Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [20]
And now she wondered whether her drink had been spiked with some happy party drug. Or maybe it was just spirit—Christmas or otherwise. This was a great, great party. Below her, across the floor, she could see Andy. Her gaze went straight to him, as though he were standing under some beam of ownership. He looked handsome and happy. He was wearing a dinner jacket, but with a normal black silk tie, not a bow—he always said he felt ridiculous in one. He said the only people who should ever wear one were the people who were born to it, whose dad had worn one. And he wasn’t one of those people. He looked like one of the Reservoir Dogs. He was talking animatedly with a friend, gesticulating expansively with one hand. The friend was laughing. He’d been like that all night. The proverbial heart and soul. Funny and popular and…special. Why was it that, sometimes, you needed to see the people closest to you as others saw them to remember how fantastic they were? Why couldn’t you always remember that? When it was just the two of you…
Behind him people were dancing. The music was a skillful mix of the songs that reminded them of their youth—in all its abandoned, gilded freedom—while convincing them they still had it. Not so loud it forbade conversation, or so quiet that it permitted abstinence. Like everything else, it was perfect.
She felt a wave of gratitude wash over her. She was so lucky.
Andy looked up and saw her in the dress. And something in him shifted. He’d wanted to ask her…for God knows how long. Sometimes he thought he’d known he would end up here from that first night, when he watched her sitting in the fountain. Known, or hoped. He knew it was more complicated for her. He knew she was certain of so much less—that for her life was shades, not stripes. But tonight…tonight she was different. How did the song have it go? Had it given him the girl and the music and the moonlight? Was it leaving the rest to him?
Their eyes met, and they smiled at each other. One of those smiles with history and memory and knowing in it. Andy put up one hand to stop her descent and pointed to the top of the stairs, indicating that he would come up to her. He grabbed two glasses of champagne from a waiter’s silver tray and weaved his way through the crowd toward her. As if he had ordered it himself, the song suddenly changed to something Motown slow—rhythmic and romantic. His heart was racing. He’d only done this once before—asked a woman to marry him—and everything had been different then. He was different. He always thought he would never do it again, unless he was 100 percent sure—of the woman and of the answer. Why the hell would you, right? Masochists are us. But right now he wouldn’t give you more than 60/40. And yet he knew that he was going to ask her anyway.
When he got to her, she took one glass from him and sipped from it, her eyes never leaving his. She looked about twenty. Tendrils of hair escaped from the pleat she wore, curling across her ear and down her slender neck. She put her arm around his neck and pulled him toward her, her lips brushing his ear as she whispered, “Have I told you lately that I love you?” He heard the emotion in her voice, and it gave him the courage he needed. Andy inhaled deeply, and whispered back, “Marry me.” An instruction, not a question. She pulled back and her eyes searched his face. He nodded, smiling, and answered her unspoken request that he repeat what he had said. “Marry me, Lisa. I mean to say, will you marry me?” Then, “Please?!”
Maybe it was Smokey Robinson. Maybe it was Moët and Chandon. Maybe it was the spirit of her mother, woven into the fibers of her dress. And maybe, just maybe, it was because, for a second, the clouds of doubt parted and she saw a future where she suddenly, shockingly, could not conceive of not having him beside her. Lisa laughed. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
SHE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING WITH THE BEGINNINGS OF A creeping headache stirring behind her ears. She knew that by lunchtime it would have