Slightly Married

by Wendy Markham

  Well, I can’t speak for Buckley but I’m definitely in love with someone else.

  Jack and I clicked from the start. He’s everything I ever wanted—smart, loyal, kind, loving, a good person. A great person. My family and friends have welcomed him with open arms, and his family has done the same with me. We belong together and we’re going to have a great life together.

  There isn’t a doubt in my mind about that, or about marrying him.

  Not when I’m actually with him, anyway.

  Not any other time, for that matter, aside from right now, today, when I’m with Buckley.

  I guess any lingering feelings I might have subconsciously been harboring for him just aren’t going away as quickly as I expected them to, now that I’m engaged.

  Then again, is that any surprise? It’s not as if a person can just turn feelings on and off depending on her marital status.

  It’s not as if someone puts a ring on your finger and bam!—you’ve turned off every bit of attraction you’ve ever felt for anyone else in your life.

  Too bad, because wouldn’t that be convenient?

  As I pinch a slab of raw pink tuna between my chopsticks and dredge it through the soy-wasabe concoction, I find myself envisioning a bunch of levers in my back, behind my heart. They’re all labeled with names: Jack, Buckley, Will.

  The Jack one, of course, is full-throttle up. The Will one is entirely turned off—and it’s about time, don’t you think?

  The Buckley one is hovering in the halfway zone, like a light switch on a dimmer. I imagine giving it a firm yank and clicking it off altogether, but it seems to be kind of sticking somewhere in the middle, flickering.

  “Wow, I’m a shitty friend,” Buckley announces abruptly.

  I look up in surprise. “What?”

  “You just got engaged. We should be celebrating. You celebrated with me when I got engaged.”

  Yes. But not wholeheartedly.

  Only he doesn’t know that.

  “Here I am dumping my problems on you when we should be toasting your engagement.” He scowls. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. We need…we need champagne. That’s what we need.”

  “They don’t have it here,” I say as he spots the waiter and raises his hand. “I tried to order it that day we were here when you got engaged, remember?”

  No, he doesn’t remember. He was too caught up in his newly engaged elation to have noticed anything that day.

  “Well,” he says now, “let’s finish eating and go down to the Bubble Lounge for a toast.”

  “Can’t. That’s way downtown. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  Not to mention, I’m afraid of what might happen if Buckley and I started drinking champagne together, given the state of his relationship and my frayed nerves.

  “We’ll stay in midtown, then.”

  Tempting, but…“Can’t. Really. You have no idea how crazy it is at work with this presentation coming up.”

  “How about after work, then? I don’t have any plans. Do you? We can have dinner.”

  “No, I’ll have to work late—” I soooo am not looking forward to that “—and Jack has a focus group or something anyway, so…”

  “Oh, right. Jack should come. That would be great,” he says, but he doesn’t look all that convinced.

  “Listen,” I say, “let’s set up a dinner with Jack and Sonja so that we can all go out together. To celebrate. With, you know, champagne and everything.” And everyone.

  Jack and Sonja.

  Buckley and me.

  I mean, Jack and me.

  Buckley and Sonja.

  “That would be good, going out, the four of us,” Buckley agrees. “We’ll have to do that.”

  We’ll have to…

  He says it just like that, as if it’s a requirement.

  And I guess maybe it should be, from here on in.

  You know, maybe I shouldn’t be spending time alone with Buckley now that I’m an engaged woman.

  Come on, Tracey…what is this, Victorian England?

  Of course I’ll go on spending time alone with Buckley, just as I always did.

  Our friendship isn’t going to change just because we’re getting married to other people.

  Well, I’m getting married, anyway.

  Buckley doesn’t seem so sure about himself anymore, dammit.

  If he seemed sure he was getting married, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with myself in the first place. I would just go on assuming he’s madly in love with Sonja…

  Now that I think about it, though…did he ever really seem madly in love?

