CHAPTER 2 #9
His face was bathed in the light reflected off skin care products.
“Novels. Novels then and novels now. I would edit collections of short stories when my authors turned collections of short stories in, and later, when memoirs became a thing, I edited those. Collections of essays, all of that. But all the while I tapped them ever so gently in the direction of novels because that’s what I loved. That’s what I was good at.”
“Writing?”
“Reading.” He shook his head. “I wish you could have seen this bookstore.”
“I was seventeen in 1988.”
“That’s why your mother and I should have stayed married. It would have been a stretch, I realize that, but I would have shown you New York before it was devoured by skin care emporiums and nail salons.”
I had more questions than I knew words to ask, but I decided to start with the obvious one. “Tell me more about the Hotallings.”
“Oh, them.” Eddie stared at a pyramid of little white tubs of grapefruit facial scrub, as if he could will them into being books. “They’re my best friends. They’ve always been there for me. They have also been a great source of pain. I think that pretty much covers it.”
We walked again. Eddie held on to the filter of his cigarette until we passed a trash can. I added in the place card. “Let’s go to the Plaza and have a drink,” he said. “Do you want to?”
I’d already had more to drink than I usually have over the course of a month, but I told myself the walking helped.
Eddie said we were going to go to the Oak Bar, but when we arrived, the hotel was in the full swing of celebration and the celebration called to us.
Two doormen pulled open the heavy glass doors fitted in brass and welcomed us in.
“They’re expecting us,” Eddie said, sotto voce.
I scanned the milling crowd, men in tuxedos, women in cocktail dresses, long dresses. “Maybe we should find some other hotel,” I said. “We could try the Sherry-Netherland.”
He took my arm. “Act natural.”
The wedding we walked into was long over, as was the dinner that followed.
By the time we arrived, the cake had been cut, and the layered white slices trimmed in ganache rosebuds were lined across a long table like the sugared shingles for a candy house.
Some of the guests had taken a slice back to their table, but most of them were dancing.
Whoever had gotten married at the Plaza had hired an entire orchestra for dancing, as well as a structural engineer to erect the floral arrangements, as the flowers spiked to extraordinary heights before spreading out in lacy canopies.
Were the sprinkler system tripped, we could all seek refuge beneath the stephanotis.
This was the magic hour, when the music played at a humane decibel and the parents and uncles and aunts were dancing, grandparents were dancing, a smattering of elderly among the glorious youth.
Countless young women in sherbet-colored slip dresses leaned against the broad chests of so many handsome men, some of them in white dinner jackets, others in tuxedos of midnight blue.
“Look!” Eddie whispered.
And sure enough, the bride danced past us—either in the arms of her father or the arms of her much older husband, it was impossible to know—her bare shoulders emitting light, her long black hair loosely configured and pinned with orange blossoms, the white silk of her hem dusting the impeccable floor.
She smiled at the man she danced with, husband or father, with so much love it would have been enough to sustain him for the rest of his life.
In another minute the crowd had shifted and she was gone again.
I thought of my seatmate, the lepidopterist, and how he must have felt in the jungles of Costa Rica, having witnessed an insect so impossibly beautiful and rare, a once-in-a-lifetime sighting.
“Come on,” Eddie said, and then he was holding me in his arms as we joined in that swirling river of life, every body in sway to the time of music, everyone glad to have been asked to bear witness to such happiness.
The bridesmaids and groomsmen, siblings and cousins, friends from work and from school, each one abloom with radiant life.
They loved the bride and the groom. They rejoiced in their happiness.
They hoped to find such happiness themselves one day, or maybe they already had: she was there in his arms, he was there in her arms. Despite all the fires in the world, on this night, in this room, they believed the whole thing might work.
“It’s the perfect antidote to a fiftieth wedding anniversary dinner,” I said to Eddie. “I hope every single couple at the Hotallings’ party found a wedding to crash on their way home.”
“A requirement,” Eddie said.
“Look, look, there she is again.” We both stopped dancing, and the people around us stopped as well, as if the moon had split the clouds to bathe us in light. Twice we had seen her. We couldn’t believe our good fortune.
