Fourth Comings (10 page)

    monday: the fourth

(labor day)

twenty-five

I
saw Hope only briefly this morning, on her way out. She was changing into a formerly white T-shirt that had been vibrantly transformed by hundreds of brushstrokes. The colors were dense and indistinguishable in the middle, then thinned out to solitary streaks along her flanks. The paint always looks slick and wet, even when it’s dry.

“You should sell those T-shirts,” I said, rising from my lumpy sheets, rubbing my bleary eyes.

“Really?” she said, looking down. “I use them to wipe off my brushes. I have tons of them. I wear them until they disintegrate.”

“I know,” I said. “But they look cool.”

She stretched the T-shirt away from her body and gave it an artist’s appraisal. Then she inhaled the armpit and grimaced.

“Yikes! No one would buy this!”

“Are you kidding? It’s the authentic stink of an artist!”

“Who can’t remember to buy deodorant.”

“Seriously, certain New Yorkers pay a thousand bucks for so-called ‘hypervintage’ jeans that have been broken in by pre-wear professionals.”

“Pre-wear professionals?”

“People who get paid to wear the same pair of jeans for a month without washing them.”

“That’s nasty.”

“I know. So a little bit of funk will add value, I promise. Just replace the Hanes label with one that says ‘Hope Weaver’ in an old-but-newish font. One word. All lowercase letters. Make a big deal out of the fact that each one is unique and hand-crafted by the artist herself. Sell them alongside the paintings you were working on when you created the shirt. It’s wearable art! The consumer as canvas…”

Hope cocked her head to the side as if she was seriously considering my ridiculousness.

“Go one step further. Donate fifty percent of the proceeds to a hot celebrity cause. Or is it cause celeb? Doesn’t matter…”

“African debt relief is hot right now,” Hope deadpanned.

“Totally hot. Africa is hot hot hot. Each purchase represents the union between humanitarianism and capitalism, and presents the wearer as someone who
cares.
Market yourself as one of Brooklyn’s underground guerrillas, one of many fashion freedom fighters who have determined that the sociocultural revolution won’t be televised—oh no—but silk-screened on a limited-edition T-shirt costing upwards of a hundred dollars….”

“How do you come up with this stuff?” Hope was laughing now.

“I’m so much better at managing my friends’ careers than my own,” I replied. “I swear you won’t be able to make them fast enough.”

“You know, the sad thing is you’re probably right. No one will buy my paintings, but these stinky T-shirts will make me rich and famous.”

“Just give me ten—no,
twenty—
percent of the profits after Africa gets its cut, okay? Then maybe I can stop relying on my sister’s charity.”

“You headed there today?” she asked.

I nodded. “You off to the studio now?”

“Yeah,” she replied, looking through her wallet. “Classes start tomorrow, so it’s my last full day to work on this final piece I need to finish before Friday….”

“Oh.”

She stopped looking when she found her MetroCard. Hope always likes to have her MetroCard in her hand, inside her pocket, ready to whip out when she reaches the subway turnstile. She never wants to fumble around for it, because she thinks that might make her a target for muggers. She doesn’t want to admit it, but she hasn’t quite adjusted to city living. (Something you can relate to.)

“You need to talk? I’m sorry I rushed off yesterday morning and—”

“What time did you come home last night?”

“I don’t know. Maybe three-ish?” A curl fell away from her messy ponytail. Hope
bzzzzzed
a raspberry to blow it out of her eyes. “You were asleep. Did you try waiting up for me?”

“No,” I lied.

I
had
tried to wait up for her last night. None of the roommates can afford cable, so my late-night TV viewing is limited to shitty infomercials for skin-care lines shilled by unnaturally preserved has-beens from eighties nighttime dramas, shitty public-access programs promoting local high school screamo bands with names like Baby on Boredom and Go Ahead and Hate Us, and reruns of shitty sitcoms of the fat-slob-husband-with-hot-skinny-wife variety. I scraped myself off the couch sometime around two
A.M.

Hope’s face fell. “I’m sorry. I should have called….”

I waved away her apology. “It’s fine. Really. You have so much you need to do.”

