Anybody Out There - Marian Keyes (17 page)

And then I was back on the sidewalk again. What was I to do?
I started walking. I hobbled a wandering, circuitous route, but eventually I reached my building,
because there was no place else for me to go. At the bottom of the steps, as I wasted a few more
seconds hunting in my bag for my keys, someone yelled, "Baby cakes. Wait up."
It was Ornesto, our upstairs neighbor, coming down the street in a bright red pimpy suit. Shite.
He caught me up and said accusingly, "I've been calling you. I have left you, like, eight trillion
messages."
"I know, Ornesto, I'm sorry, I'm just a little weird--"
"Whoa! Would you look at that face! Whoo-ee, baby cakes, that is bad." He practically ran his
nose along my scar, like he was hoovering up a line of coke, then pulled me to him in a painful
embrace. Luckily Ornesto was very self-obsessed and it didn't take long for his attention to snap
back to him.
"I'm home for a New York minute, then I'm going right back out to look for"--he paused to yell
--"HOT MEN. Come and talk to me while I get changed into my party frock."
"Okay."
In Ornesto's Thai-themed apartment, right beside a gold Buddha, there was a photo stuck to the
wall with a kitchen knife. It was of a man's face and the knife went right through his open
laughing mouth.
Ornesto noticed me looking. "Ohmigod, you totally missed it all. His name is Bradley. I thought
it was the real thing, but you would not believe what that man did to me."
Ornesto had very bad luck with men. They were always cheating on him or stealing his
expensive heavy-bottomed saucepans or going back to their wives. What had happened this
time?
"He beat me up."
"He did?"
"Can't you see my black eye?"
He displayed it proudly. All I could see was slight purplish bruising beside his eyebrow, but he
was so pleased with it that I sucked in my breath sympathetically. "That's terrible."
"But the good news is that I've started taking singing lessons! My therapist says I need a creative
outlet." Ornesto--unexpectedly, perhaps--was a veterinary nurse. "My voice coach says I have a
real gift. Says he never saw anyone get the breathing right so fast!"

"Lovely," I said vaguely. No point acting too interested: Ornesto was a great man for new
passions. He'd have had a row with his teacher and completely turned against the singing by next
week.
I looked around; I could smell something...Then I noticed it on his table. A big bunch of flowers.
Lilies.
"You have lilies?" I said.
"Yeah, trying to be good to myself, you know? So many guys in line to treat me bad. Only one I
can depend on is me, myself, and I."
"When did you get them?"
He thought about it. "Right about yesterday. Something wrong?"
"No." But I was wondering if it had been Ornesto's lilies I had smelled last night. The smell
could have come through the air vent into my kitchen. Was that what had happened? Had it been
nothing at all to do with Aidan?
25
I   used to dream of a white wedding.
The kind of dream where you jerk awake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, your
heart pounding. A dream in the worst nightmare kind of way.
I could see it all. The months of bickering with my mother over broccoli. On the day itself, trying
to fight a path through my sisters--all of them my bridesmaids--to get space in a mirror to put
my makeup on, and having to talk Helen out of wearing my dress. Then Dad walking me up the
aisle muttering, "I feel a right gom in this waistcoat."
But there's nothing like a near-death experience to bring things into focus.
After I'd recovered from my scuba-diving ascent--I had to spend a short time in a
decompression thing, then a much longer time accepting Codependent's abject apologies; clearly
the whole incident had set him back terribly, I'd never met anyone so needy--I rang my mother
to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, "What choice had I? You were in there, how else
were you going to get out?"
Then I told her I was getting married.
"Sure you are."

"No, Mum, I really am. Wait, I'm going to put him on the line."
I handed Aidan the phone and he looked terrified. "What do I say?"
"Tell her you want to marry me."
"Okay. Hello, Mrs. Walsh. Can I marry your daughter?" He listened for a moment then gave me
back the phone. "She wants to talk to you."
"Well, Mum?"
"What's wrong with him?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing obvious, you mean. Has he a job?"
"Yes."
"A chemical dependency?"
"No."
"Cripes, this is a break from tradition. What's his name?"
"Aidan Maddox."
"Irish?"
"No, Irish-American. He's from Boston."
"Like JFK?"
"Like JFK," I agreed. Her lot loved JFK, he was up there with the pope.
"Well, look what happened to him."
Petulantly I said to Aidan, "My mother won't let me marry you in case you get your head blown
off in an open-top car in a Dallas motorcade."
"Hold your horses," Mum said. "I never said that. But this is very sudden. And your history of...
ah...impulsive carry-on is a long one. And how come you never mentioned him at Christmas?"
"I did. I said I had a boyfriend who kept asking to marry me, but Helen was doing her
impersonation of Stephen Hawking eating a cone and no one was listening to me. As usual.
Look, ring Rachel. She's met him. She'll vouch for him."

