The Scenic Route (25 page)

N
aomi dreamed she was drowning in her swimming pool, and each time she came up for air, Dov told her how much he loved her. She didn't know what it meant, but it couldn't be good.

Her natural impulse was to conclude that she needed to get away from Dov and from Splurge. But she didn't want to hurt him. And she didn't want to hurt Steffi. And she didn't want to “run away.”

She was deeply troubled by what Steffi had said to her and had tossed and turned most of the night, which was probably why she was having bad dreams. Well, that and Noah's wedding, which was in T minus five hours. He had made her his combination “best woman” and “maid of honor.” But really, she was just his all-purpose slave.

Noah had made it clear her primary job was keeping their parents from doing bodily harm to each other (until after the reception), but he had also assigned her a myriad of other tasks, including taking his and Godwin's Cole Haan shoes for polishing and their matching Dolce & Gabbana suits for one last pressing. Then there were Noah's custom-dyed shirt and socks, which required schlepping to a dye shop in Queens, before hightailing it back to Manhattan and making
her umpteenth trip to the nineteenth-century West Village town house that Noah had chosen for the wedding.

There was no elevator, so she had to climb up to the “bridal” room, on the third floor of the four-story building, which was designed around a square-shaped central atrium, with a grand stairway wrapping around the atrium on each floor. The first time she climbed it, she felt like a character in a Henry James novel. By the twelfth time, it was
Les Misérables
that came to mind.

“Where have you been?” Noah asked, practically ripping the package out of her hands.

“You do know that Queens lies across a body of water, right?”

“Never mind. Happy thoughts. Only happy thoughts.” He shooed her away, and she was halfway out of the room when he emitted an unearthly screech.

“What is
this
?” He was holding up a purple shirt that he had taken out of the box from the dye shop.

“A shirt?” she asked, wondering if it was a trick question.

“And what color is it!?”

She strongly suspected purple was the wrong answer.

“It's supposed to be lavender,” he said. “Does it look lavender to you?” She couldn't say that it did. “I can't get married in a purple shirt. Who gets married in a purple shirt?”

Naomi couldn't think of anyone, but she wasn't aware of anyone who wore a lavender shirt either.

“Didn't you look inside the box?” Noah demanded.

“You asked me to pick it up, and I picked it up.”

“The color scheme is lavender, black and white,” Noah said. “Purple is not part of the equation.”

“But purple's what you have,” she said, trying to calm him.

“Not everyone spends their life going with whatever happens to
be in front of them! Some people invest time and effort in their choices.”

Where the hell did that come from?
She invested time and effort in everything she did. Almost everything. Seventy-five percent of everything. “You think I just go with what's in front of me?”

“If the purple sock fits . . . Never mind. Happy thoughts. Only happy thoughts.” She was tempted to tell him where he could put his happy thoughts. Instead, she trudged back downstairs, where her mother was rearranging floral arrangements that Naomi was fairly certain Noah had calibrated down to the last petal.

“Is that what you're wearing to the wedding?” Lila asked.

Naomi was in a halter top, shorts and flip-flops. “Obviously not,” she said, trying to recall precisely when she had signed up to be everyone's punching bag.

“I don't take anything for granted anymore in this family,” Lila said, in the aggrieved voice Naomi was getting weary of hearing. “Is
he
here?”

“Do you mean your husband?”

“I believe he gave up the right to be called that, and now it's only a matter of making the legal documents match the disgraceful reality.” She had been making pronouncements like that for the past six months. This was the first time they were under the same roof. Fortunately, there were lots of rooms in the town house, and Naomi hoped for her father's sake that he was taking cover in one of the more distant ones.

“You know he's here, Mom,” Naomi said, and then using her most patient voice, she added, “And it would mean a great deal to Noah and Godwin if you could be civil to him.”

“I'm always civil.” Lila fussed with a gargantuan lavender flower arrangement in the front hall. “Is your father's concubine with him?”

