The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (28 page)

My father asked, “Is any of this relevant?”

“Absolutely,” said Ray. “It addresses the very relevant question of me and my relationship to celebrations. Basically, I had kids for parents, kids who were on the outs with their families. No baby shower for my mother, no party after my christening, no birthday parties unless you count a cupcake with a candle in it and a Hoodsie. It took years and a couple of more kids before my grandparents came around, and mainly it was to help out because my parents had split by then. But still, how do you make up for a whole lifetime of not observing special occasions?”

“I don't see how this relates to Alice,” said my mother.

“Or the various pretenses you put forth in your phone call,” said my father.

I said, “I was a party to this. You're all acting as if I were an innocent bystander.”

“You
were
an innocent bystander,” said Ray. “You were at work when I called them—without your knowledge or permission.”

Sylvie frowned at me and put her finger to her lips.

“Thank you,” said Ray. “Okay. As some of you might have heard, I was married before. Only Alice knows that that marriage wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. My first wife cheated on me with a coworker for the entire duration of our marriage. Needless to say, it was very painful and very . . . what's the word . . .?”

“Emasculating?” said Sylvie.

“No. More like
ironic,
” said Ray. “Because if I'd known about all the fooling around before Mary died instead of after, I wouldn't have suffered in the same way when she passed. I threw away an entire year of my life being the grieving widower.” He held up his hand to avert the question nearly visible on my father's lips. “I know,” said Ray. “You think Alice was the first warm body that came along when my period of mourning ended, but it wasn't like that. Friends were throwing phone numbers at me; throwing actual
girls
at me—inviting me over for dinner or out for a drink, and I'd get there: Surprise! Another blind date, another coworker or cousin of some buddy's wife. But nothing was happening here”—he rapped the left side of his chest. “
Nada.
Until I went to the hospital one day—not because I was sick; I'm as healthy as a horse—and discovered that a whole other species of woman existed, someone who doesn't come on to a man, or flirt, or even know how to. A total professional.” He smiled sheepishly. “I gotta admit: I found that something of a novelty. From that moment on, all I could think about was, How do I get this incredible woman to give me the time of day?”

My mother's head swiveled reflexively and diagnostically in my direction, then back to Ray.

“This incredible woman who was a doctor with a very bright, financially secure future,” amended my father.

“I hope,” said Ray, “that that isn't a roundabout way of accusing me of being a golddigger.”

“I'd say not roundabout at all,” murmured Sylvie.

“My question is this,” said my father. “If everything was aboveboard and not a plot to march Alice down the aisle beneath our radar screen, why did you elope, then pretend you didn't?”

“Am I the only one who thinks the answer is obvious?” asked Ray. He strode to my chair and stroked my hand. “I know it looks like we were being impulsive, but it was purely time management. Your daughter, as you know, works like a maniac. When she was able to beg two consecutive days off—which, if you translate that into doctor-time, it's like two
weeks
—we went to City Hall. And then, when the dust settled, and because of my emotional history, we regretted not having a proper wedding, and I in particular regretted not going through the proper channels. I guess I don't see why everyone wants to put this under the microscope. We ran off, thinking it would be romantic, and—despite my previously expressed lack of respect for my former wife—I did have to consider whether or not a big blowout was in poor taste for a widower. And then, when all was said and done, it turned out to be pretty damn depressing to get married at City Hall without one single relative in attendance, not a flower, not a note of music, not even a handshake when it was over, or a honeymoon. That's when I said to myself, ‘This sucks. What was I thinking? Is this any way to get married?' Oh, and I forgot to mention: I was especially concerned, since it was Alice's first time, that she should get the works.”

My father said, “We have related concerns.” He waited a few long seconds. “Which I might put under the general heading of suitability.”

When no one spoke, I surveyed every face. Ray looked undeflated. My father wore an expression of strained diplomacy, while my mother's was utter confusion—Will I be planning a wedding or not? Sylvie, looking the most uncomfortable, stood up. “As much as I don't want to appear inhospitable,” she said, “I think this is a family discussion that should take place in private.”

My father said, “She's right. Let's go back to Alice's room.”

“Am I invited?” Ray asked.

“I think that's the whole idea,” I said.

My mother said, “Lovely to meet you, Sylvia. I know I'll see you again.”

“Take the fudge,” said Sylvie. “I'm trying to cut back on caffeine, not to mention fat grams.”

“What're you talking about?” said Ray. “You look great. If ever there was someone who didn't need to go on a diet . . .”

“Gee, thanks, Ray,” said Sylvie. “And Alice? You'll call me when your company leaves?”

Ray asked, “Is this the kind of Q and A we could have at a restaurant? Alice is probably starved.”

