The Scenic Route

by Devan Sipher

  “We had agreed we didn’t want strangers coming to our wedding.”

  “He’s actually a patient of mine.”

  “That just makes it all the more inappropriate,” Noah huffed.

  “So there will be five less shrimp to go around.”

  “That’s not the way it works. There’s seating arrangements. There’s gift bags. There’s—”

  “Happy thoughts, Noah,” Naomi said, trying to be helpful.

  “Fuck happy thoughts,” he replied before turning back to Godwin. “If you’d been paying any attention, you’d know what an ordeal it is to add someone at the last minute. But I guess throwing a wedding is too trivial a pursuit for a serious-minded mental health professional.”

  “If it’s such a huge ordeal for you, then let’s just forget the whole thing.”

  Noah staggered backward. “That’s all it takes?” he exclaimed. “Just one little disagreement and you’re ready to call everything off? Let me tell you something. I never planned to get married. I never wanted to get married. If the government hadn’t gone all PC and decided to give us our forty acres and a mule, I would never have considered it.”

  “Noah,” Naomi ventured, “you’re sounding a little hysterical.”

  “Of course! I’m the hysterical one. And he’s the calm, sensitive one. That’s what happens in marriages. Each person gets assigned their role. And I’m stuck being the hyper, flamboyant one. Which is not who I am. No one even knew I was gay until I came out, and even then they weren’t sure until I became a party planner.” Naomi wasn’t sure in what alternative universe this was true. “But here I am signing on for a lifetime of being the flighty gay sidekick to his straight-acting, centered monolith. And he’s going to get all pissy just because I’m a little stressed-out?” He turned back to Godwin, practically shaking with anger. “You want to forget about it? Fine! Let’s forget about the wedding. Let’s forget about everything!”

  “What I meant,” Godwin said slowly and carefully, “was we can forget about the plus one. I’ll call and say I made a mistake.”

  “Oh,” Noah said, the color in his cheeks coming close to matching the shirt.

  “Did you really mean what you said about assigned roles?” Godwin asked, sounding deeply (and perhaps professionally) concerned. “Do you believe that if I’m calm, you have to be crazed?”

  “Not crazed,” Noah said. “But not calm either. It’s like you’re occupying that space. We’re yin and yang. That’s the way partnerships work. But what if there are days I don’t want to be ‘wacky Noah’? What if there are days I want to be yin?”

  “Then just be yin,” Naomi suggested, putting in her vote for a less wacky brother.

  “You can’t have two yins,” Noah snapped. “You mess up your Chakra Khan.”

  Godwin picked up the purple shirt that had been strewn across the tufted sofa, and he headed for the bathroom.

  “What are you doing?” Noah asked him.

  “What it looks like,” he said. “I’m going to be yang today.”

  Noah’s jaw fell open. He was speechless. Or the closest to speechless that Naomi had ever seen him. “Really?” he asked.

  “Really.”

  Noah looked like he was about to cry. “There’s matching socks,” he said.

  Godwin walked over to the box from the dye shop and retrieved the socks.

  “I think we can squeeze in one extra person,” Noah offered. “Just don’t tell my cousin Janice.”

  “I won’t,” Godwin said, kissing Noah on the forehead.

  Noah was blushing as he turned to Naomi. “Can you write up an extra place card for Table Five?” he asked her.

  “Sure.” She turned to leave, eager to give them some privacy, but then she realized she didn’t know whom she was making the place card for. “What’s the name?”

  “Austin,” Godwin said. “Austin Gittleman.”

  In Austin’s experience, it was always the last patient of the day who would need emergency surgery. He had hoped to be changing clothes and on his way to Hope’s apartment. Instead, he was calling her while prepping for a pneumatic retinopexy. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a sixty-eight-year-old Ukrainian woman with a torn retina.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Hope?”

  “I thought you said you were getting off early today.”

  “I was,” Austin said. “I just got waylaid.”

  Austin understood why Hope was annoyed. But it wasn’t like this kind of emergency was unusual. She used to be an ER physician, so she should know better than anyone. He thought she had maybe spent too long as a desk jockey and was beginning to forget how things worked in the clinical world.

  “Listen, if you don’t want to go, it’s okay,” she said. “My friend Gavin can go with me. His wife’s working tonight, and he’s home alone anyway.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t want to go. I’m just saying I’m going to be a little delayed.”

  There was another pause. He could hear Hope calibrating her response inside her head. She worked so hard at . . . well, at life. “How late?” she finally asked.

  “An hour I think. Hour and a half tops.”

  “You’re going to miss the ceremony,” she said.

  “These things never start on time. And maybe I’ll be lucky and they’ll have cocktails beforehand. Or maybe the bridegroom will have temporary cold feet.”

  “They’re both bridegrooms.”

  “Right.” Austin had forgotten. He had assumed for so long that Hope and Godwin had dated that he was having a hard time adjusting to the idea of Godwin being gay. “So double the chance.”

  Hope seemed doubtful, but she agreed to meet him at 632 on Hudson, the downtown event space where the wedding was taking place.

  Austin focused on the procedure of injecting a gas bubble into the damaged eye of Ludmilla Marchenko and then cauterizing the insertion cut he had made with a laser. Everything was going relatively swiftly, until he tried to explain to Mrs. Marchenko her postoperative treatment.

  “Okay, Mrs. Marchenko,” he said as he finished up, “you’re going to have to remember that you have an air bubble inside your eye helping to hold the back of your retina in place. And that air bubble can move around, the same way an air bubble moves if you turn a bottle of hand soap upside down. You ever done that?”

  Mrs. Marchenko, who was only under local anesthetic, shook her head. “No need to move your head, Mrs. Marchenko. You’ve never turned a bottle of hand soap upside down?”

  “Who use bottle of hand soap?” she said. “Hand soap go in hand. Not in bottle.”

  “How about dish soap?” Austin asked, looking at the time. “Do you use liquid dish soap?”

  “Yes. Liquid dish soap is good. But I no use for my hands.”

  “That’s okay. You don’t need to use it for your hands. But have you ever turned a bottle upside down? Maybe while putting it in a grocery cart? Or taking it out of a bag of groceries?”

  “Sure. Sure. Sometimes is upside down.”

  “Did you see any air bubbles?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Marchenko.

  “You didn’t see any air bubbles in the bottle?”

  “How can I see air bubbles through bottle? Is white plastic bottle.”

  “Have you ever seen air bubbles in anything whatsoever?” Austin wanted Mrs. Marchenko to clearly understand how the bubble could travel through her eye if she wasn’t careful. But he was running out of examples of viscous liquids and he was running out of time.

  “Sure. Sure,” Mrs. Marchenko said. “Air bubbles. In bath. My grandchildren play with bubbles.”

  Austin rubbed his forehead. He was getting a headache. “That’s not quite the same thing,” he said.

  “Is not air bubbles.”

  “It’s a different kind o
f air bubbles. Here’s the thing: For the next three weeks, you can’t sleep on your back. Do you understand?”

  “No sleep on back.”

  “No sleep on back whatsoever. No lying down on your back. Because the air bubble will move from the back of your eye to the front of your eye.”

  “Move,” she repeated. “Like soap bubble.”

  “Kind of.” It was as good as he was going to get, and he was exhausted.

  He changed into his suit as quickly as he could and ran out of his Washington Heights clinic. But it had started raining, and available taxis or livery cabs were nowhere to be seen. The late spring heat wave was accentuated by the thick humidity, but he decided to chance it on the subway. Bad choice. The platform was mobbed. Which was odd for a Saturday, and it was usually a sign of a problem. But he had few options.

