The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (6 page)

“He’s handsome, Molly,” my mother said. “His nose isn’t as big as you said. It fits his face.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, waiting for more.

“Great food tonight, but the mom’s a piece of work,” my father said. He hates when a woman other than my mother tries to make him samba.

“Yeah, well, what about Barry?”

He paused. “If you love him, we’ll love him,” he said finally.

“Great dancer,” my mother added. I could tell she was stretching.

I turned to my sister.

“He complimented my tits,” Lucy said.

“He did not,” I shrieked, while I heard my mother sigh. Lucy is the most cleavage-focused woman I’ve ever met. She thinks every man is staring at her boobs, trying to decide if they’re real. They are.

“Did.”

“Did not.”

“You two …,” my mother said.

“Molly, give me three reasons why you want to marry this guy, and that headlight of a ring doesn’t count,” Lucy said.

I stared at Lucy. I couldn’t say “You’re just jealous,” not so much because the remark crossed a line I didn’t want to pass, but because some unplumbed nook of my psyche considered that she might be on to something. I looked out the window, but there were no answers in the passing cars.

“He’ll make a good father,” I offered.

“That’s crucial,” my mother quickly responded. She didn’t ask me how I could tell, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain. Just intuition.

“He worries about me,” I said. “I like a man who doesn’t want me riding the subway alone past ten.” As if I couldn’t make that decision for myself.

He may love me more than I love him
was something I didn’t think I should list. I still thought it was wildly desirable for that to be the working dynamic in a successful relationship, and in our case, the only reason I believed it to be true was that he’d asked me to marry him with record-shattering speed.
Because I’m attracted to him?
I can tell my mother anything, but talking about sex with my dad? Nope.
I trust Barry?
I wasn’t sure I did.

“Lame,” Lucy snickered.

“Do you want me to screw up by marrying Barry?” I asked her.

“You hardly know the guy.” I noticed that this failed to answer my question.

“My fiancé has a name—Barry—and we’ve been spending every minute together,” I said, though it was a lie. His work always seemed to get in the way. “Mom and Dad had an even shorter engagement.” After knowing each other for two months, they eloped.

“Point taken,” Lucy said.

The four of us remained mute for the rest of the ride.

August arrived. The day of the wedding, Lucy showed more décolletage than a random Hollywood starlet. It was a small price to pay to have her drop the subject of my making a mistake. “You can still get out of it,” she’d said sotto voce at my bridal shower the month before, which she threw at a Chicago lingerie shop that specializes in X-rated undies with toys to match. I got enough thongs to outfit a brothel and the thirty-one guests each received a vibrator disguised as a lipstick.

Three weeks later, I was a comely footnote in bridal history, not a radiant headline. Wearing my hair up was definitely the wrong move—I looked like a hostess at Howard Johnson’s—but it wasn’t that or the fact that Rabbi S.S. had double-booked and had to send his twitchy sidekick. When I looked at my pictures later, I saw a frightened bride.

I walked down the aisle on my father’s arm. Under the chuppa, six feet away from me, a stranger was waiting. It took a moment to realize he was Barry Marx, who in ten minutes would become my husband. Forever. I broke a sweat and, worrying that perspiration stains would show, stumbled on the white carpet that had been unfurled down the middle of our lawn, dividing the Divines from the Marxes. My dad, pale as milk, steadied my arm. We exchanged a glance and in his face I saw the fear I felt.

I don’t remember the vows. I don’t remember anything about the actual ceremony except Barry’s lengthy, theatrical tongue kiss. What was the romantic ballad I had obsessed over that accompanied our first walk as husband and wife? My ears echoed with silence.

But then the reception began—loud, long, throbbing. In summer, the Chicago twilight comes late, and at ten, along with a fistful of stars, lights hidden in the oak trees lit up like pavé diamonds. On account of
the heat, everyone drank not just the pomegranate martinis circulated after the ceremony but cases and cases of crisply cold pinot grigio and, later, Champagne.

