All Dressed Up (12 page)

“I – ”

“I think he’s
one of those guys with superhuman emotional energy levels…”

“Oh, I know! I
like that!”

“…and it just
simply doesn’t cost him that much to give you a hundred percent. It
doesn’t even start to empty the well. And I think there’s a level
at which everything he says to every woman is true.”

Sarah thought
so, too. She pinned herself to this for a long time – that when he
said in his low, sexy voice that he loved her, he meant it, it was
true, and he didn’t say it in the same way to anyone else. His
infidelity came from his sheer appetite for life, for every
experience he could possibly cram in. But he loved her. She was the
one.

She actually
did still believe in the appetite theory, for what it was worth. He
was one of those strapping, physical types with all sorts of
appetites, wonderful appetites some of them. He appreciated art,
thoroughbred racing, figure skating, chess. He’d lived in Italy for
a year as a child, and he had an interesting scar on his back from
an accident in his teens. He was so curious about everything. He
talked to her in a wonderful way about landscape and buildings. His
smile glowed with radiant appreciation of her perceptions and
ideas.

The
collaborative doodling and the naked, ‘volumptuous’ audition at
Life Drawing class were stories she’d planned on telling, with
age-appropriate modifications, to her grandchildren. He did not –
still – as far as Sarah was concerned – fit into any of the clichés
of the bad ex-boyfriend or the womanizing lover. She did not ask
herself – still – the way many women did, “What did I ever see in
him? Was I blind?” and couldn’t imagine – still – that she ever
would. She knew exactly what she’d seen in him. Mom had said he had
pond scum eyes, but – although Sarah remained grateful for the
support – he didn’t. His eyes were beautiful.

He would have
been perfect for her if it hadn’t been for the one tiny, teeny flaw
that he couldn’t stay out of other women’s pants. He didn’t even
seem to think about it very much. He certainly never admitted to
it, except in generalized lines like, “The thing is, I’ve only ever
slept with women I like,” or “Men will say anything that works, to
be honest.”

Sarah had
purchased the maybe-for-my-wedding dress in Bergdorf Goodman
already knowing that he was like this, knowing about the other
girls. She had thought that she could live with it, had thought
that he would marry her anyway and that she’d be happy, because she
was the one, the only one, who was truly special to him.

It was just
the kind of dress you would wear to marry a man who liked figure
skating, talked about buildings and had lived in Rome. Different.
Imaginative. Not meant for a bride.

And in Sarah’s
head it became totally and utterly her wedding dress, so that when
the whole thing went to ashes and dust – basically by means of her
telling him she couldn’t see him any more, and waiting for him to
argue or beg her to change her mind, and he didn’t – she couldn’t
suddenly turn around and wear it someplace else, and she still had
it hidden away secretly.

Nobody knew
she had that dress. Not Emma. Not Mom. Nobody. She was so, so
stupid about that dress, and it hurt – still.

Cell phone.
“You have to be in the basement by now,” Emma said.

“No, not
yet.”

“I am dying,
here, Sar.”

So am I, Em.
“I had to use the bathroom,” she lied, adding, “He’s not going to
have thrown it in the trash, and there is no smell of burning in
the apartment.”

“You don’t
think he has it in him to get that angry?”

“He’d do
something else to deal with the anger. Donate it to charity.”

Emma accepted
the truth of this without direct comment. “In that case, we’ll have
to trace it.”

Trace it?

“Right,” Sarah
said out loud. “Sure. No problem. I’ll liaise with the Federal
Bureau of Missing Wedding Gowns. Get its picture on a milk
carton.”

“Please go to
the basement. He could be storing it there till he gets it to the
charity. I just need to know. I need – ”

“I am so nice,
Emma.”

“You are.
You’re great.”

“I am too
nice. I am sucker nice. Victim nice. Walk-all-over-me nice.” Sarah
took the keys and her bag and locked the apartment, walking toward
the stairs with the phone pressed to her ear.

“No,” Emma
sweet-talked her, “because you are my sister and you would call me
on this if you really didn’t want to do it. You would. You are not
victim nice. You have your cut-off point.”

