Chapter 6
Jack hired a wedding planner, telling Emily that she should relax.
“Do the fun parts. Choose the flowers and music.” Yet he couldn’t quite relinquish control to the planner and kept presenting Emily with new possibilities.
Near the castle that would be their venue was a hotel built into the ramparts of a medieval wall surrounding a nearby village.
Wouldn’t that be great for guests? He’d book the entire hotel.
Since the castle’s vineyard produced wine, a wine tasting for their guests the day before the wedding was in order.
He would arrange it. Emily was blown away by his attention to detail.
Black truffles would be in season, so he wanted to structure the menu around them.
Truffle mousseline served on Parmesan crisps as hors d’oeuvres, followed by truffle risotto, then quail braised in wine and festooned with shaved truffles.
“Will there be truffle dessert, too?” she teased.
They were having coffee in bed in his apartment in New York’s Financial District.
His apartment was so large that when she’d go to another part of it, she would forget her purpose along the way.
She lost books, her keys. It was an incredible space but felt like the architectural expression of PTSD, where things vanished like bad memories.
“Maybe we should serve truffle ice cream, or truffle crème brǔlée.”
His expression tightened. “I’m working hard here, Em.”
She was taken aback by his sudden displeasure. “But you don’t have to.”
“I’m doing this for you.”
She guessed what the problem was, and then his irritation moved her, because it was, at its core, concern: a dedication to making everything perfect.
He wanted everyone to be pleased. Impressed.
No one else had tried so hard to make her happy.
“It was a bad joke.” She caressed his cheek.
“Who’s this really for? You know it’s not for me. We can get married at city hall.”
“But you deserve the best.”
“I am getting the best. You are the best.”
His expression softened.
She said, “This is about your parents.”
“I want them to love you.”
“A splashy wedding won’t make them love me.”
“It would help.”
“It’s just one day.” Well, three, if you counted the wine tasting the day before and a champagne brunch the day following. “Even if they’re happy for the wedding, when it’s over, they’ll go right back to thinking I’m not good enough for their son.”
He turned to kiss her palm. His smile grew. He slid the strap of her camisole down her shoulder. “You’re the only one for me.”
“Say you’re sorry you got mad at me for no reason.”
“So sorry.” He pulled down her pajama bottoms and it felt good to show how much she wanted him. It made her feel powerful to have changed his annoyance—an understandable one—into mutual understanding.
Afterward, he said, “Tell me about the dress.”
“That’s bad luck.”
“Tell me without telling me.”
Emily’s mother had refused to come to Boston, even though Jack had booked an appointment at the most exclusive bridal shop in Back Bay.
He had envisioned her mother helping choose the perfect dress, then the two of them having mimosas at brunch.
“That kind of thing is not for me,” her mother said over the phone.
“But it would be nice,” said Emily.
“For who? You want me to get into a flying tin can and come all the way to La-La Land to help you pick a dress? No thank you.”
“La-La Land means Los Angeles.”
“I don’t need you telling me what things mean. You won’t like the dresses I like. It’s your wedding. Choose your own dress.”
Emily asked Florencia to come to the appointment instead.
Emily wasn’t sure what was worse, her mother’s refusal or that her mother had been right not to come.
The sting of both was almost forgotten in her relief to be unburdened by her mother’s presence.
Florencia gasped dramatically and insisted on seeing the veil. Why had Emily even asked her mother?
“Florencia said I looked like Grace Kelly,” Emily told Jack.
“You do,” he said in wonder. “Princess Grace. Don’t marry a prince in Monaco, Em.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t marry anybody but me.”
The reception was large, of course, filled with Jack’s extended family and his parents’ connections, peppered with Emily’s friends from high school and college.
Emily was supposed to say hello to everyone individually but was starving.
She felt as hollow as an empty vase. She decided to do the bridal duties after dinner.
French burbled in the background as servers brought each plate, the food artfully arranged.
After dinner—during which Jack’s mother made a chilly toast that dwelled on Emily’s humble origins in Ohio while forgetting the basic particulars (“She grew up in the middle of nowhere in Iowa”) and showcased Emily’s academic success in order to dismiss it (“Of course her greatest accomplishment was stealing my son’s heart”)—Jack kissed Emily’s cheek.
Then the clinking of spoons against crystal invited him to kiss her deeply on the mouth.
He murmured in her ear that he needed to make his rounds. Maybe she should do hers?
