Hotel No Tell Read online

  Macy apologized to her bosses, made some statements to the press, doubled up on her Guided-Mindfulness Stress-Reduction classes, and returned to work. Unfortunately, first one and then the next and then the third of her ensuing acquisitions all met the same or a similar fate. One writer after another came forward with a riveting and often prurient story of putting herself through Harvard on her prostitution fees or of overseeing his synagogue’s marijuana-production facility or of camping by the side of the Palisades Parkway and evading state troopers for an entire year. There seemed to be an epidemic of writers who felt that coming from middle-class intact families would undermine their worth as artists. Publishing fiction was not enough for them; they needed to believe they were their main characters. I sometimes wondered whether there was a stall in the bathroom at The Writers Room that had Macy’s direct phone line scribbled across the door: “For certain publication, call Macy St. John—memoir sucker.”

  Even her closest friends and colleagues couldn’t understand how Macy could have fallen for the fabrications the third and fourth times. By the last book, Escaping Englewood Cliffs, Macy, now afflicted by acne, insomnia, and TMJ jaw pain, had enlisted the help of every fact-checker and intern available to her at Bonanza, plus a freelance researcher she paid out of her own pocket. But these crafty authors seemed to have made faux memoir a sport, and no one could find holes in their stories until after the books were on the shelves. When the final author appeared on The View to gleefully and insincerely expiate his sins, few people felt compelled to comfort Macy and so no one really tried.

  Macy spent the following three months developing an intimate knowledge of her parents’ couch in Durham, New Hampshire, until one day her father handed her a NOLS brochure and gently suggested she venture beyond the Stop & Shop. She suited up at EMS and headed to Wyoming for four weeks. She learned to use a compass, outsmart bears, eat rattlesnake (just once, for bragging rights), and navigate white-water rapids. When she narrowly missed dying in a flash flood, the fog lifted, clarity set in, and perspective reigned. She grew, by all accounts, impossibly cheerful and determined to begin anew.

  Macy returned to Brooklyn and began her own business, which she swore up and down was what she’d always wanted to do anyway. She became the sole proprietor of No Divas, a wedding-planning service for women who were not petty, narcissistic bridezillas but who were too busy to plan a modest wedding day without some assistance.

  No Divas boiled nuptial celebrations down to eight elements: dress, guests, location, music, flowers, food, ceremony, invitations. Macy told her customers they could prioritize two of those and for the rest she would be unforgiving in the name of thriftiness and moderation. If you cared about the dress and the music, then your only choices for flowers were “formal” or “wild,” and she would decide the rest. If you cared about flowers and food, then she gave you three bridal shops to pick from and urged you to go with a white bridesmaid dress. To the bride who wanted to schedule a two-hour meeting about her cake, Macy said, “It’ll be white and it’ll taste good.” The client nearly wept with relief. To the betrothed who expressed concern that her dress was ivory and the invitations white, Macy offered to dunk all the invitations in a bathtub full of tea. The bride scampered off with her tulle between her legs.

  No Divas was an immediate success. And even though nearly half of Macy’s clients were actually picky, petulant people who wanted their shoes to match their cake, they wanted even more to be known as people who weren’t. Macy had hit on marketing magic: Women who were in denial about being high-maintenance hellions could wave No Divas around as though it refuted all their distasteful qualities. They seemed to relish being disciplined by Macy, the way some CEOs and governors like being tied up, ordered around, or systematically belittled.

  For nearly two years, Macy St. John could do no wrong in the correctly prioritized, morally upstanding, urban wedding-planning department. Word of mouth spread rapidly, and she hauled in cash at the speed of falling rice (an environmental no-no replaced by bubbles, of course). Then, six days after one of her couples exchanged vows, the bride was disemboweled by a nearly extinct, monstrous bird called a cassowary while on her honeymoon in eastern Australia. Macy was beside herself, especially as the woman, a lion tamer with a Ph.D. in animal psychology, had been one of her favorite clients and a true non-diva. But Macy went to the funeral, dried her eyes, and returned to work.

