A Bad Bride's Tale (8 page)

Stevie turned, pulled him toward her. “Jez, I’m so sorry.”

Jez fell into the reassuring dough of her arms. “He’s gone, Stevie.

Dad’s fucking well gone.”

“I know.” Stevie held his hand tight, guiding him up the stairs to their spacious two-bedroom, thirtysomething flat. They stepped

over Jez’s twenty-four-pair trainer collection, which had been in the process of being edited when the news broke. Jez kicked a pair of black Pumas against the wall before collapsing onto the gray, nub- bly Conran sofa. Stevie sat next to him, pressing herself against his side, as if she could suck some of the hurt out of his body into hers. Jez slid down the sofa back, ruching his blue short-sleeved checked shirt, and leaned his head into Stevie’s lap, his bald spot a pale pink disk surrounded by wavy strawberry-blond hair.

Stevie stroked his hair. His head felt unusually heavy on her knee, as if Jez were no longer using any muscles to support himself. His skin was even paler than normal, a Tube map of veins visible in his forehead.

“Why me? Why
my
dad?” mumbled Jez. “He was only sixty- five.”

“Too young,” said Stevie, suddenly aware that she, too, could die at sixty-five and that meant she still had thirty-one years left, al- most a life again. It seemed quite a long time. “It’s so sad.”

“But he ignored the doctor’s advice last year, didn’t he? Bloody- minded bastard. Went on with his morning sherries and smearing butter two inches thick on his toast, like he was the only person in the world that mattered. But he’d never fucking listen to anyone, would he?” Jez dug thumb and index finger into the bridge of his nose and squeezed so hard it left a red welt.

“He had his ideas about how he wanted to live. And he lived how he wanted. That’s a good thing, I think,” said Stevie quietly, trying to massage some of the grief out of Jez’s shoulders. The knots upset her more than his tears. She’d never felt them so tight or seen Jez—loud, laid-back Jez—so defeated. Or so angry.

“Did he? Did he, really? I don’t think so. Mum and him . . .

Well, it was pretty fucking joyless.” Jez spat as he spoke.

“Maybe you never know what people get out of a relationship, not even your own parents. Look at mine,” she said, softly. “You’d have thought they’d have divorced years ago.”

“Dad used to turn off his hearing aid in his dodgy ear when she was twittering on. Just turned it off. Click. Silence. She never real- ized.” Jez shuddered, stuck a knuckle in his mouth, and sobbed loudly. He released more of his weight onto Stevie’s lap, which was now beginning to ache slightly. She stroked his hair silently. Jez started to cry louder.

It startled Stevie, seeing Jez crying like a baby. It wasn’t right. She wanted to take away his pain, but was unsure how to do it, so she offered him tea instead.

He looked uncertain, shook his head. “No, I’ll have a beer, pumpkin.”

Stevie wished he wouldn’t call her pumpkin. But now was not the time to remind him. She started to lever herself up from the sofa to get a beer. Jez pushed her down, gently. He wasn’t done.

“Stay with me. Don’t leave, babe.” He settled back into her lap. “You know the worst freaking bit? Dad so wanted to see me mar- ried. That’s
all
he wanted. ‘I’m so happy you’re finally settling down, son,’ was the last thing he said to me, like it was the first thing I’d ever done right. That was on Friday night, after . . . after . . .” Jez’s throat locked. “. . . after fucking
Big Brother
, of all things. All he wanted, to see his son, his only son, married,” he re- peated solemnly, allowing his father a portentous dignity he had never allowed him in life. Jez had never been entirely sure he liked his father, but it was clear now that he must have loved him. And this was a relief. By dying, his father had improved their relation- ship immeasurably.

“We should cancel, out of respect,” said Stevie, quietly. There was no way they could marry now. Rita would be in a state. It would be insensitive. Perhaps this was happening for a reason. In a cruel twist, had she shamefully got what she wished for? It made her feel dreadful. She couldn’t bear to see Jez so sad.

“Cancel?”
Jez craned his neck off her knee. “Don’t be ridicu- lous. I want to do something right. Even if he’s gone.” He soft- ened his voice, staring into the distance. “Mum also wants to bang the funeral out quickly and—you know—proceed as planned.”

Stevie felt her insides sink deeper and deeper until she had noth- ing left in her chest but an empty cavity and a fluttery feeling, like something was flying about in there, a trapped bird. “It just . . .” She paused, wondering how hard she should push it. “. . . feels wrong, Jez.”

