“Well, our parents’ homes.”
“Still . . . I spend so much time trying to escape this place, and sometimes I wonder if it’s the only place I’ll ever have to really go back to. You know? If it’s the only place I’ll ever really consider home.”
He handed me the glass of water. “Drink,” he said.
I took the water from him, starting to laugh. He turned and looked at me, tilting his head. It was weird when he did that—looked at me from that direction. It was almost like he was trying to see something that I wasn’t sure I wanted someone to see. It made me nervous.
“So.” He smiled. “Tell me something more about this documentary of yours. You must be close to finishing by now, right?”
I felt something clutch inside. I didn’t know what to say. I was used to explaining my life away with partial fictions, but it felt wrong, in a way I wasn’t entirely used to, to tell him anything but the truth. Maybe because he seemed to have so little trouble telling the truth himself. What was I going to say anyway, though? That the more time I was spending on this documentary, the further away the end was becoming? That the more time I was spen
ding, the less sure I was why I was doing it in the first place?
“Berringer, I think we have bigger things to talk about right now. Like Josh,” I said. “Just for example.”
“Ah . . . ,” he said, nodding like he understood. “The girl swings it back to Josh when she doesn’t want to talk about herself.”
I ignored that, even though I knew, inside, he wasn’t wrong. “I just don’t understand,” I said. “If you’re saying Josh is so amazing with Elizabeth, that they have this amazing connection or whatever, why aren’t you telling him? When it matters most that he does something about it?”
“It’s past time for that. If he was going to do something, he should have done it already.”
“What does that even mean?” I said. “You want him to make a mistake?”
“Which way do you think is the mistake?”
I looked away, unsure of how to answer that. I had no answer. One minute I thought Josh should absolutely marry Meryl—that anything else would absolutely be the mistake—and then, in the next minute, I realized I didn’t have enough information to know for certain. The only thing I did feel clear about—coming from my own personal experience of sitting absolutely still—was that Josh needed to do something, as opposed to just letting his life happen to him.
Berringer put his empty water glass down. “Maybe there’s not a mistake to even make,” he said.
I looked at him again, angry all of a sudden. Of course there was a mistake to make. There was always a mistake. I lived my whole life in the fear of making it. “Wasn’t there one for you?” I said.
But as soon as the words were out, I was sorry, because I realized how cruel they sounded. And I knew they were really not directed at him at all, but more at myself. Or at Josh. Or someone else who didn’t want to hear me.
“Berringer,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m just getting frustrated because I can’t get a handle on this whole thing. But I didn’t mean that. I really didn’t.”
“Yes, you did, but that’s okay,” he said. He was looking at me now, but it was like he didn’t see me.
Then he stood up. “Wait, you’re going to leave over it?” I said. “I don’t want you to leave over it.”
He bent down and kissed me on the forehead, then bent even lower and I thought he was going to kiss me again, really kiss me—on my lips, my bottom lip—but he didn’t. He just looked at me for a second.
“I’m not leaving over that,” he said.
Then he was gone.
It was probably in large part because this wedding weekend was off to a lousy start that, after Berringer left, I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the superstitious stuff surrounding weddings that I had been reading in planning Josh’s toast: all these crazy dangers people used to face if they broke their commitment to marry someone, if they decided to do something else instead.
At one point people believed that if you were engaged more than one time, you were setting yourself up for damnation. Potential seventeenth-century grooms-to-be were so scared of this fate that they would look for certain signs before going ahead and proposing. In the days leading up to the proposal, seeing a monk on the street or a pregnant woman would predict a bad union. Seeing a pigeon apparently foreshadowed good things to come. These were rules, hard and fast, and people stuck to them. They gave you concrete ways to make decisions about whom to spend your life with. More concrete ways than how you felt or how you didn’t feel at any given time.
Once you were engaged back then, that was as good as being married. If you broke your word on that—if you tried to get out of the engagement—that was going to lead you down a painful road. It was just as bad as divorce. It was sometimes considered worse.
What about now? Today? Did breaking off a commitment hold just as much terror? Even if society didn’t condemn you in quite the same way as it used to, would you end up in a worse position than if—in spite of your doubts—you stuck to your original plan?
I started walking back up the stairs slowly. Tomorrow was the rehearsal dinner. Less than forty-eight hours from now, the wedding was going to happen. Less than seventy-two hours from now, this would all be over. Meryl and Josh would be on their way to Hawaii and then back to Los Angeles, Berringer would be back in San Francisco, and I would be back in Rhode Island. That would be the end of all of this. No damnation for anyone.
So why then did I skip the entrance to my own bedroom? Why did I keep on walking, right into Josh’s? I kept the door slightly ajar behind me, sliding slowly down to the floor by the closet. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that he was still lying on top of the covers, his arms over his eyes. I could see that he was now awake. I picked my words very carefully, knowing as I did that he would listen. Even if he didn’t want to. He would listen to me.
“See, the thing is, Josh,” I said. “I know why you told me about Elizabeth.”