If We Lived Here Page 7

  No sympathizer surfaced to hand Nick and Emma drinks. So, as all of the room’s flutes raised and everyone sipped at champagne, the two of them stood in the doorway empty-handed. Emma tried to cover her humiliation with a smile and, noticing her fingers clenched into fists, unfurled them. She whispered to Nick, “Is he drunk or just awful?”

  “It’s hard to say. Probably both.”

  “Can we escape now?”

  “Yes, let’s go.”

  They found the bathroom, and were quiet as they changed from bus-casual to party attire. The halter dress Emma had chosen because it accentuated her tanned shoulders now looked off in the mirror, like she was playing dress-up in a big sister’s closet; though she supposed it didn’t really matter, since everyone had already seen her in ratty jeans. Her hair was frizzy and her eyes kept tearing up, making it difficult to apply mascara.

  “Em, don’t listen to anything Connor says. He’s never in his life had a girlfriend for more than three weeks. He’s just jealous of people in happy relationships.”

  “He’s an asshole is what he is.”

  “He probably spent the rest of the speech ribbing each and every other person in the room. It’s just his style.”

  “Charming. I can’t believe you’re friends with that guy.”

  “Was friends with him. Back in college, ages ago. He’s not my best man.”

  “Yeah, because you’re not getting married, because you’re apparently so skilled at stalling me.” Emma muttered it under her breath with more conviction than she felt.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing, never mind. Come on, let’s go face the music.”

  Emma was angry, although unclear over who or what was its target. She wanted desperately to talk to Annie to sort things out, but spotting her best friend across the room, Emma saw she was blocked three bodies deep by well-wishers. She and Nick had missed the dinner, and the only available chairs were at a table of old ladies. They took their seats amid a cloud of perfume, and Emma attacked the dessert, shoveling down two slabs of carrot cake to feed both her hunger and her hurt. “Is someone eating for two, perhaps?” asked the most shrunken of the ladies, her arthritic talon tapping at Emma’s shoulder. “Or is this just the hearty appetite of a growing girl?” Emma silently mouthed a response, cruelly wishing the woman might believe her hearing to blame for the noiselessness. She reached for another piece of cake.

  Emma was creating waves with her fork in the frosting, practically daring her seatmates to scold her for playing with her food, when she heard the opening beats to Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” sound through the speakers. She looked up, and there was Annie looking right at her, beckoning her and Nick. Emma nudged Nick up to the stage.

  “Attention, everybody, this here is my amazing maid of honor, Emma, and her dashing beau, and look, don’t they clean up nice?” Annie paused for the applause, urging Emma to curtsy. “Ems has been my friend since forever. It’s thanks to her that I made it through school, since she let me cheat off her pretty much all the way through. That’s what friends are for, right? And then she was this close to becoming Dr. Emma Feit, Ph.D., but I of course convinced her to jump ship and come keep me company in Manhattan instead. Anyway, something you may not know is that these two have so kindly agreed to share their big day with Eli and me. See, tomorrow marks the three-year anniversary of when Emma and Nick met, in a room much like this one, at a wedding kind of like this one, only less classy and perfect, of course.”

  Emma leaned in to the mike. “She can only say that because that bride’s not here.” Both had lost touch with the childhood friend since her wedding three years ago.

  “Anyway, Emma and I were dancing to this very song when we spotted him, this dashing, blue-eyed guy at the bar. Emma ditched me on the dance floor to go find her prince, and the rest is history. So here’s to you guys, mazel tov!” Annie pecked the cheeks of both Emma and Nick, and Emma smiled even though her friend’s version of that night wasn’t quite accurate. The music pumped louder, and Eli swooped in to spin his bride to be. Other couples began dotting the dance floor, and Nick took Emma’s waist. As Eli dipped his fiancée, Annie winked at Emma and mouthed the lyrics about being sorry she couldn’t afford a Ferrari.

  Emma crooned back halfheartedly, declaring herself not an Xbox but an Atari. She dropped her head onto Nick’s shoulder, blocking out her flitting friend. There was something very different about singing this song with Annie when it had come out years ago—back then, belting out their bitterness at being broke and living in wretched apartments and regularly freaking out about their bank balances—and singing it together now, the night before Annie’s hundred-thousand-dollar wedding to her financier fiancé.

