“Oh, come on, Sadie, they did the cake-eating thing,” Dave protested, tugging on a hank of his hair. “They don’t need to do this.” Emily kicked him under the table. “Don’t be a spoilsport,” said Tal. “You know you want the bouquet.”
“I know I want the bouquet,” said Ed Slikowski.
“Everyone up.” From her perch, Sadie gazed imperiously down at Dave. “Lil, up.”
Wearily, Lil rose, leaving her round-toed pumps at the base of her chair. Without them, she appeared to crumple in on herself, like a doll, her dress trailing sadly on the floor. She walked to the fridge at the back of the loft’s great room and removed a box. “Throwaway bouquet,” she explained, holding a small bunch of roses aloft. “My mom ordered it. It’s so you can keep your real bouquet.” Dave rolled his eyes.
“Okay, on the count of three,” Sadie shouted, jumping down unsteadily from the chair. “One. Two.” The band girls scrambled up, and the others—giving each other looks of forbearance—followed suit. “Three.” Lil, her back turned, tossed the roses into the air. The bouquet arced up sharply, then dropped directly toward Sadie herself, who tilted her neat profile up in the air, making her hands into a basket for her dubious prize; but as the flowers reached her waiting arms, the smaller band girl, the blonde, jumped directly in front of her, knocking her to the floor, and snatching the bouquet with one outstretched fist. The heavier band girl rushed over to her friend and hugged her, their outsized joy rather undermining their hipstery aspirations. The band guys raised their fists in mock salute and shouted, “Yeah. Way to go, Taylor. All right.”
As one, the group glared at Taylor and then turned toward Sadie, whose yellowy skin had gone rather white, though she smiled, forcibly, as she rose from the scarred wood floor. Carefully, she made her way back to her seat, at Tal’s right. He tucked an arm around her shoulder. Her hair, in large, loose ringlets—wilder and heavier than Lil’s smooth, glossy waves—sprung up around her long face. Had her eyes, Beth wondered, always been so large, so shadowed? Up close, in the flickering light, she had the aspect of a serious child—a child from a Dutch painting, prematurely aged by the rigors and politics of court. How could Taylor have caught the bouquet, Beth thought, angrily. Taylor, who wasn’t even invited. The evening had soured for her. Was it bad luck, she thought, for a stranger to catch the bouquet? Did this bode poorly for Lil’s marriage? No, no, of course not. Across the table, Lil leaned heavily against Tuck’s shoulder, her eyes drooping with fatigue.
“It’s time,” said Sadie, meeting the eyes, pair by pair, of her friends, “for all of us to go.” And so they gathered their coats and shawls and bags, pecked Lil and Tuck on the cheek, and offered a final congratulations.
Outside, the air had turned cold, wintery, the harvest moon hanging low in the black sky, orange and unreal, like a painted set. The girls shivered in their thin coats and shawls. Dave offered his cigarettes around, pulling one from the pack with his lips, then lighting one for Sadie. They began walking west, toward Bedford, the populated part of Williamsburg. “That was really fun, wasn’t it?” sighed Sadie. The others nodded their assent and quickened their step, for the air was growing cooler, it seemed, each moment, as they drew closer and closer to the river. Instinctively, they huddled together as they crossed under the BQE overpass, a desolate, graffiti-covered tunnel, the girls stepping gingerly in their delicate shoes to avoid the broken beer bottles and black, desiccated banana peels that lay at their feet in scant piles.
“I’m so tired,” said Beth, with a shiver, her voice echoing in the dank little hollow. A quick wind picked up scraps of trash—plastic grocery bags, candy wrappers—and swirled them in their direction, the fruit scent of rotting garbage filling their mouths. “Maybe we should just go home.”
“We can’t go home yet,” Will Chase shouted from behind them. “Be strong, Beth Bernstein, there is liquor to be drunk.”
“First round’s on me,” called Ed Slikowski, who was half jogging down the street. “Let’s drink to the love!” he shouted.
Emily looked at Beth. “It’s freezing,” she whispered. “Maybe you’re right.”
But then they were back under the cover of the city’s black, monolithic sky. There were, Beth saw, no stars. Not one. The wind died down—or perhaps it had been a product of the tunnel—and the air cleared, smelling now of leaves and gasoline and a thousand other things coming from the thousands and thousands of cars and houses and people and dogs and cats that surrounded them.
“We’re almost there,” said Sadie. And it was true, they were only a few long blocks from the water—with their next step, the orderly lights of the Manhattan skyline, beaming across the river, began, slowly, to enter their line of vision.
two
As Beth followed Will Chase down the dim hallway leading to his apartment, a peculiar notion insinuated itself into her brain. Some months earlier, Lil had walked down this same corridor with Tuck, to do, perhaps, the same things she might now do with Will. Not that she had decided she was going to do anything with Will—she still wasn’t even sure if she liked or hated him. And not that she knew whether he actually wanted to do anything with her. An hour earlier, as they’d finished dinner, at a dark Mediterranean restaurant with walls of bright mosaic, he’d asked if she had “plans for the rest of the evening.” She was rather taken aback by this question, seeing as it was eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night—four days after Lil’s wedding. What exactly might she have planned at such an hour?
“Well,” she said, smiling, “I am supposed to meet some friends at the Tunnel, but that’s not until four. So I guess you’re stuck with me for, oh”—quick look at her watch—“another four, five hours.”
“Would you like to take a stroll, then? The weather’s gorgeous. And the moon is out.” Somehow, the clipped tones of his voice managed to drain whatever romantic potential Beth might have wanted to associate with words like “moon” and “stroll.” Alarmingly, he stuck his head under the table. She snapped her legs closed. “You’re not wearing ridiculous shoes, are you?” She gestured toward her boots—calf-covering things with low square heels, which she’d bought the day before at a loud shop on Eighth Street—and they ventured off down Berry Street, then west, toward the river, where he showed her a giant mound of glass—blue, clear, a thousand shades of green—glinting in the white moonlight. “Is it for recycling?” she asked, hating the studenty tone of her voice.
“Don’t know,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and rolling back on his heels. “But it’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”
They walked for blocks among Williamsburg’s low houses, which were certainly not gorgeous, she thought, with their vinyl siding and creaky metal awnings, decrepit warehouses with flat, narrow banks of windows, garbage on the street. Why did her friends want to live here, in this ugly place? But maybe there were parts that were nicer, the streets lined with soothing brownstones, like where Dave had grown up. When Emily and Lil and Tal had talked about living in Brooklyn, she’d pictured Dave’s parents’ apartment—preposterously narrow, lined with bookcases, wedding cake moldings—and their shady, quiet block, with its tall stone stoops, the onyx facade of the funeral home on the corner.