Ruby (2 page)

She didn’t know what that something was, but she felt it coming, as strong and reckless as a hurricane running its unpredictable course.

Olivia wasn’t exactly surprised to see him the next day. In fact, when he walked in the door of her shop ten minutes after she opened, she felt her bones and muscles and organs shift and settle. And, even deeper, her
cells.
Her goddamn DNA. It was what she had kept waiting for all the years with Josh and his bass. She had waited and waited and it had never happened.

“She didn’t like it?” Olivia said.

In his hands, David held the hat. He twirled it around and Olivia thought that if she stared at it long enough, it might turn into butter. There was, she noticed, a dent in the crown.

“You should never break up with someone on Valentine’s Day,” he said. “Especially someone you’ve been with almost forever, who knew you when it was cool to have an Afro and wear bell-bottoms.”

Olivia was listening and frowning, but she couldn’t stop watching his hands twirling that dented hat.

“She threw it at me,” he said.

“‘Break up’ means you’re not married,” Olivia said.

“Right. If I was married, I’d have to divorce her.”

Olivia nodded.

“Your hair,” he said, and this time he didn’t trace the air in front of her. Instead, he put down the hat and touched her face, and then her hair. “It’s even curlier.”

“I was blocking the wool for some hats.” She pointed behind her to the spot where a big pot of water boiled on a hot plate. “It makes my hair do this.”

“Do you want to dance?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Months later, after she had moved in with him and married him and lost him to Amanda driving her blue Honda Civic around a curve one bright sunny September morning, Olivia thought, Dear Amanda, I am not the kind of person who does something like move to the West Village to live with a guy I’ve known for something like six weeks. I mean, Amanda, it took me almost four years to move in with my last boyfriend, Josh, and even when I did, I kept my real apartment, subletting it to one of the witches from the occult store next to my hat shop. I am not the kind of person to marry someone I’ve known for four months. What I’m telling you, Amanda, you stupid, careless little shit, is this was love. The
big one.
And you took it away from me. “Dear Amanda,” Olivia wrote. “I hate you.”

They had moved in together and fought.

“Who are you?” she’d scream at him.

She threw things, too: Arthur’s dish, old hats, the flowers he brought her to make up for their last fight.

The witch who sublet her apartment told Olivia that fire signs and air signs were good for each other. “Trust me,” she said. “Your Libra and his Leo are perfect. And both of your moons are in Cancer. Perfect.”

“Oh, shut up,” Olivia said.

Sometimes she longed for those few months alone in her tiny studio on Avenue A. Sometimes she missed her twinkling red heart lights, her nights sleeping with Arthur purring beside her. How could she have left her freedom behind so quickly? She and Josh had finally broken up and stayed broken up, and what did she do? She had gone and fallen for a guy because he made her body feel like it all fit together right. Like it fit together right with his body, she reminded herself.

“My mother always told me to marry at the height of your love,” David said after one of their fights. “Then you have that to keep you going in all the hard years ahead.”

“Your mother has been married three times,” Olivia said. “I don’t know if I would trust her.”

“Because she never married at the height!” He took Olivia’s hands in his and looked straight in her eyes. Whenever he did that, she felt as if he were somehow boring through her skull and reading her brain waves.

“Don’t be creepy,” she said.

“Listen. She went through the dating period, the get-to-know-you period, the living-together period, the engagement period. By the time she got married, she was already disappointed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So just because you tend to be bossy and domineering—”

“Excuse me?” Olivia said.

“And also fly off the handle over the stupidest things—”

“Like being called bossy and domineering, Mr. Disorganized? Mister Can’t Make Up His Mind? ‘I don’t know if I want the Bay Burrito or the Enchilada Embarcadero? I can’t decide. They’re both good, but I’ve been eating a lot of poultry lately—’”

“My point is, we should just get married now.”

Had that been in my brain waves? Olivia thought. She blinked hard and shook her head from side to side.

“This,” David said, satisfied, “is our height.”

“And to think all you wanted was a hat,” Olivia said as they waited in line at City Hall to get married.

“What ever happened to her?” Winnie asked. She was one of the witnesses.