  “Are you okay?” Nick asked.

  “Just hold me, please.” Emma sang along to the chorus, delighting in the fact that for the moment it seemed socially acceptable to be yelling out expletives at a fancy party.

  In the cab back to the hotel, Emma slouched against Nick and watched the car’s clock strike 11:59. “Happy almost-anniversary, babe. Remember that night we first met?”

  “Barely. I do remember you got me wasted, and then I made an idiot of myself in front of my family.” It was true. Nick, whose second cousin had been the groom at that wedding, had moonwalked across the dance floor and crashed right into his parents.

  “I’d been watching you all night. Your Hora was hilarious.”

  “Are you joking? I’m a pro at that dance—it’s just like the grapevine.”

  “Whatever you say, babe. And then I saw you in a corner, scribbling on all those napkins. I thought you must’ve been some kind of lunatic. Or a detective, or something.”

  “I was lesson planning, Em. I know you Jews all love to have your weddings over Labor Day weekend so you can do it on a Sunday night and avoid Shabbat, but it’s rough going for a teacher, partying right before the start of the school year.”

  “Oh, poor you. I remember I went over to talk to you, and you started in on this made-for-TV crap about how inspirational your job was. I thought I’d never heard so much B.S., which is saying a lot considering I was working in P.R.”

  “You were not very nice about it, actually.”

  “Aw, baby.” Emma squeezed his hand. “But then I had the genius idea to challenge you to a multiplication tables race, which I’d always dominated in grade school. Then you got to see what a smarty-pants I was.”

  “We tied, as I remember it.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way, Em. And you were so turned on by my brilliant math skills that you hopped directly into bed with me.”

  “Correction, my friend: It was the other way around. I couldn’t fend you off.”

  “Well, one thing’s for sure. By the time I woke up, you’d disappeared. I assumed you’d sobered up, decided I wasn’t as cute as you’d thought the night before, and fled.”

  “But in the end, you couldn’t get rid of me.” Emma nestled her head into the nook of Nick’s shoulder, and remembered back to that morning after the hookup. She’d woken up queasy—she never did shots, but something about Nick had driven her to order several—and she’d glanced at the guy in the bed, snoring softly, his face slack with sleep. She’d dreaded his awakening, worrying he might look at her with scorn or triumph or sarcasm or some other equally distasteful emotion, fearing that what she’d imagined as sparkly and special the night before might dissolve in the light of day.

  Although she’d hated to admit it, Emma had still been feeling the weight of her doctoral studies at the time. She’d flashed on Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, and felt herself to be the Ellen Oleska character, scandalizing society with her loose ways. Emma had winced to imagine how she and Nick had behaved the night before, and what people must’ve been saying about her that morning. Because of course the girl was always blamed. Remembering the book’s plot—how the free-spirited Ellen returns to Europe shamed and alone, while the object of her desire remains proudly protected
in his proper marriage, unscathed in the eyes of society—Emma had quickly dressed and ducked out, skipping brunch. Resolving to act more appropriately the next time she met a guy she liked, she’d pledged to forget all about the previous night, and Nick along with it.

  Of course, Emma hadn’t been able to excise Nick and his ocean-y eyes from her mind. Then Annie called to say she’d snagged the phone number of “that hookup guy” for her at the brunch, and reassured Emma that she was crazy to think anyone cared about what she’d done or whom she’d done it with the previous night. Emma demanded the number and memorized it on the spot. The next day she and Nick were strolling through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, seeking inspiration for a unit on The Secret Garden for his class. It was in the bonsai enclave where Emma had first felt she was falling in love.

  “Em? We’re here, come on. You keep falling asleep on me today.”

  “Huh?” Nick was tugging at her arm, urging her out of the cab. The next thing Emma remembered, she was dreaming of bonsais, those miniature trees so delicate in their pots, their wire-thin branches splaying out into bright bursts of bloom.

