London Is the Best City in America (7 page)

My father was smiling at him, like he’d received the information he needed. I was tempted to tell him the truth—that it was looking like it was turning out to be, at the very least, a little more complicated than that.

But I knew our dad wouldn’t be able to handle that. He was the ultimate people-pleaser. That was where Josh got it from. The only instinct in him that even began to rival the people-pleasing gene was the overprotective one for Josh and me. If he had to handle this situation, the two sides of him would be forced to go head to head, and I worried he’d combust. I wasn’t ready to watch that.

“They’re going to be really happy, don’t you think so? Meryl and Josh, I mean,” he said, turning back to face me. “Don’t you think Meryl’s going to make him happy?”

I touched the top of his head. “Probably,” I said.

Clearly I hadn’t been paying very good attention to what was going on elsewhere at the tavern, but I still couldn’t believe that I had failed to notice that I knew, all too well, the two twenty-something women drinking chardonnay at the bar. How could I not tell from the back of their heads? Those two perfectly straightened heads. I should have at least recognized that I recognized them. But it took coming up right next to them at the bar, actually, to realize that they were none other than Stacey Morgan and her sidekick, Sheila Beth Gold: two girls I’d graduated high school with, still best friends apparently, and even prettier and more put together than they had been a decade ago. At one point, in high school, I could have almost been considered friends with them. We went to the same parties, hung out with the same group of guys, sat at lunch tables
near
each other in the back of the cafeteria. But now it was like they were donning bright HAZARD signs—ready to announce exactly where they were on their road from Superwoman City Girl to Soccer Momdom. Even if I were still with Matt, they would have thought my “film dreams” were just a quirk that would one day pass. And now that I didn’t even have Matt as a common ground, well, I wasn’t counting on the never-ending fishermen’s wives project to win me any admiration.

Before they saw me, I tried to back away undetected, but—as seemed to be turning into the theme of the night—it was too late.

“Oh, my God, Emmy Everett!” Stacey said. She reached for my arm. She reached for my arm and held on. “Sheila, look! Emmy freaking Everett. I don’t believe it. How are you, girly?”

“Hey, Stacey,” I said, leaning in and patting her shoulder. It was an awkward move—not quite a hug, not quite not a hug. It was worse than if I hadn’t done anything at all. “Sheila,” I said.

“What are you doing here?” they said in unison.

I smiled, taking advantage of the time it gave me to try to mobilize my inner troops. I could get in and out of this conversation unharmed. Of course I could. I just needed to keep moving.

“Oh, it’s actually a bachelor party for my brother,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right!” Stacey said. “Josh is getting married this weekend, isn’t he? I knew that. I think my mom told me.” She looked past me, to him, at the table. “You think it’s too late to tell him I had a huge crush on him when he was in high school?”

“Maybe not,” I said.

She looked at me, confused, and then—trying to recover for her—Sheila gave me a big smile.

“Well,” she said, “we were supposed to be on our way to the Hamptons right now, but by the time we got going, traffic was just too awful. So we decided we’ll spend the night in the ’dale and head out early tomorrow . . . we probably should have just taken a jitney right from Midtown instead of coming all the way out here to get the car.”

“Well hindsight’s twenty-twenty, right?” I said. “At least you’ll have the car out at the beach.”

“At least we’ll have the car out at the beach,” they echoed.

I motioned toward the bartender. “Could I get another round of tequila shots when you have a minute?” I asked. “And the rest of the bottle? The rest of the bottle would be great.”

They waited for him to start rounding up the drinks before they continued, as if he cared what we were talking about, let alone wanted to listen. I didn’t even want to listen, and I had no choice.

“So,” Stacey said. “Last time we saw you, Miss Emmy, you were about to get married. You early bloomer! I mean, I always thought I wanted to be further along in my career before all of that, but the more crummy I’m-not-going-to-commit-to-you-while-there-is-even-one-model-at-Bungalow- 8 guys I’m meeting in the city, the more I’m thinking I should have just settled early on like you did. Big deal if I’m the number-three girl for the number-two guy at the biggest litigation firm in New York? I want someone to brush my teeth with. What was the name of that television show that was on for two minutes where the blond girl said that? That she wanted someone to brush her teeth with? Anyway . . . I’m ranting. The point is, we want to hear
what you’re up to.
What’s your husband’s name again? Matthew? He was studying to be an architect, right? You tell us. How is married life? With a fancy architect?”

