose to give up a child for adoption. The way Meryl had explained it, they just didn’t believe they would have been good at rearing a child. Something told me they probably weren’t entirely wrong on that front.

“Dr. Moynihan-Richards?” I said, calling out into the strange emptiness. “Mrs. Moynihan-Richards?”

I got no reply.

“My mom just wanted you to know that you’re welcome upstairs at the party. Whenever you’re ready to come upstairs.” This was great. I was talking to no one. “Or, whatever you want to do. Your decision,” I said.

I headed back up the stairs, closing the door tightly behind me, but not before I turned the light switch off again—brightness disappearing behind me—in case that would make them ready to come out.

In my room, I found Meryl standing in front of the one wall mirror, four wide, round curlers in her hair, putting her makeup on. Her dress was already on: a short, black lacy thing that fell mid-thigh. She looked gorgeous. Josh was sitting on the bed behind her, watching her in the mirror, his hands folded on his lap. She was concentrating really hard on the lip gloss application, and—I thought—she didn’t notice me.

I started to creep back out of the room, undetected, but then—when I had one foot still in the doorway—Meryl turned toward me.

“Hey, you,” she said, holding her lip gloss midair. “You running away without even saying hi to me? I know I’m not exactly the world’s fanciest bride here, but still. Don’t I deserve a little attention?”

“Of course,” I said, curling my hands behind my back. “Of course you do. I wanted to say hi to you. I just have to go to the bathroom. I have to go the bathroom pretty badly.”

I looked over at Josh, who was looking at me so apologetically that I almost forgave him for making me a part of all of this. Then I turned back to Meryl, who looked—even in curlers, even half-ready—so polished, so graceful. She had tried over the years to impart to me all those things that came so naturally to her: had shown me how to wash my hair in horse shampoo, how to let the guy lead when you slow-dance, how to eat oysters on the half-shell. Anything she could do to offer up the things that having a big sister did for you. How had I repaid her today? By being, at the very least, untruthful? At the most, disloyal? Questioning, even now, if this was where Josh belonged? It was too much for me. I started hopping from foot to foot, remembering my lie about having to pee.

“We’ve been in the car forever,” I said. And as soon as the words were out, I could feel my eyes opening wide, worrying that I’d slipped—that Meryl didn’t know we’d been driving, but she just opened her arms to signal me in for a hug. I really thought I was going to be sick.

I moved toward her anyway.

“Josh was telling me what happened on the way back here with Officer Z,” Meryl said when she pulled away. “Is that really his name? Sounds like you two had a little road-trip adventure today.”

I looked over at Josh, confused. Why was he telling her about Officer Z? Certainly not because he had disclosed what we were doing in Officer Z’s territory to begin with. I wondered, though, if it made him feel better to tell her things somewhere near the truth. If that made the lying seem smaller. I tried to piece together in my mind where he’d told her we were. Maybe Rhode Island, still, but for me—not him. Maybe Josh had said he had there with me today because something troubling was going on with me.

“I’m just sorry, Meryl,” I said. “That we’re so late. We didn’t want to be. We didn’t mean to be.”

“My God,” she said. “Don’t apologize. I was just hoping you would have gotten back earlier, so we could have watched some of your tapes together. I want to see a little of all this research we keep hearing about. I bet you’re getting somewhere amazing with all this.”

I looked into the corner of my room where I had left them—the tapes—but the garbage bag wasn’t there anymore. I felt a panic start to rise. But before I could go anywhere with it, Meryl followed my eyes to the same corner spot.

“Oh, I moved them. I’m sorry. I should have told you right away that I moved them. People have just been coming in and out of here, and I didn’t want anything to happen to them. I put them in the corner of your bathroom to keep them safe. I figured there would be less ground traffic in there.”

Then she looked back at Josh, her smile all gone, her eyes looking all worried. And I wondered, again, what it was she knew.

But Josh just shook his head. “Don’t do it,” Josh said.

“Don’t do what?” I asked.