  Chapter 7

  “Where is that fucking florist?” Annie snapped. She was perched upon what looked to be a throne, being attended to by a team of helpers—the hair guy was manipulating her straight strands into tight curls, the makeup girl was arming her lashes with turbo tear-resistant mascara, the wedding planner was attacking her slip with a lint roller, and Annie’s mother was flitting about, fanning the flames of her daughter’s panic.

  “She was supposed to arrive one full hour ago,” Mrs. Blum fumed, stabbing Re-dial on her phone with long lacquered nails. “This is very unprofessional.”

  Emma was also part of the team of helpers, though with a less clearly defined role; she thought of herself as moral support. Knowing Mrs. Blum was most comfortable in crisis mode, Emma didn’t offer the obvious comment that the wedding was still three hours away, meaning the lack of flowers did not yet qualify as a crisis. But Emma was concerned about Annie’s freak-out, mostly since there was a steaming-hot iron an inch from her friend’s skull and a razor-sharp implement even closer to her eyeball. “If I were you,” she whispered in Annie’s ear, “I’d be more concerned with the state of your hair. Did you ask to look like a cross between Shirley Temple and the Bride of Frankenstein?”

  Annie whipped her head around, and Emma let out an involuntary yelp: The bride looked like a horror movie villain, half of her hair teased perpendicular and the other half kinked into coils, one eye without makeup and the other bulging out of spidery lashes. Annie seemed to understand her effect, and erupted into the wheezing laughter Emma had loved for nearly three decades. “Emma the Bitch,” Annie said, delighted.

  “You also have food in your teeth. You’re a total mess.” Emma knew full well that Annie hadn’t eaten anything all day, and that her friend’s curls would eventually be pinned up and dotted with diamonds to create a masterful updo—Emma had attended both practice runs and rhapsodized on cue. “I think a month without carbs has gone to your head. Your body’s in ketosis, literally eating itself for fuel, so naturally you’re flipping out about a little hiccup with the flowers. Listen, if the florist doesn’t show, I will personally haul ass over to the National Mall and pick a bunch of bouquets from the presidential gardens, even if Michelle Obama herself comes running after me and punches me out with her powerhouse arms. Deal?”

  Annie erupted into more giggles. “Okay, deal.”

  “Also, I got you a bagel. Please don’t fight me on this.” Emma fed the bread to her friend, whose moans of pleasure at the food embarrassed everyone present. She was spitting crumbs, causing the makeup girl to tighten her smile.

  “Attention, everyone!” A beaming Mrs. Blum bounded into the room. “The flowers are here!” She shoved into Emma’s hand a bouquet nearly two feet in diameter and so heavy Emma felt like she should perform bicep curls. The blooms looked almost obscene in their ripeness, orchids gaping and hydrangeas fecund; Emma had to look away. Her gaze settled on Annie, whose eyes were both now heavily painted. Over the top, Emma thought. Everywhere she looked—at the sumptuous spread of croissants laid out on silver, at the treasure trove of pots and palettes in the makeup girl’s trunk, at the salon’s worth of high-end hair products crowding the vanity, at the garish patterns on her own nails that Annie had coerced her into getting that morning—it was all over the top.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” she said, and handed off the heft of flowers to the mother of the bride. She ducked into the suite’s walk-in closet and dialed Nick. “Hey, how’s lunch with the guys?”

  “Very meaty. The restaurant’s entryway has you walking through a locker of animal carcasses, and the menu is literally all steak. Our waiter had to ask the kitchen if they could scrounge together a salad for me. I’m eating carrot sticks and a wedge of iceberg—Connor’s calling me Bugs Bunny—plus I’m sure we’re splitting the check, so I’ll be shelling out forty bucks for lettuce. Oh, and the guys are giving me shit for forgetting my flask. Eli smuggled in a handle of whiskey, so the meal’s de facto BYOB.”

  “Jeez, sounds like fun. Well, I’m here playing referee between the hysterical bride and her ticking timebomb of a mother.” Emma noticed she was crouching on the trail of Annie’s wedding gown, and shifted over.

  “We should’ve armed ourselves with benzos.”

  “Or horse tranquilizers. Okay, I’ve got to go. I hear Momzilla freaking out about the rainy forecast. Clearly the weather should respect that it’s Annie Blum’s big day.”

