London Is the Best City in America

Then she looked back at Josh, her smile all gone, her eyes looking all worried. And I wondered, again, what it was she knew.

But Josh just shook his head. “Don’t do it,” Josh said.

“Don’t do what?” I asked.

He kept shaking his head, his eyes still down. But Meryl was facing me again. “Look, I know Josh wanted me to wait to tell you,” she said. “But I can’t. I can’t look at you and wait. I can’t stand you not knowing when I know you’d really want to know. Oh, I’m making it worse. I should just say it already, shouldn’t I? I know I should.”

I looked back and forth between them. The way this was going down, I had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t possible—was it?—that he had told Meryl about Elizabeth already. It couldn’t be. I was no more than five minutes behind him coming up here. You couldn’t fit an explanation into that time even if you wanted to try to fit one in. There would be more questions than answers. There would be a need for significantly more time.

And then Meryl took a deep breath and started to talk.

“I ran into Matt today,” she said.

I knew I must have heard wrong. I was so sure of it that I just kept looking at her, not saying anything.

She nodded her head. “A few hours ago,” she said.

“My Matt?”

“Your Matt.”

I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t even begin, really, to get a handle on what that might have meant. I just kept envisioning scenes in my head: the two of them walking down that same stretch of Fifth Avenue near Union Square, or hitting the same street corner near Grand Central Terminal, Matt leaving the architecture firm—where he’d started putting in Saturday hours—to have a cigarette, Meryl on her way out here. Or maybe they had been near our ol

d West Village apartment. Still Matt’s West Village apartment. Two-eighty-five West Street. A small, dilapidated townhouse in between two gentrified townhouses. Owned by one person each. One family each sharing the space we shared with nine other apartments.

I felt it so strongly, the smell of that hallway: its inevitable blend of cherry alcohol and dried fish. We’d stayed up all night the night we moved in, hopelessly lighting scented candles to cancel out the smell, Matt painting a miniature solar system on our bedroom ceiling—Orion’s belt in one far corner, Vega the strongest star in a summer sky in the other. An Olympic sprint runner eventually moved upstairs. He would do a thousand jumping jacks, nightly, right above our heads. Above those stars. It became a little like living in an earthquake.

“Come sit down for a minute,” Josh said now, moving down on the bed farther, making room for three of me.

Meryl motioned to the bed too. “Go sit,” she said.

And I could see from the way they were both looking at me, I must have been doing something scary. By the way Meryl was reaching for me, I must have been walking backward. I was walking backward without even realizing it—right out the door.

“Just sit down on the bed for one minute, babe,” Meryl said. “I’ll explain everything.”

But before she could even start, I realized how much I didn’t want to hear. If she saw him today—if she saw Matt—he was okay. He was walking somewhere, where he would have to be okay to walk. Whatever else she wanted to tell me about the run-in—if she wanted to tell me he was in love with someone or moving to Alaska or that he hated me—I couldn’t hear it.

“You know what? Just give me a second, first. Okay? Before you tell me anything else, I really have to go to the bathroom first. I already told you guys that. I really have to go.”

And then, as fast as I’ve ever moved in my life, I raced toward the bathroom, mine and Josh’s, and shut the door tightly behind me. Is there any way to explain this moment without it seeming dramatic? I was seeing stars. I was seeing great white blocks in front of my eyes. I was seeing nothing.

I shut the door tightly, curling my knees to my chest, my back tight against the frame. I reached up to lock it. Then I saw it, gently squeezed into the far corner. My bag of tapes. The bright blue drawstring tied, like a heart, on the top, keeping it all in: everything I had or, more accurately, hadn’t managed to accomplish in three years away. What had Matt been doing over these three years? Were there things in his life—designs or relationships or some combination of both—that he couldn’t manage to finish either? That he couldn’t even really start?

I turned around and reached under the sink—deep back into the cabinet, hidden beneath an old rag—for my small cigarette stash, four years old now. Almost five. I didn’t care. I knew they were still there. I knew they were still there precisely for a moment like this.

I found the pack and the matches and lit one up and took a really long drag and almost threw it up. But I smoked it. I smoked it, and felt better and felt worse and got ready to light another one.

Before I did, though, I said a small, silent prayer of gratitude that tonight was going to end. Not gracefully, maybe, but eventually. Because I wasn’t coming out of this bathroom, for anything, until I really believed that this was true.

part three

The only rehearsal dinner I had gone to in Rhode Island was for Diane #1’s only son, Brian, who was—at the time—on his fourth wedding, and not yet thirty. I suspected I had procured the invitation because there were only so many people in town who weren’t friends with one of the first three brides.

I didn’t care why I was invited, though. I was glad to be there. They had made it a drum-party rehearsal dinner because Diane had read somewhere that rehearsal dinners used to be very noisy affairs—that this was a luck thing. That, in fact, parties were originally held on the eve of the wedding day in order to chase away all the evil spirits that wanted to descend upon a couple and effectively jinx any hope they had of starting a good life together. The idea was for the rehearsal dinner to be very loud and rowdy: the more noise, the better. Evil spirits, apparently, were scared off by that type of chaos. Diane’s husband, Brian senior, spent most of the night banging on the makeshift Caribbean drum for dear life. “We’re not taking any chances,” Diane said, shaking her head. “We can’t afford to do another, if this one goes south.”

Unfortunately for Josh and Meryl, if noise at the rehearsal dinner was a true indicator of future happiness, they were off to a questionable start at best. There were no drums, makeshift or otherwise, no noisemakers, not much noise to speak of, in fact, at all.

This was what they did have: a lone flutist playing quietly in the corner, white helium balloons covering the top of the tent, and huge bowls everywhere full of floating ivory lilies.