  Her next clients were Lucy and her fiancé, Leonard. Their wedding went off without a hitch, but soon after, Macy staged the nuptials of a woman named Elsa Barges, a petite, giggling park ranger posted to Governors Island. She and her husband chose Rome for their honeymoon, and it was there, while waiting in line for hazelnut gelato, that she was fatally mowed down by a blue Vespa belonging to the prime minister’s alternate-weekend mistress.

  When Macy got the news, the insomnia and the jaw pain returned, but her parents and her extant clients begged her not to quit. With great trepidation, she tended to the details of a dog runner’s wedding: The bride supported herself by jogging with other people’s canines to give them the exercise of which their office-bound owners were so dismally deprived.

  There was one awkward moment during the planning stages, when Macy paused during a discussion of music (options: live band or DJ) and begged the bride to consider postponing her honeymoon. The bride confronted Macy with her suspicion that Macy, who had become inordinately clingy, was in love with her. Macy had to come clean and admit the fates of two of her three previous clients. The bride laughed, threw her arm around Macy, and promised not to die on her honeymoon.

  When Macy received word that the dog runner had been impaled by a stalactite during a spelunking accident in New Mexico, she returned to couch territory, only this time she chose Lucy’s brand-new sage-green sofa, fresh off the truck from Bloomingdale’s. She became obsessed with protecting Lucy, since, to Macy’s mind, she had been the only client to escape the grim reaper since the death streak began, and Macy felt compelled to keep watch over her.

  Which is exactly what I found her doing that August afternoon two years ago, while overdosing on aerated dairy and Jacqueline Susann.

  I had come directly to Lucy’s sun-soaked apartment after work to assess the situation. Lucy, a tiny, bony, excitable social worker whose metabolism was kept elevated by an excessive need to organize, had come to my rescue countless times before. That she now needed me was a turn of events I found bracing. Macy had been installed on the couch for a couple of weeks, and Lucy had careered from sympathetic to frustrated to anxious, fearing that she might soon be claiming Macy as a dependent on her income taxes or at least requiring the services of an upholsterer years sooner than anticipated. The challenge of Macy-St.-John-on-the-couch riled Lucy, who was accustomed to successfully giving succor to the downtrodden. Macy turned out to be more difficult to fix than the meth addicts and alimony dodgers Lucy normally tended to, whose problems had obvious if not easily attainable solutions.

  “What about a real estate broker?” Lucy was pleading over her shoulder as she let me in to her quiet glass palace in the sky, where the sweat on my skin instantly evaporated in the centrally cooled air. She was in shorts and a tank top, her blond hair pulled into a high ponytail, and she looked like she was about seven years old. In each hand she was clutching a bunched-up skirt.

  I dropped my backpack on the floor and followed her into the living room, an echoey space with floor-to-ceiling windows that practically dumped you into the Hudson River. When she was a child, Lucy’s parents had owned a Tibetan import boutique, and their frequent donations to that beleaguered nation sometimes meant they struggled to make the stabilized rent on their Riverside Drive classic six. In marrying Leonard Livingston—the awkward genius who had designed Speed-X, a program that made all other programs run eight times faster—Lucy had found true love and enough money to guarantee an instant identity crisis shot through with a heavy dose of guilt.

  As a result, this sprawling loft, which she’d
reluctantly agreed to purchase after their wedding, was sparsely furnished with grungy items left over from college days. The Poggenpohl stainless-steel countertops were a playing ground for mismatched plates, jelly glasses, and an assortment of chipped public-radio mugs. The gallery lighting showed off Ansel Adams reprints in plastic frames acquired at Target. There were two couches in the living room, one a gruesome brown plaid covered with an Indian print that was forever slipping to the floor to reveal a historical collection of burns, stains, and rips. The other couch was the recent arrival from Bloomie’s, the solitary new item Leonard had insisted on buying amid the uxorial asceticism he was patiently waiting out.

  Macy removed the nozzle from her lips long enough to mutter a response to Lucy’s suggestion. “If I became a real estate broker, all the houses I sold would burn down.”

