London Is the Best City in America (9 page)

For this reason, more than any other, I willed myself awake.

“Then,” I said. “That’s what we’ll do.”

part two

The week after Matt and I got engaged, my parents—in a notable act of engagement-present generosity—took us out for dinner and presented us with two plane tickets to Paris. I knew, of course, that my mom had picked Paris because when I’d returned from our first trip there some four years ago, I had told her all about how Matt and I had discussed getting married. And, more importantly, I had told her how excited I was about it, how I felt that something important had been solidified between us in Paris—something intangible, unnamable—that made me certain Matt was the person I was supposed to spend my life with, that made me certain, whatever my future held, he would be a part of it. And my mother had remembered, and wanted to celebrate that.

Only, on the cab ride back to our apartment after dinner that night, Matt asked me if I thought my parents would be offended if we exchanged the tickets for ones that would take us to another destination. Prague, maybe, or Vienna. “I just don’t remember us having such a great time in Paris,” he said. “You know what I mean? It wasn’t so memorable.”

What can I even say? There are moments when you can feel something fall down inside of you, and never rise up in exactly the same way again. For me, this was one of them.

“Women have better memories than men,” he’d argued, when I tried to remind him of the conversation we’d had there about getting married, tried to relive for him that morning at the Eiffel Tower, that night in that small coffee-barroom, everything,
everything,
we had done together there, and that he’d seemed so excited about.

That was what I feared most: that he just wasn’t excited about us anymore—that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn’t sleep facing me anymore, or the way he’d stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count. At first I told myself I invented this. Or that I was overreacting. Especially because there were slight reprieves. He’d make us Valentine’s Day dinner in bed, or leave a sunflower by the front door, he’d reach for my hand in the parking lot without looking first. But it was almost a sadder thing, waiting for these small victories. Because they were so infrequent, and because they seemed to be more like an apology for something he didn’t have the strength to tell me about.

I waited it out anyway. I waited for almost a year, the entire length of our engagement, for Matt to show me someone resembling the Matt I thought I’d known. But the longer I waited, the more I understood that something crucial and irreplaceable had been lost, probably long before that cab ride when I first noticed its absence. Which left me with these constant questions—these awful, often avoidable questions—about what exactly I was willing to live without. In order to keep him. In order to not have to face the impossibility of another kind of life.

And now I couldn’t help but worry about what kind of life Josh was walking into, or away from. Maybe it wasn’t my job to figure it out, but it felt a little too close to home to not contemplate it, to not try to help him make some sense out of it. Better sense, at least, than I had managed to make of it for myself.

My alarm clock unsnoozed itself again, buzzing for the sixth time that morning, demanding that—whatever I thought—I at least did it fully awake. It was 6:34 A.M. We were supposed to be on the road fourteen minutes ago, and my head was still throbbing from my ample tequila consumption a few hours before. As if that wasn’t grim enough, according to the thermometer that my father had put in the window sometime around my tenth birthday, it was already seventy degrees outside. Not even seven in the morning, and seventy degrees outside.

I flipped my alarm clock off and stood up.

“How is that possible?” I said, tapping on the thermometer, trying to regulate it. It held its ground.

“Who are you talking to?” Josh asked. He was standing in my doorway, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, a short-sleeved shirt with the word WORD on it over that. The car keys were already in his hands.

“You may want to change into something else.” I pointed to the thermometer as my proof. “It’s going to be a million degrees outside today.”

“I’ll take my chances,” he said. “You ready?”

I was standing by my bed in the ripped T-shirt that I’d slept in, nothing on my feet, and it was all I could do not to ask, Do I look ready to you? But he was keeping his voice low, and I knew he was afraid we were going to wake our parents. So I just held up my hand to indicate that I needed another minute.

Josh nodded, disappearing down the hall, and I opened my closet, searching for the lightest pieces of clothing I could find. In lugging my fishermen’s wives tapes inside, I had left behind all but a backpack of belongings in the car, figuring I’d just wear what I had in my closet this morning. It was a slim selection, to say the least. I settled on a yellow sundress, a pair of old flip-flops, and a beat-up cowboy hat.

