Wedding Season (13 page)

I
N FRONT OF
a restaurant on a little side street, Henry stops so suddenly that I slam into her and nearly knock both of us over.

“Take it easy, cowboy.” Henry prances ahead of me through the big glass doors into the foyer. “We’re here with the Blake party,” she tells the man at the front desk, who exchanges a smirk with the coat check girl and points to a set of stairs curving down into darkness. As we descend, the sound of women’s voices rises to meet us and echoes off the stone walls. Candles flicker in the dim below.

“I didn’t know this place had a torture chamber.” Henry gropes her way down the last stairs. “I would have come here before.”

“Apply for a job, Hank. You’re eminently qualified.”

“Joy? Is that you?” A figure pauses silhouetted in the archway before us, and stumbles forward. “Honey, you made it!” My aunt’s best friend, a tall, slender blonde in her early fifties, emerges from the dark and flings herself on me.

“Hi, Francine.” I hug her back. “Remember Henry? You met at Charlotte’s birthday party a couple of years ago. And at the engagement party.”

“Yes, of course!” Francine reaches over and pets Henry’s
face. “So nice to see you again! We’re so glad you could come, both of you.” She puts an arm around each of our waists and pulls us in close.

“Wow,” Henry whispers to me. “Eau de Jack Daniel’s. We have some catching up to do.”

“You’re just in time.” Francine’s voice is conspiratorial; the effect is only slightly thrown off by her slurring. She leans on me and gives a big wink. “We brought some friends for Charlotte. Some
friends.
They’re getting ready right now.” She nods in the direction of the rest rooms and nods at us, and for no apparent reason, keeps nodding. “Charlotte doesn’t know. It’s a surprise. Joy, baby!” With some effort, she focuses on my nose, swaying lightly. “I remember you when you were just a little, little, little baby girl, baby. Let’s go get you a drink before the show starts.”

Francine takes our hands and tows us along behind her through the medieval-looking stone archway and into a shadowy banquet hall where, seated at a long table, several dozen women of a certain age are chattering and giggling like adolescent girls.

“Charlotte, Charlotte,” Francine shrieks. “Look what I found!”

My aunt is seated at the center of the table surrounded by several women whom I recognize vaguely from her engagement party. She rises in her chair and waves her arms at us as we approach. I’m often taken by surprise by how much Charlotte and my mother resemble each other. They’re both fair-skinned and fine-boned, with wavy, pale brown hair, heart-shaped faces, and eyes an astonishing shade of hazel; Charlotte’s features, though, are softer, and overall she has a less sharp, angular aspect than Mom.

“Hello, girls!” Charlotte smiles at Henry and takes my hand. “I’m so glad you’re here. You’re our only family representation,
kiddo. Your mother declined to join us this evening. Oh, and Dora, Burke’s sister.” She indicates a woman about our age, an evil-looking brunette at the far end of the table.

“Dora Ingerson?” Henry peers through the dim. “I know her. She worked at the magazine with me.” Henry waves, and the brunette waves back. “What a bitch. I’ll go say hello.”

“Joy, let me move over so you can sit next to your aunt.” The portly, henna-haired woman on Charlotte’s right heaves out of her chair. “How are you, dear?” She looks distractedly around the room.

“Maggie Bean,” Charlotte whispers into my ear.

“I’m fine, Maggie. Nice to see you again. And you?”

“Oh, good. And you? You’re looking pretty tonight.” She pats my cheek. “You girls talk. I’m off to the ladies’ room.” Maggie waddles off into the dark.

“I met her at your engagement party?” I lower myself into the seat she’s vacated, which is still warm.

“One of the most powerful women in the literary world, believe it or not. An agent. We’ve worked together for years. And she introduced me to Burke. Her son went to school with him, and Maggie sent him to me for the assistant job.” Charlotte gives me a little smile. “Look. The girls are back.”

Henry and Francine weave toward us, both giggling and spilling cocktails as they proceed across the room.

“Joy, why didn’t you tell me you knew a floral designer?” Henry slaps the side of my head, sloshing part of her drink down my back. “Francine is going to do the flowers for my wedding. She did the arrangements tonight. Aren’t they gorgeous?”

