London Is the Best City in America (19 page)

“That’s it?” he said. “You’re done with me?”

I nodded. “For tonight,” I said, even though what part of me was thinking was, Never. I will never be done with you, Matt. I will never be able to think about you and hear about you and not totally—totally—miss you.

“You are going to think about it though, right, Emmy? What we talked about. You’ll give it some real thought?” he said.

There was a sense of desperation in his eyes that I didn’t recognize, and I wondered what had happened to him in the last three years to put it in there. Or if I had done it, in my leaving. A small piece of me couldn’t help but think we were sitting here together now—that he was so sure
now—
because I’d left. That he needed to get me back, so he’d know he still could. I was hoping that wasn’t true, or at least not all that was true. I was also hoping that I wasn’t right that if I said yes to him, his need would disappear. He would be the one deciding he didn’t need this anymore.

“Of course I’ll think about it,” I said.

And then, for the first time in a long time, I did what I wanted to do. I leaned in and kissed him. It was me who kissed him this time, longer than before, and like I meant it. His lips felt different than I remembered, though, but I knew in a minute, it would be erased. In a minute, if I let it, it would feel the same as it always had.

I got out of the car and leaned down—my face inside the open passenger-side window.

He leaned over and touched it. “If you’re going to be late or something, you’ll call me?” he said. “You won’t keep me waiting, right?”

“I won’t,” I said. I leaned in closer, that much closer into his hands. “I’ll be there.”

The first wedding superstition I remember learning about—during my own engagement, actually—was the one that said the bride and groom shouldn’t see each other from midnight on, the night before their wedding. Matt had been the one to explain the history of it to me. He had come home with information about it, I think, in his bid to convince me to let him have his bachelor party the night before we were supposed to get married. Apparently, though, the reason the bride and groom were supposed to be separated the night before the wedding was that this was the night the bride stopped being a girl. In fact, ancient Greeks had this tradition of taking away all of the bride’s old toys and belongings—even cutting off her hair if it were long—stripping her of everything that didn’t have to do with her future life as someone’s wife. What was the groom supposed to be doing during this time? Whatever he wanted.

This was what Josh was doing: sitting in the emptied-out rehearsal dinner tent all alone. The waiters, the guests, our family—they had all gone. It was just Josh sitting there at one of the remaining tables, a tablecloth still on it, one candle lit in the center, nothing else.

I walked toward him. He was staring down at his watch. He didn’t look up from it even as I got closer.

“Twelve oh-two,” he said, eyes still on his wrist, touching the watch’s face. “Twelve oh-two. And . . . nineteen seconds.”

“Officially your wedding day,” I said.

“Officially my wedding day.” He looked up at me, tried to give me a smile. It wasn’t a successful effort.

I sat down across from him, carefully, not because I was afraid he’d tell me to go away, but because I was just starting to realize that there were several ways to stay with someone. And, depending on what I did, Josh might tell me everything, or we would get nowhere again.

“You missed Meryl’s parents’ speech,” he said after a few minutes. “They were talking about commitment. They were talking about how they knew it the first time they met me. How they had that type of feeling about me. Someone who would do the right thing. Someone who would never let their daughter down.”

“I’m sorry I left,” I said.

He shook his head. “It was like her father was daring me. I swear to God. That’s what it was like.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t daring you, Josh,” I said.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I’m imagining he wouldn’t think he needed to.” He looked at me, but didn’t say anything. I cleared my throat. “Are you feeling better about things? Did you sit down and talk to Meryl?”

Josh moved the lit candle toward him, starting to run his fingers along the edges—in and out of the heat. “She went back to the city before I could.”

He said it so softly, I thought, at first, I misunderstood. But inside, I knew I hadn’t.

I felt something rising up in me, tried to push it down. It was a hectic night. I could try to understand that. Josh could still talk to her in the morning. But it did feel important to me that he talk to her, one way or the other. Only, I needed to ask myself: why did I want him to talk to her so badly? Was is it just because I thought he needed to be honest about everything? Or was it something else too? After today, wasn’t at least part of me rooting for Elizabeth? And for Grace? For the Josh I’d seen around them?