My mother said, “Is there a decent place close by where people can carry on a conversation?”

“This is Boston,” said Ray. “You name it, we have it: quiet, loud, big, small, gourmet, Chinese, Italian, seafood, sushi—”

“Are we driving back tonight?” asked my mother.

My father said, “Could we please just move across the hall and tackle these subjects one at a time?”

We did. I had to lower the bed to accommodate all of us. Without a stranger as a moderating influence, my father barked increasingly rude questions at Ray. About his income. About his job history and security. School? Brushes with the law? Life insurance? Debts? Liquidity?

I winced with each question, eliciting my own reprimand from my father. “I'm only asking what I assume you already know; what any prudent woman would ask before jumping into marriage with a relative stranger who seems to have a lot of time on his hands.”

I said, “Actually, Dad, since I wasn't arranging a marriage or calculating the size of my dowry, or granting him a mortgage, or sitting on a co-op board, there wasn't any need to ask for his last ten income-tax returns.”

“She fell in love, Bert,” my mother said.

“And vice versa,” said Ray. “Head over friggin' heels.”

“And he proposed,” my mother continued. “And, because it was his second marriage, he didn't think it was appropriate to have a big wedding, so they eloped, and then he regretted cheating Alice out of something more formal and meaningful. I just can't see anything sinister in wanting to get it right.”

“No one said anything about
sinister,
” said my father. He turned to me. “Alice? Do you understand why we would find this whole thing unnerving?”

I nodded.

“Because Alice is a chip off the old block!” said Ray. “
Unnerving
is her middle name. But I understand that. I know she finds the prospect of shopping for a wedding dress unnerving. And getting her hair done and choosing stainless. And auditioning bands, not to mention hitting the dance floor in front of hundreds of people—”

“And all those thank-you notes,” trilled my mother.

I looked at her. She'd married off her impaired, unpopular daughter. Her husband's objections had been voiced and noted. Alice wasn't asking for an annulment. The mother of the wife-bride could now move forward and fashion a fabulous wedding without worrying that—short of divorce—the groom would change his mind.

I looked at my husband, who looked back at me. “Alice?” he said. “Sweetie?”

Have I mentioned that this is a cautionary tale? One gets swept up in these things. One's doubts get pushed into a section of the brain that doesn't trigger speech, and where other people's zest for wedlock jams the pathways that send warnings to a bride.

“Anyone?” said my father.

“I really love her,” said Ray.

“End of June?” asked my mother.

29.
We're Engaged

GOOD NEWS: DR. KENNICK PASSED ME IN THE HALL, ONE DAY
before his verdict was due, and announced rather blandly, “Oh, Thrift? You've been taken off probation.”

“And put where?” I asked.

“Back in the lineup.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Heard you were holding your own.”

I said, “I think so, too.”

He took a few more steps, then turned around again. “Did someone tell me you got hitched?”

“
I
told you. I asked for two consecutive days off last month so I could go to Cape Cod.”

“Did I grant them?”

I said yes, thanks again.

Clearly it was only etiquette that impelled him to ask, “Who's the lucky guy?”

“No one you know,” I said. “Raymond Russo.”

“Physician?”

“Businessman.”

“That's good: occupational hybrid vigor—each of you bringing complementary talents to the marriage.”

I said, “Well . . . I'd better get back to my patients. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Hang in there, Thrift,” he said. “I've seen worse.”

I called after him, “And where are they now?”

Vaguely, he brushed the air with his right hand, this direction and that, with a final gesture toward the world outside. Translation: anesthesiology, pathology, motherhood, law school.

RAY EMBRACED THE
wedding chores traditionally performed by the bride. He registered for gifts in department stores up and down the eastern seaboard and for appliances in high-end catalogs. He leafed through bridal magazines for inspiration on formal wear and flowers, and enlisted his cousin, a full-time beautician and part-time calligrapher, to address the invitations. I came home one night to find seven wedding dresses in my size arranged rather artistically across my bed, with a note that said,
Pick your favorite,
I'll return the ones you don't want. Almost got trampled in the One
Day Only Bridal Rush. Some look dirty it's just from being tried on so we'll send it to the cleaners. P.S. I'm not superstitious are you? I won't remember the dress by the time 6/29 rolls around.

I knocked on Sylvie's door, wearing a big gauzy one with a hoop skirt, and holding its back closed because I couldn't finesse the buttons tracing my vertebral column. She opened the door and emitted a yelp—something between pleasure and pain, not easily characterized.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

I could see she was hesitating, so I assured her, “You don't have to be diplomatic. There's six more.”

“This I gotta see,” she said, closing her door and following me. Inside my apartment, after she buttoned me, she went straight for the array of gowns. “Hideous,” she said, of the first one she held against her body. And then, of the next three: “Can't do acetate . . . too Southern belle . . . too
Starship Enterprise.
”

I said, “Don't blame me. Ray picked them out.”