  Lucy took a deep breath through her nose. “I know,” she said. “An unemployment-benefits administrator. People would have already lost their jobs.”

  Macy didn’t even look up. “They’d leave the unemployment office and get run over by the M14.”

  Lucy gripped the skirts even tighter in her fists. “Then something with inanimate objects,” she said through her teeth.

  “Computers would freeze, produce would carry E. coli, books would turn out to have poisonous ink and kill everyone in the bookstore.”

  “How about an undertaker?” I suggested, leaning against a white column in the middle of the room. “Your clients would already be dead.”

  To my great satisfaction, Macy put down her book and glared at me.

  “Who are you?”

  “Zephyr Zuckerman,” I said, and braced myself. Over the last three decades, I had suffered a variety of reactions to my name. “We met at Lucy’s wedding in June.”

  But Macy was in no condition to judge anyone else. She merely looked at the ceiling. Lucy widened her eyes at me, imploring me to fix the situation. She and Leonard were headed to a Hudson Valley bed-and-breakfast for a weekend of Lovemaking with Intent to Conceive.

  I nodded toward the bedroom. “Finish packing,” I told Lucy.

  “Packing?” Macy sat up and fixed her eyes on Lucy like a lion spotting its kill. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Uh-uh.” I shook my head at Lucy, whose knuckles were white. “Go. And bring an iron,” I added, nodding at the balled-up skirts. Lucy fled.

  “I’m going with them,” Macy said, slamming her book closed.

  “Actually, you’re not.” I hooked one ankle over the other, as if I were a 1930s gumshoe leaning against a streetlamp.

  “You can’t stop me.” Her blue eyes glowed with indignation.

  “Of course I can. You don’t even know where they’re going. Macy—”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “What do you mean? You’re ruining my friend’s life. We all know your name.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Lucy’s friends.”

  “I’m Lucy’s friend.”

  “No, you’re her tormentor.”

  “No, I’m making sure she doesn’t die like everyone else I’ve worked for.”

  I paused for a moment, then tilted my head at her. “By lying on her couch?”

  Macy sank back down on the sofa and covered her face with her hands. “It’s working so far,” she muttered.

  “But don’t you think Lucy’s already safe? I mean, the other women all died within a week of their weddings. She’s two months out.” It was fun pretending this was a rational conversation.

  “That’s almost a good point.”

  “Why almost?”

  “Because what if it’s just untested? What if the second I leave her, bam, she’s gone?”

  “You let her go to work, don’t you?”

  Macy sniffed.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Usually I follow her.”

  I tried not to show my alarm. “You follow her?” Technically, Lucy could take out a restraining order. But any judge confronted with this pathetic creature, with her red-rimmed eyes and a smear of whipped cream across her freckles, would laugh at the request.

  “You do not understand the bad luck I attract. You should leave now before a meteorite crashes through these windows and takes you to your maker.” She stood up, made her way around the enormous island separating the living room from the kitchen, and returned the whipped cream to the gleaming fridge.

  “My maker?” I laughed, then stopped when I saw the look of genuine anguish on Macy’s face. “It’s just that I … never mind.” This was not the moment to expound on my theological views. “Look, when was the last time you had a drink? Or ate food that doesn’t spray? Or went home to your apartment?”

  She shook her head stubbornly.

  Even I recognized these as inadequate calls to action. Surely, standing here twelve stories up in the air, gazing out at a behemoth cruise liner bellowing its way south from 53rd Street, I could do better.

  “Wanna go fishing?” I tried.

  “Where?”

  “Off the back of Pier 40.”

  “What do you mean the back?”

  “The part that faces New Jersey.”

  “You mean … the west side?” She looked at me as if I were a simpleton.

  I returned the look. “Yeah, the Jersey side.”

  She headed toward the couch. I blocked her path. I had to keep her ass from hitting that cushion again.

  “Okay, you know Lucy’s and my friend Mercedes Kim? The one who lives in that building?” I pointed to the glass tower across Perry Street, the fraternal twin to the one we were in.

