London Is the Best City in America (6 page)

The one—and only—time my parents had let me decide on our family’s destination, I chose London. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. But even when my father tried to show me on our map-of-the-world chessboard that Europe wasn’t drivable—wasn’t even in the United States—I wouldn’t pick somewhere else. I flat-out refused, and told him he should just let Josh pick instead. I told him I hated chess anyway.

Which meant that going to Europe, especially with Matt, meant a lot to me. I think my mom was comforted somewhat that during the France leg of the trip, I was going to be staying with Berringer—
we
were going to be staying with Berringer—who was living in Paris that year. He was taking some courses at the Culinary Institute, and apprenticing in a fancy hotel kitchen.

Only, when we arrived at his apartment, he wasn’t there. He’d left a note that he had to go with his girlfriend to see her parents in England, but make ourselves at home and help ourselves to whatever we needed and there was cereal in the cupboard.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the reason Berringer had gone with his girlfriend—Naomi, a British girl—to see her parents was that he’d asked her to marry him, and they’d gone together to tell them. Naomi was ten years older than Berringer and absolutely striking: long red hair, winter skin, thin fingers. She’d come into the fancy hotel restaurant for dinner—that was how they met—and, the way the story went, Berringer asked her to marry him that very first night, in the alley outside. This wasn’t confirmed for me until their actual wedding ceremony the next December—when it was confirmed, again and again, usually along with the expression:
When you know, you just know.

The wedding took place in Katonah, a quiet town thirty miles north of Scarsdale, at an inn on a farm. It was a small wedding, but my whole family went. I hadn’t wanted to go because I was in the middle of finals. “Since when do you study?” my mom had asked. It wasn’t a bad point. Josh was the best man and had to read this long poem about roses. Beautiful Naomi wore no shoes.

Now I stared at Berringer’s reflection in the rearview mirror, his eyes hard on the road and both hands on the wheel, and I wondered, with Josh’s looming nuptials, if Berringer was thinking about Naomi, if he still often thought about Naomi. They’d moved to New York after that year in Paris when Berringer got an assistant chef position at a new restaurant on the Lower East Side. And it was three years later, closer to four actually, that Naomi asked him to quit and find a job in London instead because she was homesick. Because she wanted to go home again.

But less than a week after they arrived in London, she woke up next to him in their new apartment and said that it turned out she hadn’t been homesick after all—she just didn’t want to be married anymore.

That was the last I heard about Berringer for a long time. He disappeared into the recesses of northern California by way of Santa Fe, New Mexico, by way of Austin, Texas. Josh would give me updates occasionally, but I was too wrapped up in my own thing to pay good attention. That same summer, the one that Naomi asked Berringer to leave, was the one that Matt asked me to marry him. It was the day after my college graduation—a few days after Matt finished his first year of architecture school—and we were driving down south to spend a couple of days with my father’s family in Savannah. We spent the first night camping outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and, right before we fell asleep, we thought we heard a bear outside the tent, rummaging through the trash. It turned out be a raccoon that—through a mix of shadows and strange moonlight and too much dinner tequila—seemed bigger than he was. And when we figured out what was really going on and stopped laughing, Matt asked me. Right then. In the midst of the imaginary bear. He just pulled the ring out of his bag and said he didn’t want to wait for the special dinner he had planned for us in Savannah. That he didn’t want to wait. Did Berringer even know that? I doubted it.

I doubted that Berringer knew the first time Matt and I talked about marriage seriously was all those years before while staying at his apartment in Paris. That that very first morning we were there, we had gone to see the Eiffel Tower, and that was when he brought it up. He had said he could imagine the two of us taking a lifetime of seeing places like this—wanted a lifetime of that—that the best part of being in France was seeing how happy it was making me. I started crying, right beneath the Eiffel Tower. Because I knew he meant it, and it was how I felt about him—how I’d felt since the minute I met him—the best part of
everything
was watching him enjoy it too.

Part of me wanted to tell Berringer that story now, though I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t sure what I thought that was going to do.

“Do you guys know anyone who is in a happy marriage?” I asked instead, sitting up taller. “A really happy one?”

