Wedding Season (20 page)

“I’m here.”

“I miss you.”

“You, too. It’ll be nice to have you here. But you’re really better off not here, just now. The Winslow women are on a rampage. I’d bet on my mother in the ring with your dressmaker, at least this week. You should have heard her on the
phone with the florist today. Mom put the fear of God into them.”

Of this I have no doubt. Where Gabe is concerned, Mrs. Winslow personifies tender indulgence, but she’s one of those incredibly poised society matrons who can ice you with a glance.

“Ah,” Gabe says. “And there she is. Hi, Mom.”

I hear Mrs. Winslow’s voice in the background.

“Joy, Mom says hello. She’s looking forward to seeing you. I need to go—there’s some family conference happening downstairs.”

“Talk to you tomorrow?”

“Of course. Sleep tight.” He hangs up. I hold the receiver against my ear for another few moments, listening to the silence.

“I love you, too,” I tell the empty room.

I
WAKE UP IN A BED
and breakfast in upstate New York, with sun streaming through the open windows, and Gabe whistling in the bathroom. For a moment I’m lost in a sleepy sense of absurd well-being, the way I used to feel as a child opening my eyes on the first day of summer vacation, all those golden days of nothing unfurling before me. I pull the covers over my head and watch the light filter through the blossom-print duvet, a little Eden—until the awful memory of last night slaps me awake.

I
MAY BE SUFFERING
post-traumatic stress syndrome from the Winslow wedding last weekend. It looked like any other understated and overpriced wedding, except bigger. That is, if you didn’t know that the well-mannered, badly dressed, overbred, gin-preserved, dour-faced guests crowding Trinity Church were Kennedy cousins and Rockefeller offspring, titled Europeans and Fortune 100 scions. When I arrived in Boston last Friday afternoon, Gabe presented me with a gift from the family: a dress to wear to the wedding. It was this gauzy, floaty, floral number selected by his mother, probably hideously expensive, and about as much to my taste as mud wrestling. I joined the charade that this was
a marvelously thoughtful gesture and not a catty insult (as was obvious to everyone but Gabe), and wore the damn thing with what little poise I could muster; I looked like something out of a 1970s feminine hygiene commercial.

And, of course, everyone I met—at the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, the reception, the postwedding breakfast on Sunday morning—asked when Gabe and I planned to be married. That is, everyone except his immediate family. They were very polite, of course. They always are. But at the rehearsal dinner, apropos of nothing, Teeny gave me a long discourse on the value of family traditions, and how important it was to the Winslows that she and Mo had both married a certain kind of man—by which she meant blue-blooded Yankees with an exhaustive knowledge of silverware for all occasions. And at the reception, Gabe’s mother introduced him, in my presence, to a suitable young lady—Serena Horseface or something like that, a Wellesley graduate recently relocated to New York to take her master’s degree in education. I stood by with mounting blood pressure as Mrs. Winslow encouraged Gabe to look her up. After she had departed, Gabe’s mother said: “Such a lovely, accomplished girl. I simply adore her family. And so pretty, don’t you think, Gabriel? So feminine.”

I
N THE WAKE
of all that, we left the city yesterday in Gabe’s old convertible with the top down, singing loudly to radio stations that would flicker in and fade as we drove north. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived in the small, bucolic town where the parents of the groom du jour, my high school friend Ben Rushfield, have a sprawling old summer house on a dozen wild, green, and wooded acres nestled into the famous local hills. I misplaced my virginity here, once upon a long-ago summer when the Rushfields
invited a half-dozen of Ben’s classmates up for a lazy, impossibly happy week of country living—which, for my part, included a long-planned and quite romantic sexual initiation courtesy of Christopher Adams, Ben’s best friend and the love of my high school life.

By the time Gabriel and I checked into our aggressively charming and rustic little inn, located just off the hamlet’s aggressively charming and rustic little Main Street, both of us were irritable from a long drive made longer by my navigation errors. Even Gabe’s inexhaustible good humor had reached its limit. We dressed for dinner, moving around one another at elaborately wide, cold distances in the ruffled, pine-furniture-stuffed room, and drove to the Rushfields’ house in silence.

As we rolled to a stop at the end of the long driveway, several people tumbled out of the door of the old house and down the steps toward us. Ben pounced on me as I climbed from the car and bear-hugged me as best he could, being several inches shorter than I am. Behind us, his little sister bounced on her toes as she introduced herself to Gabe and chattered at us as we crossed from the lawn into the cool shade of the house.

Though I knew that Christopher (who goes by Topher) would be there, acting as Ben’s best man, it still gave me a shock when he came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel and waving to us. We hadn’t seen each other for maybe five years, since he abandoned a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century poetry, was hired as a writer by an entertainment company, and moved to Los Angeles.

“Hello, you.” Topher leaned to kiss my cheek, and I felt myself blushing.

“Topher, this is Gabe.” This must be what people refer to as regression, I thought: I suddenly felt all of sixteen years old.

“The famous Topher.” Gabe shook his hand. “At last we meet.”

“Evelyn, come on out here,” Topher called back into the kitchen. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

I could practically hear an aria swelling up as a seraphically lovely young woman appeared beside him, with a radiant and exquisitely drawn face and tawny hair spilling over her shoulders. The smile that she bore toward me faded and then blossomed again as she saw Gabriel, and she ran to him laughing and threw herself into his open arms. Topher and I looked from them to each other, and then Topher pointed, laughing, at Gabe.

“You’re that Gabriel!” he said, as I told Topher, “She’s that Evelyn,” and Evelyn, turning between the two men, asked, “This is Joy?”

“What’s going on here?” asked Marilyn, Ben’s bride-to-be, coming down the stairs.