“You girls will have to come down to the shop and talk bouquet design with me next week.” Francine smiles modestly and reaches over to fondle the centerpiece in front of
Charlotte, a vaguely pornographic-looking topiary sculpted from sweet pea blossoms and ivy. “A September wedding is such a nice challenge. Not that I won’t love doing yours, Charlotte. I think it’s time for a toast, don’t you, Henrietta?” Francine climbs unsteadily onto an empty chair and Henry clinks a fork noisily against her martini glass. The chattering buzz of the room quiets, and the several dozen women of a certain age turn their eyes toward us.

“Ladies, thank you for coming.” Francine wobbles dangerously on the chair. She puts a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Ladies,” Francine continues, “why are we here? Because. Because our friend Charlotte has robbed the cradle, that’s why. God bless her!” Cheers and applause from the crowd.

“Nice work,” Henry tells Charlotte.

“No, no, no.” Francine waves her arms. “Seriously, now, we’re here because our dear friend Charlotte has found true love.” More cheers. “With an infant,” Francine slurs. Louder cheers. “Maggie Bean, this is all your fault.” Francine raises her glass in Maggie’s general direction. “Could you find an assistant for me, too, please?”

“And for me,” a pretty woman in her early sixties calls out.

“Maura, you’re already married,” Francine giggles.

“Twice,” says Maura.

“Good help is the secret to every successful marriage,” says the woman sitting to Charlotte’s left.

“Now, girls,” Francine continues. “Our friend Charlotte has had a good run. She pursued her work and made her way as a single woman in the city while most of us were getting married. And divorced. And married and divorced again. God bless her. She was a rebel. She was a career girl. She got to sleep with all the men we didn’t. And we were sick with jealousy, weren’t we, ladies? But now. Now! She’s been brought down by a mere child. See how the mighty have
fallen.” The crowd roars. “See how the mighty have fallen, ladies. A toast. To Charlotte! We love you, honey.”

“To Charlotte!” The women around the table clink their glasses together with great enthusiasm; at the other end of the table they do it with such enthusiasm, in fact, that someone breaks a glass. I watch Charlotte laughing back at her friends as they wave their glasses at her, and wonder to myself, is this what Charlotte has had to put up with for the last two decades out of wedlock? Is this what waits for me? The subtle jibes, the tiresome loving concern, the passive-aggressively manifested resentments and fears of women who pity or envy me for what I won’t do? Maybe it’s a generational thing. It occurs to me that Charlotte may be getting married less because she wants to be married and more because she’s too exhausted by what is involved in not being married.

“Oh, my.” Francine points theatrically as she climbs down from her chair. “Oh, my. Look at that. What could they be doing here?” Emerging through the dim archway are three large, plastically handsome men, one dressed as a policeman, another as a priest, and a third in a business suit, carrying a briefcase.

“Oh, Francine.” Charlotte laughs as music begins to play and the men come slinking around the table. “You really shouldn’t have.”

“My god, it’s like a borscht belt joke.” Henry elbows me. “Did you hear the one about the cop, the priest, and the lawyer?”

“What’s the punch line?” I ask, but Henry doesn’t answer. The other guests are, for the most part, on their feet instantly, whistling and clapping. A few titter and bury their faces in one another’s shoulders, a few others remain seated and apparently oblivious, engrossed in their conversations. Francine and Henry howl with glee and press dollar bills
into the hands of the women around them. The dancers have arrived next to us, and begin to circle around me with big, fixed grins, stagy and lascivious.

“Wrong girl,” I inform the priest, pushing him and the cop toward Charlotte. The men lift her onto their shoulders, carry her across the room, and seat her on top of the bar. Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” moans out of the speakers at top volume, and the men line up and begin their bump and grind of the seven veils. Henry elbows me and nods in the direction of the doorway, where several of the restaurant’s waitstaff cluster in the shadow of the stone arch. The guests have gathered around the men in a wide semicircle, waving bills and screaming with delight as articles of clothing are removed and come flying into their midst.

“They take their clothes off,” Henry tells me. “That’s the punch line. Wow, look at his ass.”

“I’ve heard that joke before,” I say. “It was on an episode of
The Honeymooners
, wasn’t it?” But she’s run off to tuck a tip into the priest’s G-string.

O
N THE BRIGHT
S
UNDAY
of Charlotte and Burke’s wedding, I spend the first hour of the morning in bed with the covers pulled over my face while Gabe tries valiantly to coax me into action.

“I’m spending quality time with my hangover,” I growl through the sheets, when he tries to bribe me with coffee.