He kept shaking his head, his eyes still down. But Meryl was facing me again. “Look, I know Josh wanted me to wait to tell you,” she said. “But I can’t. I can’t look at you and wait. I can’t stand you not knowing when I know you’d really want to know. Oh, I’m making it worse. I should just say it already, shouldn’t I? I know I should.”

I looked back and forth between them. The way this was going down, I had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t possible—was it?—that he had told Meryl about Elizabeth already. It couldn’t be. I was no more than five minutes behind him coming up here. You couldn’t fit an explanation into that time even if you wanted to try to fit one in. There would be more questions than answers. There would be a need for significantly more time.

And then Meryl took a deep breath and started to talk.

“I ran into Matt today,” she said.

I knew I must have heard wrong. I was so sure of it that I just kept looking at her, not saying anything.

She nodded her head. “A few hours ago,” she said.

“My Matt?”

“Your Matt.”

I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t even begin, really, to get a handle on what that might have meant. I just kept envisioning scenes in my head: the two of them walking down that same stretch of Fifth Avenue near Union Square, or hitting the same street corner near Grand Central Terminal, Matt leaving the architecture firm—where he’d started putting in Saturday hours—to have a cigarette, Meryl on her way out here. Or maybe they had been near our old West Village apartment. Still Matt’s West Village apartment. Two-eighty-five West Street. A small, dilapidated townhouse in between two gentrified townhouses. Owned by one person each. One family each sharing the space we shared with nine other apartments.

I felt it so strongly, the smell of that hallway: its inevitable blend of cherry alcohol and dried fish. We’d stayed up all night the night we moved in, hopelessly lighting scented candles to cancel out the smell, Matt painting a miniature solar system on our bedroom ceiling—Orion’s belt in one far corner, Vega the strongest star in a summer sky in the other. An Olympic sprint runner eventually moved upstairs. He would do a thousand jumping jacks, nightly, right above our heads. Above those stars. It became a little like living in an earthquake.

“Come sit down for a minute,” Josh said now, moving down on the bed farther, making room for three of me.

Meryl motioned to the bed too. “Go sit,” she said.

And I could see from the way they were both looking at me, I must have been doing something scary. By the way Meryl was reaching for me, I must have been walking backward. I was walking backward without even realizing it—right out the door.

“Just sit down on the bed for one minute, babe,” Meryl said. “I’ll explain everything.”

But before she could even start, I realized how much I didn’t want to hear. If she saw him today—if she saw Matt—he was okay. He was walking somewhere, where he would have to be okay to walk. Whatever else she wanted to tell me about the run-in—if she wanted to tell me he was in love with someone or moving to Alaska or that he hated me—I couldn’t hear it.

“You know what? Just give me a second, first. Okay? Before you tell me anything else, I really have to go to the bathroom first. I already told you guys that. I really have to go.”

And then, as fast as I’ve ever moved in my life, I raced toward the bathroom, mine and Josh’s, and shut the door tightly behind me. Is there any way to explain this moment without it seeming dramatic? I was seeing stars. I was seeing great white blocks in front of my eyes. I was seeing nothing.

I shut the door tightly, curling my knees to my chest, my back tight against the frame. I reached up to lock it. Then I saw it, gently squeezed into the far corner. My bag of tapes. The bright blue drawstring tied, like a heart, on the top, keeping it all in: everything I had or, more accurately, hadn’t managed to accomplish in three years away. What had Matt been doing over these three years? Were there things in his life—designs or relationships or some combination of both—that he couldn’t manage to finish either? That he couldn’t even really start?

I turned around and reached under the sink—deep back into the cabinet, hidden beneath an old rag—for my small cigarette stash, four years old now. Almost five. I didn’t care. I knew they were still there. I knew they were still there precisely for a moment like this.

I found the pack and the matches and lit one up and took a really long drag and almost threw it up. But I smoked it. I smoked it, and felt better and felt worse and got ready to light another one.