She agreed, and without meaning it to be a lie, slipped instead out of the castle and onto the grounds.
She was alone except for a crew setting the dance floor into place on the grass.
Insects sizzled loudly in the plum dusk.
Emily expected to see fireflies but there were none.
They weren’t common in France. It surprised her that a country that appeared to have everything desirable could lack what she had always had.
Ohio summers were full of fireflies. She missed them: their intermittent light, their unmappable movements, their ignorance; they didn’t know that humans watched them, or found them pretty, nor did they care.
Her bare shoulders felt cold. A violinist tuned his instrument.
Another joined him. She reached into her pocket and touched the rigid paper there.
She remembered its printed words, its image.
She would have taken it out and looked at it in the fading light, but was glad that she didn’t, because someone said her name, the voice immediately recognizable.
It was as if, by thinking of her, Emily had conjured Gen Hall.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” Gen’s large eyes were darker than usual under the deepening sky.
She bit her lip in an apologetic grimace and rubbed the back of her neck.
Her light brown hair had been cut since Emily saw her last. If it hadn’t been tied back into a short ponytail, it would have barely brushed the shoulders of Gen’s rumpled suit.
She wore sneakers. Her white shirt was unbuttoned low.
This was before Gen became famous, her careless look iconic.
“You’re not speaking, Emily. Are you mad I came? You invited me.”
“I didn’t think—”
“Oh, I know, me neither. But I wanted to be here for you. Your big day.”
“I didn’t see you earlier. Not at the wedding. The dinner.” Emily remembered—rapidly, horribly—every public moment of the procession, the vows, Jack’s possessive kiss.
Gen widened her eyes in what could have passed for amusement but had a harder quality. “You have a lot of guests. I’m easy to miss.”
A woman emerged from the glowing lantern of the castle and picked her way in heels toward them across the gravel.
The violins played the opening melody of a piece that was familiar and should have been easy to name.
Gen smiled at the approaching woman, whose soft features and slim mouth were happy, her black eyes shining.
Gen introduced her as Maiko, her girlfriend.
Maiko slid an arm around Gen’s waist, inside Gen’s suit jacket, and offered the other hand to Emily.
Maiko’s hand was warm, which let Emily know that her own was freezing.
Maiko’s black hair was buzzed close to the head in a way that made her beauty inevitable, incontrovertibly real, as though Emily were made of plastic: the painted bride topper on the wedding cake.
“I came because I wanted to wish you well,” Gen told Emily.
“Congratulations!” Maiko said.
To Emily, Gen said, “Don’t you wish me well, too?”
Maiko nudged Gen. “Of course she does.”
What had Emily expected when she had mailed the invitation?
At the time, she had been hopeful, and had thought that she wanted to revive their friendship.
Now she recognized her self-deceit. She and Gen had never really been friends.
They had wanted each other too much. Emily loved Jack, but it wasn’t as simple as what she had had with Gen, which felt long ago yet fresh at the same time: Gen’s mouth, her accurate hands, the way her mind challenged Emily’s, the easy collaboration of their conversation.
And being with Jack wasn’t as complicated as it had been to love Gen.
Emily knew—she couldn’t forget—that she had hurt Gen the night Emily’s father had taken them to dinner, that summer after graduating from high school.
Emily’s father had been cruel to Gen. Emily had let him.
She hadn’t known, before then, how useless apology could be.
She hadn’t known how useless forgiveness could be, because Gen did forgive her, or had said that she did.
And it seemed that she had, until Gen visited her at college.
Gen spent one night in Emily’s dorm room, their bodies crammed eagerly against each other in the narrow bed. Then Gen packed her things and left.
Standing on the gravel, the castle behind her, Maiko at her side, Gen waited for an answer to a question Emily had almost forgotten. Did she wish Gen well? “You know that I do,” Emily said, and it was achingly true.
Late morning light varnished the interior of the castle’s carriage house. Emily stood at the window, studying the far-off collection of antique biplanes parked near the vineyard.
Jack stirred in the bed, finally awake. He reached to the floor for Emily’s wedding dress and frowned when something unseen crackled between his fingers, an object hidden amid the white folds.
Eyes blurry from sleep, he searched through the tulle and silk to find what had made that sound.
He reached into the dress’s pocket. “What’s this doing here? ”
“It’s nothing,” Emily said, and took the packet of marigold seeds from him.