…while a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. And it was soon over.
"It is over! It is over!" she repeated to herself again, and again, in nervous gratitude. "The worst is over!" ( Chapter VII)
Rory had occupied herself at work most admirably the entire afternoon, saving herself from agonizing, as her mother had accused, over the inevitable meeting that evening. She had resigned herself to the Inevitable. Until a week ago, such a meeting was not inevitable; it was not even probable. She knew he had been 3,470 miles away, and had been so for the stretch of roughly 1,460 days (out of the 2,555), and with 6 billion breathing bodies between he and she on the planet, she had come to seriously doubt whether they would actually
She tore at the frayed cuticle on her big toe quite savagely, effectively halting her familiar lapse to numerical, agonizing idiocy. The pain brought tears to her eyes, and it sharpened her focus back to the task at hand. She must concentrate on perfecting her pedicure; let it not be said that Rory Gilmore walked into the lion's den with jagged toenails and ragged cuticles. No, she would meet this Louisa Monroe in a blaze of crimson-toed glory.
As she carefully stroked on the paint with its tiny brush, chin resting on her freshly shaved knee, she was momentarily soothed by a sense of oneness with countless members of her sex who must have likewise undergone the exquisite torments of preparing to meet an ex-boyfriend. Not just an ex-boyfriend, in fact, but the very one. She was old enough to speak the truth to herself—Logan Huntzberger had been the One. Seven years ago, true, but in her mind the (definite) article 'the' had yet to be replaced by the (indefinite) 'a'; the capitalized 'O' had yet to be replaced by its lowercase.
The one he may have been, but surely there were hundreds, thousands of women like her who had survived the inevitable or improbable encounter with the ex? Thousands of women like her who had scrutinized and criticized themselves in every dress they owned (forming an impressive mountain of clothing on their beds); thousands of women who had felt queasy enough not to eat anything the entire day (thankfully shrinking bloat or poundage that hounded them over the years). Thousands of women like her who stared at themselves in the mirror, finally satisfied that the ex (the One) would fall to his knees and weep with regret at their crimson-toed feet upon laying eyes on their perfection. The scenario is really quite commonplace, so she tried to convince herself, standing in her kitchen and munching on a fistful of Loops while waiting for David.
Such an occasion, such preparation, would have warranted the sympathetic gaggle of girlfriends, the voice of Lorelai on speaker phone instructing her on what color of lipstick to apply for the kill. But Rory preferred to do it alone, sans Lorelai, Lane, or Julia and Hannah who would have gamely hurled invectives at Louisa's effervescent bubbles until they burst (all part of the preparatory ritual, of course). She'd rather be alone. Because when she stared at herself in the mirror, she caught the hint of regret in her own eyes—doubtful that she'd see it in his—a matched set with the dead weight of dread in her stomach. At least the thin gold straps of her heels matched her earrings, likewise.
No, it was not a simple matter of meeting an ex, as if it were some banal high school reunion. She was steeling herself for the encounter she had been conjuring in her sleep more nights than not. Ever since he walked away.
How could he fall at her feet, moreover, when the Monroes—his and hers—would be standing alongside their imagined tête-à-tête?
There are not thousands, but perhaps just a few women, in a situation like hers.
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"She has an Art History degree from Cambridge, and she's been working as an assistant curator in the Fitzwilliam Museum this last year."
Effervescent is to bubbly is to airhead. Not. Will she be denied any gleeful satisfaction from this? She hoped for hair on Louisa Monroe's upper lip, and said, "Oh, wow. Sounds like she can give Kate Middleton a run for the Mrs. HRH crown. There's some serious competition for Prince William's heart right there."
David gave Rory a queer look as he killed the engine, and began to laugh, belatedly. "Well, actually…"
Rory's eyes widened. Seriously? Prince William? While my claim to fame is square dancing with Barack Obama in Iowa, and shaking hands with Christiane Amanpour in my pajamas. She looked down and checked her toes as David locked the car and walked to her side.
"She watched him playing polo and had dinner a couple of times with some common friends is all. Louisa's like that. She could charm the socks off of anyone, even the Queen." He looked down at Rory, who had been pensive throughout the drive. "Even you, Rory. I think you'll like her," he smiled, hopeful.
Rory gave David a wan smile. "No worries. I'm so charm-able. Tell me she's had drinks with Bono, too, and she's as good as my long-lost sister." David was so earnest, so eager for her to like and be liked by his family. It made her uncomfortable. She was not in the running for any crown.
"Charm-able, huh. So the months I spent in pursuit of you must indicate that something's really terrible about my personality. I know I keep up my oral hygiene."
