The Wedding Sisters Page 7

  “Jo … wait…,” he said, pulling back, sitting up.

  She kissed him again, pulling off her T-shirt. She knew she had great breasts, perfect breasts.

  He touched them longingly and gave a pained sigh. “You’re killing me, Becker,” he said.

  “Don’t talk.” She straddled him. He was hard. How long had it been since she’d had a guy inside her? Not since freshman year, spring break. A party, someone she knew from Yardley. She was drunk, she was missing Caroline, who was with Derek Ebernoff at that point. It was an utterly forgettable encounter.

  She tugged off her underwear. Toby flipped her over, so she was on her back. He touched her between her legs. His hands felt big—different. He went down on her, and his stubble was an odd sensation. But he knew what he was doing, and the pleasure was such a staggering contrast to the tension and pain she was in, she gasped.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He moved on top of her. “Are you drunk?” he asked.

  “No. Are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He moved inside her, and it felt good and so alien that she could hardly think to miss the softness of Caroline’s flesh. This was something else entirely. No thoughts, no tears, no pain … just a satisfying hum deep in that gnawing, greedy part of herself.

  He cried out when he came, and afterwards he held her close, his lips pressed to her damp forehead.

  “Toby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re a good friend,” she said.

  Maybe she should be satisfied with that. Maybe friendship was more important than love. You couldn’t trust love. Love hurt.

  seven

  “Two weddings,” said Hugh.

  Meryl climbed into bed next to him, feeling giddy as a schoolgirl.

  “I know! Oh, Hugh, we’re so blessed. Both our girls marrying wonderful men. They are going to have incredible lives. They’ll have everything they ever wanted.”

  “Two weddings,” Hugh repeated.

  “We’ll manage. Come on—don’t worry about that tonight. Aren’t you happy?”

  Hugh put down the student papers he had been reading on the nightstand and turned to her. “Of course I’m happy. But Meryl, we now have two weddings to pay for. Two expensive weddings. Why does Amy have to get married so soon? If she had a yearlong engagement, we could at least catch our breath.”

  Amy wanted to get married in May—the month before Meg’s wedding. Meryl did see that as a problem—but not for the same reasons as Hugh. It was a new level of one-upmanship.

  “I’ll try to talk to her about it.”

  Relieved, Hugh turned off his bedside light. He kissed Meryl on the cheek and rolled over.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd,” Meryl said slowly, “that Stowe’s father couldn’t make it tonight? I mean, we’re going to be family. Do you think they think Meg isn’t good enough? That we’re not good enough?”

  “No, I think they’re just busy people. And I think you need to manage your expectations for what our relationship is going to be with them.”

  Meryl sighed. Hugh could note every social more and protocol of the characters in a Henry James or Louisa May Alcott novel, but apparently couldn’t recognize the breach of one in his own life. “And the Campions are not the ones who should be throwing the engagement party. That’s a prerogative of the bride’s parents.”

  “Says who?”

  “Emily Post!” Meryl said, reaching for her own bedside light, feeling around in the dark for the dangling metal chain to turn it on. She waved the book at Hugh.

  “What is that? I can’t see without my glasses,” he said.

  “Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Meryl. What do you need that for?”

  “To do things right. Remember what a mess it was when we were going to get married? My parents not talking to us? Your parents balking at the idea of helping us throw a wedding? Eloping at the last minute? I don’t want that to happen to our daughters, Hugh. We’re going to give Meg and Amy perfect weddings.”

  “I’m a little surprised that with all their billions, the Campions haven’t offered to pay for Meg’s wedding.”

  “Actually,” said Meryl, “they did.”

  Hugh smiled. “Well, why didn’t you say so? That’s great news.”

  “No! It’s not. Hugh, if they pay for it, they call all the shots. Tippy wants to put a wedding planner in charge, have it at their country club—basically treat this like just another event to get done on their checklist. But this is special to me. To us—me and Meg. I don’t want anyone taking that away from us. This experience is priceless, Hugh.”