Josh turned around and looked at me from the front seat. Berringer met my eyes in the rearview mirror.

“I was just thinking,” I said.

Josh turned back around, away from me. “Well, think about something else.”

I looked into the rearview mirror to see if Berringer was still looking back at me. He wasn’t. His eyes were back on the road. Now I knew he was thinking about Naomi. Naomi, and maybe his new girlfriend—Cecilia or Chloe, I forgot—something with a C. Carol Ann, maybe.

“Sorry, I was trying to figure something out about when things go wrong . . . between two people.” I shook my head, knowing I wasn’t making anything any clearer. For them or me. “Forget it. It was a dumb question,” I said.

“Not for the back of a slam book, maybe,” Josh said.

“Wow,” I said. “I loved slam books.”

Berringer met my eyes in the rearview mirror, again, and started smiling. “Favorite song? Not now, of course. Then.”

I shook my head, trying to think of it, to remember, truly, what I had loved in sixth grade, in seventh, my pen crossing neatly in someone else’s keepsake—me absolutely sure of my answers. “‘Lady in Red,’ I guess,” I said.

“ ‘Lady in Red,’ ” Josh mumbled under his breath.

“Favorite hobby?” Berringer asked, ignoring him.

“Taking baths,” I said.

“Taking baths?” Josh said. This time he turned all the way around to face me. “Please tell me that you didn’t actually used to write that down. What’s wrong with saying softball? Or ballet?”

“I used to pretend it was the ocean,” I said.

“That’s great, Emmy,” he said. “That’s really great.”

“I like taking baths,” Berringer said.

Josh put up his hand to silence him. He couldn’t take it when he thought I was being weird—not because he was embarrassed so much, but more because it made him worry about me. It made him worry that I’d get into a situation one day he couldn’t get me out of.

He rolled down the window, the air hitting me, maybe even more than it was hitting him. “Now that you live near the ocean,” he said, “maybe you can pretend it’s a bath.”

If you were coming to Scarsdale to visit someone—a roommate from college, say, or a new boyfriend’s parents—and someone suggested going to get a drink, the odds were the next suggestion would be heading over to the Heathcote Tavern. The reason for this was that the Heathcote Tavern was the only place to go. I don’t mean only as in the hip place, or the happening one. I mean only as in one and only. If you wanted to go to another bar, you’d have to head to another town. Like White Plains, maybe, or the main drag in New Rochelle.

The tavern wasn’t a bad place, though. I’m not saying that. It was, actually, pretty great: three big, red rooms with fireplaces and dim lighting and dark wallpaper. Downstairs dining area. And upstairs was the bar itself—a space that was beyond crowded two nights a year, Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving Eve, when most SHS graduates from the last decade made their way back to town for the holidays and staged impromptu, unofficial reunions at the only place they could.

The rest of the year though, like tonight, there was usually only a smattering of people populating the upstairs bar late-night: a divorced couple on some sort of first date in the corner, an older man talking to the bartender by the flat-screen television, a couple of late-twenty-something women—their backs to us—drinking chardonnay at the bar.

Of course, tonight, for Josh’s shindig, there was the addition of a long oval table in the center of the upstairs room reserved for and composed of Josh’s relatively weak-looking bachelor party. On one side of the oval were Josh’s other friends from high school—Mark, Todd, Chris—all of whom I recognized. On the other was the college and medical school representation, most of whom I didn’t. Almost everyone had carpooled here from the city, where they either lived or were staying for the weekend at the Essex House, courtesy of Meryl’s mom. When I saw the sheer number of empty shot glasses on the table, I realized this was a mistake. Having the bachelor party out here. At the rate everyone seemed to already be going, they’d be joining the Moynihan-Richardses in our basement.

When Josh walked up the stairs, someone called out, “There he is!” and everyone stood up and clapped, continuing with cheers as he went around the table saying hello. Berringer and I stood off to the side.

And I would have kept standing to the side, except I was noticed by my father, who at the head of the table was holding center court. He saluted me, and I saluted back. Samuel Bean Everett, Esq.: volunteer firefighter, Savannah, Georgia, native, six-foot-four anomaly. He had come tonight fully bachelor-partied out in construction pants, work boots, and a T-shirt Josh had bought him a few years back that read MR. SMOOTH LIVES HERE in large black letters.

