The Wedding Sisters (9 page)

His face was inches from hers. She felt his caring, his love, his safety. And she wanted more of it.
Fuck it.
She kissed him hungrily. His mouth opened to her, and her body flooded with endorphins. It was better than the alcohol.

“Jo … wait…,” he said, pulling back, sitting up.

She kissed him again, pulling off her T-shirt. She knew she had great breasts, perfect breasts.

He touched them longingly and gave a pained sigh. “You're killing me, Becker,” he said.

“Don't talk.” She straddled him. He was hard. How long had it been since she'd had a guy inside her? Not since freshman year, spring break. A party, someone she knew from Yardley. She was drunk, she was missing Caroline, who was with Derek Ebernoff at that point. It was an utterly forgettable encounter.

She tugged off her underwear. Toby flipped her over, so she was on her back. He touched her between her legs. His hands felt big—different. He went down on her, and his stubble was an odd sensation. But he knew what he was doing, and the pleasure was such a staggering contrast to the tension and pain she was in, she gasped.

“Yes,” she said.

He moved on top of her. “Are you drunk?” he asked.

“No. Are you?”

“I don't know.”

He moved inside her, and it felt good and so alien that she could hardly think to miss the softness of Caroline's flesh. This was something else entirely. No thoughts, no tears, no pain … just a satisfying hum deep in that gnawing, greedy part of herself.

He cried out when he came, and afterwards he held her close, his lips pressed to her damp forehead.

“Toby?”

“Yeah?”

“You're a good friend,” she said.

Maybe she should be satisfied with that. Maybe friendship was more important than love. You couldn't trust love. Love hurt.

 

seven

“Two weddings,” said Hugh.

Meryl climbed into bed next to him, feeling giddy as a schoolgirl.

“I know! Oh, Hugh, we're so blessed. Both our girls marrying wonderful men. They are going to have incredible lives. They'll have everything they ever wanted.”

“Two weddings,” Hugh repeated.

“We'll manage. Come on—don't worry about that tonight. Aren't you happy?”

Hugh put down the student papers he had been reading on the nightstand and turned to her. “Of course I'm happy. But Meryl, we now have
two
weddings to pay for. Two
expensive
weddings. Why does Amy have to get married so soon? If she had a yearlong engagement, we could at least catch our breath.”

Amy wanted to get married in May—the month before Meg's wedding. Meryl did see that as a problem—but not for the same reasons as Hugh. It was a new level of one-upmanship.

“I'll try to talk to her about it.”

Relieved, Hugh turned off his bedside light. He kissed Meryl on the cheek and rolled over.

“Don't you think it's odd,” Meryl said slowly, “that Stowe's father couldn't make it tonight? I mean, we're going to be family. Do you think they think Meg isn't good enough? That we're not good enough?”

“No, I think they're just busy people. And I think you need to manage your expectations for what our relationship is going to be with them.”

Meryl sighed. Hugh could note every social more and protocol of the characters in a Henry James or Louisa May Alcott novel, but apparently couldn't recognize the breach of one in his own life. “And the Campions are not the ones who should be throwing the engagement party. That's a prerogative of the bride's parents.”

“Says who?”

“Emily Post!” Meryl said, reaching for her own bedside light, feeling around in the dark for the dangling metal chain to turn it on. She waved the book at Hugh.

“What is that? I can't see without my glasses,” he said.

“
Emily Post's Wedding Etiquette.
”

“Oh, for God's sake, Meryl. What do you need that for?”

“To do things right. Remember what a mess it was when we were going to get married? My parents not talking to us? Your parents balking at the idea of helping us throw a wedding? Eloping at the last minute? I don't want that to happen to our daughters, Hugh. We're going to give Meg and Amy perfect weddings.”

“I'm a little surprised that with all their billions, the Campions haven't offered to pay for Meg's wedding.”

“Actually,” said Meryl, “they did.”

Hugh smiled. “Well, why didn't you say so? That's great news.”