  Silence settled between them.

  “Meryl, you have to be realistic. The way Meg and Stowe are talking—the way his parents are thinking—this wedding is going to be beyond our means. And now Amy’s engaged—”

  “We’ll find a way.”

  “I don’t agree with you, Meryl. Not one bit. If the Campions want to contribute to the wedding, let them. We have to be practical.”

  “Oh, now we have to be practical? You’re never practical! You live in a world of ideas, the life of the mind, the idea of a book that has consumed half your attention for our entire life but you’ve never finished. And when I try to encourage you to get the damn thing written, you tell me that I’m missing the point—that it’s the journey toward the end that matters, not the finished book. So don’t tell me now that I have to be practical.”

  Hugh sighed. “Fine. But maybe now’s the time to start thinking about working again full-time.”

  As if she hadn’t been looking.

  “Believe me, I have some calls out.”

  Silence.

  “Meryl, just be sure you’re doing this for the girls.”

  “Who else would I be doing it for?”

  “Like you said, we didn’t have a wedding—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Hugh. This isn’t for me. I know it’s not about me.” She paused. “But yes, in a way, it’s for all of us. For our family.”

  * * *

  Meryl couldn’t sleep. The conversation had settled into an uncomfortable place in her gut, along with too much food and wine.

  Hugh’s insinuation that these weddings were somehow more for her than for Meg and Amy—well, it stuck in her craw. She had no regrets about their own wedding: it had been bare bones, but it was completely romantic. Just the two of them. She wouldn’t necessarily have changed the way they got married. But she probably would have changed a few of the decisions she made leading up to it.

  She tossed and turned, finally giving up on sleep around eleven. She turned her phone back on and checked a weather app for the temperature outside. At fifty degrees, it was warmer now than it had been earlier in the night. Tomorrow would be beautiful.

  She wished it were morning already, so she didn’t have to struggle to quiet her mind. She figured she had two choices: she could have another glass of wine or two, or she could go for a walk. The wine was the simpler way to go; the walk, the healthier one.

  Meryl, thinking of the imminent dress shopping, opted for the exercise. She pulled on a pair of yoga pants and her sneakers.

  The apartment door opened silently but closed with a loud click. She waited a beat.

  In the daytime, she didn’t like to go outside without at least mascara and a touch of color on her cheeks. She often thought about Nora Ephron’s line that your just-woke-up face of your twenties is your all-day face of your forties. And at fifty-four, well … she felt bad about a lot more than her neck.

  But under the cover of night, in the crisp air of early fall and walking on the East River promenade, she felt free and she felt young.

  She loved this walk. It was the path she’d followed pushing the girls in their strollers. The place she’d come to read during the rare moments she could steal for herself. The bench she sat on the night her father had died, crying, looking at the winking lights of the bridge. She loved that
seagulls flocked to the waterside, and she loved that sometimes she smelled salt in the air. In the summer, if she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was a little girl again, back at the Jersey Shore, when her only worries were washing the sand off her feet before walking into her grandparents’ beachside condo and if the line at Sack O’ Subs would be too long. This was a shore before casinos, when there was nothing to do but take long strolls on the boardwalk and see a movie at the Ventnor theater. It wasn’t just that her life had been simpler, it was that Life with a capital L had been simpler.

  The East River did not bring her back to the shore that night. The air was dry, the only birds a few lone pigeons resting on the backs of benches and pecking along the ground.

  Ahead of her, a couple walked linked arm in arm. She felt a pang, thinking of Hugh back in the apartment, with no idea that she was out. She should have woken him up, said, Let’s take a walk together and revel in this night of good news—a turning point in their lives. But he didn’t share her unfettered joy. He was thinking practically, and she was being romantic. It was a disconcerting role reversal; she wished they had talked longer, had ended up in a better place. Maybe she would wake him when she got home. Maybe they could even have sex. She smiled to herself; that was certainly one way to celebrate the engagements.

