Margot
My mother’s wails and her subsequent fainting à la Victorian lady (resulting in her falling face-first into a golden footrest, which, come on, even I found funny) didn’t get to me. But it did get to my eye twitch. My eye twitch was seriously affected and decided making my eyelid samba was a good idea.
My sisters’ funereal silence did more than get to me; it freaked me out. I was scared they were judging me the way I knew everyone else was and also that, when all this passed and waters calmed a little, Candela would open her big mouth and say the forbidden words: told you so.
But on the list of two hundred problems my running off down the path of an empty lawn had caused, the only one that really mattered to me was in front of me right then: Filippo.
His forearms were resting on his knees, and his head was hanging down, avoiding even looking at me. I wished he would, but I wasn’t in the position to ask for anything. I ran out on our wedding and left him at the altar and let him down when it came time to give explanations in front of five hundred guests. I wriggled out of his arms and sprinted across the lawn outside the hotel and squeezed through a hole in a fence. It’s best not to even mention the state of my wedding dress.
“Say something,” I pleaded in a small voice.
Ever since he had come into my mother’s house, where I was imprisoned “for my own good” after they “hunted me down” in a gas station restaurant a kilometer and a half from the wedding venue, he hadn’t opened his mouth. All he had done was sit opposite me on the footrest my mother had crashed into when she fainted, frozen in the same position he was still in now.
When he heard me, he lifted his head, but for two eternal minutes, he still didn’t utter a single word.
“Please,” I begged.
He lifted his chin and looked at me. I had changed my mind, but I didn’t want him to. I didn’t like what I was seeing at all. None of it seemed familiar to me; this was some stranger version of Filippo who didn’t even want to be near me. But I mean, every action has a consequence. That’s one of the first things we learn in childhood, and I guess our existence is supposed to be simplified by learning this, if we possess the skill of thinking before you act, which I don’t.
“You ran. Away. From our wedding.”
The pauses between the words were heavy, as if he had to drag up every tiny syllable weighed down by shackles from the depths of his disappointment. I swallowed, and this time, it was my head that drooped.
“With no explanation, without even talking to me, without saying anything to me,” he insisted.
“I did talk to you.”
“You told me there were too many people and you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t do what? That’s as good as saying nothing.”
“I was filled with… I don’t know. Panic.”
“About marrying me?”
“No!” I looked up at him. “Of course not. I want to marry you.”
“You wanted to marry me. Don’t use the present tense.”
“I want to marry you, Filippo.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence. Don’t hurt me even more, Margarita.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you and…don’t…don’t…don’t call me Margarita. I’m Margot to you. Just Margot.”
“To me, you’re the woman who escaped down the highway on our wedding day. You’re the woman I loved who broke my heart, Margarita. Let me call you whatever I want.”
I sniffed and looked at the ceiling. Bobby pins were digging into my scalp.
“I don’t understand what happened to me. I think I need help,” I said.
“You need a lot. You made me believe this was all real.”
“That’s enough, Filippo,” I said, dripping with hostility. “You’ve made it very clear you think I was tricking you because I’m the worst person on earth, but you’re wrong.”
“So then what?”
“So then I don’t even know what I did or how I did it. I don’t even know how I got to the fucking gas station, for fuck’s sake.”
I covered my eyes. I had spent my whole life avoiding being whispered about in society, but…now I was doing it in grand style: Heir to the Ortega empire flees her wedding down the highway and is found in a Galp gas station drinking a Coke. It was going to cost me a fortune to stop that news leaking to the press.
By the way…how had I planned on paying for the soda, now that I think about it?
“What do you want me to believe? That you have mental health problems? I live with you, Margot.” I was flooded with relief when I heard my real name. “I know you don’t. You’re completely sane.”
“I’ve been feeling really weird lately, Filippo. Really, really weird. I’m not sleeping, I’ve been distracted, anxious. Sometimes I find my socks in the fridge and I throw yogurt into the laundry basket.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
Filippo stood up and started pacing around the living room. He had taken off his suit, just like I had taken off my beautiful, trashed white dress. His legs, in tight dark pants, roamed around the room that was decorated to the hilt. Minimalism and my mother didn’t get along.
“You’re not crazy, Margot.”
“Well, I ran out of my wedding to the man I love. How else would you explain that?”
“Simple.” He looked at me again. “You don’t love me as much as you say. Or you don’t love me as much as you think.”
“Filippo, please.”
“Margot, you jilted me at the altar. You jil-ted-me-at-the-al-tar.”
“Shit.” I curled into a ball in Lord Mushroom’s wing chair.
