Anybody Out There?
Page 40

Ornesto had very bad luck with men. They were always cheating on him or stealing his expensive heavy-bottomed saucepans or going back to their wives. What had happened this time?
“He beat me up.”
“He did?”
“Can’t you see my black eye?”
He displayed it proudly. All I could see was slight purplish bruising beside his eyebrow, but he was so pleased with it that I sucked in my breath sympathetically. “That’s terrible.”
“But the good news is that I’ve started taking singing lessons! My therapist says I need a creative outlet.” Ornesto—unexpectedly, perhaps—was a veterinary nurse. “My voice coach says I have a real gift. Says he never saw anyone get the breathing right so fast!”
“Lovely,” I said vaguely. No point acting too interested: Ornesto was a great man for new passions. He’d have had a row with his teacher and completely turned against the singing by next week.
I looked around; I could smell something…Then I noticed it on his table. A big bunch of flowers. Lilies.
“You have lilies?” I said.
“Yeah, trying to be good to myself, you know? So many guys in line to treat me bad. Only one I can depend on is me, myself, and I.”
“When did you get them?”
He thought about it. “Right about yesterday. Something wrong?”
“No.” But I was wondering if it had been Ornesto’s lilies I had smelled last night. The smell could have come through the air vent into my kitchen. Was that what had happened? Had it been nothing at all to do with Aidan?
25
I used to dream of a white wedding.
The kind of dream where you jerk awake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, your heart pounding. A dream in the worst nightmare kind of way.
I could see it all. The months of bickering with my mother over broccoli. On the day itself, trying to fight a path through my sisters—all of them my bridesmaids—to get space in a mirror to put my makeup on, and having to talk Helen out of wearing my dress. Then Dad walking me up the aisle muttering, “I feel a right gom in this waistcoat.”
But there’s nothing like a near-death experience to bring things into focus.
After I’d recovered from my scuba-diving ascent—I had to spend a short time in a decompression thing, then a much longer time accepting Codependent’s abject apologies; clearly the whole incident had set him back terribly, I’d never met anyone so needy—I rang my mother to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, “What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out?”
Then I told her I was getting married.
“Sure you are.”
“No, Mum, I really am. Wait, I’m going to put him on the line.”
I handed Aidan the phone and he looked terrified. “What do I say?”
“Tell her you want to marry me.”
“Okay. Hello, Mrs. Walsh. Can I marry your daughter?” He listened for a moment then gave me back the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Well, Mum?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing obvious, you mean. Has he a job?”
“Yes.”
“A chemical dependency?”
“No.”
“Cripes, this is a break from tradition. What’s his name?”
“Aidan Maddox.”
“Irish?”
“No, Irish-American. He’s from Boston.”
“Like JFK?”
“Like JFK,” I agreed. Her lot loved JFK, he was up there with the pope.
“Well, look what happened to him.”
Petulantly I said to Aidan, “My mother won’t let me marry you in case you get your head blown off in an open-top car in a Dallas motorcade.”
“Hold your horses,” Mum said. “I never said that. But this is very sudden. And your history of…ah…impulsive carry-on is a long one. And how come you never mentioned him at Christmas?”
“I did. I said I had a boyfriend who kept asking to marry me, but Helen was doing her impersonation of Stephen Hawking eating a cone and no one was listening to me. As usual. Look, ring Rachel. She’s met him. She’ll vouch for him.”
A pause. A sneaky pause. “Has Luke met him?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll ask Luke about him.”
“Do that.”
Any excuse to speak to Luke.
“Are we really getting married?” I asked Aidan.
“Sure.”
“Then let’s do it soon,” I said. “Three months’ time. Start of April?”
“Okay.”
In the New York dating rules, after a relationship “goes exclusive,” the next step is to get engaged. This is meant to happen after three months. Basically, the minute the period of exclusivity starts, the women set a stopwatch for ninety days, and as soon as it brrrrings, they shout, “Right! Time’s up! Where’s my ring?”
But Aidan and I broke all records. A two-month period between going exclusive and getting engaged and three months between getting engaged and getting married. And I wasn’t even pregnant.
But after my brush with death beneath the waves, I was full of vim and vigor and there seemed no point in waiting for anything. My urgent need to do everything right now passed after a couple of weeks, but at the time I was going round seizing the day left, right, and center.
“Where will we do it?” Aidan asked. “New York? Dublin? Boston?”
“None of the above,” I said. “Let’s go to County Clare. West coast of Ireland,” I explained. “We went there for our holidays every summer. My dad’s from there. It’s lovely.”
“Okay. Is there a hotel? Give them a call.”
So I rang the local hotel in Knockavoy and my stomach flipped alarmingly when they said they could fit us in. I hung up the phone and backed away.
“Christ,” I said to Aidan. “I’ve just booked our wedding. I might have to varmint.”
Then everything happened very fast. I decided to leave the menu to Mum because of the great broccoli wars of Claire’s wedding. (A bitter standoff that lasted almost a week with Mum saying that broccoli was “pretentious” and nothing more than “jumped-up cauliflower” and Claire shrieking that if she couldn’t have her favorite vegetable at her wedding, when could she have it?) The way I saw it, the food at weddings is always revolting, so why argue over whether your guests should have disgusting broccoli or inedible cauliflower? “Work away, Mum,” I said magnanimously. “The catering is your area.” But minefields lay in the most innocent-looking of landscapes—I made the mistake of suggesting that we should have a vegetarian option and that set her off: she didn’t believe in vegetarianism. She insisted it was a whim and that people were only doing it to be deliberately awkward.