Free A Bad Bride's Tale by Polly Williams Page B

think that because he’d been to Eton, he lived in a stately home with a family crest and hot-and- cold running butlers, rather than a six-bedroom farmhouse in Surrey in need of a new roof. But the Americans’ fantasy did no harm.
    England felt scary now. Here he felt safe. The underclass was in- visible, if they existed at all, certainly not below 125th Street, his current city limit. There were no hordes of threatening hooded youths blocking pavements. No junkies outside his apartment, as there were in Notting Hill, despite the fact his mews house cost close to two million quid. But as he had explained to Brad in the adjacent office, money couldn’t buy you much in London these days. It was a prerequisite, not a luxury. It was also a liability. It got you mugged. (And all the hoods carried knives—he’d read about it in the Evening Standard. )
    Here Seb was free of Britain’s acquisitive and angry society, as well as his increasingly unfathomable girlfriend. Shit, this urge to be American was almost embarrassing. Though embarrassment was an English thing, of course. To be stamped out. The taxi screeched to a stop on Prince Street. He tipped far more generously than he ever did in London.
    Seb paused on the street, reverting back for a moment to being a hesitant Englishman, feeling slight, pale, and vaguely undernour- ished compared to the beefy, confident Americans. Did it matter that he wasn’t meeting anyone in SoHo? No. Damn it. He’d been out to bars on his own a few times since arriving here. He’d col- lided into women, two human lives randomly enriched, albeit tem- porarily. And when he told women about his job, they laughed more readily and touched their hair a lot. After years of feeling puny and concerned about the girth of his member, here he felt like George Clooney. Like he’d had a booster jab of testosterone. Yes, he would go to a bar. He had a strong sense that it was a day when ex- citing collisions were meant to happen.
    As Seb crossed Prince Street, a commotion stopped him in his tracks. There, standing in the middle of the road, dressed like a tatty pastiche of an Upper East Side dame—all fur and leopard- print and torn fluttering silk neck scarves—was a woman trying to direct traffic, cackling, one arm up, the other hand holding an irate honking cab back, dirty palm exposed. What on earth? It took a second or two for it to sink in. She was cuckoo. Of course. Seb winced, suddenly recalling his mad Aunt Gracie, not dissimilar physically, who’d lived in a folly of a Scottish castle north of Perth and had descended from eccentricity into obesity and madness over a ten-year period. Seb swerved to avoid the madwoman, suddenly afraid of her long, thin, painted fingers, the way they knitted up his
    English childhood here on a New York street. It took him a few seconds to feel like his new self again.
    Brushing down his olive-green corduroy blazer, his hair flopping to one side of his narrow forehead, he turned onto Mercer Street and strode, as confidently as possible, through the curtained doors of a boutique hotel. Inside, a pretty waitress wearing all black, a tray balanced on her upturned palm, smiled, exposing white Amer- ican teeth. She had one of the smallest hand-span waists Seb had ever seen. From the bar he could peer into the restaurant area, where he was tantalized by groups of attractive blond women, fork- ing salad, puncturing eggs Benedict, cell phones nestled by their elbows like pampered pets. He sat down on a low seat, smoothed his trousers, ordered the most New York drink he could think of— a Manhattan—decided he would decorate his London home in the muted grays and browns and mushrooms of the sofas and curtains and carpet, gulped his cocktail, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand (like De Niro), and waited for the latest installment of his life to start.
    To his astonishment, it did. Three hours and twenty-five seconds later, he expelled his frustrations into the open