CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Getting Ready
Preparing for your wedding should be a pleasure, the greatest pleasure, surely, short of the wedding itself. But four days before the nuptials, Marina was struggling. Her dress, Jil Sander, off the rack, was being altered. A small Spanish woman, with a tight chignon and a peculiar wen by her right ear, scrabbled about on her knees at Marina’s feet on the gray carpet, her mouth full of pins. The dress had already been fitted once; but doubtless in the flurry, Marina had lost a pound or two, and now, in the dressmaker’s mirror, she could see the cloth sagging at her ribs, where it was intended to cleave to her, and sliding loosely at the hips, where it was to have molded. The dress, columnar, simple, was blue, not white, which seemed to Marina departure enough from tradition, a pale greeny-blue that might, in the trade, have been referred to as sea foam. She had the shoes (their heels were silver, and very high: she worried, although only fleetingly, that one would sink into the lawn and stick there as she processed upon her father’s arm); she’d ordered the flowers (calla lilies, after all); she knew how she would arrange her hair (upswept, though less tightly than her dressmaker’s, and with a lily tucked into its waves). Food had been organized, and seating, and a marquee beneath which the guests would sit, so that neither sun nor rain could spoil things; and even the decorations for the pergola had been finalized. There wouldn’t be so many guests—just a hundred—but those there were had had their lodgings organized, in and around Stockbridge.
In the event, Ludovic’s family wouldn’t be represented at all, although he’d put her on the phone to his mother, whose accent was, to Marina’s ear, primly British; whose voice, faintly tremulous; and whose tone, if Marina were frank (which, with Ludovic, she was not), chilly. The exchange had been brief and formal: Marina had gushed, in her best social manner, about how very much she wished her future mother-inlaw were coming and how immensely she was looking forward to meeting her; in reply to which Mrs. Seeley had said only that unfortunately circumstances (unspecified) prevented her from making the journey. Marina had paused to consider that her mother-in-law might be a nightmare, but had concluded that the distance between them meant it didn’t so much matter. Ludovic, in passing, had suggested they might take a week in Sydney once the magazine was launched.
“The mater doesn’t do well on airplanes,” he said. “Nor on the telephone, really. But she’s quite sweet. You’ll see.”
Marina had merely smiled.
Her struggles were not born of the predictable emotions. She had no reservations about her intended, although it seemed that everyone else did. She felt no rancor at the fact that organizing the wedding had been left entirely to her and Annabel, even as she’d been preparing her own section for the launch issue of The Monitor: she understood the magnitude of Ludovic’s commitment, and that he had now, of all times, to fulfill it. His ambition, inevitably, was a part of his appeal. Her struggles lay, it seemed, in other quarters. Except with Annabel: she had no quarrel with her mother. Her mother was genuinely happy for her, she felt. But on every other front: she was to be given away by a man she still hadn’t forgiven; accompanied by a maid of honor whose disapproval leaked from her like a scent. Julius was hemming and hawing about whether he would even be able to attend, on account of his move, and of the Conehead’s “commitments,” and how could she not be mortally offended by that? And then, in a recurring flight of imagination that made her shudder, she feared, inexplicably, that her cousin, tacitly disinvited, might burst upon them on the day and wreak some sort of vengeance. Set the house on fire. Shoot her father. Kidnap her. It was crazy, she knew, to entertain such wild implausibilities.
“Mama,” she’d whispered one recent evening, at her parents’ bedroom door, “tell me I’m insane, but Bootie isn’t going to hunt us down and kill us, is he? On my wedding day?”
And her mother had emerged from her closet to say, in a soothing maternal whoosh, “No, no, darling, don’t be silly. Not at all. I imagine he’s just sad, poor boy. He’s a troubled one.” A blouse over her arm, she had shaken her head wistfully. “It’s just because it feels peculiar. Like having a tooth out. I’m sure in time it will come right again; but for now, we just have to live with it.”
“But he won’t try to kill us?”
“I don’t think so, darling. I think his article about Daddy was as close as he could come.”
That article, that article: just the other day, waiting for Ludo in his office, she’d noticed that it still existed, in the personal queue of his computer. Evidently, Ludo had had the article scanned—or conceivably even typed in, by Lizbeth, that smarmy princess of a secretary, forty-eight, fleshless and sinisterly demure, who always looked at Marina as though she pitied her—and had kept it. As though, although they hadn’t spoken of it for weeks, their lives weren’t sufficiently fraught without that, too—nominally already dealt with—returning to complicate. Who needed a prenuptial blowout? Instead, when he’d come in (Lizbeth clicking tidily and glossily behind him like a well-groomed poodle), Marina had asked about the launch party—set for the thirteenth—and they’d gone yet again over the list of local celebs who had RSVPed. It was what Ludo cared most about, at that point, more than the wedding, it sometimes felt, even though to a significant degree the guest lists overlapped. He cared about the celebrities, the ones only on the party list: “No reply from Sontag’s secretary,” he’d complained. “Even though Lizbeth has rung over there twice. Don’t you think you could expect a bloody answer? Even a no? And frankly, she should be there. I could make her hot again, if she’d let me. But at least Renée Zellweger is a yes.” Maybe it had been a mistake to have the two events so close together. Marina couldn’t remember now why it had seemed so important. The urgency of their passion, doubtless. But she couldn’t have foreseen the obstacles, or her barely controlled anger at almost all involved.
