London Is the Best City in America (23 page)

“Excuse me?”

She leaned in and whispered. “That’s apparently what they call marijuana these days.”

“We need to change the subject immediately,” I said.

She just looked at me. “They’re sending people home in the lobby. They’re just telling them not to get out of their cabs because in a half hour or so they’re saying the temperature’s going to be hovering around a hundred degrees in here. Dad’s standing there telling them to come in anyway. That we’ll make do. . . . It’s something of a blackout battle.”

“Has anyone thought about just doing this outside? Why don’t we just go across the street to Central Park?”

“Things are worse out there,” she said, shaking her head, already looking past me, looking around the room for what needed doing. “It’s a hundred degrees, and the sun’s coming down full steam. Not that I don’t think they should go through with it, even under these conditions. Of course I think they should go through with it, if that’s what they want to do. They’re the people who matter most today. No one else.”

I shook my head in total amazement.

“What?” she said.

“You just have this really incredible power to surprise me,” I said. “At the moments when I need you to most.”

She rolled her eyes. Then she rolled them again, just in case I missed it. “I appreciate that, love, but we don’t have time to be all dramatic about it right now,” she said.

“Just tell me what you need me to do,” I said.

“Well, we’re going to have the ceremony in here,” my mom said, pointing toward the center of the ballroom. “And then just an abbreviated version of the cocktail hour with drinks and the unperishables. Is unperishables even a word?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Can you find out? I keep using it, but your father’s looking at me like he thinks I made it up.”

“Did you?’

She looked at me seriously. “It’s possible,” she said.

I’d never known much about making things beautiful. There were girls who were built that way, probably the same girls who knew from birth how they wanted their own weddings to be, everything already in place—every dried flower and champagne flute, every pressed napkin. I, on the other hand, was another kind of girl. You could show us how to dry a flower, and we would be able to do it. You could get us to shine-swipe a champagne flute. Hell, we could even set a fantastic china-filled table, given the proper guidance. But the whole time, we’d be giggling on the inside, deep-down believing that all of it was just an extended version of playing with Mommy’s makeup, waiting for someone to come in and get us in trouble.

So when I explain that the ballroom was beautiful when we were done, I say it with a sense of surprise that I had anything to do it with it. I imagined my wedding, if it ever came around, would involve nothing more than a beach and a little barbecue, some very rich chocolate cake. But for those twenty minutes that we had to make the Essex House’s mostly windowless ballroom blackout-friendly, I was Martha Stewart living. Granted, one with an injured foot less than daintily wrapped in a cloth napkin beneath my fancy shoe, but a Martha Stewart nonetheless.

When we were done, there were tall mahogany candles everywhere, huge clusters of them forming a semicircle in the entranceway. We’d brought in antique lanterns from the basement, placed them in front of the flower bouquets: everything dark and lit and backlit and floral. Browns and deep blues present in the candlelight, the windows open just enough for the heat-wind to start kicking in, a drop of breeze making its way from the river.

The only trouble we had was with the stained glass window directly behind the altar—the fiery, unmitigated sun threatening to burn right down on Josh and Meryl, making them sweat. My mother came up with the idea of covering the window with the black garbage bags, still holding the ice for the affair. Bag balanced on bag balanced on bag. It looked somewhere between a modernist sculpture and an unfinished wall. But it almost didn’t look like a mistake.

More of the guests had been dissuaded by the hotel’s promise of hundred-degree temperatures than had been inspired by my father’s plea that they stick it out, but there were about thirty people there, filling up the first several rows.

We had filled up the first row ourselves: me sitting next to my dad, my mom on his other side. Then Berringer and Michael and Bess and the Moynihan-Richardses. All of us were sitting there, semicircled around the small vine-inspired altar. The judge was standing, in wait, at the center of the altar.

Josh and Meryl had decided a long time ago to take religion out of the ceremony—no glass breaking and circle walking, and also no family priest performing. The part that I didn’t know was that they had also decided that they didn’t want anyone standing up there with them. Together, they’d walk down the aisle and be under the awning. Together, they’d stand there. Now we were all just waiting for it. In balmy 90-degree weather.

My dad slid back around in the seat next to me. And when I say slid, I mean that literally. We were all sticking to our seats, our feet to the floor.

“Are you going to get up and look for them?” I said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. He wasn’t really looking at me, which scared me. It was another thing Josh seemed to inherit from our dad: They only looked away when they didn’t want you to see something.

“Don’t you think someone should go and look for them, maybe?” I was whispering, careful so my mom wouldn’t hear me.

He looked worried, his eyebrows meeting on top of his nose. “They’ll come down when they’re ready,” he said.

“Then why are you making that face?”

“I have a bad feeling they’re not going to be,” he said.

But before I could ask him why he thought that was, the music started—the one lone cellist who had decided to stick this out started to play her rendition of Canon in D. Everyone stood up, myself included, trying to get a clear view of the betrothed in the half-dark: Meryl in her princess dress, Josh beside her, his hand on her elbow. If this were all we’d have to remember this day by, wouldn’t it end up looking like this was the only way it was ever supposed to be? So maybe I was wrong to be questioning it still. What did I know about the way things came together? Maybe they had to come this close to falling apart first.

Only—before I could think about the rest of it, before I could think about everything I did know—they were there, right before me, right before all of us, walking down the last stretch of aisle, holding hands. It didn’t seem like real handholding though. It seemed to be more in the manner of one leading the other. I just wasn’t sure which one was which.

I took a quick peek at my parents, who were clasping each other’s hands tightly, my father keeping his eyes down. Then I looked back toward Josh and Meryl. They were at the front now, facing the judge, both of them sweating from their walk down the stairs, thin parallel lines running down their backs, Meryl’s hair sticking tight against her head.