  A train didn’t arrive for twenty minutes, by which point there were so many people on the platform, Austin didn’t walk toward the subway doors so much as levitate toward them. But the train was mostly full, and very few people got off. Austin was still two people away from the doors when they closed on a full car. Fortunately, the next train came only three minutes later, but it was also jam-packed. Austin succeeded in getting on board; however, the air-conditioning on the train didn’t seem to be working, and he spent the next twenty-five minutes getting a free sauna experience, compliments of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. When he got off the train, he felt like he had swum to the wedding. But he had five blocks still to go. And the rain was heavier now. He had as good a chance of catching a taxi as of catching a zeppelin. And needless to say, he had no umbrella with him.

  He arrived at 632 Hudson two hours late and drenched from head to toe. But he was there. And all he had to do was find Hope. And hope she didn’t want to kill him.

  Dov started in about spending their lives together before the wedding even started.

  “You know I was thinking as long as there’s a rabbi here, we could make it a two-for-one special,” he said. Naomi pretended not to hear him. “Instead of ‘Three Weddings and a Funeral’ we could make it ‘Three Bridegrooms and a Bride.’”

  It was a bad pun. A bad idea. And in bad taste. But Naomi knew it was her fault in a way, because he was trying, as usual, to flatter and amuse her. And, of course, he was trying to get her to marry him.

  What he didn’t know was that she had become a nervous wreck from the moment she’d heard Austin’s name. She didn’t know if it was the same Austin Gittleman. But Godwin had said that Austin was also originally from Huntington Beach, which ruled out just about any other possibility. Naomi had expected Noah to tell Godwin how uncomfortable it would be for Naomi if Austin was at the wedding. But then she remembered that Noah didn’t know how uncomfortable it would be, because no one knew anything about her relationship with Austin. And that was because, well, it wasn’t a relationship. It was . . . Oh, she had no idea what it was. But she knew it was going to feel awful to see him with another woman, and she wanted to circumvent it if at all possible.

  She hid in corners and slunk along walls as the guests arrived, in order to prevent accidentally spotting him, but the more she did so, the more curious she became to see him. No, more than that. The more she yearned to see him, until it was a palpable part of her being. Like a tumor making her head feel thick and her skin feel prickly. She would have gone up to the roof garden to get some air, but it had started raining.

  Dov, of course, knew none of this. And she intended to keep it that way. She had known for weeks that Noah’s wedding was bringing out the romantic in him. Or the competitive achiever in him. But she hadn’t anticipated a full-on assault about getting engaged from the moment he arrived. She tried to convince him she had her hands full as best woman, though by that point her responsibilities were pretty much limited to keeping her parents from launching into open warfare. But they would have had to talk to each other to harm each other, and so far they were still actively avoiding being within ten feet of each other. Dov, on the other hand, was like her shadow, as if he was afraid that if he let her out of his sight, she would disappear in a puff of smoke. And maybe she would. She was feeling so anxious, she almost felt capable of self-combusting.

  Noah and Godwin had barely finished exchanging their vows in the Spanish-tiled atrium when Dov was at it again.

  “This could be a good time for us to make an announcement,” Dov said.

  “Shhh,” Naomi shot back, since Noah and Godwin were addressing their gathered guests.

  She pulled Dov against a wall, which he took as a romantic gesture, but she was doing it mostly out of concern that Austin was possibly watching her from above. There were guests gathered all along the antique balustrades of the three-story staircase, applauding the couple whom the rabbi had just pronounced legally wed.

  “I want to thank my husband,” Noah said while holding Godwin’s hand, “for marrying me despite planning a wedding with me.”

  “And I want to thank my husband,” Godwin said, rather impressively carrying off the purple shirt, Naomi thought, “for making my life as beautiful as this wedding.”

  Everyone applauded again. Well, most everyone. Naomi noticed her father heading straight to one of the bars. But he had not only walked Godwin down the aisle; he had kissed both Godwin and Noah on the cheeks while lifting a prayer shawl over their heads. And Mom, to her credit, had held Dad’s hand during the ceremony as they stood beside Noah and Godwin.

