Free A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott Page B

she is dark. They are both tall and sleek. They take long strides together.
    Elizabeth smiles a little, turns back to the window. All the manikins are cold, or aroused, standing there under those blue and red lights, in silk dresses that shine with hundreds of tiny mirrors. She wonders how Tupper Daniels would react if she were to answer the door tonight in a dress like that, her nipples erect.
    She turns, continues walking. Remembers Joanne in the bridal shop where she finally found her gown. Up on a platform before a semicircle of mirrors. Her mother and the saleswoman and the eight of them in the bridal party grouped around her, watching her, or one of the five images of her. The same scene repeated six times around the busy shop, six different brides, all shapes and sizes, all young, up on little platforms, before five images of themselves. Thirty images in white silk or satin or lace or Qiana or polyester, some turning to check their hems, some running their fingers across their chests, along their waists, some standing oh so still, arms out, smiling back at themselves. Mrs. Paletti had cried when Joanne had said, “Yes, this is the one.” And all of them had smiled, sat up a little, made a wish.
    No one being rational then, saying perhaps this is a little silly, perhaps all this fuss and fanfare will outshine the event, leave you disappointed, bitter that it’s over. None of them, not even Joanne’s mother, who had been through the disappointment herself, reminding her that this is a fantasy, that when it’s over there will still be your parents fighting and the papers onyour desk, and a lifetime of wondering what you should look forward to. Not saying it, not even thinking it, but thinking instead of their own moment up there on the platform, in the white gown, their own moment, in the past or in the future, that they’d been told all their lives to prepare for.
    Told so often and so well that even now she can dismiss Joanne’s unhappiness, admit that yes, even now, she wants her own moment up there in the white dress. Even now she believes it will somehow change her life forever.
    End it, Joanne had said. But she’ll get over it; everyone goes through it. She has no reason to be unhappy. She has Tommy, love.
    She turns down Fiftieth Street, heads crosstown, believing that Joanne should be happy, will be happy. And yet, as she decides that maybe she will sleep with Tupper Daniels and feels, like the fresh air, like Friday night, like her freedom to turn at Park or York, Sixty-first of Seventy-ninth, that the decision need not be final, she knows she would not trade places with her.

Chapter 5
    Eight ten and the downstairs buzzer rings.
    He answers “Tupper” when she asks who it is, and when she opens the door he stands there with a bottle of wine and a cone of flowers. Rosebuds and baby’s-breath, the kind they sell on the street, near subway entrances. The kind that always make her think of businessmen stopping on their way home to buy the wife some flowers after eight hours of lusting after their secretaries.
    “Madame Editor,” he says, presenting her with the bouquet, the facetiousness again in his eyes, again making her feel caught. His eyes look very blue.
    “How sweet,” she says. Bette Davis to Robert Montgomery. “Do come in.”
    A new blazer tonight: dark green. Navy sweater, jeans, loafers.
    “Not exactly posh,” he says, looking around her room. “But nicely done. Your elevator isn’t working.”
    “I know,” she says with a laugh. “It seldom is.”
    He takes off his blazer. His shoulders are rather broad. His aftershave is smooth, pleasant. He leans to look at some of the Folon prints over her couch. “How long have you lived here?”
    “Two years,” she says, watching him, wondering why she’sperspiring so. Why he seems so comfortable in her apartment and she suddenly feels like a stranger. She looks at the room. Although she is pleased with it, has copied it almost exactly