The notion that Naomi could mitigate her mother's behavior was preposterous. She had tried for thirty-five years without success.

“I know you think I'm acting ridiculous,” Lila said. “But he didn't just cheat on me. He humiliated me. He could have had sex with some tramp at a hotel bar, and I wouldn't have thought twice about it, once he got a clean bill of health from Dr. Rosenberg. But he did it in our house. In our bed. And with someone from the neighborhood. So that everyone knows.
Everyone
knows. If I
don't
divorce him, I become a laughingstock.”

“So you're better off being alone?”

“Oh, Naomi, I've been alone for a long time.”

Naomi was putting that statement high on the list of things she wished her mother had never said to her. Naomi wanted to comfort her mother. But she also wanted to chastise her. Why would her mother say something like that on the day of her son's wedding? Why would she say something like that ever? There was such a thing as oversharing. Naomi feared her mother's chronic disappointment was contagious, or, worse, something she had inherited.

She found her father hiding out in a room on the top level of the building, near the French doors leading to a roof garden, and, more relevantly, next to an unmanned bar.

“How many of those have you had?” she asked, pointing to his tumbler of bourbon.

“Not nearly enough,” he said.

Standing over him, she noticed how the silver hairs had vanquished the last of his dark ones, and how his cheeks were hanging lower on his strong-boned face. She sat down beside him on a purple antique sofa. “It's very nice of you to be walking Godwin down the aisle.”

“Well, his parents are dead, and he doesn't have much family,” her father said, swirling his drink. “So what am I going to do? He's like the
shvartze
son I never had.”

“Daddy!”

“I'm kidding.”

“You just lost all the PC points you got for being here.”

“Aw, kiddo, I never had any. I'm here because your mother asked me to come.” Naomi gasped. “Or should I say commanded me to come.”

“She told me that—”

“Your mother says a lot of things. One of them was that she would never forgive me if I didn't show up. Okay, she also said that Noah would never forgive me.”

Sometimes Naomi wished she came from a family of repressed WASPs. If no one talked about their personal problems, her life would be much less confusing.

“What the hell is going on with you two?”

“She wants to get divorced.”

“And just because she wants it, you're going to do it?”

“That's pretty much how it worked when we got married.”

“That's not the version of events I've heard for the last thirty-five years,” Naomi said, crossing to the window. It looked like rain. Noah was not going to be so “happy” about that.

“
You
are not the reason we got married,” her father said, waving his hand in front of his face like he was swatting at a persistent fly. “I was going to marry your mother either way. Just not at that moment.”

“Really?” Naomi asked.

“Well, probably.” He took a gulp of his drink.

“What about this woman?”

“Shirley?”

“I thought her name was Concubine.” Her dad laughed. “Do you love her?”

“Love,” he said, like he was encountering the word for the first time. “Do you love Dov?”

She hadn't anticipated his turning the tables on her. It was a question she'd been asking herself a lot. Since Dov had started hinting about proposing. More than hinting. She could easily come up with a hundred things she loved about him. But the pressure he was applying wasn't one of them. “I think so.”

“Well, I think I love Shirley. But I also think that when it's really love you don't think. You know. But a lot of times by the time you know, it's too late. Or it's not enough. Or you're just not willing to fight anymore. Naomi, honey, your mother's a fighter. I know it comes from what happened to her family in Europe. I get it. But I don't like it. I'm tired of it. I'm entitled to some peace and quiet before I die.”

“I'm sorry, Dad, but I think peace and quiet is what you get after you die.”

He smiled and took another gulp of his drink. She watched him swallow. Then she took the glass from him and took a gulp herself.

“Hey!” he objected.

She grimaced as she swallowed the medicinal amber liquid. “Were you disappointed I wasn't a boy?” she asked, giving him back his drink.

“Where'd you get such a crazy idea?”

“It's how I felt when I was a kid. That you wanted a boy.”