Jez brushed Stevie’s cheek with his fingers. “You’re so sweet. But really, I want to go through with this, I do.” He clenched his fists with fresh resolve. “Yes, I do. I think I’d just fucking crumble to pieces right now if I didn’t have this wedding to focus on. You are my solace, pumpkin. I love you.”

Stevie bit her lip, looked down at Jez—the man she was to marry—and saw him as he truly was at that moment, needy, griev- ing and, for what felt like the first time in their relationship, totally in need of her support and love. Did she really have it in her to de- stroy him completely?

“Hold me tight,” muttered Jez, as he wiped his wet nose on her jeans. “Hold me while I sleep, that’s all I ask.”

Stevie held Jez tight as a baby, as if the tightness of the embrace could arrest the moment somehow, prevent time from careering

forward. Jez fell into a troubled doze, tears and snot drying and flaking in his blond mustache stubble. She tenderly stroked his hair away from his sweaty temples. The gesture made Jez smile in his sleep. As the smile faded, his lip stuck to his front tooth. Stevie looked away.

NINE
Æ

behind a sheet of shimmering glass, seventy feet
above Lower Manhattan, Sebastian Compton-Pickett put down his ergonomic phone, relieved. Thank heavens for Absolutely.com. He knew he had to book something as a surprise (as requested by Katy), but the blasted markets had been so unstable in the last two weeks—more terror alerts—and he hadn’t been able to leave his desk until nine, let alone research holidays. That he’d become the kind of man who’d use a concierge company to arrange a “romantic break” gave him a frisson of pleasure. It was a sign he had arrived. He was cash rich, time poor, and—for the first time in his life— confident enough with women to secretly insult them.

Sebastian slid his black Amex back into his wallet with pale, fine-boned hands. A thumb-sized picture of Katy beamed at him from a small pocket. Katy was a superb-looking woman, no doubt about that. She was clever, funny, and hot in the sack. She had her own career, her own friends. But—as Mother had warned him— Katy was becoming neurotic.

Did she look fat? (No.) Did she look old? (Yes, sometimes.) It

drove him loopy. She needed constant reassurance. Why wasn’t she happy? He’d agreed to move in with her. But give an inch . . . She always wanted more. The woman had an agenda. He would marry
if
and
when
he was ready. And the more she pushed, the bigger the
if
grew. It was now writ across his brain, large as the letters on the Hollywood Hills.

Of course, the geographical separation wasn’t ideal. He’d allow her that. But New York was a terrific opportunity. He’d have been bonkers not to take a bite. Obviously, the decision had disturbed Katy, switched their roles around, he thought triumphantly, his chest expanding slightly beneath his Turnbull and Asser white shirt. In the past, she was the flighty one with the glamorous ca- reer, tales, and travels. He was the gawky and posh younger guy, twice turned away from the club Bouji for wearing a tie and gener- ally radiating unhipness. As a banker, he was deemed a “good catch,” but one who was still only able to get a woman as good- looking as Katy once she’d hit her mid-thirties. He hadn’t realized how much he resented this dynamic until he got the New York contract and felt something within him lift.

Seb took a last bite of his Dean & DeLuca brownie—a man needed energy in this city—and gazed out of his sparkling window. To his left was the scar of Ground Zero—it still made him jumpy, he quickly looked away; and to the right, was . . . Oh, she was pretty. Nice bottom. And another. Crikey, these New York girls, even this far downtown, the girls were terrific. They were even more Katy-like than Katy. Here he never encountered the kind of tombstone-toothed country creatures his parents had lined up for him in Surrey. And, more important, these women were accessible. His accent opened many doors, his wallet opened the others. But boy, did his balls ache. He hadn’t had sex for twenty-three days.

Seb slipped on his suit jacket, and took the
elevator
—he loved us- ing that word—and dropped down the silvery artery of the build- ing, like a bead of mercury, through hundreds of offices where women in tight skirt-suits crossed and uncrossed their legs. On the
sidewalk
—so Woody Allen, so cool—he put his arm out assertively to hail a yellow cab. (He’d quickly learned that a wavering, apolo- getic English arm wasn’t effective.) As they drove riotously, horn- blasting, up Broadway into SoHo, his skin was goose-bumped with anticipation. The city seemed to be waiting for him, hungry to swallow him up. Resisting the urge to redirect the driver up to Midtown and pop back quickly to his apartment for a quick self- administered release beneath the sheets, he rolled down the win- dow and, with a sharp inhalation, sucked in the American air.