Before I did, though, I said a small, silent prayer of gratitude that tonight was going to end. Not gracefully, maybe, but eventually. Because I wasn’t coming out of this bathroom, for anything, until I really believed that this was true.

part three

The only rehearsal dinner I had gone to in Rhode Island was for Diane #1’s only son, Brian, who was—at the time—on his fourth wedding, and not yet thirty. I suspected I had procured the invitation because there were only so many people in town who weren’t friends with one of the first three brides.

I didn’t care why I was invited, though. I was glad to be there. They had made it a drum-party rehearsal dinner because Diane had read somewhere that rehearsal dinners used to be very noisy affairs—that this was a luck thing. That, in fact, parties were originally held on the eve of the wedding day in order to chase away all the evil spirits that wanted to descend upon a couple and effectively jinx any hope they had of starting a good life together. The idea was for the rehearsal dinner to be very loud and rowdy: the more noise, the better. Evil spirits, apparently, were scared off by that type of chaos. Diane’s husband, Brian senior, spent most of the night banging on the makeshift Caribbean drum for dear life. “We’re not taking any chances,” Diane said, shaking her head. “We can’t afford to do another, if this one goes south.”

Unfortunately for Josh and Meryl, if noise at the rehearsal dinner was a true indicator of future happiness, they were off to a questionable start at best. There were no drums, makeshift or otherwise, no noisemakers, not much noise to speak of, in fact, at all.

This was what they did have: a lone flutist playing quietly in the corner, white helium balloons covering the top of the tent, and huge bowls everywhere full of floating ivory lilies.

Everyone was walking around in their soft dresses and blue neckties, patting each other on the back, drawing kisses in the air. Eventually, we all found our way to our respective tables, and dinner was served, family-style. All of it was just like Meryl had asked for. We passed around large platters of barbecue chicken, spicy cashews, shrimp, and mixed salad. There were heaping silver teacups full of dark scotch and Russian vodka. And, in the middle of each table, circling the tea roses, were chocolate-covered strawberries.

After dinner, my mother walked to the front of the tent and announced that there were wet-naps in a bowl on each table. She held up hers as demonstration: more stewardess than hostess.

She pointed out the make-your-own chocolate chip cookie sundae bar catty-cornered in the back, as if anyone could miss it. You have never seen so many sweets: licorice and gummy bears and candy raspberries and brownie bites and peppermint chews and soft fudge. Baskets of jellybeans, and frosted cinnamon sticks. Six different kinds of ice cream.

“Help yourselves,” she said.

I took my wet-nap out of the bowl first. It was wrapped in a small blue Tiffany bow.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, but I tied the bow around my wrist anyway. Meryl’s mom Bess, who was sitting across from me, winked at me when she saw me do it.

Then she did the same thing.

It had been just the two of us for most of dinner—her husband having made friends with the bartender, my parents and Meryl playing hosts, Josh on the other side of the tent offering constant help to the help, staying as far away as possible from anyone who might actually want to talk to him. And the Moynihan-Richardses’ seats had never even been sat in.

“It’s like you and I are starting a trend here,” she said, pointing proudly to her wrist.

“Kind of,” I said.

There was talk that the M-R’s were around here, somewhere, hiding out at a corner table, and other talk that Mrs. Moynihan-Richards hadn’t been feeling well and so they were back in the basement now. No one seemed to know for sure, and Bess—at least—didn’t seem to care too much.

“So, are you getting excited for tomorrow?” Bess said.

This wasn’t the first time she had asked me this question. We were starting to struggle with each other. It wasn’t making any of it easier that I had long ago lost sight of any joy in tonight, my mind periodically shifting through different images from today, over and over, as if part of a broken-down slide show. In one, Elizabeth was sitting on the couch, in the other Meryl standing in my bedroom. It didn’t seem possible that they existed in the same world. They weren’t supposed to, which I was sure made it that much easier for Josh to separate them, to let each count in her own space. The fact that I could understand, now, how that could be done was making me feel worst of all.

“Tomorrow’s supposed to be a scorcher, you know,” Bess said. “Even hotter than today. Meryl’s father heard a hundred and four! I’m lucky I moved the ceremony inside, is all I have to say. Who wants to be in heat like that?”