There’s nothing I find less appealing than a drunken woman, but I definitely had a buzz on. Loose-limbed and smoking, Lucy and I did our Molly and Moosey number, alone in a circle of clapping girlfriends, a performance saved from lewdness only because it was performed in bridal frou-frou. Soon Brie, my other Northwestern friends, and the New York crowd joined in, watched on the sidelines by Isadora, too soignée for such a display.

“This must be what happy feels like,” I said to Brie as we twirled in the middle of the dance floor, our booties bouncing to the beat.

When the band took a break, I went in the back door and upstairs to powder myself with scented talc and keep the dainty bride thing going. As I walked out of my bathroom door, I heard Barry’s laugh. He owns the kind of guffaw that makes people turn around in movie theaters; aspiring standup comics should pay to have that appreciative noise in their audience. The sound stopped abruptly, but it had come from downstairs, and I moved toward it.

I got to the foyer as Barry walked out of the guest bathroom and continued in the other direction, toward the hallway that led outside. I was ready to call his name when the door opened again. One of his guests from New York—Remy, Romy, Ronnie?—exited the bathroom and sashayed in the other direction. Which made us collide.

“Molly,” she said, nonplussed. Her Toffee Frost lipstick was smeared, her long red hair disheveled. I couldn’t tell if the hairdo was intentional or if a neo-beehive had collapsed due to avid fondling. “Beautiful wedding!” she gushed, and flew away, innocent as a butterfly.

I staggered outside, searching for the nearest chair.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Barry said, running toward me. “C’mon, sweetheart—the cake.”

“I need a moment,” I said, but a waiter was rolling in three towering layers of chocolate pastry, heavy on the whipped cream, studded with enormous strawberries, topped with blazing sparklers. Barry and I completed our drill—his hand on top of mine, the new gold band gleaming against his tan—as the knife sliced through the layers and the shock sliced through my heart. We smiled for the camera.

“Is Mrs. Marx ready for her life to begin?” Barry whispered as he drew me toward him. His breath was minty, his smile confident, his teeth unnaturally white.

Mrs. Marx has another idea about where to stick this knife
, I thought as he kissed me and the photographer snapped.

f anyone imagines that during shiva a moratorium is declared on discussing the widower’s social life, they would be dead wrong.

“Whenever you’re ready let me know, because my wife’s sister—you remember Stacey?”

“Stacey with the chest?” Barry asks.

“Precisely. Stacey and her husband?
Finito.”

I overhear at least six proposed hook-ups, including one from our accountant, who wants Barry to meet his daughter. She’s a senior at Stanford but, he promises, “an old soul.”

“I thought you could use some dinner,” a divorced mom from Annabel’s school class says as she presents an armful of vegetarian lasagna. “For you and Andrea.”

I hear Barry think,
Not my type
, as he sizes up her double-wide hips, but the only words out of his mouth are “Thanks. Annabel and I appreciate it.” He hands off the Pyrex to Delfina, who crams it into the freezer next to a pot roast, turkey chili, and a tragic casserole of Velveeta and canned pinto beans that’s made from a recipe I passed by last month on the AOL home page.

“Should have gone for the bigger Sub-Zero,” he says to Delfina as he returns to the living room.

“A lot of things you shoulda done,” she says to herself after he leaves the room.

While many Reform Jews do a token shiva for a day or two, my family goes the whole nine yards: seven days, with time off for good behavior on the Sabbath, when Barry shows up at temple, both Friday night and Saturday morning. Throughout the week, I carefully monitor my husband. Has Model Mourner researched funeral customs? Although he dresses carefully, in a black cashmere turtleneck and gray flannel pants, he doesn’t shave, which leaves him looking just this side of seedy. On at least a dozen occasions he gets teary when someone mentions my name.