Josh looked over at her, squeezed her hand harder, before he leaned in and said something to the judge.

“If you’ll all take your seats,” the judge said. We did as we were told, quickly, everyone keeping their gaze straight on the two of them.

This is when they turned around and faced us.

Josh tried to give everyone a smile. “We wanted to thank you all for coming,” he said. “That’s first.”

“And waiting,” Meryl added.

He nodded his agreement, clearing his throat. “But because of the blackout going on here right now, obviously this isn’t the best circumstance to get married, and so we’re not going to be doing that today.”

He was so backward in how he said it that you could have missed it. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have still been waiting for the ceremony to start. I wondered if part of Meryl was waiting herself, her hand wrapped so tightly around the orchid, tighter than the one holding Josh’s.

Josh kept his eyes on her though. And eventually she looked back at him—believing him. Believing that this would turn out okay. I think it gave him courage, because he kept going.

“Obviously, we’ve been together forever, and we love each other very much. This is just a little shift in plans I’m talking about now. Not a cancellation or anything like that. Just a postponement, really.” He tried to laugh. “Until a day when we can actually see each other.”

Which was exactly when the lights came back on.

It was just a flicker at first, a blink, but then the whole room lit up like a jammed highway, bright and unquestioning: chandelier light floodlighting the candlelight, wall lamps now bright and gauzy against lanterns, half-light becoming full light, the regular world back in colorful 3D.

And standing there, under the fiercest spotlight of all, was Josh. What the light revealed about Josh. Meryl must have been looking for it first, but then we all were, and there was no denying what was on his face—a look of total and utter despair.

“Meryl . . . ,” he said.

But it was too late. The orchid fell out of her hand—almost in slow motion—the flower falling to the floor. “Postpone yourself,” she said, as if that made any sense.

I put my face in my hands.

“Tell the truth, Josh,” she said, still only looking at him. Her face right in his, moving in closer. “You keep talking about the lights and circumstance and every other half-truth you can think of, but you said you were going to get up here and tell our families the truth.”

He didn’t say anything at first. No one did. What was there for us to say, anyway? The newly shining lights almost made them seem on a stage, performing. It seemed like this wasn’t happening in real life. I had been absolutely prepared for Josh and Meryl to fall apart now and not prepared at all, which was the only reason I could even be sure that it really was happening.

Which might be why I looked up behind them. To that one stained-glass-window garbage-bag sculpture, the light still peeking in between the bags’ creases. Which was when I noticed one of the bags covering the window—one of the bags on the bottom tier, water dripping into it, heat beaming onto it—wasn’t exactly like the others. It was fatter, misshapen.

It had a bright blue drawstring tied in a double knot on the top of it.

It was my bag.

My tapes. My tapes
cooking
inside! It was like I could envision them in there—curling into themselves, shriveling and cracking irrevocably. And I could envision the rest of it: how, in the chaos, they never made it up to my parents’ hotel room. How my father must have taken them out of the car, intending to take them to the cool suite, but he was needed for something, he got side-tracked and dropped them here. And then, for all the wrong reasons, someone placed them in the window with the other garbage bags, a sacrifice, to take in all of the heat, all of the day’s relentlessly boiling sun.

“Oh, my God!”

The words came out of me in a primal way, in a voice I didn’t really even recognize as my own, until I saw everyone turning toward me, shocked. Josh included. He, of course, thought I was responding to what was happening to him. How could he know anything else? How could anyone begin to imagine it would be happening twice, at once, both of us losing everything we had been holding on to so tightly? The two of us losing exactly what we had been most afraid to lose, that thing we kept plugging ahead with, the main excuse we’d used again and again, to not let ourselves change in the ways we needed to most.

Josh’s and my eyes met, and I could see it. He wanted me to say something. He wanted me to say something else to break the silence. He wanted me to say something else to save him.

And when I didn’t, he started to. But before he could, there was movement all around. Dr. Moynihan-Richards stood up to his full five-foot height, ready and eager to come to his daughter’s aid. Watching him, Michael stood up also. Then Bess, straightening her dress as she went. All of them were ready to pounce if they needed to—this family who was just about to join ours, now permanently against it. Which was when we all stood up also: Berringer first, ready to help Josh, my father. My mother. When I stayed seated at first, my eyes still garbage-bag-bound—drawn tunnel-like to the blue string—my mother reached across my father and pulled me up by the shoulder until I was at full height too.

I took one last look at my bag of tapes, crushed into the window, and then focused on the issue more presently at hand. Ready to conquer Mrs. Moynihan-Richards if the situation called for it.

I could take her.

But this—this next part—this is what I try to hold on to most. For a moment, Josh stopped looking at Meryl, and turned instead to look out at all the rest of us, everyone in the first row, and everyone behind us, if not in apology then in announcement of what I already knew. If someone were to blame here, it was him. He knew it better than anyone. He understood it.

And in his acknowledgment, I stopped needing to. To blame him, that is. Everyone else would make sure to do plenty of that. I was going to need to do something else. Meanwhile, outside, the hotel-world was starting to come back: the hum of the resurrected air conditioner and a hundred appliances that must have been left plugged in before the chaos—blow-dryers and printers, one loud stereo. In trying to stay cool, we hadn’t closed the door to the ballroom, so we heard all of it. The phones ringing and elevators running, and right outside in the ballroom foyer, a girl screaming to her friend or her family or someone else she thought she knew, still a little too far out of her reach—who had taken something from her that she was trying, desperately, to get back. In just one more minute, she’d realize she couldn’t.

And my brother said, “I can’t do this.”

part five

This is how it ends?
Of course not. No. This is how it begins.

—Sadie Everett

Well.

Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable?