London Is the Best City in America (3 page)

In demonstration, he made a “big” rectangle sign with his hands, his hot dog in one of them, a large Coke cup in the other. The little girl from the blond family was staring at him. I wondered what she thought she saw—this child-man in his dirty baseball cap, white button-down shirt, bare feet. My big brother. Best friend since birth. Childhood hero. Huge baby. He was going to be thirty-one next month. In less than seventy-two hours, he was supposed to be someone’s husband. Someone who, even if it wasn’t the point, I really loved.

“Does this problem have a name, Josh?” I asked.

He was quiet for a long minute in which I got to imagine that my instinct was wrong. Maybe this had nothing to do with another woman. It would be easier if it didn’t. I figured that he’d be more likely to get married this weekend if it didn’t have something to do with that.

“Elizabeth,” he said.

My heart dropped. I could actually feel it—the hollowing out of it—until it filled my whole stomach, like a drum. I couldn’t remember having heard about anyone named Elizabeth from him, not during the year he’d spent alone in Boston, not since I’d been living in Rhode Island. The fact that he’d kept her to himself made her seem bigger, somehow, more important.

“Elizabeth?” I said.

“Elizabeth, yes. Elizabeth.”

I couldn’t look at him, not when he wasn’t looking back at me. I stared at the main pool instead, blocked off with a fat orange rope so that nobody could fall in. Or jump. One of the first times Josh brought Meryl home with him, we swam in this pool—all three of us, together. She was wearing this backless green bathing suit that revealed a thin line of freckles right along her spine. I was only sixteen. I’d never seen anything like that.

“She has no idea, does she?” I said.

“Meryl?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

I didn’t know what to say then. It all felt too crazy. I was supposed to be Meryl’s maid of honor on Sunday. I had a long blue sheath dress with thin straps. I had a pearl necklace I never would wear otherwise. I had white lily hairpins. Josh had encouraged all of this.

“You want pizza?” Josh said. “I want to get a slice of pizza before we leave. And another soda.”

“You think the snack bar’s even open still?”

“I think it could be.”

Then he stood up. I shielded my eyes against the night sky, staring up at him. I had a million questions to ask, but none that I was particularly ready to hear the answers to.

“What, Emmy?” he said, looking down at me.

“I just want to know how you can be so sure,” I said. “That Meryl doesn’t know? I mean, how can you know that?”

“Didn’t we just cover this?” he said.

There was an edge to his voice. He wasn’t good at disappointing people, which I could already guess was at least part of the reason that he was in the position he was in now. He couldn’t seem to tell anyone no, even when that was exactly what was needed.

“I’m just trying to understand,” I said, as he sat back down.

“Which part?”

“How you got here,” I said.

He didn’t say anything, but lay all the way back on the grass, covering his eyes with his arm.

I swatted at him. “Come on. Go get your pizza before the thing closes.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want it anymore.”

“You don’t want it anymore?”

“No,” he said.

“What do you want, Josh?”

“Something else,” he said.

Who once said that, in any family, there was one child who was better at things, even if exactly how much better was never spoken? There was the one who got the better grades and did better at sports, who things just came easier for. It seemed to me that, usually, it was the older one who would tread the straighter path, whose initial accomplishments would run deeper. Could it be just a coincidence that so many of the great sufferers—those who would eventually take to art and writing and music and dance—were younger or youngest siblings? Joyce and Twain and Austen and Baryshnikov. Were they always feeling like they were just in a game of catch-up they had already lost?

I never had any illusion of ever being able to catch up. In our family, at least, Josh was always quicker than I was. He was the one that made all the all-star teams and got straight A’s, the one who knew who he wanted to be. His goals might have changed a little over the years, but only in the most assured and boring way: pediatrician, brain surgeon, pediatrician again. He never had any inappropriate ideas like joining the circus or moving to Alaska. At fifteen, Josh was already taking a psychology class at the community college, looking into seven-year medical programs, telling our parents’ dinner guests coyly about his plans. And he was certainly always the one who was better at relationships. He had been with Meryl for the better part of the decade, and it appeared to be fairly smooth sailing for the two of them: maintenance during the end of college, all through Josh’s medical school and residency, well into their current cohabitation in Los Angeles.