  Dov was nuzzling Naomi’s neck, something that usually turned her on but right now was irritating her. She glanced around the room, looking for Austin. But her vantage point was limited. Every vantage point was limited. There were too many nooks and crannies, corners and hallways, in the elegant but sprawling house. Why couldn’t Noah have gotten married in a banquet hall like a normal person?

  Now she was really losing it. And it was Austin’s fault. For the second time, she was spending an important evening of her life thinking about him, instead of focusing on the things that were real in her life. Like Noah and Godwin. And Dov.

  Why wouldn’t Dov stop touching her? He was like a hormonal teenager. And one with no sense of propriety. She shifted her body out and away from his and slipped into a crowded lounge with tasseled lamps and another bar, which was a good thing. She needed a drink.

  “How about we just tell your family?”

  “Tell them what?”

  “That you’ve come to your senses.” She looked at him like he had lost his. “That I’m making an honest woman of you.”

  For some reason, that both insulted her and made her feel paranoid. “I’ve never lied to you!” she said hotly.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Well, then maybe you need to think a bit more before you speak.” She was being horrible. She felt horrible. But the bourbon burning her throat seemed to balance the effect. No wonder Dad liked it so much.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t take me for granted,” he said chugging a vodka shot.

  Now he was just being completely out of line. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let’s just say there are a lot of other women who’d be very happy to be in your shoes.”

  He had finally said it. She almost felt relieved. “A lot of women?” she said. “How many women, Dov?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then you’re saying a lot of things you don’t mean.” They were both saying a lot of things they might not mean.

  “I’m just saying that other people wouldn’t be so damn ungracious about me proposing marriage.”

  “Then maybe you should ask one of those people to marry you.” She didn’t mean that. Maybe she did.

  “Maybe I will,” he said.

  Naomi scanned the room, both hoping and fearing she’d spot Austin. Her attention was pulled back to Dov when he banged his glass down on the bar.

 
“Are you going to marry me or not?”

  “Oh, that’s romantic.”

  “It’s a straightforward question. Are we in business or aren’t we?”

  And there it was. The reason he had continued to pursue her. The reason he had ignored all those other potential mates, who would always be there waiting for the right moment to pounce. She was something he wanted. And Dov always got what he wanted. Or at least tried. He wouldn’t have been so successful if he wasn’t so tunnel-visioned. But Naomi saw so clearly what would happen once she said yes. The thrill of the chase would be over. And she’d be moping around a seventy-five-hundred-square-foot home wondering what surgically enhanced blonde was making the moves on her husband.

  “I’m selling my shares of Splurge,” Naomi said, finally sure of her decision.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t think we should be in business anymore.”

  She ran out of the room. She ran into the dining room, where guests were feasting on coriander-crusted tuna and grass-fed hanger steak. She twisted and turned, not seeing Austin, not seeing which way she should go. She ran up and down the stairs, in and out of crowded vestibules. The rain was crashing against the windows in waves of agitation.

  Naomi found Noah on the second-floor landing, speaking to a male couple in snug-fitting Thom Browne suits. She stood waiting for a break in the conversation, looking left and right, feeling the heat from the bourbon in her chest.

  “Are you okay?” Noah asked her.

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I need to make an early exit.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, Noah, please don’t make me explain.”

  “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “The problem is I haven’t seen a ghost.”

  “Maybe you should lie down.”

  “I can’t. I mean I can’t stay. I’m so happy for you and Godwin. I’m so sorry.”

  She ran down the stairs like Cinderella leaving the ball, leaving her prince, leaving her sanity. She just knew she needed to run. She got down to the front hall before remembering she didn’t have her purse. She had left it in the bridal room when she changed into her dress. She ran back up the stairs, nearly crashing into her parents. Talking. To each other. Like civilized people.