A pause. A sneaky pause. "Has Luke met him?"
"Yes."
"I'll ask Luke about him."
"Do that."
Any excuse to speak to Luke.
"Are we really getting married?" I asked Aidan.
"Sure."
"Then let's do it soon," I said. "Three months' time. Start of April?"
"Okay."
In the New York dating rules, after a relationship "goes exclusive," the next step is to get
engaged. This is meant to happen after three months. Basically, the minute the period of
exclusivity starts, the women set a stopwatch for ninety days, and as soon as it brrrrings, they
shout, "Right! Time's up! Where's my ring?"
But Aidan and I broke all records. A two-month period between going exclusive and getting
engaged and three months between getting engaged and getting married. And I wasn't even
pregnant.
But after my brush with death beneath the waves, I was full of vim and vigor and there seemed
no point in waiting for anything. My urgent need to do everything right now passed after a
couple of weeks, but at the time I was going round seizing the day left, right, and center.
"Where will we do it?" Aidan asked. "New York? Dublin? Boston?"
"None of the above," I said. "Let's go to County Clare. West coast of Ireland," I explained. "We
went there for our holidays every summer. My dad's from there. It's lovely."
"Okay. Is there a hotel? Give them a call."
So I rang the local hotel in Knockavoy and my stomach flipped alarmingly when they said they
could fit us in. I hung up the phone and backed away.
"Christ," I said to Aidan. "I've just booked our wedding. I might have to varmint."

T    hen everything happened very fast. I decided to leave the menu to Mum because of the great
broccoli wars of Claire's wedding. (A bitter standoff that lasted almost a week with Mum saying
that broccoli was "pretentious" and nothing more than "jumped-up cauliflower" and Claire
shrieking that if she couldn't have her favorite vegetable at her wedding, when could she have
it?) The way I saw it, the food at weddings is always revolting, so why argue over whether your
guests should have disgusting broccoli or inedible cauliflower? "Work away, Mum," I said
magnanimously. "The catering is your area." But minefields lay in the most innocent-looking of
landscapes--I made the mistake of suggesting that we should have a vegetarian option and that
set her off: she didn't believe in vegetarianism. She insisted it was a whim and that people were
only doing it to be deliberately awkward.
"Grand, grand, whatever," I said. "They can eat the bread rolls."
I was far, far more worried about the bridesmaid issue. I really felt I couldn't cope with all four
of my sisters arguing over color and style and shoes. But in a fantastic stroke of luck, Helen
refused to be one because of the superstition that if you're a bridesmaid more than twice, you'll
never be a bride. "Not that I'm planning anything," she said, "but I want to keep my options
open."
Once Mum heard that, she forbade Rachel from being a bridesmaid because that would put the
kibosh on her ever marrying Luke, then after a big summit, it was decreed that I would have no
bridemaids but that Claire's three children would be flower girls. Even Luka, her son.
Then there was the dress. I had a vision in my head of what I wanted--a bias-cut satin sheath--
but couldn't find it anywhere. In the end it was designed and made by a contact of Dana's, a
woman who ordinarily made curtains.
"I can see the headlines now," Aidan said. "`New York Bride in non�Vera Wang dress shocker.'"
And, of course, there was the invitation list.
"Okay with you if I invite Janie?" Aidan asked.
It was a tricky one. Naturally I didn't want her there if her heart was broken and if, at the "Does
anyone object?" bit, she was going to jump to her feet and screech, "IT SHOULDA BEEN ME!"
But it would be nice if we could meet and be civilized.
"Sure. You've got to invite her."
So he did, but we got a nice letter back, thanking us for the invitation but saying that, as the
wedding was in Ireland, she wouldn't be able to attend.
I didn't know whether I felt relieved or not. Anyway, she wasn't coming and that was that.