In America—
Ama-ree-ka
, Seb repeated to himself silently—he was free of his past, his parents, and his increasingly dull old public- school friends. No one here put him in social boxes; well, only an En- glish aristocrat box. They all seemed to think that because he’d been to Eton, he lived in a stately home with a family crest and hot-and- cold running butlers, rather than a six-bedroom farmhouse in Surrey in need of a new roof. But the Americans’ fantasy did no harm.

England felt scary now. Here he felt safe. The underclass was in- visible, if they existed at all, certainly not below 125th Street, his current city limit. There were no hordes of threatening hooded youths blocking pavements. No junkies outside his apartment, as there were in Notting Hill, despite the fact his mews house cost close to two million quid. But as he had explained to Brad in the adjacent office, money couldn’t buy you much in London these days. It was a prerequisite, not a luxury. It was also a liability. It got you mugged. (And all the hoods carried knives—he’d read about it in the
Evening Standard.
)

Here Seb was free of Britain’s acquisitive and angry society, as well as his increasingly unfathomable girlfriend. Shit, this urge to be American was almost embarrassing. Though embarrassment was an English thing, of course. To be stamped out. The taxi screeched to a stop on Prince Street. He tipped far more generously than he ever did in London.

Seb paused on the street, reverting back for a moment to being a hesitant Englishman, feeling slight, pale, and vaguely undernour- ished compared to the beefy, confident Americans. Did it matter that he wasn’t meeting anyone in SoHo? No. Damn it. He’d been out to bars on his own a few times since arriving here. He’d col- lided into women, two human lives randomly enriched, albeit tem- porarily. And when he told women about his job, they laughed more readily and touched their hair a lot. After years of feeling puny and concerned about the girth of his member, here he felt like George Clooney. Like he’d had a booster jab of testosterone. Yes, he would go to a bar. He had a strong sense that it was a day when ex- citing collisions were meant to happen.

As Seb crossed Prince Street, a commotion stopped him in his tracks. There, standing in the middle of the road, dressed like a tatty pastiche of an Upper East Side dame—all fur and leopard- print and torn fluttering silk neck scarves—was a woman trying to direct traffic, cackling, one arm up, the other hand holding an irate honking cab back, dirty palm exposed. What on earth? It took a second or two for it to sink in. She was cuckoo. Of course. Seb winced, suddenly recalling his mad Aunt Gracie, not dissimilar physically, who’d lived in a folly of a Scottish castle north of Perth and had descended from eccentricity into obesity and madness over a ten-year period. Seb swerved to avoid the madwoman, suddenly afraid of her long, thin, painted fingers, the way they knitted up his

English childhood here on a New York street. It took him a few seconds to feel like his new self again.

Brushing down his olive-green corduroy blazer, his hair flopping to one side of his narrow forehead, he turned onto Mercer Street and strode, as confidently as possible, through the curtained doors of a boutique hotel. Inside, a pretty waitress wearing all black, a tray balanced on her upturned palm, smiled, exposing white Amer- ican teeth. She had one of the smallest hand-span waists Seb had ever seen. From the bar he could peer into the restaurant area, where he was tantalized by groups of attractive blond women, fork- ing salad, puncturing eggs Benedict, cell phones nestled by their elbows like pampered pets. He sat down on a low seat, smoothed his trousers, ordered the most New York drink he could think of— a Manhattan—decided he would decorate his London home in the muted grays and browns and mushrooms of the sofas and curtains and carpet, gulped his cocktail, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand (like De Niro), and waited for the latest installment of his life to start.

To his astonishment, it did. Three hours and twenty-five seconds later, he expelled his frustrations into the open mouth of Char- maine, a twenty-two-year-old waitress/actress from Louisiana un- der the impression he was twenty-seventh in line to the throne.

TEN
Æ

was sixteen bikinis too many? could sixteen biki-
nis fit into a ten-day trip? Katy perched on her bed’s faux-fur throw and pondered. No, sixteen was fine. All eventualities covered.

Her tummy rumbled in a satisfying, reassuring way. It was 4:00