Stacey took a deep breath in, which made me realize that I hadn’t taken one either the entire time she’d been talking. I wished more than anything then that I was married to Matt, that I could give them a happy report. Especially because Stacey was beaming again, already smiling again so widely that I understood that even her problems didn’t really bother her. She didn’t
really
fear she wouldn’t find someone. She didn’t really fear. She was the number-three girl for the number-two guy at the biggest firm in New York City. This was just her opening statement of practiced misery. So I would end up saying something back that would reaffirm for her that she was in the best place she could be in, the only place, and she should feel good about it.

I pulled my hair tighter behind my ears, bracing myself. “Well, you know,” I said, and shrugged, “you may want to ask someone who’s actually married. That didn’t end up happening for me.”

“Jeez, Emmy, I’m sorry,” Sheila said, reaching out and touching my wrist. “I’m really sorry.”

I tried to wave it off. “That’s okay,” I said.

“Oh, of course it is. Of course!” Stacey said, Sheila nodding her head, fiercely, in agreement. “Things sometimes happen. Things change! The important thing is the present. What are you up to now, Emmy?”

“I’m working at a fishing supply store in Rhode Island,” I said.

“Oh.” They looked at each other. “Huh.”

The bartender placed down the tray of tequila shots, the bottle sitting in the middle of the tray. I picked up the tray and then turned back to the girls, holding it up in their direction. “Well, I guess I should be getting these over to the table,” I said. “But don’t worry. I’ll be back in a minute to get everyone else’s.”

They looked at each other, again, and then both started laughing, a little too hard. But I guess that’s what you get for offering up a bad joke, or, maybe, for seeming a little too much like one yourself.

When I got back to the table, my father was telling a story. I put the booze quietly in the center and sat down in the chair next to Berringer. He looked over at me and gave me a smile, and then turned his attention back to my father, whose arm was around Josh. I was only catching the tail end of the story, but I’d heard it before. It was the one when Josh was pitching his first junior varsity baseball game. Josh had been pitching a no-hitter until the last inning, when someone hit a home run out of the park. “Josh ran up to the home plate and broke the bat in half because he was so convinced the guy put cork inside,” my father was saying.

Everyone laughed, except me. I was too busy wondering if all bachelor parties were this much fun.

Berringer leaned in toward me. “Are those friends of yours?” he asked, motioning to Stacey and Sheila at the bar.

I shrugged, reaching straight across him for a tequila shot. “Why do you ask?”

“You look upset.”

I downed the shot, instead of answering him. Then I reached for another. I started to ask if he remembered Sheila and Stacey, mostly because I thought he wouldn’t. Which I thought would make me feel better. But before I even could, he leaned forward and whispered in my ear.

“When I tell certain people that I’m a chef, they look at me funny, and ask what I like to cook,” he said. “And I know if I say I like making some really fancy dish, like margret of duck with verjus, or whole roasted squab and truffles, or foie gras and anything, they’ll approve. I know these are the things they want to hear.”

“So what do you tell them?”

“Peanut butter,” he said. “And jelly.”

I started laughing, feeling a chill run through me, his lips still close to my ear.

I pulled back and looked at him. “So, you want to tell me something, Berringer?”

He was still smiling at me. “Anything,” he said.

“Have you met Elizabeth?” When he didn’t answer, I tried to clarify for him. “Josh’s Elizabeth.”

“Emmy, you should probably be talking to Josh about this instead of me.”

I motioned across the table to where Josh was taking another tequila shot of his own, quickly—his face starting to get red, a little too flushed. “Josh is busy right now,” I said.

Berringer shook his head, keeping his eyes down. He certainly wasn’t smiling anymore.

