She had been a talented photographer. Perhaps not good enough to be a working artist, but surely she could have become a gallerist or a curatorial assistant. What would have happened had she not been so afraid of making her student loan payments? If she’d been a bit more courageous and self-assured? Instead, she took a job with a nice paycheck in a communications department at an ad agency. Not even making the ads. No, she did promotions for the ads, which, even without her mother’s reminders, was so meta it felt useless. But it paid well. Eventually, after she met Reggie, she tried her hand at real public relations. It was then, when one of their celebrity clients was getting married and appreciated her ability to manage events well, that she was asked to do her first wedding.
After her grandmother died, without that unconditional love, Olga did not know who would ever love her again or what would make her feel worthy of being loved. Weddings, Olga felt back then, could do this. Making people’s dreams come true, Olga reasoned, would provide countless opportunities to be adored, to be valued, to feel important. She reflected now, with Meegan before her, what a wide-eyed assessment that had been. Weddings, she quickly discovered, were about everything except the health of a couple’s relationship. They were social performances, the purpose of which varied from family to family. And they were competitive. Clients wanted to appear more tasteful, more unique, more extravagant, than the hosts of all the other weddings they had been to before. Olga’s success at work, therefore, was not evaluated against how many of her clients’ dreams she could bring to life, but on scores of emotional calculations far beyond her control. It was the ultimate in conditional love. She had grown, she realized, to resent the constant cycle.
“I’m not avoiding your question, Meegan,” Olga replied, “but I’m curious why you think someone should be in this line of work?”
Meegan beamed. Olga rarely offered the opportunity to expound on personal opinions.
“Well, I guess the biggest reason is that this world is so fast and crowded. We all do a hundred things a day, and post photos of it all, too. But weddings? They still make you take a breath and take things in. People don’t forget them. No one ever says, ‘Tim and Tina’s wedding? I don’t remember that one!’ They always remember. So, in this time when memories are so hard to keep because our lives are so cramped and disposable, weddings stick. And we help create the memories that stick for these people. And that feels really special. And really important.”
Olga glanced at the clock. The bridal shop would be opening soon. On another day she might have reminded Meegan that Muslims were being banned in their country and children being shot down in schools, and maybe that ought to take up a bit more mental space than a dramatic centerpiece. Or pointed out that many people, like her cousin Mabel, threw weddings all the time with no professional help whatsoever, at pennies on the dollar of their clients’ budgets, and that those parties were just as memorable. But today, perhaps softened a bit by the events of the weekend, Olga was touched by her earnestness. Why poison Meegan’s happiness with her own dissatisfaction?
Olga closed her laptop, gathered her purse, and looked Meegan in the eyes.
“Meegan, you’re in this for all the right reasons. You’ll go far.”
Meegan smiled and went to lean in to give Olga a hug, and Olga bolted for the door.
In the elevator, she rested her head against the cool metal and thought, What the fuck am I doing with my life?
LOS PA?UELOS NEGROS
Though it had been merely overcast when she had gotten to the office—a space meticulously designed to conceal the fact that there were few windows—as Olga stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby, she could see the downpour. Of course, she had no umbrella, nor the will to go back upstairs and see Meegan’s earnest face again, so she stood for a moment calculating how fucked up her blowout would get if she made a sprint towards Sixth Avenue, where she was certain the Sudanese guy who sold umbrellas would be set up. They should put you on TV, she’d told him, a few weeks back when she saw him doing brisk trade after a sunny day turned like a race car and the skies had opened up. He said he’d learned to smell for rain where he was from and Olga quipped that her only learned olfactory instinct was which subway cars to avoid. She thought about the subway ride up to the bridal salon. It should be just a quick shot on the 2/3 uptown, but now, with the rain, who knew how or when she would get there. New York had a shocking way of spiraling into chaos whenever met with precipitation, as though the entirety of its infrastructure was actually made of sugar, and the water triggered dissolution. She could call a car, but not only would that take longer, it would cost a fortune. For her bridesmaids’ gowns, Mabel had selected an ensemble look; Olga felt confident she’d been purposefully assigned the ugliest of the style variations and at $450 before alterations, Olga refused to sink another penny into this frock. Resolving to stick with her original plan, Olga placed her purse over her head in a symbolic attempt to preserve her hair, and charged out the door as fast as she could, immediately running full force into a mountain of a man holding an oversized umbrella.