“With you along?”

“No. By himself. Because he thought it was the only way I'd get one. Apparently there are strict seasons, and you can't just get a June wedding dress anytime you please.”

“Although,” said Sylvie, examining the tags, “I daresay Filene's Basement isn't as sensitive to those issues as, say, Priscilla of Boston.”

“I'm supposed to choose one, and he'll return the rest.”

“Does the groom usually pay for the dress?”

I said no; I'd reimburse him.

“Let your mother reimburse him! You don't have to spend your hard-earned salary on a dress you didn't want in the first place. Besides, she's getting a bargain: three hundred and ninety-nine bucks for something that must've cost five times that much in its original state.”

“Could you unbutton me?” I asked.

“You're going to need a lot more than a dress,” Sylvie said, working the silk knots out of their slippery loops. “There's the foundation garments, the stockings, the shoes, the veil. Ray can't do everything.”

“Does one have to wear a veil?”

Sylvie turned me around by the shoulders so she could deliver a meaningful stare. “You don't have to do anything. You can wear a feather headdress or an orchid behind one ear. Or not walk down the aisle at all if a little voice inside your head is telling you to run like hell.”

I said, “We're already married, so don't get dramatic. This is for my parents.”

She went back to the dress candidates with a sigh. “The worst,” she said, tossing a much appliquéd and pearl-encrusted model to the floor. She reached for the last one. “Not bad except for the stains.”

I said, “I'm not supposed to consider its state of cleanliness.”

“I see: a twofer,” said Sylvie. “Something old
and
something new.” She glanced at its price and its original tag. “Bergdorf's. Very nice. And no froufrou. Let's see this one on you.”

I obliged. It had a zipper for easy access, a no-nonsense approach to straplessness—straight across, high on the sternum—and a slit from knee to ankle for ease of ambulation. Sylvie motioned with an index finger: pirouette, please.

“Too anything?” I asked.

She stepped back. “We've got a winner, as far as I'm concerned.”

“It's kind of pink.”

“Blush,” she pronounced, dragging the
ssshhh
out until I laughed.

I looked down at myself. It fit. It wasn't necessarily me, but it wasn't a dress for a bridal Barbie, either—no layers, no lace, no embellishment at all.

Sylvie said, “I bet some New York deb ordered this at Bergdorf's and then for whatever tragic reason had to cancel the wedding, so it went to their sale rack, but then someone stepped on the hem, and it had to go to Filene's Basement. My guess is it was originally thousands and thousands of dollars.”

I said, “Ray has good taste.”

Sylvie looked up. “No one ever disputed that.”

In a flash she had pulled off her T-shirt and stomped out of her scrub pants, leaving on a hot-pink lace bra and transparent purple underpants. “Button me up,” she ordered, her voice muffled inside the bodice of the most ornamental and twinkling model. “This might be as close as I ever get.”

I said, “Do you really believe that?”

“I'm not the marrying type,” she said. “Which I say with no self-pity whatsoever.”

“You never know. Look at me.”

Sylvie shook her head. “Don't confuse my faux popularity with wife potential. I attract men through sheer hard work, which is required because I'm not conventionally attractive. Men are very susceptible. That's where I reel them in: Love me and leave me, permission granted.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, and Sylvie joined me, both of us in bridal finery. I said, “Whoever told you that you weren't attractive? Not those boys on the high school football team. Not your fellow physicians.”

“Some men might find me attractive in a kind of freaky bad-girl way, but trust me—I'm not what you want to bring home to Mother.”

I said, “If I had a son, I'd be thrilled if he brought you home.”

Sylvie patted my hand. “I know you would.”

“I'd like to be a little freaky in a bad-girl way myself. I just don't think I have the basic building blocks.”

“I'll be fine. I've got my life all figured out. I'll stay unencumbered, date-raping my fellow house officers as needed. And then, when I'm forty, I'll adopt a baby girl from China. Or, Plan B: artificial insemination from some smart, good-looking, athletic yet musically gifted volunteer.”

I smiled. “Or
not
artificial.”

“Too complicated. And too messy. Look at Leo and his love-child problem. He wants to do the right thing, but he doesn't love Meredith.”

I would not have exhumed this topic, but this was Sylvie, fearless confronter of all things awkward. I said, “Okay. Is this the point where you confess that you slept with Leo?”

Sylvie said, “N-O. We did not go down that road. Yes, we danced; we might even have danced close. And yes, I thought about it. But in the end I was saved from sin because Saint Leo said, ‘I think you're a very nice woman, Sylvie,
blah blah blah,
but I'd hate myself in the morning.' ”

“And what did you say?”

