Wedding Season Read online

  “Where’s our table?” Maud pulls at one of my curls. “I’m starving.”

  “Where’s Erica?” asks Miel.

  “Maybe she and Brian decided to elope.” Joan smirks. The idea of Erica—that quintessential Upper East Side debutante currently making her modest entrance—on the connubial lam is unlikely and amusing. Erica roomed with me and Henry our first year at Vassar; the other girls on our floor called us The Odd Triple, which was apt. Henry, being Henry, adored Erica, and made us a team for the year. I was more ambivalent; it wasn’t until several years after graduation and a good year after the founding of our girls’ night that I was able to take Erica on her own terms. Finally, Erica was just so obliviously and unapologetically and sweetly her blonde, blithe, sweater set-wearing, single-strand-of-pearls self that to judge her for it seemed to miss the point completely, and I gave in to just liking her. She surprised me by becoming a very successful literary agent at a large commercial firm, and has since used her contacts to incredibly kind and generous ends for many of her friends, including me. Erica is simply a happy girl, and perhaps the only perfectly self-accepting person I know. Tonight, however, she is the locus of my anxiety and irritation, for the simple and only reason that she is the first wedding on my list; next weekend I will be her bridesmaid.

  Erica, who has been in consultation with the maître d’, waves us toward a table. The girls collect their coats and march. Henry brings up the rear, singing “Here Comes the Bride” loudly enough for the other customers to take notice, swiveling their heads around and peering at the group. I raise my hands helplessly to Luke, who laughs.

  “I remember the first time you came in here.” He touches my wrist with one finger.

  “That was almost six years ago. You’ve been here too long.”

  “You’ve been here too long. Find another goshdarn bar. And keep those ladies quiet, will you?”

  My table has just erupted into squealing laughter. I nod at him and go to join my noisy, my old, my dear old friends, with whom I’ve been coming to this goshdarn bar once a month for almost six years. Which is kind of nice.

  ERICA IS SANDWICHED between Joan and Henry on one side of the table, flushed and giggling. Maud and Miel shift over to make room for me, and Miel knocks over a full water glass. No one misses a beat; we just grab napkins and keep talking. Miel is as dependable as a national park geyser in this respect, guaranteed to make at least one mess per meal, and on the scale of things, this is minor. Once, getting up to go to the bathroom, she knocked over the entire table. Henry always says that what Miel lacks in coordination, she makes up for in clumsiness.

  Erica reveals to me the source of their uproar a moment before; she holds up a cat’s-cradle tangle of leopard-print string that, after close inspection, Maud swears to be a negligee. The outfit seems tame compared to what they’ll dredge up for Joan, but it’s entertaining to think of Erica working it on her sturdy fiancé, who wouldn’t even consent to live with her until they married.

  “But wait, there’s more!” Maud hands over a little gift bag. Erica digs into the tissue paper, comes up with a pair of leopard-print thigh-high stockings, and flushes ever pinker with excitement.

  “Model it for us,” Henry says. Erica giggles. Our waiter comes to the table and eyes the stockings without expression.

  “Let me guess,” he says. “Bridal shower.”

  We nod. Erica giggles.

  “Congratulations,” the waiter tells her wearily. “Want to hear the specials?”

  AFTER THE ORDERS have been placed and the drinks have been handed around, our conversation makes its inevitable turn to the wedding. Or, I should say, to the weddings, plural, because each and every one of the women at this table, except for me, is wearing an engagement ring. Every one of them figures among the brides who comprise my seventeen.

  Erica will marry Brian, just the kind of boy you’d expect her to marry, a ruddy-complexioned, hale and hearty, solid and good-natured entertainment lawyer, whom she’d known for all of three months before he proposed. You just know when you meet the right person, she told us when she announced the engagement. You just know. You just know.

  Maud will marry Tyler, a lean, Scottish-born and broody-melancholy hipster in his early forties, who happens to be the lead singer of a quite successful rock band known as The False Gods. They’ve been a couple for more than ten years; they met while Maud was interning on a documentary project about the band. At the time Tyler was in the midst of a divorce that subsequently turned nasty and got quite a bit of public attention, which is at least in part why he and Maud waited this long before making it legal.

  Miel will marry sweet Max, who resembles, in temperament as in appearance, an angel just out of bed. He worships Miel, which alone would be enough to make me like him, were he not so likable anyway, in the manner of an especially tender and well-behaved child. Max is a friend of Gabe’s from the Yale art department—he now owns a small art gallery—and he and Miel met through us, when Gabe and I had been dating for just a couple of months. Because of this connection, after Max and Miel became engaged Gabe and I were treated to a flurry of insinuation and speculation regarding our plans for the future, which we did our best to ignore. Gabe asked me to move in with him a few weeks later. Coincidence, inspiration, or peer pressure? I’ll never know.

  Joan will marry Bickford, who is, I’m sorry to say, known at large as Bix; he is this generation’s first-born of the St. James clan, as in the St. James Foundation, the St. James Collection on loan to the Guggenheim, the St. James Auditorium, and so on. Bix is the family’s requisite wayward son, a dilettante, a bon vivant, a maker of very, very bad independent films, and quite able to keep pace with Joan, who fell from an exceptional career as a man-eating femme fatale into his dissolute arms. Gabe has known Bix for years—they attended boarding school together in Massachusetts—and does not like him at all. I just find him kind of ridiculous; Henry finds him amusing, Maud irritating, and Erica horrifying. Miel’s too oblivious to have an opinion on him, which may be why she and Max double-date with them so often; the rest of us are usually at pains to avoid socializing with Joan and Bix as a couple. It’s a little awkward, but in any circle of friends, a complication of this sort is more likely than not to arise. I feel lucky that out of so many potentially disastrous unions it’s just this one instance that has rated any friction.

  Last but not least, Henry will marry the lovely Delia, native of Chicago, who is, among other things, an experimental composer trained at Juilliard and now the leader of the twenty-one-girl a cappella chorus Mercy Fuck. To the great delight of denizens of the downtown music scene, the band opens unannounced at a variety of weird little rock clubs, performing the most elaborate vocal arrangements of power ballads from the late 1970s. I personally am partial to their Gregorian-chant-inspired version of Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” Henry and Delia met at a lesbian bar where Mercy Fuck was performing, and Delia came on to Henry by serenading her with “My Girl.” She climbed on the tables and everything. Henry was smitten. She still is. They’ve been together for several years, a first in the annals of Henry’s romantic life, and as far as I know Henry has observed absolute sexual monogamy throughout—also a first. I think Henry’s crazy New Orleans family was actually more freaked out about her dating a black woman than they were about her dating women en général. They seem to have recovered, from what Henry tells me—or, at least, they’re too soused to stay mad. Members of Delia’s family, on the other hand, continue to stay mad. Whether their parents and siblings and so on will attend the wedding is still very much up in the air.

  OUR DINNER ARRIVES, and Maud begins telling us about the latest project taken on by Some Nerve, her film company; it’s a documentary about pre- to postop transsexual men.

  “We’re trying to get one of the subjects to let us film the operation.” She bounces up and down on the springy banquette, and her little antennae of hair bounce with her. “How cool would that be?”

&
nbsp; “You’re a brave woman, Maud. Godspeed.” I do a quick mental calculation about where video-documented castration might register into my scale of coolness and draw a blank. I empathize with transsexuals; I am a straight girl trapped in the body of a straight girl. There’s no corrective operation for it that I know of. The best I can hope for is a change in the zeitgeist; short of that I’m left squirming around in the world like a restless child in the back seat on a long car trip.

  “So, darlings.” Joan looks around at us with a portentous expression. “This is our last night together as single girls.”

  “Hey, Luke!” Henry hoists herself up and yells over the banquettes. “Bring over a bottle of champagne!”

  I slouch down low on the banquette, until I’m bent double, almost horizontal, halfway off my seat and nearly out of sight. Assuming this position is a deeply immature habit that I’ve never managed to outgrow. I’m in very close touch with my inner adolescent—and her posture is just terrible.

  “Resistance is futile, Joy,” Henry says, kicking at me. “All roads lead to this place. You’ll be a common-law bride in five years anyway.”

  “Common-law marriage doesn’t exist in New York.” I try to sit up, slip on the slippery banquette leather, and land on the floor underneath the table. “And neither does no-fault divorce. Did you know that?”

  The lower portion of Luke appears next to me, and Joan sticks her head under the table.

  “If you want the champagne, you have to come out of your secret fort,” she tells me.

  “What’s the password?”

  “I do,” she answers, and disappears. I briefly consider the possibility of remaining under this table until everyone I know is married. I hear a crash, and champagne drips down my shirt; Miel has knocked over her glass. I crawl toward Luke’s feet and out from under the table.

  “Thanks for joining us.” Henry hands me a glass.

  “Sorry I’m late.” I take my seat. “The traffic was hell.”

  “Jojo, just be happy for us,” Miel whispers to me. “We’re happy for you.”

  “I’m happy that you’re happy,” I whisper back. “I really am.”

  “To the blushing bride!” Henry winks at Erica, and we clink our glasses together.

  “Cheers, sweetheart,” Joan says. “This time next week you’ll be Mrs. Erica Fiske!”

  “No,” Erica shakes her head gently. “I’m keeping my name.”

  “You are?” asks Joan. “Why?”

  “Honey, are you joking?” Maud turns on her. “This is the twenty-first century. Who the hell still takes her husband’s name?”

  “I’m going to.” Joan lifts her chin. Maud and I gape at her.

  “So am I,” Henry tells us. “We’re going to hyphenate.”

  “But when you have children,” Erica furrows her brow, “the long, hyphenated names, they’d be so hard to learn how to spell.”

  “Joan, I can’t believe you’re taking Bix’s name.” Maud slaps the table. “You’re supposed to be a feminist.”

  “And I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again. Tell me,” Joan says narrowing her eyes at Maud, “how exactly is it a more feminist act to keep my father’s name than to take my husband’s?”

  “But it’s your name now,” Maud says.

  “I didn’t choose that name. Now I do get to choose. It seems like a positive political action to me, that I exercise the right to make my own decision about who will be my family.”

  “Blah blah blah.” Henry makes a face at Joan. “Why doesn’t Bix take your name? Oh, I guess it’ll probably come in handy to be a St. James.”

  Joan pretends to ignore the comment, but I see her suppress a smile.

  “Max and I are picking out a new last name for us to share. We’re getting ours changed legally.” Miel sloshes champagne on me. “But I’m keeping my name professionally.”

  “I guess that’s mainly why I’m doing it.” Erica hands me a napkin. “I’m known as Erica Stevenson in the industry. And I like my family name. Fiske isn’t very pretty, is it?”

  “See, now, Miel’s choice, to me, is an interesting creative alternative,” Maud says. “Taking your husband’s name is so traditional, it just has all this historical baggage associated with it that I can’t imagine you’d want to deal with.”

  I bite my lip and start sliding down the banquette again.

  “So does marriage.” Henry kicks me under the table until I sit up straight. “But that fact is not stopping any of us from tying the knot. As the lovely Joy Silverman would probably declare flat out if she weren’t such a passive-aggressive freak.”

  “The great crusader!” Maud pokes my ribs.

  “Listen to you, Little Miss Ideology.” Joan lights another cigarette and waves it at Maud. “We’re the ones with all the political opinions. When have you ever heard Joy take sides on any other issue?”

  “Ask her about lawyers,” Henry says. “She has very strong opinions about lawyers.”

  “You all just go on about your business,” I tell them. “I didn’t say a thing.”

  This is not, strictly speaking, true. Over the years I have said a great deal on this particular subject to these particular women, some of whom—Joan and Miel, actually—were basically in agreement with me. To my credit, be it ever so slight, I have kept my opinions to myself since they began announcing their engagements.

  “Leave Joy alone, you guys.” Erica smiles at me. “She’s being very good about all this.”

  “Good about what?” A pretty, petite blonde appears beside our table and addresses Joan. “Have you been good, Joanie? That’s not like you.”

  After a moment I recognize the blonde as Ora Mitelman.

  Ora was a discovery of Joan’s, in the latter’s capacity as editor of X Machina. She’s a writer, and Joan was the first to publish her work—a serialized group of lyrical, tragic reminiscences on her poetically unhappy childhood as the product of a turbulent marriage between a free-spirited debutante-heiress and a moderately famous Abstract Expressionist painter, and the melancholy yet bodice-ripping tales of her sexual coming of age as a sensitive and therefore tormented and therefore drugged-up and medicated adolescent in New York’s mondes, beau and demi both. The series, which ran under the title “Spirit & Flesh,” was picked up by a prestigious publishing house and released, several years back, in the form of a memoir by the same name.

  The book made Ora a darling of the media. She did a national book tour, appeared on high-profile talk shows and was fawned over by their hosts, and was commissioned by magazine after magazine to write essays as a spokesmodel for her generation. For a time it was all but impossible to pick up a piece of printed matter without seeing her lovely face—those bottomless green eyes, those delicately molded lips, the Pre-Raphaelite gush of curls—paired with a manifesto about the death of love and the bitter emptiness of modern coitus and the deep, desperate grief of girls everywhere in regard to same. Meanwhile, she continued her column in X Machina, cataloging the endless stream of empty, meaningless sexual forays in which she engaged in her thankless, fruitless search for true love.

  This quest, which given its impressively exhaustive nature should by rights have provided Ora not a single spare moment, did somehow leave her with enough time to write a novel, published earlier this spring. Entitled The Sadness of Sex, the book details a privileged young woman’s poetically unhappy childhood as the product of a turbulent marriage between a free-spirited debutante-heiress and a moderately famous Abstract Expressionist painter, and the melancholy yet bodice-ripping tales of the heroine’s sexual coming of age, et cetera. I waited for someone, anyone, to cry foul, but the sensible shriek was never heard. The media went into its frenzy. The world continued revolving on its axis.

  “Ora, darling!” Joan stands and leans over Henry to embrace her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Having dinner with my agents. So good to see you, Joanie! You look gorgeous, as always.”

  “And you. When
did you get back in town?” Joan asks. “I thought you were still on the book tour.”

  “It’s over at last, thank goodness,” Ora tells Joan. “I’m just exhausted. I got back a couple of days ago. I’ll be in and out of town this summer—but I’ll be here for your wedding, of course. I wouldn’t dream of missing that! And who are these lovely ladies?”

  Henry makes a face at me. To say that she dislikes Ora would be an understatement; the tender moniker she has bestowed on our authoress is ’Tis-Pity-She’s-A-Whore. We’ve both met Ora several times at events with Joan, and found that she seemed to speak at length only with the male persuasion, granting any woman to whom she was introduced only a graceful nod and lowering of the lashes in acknowledgment, before the visiting audience was dismissed and she returned to bright and animated conversation with whichever potential Mr. Right she happened to be investigating. I am not remotely surprised that she doesn’t remember me.

  Joan introduces us one by one, and explains the occasion for our gathering.

  “How sweet!” Ora trills. “You come here every month? How funny! I haven’t been here for years and years, not since I was a mad little thing in the bad old days. Who knew people still came to Pantheon!”

  “It’s making a comeback, apparently,” Joan says.

  “My goodness, with bartenders like that, I should think so.” Ora smiles around at us. “Isn’t he delicious? I know I’ll be coming back soon!”

  I look at Henry, who makes a low but distinct growling noise in the back of her throat.

  “And will you all be getting together to fete our Joanie next month for her wedding? I’d just love to join you if I’m in town! I so love spending time with girls. Isn’t it the best?” Ora says.

  Maud rolls her eyes at Miel, who looks puzzled.