“Really? Because…” I could tell from her voice that she was relieved.

“It’s fine.”

She stuck the MetroCard in her deep front pocket.

“And besides,” I replied, “if we’re going to talk about Marcus, we need more than just a few minutes.”

“You
do
want to talk about it!”

“Just go, Hope,” I said. “Really. I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Then I made kind of a dick move. “Yeah. I’m having brunch with Bridget this morning, anyway.”

“Right,” Hope said, trying to keep it light. “Because you tell Bridget
everything.”

I once made the mistake of telling Hope that Bridget had become my best friend after she, Hope, moved. Of course, by definition there can only be one “best.” So Hope, who is not one who usually gets involved in these types of power struggles, gets passive-aggressively pissy about it. I don’t see it as choosing one friend over another, because each plays a unique role in my life. Bridget is the careful listener. Hope is the carefree talker. And I value them both, just at different times, and in different measures.

Bridget was my best friend in the years before Hope entered my life in middle school, and then again after she left. For too many years, I denied that Bridget was anything more than a superficial replacement for Hope. But Bridget has proven to be more than just a fallback friend. In those years that I didn’t see Hope very much, Bridget was the first person I turned to whenever there was a major shake-up in my life (mostly involving you). There have always been fundamental differences between us, and not those unfair assumptions based on her beachy beauty and how she once put it to use as a professional catalog model and football player’s girlfriend—the latter pursued with more go-getter grit than the former.

Our differences unite rather than divide us. She provides alternative insights that expand my myopic pessimism. As such, Bridget has offered more comfort and shrewd advice than any other friend (including Hope). However, when I’m not in crisis mode, and Bridget and I are just blithely shooting the shit on an ordinary day, our talk, while perfectly pleasant, lacks that certain urgency for more. I say good-bye feeling all talked out.

My relationship with Hope is simpler, and paradoxically more complicated. With Hope, there is an immediate intimacy and ease to our conversations that I have not found with anyone else. (But you. On our best days. When we used to talk, or rather, when you used to talk to me.) Hope and I share a love of wordplay, an appreciation of low culture, and above all, a fascination with the tragicomedy of life. We banter playfully and energetically; I always feel happier afterward than I did before. When I’m in her company, I laugh loud and long, which is something I don’t do nearly enough.

Our ability to enlighten and entertain each other is based on a deep understanding of the way each other’s mind works. However (there always seems to be a “however”), no matter how close Hope and I are, there always seems to be certain taboo subjects that I can’t discuss with her (mostly involving you). And these gaps in confidence are usually filled by Bridget. Why should this time be any different?

Hope’s eye caught the stack of boxes still taking up too much floor space.

“I thought you stayed in all day yesterday to unpack,” she said.

“I started to,” I said lamely. “But I got
distracted.”

“You were
distracted.”

And simple as that, we both giggled at the shorthand joke that only we could understand.

Only we knew I was referring to that last morning before Hope moved to Tennessee. Her parents were waiting in the driveway, glancing at their watches, tapping their feet on the asphalt, jiggling their keys, eager to leave Pineville—and memories of their son’s tragic overdose—behind. But when I stepped inside Hope’s room to say good-bye, it could only be described as aggressively
un
packed. The carpet was littered with assorted vintage clothing (thirties granny dress, seventies burnout jean jacket), random CDs (
The Very Best of the Partridge Family, Biograph
), stray art supplies (crusty brushes, flattened tubes of oil paint), and miscellanea of the female hygiene variety (no need to elaborate). Hope was untroubled by her lack of progress, and assumed a yoga pose that put her on her back with her legs flipped up and over so her toes touched the floor behind her head. Her mantra?

“I’m distracted.”

And so, with my invocation of this simple exchange from our past, the last few moments of awkwardness were forgotten. (Well, not quite forgotten; otherwise I wouldn’t have written about it.)

“I’ll see you tonight,” Hope said. “I shouldn’t be too late.”

“Sure,” I said, knowing that she never meant to be too late, but she lost track of all time when she was at the studio.

After we said our good-byes, Hope hesitated in the doorway for a moment. Her paint-stained fingertip touched the wall, tracing the intertwined vines in Claire’s name. Then she dropped her hand, gave me a shy, closed-mouth smile, and turned away without another word.