We stayed on the floor for a few more songs. Eddie knew all the words, and he sang them quietly so only I would hear. “People stop and stare, they don’t bother me, for there’s nowhere else on earth that I would rather be.”
“Who?” I asked.
“My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe, 1956. In the recitation of Broadway musical lyrics I cannot be beaten.”
Jonathan didn’t like to dance, and Eddie was a wonderful dancer.
After we stopped, Eddie set out to find champagne.
I was at the dessert table picking up a slice of cake and two forks when a young woman draped in salmon-colored satin, one of the glorious bridesmaids, came up to me.
“Mrs. Fuller?” she said. “Oh my god, I thought that was you! Oh, you look so beautiful!”
Repair people and students and former students were the only people who called me Mrs. Fuller, and since I didn’t remember her fixing my roof, she must have been in my English class.
So many bright young women had passed through my teaching life that I dreaded running into them.
They receded so quickly after graduation, replaced by the fall’s fresh crop.
I was smiling stupidly as Eddie returned with the champagne.
He put the glasses down on a small table and I put down the cake.
“Ed Triplett,” he said, holding out his hand to her.
“Kathy Schultenover,” she said, taking his hand. “Oh my gosh, are you Mrs. Fuller’s husband?”
“I’m Daphne’s father,” he said, as if this were a common mistake.
“Father!” she said. “Oh, I love that. You brought your father!”
The father-husband business tripped me up, and as a result I was both slow and stupid in my response. “What a beautiful wedding.”
“Right? We’re having the best time. I think everyone’s having the best, best time, and it’s so wonderful that you came, both of you.
Livi must be over the moon. And look, I’m engaged!
” She raised her delicate hand, the twinkling stone a not insignificant burden.
“I’m going to invite you to our wedding.
Would you come, both of you? You should come, Mr. Triplett. ”
“That’s a wonderful invitation, but I won’t hold you to it,” Eddie said.
Then, without warning, Kathy Schultenover put her arms around me and pressed her head against my neck. “I’m a tiny bit drunk,” she said, “but I love you. You were my favorite teacher. I read Madame Bovary because of you.”
I kissed the top of her head and said she might have been my favorite student. When she stepped away, there were tears caught in the mascara of her lashes. Then a young man appeared out of the mass of dancers and took her in his arms. She waved to us as they danced away.
Eddie shook his head. “I wouldn’t have missed that for anything.”
“The bride was my student?”
“It’s hard for me to imagine forgetting a girl like that.”
I shook my head. “There were so many of them.”
“Did you remember Kathy Schultenover?”
“I remember the name Schultenover, but I don’t remember what year she graduated or what she read for her senior thesis.” I shook my head. “You remember all the lyrics to musicals and I can’t remember my own students. I’m terrible.”
“The songs stay the same while the people cycle through,” Eddie said. “It’s madness to think you could remember all of them.”
“I remember you,” I said.
“Well, see, that’s plenty.”
“I love teaching,” I said, staring out at the brightly colored tide of dancing youth.
“There aren’t many schools left where you can assign Madame Bovary to an eleventh grader and she’ll come back after Christmas break to tell you she read A Sentimental Education for fun.
When they read David Copperfield, they read the whole thing.
They read The Return of the Native. The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester. Moby-Dick!”
“I hate to tell you, but everyone read Moby-Dick when I was in high school, and I didn’t go to any fancy private girls’ school on the Upper East Side.”
“Times change. Soon no one will believe the wonders I’ve seen, smart kids reading big books and writing papers without AI.”
“I don’t believe they write their own papers,” Eddie said.
“Jonathan wants me to retire, but I won’t do it, not as long as girls get drunk at weddings and talk about Madame Bovary.”
“You’re fifty-three,” he said. “You’re too young to retire. For heaven’s sake, I’m too young to retire.”
We took up our cake and champagne and walked the room’s perimeter until we found a velvet banquette tucked in the far back corner, our own wedding island. There we settled in.
“This cake is better than the last cake,” I said. Eddie said he hadn’t eaten any of the last cake, and I said in that case he would have to take my word.
“I take your word on everything,” he said.
The champagne was better at the Plaza, too, but there was no need to harp on it.