In the last week of August, in the quiet of the city, she’d met with Scott, her book editor, and he had pronounced himself thrilled with the manuscript. They would publish the following September; there would be fanfare of a relatively grave sort (“It’s sexy but serious,” Scott kept repeating. “That’s my marketing pitch: sexy but serious. We could run the first serial in Vogue, or The New Yorker—maybe both?”). They would advertise, and tour her, and “it’s also a natural for TV,” he’d gone on. “Maybe Rosie, maybe Oprah—that’s what we’re thinking.” She would in time have to strategize with the publicity department: they would want “a really great head shot,” he said. “You’re gorgeous. You’re a young celebrity. Let’s make the most of it.” In the office, she had bubbled, thrilled, a tingle of triumph on her spine; but as soon as she regained the street it struck her that only Ludo would be happy, and that even he was otherwise preoccupied. She wouldn’t tell her father—not yet, anyway. The wound, still unscabbed, couldn’t take it. He didn’t believe in her, or not in the book; would merely warn her against being manipulated. She could play the conversation in her mind, and certainly did not need actually to conduct it. But even the imagining incensed, as she walked back down Broadway through the jumbled, zinging hubbub of Times Square. The late summer tourists, all encumbered and gawping, their loose shorts flapping like flags, ambled, slung with bags and cameras, beneath the neon cacophony, eager and clueless, while bike messengers wove in and out, skimming the curbs, and locals—still so many of them, even after lunch at the end of August, the quietest hour, sidewalks thick with them, like herded sheep, in the stink of exhaust and sweat and sausages—nattered, waved, pushed, argued, like hammy extras on a film set, and generally enraged her. By the time she crossed to calmer Chelsea, wondering whether she might, fortuitously, glimpse Julius and with him, perhaps, the elusive Cohen, she bristled anew at Murray’s intransigence, reliving their San Domenico exchanges, as if she were but some spinoff of his own enterprise and her output his to control; as if—this, really, was always his way, when she thought about it, and why (she dug with her foot, crossed against the light, round
ly scolded by a cabbie’s horn), let’s be serious, why had she not thought about it before? Marina the diligent daughter, his right hand, who else could finish his work, even his sentences if need be, and never questioned, never asked, when he might make room for her, because—it was so obvious; how could she have needed Ludo to show her, and even, too, the missteps of poor Bootie Tubb?—to him it was all about Murray Thwaite, always. There was nobody else. And the rage welled up in her again at the dressmaker’s, perched upon her silver heels, her arms out to her sides: could she let him give her away, she wondered; but could not countenance the breach if she denied him. Not now. It would have to be as they had planned, but always, always, she would hold in her heart the memory of her buried rancor, the chemical taste of it, and it would taint and corrode the wedding and its recollection, invisibly but as surely as an acid bath.
Not to mention Danielle, or Julius, her closest friends gone AWOL, lost in their own selfishnesses at this, Marina’s most important moment. Danielle, who had accused her husband-to-be of every dishonesty, of charlatanism, almost, out of some unspeakable coil of envy which Marina knew she ought to be able to forgive (poor Danielle, with her secretive and failed infatuations; it had to be hard, after all, stranded alone, to see Marina blissful) but couldn’t, quite, yet. Her maid of honor: Danielle, too, would process, part of the parade of clandestine ill will. It seemed an intolerable prospect, for all Danielle had retracted her harsh words, had tried to paper over. No wonder Marina feared Bootie’s bursting in: these tiny, skewering dramas seemed impossible to control, to contain: there had to be an eruption, some eruption, whether her own or someone else’s; at which point Bootie was the safest, most expendable among them.
When she got home, she tried to explain this to Ludo, who dabbled abstractedly in his plate of sushi, but she was bound by loyalties and confidences and did not, above all, want to pain him or suggest to him that those around her welcomed him anything less than wholeheartedly, and thus he didn’t really understand what she was trying to say and dismissed it, tediously, as the “archetypal jitters.” “Don’t be predictable, my sweet,” he said with a wave of his chopsticks. “It’s so unlike you. We’ve got such important things to focus on, just now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Home Again
David lay on the futon with his eyes shut. “I can’t believe this,” he said.
“You can’t believe what?”
“What do you think I mean?”
Julius sat at the table with his chin in his hands. The room was really very small, especially for two people; and after David’s place, parodically dingy. “You can see why I never invited you here,” he said.
“I can’t see, though, why you ever lived here in the first place. It’s disgusting. What does it say about you that this is your home?”
“It’s very cheap.”
“Standards, Lady Muck. You of all people know a body needs standards.”
“It’s very cheap. We can afford it. When we strike it rich, we can go again.”
“Which is worse, do you think: this place together, or this place alone?”
