The Perfect Couple(30)
There are some Hear, hears from the audience. Greer feels a vague recognition. She loved her children. Loves them. It was different when they were small, of course.
“And Karen and I somehow lucked out and got this beautiful, smart, nice little girl. She got a hundred percent on all her spelling tests. She was the one who scooped up a spider and carried it outside instead of squishing it with her shoe, and she was always digging in the backyard looking for snakes or salamanders and then putting them in a shoe box with grass and little dishes of drinking water. She was never ashamed or embarrassed of where she came from or who she came from, even though she outgrew us and the rest of Forks Township, Pennsylvania, a long time ago.” Bruce raises his glass. “And so to you, Benjamin Winbury, I say from the heart: Take care of our little girl. She is our treasure, our hope, our light, and our warmth. She is our legacy. Here’s to the two of you and your life together.”
Greer wipes a tear from the corner of her eye with a napkin. She isn’t normally sentimental, although anyone would have found that toast stirring.
Thomas stands up next and chimes on his own water glass. It’s true perhaps that nothing in this world prepares you for how much you love your children, but Greer has always been a realist where her sons are concerned. She has a firm handle on their strengths and weaknesses. Thomas is the better-looking one; Benji inherited Greer’s father’s crooked nose, and no barber has ever been able to tame Benji’s cowlick. But Benji is smarter and has been either blessed or cursed with a natural gravitas, so he has always seemed like the older brother.
For his toast, Thomas tells the story of when Thomas and Benji, ages eight and six, respectively, got lost at Piccadilly Circus and how Benji was the one who had saved them from abduction or worse. The story goes that Benji, against his brother’s severe warnings, had approached a group of punk rockers and asked a girl with a bright pink Mohawk to help them find their mummy.
“He said the girl’s hair was pretty,” Thomas says. “He believed anyone with such pretty hair was sure to have deep reserves of cleverness and wisdom.”
Greer laughs along with everyone else, although the story rubs her the wrong way for two reasons. First off, she was the one who had taken the boys to Piccadilly, where she had bumped into a woman named Susan Haynes, who sat on the ladies’ auxiliary at Portland Hospital, a group Greer had been keen to join. Greer had become so engrossed in conversation with Susan that she had lost track of the boys. Her own children. When Greer surfaced from the conversation, she looked around and found the two of them had vanished.
Greer is also dismayed because this is the exact same story that Benji told when he had given the toast at Thomas’s wedding four years earlier. Greer finds it terribly unimaginative for Thomas to recycle the very same story. Greer would like to give Tag a private look to see if he agrees, but he’s… where? Still on the call with Ernie? Greer checks on Featherleigh. She’s in her seat, gazing at Thomas with an insipid look on her face.
She’s blotto, Greer thinks. She has three empty cups of the blackberry mojito punch in front of her.
As soon as the applause for Thomas’s half-baked effort subsides, Greer slips discreetly into the house in search of her husband.
She skirts the kitchen, where the catering staff is plating dessert, an assortment of homemade pies: blueberry, peach, Key lime, banana cream, and chocolate pecan. She heads through the den toward the back stairs but stops when she hears a voice coming from the laundry room.
The laundry room? Greer thinks. She pokes her head in.
There’s a girl with her back up against the stacked washer and dryer, her face in her hands, sobbing. It’s… it’s the friend, Celeste’s friend, the maid of honor. Greer blanks on the girl’s name. It’s… Merrill or Madison? No, not quite. Merritt, she thinks. Merritt Monaco.
“Merritt!” Greer says. “What’s wrong?”
When Merritt turns to see Greer, she gasps in surprise. Then she hurries to wipe away her tears. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just… the excitement.”
“It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?” Greer says. She feels a wave of maternal concern for this girl who is neither getting married like Celeste nor pregnant like Abby. But still, the freedom! Greer wants to encourage Merritt to savor her freedom because soon enough, certainly, it will be gone.
“Come, let’s get you a drink,” Greer says. She beckons Merritt forward, thinking she will lead the girl back out to the party and find Chloe-with-the-champagne. Surely Merritt’s sadness is nothing a little Veuve Clicquot can’t fix.
“I’m fine,” Merritt says, sniffing and trying to collect herself. “I’ll be out shortly. I need the ladies’ room. I should fix my face. But thank you.”
Greer gives the girl a smile. “Very well. I’m on a mission to find my husband anyway. He seems to have disappeared.” She turns to leave but not before catching the glint of a silver ring on Merritt’s thumb.
So it’s true, Greer thinks. All the fashionable girls are wearing them now.
Monday, October 24, 2016
CELESTE
Two days after giving Benji her direct line at the zoo, he calls—not to put her in touch with his friend who may or may not want to bring groups of foreign executives to the zoo but to ask her out to dinner. He wants to take her to the Russian Tea Room on Friday night.