“My cut-off
point is way too close to the victim end of the user-to-victim
spectrum.”

“Is that what
you think? That I use the people I love? Or, no, who are we talking
about here, Sarah? Me or Luke?”

“Both. You and
Luke. But I’m the common denominator. I can’t believe you are
attempting to have an important conversation with me now, of all
the times you could have chosen. Okay, I’m heading down the
stairs.”

“You started
it.”

“Well, let’s
stop it. I didn’t start it, I just said I was too nice.”

“In a loaded
way.”

“Yes, in a
loaded way. There is a huge load, okay? But I’m scared if we start
talking about it there will be too many accusations. I’m scared of
the size of fight we could have, Em.”

“And maybe we
need Mom in the fight, anyhow,” Emma said quietly.

“Ooh, three
ways, girl on girl. People will want to watch. We should order some
mud and put on bikinis. How horrible is this basement, by the
way?”

“Slightly
better than a subway entrance. You’ll see in a second. The garbage
pails are around the corner when you get out of the stairwell. Turn
right. I guess I’m too busy being scared of other stuff to be
scared of the size of the fight. Scared of – Scared that I’ll never
– ”

Sarah heard
Emma’s breathing change, as if someone was crushing her lungs with
a heavy boot. This was Sarah’s cue to tread gently, but she did the
opposite, because she knew too clearly what Emma was thinking. Her
scalp and stomach tightened. “You can’t have him back.” And she
wasn’t talking about Charlie. “Don’t even think it.”

“I’m not
thinking it. I know it’s not that simple. But I want what you
have.”

“Oh, what I
have? What do you think I have? Sarah, keep Billy company.”

“A
relationship with him. It’s good, what you have. I just want –
”

“That is so
shallow, Emma!”

“Shallow? My
God!”

“You tried it
for one weekend and you were pathetic.” She reached the bottom of
the stairs and turned right as Emma had said to.

“Eight years
ago. He was two, he was so difficult, you and Mom both had 103
degree fevers, Dad was away, we were all shut in the house, he
didn’t know me, Billy, my own son, and I didn’t know him. And I
know I was pathetic, do you think that’s easy to look in the face,
the fact that I was that pathetic?”

“You have not
earned it, okay? If you mean telling him…”

“No!”

“This is the
last thing in the world you can express on a whim.”

“A whim?”

Here were the
pails, big black plastic things with the apartment numbers daubed
on them in white. Sarah began to lift lids, figuring that if
someone was angry or wounded enough to toss out a fifteen-thousand
dollar gown he might not necessarily choose to use his own bin.
Most of the bins reeked – a sour mix of dead food, cat litter and
newsprint. If there was a wedding gown in there, it was
well-concealed beneath genuine trash.

“You have not
earned the right to stuff up Billy’s life, just because you gave
birth to him.”

Lift lid,
check bin, hold breath.

“To slap Mom
in the face like that, even if she did have her own reasons for
pushing the idea of taking him for you. They were pretty serious,
those reasons.”

Lift lid,
check bin, almost drop phone on a pile of orange peel.

“To slap me in
the face, for God’s sake, Emma! Again!”

Lift lid,
etc.

“I did so much
of what you could have been doing. Just like you said. And it
wasn’t a piece of cake, sometimes. I had my own problems, and I
pushed them away. You got off scot-free, Emma, and you don’t even
know it.”

“Scot-free?”
Emma echoed. Ominously calm.

“Not
scot-free.” That’s right, Sarah, back down at once, there’s a good
girl. You never really confronted Luke, either. “But a lot more
lightly than you think. A hell of a lot more lightly! Do you ever
think about what was happening to me that winter in London?”

Silence, then,
“Are you seriously going to compare it?”

“Yes.”

“Wow,
Sarah.”

“There is
nothing in these damned bins, by the way. And no bags of charity
clothing down here.”

“Have you
looked under – ?”

“I am not
lifting up bits of trash,” she snapped. “Your wedding dress is not
here.”

This time,
Emma didn’t call Sarah back. She left a note. “I have gone to
Hackensack.”