"Well you're no Bono, but you will do," Rory reassured, squeezing his arm distractedly. They were walking up the long driveway to the front door, which was open and spewing light and chatter and music. So inviting. Meanwhile, her legs felt heavy. Such a long driveway.
"Now I feel like that talking pig. 'That'll do, pi—' Man, this place is huge," David interrupted himself as he took in the Huntzberger mansion up close. Rory raised an eyebrow in the dark. They were just as moneyed, but she'll grant that the Monroes were slightly less ostentatious in their stylish 700 sq. meter digs scattered along the Upper East Side.
"I hope their plumbing is good. Any pooling would take months to discover and drain." An old comment coming up unbidden, resurfacing from the last time she walked up that driveway. The memory only helped to increase the chill in her gut under her burgundy wool coat.
They entered the foyer. As the warmth and crush of fragrant people pressed in on Rory, she ironically, thankfully, felt the numbness in her legs and insides gradually liquefy. The tinkling of wine glasses, of ambient piano keys, doused the flitting images in her head of ice blue dresses, a faceless Fallon girl, a long-ago dinner gone awry. Surely she had gained in wisdom and fortitude in the ten years since? Well, let's get this over and done with then, she thought to herself with growing calm, shrugging her coat gracefully into David's hands.
She meandered alone and around the marble pillars as David deposited their coats. She stopped in front of Diego Velazquez's Infanta something-or-other, vaguely comforted by the familiarity of the painting, the inconspicuousness of her presence. Ten minutes in and no one had yet accosted her for being where she wasn't supposed to be. A good omen. As was the beatific face of the girl child in the painting. You've done nothing wrong, Rory.
"Is that a Velazquez?" David reappeared by her side, sliding his arm around her waist. "Come on, let's go find Louisa and her Logan."
Yes, let's. Finally. Across the country, the Atlantic, and back, it is time for me to find Logan.
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Rory was not as inconspicuous as she thought.
It began with a prickling at the nape of his neck, which spread down his arm to a restless shaking of the hand that held his drink. He swirled, and the liquid sloshed a bit down the sides of the glass. Louisa was gaily regaling the Furstenbergs with the details of her crystal-studded wedding dress (how heavy is that? he wondered), and Logan felt justified in excusing himself.
"Sometimes I do wish I were the groom. Just a tux with a neat little bowtie and voila!" Louisa rued, laughing.
"And have you wither from the lack of attention? I wouldn't allow that," Logan replied seriously. "Excuse me," he nodded to their company, and turned swiftly on his heel.
The air had shifted in the house, as if disturbed by the colliding molecules of a new presence. He needed to move. He wasn't sure where he was going, smiling and shaking hands with his guests as he went along. (Louisa's and his parents' guests, rather. He really wouldn't know the -bergs and -bergers from Adam and Eve.) Until he found himself striding up the winding staircase that receded against the wall, two steps at a time, the stairs leading up to a circumferential balcony that overlooked the living room. It was nearly a 30-foot distance to the floor below. As he rested his elbows a moment on the balustrade, his eyes zoomed onto a still figure, a point of focus in a restless room seething with the movement of bobbing heads.
He knew it was her.
Her hair was shorter than he had ever seen or remembered it; the ends curved slightly inward to touch her chin. It exposed her neck. And from his view from above, it was all he could see. Her neck made longer by its not being hidden under the heaviness of her hair; made longer by the unbroken view of her sloping upper back. And so white was her neck and back against the deep dip and blue of her dress. His empty hand twitched reflexively, and he allowed it to curve around his glass. Her toes, he also saw, were red.
Logan ran his fingers under his collar. He felt hot and tight, strung-out from his run up the long stairs (or so he reasoned). He neither blinked nor flinched from his perusal of her, unconsciously willing her not to turn around. He might need a moment, another drink to brace himself for the blue of her eyes—the real blue, not the washed-out version in his memory. She did not turn around. Rather, her face turned abruptly to the side (the sudden shift from stillness surprising him) to look at a man who had sidled up to her. The man wound his arm around her waist, his sleeve touching her bare pale back. He pointed to the Velazquez, and she might well be telling him its title and the year it was painted. Not that the man—David, he supposed—would be particularly interested in the triviality, but it would certainly serve to magnify her quirky charm. Logan's hand prickled again, drops of his drink falling on the balustrade. Swiping them with his sleeve, he suddenly recalled his 7 year-old self squeezing and swinging between these banisters after a solitary viewing of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He had very nearly fallen. He stepped back now from the edge.
