Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

Leda will have no such problems. She's arranging all the details and drawing everybody else in with her. She summons Nathalie on her lunch hour to help her choose a dress from the off-the-rack options at a store called Better Bridal Bargains. She sweeps out of the fitting room, all sixty years of her, in organza concoctions with full skirts, in beaded bodices and empire waistlines. She looks like a princess who's fallen victim to an evil aging spell.

“Honestly, I've always wanted to be married in a tiara,” she says. “Haven't you?”

“I guess,” Nathalie says, stealing a look at her watch. She has to be back at the office by one.

“You probably haven't,” Leda says pityingly. “You're so practical, so lawyerly. I was almost expecting you to walk down the aisle in a navy blue power suit.”

That is what Nathalie is wearing right now. She doesn't use clothes to draw attention to herself. Her outfit, like a doctor's coat or a mortician's black, enables a client to look past her, the individual woman, to the expertise she represents. Leda has never worked, having married Nick's father when she was still in college, so it would be unreasonable to expect her to understand. Nathalie looks Leda up and down. The bodice of the current dress is tight, clenching her torso into several horizontal rolls of fat.

“I'd have to vote against this one,” she says. “It's not the most flattering.”

“But it's the most romantic, ” Leda says. “It's like Martin's proposal. He said we should just do it, life is too short, we shouldn't wait. ‘Let's get married this week,’ he said, and you know what I said, dear?”

Nathalie waits.

“I said ‘Martin Horst, when you're right, you're right.’ This dress is like a fairy tale. I'm going to take it.” She spreads the skirt out on either side, folds of fabric frothing like egg whites in her arms, and grins at herself in the mirror. Her short white hair matches the gown. She looks like she feels adored.

At home that night, Nathalie finds her husband sanding the chair again. It's a rocking chair that belonged to her grandparents, and over many years it has been painted successive layers of white, red, and green — most of which have been removed and now lie scattered in particles around the garage floor. It's less like he's sanding the chair than pulverizing it. In fact it looks noticeably smaller, the runners spindly and weak. She worries that by the time he gets through with it, there won't be any chair left.

“Hey, look,” he says. “I'm finally down to the real color.” He points to a spot, a nondescript light brown, on the arm.

“Okay,” Nathalie says. She used to be more enthusiastic about these things before the house smelled permanently of paint stripper. “Have you taken care of the flowers?”

“Done.”

“Called everybody on the list?”

“Done.”

“Ordered the catering?”

“Done.”

“Figured out what you're going to do for Martin's bachelor party?”

This makes him look up from the light brown spot. “You're joking, right?”

“Leda was hinting that he'd enjoy having one. She said maybe you and Michael Thomas could take him out.”

Nick lowers his eyes to the light brown spot, squints at it, then bangs his head against it several times in succession. Michael Thomas is Rupert Thorne's son. He still insists on referring to himself as Leda's stepson, even though she divorced his father two years ago. (Rupert Thorne was having an affair with another patient, and apparently was always having affairs with patients.) A thin, jittery, forty-year computer programmer, Michael Thomas lives alone in an enormous house he bought early on in the tech boom. He adores Leda and took her side, one hundred percent, when his father told him about the divorce. Leda generously continues to invite him to family functions, which he always attends bearing tasteful but extravagant gifts: fine wines, tropical flower arrangements, fruit baskets. Like most very enthusiastic people, he seems a little unbalanced.

Without answering her question, Nick goes back to sanding. He's been doing this more and more the past few months: checking out of conversations and turning instead to the project at hand. What's disturbing to Nathalie is that she doesn't even necessarily mind. After all, she already knows where the conversation would go. In the first months after the layoff she kept trying to get Nick to talk, kept trying to boost his spirits, kept trying everything she could think of.

All it accomplished was to make him mad; he said he felt like a child, like her own project to fix. It reinforced his sense that she had her life together and he didn't. “The best thing you can do,” he said, “is to leave me alone.”

Nathalie is good at leaving things alone; she doesn't like to intervene. Her work involves labor disputes, and in conference rooms she often faces clients staring at her beseechingly, begging to be told what to do next with disgruntled former employees or tough-negotiating union representatives. She always lays out options and consequences rather than recommending any one course of action. She explains their liability, the strong and weak points of the case, and that is as far as she will go. The lighter the touch, she believes, the better. But at home these days she thinks maybe she isn't just leaving things alone; maybe she's on the way to leaving.

Martin and Leda are as giddy as kids. They show up at the rehearsal dinner, at Nathalie and Nick's house, holding hands and blushing. They keep turning around and smooching and pinching each other's sagging cheeks. There is a lot of eyerolling going on in Nick's corner of the room. Michael Thomas, who arrived staggering beneath a present the size of an oven, keeps crossing and uncrossing his arms and saying loudly, “Aw.” He says it every time they kiss, which means at least five times so far.

“She and my dad were never like this,” he says to Nathalie in the kitchen. “He was a cold bastard with her like he was with everybody else. Once he got them into bed it was all over. Conquest was the name of his game. Frankly, I never understood what she saw in him.”

Nathalie nods. After that divorce she and Nick had Leda over for dinner, and she got tipsy and confided that she'd married Rupert Thorne “for the sex.”

Nick said, “I'd really rather not know this about you, Mom.”

Leda shrugged, her cheeks a flourish of color. “It's not enough to base a relationship on,” she said, “not one that will last forever.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Nick told her.

Now he's in a corner with Martin and Leda, listening to them talk. All week long he worked on wedding arrangements during the day and on his various projects in the garage at night. He looks exhausted, dark shadows beneath his dark eyes. Leda, on the other hand, looks radiant, wearing a pink suit with a corsage — what Nathalie thinks of as a mother-of-the-bride outfit — and a flower in her hair. She's staring at Martin with a wide-eyed, loving stare. Martin's elaborating a joke that involves an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Belgian; Nathalie misses the setup, but the punch line is the single word potatoes.

Leda's laugh rises and flits across the room, a string of notes like pearls.

At dinner Martin rises and makes a toast. He is sixty-six; his ex-wife has moved to Florida, and his children live in Europe. His suit bags and pouches, and it looks like he's carrying rocks in his pockets. His eyes are watery; his nose hairs need clipping.

He raises a glass in Leda's direction. “To my darling bride,” he says, “I let you go once before, and I will never be so foolish again.”

Leda blows him a kiss.

Michael Thomas says, “Aw.”

After dinner, while Nathalie and Leda clean up, Nick and Michael Thomas take the groom out for his bachelor party. Since Martin likes to go to bed early, this is at seven-thirty. Nathalie drives Leda home, and when she gets back, at nine, the light in the garage is on. Nick is standing over the chair, looking down to where it rests on its side at a weird angle. His eyes are bloodshot and he smells like booze.