Even from several feet away, I could see that tonight’s festivities were affecting him. His cheeks were already red, his eyes watery. My dad rarely drank—a by-product, I always assumed, of being married to Sadie the teetotaler. I hadn’t known my mother to have a drink, in fact, even once over the span of my lifetime. This was a little ironic when you considered that she met my dad at a bar. On a Sunday morning, nevertheless.

It was one of the stories that made the rounds—over and over—wedding weekend or not. The story of that New Year’s Day morning spent at the Oak Bar—on the bottom floor of the New York Plaza. My mom and her friend Lydia were sitting at a corner table, drinking Shirley Temples. It had been Lydia’s idea to go there as a way to kill a little time before the matinee they were seeing that afternoon. Enter my father. He had forgotten his newspaper at that very table, and was racing across the woody room to retrieve it. This was when she spotted him wearing “ripped dungarees” and his hair in a short ponytail. He was just passing through New York on his way from his home in Savannah, Georgia, to an island off the coast of Maine, where he was going to be a firefighter and coach high school basketball. He asked her to reach under the table and hand his paper back to him.

And in response, my mother, in an act that she maintains was completely unlike her, asked him to sit back down for just a minute and join them for another Shirley Temple. This baby-faced guy, who was pale-skinned and very southern and bright-blue-eyed, and who called her miss when he asked for his paper back and who wasn’t anything like the guy that she thought she’d end up with: not wealthy or ambitious or Jewish. Not even Jewish.

While they were waiting for his drink to arrive—the story goes—she excused herself and went into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall and cried because she knew she’d never be okay without him.

Then she washed her face and checked her reflection in the mirror and went back outside and asked him to stay with her in New York and reconsider what he wanted to do with his life and let her raise the children the religion she needed to and marry her one day. Or, just to stay.

“Emmy!” My father screamed to me now. “What are you doing over there? Come over here. I want to kiss you hello, little beauty.”

I hated when he called me little beauty. How had he turned out six-four, and his only daughter five-three? I looked at Berringer to see if he heard, but he was wrapped up in a conversation with the high school boys and had forgotten all about me.

I headed over to my father. “What’s going on?” I said, as he leaned down and gave me a hug hello.

He pointed to his shirt. “The guys nicknamed me Mr. Smooth. Isn’t that something?”

“It’s something,” I said.

He looked down at his shirt, running his finger along the MR. SMOOTH. “It is something.”

I delivered my mother’s brief message that she was going to bed, and he looked up at me, more than a little worried at what I’d said, like he had maybe done something wrong, which he hadn’t. It was just that they were rarely apart. That was the thing about my parents. They were still so much in love. Thirty-plus years later. They remained the only answer I had to the question I had asked Josh and Berringer in the car. Who was happily married? Who still loved each other? The problem was that with your parents, it sometimes seems like it doesn’t count.

“Does she want me to come home?”

“Nope. She said, Just tell Dad I’m going to feed the Moynihan-Richardses and then pretend to go to sleep. Honest. All’s quiet on the western front.’”

More convinced than before, he rubbed his hands together, relieved. “Then how about another round?” He turned toward everyone, talking more loudly, almost screaming, really. “How about another round, boys?”

He started walking toward the bar, but then he tripped, knocking two beers right off the table.

“Whoa there, Mr. Smooth,” I said, trying to sit him back down. “Let me get it, okay?”

“Thank you, baby. I’m not used to drinking,” he said, reaching up and touching my cheek. His palm was warm and wet from the alcohol. “You happy tonight?” he asked.

“I’m happy tonight.”

He looked at me, trying to consider if that were true, trying not to act like he was considering. He had this small fear—my father—inherited from my mother’s Jewish worriedness, that if I weren’t completely okay, he had failed me.

He was the same way with Josh, which was how I knew what was coming next. He looked over to where Josh was standing, talking to a friend from medical school. Josh was clenching and unclenching his left hand, laughing. I guess they were joking around about the ring that was going to be there soon enough. I guess they were joking about everything that was coming next.