It gave him an unfair upper hand, being able to watch Rory like this before they actually met again. To saturate himself in her white neck and red toes as if to inure himself. There again, his sleeve touching her skin. Desensitization. He wouldn't be caught off guard. Not by the sight of a man standing next to her. Nor would he fall into the depth of her blue eyes.
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It all happened very suddenly. Suddenly David raised his hand in a violent wave; suddenly there was a shout of "Louie!" and a squeal (a chirp?) of "Davey! Oh my God!". A flash of something white and shiny (and bubbly); a jostling of bodies next to her as the cousins-cum-brother-and-sister hugged each other. Rory stepped clear and couldn't help smiling at their exuberance. Davey? Her glance slid sideward—she caught her breath as she caught sight of a blonde man standing in the periphery—her glance slid downward and she stared at the tip of his shoe. Now, Rory. Now. Just look at him for God's sake, woman. Remember the crimson toenails! But he stepped a fraction away from her peripheral view. They formed a funny little semi-circle, a dance of shifting eyes and stances as they looked intently on the happy twosome between them. Their eyes glanced over each other, seeing but not seeing; she saw his hair ever slightly askew over his ears, he noticed hers sideswept to cover the corner of her left eye. Then the couples rearranged themselves properly, Rory looking at Louisa for the first time, the newness of the person a convenient reason for ignoring the man opposite her.
"Louisa, this is Rory Gilmore. Rory, my cousin."
Must alert the anti-Barbie movement, was Rory's initial thought. A woman can apparently have a pair of C-cups, a wasp of a waist, and almost mannish hips without keeling over from imbalance, despite the rules of symmetry governing normal human physiology. (Then again, is it the product of normal human physiology, or supernormal medical technology? she wondered.)
"Hi!" Rory stretched her smile a little wider, to atone for the ungenerous thought. "It's good to meet you. I've heard so much about you." More famous, clever first words from Rory Gilmore. As her hand was clasped by Louisa, whose smile was wider than hers, (did she ever see such white teeth?) she felt herself being pulled unwillingly forward as Louisa raised her cheek. Rory stumbled awkwardly against the cool face. And as she did, she felt a rush of panic, a contraction in her chest. Would she and Logan have to kiss each other's cheeks, too?
"Me too! I'm so happy you could make it—" she was still holding Rory's hands—"David was telling me about some awful deadline or other that you were scrambling to meet. So am I to read an article with your byline over breakfast? Please let it not be another depressing treatise about melting ice caps!"
"Actually, Rory is assistant news editor in the dot com version of The Times. You'd only read her now and then—once or twice a week?—in the Education and Metro sections. Which is really unfortunate because she's a brilliant writer. She last wrote about the history curriculum in the top public schools in the country, isn't that right, Ror?" David squeezed her shoulder in obvious, embarassment-inducing pride. "What the textbooks are teaching about Iraq and all that."
"That sounds wonderful and intimidating and highbrow. I myself can't write or read anything of consequence in the real world. I confess my favorite section is in the Arts—I know, ho-hum—and the crossword puzzles. But now I've done it—I've just admitted to subscribing to Logan's competition! Tell me you still love me," Louisa turned quickly to Logan, then to Rory and back. "Oh how stupid of me to forget—but you and Rory don't need much of an introduction right?"
"Well I also review books, and movies," Rory added belatedly. "Have you guys watched Joe Wright's Jane Eyre?" She would have been perfectly happy to fade into the marble, but she felt she must assert herself against David's litany of knowledge of her and the impending introduction.
"Books, movies, and Bronte, I should have known," Logan finally spoke, his voice a bit rusty. "How've you been?" he casually asked, extending his hand.
Rory took it, shook it, dropped it. Thinking back to that moment, Rory felt that their handshake was the nth in a series of handshakes. (It probably was; for sure he had shaken countless hands that night.) Fingers slightly limp, loose, and dry, and that infinitesimal effort at a squeeze. They looked straight into each other's eyes, and neither the blue nor the brown flinched. Her eyes stung from the effort.
"I'm good. You? How are you, Logan?"
The roll of his name off her tongue was unexpected. It jarred him, how it sounded so familiar. "Fine," he clipped.
And so there it was. The worst was over. The momentous meeting after seven years, between a couple once in true love, reduced to the mechanical and meaningless social niceties of strangers. (In fact, Rory has this very exchange with her Starbucks barista every morning.)
"Hell—you're not just fine, man, you're marrying Louisa!" David had exclaimed, clapping Logan's shoulder. "I'm David, by the way," he added, grasping Logan's hand.
"Oh right, congratulations to both of you!" Rory added with as much chime as she can muster.