I stood in front of the dresser mirror with the hat on, pulling my hair into two low pigtails. It wasn’t a great look. My cheeks were still sallow from lack of sleep, my eyes too wide.

“I look like a little girl,” I said to my reflection.

“You look fine,” Josh said, appearing once again in the doorway, apparently out of nowhere.

“Stop doing that,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Materializing.”

He motioned for me to follow him, and so I did, reaching for my pocketbook and then tracing his steps out of my bedroom and down the upstairs hallway, down the main stairs, out the front door. He didn’t talk to me again until we were outside.

“I left Mom and Dad a note saying we were going to the city to spend the day with Meryl,” he said, walking quickly. “I said that they could call your cell if they needed us for anything.”

I tried to keep pace with him. “What did you tell Meryl?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean where exactly did you tell Meryl you were going to be?”

“Meryl’s going to be busy doing her own thing today,” he said. “Everyone’s in town. She has some sort of last-minute outing with Bess and the wedding planner.”

By some strange twist of fate, Meryl had ended up hiring the same wedding planner I had been using to help plan Matt’s and my wedding. Tiffany Tinsdale. Tiffany Tinsdale, who worked out of a townhouse on the Upper East Side, whose messiness she would apologize for—as soon as you walked in the door—knowing good and well the only thing ever out of place was the piece of paper she placed on the floor to pick up while she told you how sorry she was for the messiness. I thoroughly disliked Tiffany Tinsdale. And the feeling was mutual. She wanted me to care about all types of things I couldn’t seem to care about at all: place settings, bridesmaid’s dresses, party parting gifts. Those things didn’t matter to me normally, and the way things were going with Matt, the wedding planning came to feel like an uncomfortable reminder that the wedding had become a show, a too-large production. And I didn’t even know why I was putting it on anymore.

Tiffany. I could only be thankful now that there would be no visiting with her this weekend. When Meryl realized she had also worked on my nonwedding to Matt, she let Tiffany go and hired someone named Bethany instead.

I looked carefully at my brother. “So you’re not worried?” I said. “That Meryl will be suspicious?”

“No,” he said.

I kept looking at him, waiting for the rest of it. I knew there was a rest of it because he was refusing to look back.

“I left her a voice mail that I’m spending the day with Berringer and to call his cell phone if she needs me, okay? And no, Emmy,” he said, anticipating my next question, “I don’t think I’ll get caught.”

This made me think. First that he was wrong, and he was going to get caught. And, then, that he wasn’t wrong. That he had done this before, so many times by now, that he knew exactly how to manage it.

He clicked open the car doors, and I got into the passenger side, watched as he slid into the driver’s seat.

“You know, I’m not sure I like you so much right now,” I said once he closed the door.

“Well,” he said, “if it’s any consolation, I’m not sure I like myself.”

The quickest way to Rhode Island from our parents’ was to take 287 to I-95 and then just stay on it, straight, all the way along and through Connecticut, one long boring shot. If everything went as scheduled, this would land us on my edge of Rhode Island in a little over three hours, on Elizabeth’s edge—I was guessing—fifty minutes or so after that.

When we hit 287, I rolled down my window and put my hand outside, the wind pressing up against it. I knew that things were supposed to look better in the morning, but I was still waiting for better to kick in. I was nervous about meeting Elizabeth, nervous I wasn’t going to like her, and even more nervous that I would. And more than anything, the absurdity of this—the rush, rush of it—wasn’t quieting what I felt just under the surface. That as soon as we stopped, there was going to be all kinds of unhappiness.

I was guessing that Josh felt it too. Because he was driving un-characteristically slowly, cars speeding past us on the left: two matching green Saabs, an SUV, a minivan full of kids, who waved at us as their parents passed.

He waved back.