“I ran into Matt tonight,” I said.

Josh looked up at me. “What?”

“For some reason, when Meryl told me she ran into him, I assumed it was in the city.” I shrugged. “But it was here. She ran into him here. And, are you ready for this? He has a child. A thirteen-month-old son. Can you believe that? Matt is someone’s father.”

Josh didn’t say anything, but he looked down too quickly. He started focusing again on the candle. Balling up the hot wax.

“Josh, you didn’t know, did you?”

He looked back up at me, his eyes confirming his answer even before he confirmed it out loud. I felt my whole body drop, fall completely into itself. He had known that. He had known something so huge about Matt, and had not needed to tell me? I felt it all going—my ability to handle any of this.

“I heard something about it when I was in town a few months ago for Meryl’s and my engagement party. Someone had heard from someone who said they had heard from his mother. Or something like that. I don’t even know. But I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, and I didn’t want to upset you. I didn’t want to upset you unless I confirmed it myself.”

“No, I can see how this is much better. I’m much happier that I found out this way. Really.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

But his words meant nothing to me—not after everything I had put myself through for him this weekend. I felt myself getting really angry. I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t know how to halt what was coming next.

I pulled the candle away from him. It was a silly thing to do, but it was all I had right then. So I took it, and put it down in front of me, daring him to take it back again.

He looked down at his empty hands, then looked over at me. “Emmy, I really can’t do this right now, okay? We can deal with it tomorrow if you want. For as long as you want. Or . . . I don’t know. I just can’t talk about it now.”

“Well, that’s the whole problem, Josh, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re totally unwilling to talk about anything. Because you think that once you say it out loud, it becomes a little too true.”

His look of irritated pity switched before my eyes to something closer to mine—something also displaying anger. “Why?” he said. “Because I didn’t tell you something about Matt the second I heard it? When I didn’t have confirmation that it was true? He’s not even in your life anymore.”

Not in my life anymore. The year Matt’s brother had turned three, we’d had a birthday dinner for him in the city: pizza and ice cream sundaes and bottomless cream sodas. We put up a Superman tent up in the living room and let him stay up as late as he wanted and watch all his favorite cartoons. When he finally fell asleep—Matt in a sleeping bag on one side of him, me on the other—Matt turned toward me and said, “Isn’t it amazing? You’ll have known him his entire life.” My entire life. Tonight he was offering it to me again.

I turned away from Josh now. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Really? I know how long it’s been already. I know you keep asking these fishermen women to tell you how to do it.”

“Tell me how to do what?”

“Wait long enough. For Matt to come back.”

He looked at me so intensely that it was all I could do to look back at him, to try to stand my ground. But my burning desire to tell him that Matt had, in a way, come back to me made me wonder if he did know. It made me wonder what I wasn’t seeing about my own life. What I really didn’t want to see, at all.

“You don’t even want to try to understand,” he said. “What I’m going through now.”

“Maybe that’s true,” I said.

And maybe I didn’t. I didn’t, for sure, want to get into what Berringer had said to me earlier about not supporting Josh, but as soon as Josh said I wasn’t trying to understand him, Berringer’s voice came ringing back in my ears. I didn’t want to talk about—let alone think about—how much Berringer’s opinion was affecting me. And I certainly didn’t want to think about how much I hadn’t liked seeing him with Celia. The other truth was that I felt done trying to understand what Josh was doing because he wasn’t
doing
anything. He was just going to keep worrying about all of this until the decision was made for him, until he walked down the aisle, and let someone else tell him how he was going to be spending his life. But, I saw now, even that wouldn’t be about making a choice. It would be about taking the path of least resistance, which was a totally different thing.

“You’re just so mad at me, Emmy,” Josh said, misunderstanding my look. “You won’t even see that I’m confused. I’m just confused about what the right thing to do is. Can’t you understand that at all?”