“What?” I said. “She’s that great?”

He looked back up at me, reluctantly, offering a soft nod. “She’s pretty great,” he said.

I stared down at my empty shot glass, thinking of Meryl. She had just come to New York a couple of weeks ago for her final dress fitting, and had driven up to the Hilton in southern Connecticut to meet me for lunch. We ended up talking about this great documentary she had seen in L.A. about a filmmaker who was so in love with this old novel he read that he embarked on a countrywide journey to find the author, who hadn’t been heard from in over two decades. She got so excited telling me the story that she decided we absolutely had to see it together
that
day, and we ended up driving another hour and half to this beautiful old theater in Northampton, Massachusetts—the only place it was playing anywhere in New England. It was the best day I could remember having in a long, long time. It would be the easiest thing in the world to make the argument that she was pretty great too.

“The point is, things shouldn’t have gotten as far as they did with Elizabeth if he wasn’t going to back it up,” Berringer said. “Josh knows that. He knows it now. And wants to do the right thing here.”

“The right thing for whom?” I said.

He didn’t answer me, and I wanted to push it, ask him what that even meant—marrying Meryl or telling her the truth about Elizabeth?—but I wasn’t sure Berringer knew the answer. I also wasn’t sure that being right was as simple as I had been allowing for, as most of us allowed for, when we used it as an excuse to do what we thought we were supposed to do. Besides, what I wanted to ask Berringer more was which woman he thought Josh belonged with, and I knew he was never going to tell me that. He would say it wasn’t his judgment to make. And maybe it wasn’t. But I knew he had an idea anyway. He knew Josh better than anyone did—maybe even better than I did. He understood exactly what, in the end, he could and couldn’t do. What maybe he needed to do.

“Elizabeth’s a breeder,” he said. “She breeds these enormous dogs, you know.”

“Berringer,” I said slowly, the beginning of the tequila making its way to my head. “I’m beginning to think I don’t.”

Apparently, their story went something like this.

That year—Josh’s last of medical school, Meryl already in Los Angeles—Josh was volunteering a few times a month at a free clinic in Springfield, Massachusetts. There was a huge dog show in town at the Expo Center, which he wandered over to during his lunch break. Elizabeth was there, showing two of her dogs. Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone. If one of you were saving the other at the beginning—like if you met during a car crash, for instance—you would continually take on that role (the savior, the saved) in various capacities for the length of the union. Or: if you didn’t inherently trust somebody, that, too, would be your gut reaction for as long as you knew each other, reaffirming itself beneath whatever good the other person tried to do for you.

“What happened in their first five minutes?” I asked Berringer now.

“Time stopped,” he said.

Sometime around the real last call—not the one the bartender had quietly pushed back in honor of one
more
final round of drinks—my father stood up, clinked his spoon to his glass, and made a quick toast to Josh. No big stories, no teary eyes. Just a wish for him of true happiness. Josh was very red at this point, watching our father, and I could tell he was having trouble focusing on what was being said, but when our father was finished, Josh stood up and hugged him anyway.

“To the happiest weekend of your life,” my father said. His voice all choked up, too thick.

“Oh, man, let’s get out of here,” I said, turning to Berringer.

I had already called a car service for the other guys. I had already made sure that was taken care of. Berringer nodded, but before we could stand up, my father was calling my name again, louder this time.

I looked up slowly, all eyes on me. “How about you?” He smiled, raised his glass. “You want to make a toast?”

Berringer caught my eye, not looking away. I tried looking around at this table of boys, none of whom I really knew. Not anymore. Then I looked at Josh. He was avoiding looking back. What did I know about him? All I could think was that he had this whole other life that he hadn’t told me about until now. What else didn’t I know about this person I really thought I knew everything about?

I had done all sorts of research on weddings in preparation for a toast. I had read a good half-dozen books on what different wedding rituals meant, where the traditions came from. I’d planned on incorporating all sorts of the bizarre trivia into whatever speech I ultimately made. But it didn’t matter. For the life of me then, I couldn’t think of one single thing to say.