Olivia felt very cranky. She and David had had an argument in the cab on the way down here and Winnie was wearing brown. “It’s the new black,” Winnie had explained. Being an editor at the women’s magazine
You!
made her say things like that all the time. “No,” Olivia had told her, “it’s brown.” Some wedding day, Olivia kept saying to herself.

“What was her name?” Winnie was saying. “The doctor.”

“Rachel,” David said.

“Yes. Rachel. What ever happened to her?”

This was what the fight had been about. After so many years together—seventeen gross, nine net, David liked to say—he thought he should track her down in goddamn Central America to tell her that he was getting married. Rachel, for an ex-girlfriend, was a pain in the ass. Josh, who only lived across town, stayed out of their lives. But Rachel sent them a clever computer-made change-of-address card with her head back in San Francisco and her feet lifting up and out of New York, the whole country in between strewn with clever images of her things: a stethoscope, a Jack Russell terrier, various plants. Even a Stickley chair.

“What do you want to know?” Olivia said, hearing the snap in her voice. “She keeps us posted, constantly.”

David looked pained, and Olivia found herself wondering if they were going to call the wedding off, right here in the line. Imagining it, she realized how much she wanted to go through with it. She was meant to marry David. It was that simple. The thought of packing up Arthur and moving him back to that little apartment, of living out the rest of her life without David, was so terrible that she actually gasped.

“What?” David said.

“God,” Olivia said. “I want to marry you.”

“I want to marry you, too,” he said, laughing.

“I hope so,” Winnie said. “I went all the way to midtown to borrow this dress from
You!
Brown is this year’s black, you know,” Winnie said, for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“So I’ve heard,” Olivia said.

Winnie could always be counted on for information like that. Of course, she could be counted on for scores of other things, too: sample shoes in exactly Olivia’s size (ten) and give-away moisturizer and shampoo and books in galley form. She could be counted on to come with you in the middle of the night to the twenty-four-hour emergency vet all the way on the Upper East Side when your cat got mysteriously sick. She could be counted on to move your stuff across town when you moved in with your boyfriend, whom you hardly knew. She could be counted on to tell you that you were crazy to move in with him so soon; that clearly the two of you were crazy for each other; that you should, every now and then, throw caution to the wind. She could be counted on to show up at a moment’s notice with a bouquet from the deli, a love poem, and even something blue—lapis earrings that had been her grandmother’s. Which made them old, borrowed,
and
blue, Winnie had pointed out.

She could be counted on for everything, Olivia knew.

“I don’t care what you say,” Olivia said, softening. “Brown is brown. Besides which, I brought you a black hat to wear and you can’t wear black and brown together.”

“You can now,” Winnie said. “It’s okay. You can even wear navy and black together.”

“Oh, sure,” Olivia said. “What are you going to tell me next? That you can wear white shoes after Labor Day?”

She shifted Arthur’s case to her other arm. Inside, he meowed at her, angry. Arthur hated his case and would hate to put on his little cat top hat that she forced him into on every holiday and special occasion.

“Oh, good,” David said. “There’s Rex.”

Rex, his best friend and today’s best man, loped toward them, unshaven and still with bed hair.

“Couldn’t you at least comb your hair?” Olivia said. She spit on her fingertips and reached for Rex, who backed away from her. Now that she knew she was doing exactly the right thing, Olivia wanted everything to be perfect.

“No way,” Rex said. “I don’t even let my mother do that.”

David slapped him on the back, all male and happy. “Hey, man.”

“Hey, man,” Rex said.

Olivia and Winnie rolled their eyes at each other.

Three years earlier, Rex and David had both moved to New York from California. Olivia loved the way they said they were from “the Bay Area,” the way they called beer “suds,” the way they searched the city for a good burrito. Thinking of all these things made her remember to be happy: she was marrying David. She put down Arthur’s case and moved into David’s arms.

Rex was talking about the new play he was working on. He did the lights for theater and, once, for Barney’s Christmas windows.

“Don’t talk about work on our wedding day,” Olivia told him.

“No, no, no,” Rex said. “I’m talking about love.”