“No. You can’t run away from this too. You jilted me at the altar in front of my whole family, my mother, father, sister, nonna… My nonna is a hundred years old, Margot.”
“Don’t make me feel even worse.”
“Besides my nonna,” he continued, “my boss was there. And my boss’s boss. The guests included eight work colleagues. A minister from my country and…wait, there was also my uncle, who’s a bishop.”
“Fine, I’ve caused problems with the Italian state, the Spanish embassy and the Vatican. Anything else?”
I watched as he leaned against the ornamental fireplace and crossed his ankles. His elbow on the mantelpiece, his fingers in his thick blond hair. His eyes cold. Like ice.
“What did I do wrong?” he asked, still not looking at me. “I always treated you with respect, like an equal. I respected your professional ambition, your beliefs, your schedule.”
“Filippo, that’s what a normal couple does.”
He shot me a furious look.
“I loved you more than anyone has ever loved!”
God. Not the opera, please. I squeezed the bridge of my nose and braced myself for the next hit.
“I was crazy in love. I left my apartment to move into yours! I put my plans on the back burner. I always prioritized our relationship like it was the only thing that mattered. I put up with your mother, for the love of God! That has to be worth something.”
I had to give him that one, but all I could do was nod.
“You know what, Margot? You’re right. You need help. And I’m sorry if I’m being harsh, but the fact that you made me a laughingstock in front of five hundred people took away the love filter. Do you know what you seem like? Like you’re thirty-two years old and you don’t even know who you are or what you want. You always do things because you think they’re expected of you, right? Yes, you do need help, but not mental help. You need help to learn how to live and be free, dammit.”
I hung my head and tucked my knees into my chest.
“Your inertia drags everything around you down. Even me. Because you don’t care about all the things you are, Margot, you’re obsessed with what you are not, and that is exactly what happened to you today. Your fucking obsession was more important than our love.” His voice broke, and I buried my head between my chest and my knees, cocooning myself. “Fear that people would say…what? That you weren’t elegant, that you hadn’t chosen a good dress, that the food was cold? You broke everything because of the opinions of people you don’t care about!”
I looked at him and shook my head while two round tears made tracks down my already washed face.
“Now what?”
“I’ll fix it,” I promised.
“It can’t be fixed.”
“Of course it can.” I sobbed. “Filippo, this is our fairy tale.”
“I don’t believe in fairy tales, Margot, and you shouldn’t either. Live your life through your own eyes, not everyone else’s. That would be a good start.”
I ran my hand under my nose and then swiped away a few tears. As he headed toward the door, Filippo said, with a determination that I never could have imitated. “I’m going to leave Spain for a while. My bosses told me I should enjoy the month and a half I had taken off even though I didn’t…didn’t get married. And I’m going to do just that. I’m going to go sailing with some friends and maybe read on a beach. And during this time, until I get back, I don’t want you to call or text me because I need to figure out if I can forgive you for what you’ve done, if our love carries more weight.”
“You’re leaving me? I mean, you’re going to live”—I wiped away my tears—“like a free man the whole summer and then you’ll decide? Because I don’t like that, Filippo.” I sobbed. “I don’t want this to turn into a summer of you getting revenge on me by fucking other women.”
“No, I’m not leaving you, though you have no right to demand fidelity from me right now. All I’m trying to do is see whether I miss you after a few weeks, if I can forgive this humiliation. Then we’ll talk.”
“When?” I cried.
“Don’t call me or text me. We’ll talk in September.”
“It’s June!” I whimpered. “That’s more than two months.”
“That’s how long I estimate I’ll need to make my mind up. If you’re upset about that, we may as well throw in the towel now and say goodbye forever.” When I didn’t say anything, he nodded, taking my silence to mean I accepted his conditions. “Goodbye, Margot. Have a good summer.”
I heard the door click shut from where I was cowering in the wing chair. My mother’s voice moved away with Filippo’s footsteps toward the exit of the humongous flat in the Marqués de Salamanca Plaza. I was sure she had been trying to eavesdrop on our conversation, worried that her daughter was throwing away her opportunity to redeem not being special through a good marriage. The door to the building closed too, and I swear I could hear my ex-fiancé’s footsteps going down the stairs outside. I let my nails root through my hair as much as my hairstyle would allow and then rested my cheek on my knee.
My mother poked her head into the room and then came in. Her heels tapped along the floor with a sound muffled by expensive carpets.
“Margarita, it would be better if you take a vacation. Nobody in Madrid should see you right now. We don’t want this turning into an even bigger incident, do we? You…just behave. Show him that you regret what you did and he’ll forgive you.” She patted me on the arm. “And get your feet off that chair. It’s a Louis XVI, and it cost two thousand euros.”