But it wasn't.
Because when I went on to our wedding-list Web site, I saw that someone called Janie Sorensen
had bought us a present. For a minute I thought, Who on earth is Janie Sorensen? Then I
thought, It's Janie! Aidan's Janie. What had she bought us? I clicked like mad to get the details,
and when I saw, I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. Janie had bought us a set of kitchen
knives. Really sharp, pointy, dangerous ones. Fair enough, we'd put them on our list, but why
couldn't she have got us a cashmere throw or a couple of fluffy cushions, which were also on the
list? I sat staring at the screen. Was this a warning? Or was I reading too much into it?
Later I tentatively put it to Aidan and he laughed and said, "That's typical of her sense of
humor."
"So it was deliberate?"
"Oh yeah, probably. But nothing to be scared of."
There was more to come.
Less than a couple of weeks later, on a Friday night, I was at Aidan's place, looking through
take-out menus and calling out dinner suggestions to him. He was pulling off his tie and, at the
same time, opening his mail, when something in one of the envelopes shocked him. I felt it
across the room.
"What?" I asked, staring at the card in his hand.
He paused, looked up, and said, "Janie's getting married."
"What?"
"Janie's getting married. Two months after us."
I was carefully watching his reaction. He was smiling like billy-oh and he said, "This is great.
Just great." He seemed genuinely happy.
"Who's she marrying?"
He shrugged. "Someone called Howard Wicks. Never heard of the guy."
"Are we invited?"
"No. They're doing it in Fiji. Just close family. She always said that if she got married she'd do it
in Fiji." He read through the letter again and said, "I'm really happy for her."
"Do they have a present list?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, "but if they do we could send her a garrote or something? Maybe a nice
big machete?"
D     espite delegating as much as we could, organizing the wedding was three horribly stressful
months. Everyone said it was our own fault, that we hadn't given ourselves enough time, but I
suspected that if we'd given ourselves a year the stress would have expanded to fill the available
time, so that we'd have had a horribly stressful year instead of just three months.
But it was all worth it.
On a bright, blustery blue day, on a church on a hill, Aidan and I got married. The daffodils were
out, throngs of shocking yellow, bobbing in the brisk breeze. Spring-green fields were all around
us and the foamy sea sparkled in the distance.
In the photos taken outside the church, men in shiny shoes and women in pastel frocks are
smiling. We all look beautiful and very, very happy.
26
I   checked Aidan's horoscopes. Hot Scopes! said:
Oh, boy, you are HOT today. Smokin'. Solar activity in Scorpio means this is the right
day to get that new romantic relationship off the ground.
Hot Scopes! was the worst site. It always said something to upset me. I shouldn't do this, I really
shouldn't. I knew it was all crap but I couldn't stop myself. I was desperate for some sort of
indication of how things were for him. Stars Online said:
Yes, it's hard for you to rein in your natural urge to leap before you look--in affairs of
the heart especially. But showing self-restraint is the only way forward if you want a happy
ending.
That was more like it. And what had Today's Stars to say for itself?
Keeping a firm grip on reality is vital for you over the next seven days.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Monday's clothes

A red satin embroidered cheongsam (that's Chinese dress to you), over cutoff jeans and red
patent sneakers. My hair is in an updo held with chopsticks, in a cunning ruse to avoid wearing a
hat. It is now 6 days since I've worn one, I'm having a quiet little rebellion. I wonder how long it
will take for someone to notice, and believe me, they will notice.
I'd really like to hear from you, I love you.
Your girl, Anna
When I walked into the office, Franklin did a quick sweep over me, resting slightly longer on my
hair. He knew something was missing, but was too agitated to decide. That's because it was time
for the MMM (Monday Morning Meeting); an hour and a half in hell would be preferable.
In preparation, Franklin corralled his "girls"--the people working on Candy Grrrl, Bergdorf
Baby, Bare, Kitty Loves Katie, EarthSource, Visage, and Warpo (a brand that was even more
edgy than Candy Grrrl--you'd want to see what they had to wear; I lived in dread of being
moved to their team).
"Good job," Franklin said to Tabitha. Bergdorf Baby's new night serum had got a great write-up
and--much more important--photo in Sunday's New York Times.
To me and Lauryn: "We gotta get things back on track, ladies."
"Yeah, but--" Lauryn started.
"I know all the reasons," Franklin said. "All I'm saying is, you've got to catch up. Big-time."
Lauryn gave me a hard sideways look; she had plans for me. She was going to try assigning all
my time to her feature ideas, while I needed to start generating captions and photos on beauty
pages and getting my targets back on track. Which of us would win?
We streamed into the boardroom. We were all there, all fourteen brands. Some women were
clutching newspapers and magazines. They were the lucky ones, the ones who had managed to
get coverage.
I even had one or two pages myself. Not in the newspapers, obviously. While I'd been away, it
looked like nobody had bothered to keep the badgering of newspaper beauty editors up-to-date--
I didn't know what those temps had actually done.
But because of the glossies' long lead time, some of the schmoozing I'd done months ago had
borne fruit--like putting bulbs down in September and flowers appearing months later, the
following spring.
Along the wall, people jostled for space, trying to become invisible; you could almost smell the
fear. Even I felt anxious, which was unexpected. After what had happened I'd have thought that a
public bollocking at work wouldn't touch me. But clearly it was a Pavlovian response; something
about standing in this room on a Monday morning tripped my fear switch.