I rolled over and looked at the top of the bunk. Kirk was gone. In his place was Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly.

JESS:

YOU CAN TAKE ME “BACK TO THE FUTURE” ANYTIME.

LUV YA, MIKE

twenty-six

I
t is a testimonial to how much I value my friendship with Bridget that I agreed to be her maid of honor. I assumed this role would require my participation in certain bridal rites that rank well below other distinctly female activities, such as running out to the twenty-four-hour drugstore at midnight to buy high-absorbency tampons. But Bridget is my oldest friend, and her sunny optimism is a rarity in this city. Even rarer is the purity of Bridget and Percy’s love for each other.

I’ve known Bridget since diapers. I’ve known Percy since French I, when he was a tiny, hairless freshman, and I was the sophomore object of his comically misguided Pepé Le Pew–like flirtations. It’s been five years since Bridget and Percy were cast as the leads in the 2001 Pineville High production of
Our Town,
and yet I
still
can’t fathom how they progressed from mere acquaintances (through me), to friends in their own right, to more than friends, to a long-term couple who kiss and do other, uh, intimate things. It should be no surprise that I can’t quite wrap my head around the prospect of them uniting as man and wife. In fact, the only thing I consider to be even more extraordinary than Bridget’s ardor for Percy—whom she has been blissfully and abnormally dating since high school without a breakup or even so much as a major fight—is the fact that she has not made any progress on this wedding, which is supposed to be happening next September. Bridget has been the anti-Bridezilla, putting most of her energy toward more practical concerns, namely, making sure she graduates with Percy in June, because she lost a bizillion credits when she transferred from UCLA to NYU to be with him.

Lately Mrs. Milhokovich has been putting the pressure on her daughter:
Is this wedding happening or what?
So now, with a year left for planning, I assumed that Bridget had called for this brunch so we could sit down with our respective calendars and schedule appointments with the cake stylists, floral artisans, and favor specialists who would have me tied up in the Knot for the next twelve months. I have braced myself for these tasks ever since I agreed to be her number one bridesmaid last December.

I assumed that the first order of business would be the finding of the Gown, followed by the far-less-important search for the bridal party’s complementary couture. I’m still scarred by the memory of being dressed up like a banana for my sister’s wedding when I was sixteen. Though Hope had assured me that bridesmaid dresses have come a long way since then, I could only hope that Bridget’s color scheme would be inspired by a more flattering fruit or vegetable. And I didn’t have to think too hard about how stunning Bridget would look on her wedding day, because with her classic blue-eyed blond looks, she’s always resembled my own sister (and mother) more than I do. So superficially blessed, Bridget could easily pull off a wedding dress made entirely out of engineered lunch meat.

When we were younger, before my parents moved to their waterfront condo across town, Bridget and I always sprinted across the street and up the stairs to the other’s bedroom to break any big news. Now that we’re both in the city, we’ve settled on an undistinguished Irish pub in Brooklyn Heights to serve the same purpose. Bridget says she doesn’t mind making the “trek” to Brooklyn from the East Village because such interborough subway travel makes her feel more like “a real New Yorker.” Of course, merely having such thoughts undermines any cred she’s earned, but I love the pure ingenuousness of her efforts.

Bridget got there before I did, looking radiant and reluctant to say good-bye to summer in a crinkly-cotton Empire-waist dress and flip-flops. She was seated at a plastic-covered table past the already rowdy regulars at the bar, in a small alley-like seating area tucked back near the kitchen and unisex restrooms. It was my favorite table because it had the best view of all the random Irish-themed artwork hanging crookedly in mismatched frames along the deep green walls: an eight-by-ten glossy of Colin Farrell in a still from
Miami Vice;
a poster of a football team, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish 1988 National Champions; a Dublin street map; a collage of U2 ticket stubs; and so on.

Bridget greeted me with a cheery little wave.

“I already ordered for us,” she said, grinning merrily in anticipation of the $7.95 breakfast plate of deep-fried bacon, eggs, hash browns, and soda bread that we always split when we met here.

