gaudily made up, as if for a school play or an ice-skating competition. At the reception, her parents seemed frightened. It was as if they had been instructed to keep their mouths shut at all costs. A guest would shake Mrs. Thorn's hand in the receiving line and say, “Hi, I’m Jen Ryan. Christie and I were roommates at Trinity?” and Mrs. Thorn would nod, grim-faced, and say-literally-nothing. The groom's name was Thomas Bruewald, and he was gawky and tall, with an oversize head and a unibrow. His par- ents were never identified. Apparently they were foreign. He had grown up half over here and half over there-in Bavaria, was it? Or Croatia? At any rate, it wasn’t Umbria or Aix or anywhere worth trying to lock in an invitation for. Bruewald had gone to one of those Euro institutes with the word “polytechnical” in the name. The champagne at the reception was a little too good, and some people had more than their fill and, by the end of the night, were making rude remarks. One guy said that Christie's parents must have taken out a second mortgage to pay for the wedding. “Didn’t know you could get a second mortgage on a trailer,” somebody else said. And then, of course, you got “Hey, wait a minute! There are no trailers”-the crowd in unison-“in Greenwich, Connecticut!” But nobody said that the groom was funny-looking. You could pick on Christie for trying too hard, you could note the moment when Mr. Thorn took off his tuxedo jacket and started doing body shots with the bridesmaids, but you didn’t pick on the groom's looks. You just didn’t go there.
Christie herself was quite pretty. She had large, unflawed features and blond hair that was only a shade or two lighter than her natural color. She was also thin. And, in an age when Manhattan had been overrun by the kind of chain stores you’d find at a suburban mall, these attributes had kept her in dates for a decade and the word “beautiful” had been lobbed over her head with surprising-to some of us, disturbing-frequency.
The groom had some kind of science-related job-engineering or drug research-that required a reverse commute to New Jersey. And, once the wedding was over, once the gifts had been ordered (they had registered for everything but the kitchen sink, in anticipation, evidently, of dinners for sixteen at which oysters would be served and finger bowls required), once the thank-you note from Christie-Christie Bruewald now-had arrived, it seemed that only the sparsest smattering of social interactions was indicated, coffee or a drink twice a year. There was even some thought that the newlyweds would move out of the city. Christie had always talked nonstop about children (little trophies, one presumed, to fill up that bottomless pit of dissatisfaction), and the suburbs had been mentioned more than once.
Christie's new thing, at our biannual meetings, was to brag about her visits to Thomas's family in Europe. It was mystifying-one would not have thought an “in” in the former East Germany particularly brag-worthy, and, in any case, everyone at the wedding had seen how cowed the guy was, how classic the trade they had made. Did she think we didn’t see her boasts for what they were? She started to slip into conversation the fact that Thomas's uncle had a title, or had had one-she was vague on the details-and she mentioned that there was a castle in the family. Her Christmas card (sent yearly to all of us, even though we had not sent one to her in years) introduced the Bruewald family crest. It was all so ludicrous and pathetic, really, when they were living in a studio in a high- rise on York Avenue.
“So why do you even see her?” my husband would ask. (I was married now, too.) “If she's so awful, why don’t you dump her? Just don’t call back.” Like most men, he had no patience with these pseudo-friendships between women that drag on for years. The question bothered me, and in my head I came up with three reasons that I continued to see Christie Bruewald, nee Thorn, at six-month intervals. First, I enjoyed taking note of her pretensions. I enjoyed seeing how far she would go. In a way, I had exulted in the family-crest Christmas card. I had put it up on the refrigerator and shown it to everyone who came over. I was dying, now, to see what would follow. When I met her for coffee, I went prepared with a mental tape recorder to catch her appalling lapses in taste-not so much for myself as to pass on to everyone else. Second, there were, I have to admit, sparks of humanity in Christie's pretensions, and in her desires, that I felt were missing in the rest of my life. She had coveted
Still, despite my three reasons, a year or so after my own wedding I went through a period when I felt it was important to burn the fat from my life.
Christie had begun to represent all that was wrong with New York- which, as usual, meant what I was tired of in myself. I wrote “Seeing people like Christie Thorn” on a list of things that were a waste of time, and when she called and left a message to start the back-and-forth that would culminate in our having lunch a few weeks later, I didn’t call back.
Perhaps I ended it then simply because the interesting part appeared to be over. Though my own life still seemed to me a fount of infinite promise, hers felt blandly curtailed. I realized that there was a part of me that had almost wanted her to make it, on her own terms, whatever they might be. The sad thing about Christies wedding was that it hadn’t been outrageous at all; it had been just another overpriced New York wedding spearheaded by a bride with too much makeup on. I found it all too easy to imagine how her story would continue, how, inevitably, it would end. I lived with that story, kept the thread going in my mind, and added to it from time to time, when some event in my own life recalled Christie's unhappy mixture of envy and drive, of self-promotion and apology.
My version (wholly fictional) went something like this: Having married for money, Christie quickly discovers that she hasn’t married for enough. Realizing her mistake only deepens the dissatisfaction she feels with her life, and, in order to convince herself that things can still change, she has an innocuous little affair in the first six months of her marriage. The second affair, a year later, is not so innocuous. Thomas is doing as well as he ever has, but this is New York, and after their second child the Bruewalds are unable to afford a big enough apartment in the city and they make the move to the suburbs. (For Christie, Brooklyn, or a bohemian setup with the baby in the living room, has never been an option.) They buy a starter house in one of the less well-known towns of Westchester. They socialize a lot and their favorite friends are people like themselves, but who make a little less than they do, and are jealous of them for some other reason as well-Christie's having lost the weight after her pregnancies, say. The kids are the usual product of a marriage like the Bruewalds’. They suffer from Christie's frustrated ambition and their father's subservience to it, and they end up angry and self-hating beneath a surface of entitlement. But the European influence helps to normalize them somewhat, and at least they know how to ski. When the children are grown and out of the house, Christie starts spending most of her time down at the time- share in Cancun, befriending other “party people,” whose spouses turn a blind eye. But she and Thomas never divorce because she's afraid to be alone.
That would be about the size of it. It would end in a sorry, grasping old age, marked by an incivility to service people (flight attendants, doctors’ secretaries) and a dye job that wasn’t what it used to be.
It was what she deserved, wasn’t it? There is order in things, and people who spend a hundred grand on a wedding they can’t afford simply not to lose face should pay in some way. Who was she kidding?
It will be clear from my iteration of Christie's excesses that, as a couple, my husband and I have always prided ourselves on living within our means. When the time comes for us to move into a bigger apartment, we understand that staying in the city will mean living at the back of a building, in interior rooms that open onto shaftways. So it's only for kicks, just to see what we’re missing, that we ask our broker to show us something fancy. We go prepared to look, to smile wistfully, and to depart, understanding that by any reasonable standards we have more than enough, and by any other standards we simply don’t measure ourselves. When, high up in Carnegie Hill, on our way into one of those hushed old buildings that face the Park, our two-year-old daughter falls in love with the doorman, we take it, laughing, with endless hope for the future, as a sign that the girl knows quality when she sees it. “You can see him on the way out,” we promise. “He’ll still be there.” Yet, when we fall in love with the apartment itself, we cannot take it as a sign of anything at all. It is smaller by a room than the others we’ve looked at; and costs more by… oh, about a hundred grand. Where are our wistful smiles now? Where is our comfort in reasonable standards? It is clear that we-and only we-are capable of fully appreciating the charm of this