“No! It's not. Hugh, if they pay for it, they call all the shots. Tippy wants to put a wedding planner in charge, have it at their country club—basically treat this like just another event to get done on their checklist. But this is special to me. To us—me and Meg. I don't want anyone taking that away from us. This experience is priceless, Hugh.”

Silence settled between them.

“Meryl, you have to be realistic. The way Meg and Stowe are talking—the way his parents are thinking—this wedding is going to be beyond our means. And now Amy's engaged—”

“We'll find a way.”

“I don't agree with you, Meryl. Not one bit. If the Campions want to contribute to the wedding, let them. We have to be practical.”

“Oh,
now
we have to be practical? You're never practical! You live in a world of ideas, the life of the mind, the idea of a book that has consumed half your attention for our entire life but you've never finished. And when I try to encourage you to get the damn thing written, you tell me that I'm missing the point—that it's the journey toward the end that matters, not the finished book. So don't tell me now that I have to be practical.”

Hugh sighed. “Fine. But maybe now's the time to start thinking about working again full-time.”

As if she hadn't been looking.

“Believe me, I have some calls out.”

Silence.

“Meryl, just be sure you're doing this for the girls.”

“Who else would I be doing it for?”

“Like you said, we didn't have a wedding—”

“Don't be ridiculous, Hugh. This isn't for me. I know it's not about me.” She paused. “But yes, in a way, it's for all of us. For our family.”

*   *   *

Meryl couldn't sleep. The conversation had settled into an uncomfortable place in her gut, along with too much food and wine.

Hugh's insinuation that these weddings were somehow more for her than for Meg and Amy—well, it stuck in her craw. She had no regrets about their own wedding: it had been bare bones, but it was completely romantic. Just the two of them. She wouldn't necessarily have changed the way they got married. But she probably would have changed a few of the decisions she made leading up to it.

She tossed and turned, finally giving up on sleep around eleven. She turned her phone back on and checked a weather app for the temperature outside. At fifty degrees, it was warmer now than it had been earlier in the night. Tomorrow would be beautiful.

She wished it were morning already, so she didn't have to struggle to quiet her mind. She figured she had two choices: she could have another glass of wine or two, or she could go for a walk. The wine was the simpler way to go; the walk, the healthier one.

Meryl, thinking of the imminent dress shopping, opted for the exercise. She pulled on a pair of yoga pants and her sneakers.

The apartment door opened silently but closed with a loud click. She waited a beat.

In the daytime, she didn't like to go outside without at least mascara and a touch of color on her cheeks. She often thought about Nora Ephron's line that your just-woke-up face of your twenties is your all-day face of your forties. And at fifty-four, well … she felt bad about a lot more than her neck.

But under the cover of night, in the crisp air of early fall and walking on the East River promenade, she felt free and she felt young.

She loved this walk. It was the path she'd followed pushing the girls in their strollers. The place she'd come to read during the rare moments she could steal for herself. The bench she sat on the night her father had died, crying, looking at the winking lights of the bridge. She loved that seagulls flocked to the waterside, and she loved that sometimes she smelled salt in the air. In the summer, if she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was a little girl again, back at the Jersey Shore, when her only worries were washing the sand off her feet before walking into her grandparents' beachside condo and if the line at Sack O' Subs would be too long. This was a shore before casinos, when there was nothing to do but take long strolls on the boardwalk and see a movie at the Ventnor theater. It wasn't just that her life had been simpler, it was that Life with a capital
L
had been simpler.

The East River did not bring her back to the shore that night. The air was dry, the only birds a few lone pigeons resting on the backs of benches and pecking along the ground.

Ahead of her, a couple walked linked arm in arm. She felt a pang, thinking of Hugh back in the apartment, with no idea that she was out. She should have woken him up, said, Let's take a walk together and revel in this night of good news—a turning point in their lives. But he didn't share her unfettered joy. He was thinking practically, and she was being romantic. It was a disconcerting role reversal; she wished they had talked longer, had ended up in a better place. Maybe she would wake him when she got home. Maybe they could even have sex. She smiled to herself; that was certainly one way to celebrate the engagements.