  “Clearly. Bye, love.” Emma cozied up to the hanging gown and ran her cheek along its delicate material, relishing the silence of the space. She’d been looking forward to Annie’s wedding, but now that it was here, Emma felt a little lonely, like it would be a farewell to her friend. She sighed, smoothed out the gown’s lace, and returned to the fray.

  Emma thought she might faint, standing beside the chuppah with spine erect, shoulders thrust back, and right foot planted slightly in front of left, as the wedding planner had demonstrated during the rehearsal. The air hung heavy, as if someone had sprinkled cornstarch into the heat, smothering out most of the oxygen and thickening the atmosphere to paste. Emma was supposed to keep her elbows bent ninety degrees, flowers held just below her boobs—“at high stomach,” the wedding planner had said—but the bouquet seemed to be gaining a pound a minute. Emma’s forearms trembled.

  It was during the opening line of Annie’s reading when Emma started to feel like her sash was suffocating her. She thought she’d been in on all of the plans, but it turned out the bride had kept one detail from her, the fact that she’d be reciting Emma’s favorite poem at the ceremony. When Annie had asked her months ago, offhandedly, to suggest a great love poem, Emma had quoted from memory Edith Wharton’s “Happiness”:

  THIS perfect love can find no words to say.

  What words are left, still sacred for our use,

  That have not suffered the sad world’s abuse,

  And figure forth a gladness dimmed and gray?

  Emma had continued on through that stanza and the next, and then blathered on about the poem’s perfect sentiment: how only through silence could the language of love emerge, richer than any spoken tongue. She’d shut up only when she’d noticed Annie texting. Now Emma realized her friend must’ve been recording the name of the poem. Annie had only just met Eli, but she’d already been plotting for their wedding.

  It irked Emma that Annie was now practically shouting the lines that called for quiet. The poem’s mood was all wrong for Annie and Eli’s love, which was loud and neon, not hushed and subtle. Emma hoped her annoyance didn’t bleed through her fixed-on smile, and she was almost grateful for the light-headedness that made it difficult to concentrate on the words. She scanned the crowd to catch eyes with Nick, who winked. He, too, must’ve realized that Annie had co-opted the poem: Emma often recited it to him during their stints of mutual insomnia, hoping the words would
calm their restlessness. As Annie now read out the last lines, Emma saw Nick’s lips move along with the bride’s: “The song the morning stars together sing, / The sound of deep that calleth unto deep.”

  The bouquet was becoming nearly unbearable. In her head Emma cursed the extravagance. She remembered back to Annie’s third or fourth florist visit, when Emma had mentioned an idea for her own someday wedding: bonsais for table centerpieces.

  “You mean those gnarled-up little trees?” Annie had responded.

  “They’re beautiful and delicate.”

  “I dunno, Ems. Bonsais have their growth stunted, right? They remind me of the Chinese binding girls’ feet. It’s creepy. They get to be, like, five hundred years old and still look like they never got it together to grow. Not such a nice metaphor for love, if you ask me.”

  As often happened, Annie had surprised Emma with her insight. Emma had never thought about bonsais that way. Now, she let her arms drop, which she knew ruined the symmetry of the bridesmaids’ stances. She considered that maybe Annie had it right with the overblown bouquets, with the thirteen-piece band, and the filet mignon dinner that she knew were forthcoming, with the hundreds of acquaintances there to witness the vows that Emma had coaxed out of her friend and that Annie was now reciting through teary whimpers. Maybe it was best to have a love that was big and loud and uncontainable.

  No wonder Emma and Nick, with their more reserved affection and meeker love, had been passed over for their dream apartment. Emma never would’ve gotten on stage and declared that she’d never experienced a moment’s doubt about her relationship, as Annie was doing now; she never would’ve claimed to have known she and Nick would end up together from the first moment they met. Probably that couple who’d gotten the apartment had walked in, all bedroom eyes and public displays of affection, the woman’s diamond ring and the man’s flashy watch winking under the skylights. Probably they hadn’t had to sit at Mrs. Caroline’s table begging her to believe them that they were solidly in love.