My own relationship history was a little messier, more dramatic, which—whether or not it’s the nicest thing to say about myself—was also a fairly accurate way to describe the behavior that landed me in the second-place position. While Josh was navigating the straight and possible, I spent most of my younger years conjuring up situations for myself that could never be: becoming a dancer in Brazil (I was relegated to the back row in after-school ballet class), marrying a rock star (cigarette smoke at concerts made my eyes swell closed), running a cruise ship (tendency to get seasick in port).

But Josh and Meryl—they had always made sense. Even how they met was such a nice story, so in want of a happy ending. It was the night of Halloween during their senior year of college. Meryl was having a party at her house off-campus, and Josh went dressed as a frog (my idea: kiss the frog and he’ll turn into a prince). He had gone to the party because he liked one of Meryl’s roommates. Would you believe me if I told you she was dressed like a princess? Meryl, not the roommate. From the very beginning then, Josh would later say, he wasn’t sure he deserved her. But Meryl’s boyfriend—who was away at medical school—didn’t make it back for the party even though he had promised to. So she found herself sad in the bathroom, having broken up with him earlier that day or the day before. They’d argue over the actual moment—
don’t you think I’d know, he was my boyfriend?
—as if that was the interesting part. The interesting part, if you ask me, was that they spent the whole night in the bathroom, frog and sad princess, while someone in desperation was throwing up outside, trying to open the door. That part’s not interesting, Josh liked to say. That’s disgusting.

Here’s the only part of them, of my brother and Meryl, that I found myself questioning during those years after they graduated from school: Why were they waiting so long—through year after year of close friends tying the knot—to get married themselves? They lived together out in Los Angeles, already existing in a fairly married state. But Josh said that neither of them was really in a rush to “make it official.” His words, not mine. One of the main reasons he offered for this non-rush was that Meryl took wedding pictures for a living, which seemed to considerably lower her threshold for thinking in any detail about her own big day.

This seemed like a plausible explanation, especially because, even once Meryl started planning her wedding, she made it very clear that she wanted to keep the wedding low-key: family, a few friends, a small tent in my parents’ backyard. In my parents’ backyard. She was most adamant about this part. Maybe this was partially due to the fact that her own family situation was a little complicated. Her parents—Bess and Michael, the parents who raised her—lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a duplex that wrapped around two city blocks. Her birth parents, on the other hand, were sociology professors at a small college in the Ozark Mountains. As far as anyone could tell—until Meryl had found them a few years before—they hadn’t spent any time to speak of away from the Ozark Mountains. But now they too were en route to this weekend’s wedding. An
entire
wedding weekend.

How had that happened? How had Meryl’s plans for an intimate family-only wedding turned into a full-blown extended celebration? No one was exactly sure, but it had something to do with her decision to let Bess take over the majority of the planning. Bess turned the reception into a three-hundred-person affair at the Essex House in New York City, complete with a ten-piece band and a cocktail hour and a very expensive pineapple cake.

Then my mother—in an attempt to give Meryl and Josh what they had originally wanted—decided to host a fifty-person rehearsal dinner in our backyard, which was now taking place tomorrow night.

And tonight, post-fireworks, I had helped organize a small late-night bachelor party at a local bar for Josh. The bachelor party was my apology, in a way, for being so absent over the course of the wedding planning. Josh and Meryl had been so far away out in California—me, just a few hours from New York City by car. I could have stepped in and tried to negotiate things with Bess, tried to shrink the massive party planning. But I hadn’t. Not that Josh had complained once about this. Meryl wouldn’t let him. She understood that I couldn’t really come back to New York, not yet. She understood that even after Josh thought it was time I did. Even after everyone else in my life thought it was time I did too. I felt myself starting to panic and turned to Josh. I needed to talk him through this. I needed to hear him talk.