“I have a boy.”

“Before Noah was around. I always felt that you didn't know what to do with me. That you wanted a boy to take to hockey games.”

“I stopped going to hockey games.”

“That's kind of my point.”

“Naomi, you're being ridiculous.”

“I'm not being ridiculous. I'm telling you how I felt.”

“Well, your feelings are ridiculous.”

“You can't tell someone their feelings are ridiculous.”

“Of course I can. If you're saying things that are baloney, I'm
gonna call it baloney. I didn't want a son. I didn't want anything. Jesus, Naomi. I didn't want kids.
We
were still kids.”

Naomi's parents weren't going for warm and fuzzy wedding memories. Maybe the question wasn't why they were getting a divorce, but why it had taken so long.

A caterwaul erupted from the third floor. Either someone had died, or there was purple soap in the bathrooms.

Naomi ran to the bridal room, hoping she wasn't to blame for the latest calamity, but this time Noah's wrath was being directed at Godwin.

“All I said was I don't remember signing off on a purple shirt,” Godwin said.

“Well, I don't remember signing off on plus ones,” Noah barked.

“Just plus
one
,” Godwin said. “One close friend asked as a special favor to bring a date, and I said she could.”

“We had agreed we didn't want strangers coming to our wedding.”

“He's actually a patient of mine.”

“That just makes it all the more inappropriate,” Noah huffed.

“So there will be five less shrimp to go around.”

“That's not the way it works. There's seating arrangements. There's gift bags. There's—”

“Happy thoughts, Noah,” Naomi said, trying to be helpful.

“Fuck happy thoughts,” he replied before turning back to Godwin. “If you'd been paying any attention, you'd know what an ordeal it is to add someone at the last minute. But I guess throwing a wedding is too trivial a pursuit for a serious-minded mental health professional.”

“If it's such a huge ordeal for you, then let's just forget the whole thing.”

Noah staggered backward. “That's all it takes?” he exclaimed. “Just one little disagreement and you're ready to call everything off? Let me tell you something. I never planned to get married. I never wanted to
get married. If the government hadn't gone all PC and decided to give us our forty acres and a mule, I would never have considered it.”

“Noah,” Naomi ventured, “you're sounding a little hysterical.”

“Of course! I'm the hysterical one. And he's the calm, sensitive one. That's what happens in marriages. Each person gets assigned their role. And I'm stuck being the hyper, flamboyant one. Which is not who I am. No one even knew I was gay until I came out, and even then they weren't sure until I became a party planner.” Naomi wasn't sure in what alternative universe this was true. “But here I am signing on for a lifetime of being the flighty gay sidekick to his straight-acting, centered monolith. And he's going to get all pissy just because I'm a little stressed-out?” He turned back to Godwin, practically shaking with anger. “You want to forget about it? Fine! Let's forget about the wedding. Let's forget about everything!”

“What I meant,” Godwin said slowly and carefully, “was we can forget about the plus one. I'll call and say I made a mistake.”

“Oh,” Noah said, the color in his cheeks coming close to matching the shirt.

“Did you really mean what you said about assigned roles?” Godwin asked, sounding deeply (and perhaps professionally) concerned. “Do you believe that if I'm calm, you have to be crazed?”

“Not crazed,” Noah said. “But not calm either. It's like you're occupying that space. We're yin and yang. That's the way partnerships work. But what if there are days I don't want to be ‘wacky Noah'? What if there are days I want to be yin?”

“Then just be yin,” Naomi suggested, putting in her vote for a less wacky brother.

“You can't have two yins,” Noah snapped. “You mess up your Chakra Khan.”

Godwin picked up the purple shirt that had been strewn across the tufted sofa, and he headed for the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” Noah asked him.

“What it looks like,” he said. “I'm going to be yang today.”

Noah's jaw fell open. He was speechless. Or the closest to speechless that Naomi had ever seen him. “Really?” he asked.