We hugged hello and had barely settled into our rickety seats when Bridget began our conversation with a gleeful yet terrifying, “I’ve got big news!”

I might have flinched.

“We’re not getting married.”

I almost tipped over in my chair. “What?!” Water spilled from glasses and silverware clattered as I clutched at the table to retain my balance. “You’re breaking up?”

“Nononononononono!” Bridget’s pale hands flapped around her lovely face like the wings of a dove struggling to take flight. “We’re not breaking up at all! We’re still engaged.”

“But you’re not getting married?” I was confused.

“Well, hopefully someday. But not until gays can do it, too. And even then we’ll probably elope.”

“Really?” She had taken me completely by surprise. “When did you decide this?”

“I don’t know. It’s a pretty hot topic around school. And as a black man, Percy really sympathizes with the struggle for equality. We wouldn’t join, like, a racially segregated club, so why would we participate in an institution that discriminates against homosexuals?”

“Well, that makes a lot of sense….”

This was a lie. I respected them for taking this stance, but it didn’t seem like their battle to fight, especially when not all gay people even
want
to get married. My former writing professor/mentor, Professor Samuel MacDougall, even wrote a book about it,
An Unconventional Life.
To be honest, I never got around to reading the book, but I did catch a lot of the controversy surrounding its publication, and how it made him a traitor to gay activists and a hero among right-wing conservatives who champion traditional “family values.” From what I saw in the
New York Times,
Mac merely argued that gay-rights activists were squandering their resources and energy battling for the right to participate in a failing institution rooted in subjugation and conformity. We’d all be better off if we fought for other causes that improve
everyone’s
lives. Gay, straight, and in between.

“Are you upset? You seem upset. I hope you’re not upset! Because Percy thought you might be upset.”

“Why did Percy think I would be upset?”

“Well, because you’re the maid of honor and you’ll, like, miss out on all the girlie stuff.”

I rolled my eyes so hard that the blowback nearly took my head off my shoulders. “Does Percy know me at all?”

“I told him you’d be relieved,” she said, relaxing a little. “I know you’re so not into the whole wedding hoopla.”

(Okay. At this point you might be a little skeptical about the veracity of this conversation. I mean, all this wedding talk so soon after your proposal.
Really?
I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I was pulling some James Freysian high jinks—you know, narrative manipulation that goes above and beyond the typical shenanigans employed by nonfiction writers through the ages. You will just have to believe me when I say that this conversation, even more so than others already documented in this notebook, occurred almost exactly as depicted here. The sheer implausibility of this conversation calls for a compulsory and most careful transcription.)

“But you know what I didn’t realize about myself until after I got engaged?
I’m
not into the wedding hoopla. In fact, I hate all the wedding hoopla. Am I really supposed to care so much about the font I use on my personalized napkins?”

She waited for me to shake my head, then continued.

“And what a waste of money. Did you know that my mother was going to put a second mortgage on the house so she could pay for this thing? If she’s determined to spend her money, it would be so much smarter to use it to pay off our student loans, or put it toward a house. But we’re not even sure she’ll give us the money if we’re not using it for the wedding, which is just so backward-thinking it’s scary.”

I barely got in a nod before she went on.

“And having people gush over me all day long as if I were Wedding Barbie come to life?
Bleech.
I don’t want anything to do with it!”

That part made sense. For most women, their wedding day is the only day in their entire lives when they are indisputably the most beautiful woman in the room—even if they are not. Bridget is almost invariably the most beautiful woman in the room. She’s so
oohed
and
aahed
at all the time, she doesn’t need fifty thousand dollars spent for the privilege.

“Have you ever seen
Battle of the Brides
?” she asked. “It’s a reality show. I think it’s on Bravo.”

“We can’t afford cable.”

“Oh, yeah. Right,” she said. “Anyway, this show is all about brides-to-be competing against each other for the
wedding of their dreams.”
She said the last words in a singsong, then stuck out her tongue. “They have to do all this crazy stuff. Like in this one episode it was the Touch of Silk competition. Six psycho brides standing outside in the freezing cold with one hand on this twenty-five-thousand-dollar wedding gown, which wasn’t even all that pretty. It was just too, too much. So tacky, like a cheaper version of the fifty-pound white duchess satin monstrosity the Donald’s latest wife dragged down the aisle.”