“I didn't want to look morally clueless, so I nodded sadly and said, ‘You're so right. I'd hate myself, too.' And that's the irony. That's why I was so hurt when you assumed the worst: I could have fucked him to kingdom come and you wouldn't have been any less mad at me.”

I said, “I was stupid. I'm sorry. I overreacted.”

“It's okay. It's not as if you weren't technically correct. I mean, if it had been up to me . . .”

She tilted sideways until our shoulders knocked. “So when are we reaffirming the sacred vows?”

“June twenty-ninth.”

“Am I invited to this shindig?”

I said, “Of course. You're first on my guest list. Invitations are going out . . . sometime or other.”

“Is Leo on your list?”

I said, “Should he be?”

“It would give me someone to drive down with, and to sit with at the reception. Besides, he was your roommate for six months. He's exceedingly fond of you.”

I said, “He's not exceedingly fond of Ray.”

“That's the human condition, sweetie-pie: people you love marrying people you hate.”

“Did he tell you that he hated Ray?”

“No. Certainly not. It was a figure of speech. Besides, I promised myself that I was going to mind my own business.”

“Do you see Leo?”

“Sure. We wave across the cafeteria and occasionally sit down for a cup of coffee. But he's very careful to mention how complicated his life is at the moment, meaning, ‘Not interested in you, Dr. Schwartz.' ”

“But his life really
is
complicated. Only a very shallow guy is going to jump into bed while he's figuring out if he wants to be with the mother of his child.”

“First of all, they're all shallow. Second, in many ways it's preferable. I dated a guy who was a messenger for a law firm—absolutely no ambition whatsoever except to look great in spandex. He never complained, except occasionally about the weather, and about office buildings with no numbers.”

I said, “I think I'm like that: simple. I get up when the alarm rings. I go to work. I have a cheese sandwich and chocolate milk for lunch. I read and memorize and take notes. I do what I'm ordered to do: Run this to the lab. Get the results. Hold this. Stitch this. Inject this. Intubate that. If someone wants to date me, I accept. And if they want to marry me, I get a blood test.”

“Alice. Unh-uh. Please don't talk like that. Because if you start sounding ambivalent, I might have to exercise that speak-up-or-forever-hold-your-piece option from a back pew.”

“You can't. We're already married. Wedding number two is just for show. It doesn't change anything.”

“But . . .”

“But what?”

“Nothing. Nothing substantive. My own prejudices and
mishegaas.
” She shook her head firmly, eyes closed.

“You can't turn back the clock,” I said. “Not that I want to.”

I could see her searching for something benign, for an answer free of wedding animus.

“Are you worried that we'll need a two-bedroom, and I'll move away?” I suggested.

Sylvie patted my stooped and strapless shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “You're right. That's it. Geography. C'est tout.”

RAY GRANTED MY
mother sole discretion over reception decisions. Not only was it her house, her caterer, her florist, her daughter, and her signature on the checks, but it was time for Ray to go forth and sell his wares. On May 1 he headed north with routes highlighted in yellow and carnival locations circled in red. I asked why he didn't expand his customer base to gourmet and souvenir shops, those places on the Mohawk Trail and Martha's Vineyard that sell maple candy and saltwater taffy. And what about all those ski resorts?

“I try,” he said. “Believe me. If it has a sign out front and a jar of beef jerky by the register, I pull over.”

He informed me that most of northern New England was not covered by his cellular provider, but he'd call me whenever he entered a service area. He spent the night on April 30, enjoyed marital relations, and was dressed and ready to go when my alarm sounded on May 1. “I know it'll seem like a long time,” he announced, sample cases in hand, “but this is good. When you spot me standing at the altar, I'll be a sight for sore eyes.”

I said, “Are you saying this is a two-month road trip?”

He said, “You can't be surprised when we're talking about a huge territory, with islands and ferries and thirty-mile-an-hour speed limits.” He took out his map and laid it across my lap. “I don't think you understand how big New England is. If you figure the distance between here and Presque Isle, to take one example, and figure a dozen stops every hundred miles, not only is it going to take two months, but I'll be cutting it short to get back in time.”

I said I had no idea.

“This is what I save my energy for. This is
Around the World
in Eighty Days,
only without the trust fund. This is me sleeping in budget motels or pulled over on some creepy backwoods road because I'm nodding off at the wheel.”

I said, “Ray, under no circumstances should you sleep by the side of the road.”

“I sleep in my car,” he said. “There's only been a couple of times that anything bad happened.”

“Were you attacked?”

“Robbed. But now I try to pull over into campgrounds.”

“Is it a question of money?”

He shrugged.

“You didn't want to ask me?”