Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

Irene’s aesthetic was the driving force behind the whole event. In going through her things, Sara had found a few of the old guidebooks they’d bought in college when first planning their trip to the Côte d’Azur. Boom — here was the color scheme: the turquoise waters off St. Tropez, and the rose rooftops of Monaco. Bam — there was the font: a vintage script used by the Hotel Negresco on its dinner menu.

Sara found it impossible to believe that she and George would be there, for real, in just twenty-four hours: reading under the bold-blue-striped beach umbrellas at Cannes, climbing the spiral stairs of the elegant fairytale castles of Antibes, tossing a pair of dice at a craps table in Monte Carlo. All of the Shermans had chipped in to send them first class. Sara tried hard to remember this, and to let her gratitude balance out Irene’s absence. She had already planned out every detail of the trip, from what she would order for dinner at Le Chantecler in Nice, to where she could rent a sun umbrella in Théoule-sur-Mer, and the rules for baccarat when they visited the Place du Casino in Monte Carlo. And up on the very top of a mountain, in a sun-drenched spot called Pointe Sublime, she and George would scatter Irene’s ashes as she’d asked them to, and it would be done at last. Sara couldn’t stop dreaming about it.

Adeline called from the next room, “The photographer says he’s ready for you!”

“Is George up there already?” Sara shouted back.

“He didn’t say!”

“Has anyone heard from him yet?”

Silence.

Sara gathered her gown and moved slowly toward the front door, with the sisters and mothers all rushing over to send her off enthusiastically, to tell her she looked beautiful, to remind her how lucky she was. Sara made sure Beth had the folder with the marriage license in it and headed to the freight elevator (the only one with roof access). She was sure her sisters were already pulling bobby pins out of Mrs. Murphy’s hair and her mother was back to editing the bouquets. She turned back to the crowd of turquoise-satin bridesmaids at the door. “I need everyone else up there in ten minutes . Moms, aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters. Both families. Bouquets and boutonnières. Shoes on.” That one was for Eddy, who seemed to feel that wearing closed-toed heels somehow made her a party to systemic gender marginalization.

“Aye-aye, captain!” Eddy saluted back. “Go, go, go!”

Sara did a last check of her hair and makeup in the reflection of the closed elevator doors. Who was this girl in the cold steel with the cupid’s bow lips and the Clara Bow eyebrows? It was all wrong. Why had she let the lady do it that way?

The elevator doors opened. Inside, a small Hispanic woman hid behind a cart filled with fresh towels and cleaning products. A little radio was blaring some sort of sermon on a tinny Spanish station. “¿Dónde está, oh muerte, tu aguijón? ¿Dónde, oh sepulcro, tu victoria?”

“Oh!” the maid screeched happily, covering her mouth with both hands, in the universal language of bride excitement. “¡Eres tan bella!”

“Gracias,” Sara managed.

In just an hour Sara would be standing up there, holding George’s hands in front of Minister Thaw and listening to him read from First Corinthians. Love is patient, love is kind. And she would nod mindfully as Thaw rattled off his list, of all the things that Love Was Not: envious, boastful, proud. And with her wearing the most beautiful dress she’d ever worn, on the most expensive single afternoon of her entire life. The rest of the verse was practically a checklist of how Sara had been feeling all year. Love was not: dishonoring others, being self-seeking, or angering easily. Check, check, and check. Love keeps no record of wrongs? Sara had a whole spreadsheet of them. Who hadn’t sent a gift, and who had brought a plus-one without asking, and who had demanded that they be married in a church in the first place, and which cousin wasn’t coming despite living less than three hours away, and which aunt had to be cut off after two by the bartender and… Love doesn’t delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails.

The radio piece ended, and soon a commercial began. Sara recognized it from the first somber piano chord. She had been hearing it everywhere all week: in cabs, at her dentist’s office, at the gym. At this point she could practically recite it from memory. “At Mount Sinai Cancer Center… the patient is the center of our universe. Like Sue, who thought it was all over when her liver cancer came back. ‘I came to Mount Sinai, and right away I was working with a team of specialists in my type of cancer. Providing the very latest options, including personalized therapies, just for me .’ Today Sue is cancer-free, thanks to specialists like Dr. Atoosa Zarrani… ‘We live for the chance to help people like Sue. My colleagues and I worked hard and together… we cured her.’”

Well, good for fucking Sue . Sara wanted to snap the antenna off the piece-of-crap radio and drive it through the speakers.

Then there was a hand on hers. “No cry,” the maid was saying. “You look so beautiful! Happy day!”

Sara coughed as the elevator came to the twentieth floor at last, and the maid pushed the cart away, smiling and crossing herself and wishing her well in Spanish. The doors closed, and as Sara went alone up the last few floors, she tried to fix her mascara in the reflection of the emergency call box. Steadily she felt the elevator easing its ascent, and she looked up expectantly at the sound of its cheerful ding. The doors stayed shut as things settled. She held her breath. Crazy how, after almost ten years together, just a day away from George, and she was as excited to see him again as she had been that first day, waiting for him to come down from his dorm to pick her up for the movies.

At last the doors opened onto the roof of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. For the first time all morning, she smiled, as she scanned the wide blue cloudless sky and all the rooftops of midtown Manhattan for George.

• • •

In George’s dreams he saw a spinning wheel of hydrogen gas, thirty-six billion miles across, beginning to collapse under its own immense weight. Though it had been spinning for over one hundred thousand years, its end had come. Seismic shocks ripped through the icy disk, just ten degrees above absolute zero. He watched it radiating microwaves and great streams of plasma — solar winds that emanated in all directions at once. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of these rays traveled on through emptiness forever, reflecting off no other planets or asteroids or matter of any kind, being sucked into no black holes or other gravitational fields, crossing paths with no other particle. Turbulent storms moved along the circumference at speeds greater than sound, as the wheel contracted like a great iris in space, years passing in moments, the core becoming hotter and brighter as it shrank. Faster and faster, the humongous orbit of gaseous molecules, ten times larger than our whole solar system, caving further and further in on itself — until in one spectacular and sudden stabilizing moment, it all stopped. And everything became still in the space around this new, glorious star. And then George woke up alone on an unfamiliar couch, vaguely aware of being completely naked.

Feathers of all colors drifted through the air. Hot pinks, neon greens, and bruised purples danced a lazy pas de trois around the martini glasses on the coffee table, sticky with the day-old residue of sour apple Pucker. The television was on, but muted. George’s arms were wrapped around a gray lamp that seemed to belong on the side table. He’d heard of waking up with lampshades on your head but never cuddling with the lamp itself. Slowly he remembered that he was in the hotel room that Sara and her sisters had used the night of the bachelorette party. After their spa day, they had come back here to throw on their slinky dresses and high heels and feather boas before the big bar crawl. The boys had thrown George’s bachelor party that same night down in Atlantic City and had been so late getting back the next day that they had gone directly to the rehearsal dinner without stopping into the room to see that it had, clearly, never been cleaned.