I don’t doubt that Bridget is indeed disillusioned by all the “wedding hoopla.” But the fact that she knows that Mrs. Trump III wore a fifty-pound white duchess satin dress—hell, that she even knows the term “white duchess satin” at all—indicates that Bridget has jumped through one or two of those hoopla hoops already.

“If they took their hands off the dress, even for a split second, they were out. These women were
possessed.
They just had to have this ugly gown like it was everything worth living for. And after, like, twelve hours,
not one
of them had been eliminated. So the evil producers made them take off their comfy shoes and put on white stilettos with, like, four-inch heels. Still, not one of them gave up. Finally, after they’d been in the competition for something like eighteen hours, they wheeled in these gigantic speakers and got this hyperactive wedding deejay calling himself DJ Jazzy Spaz to blast nothing but Barry Manilow songs.”

I’ve read somewhere that blasting Barry Manilow has proven to be a successful POW torture technique. The funny thing is, if I had been in this Battle of the Brides competition—and you know this is the ultimate counterfactual—the sounds of Barry Manilow would have encouraged me to keep on going, to never give up, to keep my goddamn hand on that gown until it was mine, all mine. One woman’s torture is another’s sign of the divine.

I was oddly compelled by Bridget’s dramatic coverage of this story. “So they stood out there for eighteen hours? Without breaks?”

“They got, like, a five-minute break every six hours or something. And they would hobble off to the sidelines and their future husbands would massage their aching feet and coach them through the next round. ‘They’re going down, honey! You’re the leanest, meanest bride ever!’ And then these psycho brides would start weeping about how hard this was, how it was torture, how it was the most difficult thing they have ever endured in their entire lives, and I was like, SOLDIERS ARE DYING IN IRAQ RIGHT NOW.”

The motley crowd assembled at the bar—all drinking pints of the hair of the dog that bit them the night before—turned around to look.

“Sorry,” Bridget said to the gawkers, then to me: “As you can see, the whole thing was really sick. That’s what started to turn me off weddings. Why is there so much emphasis on that day, and so little about the fifty years that come after?”

I laughed. “You sound suspiciously like me.”

“I know!” she said. “You’ve always said that if you got married, you would elope to Jamaica.” She was right. I have been saying this since my sister’s wedding. “Just you, your husband, and some Rastafarian minister…”

She stopped mid-sentence. Her eyes were magnetized to the bit of metal on the fourth finger on my left hand.

“What is
that
?”

I dropped my hand to my lap. But it was too late.

“Was that a
ring
?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“A
ring
on a
significant finger
?”

I brought my glass to my lips and choked down a mouthful of room-temperature tap water.

(I suppose I should provide a valid excuse for keeping your ring on the significant finger, knowing that doing so will only invite comment and conversation on a subject I’m not sure I wish to discuss. Ah, but therein lies the answer. Taking it off would mean that I wasn’t giving your proposal the full week of consideration I promised. Keeping it on forces me to confront the complications that made it impossible for me to respond to your proposal when it was first popped. And honestly, who would even notice an unblinged bit of silver that looks nothing like a traditional engagement ring…?)

“You’ve let me go on and on without telling me you’re, like,
engaged
?!”

“Well, I’m not—”

“Did Marcus ask you to
marry him
?”

I actually laughed when she said that because it was (a) absurd and(b) the truth.

“Is it
true
?”

I nodded, unable to say it out loud. Discussing this situation in the confines of Sammy was one thing, but saying it out loud, in public, was another.

“You and Marcus are getting married!” She squealed and bounced up and down in her chair, again drawing the attention of the bar crowd. But this time she was too happy to be embarrassed. Unlike Hope, who was shocked by the news, and Manda, who was merely amused by it, Bridget was sincerely thrilled by the prospect of our union.

“Did you hear that, Siobhan?” Bridget gushed to our regular waitress, a tough, thirtyish punk originally from County Cork with sleeve tats covering her milky-white, well-muscled arms. “She’s getting married!”