  Meryl passed the northernmost part of Carl Schurz Park and followed the curve around the back of Gracie Mansion. The Federal-style house, painted pale yellow with green shutters, was the official home of the mayor of New York City—except during Michael Bloomberg’s twelve-year tenure, when he opted to live in his East Seventy-ninth Street town house instead.

  Meryl was suddenly parched. Too much wine. She would loop around to York Avenue and stop by the 7-Eleven to get a bottle of water.

  Jazz music filled the air as she got closer to Gracie Mansion. The backyard, obscured by tall fences, was lively with the sound of a party. She was in luck; Meryl ordinarily wouldn’t cross through the park at night, but she knew that if the mayor was entertaining, the walkway to Eighty-eighth Street would have a heavy police presence. She could cut easily through the park to the convenience store on York.

  Sure enough, a police car was parked on the grass behind the Gracie. Meryl felt like an interloper even though she was on public grounds. On East End, drivers in town cars were idling, waiting for party guests. She pulled up the hood on her Yardley fleece, suddenly eager to get back to the safety and privacy of her warm bed.

  But first, water. She walked briskly to York and made a left for the 7-Eleven.

  The convenience store was as crowded as if it were the middle of the afternoon. She glanced at the hot dogs on the rotating metal trays. No, Meryl. She kept walking to the refrigerated water near the back.

  “Meryl Kleinman?”

  She turned automatically at the sound of her maiden name. “Scott?”

  So this was what happened when you walked out of your apartment in the middle of the night; you ran into someone you hadn’t seen in twenty years—while wearing a fleece hoodie and no makeup. A very good-looking someone. A someone who had made an appearance in more than one postmarital fantasy.

  Scott Sobel.

  What was he doing in her 7-Eleven?

  “Hey!” He leaned in for the awkward greeting hug. “This is crazy! Do you live around here?”

  He was dressed in an impeccable suit, clearly coming from or on his way to an event. She was wandering around in yoga pants and tennis shoes. It was safe to assume she lived in the neighborhood.

  “Yes—right on Eighty-fourth. What are you doing here?”

  “A party at Gracie Mansion. A colleague of mine is making a documentary about it.”

  “Oh … wow. For TV?” Scott was a prolific producer of reality television, most of which chronicled the lives of the newly rich and the more newly famous. She’d watched his first show out of sheer curiosity because it had his name on it, and became shamefully addicted.

  A woman with long honey blond hair and luxurious houndstooth coat approached them, holding two coffees. She handed one to Scott.

  “Camille, this is Meryl Kleinman, Meryl, Camille McGuiness.”

  “It’s Becker now, actually. Meryl Becker.” She shook the woman’s hand, painfully aware that she had left her wedding ring on her nightstand.

  “Meryl was just asking if your doc is for TV.”

  “We’re hoping to get theater distribution,” Camille said. “At least in New York and L.A.” She had a clipped British accent. Meryl guessed she was in her midthirties. When Meryl had been in her midthirties, she had been doing what? Pretty much what she was doing now: freelance PR, married to Hugh, raising the girls.

  “So what are you up to these days?”

  “I work in book publishing. Freelance publicity.”

  “Of course! I should have known. Camille, this girl always had her face in a book. It could be the most perfect beach day, and all the other kids would be running to the ocean or playing horseshoes or volleyball, and Meryl was having none of it.” He grinned playfully.

  Meryl was tempted to say that she had just been thinking about those summers at the Jersey Shore—but she worried it would sound sad. Or worse, imply that she thought about him, which she did. But only in the way of any woman remembering one of her first crushes. She had been fifteen. He was a seventeen-year-old lifeguard at the beach—as remote as a movie star. Until one night—a night that burned into her mind as only events from your adolescence can—when she ran into him at her friend’s older brother’s house party just a few blocks away from her grandparents’ condo.