It took me two days to notice, however, that Dr. Barry Marx has varied his meticulous routine. Before dinner, were it not for shiva, he’d have gone for his usual after-work run followed by a shower that would last five to fifteen minutes, depending on whether or not he jerks off. After dinner, he’d log time at his laptop to look at e-mail (he has three accounts:
[email protected]
and
[email protected]
, plus the one he doesn’t know I know about,
[email protected]
). He’d then check out the
Wall Street Journal
’s take on medical developments, followed by a spot of porn while he’d blare the TV—always a marital sore point. Because of shiva, he’s taken a break from these pursuits, but the rest of his evening remains intact. At eleven-ten, Barry does two hundred sit-ups and fifty push-ups, kisses Annabel’s forehead, and spends eight minutes on WaterPik maneuvers. Letterman’s opening monologue follows, then exactly one chapter of a book—mystery, history, or athlete’s biography—before his midnight curfew.

But he’s added an intriguing detail. Barry has taken to wearing his wedding ring, which every night he now deposits in the Cartier box in which it arrived, the one he keeps in his second-from-the-top drawer. The box is in pristine condition, since the ring has seen little action. This never bothered me—my father doesn’t wear a wedding band and plenty of cheaters I know do. Nonetheless, the ring—engraved with our wedding date and the word
forever
—has started appearing on his finger.
Tonight he looks at the shiny band as if he’d never seen it before, turning it over in his hand as the phone rings.

“Hideous,” he says after picking it up. “I’ll be glad when this ordeal is over.”

The slightly nasal voice on the other end is the same person who has called around eleven every night for the last week.

“Thank God it’s the last day,” Barry says.

I study Barry’s face. His eyes look puffy, and I see wrinkles, newly engraved.

“How do I feel? Like dog shit.”

This does not make me unhappy.

“I think she’s doing okay, but it’s hard to tell—she’s been practically mute.”

Wrong. Annabel’s been quite a little chatterbox when Barry’s not around, especially when she’s alone.

“Everyone’s all over her—Delfina, my mother-in-law, and that loudmouth Lucy. Oh, and Molly’s friends.”

Who’ve come, one by one and in small groups, every night of shiva.

“Yeah, especially the lipstick lesbians.”

My gang has really been here.

“Tomorrow? Impossible. I’m back in surgery.”

That poor nose.

“No, my feelings haven’t changed.”

Does he care about this woman? I can’t tell. After the wedding, I never could tell if he cared about me.

“I’m hanging up now.”

The voice sounds even more nasal.

“Have a little decency,” he says.

He looks at the clock.

“I mean it. I’m beat. Another time, Stephanie.”

Stephanie
.

Barry crawls into bed. He avoids my side as if rolling there would mean that he, too, will land in a grave, and falls asleep in less than two minutes.

It’s true that he has surgery in the morning, but not until ten. A detective named Hicks arrives at seven forty-five. He is African American, no older than his early thirties, one earring, a discreet gold stud. I can’t resist watching him, a man who is far more handsome than he guesses.

“Mr. Marx,” he begins, taking inventory of our living room.

“It’s Dr.,” Barry answers reflexively
Putz
, he thinks,
why did I say that?

“Excuse me,” Hicks says. “
Dr
. Marx. I’m sorry for your loss and intruding at this time, sir, but as I told you on the phone, this is standard. Just a few questions.”

“I’m all yours,” Barry says.

We’ll see about that
, I hear Hicks think. “The evening that Mrs. Marx went out biking—the night before she was found dead, that is. Where were you?”

Barry answers immediately. “I was running. In Central Park. Training for the marathon.”

“Same here,” Hicks offers, in a friendlier tone than I would have predicted.

“Well, then you know how much time you have to put in,” Barry says. “At least an old guy like me does.” He laughs as he attempts to grease his way with charm. He guesses that he isn’t actually too many years older than Hicks, but the detective isn’t going to reward him with personal workout details.