27
1996. December, New York.
Dawn comes sooner than it should. I lie naked on top of my duvet, stare out the window of our East Village apartment, listening to the spits and hisses of the radiator. They’re predicting heavy snow and the sky has that breathless, dry-ice blankness, as if the air is taking a pause. It’s my wedding day.
Peter has spent his last night as a single man at the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue with his best man, a posh friend from Oxford who has always seemed suspicious of me—as if the fact that I am American means I must be a fortune hunter.
Anna is asleep in the living room. I can hear her soft snuffling. She must have passed out lying on her back. Last night we put on our ancient Lanz nightgowns, the ones Granny Myrtle gave us every year for Christmas until we were too old to appreciate their old-fashioned coziness, drank shots of tequila, and talked so late into the night that I’m going to have hideous purple bags under my eyes. Anna is my maid of honor. She and Jeremy have been staying with Mum, who has been characteristically horrible to him, much to my delight. Jeremy has made it almost impossible for me and Anna to have any time together. He makes her do a full hour of yoga with him every morning after breakfast, and even insisted on coming to my dress fitting. On Wednesday, when Anna and I had plans to go to the Russian Tea Room for a girls’ lunch, he surprised her with matinee tickets to Cats at the Winter Garden—even though Anna hates musicals and the show has been running since 1982. “It’s tiresome,” Mum said when I called her to complain. “But that’s what people from California do when they come here. For some unfathomable reason, watching actors singing on stage dressed as animals makes them think they’re getting culture.”
My cream silk velvet dress hangs on the closet door, still in its dry-cleaning bag. It is long, with a train, cut skintight against my body, the neckline low enough to reveal just too much. Next to it, on the floor, are the $300 satin pumps Anna insisted I buy. They’re the kind of shoes that will never be worn again—the kind you swear you’ll have dyed black after the wedding, but you never get around to it. Instead, dust will settle into the white—dull them, dim them, and they will live like that for years in the back of your closet, slowly going gray.
* * *
—
Dixon walks me down the aisle, handsome and dapper in a morning coat. My father is still excommunicated, though he’s here at my mother’s insistence, sitting in the family pew next to Jeremy. I refused to bend for Mary the Bitch. As I walk up the aisle to my future life, I smile, thinking about how cruelly she will take her revenge on my father for agreeing to come without her. Peter is waiting for me at the altar, and he smiles back at me across the length of the church, happy and proud. I wonder if he would love me if he could see inside my head—the pettiness, the dirty linen of my thoughts, the terrible things I have done. The church is festooned in lilies and thick white cabbage roses that smell like the perfume counter at Bloomingdale’s. I have a sudden image of Anna holding my hand on the steep up-escalator when I was little. She had taken me to try on new Keds while our mother shopped for Christmas presents. We found Mum in Accessories, trying on a pair of red leather gloves lined in cashmere.
“Elegant, aren’t they?” she said, and put them back on the table. Later, as we stood on the subway platform waiting for the express train, I saw a flash of red peeking out of her coat pocket. On Christmas morning, she opened a narrow box, tied with a green satin ribbon. It was the red gloves. “From your father,” she said. “How on earth did he know?”
The organist plays Pachelbel’s Canon, possibly my least favorite piece of music. Peter’s request. When I argued that it was pedestrian, he laughed and told me it was a family tradition and that I sounded like my mother, so I had no choice but to relent. Now, pacing myself down the aisle to its treacle strains, I’m annoyed.
Peter’s mother sits on the Brit side—a sea of women in ugly hats, tulle-ed and feathered, clutching their men closely to them, lips pinched in disapproval at my skintight dress. As I walk, my train collects strewn rose petals from the marble floor. I search the rows for Jonas, hoping he is not here—I’ve invited his entire family. But the snow is coming down hard now, and the church has dimmed to shadows, a stark Netherlandish gray. I face forward, walk toward Peter, so handsome in his lanky old-world self-confidence. I love him—everything about him. The way, when he is excited, the tips of his ears flush red. The length of his gait. The way he steadies me, makes me safe. His long, elegant hands. The way he always gives money to beggars, looks them in the eye with respect. The person he sees when he looks at me. Peter’s best man stands too close beside him. He is right to protect his friend from me, I think as I take Peter’s hand.