"David, good to meet you!" Logan said, pumping David's hand. "And here I thought Louisa being an only child meant I'd have to suffer without the time-honored tradition of—"
"A bachelor party? Davey, you wouldn't!" Louisa pouted. "Logan and I had planned our calendar for the next four weeks until the…" She rolled her eyes at Rory to convey the extent of her dismay and disgust.
Four weeks.
"Well if not Davey, then I would have ably filled in the gap, sweetheart." A tall, dark-haired lanky man swooped in on their crowd to kiss Louisa's hand. "I'm Finn, by the way, Logan's stepbrother? I'm sure you can see the resemblance. Same thick, oozy charm, same rakish hair. I'm sure I can squeeze in a tawdry striptease for Logan in between tea and scones with the wedding planner next Thursday."
"I've seen you in a striptease at least a dozen times, Finn," Logan replied drily. "Surely I deserve something more special this time around? And I've introduced you to Louisa thrice this evening—Louisa, don't take offense, ethanol had irreparably damaged Finn's brain cells." Then he catches Rory's eye, and remembers with discomfort that Finn and Rory had coincided in his life for a time. He cleared his throat and gestures vaguely, "Uh…Finn you remember Ro—"
But Finn was already examing Rory from head to toe, to David's chagrin. "I don't believe we've met tonight, love. I would have remembered you for sure…"
"My girlfriend, Rory Gilmore," David willingly supplied.
"Ror—" Finn did a slight double-take, a small guffaw escaping from his throat as he looked from Rory to Logan. "Forgive me, love, I'm afraid my college years are all a blur, including, unfortunately, probably the best sexual encounters of my life. But of course, Rory Gilmore. Our intrepid Ace reporter." He couldn't resist.
Fucking bastard, Logan thought. Oh shit!, on Rory's part.
"Um, we're not talking about Tila Nguyen jumping out of a five-tier confection, Lou," Logan intercepted, as Louisa's pout deepened at Finn's antics. "It will be an entirely respectable…er…gentleman's evening, with your cousin at the helm." With that, Finn proceeded to euphemistically discuss the cigars that such an evening warranted.
All in all, barring Finn's near faux pas, it was an innocuous enough reunion in Rory's assessment. Civil, consoling even, as the banter among the men overtook her needless anxiety. David and Logan were fast friends, and she felt no antagonism towards Louisa (despite the C-cups and absence of facial hair). But as she stood in linked arms with Louisa, looking quietly at David and Logan, her serenity dissolved as she realized in a sudden flash of clarity how their inopportune foursome came to be.
Logan and David, both blonde and brown-eyed, seemed nearly, freakishly, like blood brothers. Same bright smile, Ivy League schooled, the former only being a tad smarter, more charming, wittier, more accomplished (as brothers usually go). Whereas with her dark hair and blue eyes, and the other's green-eyed paleness; with the evident differences in their interests and temperament, she and Louisa cannot be any more unalike.
She knew then that in the last seven years, she had been searching for one like Logan. And had not been successful. She had wanted a Logan. No, she revised, removing the indefinite article. She wanted Logan.
While Logan had chosen to end up with someone decidedly unlike her. She likewise understood what that meant.
She felt her face flush at the revelation. Was this apparent only to her? Or did he see it, too? She needed to be somewhere far, far away. Because she was about to cry. She gently extricated herself from Louisa, nodded to David, and said quietly, "Excuse me. I just need to go to the ladies' room."
"Are you okay, Ror? You look all hot and red," David murmured with some concern, catching her arm.
Logan, looking at her longer than he wanted, thought she looked startled, in contrast to the last five minutes when she had been all placid and composed. Her too bright eyes pierced him even as she stared far across the room. Was it Finn's fucking insensitive reference to 'Ace'?
"No, I'm fine. Just need to…go. Please, excuse me a moment."
She turned to go, as Louisa called, "Oh wait, let me show you where."
And unthinking, she turned back to say, "I know," leaving Louisa to wonder a moment whether and in what circumstances Rory had been inside the Huntzberger mansion before.
Of course Rory knew where the ladies' room is. She knew the lay of the land; the landscape of her heart and his. The hopelessness of it all. The worst is over. Or perhaps—with her new understanding, with the fresh memory to draw on of him squeezing her fingers lightly—it has just begun.
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Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and tried to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals—all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past—how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life.
Alas! With all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing. ( Chapter VII)
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A/N: And the party (oh, agony!) is not over. Just couldn't cram everything into one chapter (this is something I need to absorb and mull over, as perhaps you do, too). Happy holidays everyone, and thanks for the generous reviews, as always.