Julius sniffed. “I lived here for six years on my own and perfectly well.”
“But not happily.”
Julius shrugged. He wasn’t sure, at this point, what happiness might entail. Perhaps all these years he had been happy without knowing. It seemed perfectly possible.
“Because it feels unhappy. You know, there are animals that go off by themselves to die? I don’t know which ones, but there are. It feels like a place you might go to die.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Seriously, the vibe is bizarre.”
“Maybe it was the boy, Marina’s cousin.”
“Dank.”
Julius nodded, but felt guilty about it. The boy had contrived to inspire nothing but guilt since the first unfortunate encounter. “He’s not so bad, I hear.”
“From whom, exactly?”
“Okay. He’s dank.”
“Do you really want me to go to this wedding? I’m not sure I can face it.”
“She’s one of my best friends. Maybe my best friend. And oldest.”
“I know, I know. The gorgeous WASP in the cafeteria line on the second day of college. It’ll all be so fancy, the incredible guest list. I know, I know.”
“I’ve been to plenty of things for you.” Now, more than ever, Julius was aware of this. Aware of all he had relinquished—willingly, it was true; but still. This wedding was non-negotiable.
“What’s with you and your college friends? It’s like you never moved on.”
“I never needed to.”
“Is that the benefit or the drawback of going to such a fancy school?”
“Since when is Union not fancy?”
“It’s not hobnobbing with the jetset.”
“She’s not the jetset, David. Believe me.” He couldn’t resist: “That you could mistake Marina for the jetset shows you haven’t got a clue.”
“My point exactly.”
“I am asking you to do this. And I’m asking you to drive the car, and we have to pick it up in an hour. The wedding is at six, and it takes two and a half hours to get there, and I wanted to check in to the hotel first.”
“I think I let the movers take my tux. It’s in storage, by now—can’t get it till Monday. Oops. Sorry.”
“Then your regular black suit will be fine.”
“Fine? I don’t think so.”
“I packed for you.” Julius pointed at the two suit bags by the door. “Everything we need, including lotion and breath mints.”
David still had his eyes shut, his arms over his head. “Shaving cream?”
“Toothpaste, too.”
“A bedtime story?”
“Also.”
“I’m still not sure I can go. Just the thought of it upsets my stomach. It’s like all your friends are members of Mensa or something. Like you have to pass some stupid test to join the club.”
“I should have made you meet them before.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t dread it, then. You might even be looking forward to it.”
“I’m not dreading it. I mean, who are these people?”
“Her dad is actually pretty famous, you know.”
“In pretentious magazines nobody reads.”
“Does it matter? She’s my best friend.”
“Doesn’t that make it worse? She’s had so much of you, for such a long time. I can’t really stand it. And you’re mine, now.”
“I’m not anybody’s, Mister Man. As you well know.”
“You don’t love me.” David sat up, put on a miserable grimace, like a clown’s unhappy face. His hair was appealingly tousled. “If you loved me, you’d spare me this. You’d stay here with me.”
“Come with me. At least as far as Stockbridge. You have to drive the car. The hotel will be cute—Marina promised. And then decide.”
David stood. “It has to be cuter than this hole.”
Julius batted playfully at his arm. “This is my home. Ever so humble, and all that. If you love me, you’ll suck it up.”
“I’ll drive you to Stockbridge.” He sighed, a gargantuan mockery of a sigh. “Who ever thought I’d end up like this. Lady Muck’s humble chauffeur, and keeper of the Muck Hovel.”
“I’m not joking,” Julius said, in a joking voice. “I really can’t be doing with that.”
“Oh no, oh please, Lady Muck, forgive me!”
“I really can’t, David.” Julius, too, was standing, and thin-lipped, and google-eyed. He was still trying to pretend that he was in jest, because although they both knew otherwise, the pretense seemed important. “So why don’t you go shine up the Bentley, and we’ll be off.”
David made a noise in between a snort and a giggle, an ultimately unparseable noise that further irritated Julius; but he moved to the door and shouldered his bag even as he made the noise and Julius knew that this first step, at least, he
had won.
“You’ll have a good time, I know it,” he said in the close stairwell, where the old and odorous air hung unmoving. Then amended: “Or an interesting time, at least. I can promise you an interesting time. And interesting is good, right?”
“May you live in interesting times? Is that good? I thought it was a Confucian curse, not a blessing.”
“Well, sweetheart.” Julius briefly slipped an arm around David’s waist as they stepped onto the street, but pulled it immediately away because he thought he could feel David flinch, because he knew David didn’t want their intimacy to be seen. “No worries on that score, at least. Whatever else they may be, our times are almost criminally uninteresting. The dullest times ever.”
“We can make them exciting, Lady Muck,” David said, suddenly apparently more cheerful. “Just getting out of that place is a start. Look, the sun is shining. Look, the world is still here.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“It is, too. Don’t pout. It is, too. Out here in the wider world, even Stockbridge seems possible. It’s that place, I’m telling you. Where animals go to die.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
The Emperor's Children Page 36