“Josh,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

He didn’t answer me. He didn’t even move. I tried to think of what I really wanted to say to him. Already, I’d made him feel alone in this. I didn’t want to make it worse. But, still, it didn’t make much sense to me. This was him. This was Meryl and him. For a decade now. For forever now. That first day the three of us had come to this pool together, I forgot to put on sunblock and severely burned the tops of my feet and toes. Meryl had made a pail for me of vinegar and oatmeal. She told me that it would take the sting out. She sat there until the red went down.

“I mean, I’m on your side. Of course I’m on your side. I just hope you’re considering everything that needs to be considered, you know? People get scared to get married. They get really scared. How many movies start with someone running the wrong way down the aisle?”

I looked down at him, waiting for a response. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even move his arm off his eyes. And upon closer inspection, I realized that his chest was moving up and down a little too steadily, his eyes closed tightly beneath his bent arm.

I poked him hard in the ribs.

He shot up, startled. “What?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

It made me mad. I was here contemplating his future, and he was sleeping. This was what he did, though—this was how he did things. Sleeping was his main defense mechanism, like running away, for someone else, or pretending not to understand. Or maybe I was giving him too much credit. Maybe he was just that uninvolved.

“You asked me a question,” I said. “You asked if I was ready to go home.”

“Are you?” he said, confused.

I handed him his flip-flops.

“Very,” I said.

It was hard for me to think about Josh and Meryl without also thinking about Matt and me. Beyond the arguably analogous situation Josh had managed to find himself in now, my brother’s situation with Meryl had often, in other ways, mirrored my situation with Matt. Or, maybe I should say, our situation matched theirs. For one thing, it was exactly a year to the day after Josh met Meryl that I first met Matt. The reason I remember this for certain is that we, too, met the night of Halloween—the Halloween following their first meeting, actually—a coincidence that I found a little bizarre at the time. But over the years since, I kept meeting people who had a Halloween either at the beginning or the end of their relationship.

And I started to think that maybe it wasn’t bizarre at all—maybe it just made a certain kind of sense that it would be easier for people to act most like themselves when they were pretending to be someone else. This could also begin to explain why so many old-school wedding superstitions were wrapped up in All Hallows’ Eve. Young brides-to-be used to stand around a fire holding stringed apples over the flames. Legend went that the young woman whose apple fell would marry first and have the longest and happiest union. The one whose apple fell last would have the toughest time. Young grooms, meanwhile, would crawl under a blackberry bush in their costumes. And when they reached the other side, they would receive instructions on whether their union was fated for bliss or destruction. Forever now, apparently, relationships coming together or falling apart based on what ghosts said.

The Halloween that Matt and I met, I was in my last year of high school and already planning way past my hometown. I’d only applied to schools on the other side of the country, imagining sunshine, California convertible tops, people who would think New York sounded both exotic and absolutely unappealing. People that would lead me to my new life.

But there I was—still in my hometown—standing at the Scarsdale train station wearing jeans and a ponytail and a short sweater. I had wandered off from the party down the street to get some liters of soda and was using the pay phone, calling over there for someone to come and bring me back. This was when I saw him. He was in the train station entryway smoking a cigarette, wearing a pair of army pants and a paint-splattered white T-shirt. Blue streaks were covering both cheeks. He kept his eyes down, his long eyelashes steady. He was, without a doubt, my favorite thing I’d ever seen.

I put the phone down. “What are you supposed to be over there?” I asked. “A painter?”

This was my great pickup line.

He looked up at me, caught my eyes, started to smile, his cheek-to-cheek, once-in-a-blue-moon smile. And then he stopped. “What are you supposed to be over there?” he asked back. “A high school prep?”

As it turned out, Matt wasn’t dressed up either. His parents had just moved to Scarsdale—his mom had just had another kid, a little boy—and he had come out for the day from the city, from NYU, where he was just starting his sophomore year. Where he had just declared a major in architecture. A minor in still drawing. He had spent the day helping his dad paint their new basement. The only reason he accepted my invite to come back with me to my friend’s party was that he had missed his train back to the city and had an hour to kill until the next one. Later, he’d tell me this, not to be mean, but because he found it amazing how far we’d come. Even by the end of that first night. I didn’t care about any of that anyway. All I knew was that he reached for the soda.