Beautiful Day(44)

He’d enjoyed another celebratory beer after the eighteenth, and then, not wanting to bother Pauline (which really meant not wanting to hear Pauline bitch about the GPS—she could never get the damn thing to work, she took it personally, as if the woman whose voice gave directions was an enemy of hers), he took a cab back to the house. Even the cab ride had been relaxing. Doug put the windows down and gazed out at the pretty cottages with their lovely gardens, their gray shingles and neat white trim, their sturdy widow’s walks. He felt better than he had in months. Spending the day by himself playing golf was just what he needed.

He had believed, during the fifteen minutes in the cab, that everything would correct itself. He didn’t need to make any drastic changes. He had been frazzled the day before with his own version of prewedding jitters. Nothing more.

But the second he entered the master bedroom—a bedroom he remembered his grandparents sleeping in, then his parents, then him and Beth—and saw Pauline sitting at this grandmother’s dressing table, fixing her hair, he thought, Oh, no, no, no. This is all wrong.

She must have noticed his expression because she said, “You hate the suit.”

“The suit?” he said.

She stood up and yanked at the hem of her jacket. “I didn’t want anything too flashy. They’re so conservative at the yacht club. All the old biddies with their pearls and their Pappagallo flats.”

Doug looked at his wife in her blue suit. It was a tad matronly, true, reminiscent of Barbara Bush or Margaret Thatcher, and Doug could never in a million years imagine Beth wearing such a suit—but the suit wasn’t the problem. It was the woman inside the suit.

“The suit looks fine,” he said.

“Then why the long face?” Pauline asked. “Did you hook your drives?”

Doug sat on the bed and removed his shoes. He had a house full of people downstairs and more people coming to the yacht club. He had to get in the right frame of mind to play host. He had to follow the advice he had glibly given so many of his clients: fake it to make it.

“My drives were fine,” he said. Pauline said things like “Did you hook your drives” to make it sound like she understood golf and cared about his game, but she didn’t. He had never hooked a drive in all his life; he was a slicer. “I played pretty well, actually.”

“What did you shoot?”

“A seventy-nine,” he said. He wasn’t sure why he fudged the number for Pauline’s sake; he could have said he’d shot a 103, and she still would have said:

“That’s wonderful, honey.”

She sat next to him on the bed and started kneading the muscles in his shoulder. She must have realized something was very wrong, because unsolicited touches from Pauline were few and far between. But he wasn’t in the mood to be touched by Pauline. He might never be in the mood again.

He stood up. “I have to get ready,” he said.

It was only the rehearsal, but as they stood in the vestibule of the church, it felt like a big moment. Everyone else had processed before them—first Autumn on the arm of one of the twins, then Rhonda and the tall, nearly albino half brother, then Kevin and Beanie, who were standing in for Nick and Finn, who apparently were still at the beach although they had each been texted and called forty times in the past hour, then the other twin and Margot. Then Kevin and Beanie’s youngest son, Brock, as the ring bearer, alongside Ellie, the flower girl.

Ellie was still in her bathing suit. Doug, who made a point never to interfere with his kids’ parenting, had said to Margot, “Really? You brought her to church in a bathing suit?”

Margot had instantly gotten her hackles up, as Doug expected.

“I’m doing the best I can, Dad,” she said. “She refused to change. I think it’s a reaction to the D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

Really? Doug thought. Margot and Drum Sr. had been divorced for nearly two years. That sounded suspiciously like an excuse.

Roger, the wedding planner, was the director of this particular pomp and circumstance, despite the presence of the pastor of St. Paul’s and their pastor from home, Reverend Marlowe, who were co-officiating. Roger had his clipboard and a number two pencil behind his ear; he was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, Tevas, and a T-shirt from Santos Rubbish Removal. Doug had an affinity for this fellow Roger that bordered on the fraternal. He appreciated that sense and order and logic were prevailing in the planning of this nuptial fete. Whatever Doug was paying the guy, it wasn’t enough.

Roger had an old-fashioned tape recorder that was playing Pachelbel’s Canon; tomorrow there would be two violinists and a cellist. Pachelbel’s Canon was a piece of music Beth had loved even more than Eric Clapton or Traffic. She had loved it so much that she had asked Doug to play it over and over again in the days before she died. It would ease her passage, she said. Naturally, it was also the piece she had suggested for the processional, not realizing that as Doug stood, linked arm in arm with his youngest child, he would be suffused with the memory of sitting at Beth’s bedside, helplessly watching her die.