The last month of summer went by quickly. Julia concluded her lecture series at the university, shipped her paintings home, and packed her bags for New York. By the time she was back in Manhattan, she was too busy to stop and think and long for anyone or anywhere. Bess had meetings for her with the wedding planner and the caterer and the floral designer. She’d have to pick out a simple band at Tiffany’s to go with her engagement ring. She had to get her syllabi in order for her full load this semester, revise her curriculum vitae, and submit a letter to the dean of the School of Fine Arts at Hunter expressing her interest in the department chair position upon Max’s retirement at the end of the year.
Simon was in London working with the Tate and Hockney, but he was due back in a few weeks to help plan some of the final arrangements for the wedding. They had finished making the guest list, and the invitations were ready and waiting to be picked up at the stationery shop on the corner of East 89th and Lexington.
It was a Thursday in early October when Julia picked them up and brought them into Bess’s office on the second floor of the brownstone. They addressed them together, with Chloe carefully putting the modern art “Forever” stamp in the top corner of each one. The image was one of William H. Johnson’s, and it featured a bright angular bouquet of flowers on a table and looked like a postmodernist’s tribute to Picasso and van Gogh.
Chloe was more excited about the wedding than anyone. She had lost her two front teeth and she had broken her arm at day camp in the Hamptons over the summer, which she worried would somehow hamper her role in the wedding. But her arm was nearly mended by now, and she had the littlest buds pushing through her gums. It was her great Christmas wish, like so many seven-year-olds, that she would have her two front teeth by the time of the big event. Julia assured her that nothing short of a full body cast could keep her from her star role in the wedding.
The invitations went out on a Friday in late October and the majority of the responses came back before the end of the month. Julia’s mother would take the train up with her new neighbor friend, and Aunt Dot would come if she was feeling up to it. Meg and her family were unable to attend due to previous holiday commitments, but she sent an extravagant present, a crystal ice bucket and eight crystal highball glasses from a high-end gift shop on King Street, even though the insert in the invitation had requested donations be made to 92nd Street Y’s “fine arts for inner-city kids” program in lieu of gifts. Between Simon and Julia, they had more than enough to outfit an apartment.
Time moved on, and it moved on fast. Julia stepped back into her New York life like an old and familiar coat worn in just the right spots—teaching all day, visiting the latest galleries on the weekend, painting on her deck on weekend mornings until the chill drove her inside. She had submitted some slides of her “Faces of Budapest” paintings to a few of the premier private galleries around the country and was hoping one of them might be interested in putting together an exhibit with a focus on Central Europe. She was eagerly awaiting their responses.
Simon came back into town like a whirlwind in early November, carting her around to meet interested buyers, taking her to furniture stores where they could select a few new pieces to make his apartment more theirs than his, taking her to her doctor’s appointment where the obstetrician encouraged them to start trying for that baby as soon as the ink was dry on the marriage certificate.
Hockney arrived later that week with his third wife in tow, a very young woman from Lithuania who wanted to dine at the Four Seasons beneath the twinkling chain curtains because she’d read about them in an American magazine. It would be an important dinner meeting with Pierre Levasseur, who was the assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Levasseur had taken a recent interest in Hockney after the press release about the Tate exhibit. If Simon could land Hockney an exhibit at the MOMA, they both would have reached a kind of milestone in their careers far beyond their wildest imaginings. Simon was relieved to have procured a dinner reservation at the Four Seasons on such late notice, but he insisted that they be put at a table in the far corner. (The last time they had eaten there nearly two years ago, they’d sat right beside Brad Pitt and his entourage, and Simon was completely put out by how loud they were and how many things they sent back to the chef because it had this or that ingredient they didn’t like.)
The night of the dinner, Julia felt fine. But when they were all seated at their corner table with a view of the whole room, swaying silver curtains and all, she saw a man out of the corner of her eye who bore a striking resemblance to Jack Ball, the photographer friend she had lost at the World Trade Center. He kept staring at her from across the way, and by the time the entrées arrived, her heart was pounding so furiously she knew a panic attack was inevitable.
It had been so long since she’d had one. What was wrong with her? Was she hallucinating? When the man came over to introduce himself, she stood up as if drawn by some other force and yelped with fear, at which Simon quickly arose and came to her side. She realized as she stared at the man that it wasn’t Jack. He was much shorter and his nose had a crook in it that was different from her friend’s. The man was, in fact, a British journalist who particularly admired Hockney, and he couldn’t help but be so bold as to introduce himself. Simon quickly excused himself and escorted her to the ladies’ room, where she stood in the hallway trembling.