“Tell your hangover you need to reschedule.” He sits down on the edge of the bed. I reach my hand out from underneath the blankets for the coffee cup. “Not until you’re actually vertical,” Gabe says, moving it out of range. I pull my hand back in and burrow deeper. “Joy, we have to be at the wedding in two hours. Less.”

“What wedding?”

“The one we had a rehearsal dinner for last night, remember? Come on. If we survived that, we can manage this. Get up.” Gabriel puts his head under the blankets and looks at me.

“I don’t think the dress I was going to wear today is really suitable.” I roll on my side to face him. “Do you happen to know where I can pick up one of those lab suits doctors wear to work with the flesh-eating virus that liquefies you from the inside out?”

“Red.” Gabe climbs in beside me, pulls the covers over both of our heads, and lies on his side, facing me. “You
could
let a wedding make you crazy, but don’t, okay? I’d miss you if I had to send you to the loony bin.”

“Even if I survive this one, there are fourteen more left.”

“You have an excellent sense of humor. Or you used to. That should help.”

“I seem to be missing the joke.”

“Apparently.” A rare and, I know, perfectly understandable note of impatience has crept into Gabe’s voice.

“The last time I checked, you weren’t such a raging fan of the marriage ceremony, either, Mr. Winslow.”

“Look. None of these ceremonies is my wedding or yours, right? There are other things I’d rather be doing with my weekends, too, but I’m fairly certain marriage isn’t contagious.”

“That can’t be right. It’s clearly a virus, and it’s spreading. Like the flesh-eating disease.”

“But we’ve been inoculated, okay? We’re immune.” Gabe throws the covers back and sits up. “Here. Take your medicine.” He hands me the coffee, goes to the bathroom, and comes back with a bottle of aspirin. He shakes a couple of them into my hand, and as I chase them down with a swallow of coffee, he makes the sign of the cross over me and intones, “Body of Christ, blood of Christ.” Then he starts doing a bayou voodoo queen dance around the bed, moaning a gibberish chant and waving his hands over the body of the novice prone on the altar.

M
Y HEADACHE HAS
subsided to a comparatively agreeable dull thudding by the time we arrive at The Original Hotel and are swept through the lobby on a tide of guests to the grand ballroom where the wedding ceremony will take place. This venue represents an Ingerson family defeat; Burke’s parents lobbied hard for a ceremony in Philadelphia
and then, when Burke held fast to Manhattan, pleaded for a nice Presbyterian chapel uptown. But Charlotte, bless her secular heart, refused, and though the stand involved a number of lengthy phone calls and brunches ranging from the terse to the histrionic, the happy couple won out. They placated Burke’s parents with The Original, which belongs to an old friend of the Ingerson family, and left catering and the guest list—which thereby grew to three times the suggested length—in the hands of his mother, if only to keep her distracted from the fact that the ceremony would be performed by a justice of the peace.

We were out to dinner with Charlotte one night a couple of months ago, when she and Burke were still in the thick of wedding day logistics, and Charlotte, in one of her rare moments of anger, wished marital strife and swift divorce upon the Ingersons: “Then his mother could plan her own damn wedding all over again, which is obviously what she wants to do,” she snapped at me and Gabriel. At that time a number of my friends were engaged in similar wrestling matches with their families, and Charlotte’s remark struck me as quite correct. Why else would individuals who were involved, really, only peripherally in the ultimate point of the wedding ceremony—that is to say,
the marriage—care
so much and battle so fiercely over its particulars, but that they saw it as some grand opportunity for a personal do-over?

T
HE ORIGINAL BALLROOM
is stuffed with huge, aggressive arrangements of orange tulips—it looks like Francine and her floral minions were on Dexedrine when they got together to do the flowers—and lined with row upon row of flimsy, ribbon-bedecked white chairs. The room is already swarming with guests in Waspishly tasteful spring finery who ricochet toward and away from one another like charged
ions. The high arc of air under the vaulted ceiling trembles with the shrill cries of recognition from women who haven’t seen one another for ten years and would happily have gone another decade unseen; the booming and backslapping of the husbands; the shrieking laughter of children who climb on chairs and chase one another in circles around the elevated platform that will shortly serve as an altar for the ceremony. It looks like the opening scene of some pastoral operetta. I hear my mother keening my name and look plaintively at Gabriel, who tows me toward the heaving bosom of my family.