  Scott took her for a walk on the boardwalk that night. He kissed her in the darkness, leaning against the metal rail, against the backdrop of the rushing ocean and the thick, humid salt air.

  It was the greatest moment of her life up until that point. In some ways, still one of her life’s great moments.

  The next day at the beach, he acted like he barely knew her name. And the summer came to a quick and anticlimactic end. But Scott knew enough people in the periphery of Meryl’s social circle in high school and later in college that over the years she would occasionally run into him at a party. But that hadn’t happened in decades.

  “Crazy. Weren’t we just kids on that beach? Time flies, right?”

  She nodded, thinking that he hadn’t changed a bit. He was still the sun-kissed beach boy, object of her urgent, youthful desire. A few gray hairs and crow’s-feet couldn’t compete with that memory.

  Camille shifted impatiently. “We should get going,” she said.

  Scott nodded. “So listen, I’m in New York for a few weeks, getting a show off the ground. We should grab coffee.”

  He pulled out his phone. Meryl realized he was waiting for her phone number. She recited it, feeling vaguely uncomfortable giving out her number to a man. But he was just an old childhood friend. Well, “friend” might be overstating it. But if friend was overstating it, then it was certainly nothing more than that and therefore harmless.

  Meryl arrived back at her apartment more restless than when she’d left a half hour earlier. And she forgot all about waking up Hugh.

  eight

  “D.C. is finally starting to feel like home,” Meg told Stowe.

  It was a strange thought to have walking through the white corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building. But she realized, following Stowe to his father’s office, that it was true. Of course, she would never admit this to her mother. She knew Meryl still had a fantasy that Meg would somehow end up back in New York, finding a way to parlay her journalism career into a job at The New York Times or even CNN’s New York office. There had been times when Meg thought along those lines herself. But that was before Stowe.

  “My father just said the same thing.”

  Reed was in D.C. only a few times a month, but today was one of those times. There was a vote on the floor, and so it was a quick stopover in Washington before heading back to Pennsylvania.

  Along the edge of t
he rotunda, a CNN reporter was conducting an interview. Meg felt an itch to get to work, but Stowe wanted her to stop by Reed’s office to meet his new communications director, a woman named Hunter Cross.

  “Knock knock,” Stowe said, opening the door Reed’s office.

  “Kids, come in,” Reed said, standing behind his desk and waving them forward.

  Perched in the seat in front of him was a striking woman with shoulder-length auburn hair wearing a chic tweed dress. She stood to greet them, her smile as bright as a beauty pageant contestant’s. But her eyes, falling on Meg, were cool and appraising.

  “Meet Hunter Cross, my new director of communications,” said Reed, beaming.

  “Hi, Stowe—good to see you again,” Hunter said.

  Again? When had Stowe met this woman before?

  “This is my fiancée, Meg Becker,” Stowe said, either ignoring Meg’s quizzical look or missing it entirely.

  “Ah, the journalist,” said Hunter. The phone in her hand buzzed. She glanced down, frowning. Then she turned to Reed. “Stackhouse has a Web site live. Presidential exploratory.”

  “What?” Meg said, reaching into her bag to find her own phone. Senator Leland Stackhouse had promised her an exclusive if he was going to announce a bid for the Democratic nomination. Heart pounding, she quickly scrolled through her e-mails. Nothing.

  “No tip-off for you?” Stowe said.

  Meg looked at him, shaking her head. She loved that he understood her work. Still, they tried not to talk politics too much. While they weren’t so diametrically opposite as, say, Mary Matalin and James Carville, they did have their differences. And of course, Reed and Tippy considered her a raging liberal.

  “Don’t feel bad,” said Hunter. “I’m sure his people are working with their contacts inside CNN. It’s very hard to break into that circle.”

  Meg looked at her, incredulous. “I have my own relationship with the senator. I’m sure this was an oversight.”

  Hunter gave her a smug grin. “Of course it was.”