  He’d hemmed and hawed an awful lot right from the beginning. And I can’t help but note that every time he and Sonja took their relationship a step further—exclusively dating each other, moving in together, getting engaged—it was entirely her idea. Buckley had dragged his feet from day one.

  Maybe not from day one. I was there on day one—or rather, night one. I watched Buckley fall all over Sonja, with her long curly dark hair, white-white-white smile and one of those impossible figures that is svelte with big, perky boobs.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not lacking in that department. Especially not when I’m less-than-svelte.

  But whenever I lose weight, I lose it all over and things immediately start to sag. A good push-up bra takes care of it.

  Sonja doesn’t rely on underwire, though. She goes braless every now and then—very obviously—and I happen to know that the only thing pushing up her boobs is good fortune and a good gene pool.

  Anyway, this isn’t about boobs and bras—or lack thereof—it’s about Buckley’s feelings for Sonja. He was definitely into her the night they met, and immediately thereafter.

  So what changed that for him?

  Her constant pushing for a commitment.

  I pushed Jack for a commitment, too.

  What if he changes his mind about me? asks a small voice in my head—the voice that belongs to Inner Tracey, who is frequently insecure.

  I haven’t heard from her in quite a while.

  I didn’t miss her.

  He won’t change his mind, I assure Inner Tracey, irritated. Don’t worry.

  After all, Jack might have been slow to commit, but now that he’s in, he’s in. That’s just how he is. He takes his time making up his mind to do something so that he’s absolutely sure it’s the right choice.

  Trust me. I’ve been shopping with the man for everything from suits to groceries. It’s a painstaking process.

  I, on the other hand…

  Well, I’ve been known to make an impulse purchase on occasion. My closet—and our kitchen cupboards—are full of proof:

  A pair of scary, dressy wool shorts—remember when dressy wool shorts were all the rage? (Me, neither: I’m sure the rage lasted all of a week after some frivolous starlet wore them to an awards show. I, of course, must have had the misfortune to go shopping that week and the greater misfortune of thinking they’d look hot with a blazer and heels.)

  A tin of canned salmon (in the cupboard, not the closet) because I thought I would learn to make croquettes, which must also have been all the rage at the moment.

  Back to the closet: a pair of perennially trendy spike-heeled boots that couldn’t safely and steadily transport me across the shoe department floor, let alone anywhere else.

  A can of steel-cut Irish oats—probably bug-infested by now—that are supposed to be good for you but take forever to cook (cupboard again, and I really should toss them).

  A pair of marked-down Levi’s in my size that should have fit but didn’t, which I would have realized had I tried them on, but I didn’t feel like it.

  I could go on, but I won’t.

  The point is…

  Wait, what is the point?

  Well, one point is that dressy shorts is an oxymoron.

  Another point is, who buys jeans without trying them on?

 
; Not Jack.

  What that has to do with anything is unclear to me at the moment because my head is spinning—without benefit of champagne.

  Maybe I never should have thought that an engagement ring—not to mention a promotion—would solve anything.

  Now I’m starting to wonder if my problems have just begun.

  5

  If the first three days of the week were bad at work, Thursday is absolutely atrocious.

  The presentation didn’t go well. The Client hated it—and us.

  That’s what I tell Latisha when she sticks her head into my office just after six-thirty to see how it went.

  “They hated you?” she echoes dubiously, catching me with a pocket mirror examining the latest stress-generated blemish on my face.

  “Yup,” I say, nodding vigorously and snapping the mirror closed.

  “They hated you personally.”

  “All of us.”

  Latisha smirks. “What did they do? Push you down and call you names?”

  “Don’t laugh. They might as well have.” Sitting in my desk chair, I wedge my poor aching, swollen feet from the evil yet très fashionable high-heeled shoes I wore all day.

  “So what happened?”

  “It was a horrible presentation.” I reach into my bottom desk drawer and grab a pair of antique black flats for my crosstown walk to meet Jack and his family.