Meryl passed the northernmost part of Carl Schurz Park and followed the curve around the back of Gracie Mansion. The Federal-style house, painted pale yellow with green shutters, was the official home of the mayor of New York City—except during Michael Bloomberg's twelve-year tenure, when he opted to live in his East Seventy-ninth Street town house instead.

Meryl was suddenly parched. Too much wine. She would loop around to York Avenue and stop by the 7-Eleven to get a bottle of water.

Jazz music filled the air as she got closer to Gracie Mansion. The backyard, obscured by tall fences, was lively with the sound of a party. She was in luck; Meryl ordinarily wouldn't cross through the park at night, but she knew that if the mayor was entertaining, the walkway to Eighty-eighth Street would have a heavy police presence. She could cut easily through the park to the convenience store on York.

Sure enough, a police car was parked on the grass behind the Gracie. Meryl felt like an interloper even though she was on public grounds. On East End, drivers in town cars were idling, waiting for party guests. She pulled up the hood on her Yardley fleece, suddenly eager to get back to the safety and privacy of her warm bed.

But first, water. She walked briskly to York and made a left for the 7-Eleven.

The convenience store was as crowded as if it were the middle of the afternoon. She glanced at the hot dogs on the rotating metal trays. No, Meryl. She kept walking to the refrigerated water near the back.

“Meryl Kleinman?”

She turned automatically at the sound of her maiden name. “Scott?”

So this was what happened when you walked out of your apartment in the middle of the night; you ran into someone you hadn't seen in twenty years—while wearing a fleece hoodie and no makeup. A very good-looking someone. A someone who had made an appearance in more than one postmarital fantasy.

Scott Sobel.

What was he doing in her 7-Eleven?

“Hey!” He leaned in for the awkward greeting hug. “This is crazy! Do you live around here?”

He was dressed in an impeccable suit, clearly coming from or on his way to an event. She was wandering around in yoga pants and tennis shoes. It was safe to assume she lived in the neighborhood.

“Yes—right on Eighty-fourth. What are you doing here?”

“A party at Gracie Mansion. A colleague of mine is making a documentary about it.”

“Oh … wow. For TV?” Scott was a prolific producer of reality television, most of which chronicled the lives of the newly rich and the more newly famous. She'd watched his first show out of sheer curiosity because it had his name on it, and became shamefully addicted.

A woman with long honey blond hair and luxurious houndstooth coat approached them, holding two coffees. She handed one to Scott.

“Camille, this is Meryl Kleinman, Meryl, Camille McGuiness.”

“It's Becker now, actually. Meryl Becker.” She shook the woman's hand, painfully aware that she had left her wedding ring on her nightstand.

“Meryl was just asking if your doc is for TV.”

“We're hoping to get theater distribution,” Camille said. “At least in New York and L.A.” She had a clipped British accent. Meryl guessed she was in her midthirties. When Meryl had been in her midthirties, she had been doing what? Pretty much what she was doing now: freelance PR, married to Hugh, raising the girls.

“So what are you up to these days?”

“I work in book publishing. Freelance publicity.”

“Of course! I should have known. Camille, this girl always had her face in a book. It could be the most perfect beach day, and all the other kids would be running to the ocean or playing horseshoes or volleyball, and Meryl was having none of it.” He grinned playfully.

Meryl was tempted to say that she had just been thinking about those summers at the Jersey Shore—but she worried it would sound sad. Or worse, imply that she thought about him, which she did. But only in the way of any woman remembering one of her first crushes. She had been fifteen. He was a seventeen-year-old lifeguard at the beach—as remote as a movie star. Until one night—a night that burned into her mind as only events from your adolescence can—when she ran into him at her friend's older brother's house party just a few blocks away from her grandparents' condo.

Scott took her for a walk on the boardwalk that night. He kissed her in the darkness, leaning against the metal rail, against the backdrop of the rushing ocean and the thick, humid salt air.