“Your wedding has just turned into a French farce, I think.” I gave Marilyn a kiss. “It looks like my high school sweetheart is now the boyfriend of my boyfriend’s high school sweetheart.”

“What?” Marilyn squinted at me. “Oh, right. Topher and Evelyn. They’re engaged, actually.” She patted my shoulder. Evelyn laughed a tinkling laugh and came to take my hand between both of hers.

“I’m so glad to meet you.” She gave me the apple-blossom smile, and then put one hand on Topher’s shoulder and the other on Gabe’s chest. “It feels like fate, doesn’t it?”

“Thank you.” I took the sweating glass of lemonade that Ben offered. “Rushfield, was this a little surprise you were waiting to spring on us?”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “I never put two and two together.”

T
HERE ARE NO
single people here, I thought as we sat down to dinner, and an image floated through my head of the assembled couples marching in neat animal pairs onto an ark. Ben’s parents held court at one end of a long table, Marilyn’s at the other, flanked by complete sets of grandparents (one widowed and remarried). A couple of high school friends, and a handful of people I’d never met, mostly from Ben and Marilyn’s graduate program, all married or engaged. Even Ben’s little sister had a boyfriend, who was seated to my left, a handsome boy who still had about him the sweet, brutish look of a high school jock popular enough to be nice to everyone. He told me he was twenty-three, and the matron of honor, a very pregnant woman in her late thirties seated on my other side, overheard and whispered to me, “No one should be allowed to be twenty-three.”

Across from me, Evelyn sat laughing and luminous between Topher and Gabe, who both attended to her as if under a spell. I watched as Gabe leaned close and whispered to Evelyn; she drew back to look at him with her large soft eyes, her gaze serious and liquid, and put one slim hand against his cheek. I turned away, and when I turned back, Gabe was looking at me, his cheeks flushed. He gave a crooked smile and raised his half-empty glass to me. Topher stood to pour wine for the people sitting across from him. I noticed the curve of his neck, brown against the white linen of his shirt collar, and suddenly remembered resting my head in that hollow during a slow song at some formal dance, laughing together afterward over the limp orchid of my corsage, which we’d crushed by holding each other so tightly.

A
FTER DINNER
a few of us decided to take a swim. In the cool midnight we wandered down a long slope to the pond, our faces pale in the light of an almost-full moon. Watching Gabe’s silhouette advance in front of me, I stumbled, and Topher, beside me, put a steadying hand on the small of my back.

“Oops.” He slipped an arm around my waist. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.” I leaned into the warmth of his body as we passed several white tents set up for the wedding dinner.

“Look at this place. Hasn’t changed, has it? You remember our summer up here?”

“Of course I do.” I blushed into the dark. “The age of innocence.”

“Something like that.” His arm tightened around my waist. “I’m glad Evie’s getting to see it. Isn’t she great?”

I felt myself tense, and I moved away, slipping from the curve of his arm.

“Gabe seems to think so,” I said.

“Come on, you’re not jealous? That’s not like you.”

“How could I be jealous? I’m out in the moonlight, arm in arm with her fiancé.”

“Gabe seems like a solid citizen,” Topher said. “You’re living together?”

“Since last fall.”

“You talking about getting married?”

“God, no. You know how I feel about marriage.”

“Still?” he said, and laughed. “I thought you’d grow out of that.”

“I’ve grown into it. It’s an ingrown idea.”

“Don’t get uppity with me, Silverman. I knew you when you were in braces,” he said. “I took you to the prom. I know
all your secrets.” He peered down at me through the dark. “You’re a romantic.”

We had reached the water’s edge, where clothes were strewn on the damp grass. In the shallows, Ben’s sister and her boyfriend were splashing at each other and howling with laughter. Beyond them, Gabe’s narrow body flashed through the water as he raced Ben out to the raft where Marilyn and Evelyn sat, naked and shining in the moonlight.

“’In the sun that is young once only, time let me play and be golden in the mercy of his means,’” Topher recited. “I cried when I read that in freshman English. I was such a sensitive little lad. Is that why you liked me, Joy?” He stripped off his shirt.

“No. I liked you because you were a babe. And I loved your fade-away shot.”

Naked except for his boxers, Topher tossed an imaginary basketball into the air, and jumped to land ankle-deep in the pond.

“Christ in hell, that’s cold.” He stepped back to the bank and stripped off the underwear. “Hurry up. I’ll race you to the raft,” Topher said. I sneaked a glance at his so-familiar naked body—the muscular shoulders and back sloping down to a lower region that I still found embarrassingly attractive. I looked away as he waded back into the water swearing, and plunged headfirst into the shallows. A moment later Ben’s sister shrieked and fell backward, and Topher surfaced beside her, one of her ankles in his hand, water streaming from his dark hair. As I undressed, I looked back up the hill to the house. Lights were on in all the windows, and shadows moved across the porch. I could hear music faintly through the open door, and bursts of laughter floated across the lawn. I dove.

I hit the water, and the several glasses of wine I’d consumed hit me. I swam dizzily in the general direction of the
raft, with Topher a few strokes ahead and the group on the raft yelling and clapping for us. Topher reached it first, took the hand that Ben offered him, then yanked him into the water with a colossal splash. Some other man leaped in after them, followed by Marilyn’s sister, and they chased one another around the raft, churning the water and shouting into the night. I hauled myself up onto the raft and lay panting on my back beside Gabe, who put one cold hand on my wet shoulder as he talked with Evelyn, seated on his other side with her arms wrapped around her knees. I closed my eyes and felt the raft spinning beneath me. I opened them, and the raft stopped spinning, but the thick band of stars above us began a blurring spiral.