  Not cool vintage indy-actress antique.

  Scuffed old somebody’s-cleaning-lady antique. Aerosoles that are très ugly but feel like slippers. Ah, bliss.

  “Thank God this week is almost over,” I tell Latisha, flexing my grateful toes. “Thank God at least this day is over.”

  “Yeah, everyone else is already gone. I didn’t realize you were even still here until I saw your light on. Come on or we’ll be late.”

  I look up from putting my brand-new issue of Modern Bride, with its tantilizing “Exotic Honeymoon Destinations” cover story, into my bag.

  “We’ll be late?” I echo. “Late for what?” Last I knew, she wasn’t coming along to dinner with the Candell clan and me.

  “For Julie’s thing.”

  “What thing?” Julie is one of the administrative assistants on the cereal account down the hall. She’s a sweetheart. I love her.

  “You know…her goodbye party.”

  “What?” I am completely nonplussed.

  “Her goodbye party,” Latisha repeats, but with less conviction this time. In fact, it almost sounds like a question.

  And, I’ve got one of my own. Two, actually: “Julie’s leaving?” and “What party?”

  Is it my imagination, or is Latisha actually squirming?

  “You didn’t know Julie was leaving?”

  Yup. She’s squirming all right.

  “No. She quit?”

  “She was laid off. Today’s her last day.”

  No, I did not know that.

  “She’s having a party?” I ask, because I did not know that, either.

  “It’s not that big a deal. She just asked if a bunch of us wanted to go out for drinks at the Royalton to help drown her sorrows. Not that she’s all that sorrowful because they all got great severance packages and she’s paying for everyone’s drinks.”

  Except mine, of course. Because I won’t be there. Because I wasn’t invited.

  Wow.

  “They all got great severance packages?” I echo. “Who is they all?”

  “Don’t you mean who ‘are’ they all?”

  I fix Latisha with a hairy eyeball. Since when is she the queen of good grammar?

  “You know what I meant.”

  She shrugs. “Yeah. A couple of other people got let go from that account. Two of the executive VPs in Creative, an assistant A.E. and a few people in production, I heard. The media group will be reassigned to other accounts.”

  Glad Jack isn’t on the Choc-Chewy-O’s account, I watch Latisha sneak a peek at her watch.

  “Go ahead.” I bleakly shove a folder filled with notes from the meeting into my already jammed black bag and reach for my coat on the back of the door. “Looks like you’re late.”

  “Do you want to come?”

  “To the party?” To which I was not invited?

  “It’s not really a party,” Latisha backpedals with uncharacteristic and unappealing reticence. “It’s just, you know, a…thing. But you should come.”

  “Don’t you think I’d feel a little funny?”

  “Why? It’s just Julie, and, you know…everyone.”

  I thought I was a part of everyone. Apparently not.

  “I really thought you knew about it,” Latisha—not prone to mumbling—mumbles. “I mean, I figured you probably hear stuff now that you’re up there.”

  “Up where?”

  “You know…out of the cubes with the rest of us, into the room with a view.”

  “Yeah. Well…I didn’t know.” I shrug, feeling uncomfortable.

  “So you want to come or not?”

  “That’s okay. I’ve got plans tonight with Jack anyway. We have a seven o’clock reservation at Gallagher’s with his family.”

  “Cool.” She looks relieved. “Well…have fun.”

  “You, t—” I smack my forehead. “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  “I just realized something.”

  “What?”

  Adrian mentioned the other day that the Choc-Chewy-O’s account group would be meeting to talk about trimming the fat…and, being naturally food-and-weight-obsessed, I took it literally.

  Trimming the fat…they were talking about layoffs.

  Duh.

  “What, Tracey?”

  “Nothing, I just…I think Adrian might have mentioned something about layoffs on that account, but at the time, I…you know…”

  “Didn’t think you should say anything?” she supplies.