“Remember the time,” he said, “when we drove all the way to Arizona for the summer trip? I think I was in seventh grade. So, what were you, in second? That was the last time we went that far.”

“I’m pretty sure we went to Colorado after that,” I said.

“Colorado’s not as far as Arizona, Emmy.”

“Oh.”

He looked at me blankly. “Do you really not know that?”

“Josh!” I said. “Does this anecdote of yours have a point? Or do you want to critique my geography skills?”

“What geography skills?”

I gave him a look too, before fixing my gaze back out at the road. The little boy from the minivan was gesturing wildly at me and sticking his tongue out. I stuck mine out back.

“My point is,” Josh said, “that I think it was in Arizona when you made up that game. You know, when you’d scream, Wolf! out the back of the window if you didn’t recognize the car behind you? What was that game called?”

“Wolf.”

“That’s right. Wolf. Now, that was creative.”

I rolled my eyes in disbelief that it had taken me this long to see it coming. But now I knew. I knew what was coming next—some version of Josh’s you’re-not-supposed-to-be-living-your-life-in-this-way speech. You’re supposed to be doing something creative. You’re supposed to be doing something.

“You know, Josh,” I said, “I really don’t think you’re in a position to lecture me about anything right now.”

“Who’s lecturing? I’m not lecturing. I’m just saying.”

I closed my eyes. “Well, wake me when you’re done saying.”

“You never want to talk about this, Emmy. How you’re just, like, wasting more and more time away in Rhode Island. You never want to deal with it at all. Even Meryl says . . .”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. I couldn’t believe he was bringing up Meryl now. How could he think that was a good idea? It was like he had totally lost any sense of reality.

I tried to stay calm. “Honestly,” I said. “Why do you think you are entitled to make choices about my life? What qualifies you for that? The great ones you are making in your own?”

“That’s mature,” he said. “I’m a doctor.”

I shook my head, turning away from him. I really didn’t want to talk about any of this anymore. I understood that Josh didn’t want me in Rhode Island—that he didn’t want me doing what I was doing, or not doing. But the way I figured it, he was out of line getting so bent out of shape. I could do anything in Rhode Island that I could do in New York City. Or Los Angeles. Or anywhere else for that matter. And for all he knew, I was.

“Did you not see all of the tapes sitting in my bedroom?” I said. “Does the documentary I’m working on not count at all?”

“Right, the
documentary.
” His voice had an edge to it, which I tried my best to plow right through.

“It’s just so fascinating, you know? These women have partners who spend more than half their time away from home. Four weeks, six weeks at a time . . . can you imagine what it must be like to be married to someone who is always going to leave you? What that must be like to be the one who is always waiting for someone to come back? Pretty interesting stuff to think about.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to say,” he said, “I don’t really think it’s such an original topic.”

“Not so original?”

“Right.”

I stared him down. “So, Wolf is genius, but taking a look at a difficult aspect of an understudied subculture’s life isn’t very creative?”

Before he could even attempt an answer, I put my hand up to silence him. It was enough, and quite honestly, I was feeling more than a little defensive about my documentary, somewhat troubled as it was. Of course, Josh couldn’t understand its value. He’d never been waiting for anyone. He’d never been left. He was too busy keeping everyone in.

But the thing was, I wasn’t exactly finding endless cohorts among the wives either. While a lot of them didn’t like the separation from their husbands, many of them didn’t necessarily talk about feeling abandoned or left behind, either. Maybe that was part of my documentary trouble. I wanted to hear that everyone did feel so badly, too. So I wouldn’t feel as badly feeling that way myself. The more time that went by, though, the less I could deny it. As much as I was trying to make the wives fit the pattern I had set up for them—as much as I was projecting my issues onto them—the less I was seeing what they might really be able to teach me. Just the week before I’d asked Kate #2 what she did when her husband was away. “What do you mean, what do I do?” she said. “I feed the cat, I watch television, I put less sauce in the saucepan.” The lesson there seemed to be something I wasn’t letting myself do. Something about getting on with it already.