Fuck. I’m turned on. I’m also resigned to the fact that this show is fucking doomed. There is nothing this woman deems too much information.
People will already have their doubts once they see a wedding photo of us online, one in which I’m wearing a tux and she’s clad in a dress made out of marijuana leaves, and then she’ll tell them they can find her on Instagram at cumslut69, and the jig will beup.
“Look,” I begin slowly, knowing she will definitely resent what I’m about to say. “I realize you prefer to turn everything into a joke, but I’m fairly well-known in certain circles. If we don’t want anonymous sources coming forward from my side insisting the marriage is fake…it would be helpful if you could present yourself as someone I’d actually marry.”
Her eyes narrow. “Masochistic?”
“Respectable. We need to look like we belong together. So maybe a wedding dress that can’t double as a bikini, that sort of thing.”
“Fine,” she replies. “But you’re paying. Let’s see if there’s a dress store nearby.”
“Rebecca, I don’t shop with any woman I’m not actively fucking.”
She glances around us. “Will a blow job suffice? It’s kind of hard to have sex in an elevator.”
Goddammit. If I could adjust myself without her noticing, I would. In three minutes’ time, I’ve gotten a glimpse of her breasts, learned that she’s fucked a glass bottle on a dare, and been offered a blow job.
I insisted she could survive these next few months.
Now it’s me I’m worried about.
We arrive in the lobby and I walk out fast before she canmake the situation worse. I’m relieved, at least, that she’s putting the sweatshirt backon.
“I’ve been renting an executive apartment near Maplewood since the winter,” I tell her when she gets outside. “I suppose I’ll just move my things over to your house sometime this week?”
Her eyes widen and then she looks away. “No. Let’s hold off on that. I’m just going to stay in the city for a while.”
It’s the small catch to her voice that snares my attention. She’s so blasé most of the time that I tend to forget how much she’s suffered these past few months. I’m remembering it now, though, with a thud.
“Rebecca…have you been home since the funeral?”
“I haven’t had time,” she says, still not meeting my eye.
How often did my mother use that excuse to avoid going through Kieran’s things? Three years have passed and neither of us can stand to go near the building where he jumped. And Bex has got nothing but time—she’s already admitted she spends her days in bed watching TV. So is she avoiding the house itself…or is she avoiding the train?
“I can call a car to take you to New Jersey,” I offer. “And I can pick you up when we have to come back on Friday.”
Her eyes flicker up to me and there it is, suddenly: that fragile thing I saw in her face at the funeral—something shocked and young and so wounded.
“Thanks,” she says, “but I still have to get a dress. And I think it’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.”
“I’m pretty sure it’sworseluck to marry a woman who’s counting the days until she can file for divorce.”
Her eyes crinkle. “That’s a good point, but let’s not take on any more bad luck than necessary.” She gives me a bright, forced smile as she turns to walk down the street, dragging a suitcase behind her. “See you in four days, I guess.”
I watch her walk away, too small and delicate to bewandering the city streets alone at dusk. And too broken. Perhaps just as broken as she was last December, and a little too good at hidingit.
Rick would want me to do something. He’d want me to call Jessie’s sisters or find her a therapist or help her sort through their stuff.
But what he’d want most of all is the one thing I’m not doing—he’d want me to leave his daughter alone.
• • •
Four days later, I’m ushered into a brownstone in Greenwich Village by a maid and silently pointed toward the French doors. I step out into a courtyard that is completely abloom somehow though it’s still March and barely above freezing. It reminds me, for better or worse, of the place where I once proposed to someone else, back when I was another person entirely.
Oddly, that makes me feel better about what we’re doing today. You can never really know anyone and you can never really trust anyone, so if you’ve got to marry at all, doing it with no illusions about love is the only way togo.
Lars and Paula are here already, supervising Katrina as she lays our props on a table: birdseed, a bouquet. Rings.