  Macy frowned for a moment, then raised her eyebrows in surprise. “The one who married Dover Carter?”

  I nodded. “Dover has a premiere tonight at the Ziegfeld. Red carpet, Brangelina, free food. We could go to that. It might distract you.”

  Macy guffawed. “We can’t just show up at a movie premiere. There’s security, guest lists, rope lines.…” Macy trailed off as she exhausted her knowledge of Hollywood protocol.

  “Yes, but if any Sterling Girl calls Dover’s assistant before an event, we can go to whatever he’s invited to that night.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. When he married Mercedes, he got all of us.”

  “Is he invited to something every night?”

  “Pretty much. But he’d usually rather watch Mercedes perform or stay at home.”

  “She’s an actress, too?”

  I shook my head. “Violist. Philharmonic. So which do you want to do?”

  “You just call him Dover,” Macy mused incredulously. “You just call Dover Carter … Dover.”

  “Last option,” I said impatiently. “We could buy a couple of boxes of granola bars and hand them out to homeless people.”

  Macy’s face grew stormy with betrayal and she pointed her finger at me. “Don’t pull that Pollyanna bullshit with me.”

  That was the moment I knew I wanted to be friends with Macy St. John.

  She waved her arms, looking like an angry bird. “This is not some exercise in wallowing and self-indulgence. I am cursed. Do you understand me? I am not fit to have contact with anyone besides Lucy, not until I figure out why she’s still alive.”

  Ultimately, we neither fished nor gawked. Macy meekly agreed that she could use a shower and a change of clothes, and so I accompanied her back to Red Hook. On the subway, she began to tell me her woeful story of a cursed professional life, and we missed our stop and wound up near Prospect Park. We soon found ourselves among a group of happy, tipsy Park Slopers, cheering for the newly invented sport-as-avant-garde-performance called Circle Rules Football. It involved a huge exercise ball, orange pylons, and a healthy dose of self-conscious irony. For the life of us, we couldn’t figure out the rules, but it didn’t seem to matter, not even to the players.

  I wish I could say I was the one who convinced Macy to stop being so superstitious, but ultimately it was good luck that ended her tenure
on Lucy’s couch. One of the couples on a nearby blanket, swilling Asti Spumante and shouting encouragement to the performers, happened to be former patrons of No Divas. Most significantly, theirs had been the wedding Macy worked on immediately before the disemboweled lion tamer’s wedding. Seeing the bride alive and well—albeit in an unflattering baby-doll dress and a poor-quality roots job—did wonders for her outlook. Or, more likely, Macy had come to a point in her depression where she was yearning for just the smallest sign, some event in the outside world that her frazzled brain could grab a hold of and interpret as the end of her curse.

  We stayed until it was too dark to see the game/performance. As we left the park, Macy promised to spend the next few days returning all the calls that had gone unanswered and trying to rescue No Divas from its state of near extinction. We parted ways at Grand Army Plaza.

  “I feel like a guy,” she said sheepishly, sidestepping the flow of suits returning home from Manhattan offices.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve spent this entire evening listening to me go on and on and on. I didn’t ask you one thing about you.”

  I waved my hand at her. “I’m just glad you’re—” I started to say “off Lucy’s couch” but caught myself. “Glad you’re feeling better.”

  She scrunched her nose sheepishly. “How fast are you going to call Lucy and tell her you fixed everything?”

  “If it were you, how long would you wait?” I felt like I was flirting.

  She guffawed. “Please. Me? There’d be skywriting and a blog post before you could say ‘Nevins Street.’ ”

  * * *

  Over the next two years, Macy became the first new confidante I’d made since college. It seemed I’d never know her as well as I knew the Sterling Girls, but I was learning to be comfortable with the fact that I couldn’t catalog every scar, every boyfriend, know for certain whether she was more passionate about the Promenade or the High Line, or recount on her behalf an embarrassing incident involving jelly beans and underpants. For the first time in my adult life, I maintained a friendship based not solely on history but on an exhilarating brew of proximity, unmarried status, a love of the city, and a shared desire to remain childless.