I doubted that Berringer knew the first time Matt and I talked about marriage seriously was all those years before while staying at his apartment in Paris. That that very first morning we were there, we had gone to see the Eiffel Tower, and that was when he brought it up. He had said he could imagine the two of us taking a lifetime of seeing places like this—wanted a lifetime of that—that the best part of being in France was seeing how happy it was making me. I started crying, right beneath the Eiffel Tower. Because I knew he meant it, and it was how I felt about him—how I’d felt since the minute I met him—the best part of everything was watching him enjoy it too.
Part of me wanted to tell Berringer that story now, though I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t sure what I thought that was going to do.
“Do you guys know anyone who is in a happy marriage?” I asked instead, sitting up taller. “A really happy one?”
Josh turned around and looked at me from the front seat. Berringer met my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“I was just thinking,” I said.
Josh turned back around, away from me. “Well, think about something else.”
I looked into the rearview mirror to see if Berringer was still looking back at me. He wasn’t. His eyes were back on the road. Now I knew he was thinking about Naomi. Naomi, and maybe his new girlfriend—Cecilia or Chloe, I forgot—something with a C. Carol Ann, maybe.
“Sorry, I was trying to figure something out about when things go wrong . . . between two people.” I shook my head, knowing I wasn’t making anything any clearer. For them or me. “Forget it. It was a dumb question,” I said.
“Not for the back of a slam book, maybe,” Josh said.
“Wow,” I said. “I loved slam books.”
Berringer met my eyes in the rearview mirror, again, and started smiling. “Favorite song? Not now, of course. Then.”
I shook my head, trying to think of it, to remember, truly, what I had loved in sixth grade, in seventh, my pen crossing neatly in someone else’s keepsake—me absolutely sure of my answers. “‘Lady in Red,’ I guess,” I said.
“ ‘Lady in Red,’ ” Josh mumbled under his breath.
“Favorite hobby?” Berringer asked, ignoring him.
“Taking baths,” I said.
“Taking baths?” Josh said. This time he turned all the way around to face me. “Please tell me that you didn’t actually used to write that down. What’s wrong with saying softball? Or ballet?”
“I used to pretend it was the ocean,” I said.
“That’s great, Emmy,” he said. “That’s really great.”
“I like taking baths,” Berringer said.
Josh put up his hand to silence him. He couldn’t take it when he thought I was being weird—not because he was embarrassed so much, but more because it made him worry about me. It made him worry that I’d get into a situation one day he couldn’t get me out of.
He rolled down the window, the air hitting me, maybe even more than it was hitting him. “Now that you live near the ocean,” he said, “maybe you can pretend it’s a bath.”
If you were coming to Scarsdale to visit someone—a roommate from college, say, or a new boyfriend’s parents—and someone suggested going to get a drink, the odds were the next suggestion would be heading over to the Heathcote Tavern. The reason for this was that the Heathcote Tavern was the only place to go. I don’t mean only as in the hip place, or the happening one. I mean only as in one and only. If you wanted to go to another bar, you’d have to head to another town. Like White Plains, maybe, or the main drag in New Rochelle.
The tavern wasn’t a bad place, though. I’m not saying that. It was, actually, pretty great: three big, red rooms with fireplaces and dim lighting and dark wallpaper. Downstairs dining area. And upstairs was the bar itself—a space that was beyond crowded two nights a year, Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving Eve, when most SHS graduates from the last decade made their way back to town for the holidays and staged impromptu, unofficial reunions at the only place they could.
The rest of the year though, like tonight, there was usually only a smattering of people populating the upstairs bar late-night: a divorced couple on some sort of first date in the corner, an older man talking to the bartender by the flat-screen television, a couple of late-twenty-something women—their backs to us—drinking chardonnay at the bar.
Of course, tonight, for Josh’s shindig, there was the addition of a long oval table in the center of the upstairs room reserved for and composed of Josh’s relatively weak-looking bachelor party. On one side of the oval were Josh’s other friends from high school—Mark, Todd, Chris—all of whom I recognized. On the other was the college and medical school representation, most of whom I didn’t. Almost everyone had carpooled here from the city, where they either lived or were staying for the weekend at the Essex House, courtesy of Meryl’s mom. When I saw the sheer number of empty shot glasses on the table, I realized this was a mistake. Having the bachelor party out here. At the rate everyone seemed to already be going, they’d be joining the Moynihan-Richardses in our basement.
When Josh walked up the stairs, someone called out, “There he is!” and everyone stood up and clapped, continuing with cheers as he went around the table saying hello. Berringer and I stood off to the side.
And I would have kept standing to the side, except I was noticed by my father, who at the head of the table was holding center court. He saluted me, and I saluted back. Samuel Bean Everett, Esq.: volunteer firefighter, Savannah, Georgia, native, six-foot-four anomaly. He had come tonight fully bachelor-partied out in construction pants, work boots, and a T-shirt Josh had bought him a few years back that read MR. SMOOTH LIVES HERE in large black letters.
Even from several feet away, I could see that tonight’s festivities were affecting him. His cheeks were already red, his eyes watery. My dad rarely drank—a by-product, I always assumed, of being married to Sadie the teetotaler. I hadn’t known my mother to have a drink, in fact, even once over the span of my lifetime. This was a little ironic when you considered that she met my dad at a bar. On a Sunday morning, nevertheless.
It was one of the
stories that made the rounds—over and over—wedding weekend or not. The story of that New Year’s Day morning spent at the Oak Bar—on the bottom floor of the New York Plaza. My mom and her friend Lydia were sitting at a corner table, drinking Shirley Temples. It had been Lydia’s idea to go there as a way to kill a little time before the matinee they were seeing that afternoon. Enter my father. He had forgotten his newspaper at that very table, and was racing across the woody room to retrieve it. This was when she spotted him wearing “ripped dungarees” and his hair in a short ponytail. He was just passing through New York on his way from his home in Savannah, Georgia, to an island off the coast of Maine, where he was going to be a firefighter and coach high school basketball. He asked her to reach under the table and hand his paper back to him.