But that plan
didn’t last.

She got as far
as her first glimpse of the big pile of hospital buildings on top
of the ridge at Summit Avenue, before thinking it through. She’d
finished with the place ten days ago. She’d said her goodbyes.
She’d honestly thought… kidded herself… that when she started at
Park Hospital after the honeymoon everything would feel different.
Medicine would feel different.

Now she knew
better.

She hated
being a doctor. She had always hated it, and she always would.
She’d only done medicine because it was the obvious thing to do
when you’d gotten spectacular grades, and because it was the
obvious and most extreme contrast to dropping out of school
completely, which had seemed the only other option.

Oh, and
because then she’d met Charlie.

She’d spent
her entire pre-med undergraduate years, and her medical school
years, and her internship, riding out her dislike of everything
about a medical career while searching for a specialty which
avoided the things she hated the very most – such as patients, for
example – to the point where she would barely be a doctor at
all.

Dermatology,
psychiatry, pathology, none of them worked. Surgery. She’d gone
with that, in the end, because she had the right kind of fingers
for cutting and stitching, and the patients were at least mostly
unconscious, and she’d gotten into a great program and Charlie was
at the same hospital, and Charlie was a surgeon and had told her
she could do it.

Brilliant
reasons. God, she was going to hate being a surgeon.

She hated the
physical ickiness of body fluids and people in pain. She hated
caring about patients, or sometimes despising them, and having to
treat both kinds of people the same way. She hated the weight of
responsibility, the abrasive relationships with colleagues, the
delicacy and focus required of her in tasks like setting up an I.V.
– tasks which she only learned each time by hurting people,
sticking the needle in wrong. She hated the fact that you had to
make no mistakes, because mistakes could kill people. Sometimes
even the correct answer to a medical problem was so gray and
unclear. And even when it was clear, when you knew the right answer
was B, it didn’t mean B would save the patient’s life.

She began to
drive toward Manhattan, and didn’t think about the best route so
that instead of heading south on the Turnpike toward the Holland
Tunnel she ended up in line for the toll at the GW Bridge and
couldn’t turn around. As soon as she’d crossed the bridge she
turned back, which was complex and took minutes that didn’t matter
because she had no idea if she was going back home again, or
what.

I can’t do
this. I can’t start at Park Hospital in two weeks, and it has
nothing to do with Charlie. Although it has a lot to do with Billy.
I wouldn’t have become a doctor if it hadn’t been for Billy. To
justify the cop-out of giving him to Mom.

Her breathing
rose to a panicky shallowness and she really thought she might
faint and crash. An instinct for safety and for not upsetting her
parents or Sarah or Billy – would he care much? – or Charlie, or
anyone, by killing herself at the wheel finally kicked in and she
managed to get onto Route 17 and back to Saddle River, where her
Hackensack note was gone and there was a wedding dress note from
Sarah, instead.

“Mom called.
Lainie has the dress. Which I assume you still want. I am going
back to the lake and picking it up on my way through. Mom doesn’t
understand why you’re in Jersey, and neither do I. Come up, Emma,
and we’ll try to talk. I don’t hate you, I don’t blame you. I have
just as much to work out as you do. I just know you can’t have
Billy back.”

Beneath the
note lay the windjammer cruise photo from the apartment.

Chapter
Six

“She keeps
telling me she’s okay, do you think she’s okay, Sarah?” Amber had
asked on Sarah’s cell, just before she left to drive to the lake
via collecting Emma’s gown from Lainie.

“I know she’s
not okay. But her way of dealing with not being okay is always to
pretend she’s totally, aggressively, glass-shatteringly okay while
sucking up the energy of everyone around her in supporting her
fiction.”

“You know only
a sister could say that, right?”

“And get away
with it? And still claim to love her?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not
getting away with it. I’m feeling terrible and like, oh,
confronting her was so overdue, both at the same time.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re
avoiding each other. We had a fight on our cell phones while I was
looking for the dress in Charlie’s apartment garbage cans.”

“And she
really asked you to look for evidence of fire?”