I shook my head. How could I tell him what I really thought? That, inside, he knew exactly how this was going to play out? He knew it exactly, but he just kept doing what he wanted to anyway, so he could keep everyone in, keep them hoping.

But he was going to marry Meryl. Or he would have done something else. He would have done something else a long time ago. It was the most unfair and wrong way to go about it that I could think of.

“The thing I don’t get, Josh,” I said, “is what’s so great about you? What’s so great about you that both these women should want to be with you regardless of what you’ve done? What makes you so special?”

He leaned toward me, and, for a second, I really thought he was going to knock the candle off the table—my brother, who had never so much as jokingly slapped me growing up. But instead he just stayed leaning in, toward me.

“You want to know a secret? Nothing’s so special about me,” he said. “That’s what they’d both find out. They’re both better than me. I haven’t done anything yet to deserve either one of them.”

I leaned in too. “Then why don’t you do something now?”

Josh kept looking at me, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say that I was right—that he wasn’t going to marry Meryl, or that Elizabeth and Grace were going to be okay either way. He didn’t tell me that love fell second to commitment, sometimes, if for no other reason than people were too scared to let things be any other way. That they had trouble even beginning to know how to be so honest.

He didn’t tell me this—he didn’t tell me anything—in part because, before he could, out of the shadows, came Dr. Moynihan-Richards. He was holding a package from CVS Pharmacy—the only all-night drugstore anywhere in town. He was still wearing his suit.

Josh stood up, smoothing out his tie as if this were the main problem. “Dr. Richards,” he said. “I had no idea you were there.”

“Clearly,” he said. And walked away.

I looked up at Josh in disbelief. He was looking toward where Meryl’s father had just been. I knew he was trying to decide whether to go after him. But what was he going to say anyway? What was there to say even if he caught up to him, and could— somehow—convince him to listen for a second?
I really do love your daughter, sir, but I can’t quite be sure if she’s the best person for me to spend the rest of my life with.

“Josh,” I said, “I had no idea he was standing there. You don’t think he heard us, do you?”

“The part where you were yelling? Um . . . yeah. I think he may have heard that part.”

I didn’t know what to say. I watched him sit back down, pull the tablecloth back toward him. It knocked the candle and remaining flowers off the table. It knocked away a stranded fork, the wet-naps.

“This is fucking great.”

I leaned across the table toward him. “Listen to me, okay? He couldn’t have known what we were talking about. Not really. You can make something up if it comes to that.”

He looked over at me, but it was like he didn’t see me. Like he was trying to figure out who I even was, really. He had never looked at me like that before. It made me feel scared.

“Look, Emmy,” he said. “I don’t think I want to be around you very much right now.”

“Well, I don’t want to be around you right now either,” I said, and with that, I stood up.

And I left him there. For the first time, maybe ever, I left my brother behind. I knew he would just keep sitting there in our parents’ backyard, in his vacated rehearsal dinner tent—the tablecloth bunched up, red table exposed beneath it—at a total loss.

I knew Dr. Moynihan-Richards was still out there, somewhere, in the shadows, or that he was on his way back into the basement to share his information. I knew that in a minute or two, Josh would start to cry.

I didn’t turn around.

part four

Maybe I’m wrong, but there does seem to be something buzzing around in the air on wedding days, this all-encompassing fragrant thing that gets caught there the same way it does on Christmas or on a snow day. The second snow day in a row when you’re ten years old, say, and, even inside, everything is all frosty and hidden, the static creeping up from the radio in the kitchen, the broadcaster just about to tell you the very best news you could ever imagine hearing. You almost can’t believe it. And yet somehow, instinctively, you’ve been waiting for it.

Three of the happiest wives—Nancy #1, Josie #3, and Jill #4—had all said they’d had a version of this feeling on their wedding days. And even Kristie #2, who was currently in the middle of a divorce, smiled when she remembered feeling certainty on her wedding day. “We got married at Pete’s friend’s place on Block Island,” she said. “And even now, I know I was absolutely supposed to marry him that morning. I was supposed to become his wife.”