  “Right,” I say, because it’s more appealing than didn’t get it.

  Hmm. So what do you know? Maybe I do hear things now that I’m up here with a view. I just don’t know what those things mean.

  Idiot.

  “Listen, tell Julie I said…uh, good luck. Okay?”

  “You have her number, right?” Latisha seems a little terse. “Call her tomorrow and tell her yourself.”

  I sigh inwardly, watching Latisha walk away.

  Maybe it’s been years since middle school, but suddenly I’m right back in the thick of it, a pimple-faced loser in comfortable shoes, being dissed by the popular girls.

  You are not, I tell myself. You’re a glowing, newly promoted bride-to-be.

  With zits.

  Wearing Aerosoles.

  Not invited to the party.

  I glumly shove the pointy pumps into my bag along with everything else, and throw the strap over my shoulder.

  Damn, it’s heavy. Mostly due to Modern Bride, of course. By the time I actually become one, I’m going to need an exotic-honeymoon package that throws in a masseuse and a chiropractor.

  I reach over to turn out the desk light, then hesitate. I should probably wait a few minutes. I don’t want to ride down the elevator with Latisha and whoever else is on the way to Julie’s “goodbye thing” to which I wasn’t invited.

  Really, what’s up with that? Since when do they go out together without me?

  Could I possibly have done something to upset Julie? Or someone?

  Nothing that I can think of.

  Hurt, I linger a few more minutes in my office until the coast is clear.

  Out on the street, swept into the familiar throng of rushing commuters, I breathe some cold, fresh February night air to clear my head.

  Maybe I should have point-blank asked Latisha why they left me out.

  Then again…she probably doesn’t know why. She didn’t even realize I wasn’t invited in the first place. She assumed I was.

  Well, of course she did. Why wouldn’t she? I was there when we all went out for Chinese to celebrate Julie’s birthday after New Year’s
. And I was there when—

  My thoughts are interrupted by my ringing cell phone.

  Maybe it’s Julie, calling to say it was an oversight and that I should get my butt over to the Royalton.

  I pull the phone out of my pocket and check caller ID.

  Jack.

  Middle school again, and who cares about the popular girls? A cute boy is calling me.

  “Hey, cute boy,” I say into the phone, feeling better instantly.

  “Cute boy? Huh?”

  “Where are you?” I ask, deciding against telling Jack I’ll be calling him Cute Boy from now on.

  “I’m just leaving Penn Station.” He had to take the train to Jersey for a meeting this afternoon and is just getting back into town. “The uptown subway isn’t running so it’s an absolute madhouse over here. I’ll have to walk up.”

  I don’t bother to ask him about a cab. As any New Yorker knows, you can stroll to Long Island in the time it would take to snag a rush-hour cab from Penn Station when the subway isn’t running.

  “Where are you?” Jack asks.

  “Heading across Forty-eighth Street toward Gallagher’s.” Which is just a few blocks northwest of the oh-so-hip, monochromatic lobby bar where the entire cubicle population of Blaire Barnett Middle School is enjoying flavored mojitos.

  “I’ll be at Gallagher’s in about ten minutes,” I tell Jack.

  “You’ll beat me, then. The reservation’s under Candell. Go ahead and sit down. Tell Mom I’m on my way. And don’t tell her or my sisters the news until I get there.”

  As if. We’ve been looking forward to this for days. We still haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about our engagement in person.

  Not together, anyway.

  Last night before bed, I nonchalantly mentioned to Jack that I’d had lunch with Buckley and shared our news with him. He wanted to know what Buckley had to say about it.

  He asked me that question in the most casual way, not even looking up from his iPod, which he was programming with a couple of Springsteen albums for today’s train trip out to Jersey.

  I, of course, answered the casual question in the most casual way. “He said congratulations.” And that he isn’t sure he wants to marry Sonja. “Oh, and he said the four of us should go out. He wants to celebrate with us.”

  “Really?”