“Who’s the lucky one this time?” Olivia said. She had wanted Rex to fall in love with Winnie, but now she knew better. Rex fell in and out of love with each new show.

“Get this,” Rex said. “Her name is Magnolia. For real. Her mother loved magnolia trees.”

Olivia tried to count the people in front of them in line. Since everyone brought witnesses and even entire families with them, it was difficult to tell how many people were actually ahead of them. A group of bikers. A very pregnant woman with a sullen guy. Two women dressed in extravagant wedding gowns. A Chinese family. A Spanish family. Then them. She smiled. They would be married in no time.

David’s voice drifted above her. He was talking about work. He was an industrial designer, and right now he was talking about stainless steel. Olivia tilted her head back and watched his chin move. She hadn’t really studied him from this angle and she kind of liked it. She was short enough and he was tall enough that when she looked at him like this, he looked oddly elongated, like someone in a fun-house mirror. She could see a small spot on his chin that he had missed when he’d shaved. His curly hair reminded her of a topiary and his nose looked bigger than it really was. Although he did have a good-sized nose, a Roman nose, even though he wasn’t Italian at all.

She was Italian. Exactly half. But except for her hair—also brown and curly, although she used an eggplant rinse on it—she did not look at all Italian. Her eyes were blue and she had such fair skin that she always wore a hat in the sun, which, of course, she enjoyed doing, large straw ones with wide brims and fake fruit or flowers on them.

“We really should buy that house at the beach,” she said. On their last excursion up to Rhode Island, they had fallen in love with a run-down purple house. For weeks, they’d been debating whether or not to buy it. It needed work. It needed furniture. Whole sets of things: dishes, utensils, towels, pans. All of it felt so big and grown-up to Olivia.

“I would love to buy it,” David said.

He’d been saying that all along. Like getting married, Olivia realized, they would probably end up doing what he said.

“I would love to be able just to walk down to the ocean early in the morning and stick my toes in,” David said.

Olivia turned to face him. “Should we do it? It would be so romantic.”

Rex raised a hand. “Not in the Hamptons, okay? I hate that scene.”

“No,” Olivia said. “We would buy this house in Rhode Island that we saw.”

“Even though your whole family still lives there?” Winnie said. “That sister?”

“We would let them visit us only once a year. On the Fourth of July.”

David said, “Are you sure about this? You said you were scared of owning two sets of everything.”

Olivia nodded.

“We could drive up and show them,” she suggested.

“I thought we were going for dim sum,” Rex said.

“Dim sum, then we’ll go look at the beach house,” David said.

“Goody,” Winnie said. “A road trip.”

“She even has to come on our honeymoon?” David said.

“Magnolia’s meeting us at the dim sum place, so she can come along,” Rex said.

Olivia leaned into David.

“Oh,” she said, surprising herself by starting to cry. “I’m a June bride.”

A person doesn’t have a right to so much happiness, Olivia thought. But here she was, filled with it. Everything that had come before seemed small and distant now. She imagined riding this happiness through the years, through the rest of her life.

“Next,” a woman called.

She was tall and skinny with too-white skin and stiff black hair and red lipstick that bled past her lips, all of it together giving her the look of a vampire. Her clothes were black and clingy, her shoes thick cork-soled platforms that made her fall slightly forward as she walked toward them in a cloud of tobacco and lily of the valley perfume.

“I’ve come to suck your blood,” David whispered into Olivia’s neck.

The woman thrust papers at them and motioned for them to follow her into the justice of the peace’s chambers. His name, according to a removable plaque on the door, was Rolioli. Vince Rolioli. Like the woman, he had stiff black-lacquered hair like the Dave Clark Five dolls Olivia had had as a little girl. Behind her, Winnie giggled.

“You got your witnesses?” Vince Rolioli asked.

Olivia nodded, waiting for him to stand. Then she realized he was standing, all four feet something of him.

Winnie was holding Arthur in his top hat, and Olivia squeezed her arm. “You look beautiful, Winnie,” she whispered, because it did work—the chocolate brown crushed-velvet minidress and the big black
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
hat that let just enough of Winnie’s blond bob show and the Prada shoes Winnie got at a
You!
shoe giveaway.