The Light of Paris(44)
“I know it’s difficult.” But I imagined it was a lot easier when you married the right person in the first place.
“I’m sure you’ll work things out,” she said, and the smile on her face went smooth and plastic, and the brief hope I’d held flickered and then died. There was going to be no Hollywood ending where we embraced each other and cried while an emotionally manipulative song played in the background. Things are never like that in real life. At least not in mine.
And maybe Phillip and I would work things out. Maybe I did belong there after all.
Because people in my family didn’t get divorced. My parents’ marriage hadn’t been any great love story, but they had stuck it out together. I couldn’t think of anyone who had gotten divorced. The apocryphal stories I had heard always involved some dramatic circumstance—a mistress, a secret bank account in the Cayman Islands, a gambling addiction, alcoholism. No one else gets to upend their entire life just because they are unhappy. Why should I?
Anyway, I didn’t know where I would go if I left. It would be better, I thought, to stay with him, to have him leave the bathroom scale pointedly in the middle of the floor when I let myself slip, to continue to wear the disguise of the perfect society wife I had put on to impress him. It would be better than whatever lonely uncertainty lay out there.
After all, it had been my choice to marry him. It had been my choice even though my reasons weren’t the best: because I was tired of being lonely, because I wanted to please my parents, because life looked like a gigantic game of musical chairs and I was sure the music would stop at any moment and everyone would see I didn’t have a partner.
And, at least at the beginning, I had seen so many other advantages to marrying Phillip. For instance, I had always wanted a sister. So when Phillip told me he had two sisters, I was absolutely over the moon. Here it was. Here was my family. Here were my sisters. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Phillip’s sisters were cool-weather versions of the women I knew in Magnolia, the same frozen hair, in black instead of blond, the same sleeveless shift dresses, in muted solid colors, not summer prints, and they knew I was not one of them.
There was a bond among the three Spencer siblings that felt like a force field; whenever I tried to approach it, I was thrown back. They followed their mother’s example in doting on Phillip to distraction, and there was a sibling connection that I, as an only child, would never understand; the three of them were best friends, so close it would have been impossible to separate them. At the engagement party with Phillip’s family (there were two of everything except the wedding, which meant many, many presents and many, many thank-you notes), a sister clung to each of his arms, accepting the congratulations on my behalf, laughing with the relatives and friends I should have been meeting, basking in the warmth of the family I knew, with growing certainty, I would never fully be able to join. For my part, I spent the majority of that party, ostensibly held in my honor, hiding from Phillip’s mother, drinking far too much red wine, and making sweet, sweet love to a garlicky plate of hummus. But I got to keep all the presents, so I guess I won?
After the wedding, when the photographer’s proofs arrived, there was a whole series of Phillip and his sisters cuddled together in an armchair, laughing, a matched set of dark-haired beauty. Somehow, his sisters’ dresses had remained perfectly unwrinkled. Personally, I had been so terrified of crushing my own dress that from the moment I had put it on, I had refused to sit down, and I had nearly fainted during the receiving line from keeping my knees locked for such a long time.
“When did you take these?” I asked him when we looked at the pictures, running my finger along the edge of the page, as though I could join them by touch.
Phillip leaned over and peered at the page. “In the groom’s room. Before the ceremony.”
“Oh,” I said. At the moment Phillip and his sisters had taken this picture, I was standing silently in the bride’s room, my dress stiff and uncomfortable, my hair pulled back too tightly, the combs of the tiara pressing against my scalp, my mother looking at me critically, the rest of the bridesmaids gathered in a corner drinking a bottle of champagne and laughing.
Phillip clearly had no problem playing his part. During the reception, he strutted around the room, circulating among the tables at dinner without me, accepting the congratulations and best wishes of people who adored him. I only knew half the people there, so after I made a few tentative forays to greet them, I retreated to the head table to eat my dinner alone. It would have been kind of him . . . well, why not say it as it was? He should have taken me with him. He should have introduced me to the people I didn’t know, held me beside him as his wife. But that was not the way Phillip worked. Before the wedding, it had been all about my mother, who had planned the entire thing, right down to the personalized tulle bundles of Jordan almonds and the napkins that matched the bridesmaids’ dresses. And then on the day itself, it was all about Phillip. I wondered how I had lost my place at my own wedding, feeling more and more kinship with the tiny plastic bride sitting on top of the wedding cake, nothing more than a part of the set dressing in The Phillip Show.
Every night on our honeymoon, I slipped into sleep and he went down to the hotel bar and drank until the stars faded, chatting with the patrons, accepting their congratulations on his own, again. I would wake and find him gone, the room empty except for the cold company of the moonlight, and I lay awake, staring into the silvery darkness until the door creaked open and he settled into bed beside me. I never said anything, and he never intimated he thought there was anything wrong with the arrangement. And there wasn’t anyone I could ask. There are a hundred etiquette guides for weddings, and not a single one for marriage.