White Ivy(84)

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IT’D RAINED THAT morning in Kauai when they landed but by early afternoon, the sun was streaming through the stained-glass windows of St. Mary’s Cathedral. Sitting beside Ivy in the dark cherrywood pew was Marybeth’s aunt, the one whose ranch they’d visited in New Hampshire last year. She kept bumping into Ivy’s elbow as she raised her compact mirror to powder her face with an almond-scented bronzer. “Are you a friend of the bride or groom?” she whispered, and Ivy almost said, Neither. She said she was the fiancée of the best man. “The splendid blond one?” the aunt asked. Ivy nodded with pride. Standing at the altar with the other groomsmen was Gideon, looking splendid indeed in his tailored gray suit, his hands clasped somberly in front of him. Certainly he looked better than the groom, who wore his tux like a straitjacket, his arms rigidly pressed against his sides.

As Ivy waited for Marybeth to walk through the doors, she felt her phone vibrating inside her clutch. Marybeth’s aunt adjusted her hearing aid, looking around for the source of the noise. The organist began playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” and the crowd stood. Ivy followed suit, a second late as she silenced her phone. A gasp of delight rippled through the room. Dripping from head to toe in lace and pearls, Marybeth looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting with her burnt-orange hair rippling under a sixty-two-inch ivory silk tulle veil, the culmination of a thousand hours of Chinese labor hand-embroidering all those cascades of delicate flowers. Her gloved arm was threaded through her father’s, a jolly-looking man with round blue eyes spaced very close together. Tears were already streaming down his face into the bow tie around his fat neck. People said that daughters wanted to marry men like their fathers and Ivy could picture how in twenty years or so, Tom could develop the same thick neck, the red freckled cheeks. But age would never soften Tom to jolliness. He was one of the most unhappy people Ivy had ever met. Yet she couldn’t pity him. His unhappiness, unlike Andrea’s and Austin’s and even Roux’s, contained malice. It had the need to hurt others. In that way, Tom Cross and Nan Lin were alike.

Ivy had once asked Marybeth what it was about Tom that had first attracted her to him. Marybeth said, “He hates dumb women, loud women, flirtatious women, fat women, Catholic women, Jewish women, women who snore, women who can’t drink… you get the idea. I thought, ‘At least I’ll never have to worry about him running off with some bimbo.’ The opposite, actually. You should see the stack of HR complaints against him from his secretaries. Anyway, when he kept on asking me out, I thought there must have been something special about me. So I decided to give him a chance. I’ve always wondered, though, why me? I guess I’m marrying him to find out.” Ivy thought of this now, watching Marybeth float down the aisle in a daze of serene happiness. What a reason for marrying someone. But then again, plenty of people got married for less.

The ceremony was tedious—there had already been the processional when they’d arrived at St. Mary’s, and they still had to sit through the biblical readings, exchange of vows, exchange of rings, another prayer, the nuptial blessing, more prayers, singing. When Ivy wasn’t looking at Gideon, her eyes kept returning to Tom’s father, whose deep baritone voice was the loudest in the room as they sang “Ave Maria.” During mass, he closed his eyes but his lips fluttered continuously without sound; every so often, he’d gesture at the ceiling as if conducting an invisible orchestra. When giving his speech at the reception, the elder Cross spoke about his son’s devotion to God, his faith in the sacred matrimony in upholding God’s will, his expectations for Tom in remaining a leader for the parish. Not once did the elder Cross mention Marybeth, who had long drained her champagne and was chewing ice cubes from her empty water glass.

“That was beautiful,” Ivy whispered to Gideon as everyone clapped.

“It was lovely,” Gideon said unsmilingly.

Then Gideon made his best man’s speech—a short, lighthearted roast followed by funny stories showcasing Tom’s finer traits. Near the end, Tom’s face scrunched up like a dried apricot. Ivy thought he would start weeping again but he didn’t. The guests laughed. Clapped. Toasted. As soon as Gideon took his seat, white-gloved waiters served their appetizers out of heated gold platters. Contemporary American food with a Hawaiian twist. The portions were tiny, meant to take a backseat to the exotic garnishes: sprigs of emerald green, bright fuchsia spirals, a cluster of unnatural aqua-colored beads—“liquid nitrogen,” someone explained to his neighbor. After they finished eating, the younger guests milled onto the makeshift dance floor on the sand, surrounded by real torches, as a seven-piece band powered through rock renditions of traditional ballads. The star of the show was the Hawaiian pahu drum, played by a thickset Hawaiian woman in a grass skirt with two coconut shells for a bra and a pink-and-white lei swaying over her voluptuous breasts. It was as if she had looked up on the Internet what she was supposed to wear to look the part of who she was.

Ivy went to use the bathroom. A headache was forming as a result of mixing her liquors, and the pain throbbed harder with each beat of the drums. When she came back outside, Gideon handed her back her clutch. “Your phone’s been buzzing this entire time,” he said. “I was worried it was an emergency so I checked who was calling. Someone named Kang Ru?” Ivy nearly fainted from her idiocy. “It’s one of my college friends,” she said quickly. She took the phone from Gideon—twelve missed calls. She said a short prayer of gratitude that Roux wasn’t the texting type. “I’ll call him back later,” she said, and turned off her phone. “Let’s dance.”