“What’s got into you, Julia?” he whispered in a frustrating hush as he ran his fingers through his spiky salt-and-pepper hair. Three deep worry lines were spreading across his forehead, and she noticed a thick vein throbbing along the side of his neck. “This is one of the biggest dinners of our lives.”
“I don’t know,” she said as she bit her thumbnail. “I’m sorry.”
“Get ahold of yourself.” He motioned toward the bathroom. “Splash some water on your face, powder your nose, and then come on back to the table.”
“All right,” she said, and she raced into the beautiful bathroom with its green velvet walls and little crystal chandeliers.
She popped the emergency Ativan she now carried in her purse, and she continued through the dinner breathing out of her mouth, nodding, smiling, and saying very little. Simon was irritated, she could tell, but he walked her up to the brownstone, with Hockney and his wife in the cab, still eager to hit the late-night scene. He rubbed her cheek with his thumb. “Get some rest. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She looked into his eyes. He did earnestly love her. She could see that, and she didn’t really even know why.
“I hope I didn’t mess up the evening.”
He pecked her forehead. “Of course you didn’t. You were the most beautiful woman in the room, and I was the envy of every man.”
She shook her head as Hockney called, “Let’s go, Simon! You two have the rest of your lives to smooch, and my bride wants a nitrotini at Bar 89.”
JULIA MET WITH HER THERAPIST THE FOLLOWING week for the first time in several months. She told her all about the summer—her week at Edisto, the months in Budapest, her anxiety about the wedding.
“You think I just have the garden-variety jitters?” she asked.
“Probably,” her therapist said. “But I’m stunned that you went to Edisto to keep those children.” She clicked her pen against her pad. “And I’m even more stunned about how much genuine fun it sounds like you had.”
Julia planted her face in her hands. “I know,” she said. “It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Isn’t that insane?”
ONE NOVEMBER AFTERNOON, WHEN THE FIRST snowflakes started falling, Julia took a break from grading papers to watch them flutter down in front of her office window. The first snow brought with it a hush that fell over the city for several months like a heavily weighted cloak, and it brought a kind of quiet, sleepy peace she always enjoyed. Just as she imagined her pulse slowing like a bear preparing for hibernation, her phone rang.
“Oh, Juuul-yah.” It was Aunt Dot. Immediately, Julia could tell by the tone of her voice it was bad news and she thought of the children and prayed they were all right.
“It’s back,” the woman’s warbly voice bellowed. “Marney’s cancer. It’s in her brain, and it’s not good.”
Julia blinked hard and continued to stare out of the window. Her office faced the inside of the building and she had a view of other offices on all sides and an old, rusted furnace no one had bothered to dispose of.
“What’s the prognosis?” she said as the snow began to coat windowsills and the surface of the old furnace.
“We’re looking at all of the options, but it’s the worst kind. They call it glioblastoma multiforme,” Dot said. “My neighbor Arthur Chutney had it a few years ago and he was gone in less than three months.”
Julia blinked slowly. It was more than she could take in. And then the three round faces popped into her mind. “How are the children?”
Aunt Dot clucked. “They don’t really understand, and she hasn’t told them much.”
Julia saw Etta in her mind’s eye—her green, knowing eyes. And then the words surfaced. “What should I do?”
“I don’t know, honey. I really don’t know. I know your big day is approaching and I don’t want to put too much on you.”
“I do have a lot right now.” Julia exhaled deeply as Etta’s image faded. “Thank you, Aunt Dot. Thank you for letting me know.”
“I guess all any of us can do is pray, Julia. Our times are in his hands.”
“I will,” Julia said, nodding firmly. “I will pray every day. Please keep me updated when you can.”
“Of course, sweetheart.”
THE DAYS CLICKED SLOWLY BY AS THE SNOW FELL AND turned to a gray slush, and Julia thought of Marney. She looked up glioblastoma multiforme on the computer and the outlook was bleak. Life expectancy was typically less than a year.
She almost called the home phone at Edisto more than once as the cold, dark evenings ticked by. Then she found herself swept up in the preparation of the department meeting where she was elected, almost unanimously, chair of the visual arts department. Now the dean needed a five-year plan to show to the provost in a few weeks before the next budget was decided on and Max gladly turned it over to her. “All yours now, Julia.”
“Oh boy.” She took a deep breath, brewed a large pot of coffee, and got to work preparing the plan.
A month went by, and she heard nothing more. Two weeks before the wedding, Marney called her, sounding very frail at the other end of the line. “I need to speak to you, Julia. Can you come home? I just need one meeting with you.”