The People We Hate at the Wedding Read online

  “All right,” he says, “you can let go.”

  Wendy rips her palms away from the bin and begins wiping them against her shorts, leaving greasy fingerprints spotting her thighs. When she’s done and her face is red and wet, she thrusts a palm out to Paul.

  “The Purell?”

  Paul folds his arms. “Not quite yet.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  He follows the script: “Wendy, I want to remind you that you’re here voluntarily. You can leave whenever you want.”

  Wendy mutters another breathless obscenity and looks down.

  “You people are more awful than Al Qaeda,” she says.

  He’s been told worse. Hell, he’s agreed with worse. He thinks that maybe, even though Mark’s home, he’ll have a cigarette, anyway. He’ll close the door and light some cloying, lilac-scented CVS candle so Mark won’t be able to smell the smoke from down the hall (he will, though; he inevitably does).

  There are other reasons why he took the job. Reasons that are less righteous and more logistical, reasons that require less moral acrobatics. Namely: it was the only offer he got. Actually, no, that wasn’t entirely true. He deserved more credit than that. Revised: it was the only offer he got in the Philadelphia metro area. There were any number of other gigs he could have applied for back in New York, jobs that a few of his professors had pushed him to go after. They would have been more traditional in nature—a counselor at a high school in Brooklyn; an appointed caseworker in the Wellness Center at NYU—but the pay would have been fine-ish, and the hours comfortable. And besides, they would have allowed him the opportunity to actually help people, which is why he decided to forgo the sort of lucrative careers his friends were pursuing and instead become a social worker in the first place. Most important, Paul wagers, none of them would have required that he choke back an uncomfortable, guttural hybrid of laughter and tears while he watched some Daughter of the American Revolution bear-hug a trash can. But Mark had wanted to move to Philadelphia. He had presented Paul with no other option, really. Had said, in that coolly pragmatic, multiclausal way of his (which invariably made Paul feel slightly hysterical, no matter the context): “I’m going, and I’d love for you to come, but if you didn’t, I’d understand, and I’d wish you the best of luck.” Days later, over drinks at a basement bar on West Eighth Street, Paul’s graduate school friends, newly minted social workers with names like Anita and Deidre, had begged him to more closely examine Mark’s statement. They pleaded with Paul to confront the mixed messages that were inherent in phrases like “I’d wish you the best of luck” and the tinge of narcissism behind sentences that began with “I’m going.” Paul had drained his glass of Cabernet and promised that he’d heed their warnings and give Mark’s ultimatum some thought. Really, though, he left the bar and laughed. Therapy is as flawed a system as anything else, he thought to himself as he descended the subway stairs and started to make his way back uptown. More flawed, actually. More fucked. The only facts therapists have to base their conjectures on are the ones supplied to them by their patients—men and women who are, by their own admission, screwed up. And from that perspective, the whole process seems so cockeyed and subjective that you can count on it being about as reliable as a Ouija board. Which, okay, fine, is probably what drew him to the practice in the first place: facts terrified him, and objectivity he found cripplingly claustrophobic.

  But in this case, in this case, facts are on his side: Mark wasn’t being narcissistic, or intentionally convoluted—he was being practical. He’d just finished his Ph.D. in behavioral economics at Columbia, where his dissertation on risk aversion and rational decision-making among the native Sami tribes of Swedish Laponia earned him not only the department’s highest honors, but also an assistant professorship offer at the University of Pennsylvania, where he’d caught the eye of the chair of that school’s economics department. It was an opportunity too good to pass up, and Paul knew this. He was happy to support Mark in it, even if his support wasn’t directly requested or expressly needed.

  Besides, things had been going well: two years in they had finally moved in together, with Paul surrendering his studio on West Tenth Street in order to take up in Mark’s one-bedroom in Morningside Heights. And despite the horror stories he’d heard about the first six months of joint habitation (“just wait—you’ll learn things you can’t unlearn about him”), they had settled rather flawlessly into a predictable domesticity. A bliss, even. And so moving with Mark south, to Philadelphia, on account of some new, incredible job, was hardly an act of manipulation or narcissism, despite what Anita and Deidre and their forty-thousand-dollar theories professed. Paul had made a rational, self-possessed decision—and if working at Goulding’s clinic was a secondary outcome of that decision, then that was something that was entirely his choice and his doing.

  And this is something he tells himself over, and over, and over again.

  “So what now?”

  “Pardon?”

  Wendy stares at Paul. Her arms are stretched out in front of her, zombie-esque, and she has her fingers spread so far apart that the thin webbing separating their bases looks translucent in the sun.

  “You said there was something else we were doing today,” she says, with a tinge of impatient dread in her voice. “So, what is it?”

  “Right.” Paul sets his clipboard down on the grass and checks his watch: four fifteen in the afternoon. Behind him, twenty yards back, the porch of the clinic’s main building—a blue-and-white colonial revival—is darkened by shadows. Bugs, energized by the heat wave, buzz around the campus’s outdoor lamps. Paul swats a mosquito away from his right ear.

  He says, “Okay, first, though, how are you feeling?”

  “I was just molesting a trash can.”

  “Yes, I know. But how are you feeling?” Paul notices that Wendy hasn’t reached for the gloves she usually wears once he’s told her to let go of the bin. He can see her thumbs poking out from the pockets of her shorts. “Where’s your anxiety?”

  She throws him a look—they’ve both lost count of how many times he’s asked her that question over the past few hours—but then her face softens. She thinks.

  “A seven, maybe,” she says. “It’s lower.”

  “Okay.” Paul nods, encouragingly. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

  Wendy smiles, but it fades quickly. “So, what’s next?”

  “Before I tell you, I need to remind you again that you’re here voluntarily. No one is forcing you to complete any component of this treatment. Participating in any and all parts of Dr. Goulding’s form of exposure therapy is done entirely on your own accord. If at any point—”

  Wendy interrupts him by raising an ungloved hand. Paul can see a few telltale raw, pink spots where she burned her fingers with scalding water while washing herself. She says, “Save your breath. I read the waiver.”

  “Okay, then,” he says. “I’m going to need you to take off your shoes.”

  She looks down at her white Keds.

  “But this grass—”

  “It’s got a lot of dirt in it. I know.”

  She looks down again, then slowly slips out of each shoe, leaving the laces tied. When she sets her feet down on the grass she does so gingerly, arching the balls of her feet upward so that the only parts of her touching the ground are her toes and heels. In the back pocket of his jeans, Paul’s iPhone vibrates and he reaches instinctively to silence it. It’s the sixth time today that it’s rung. The first time the call was from an unknown number bearing an Indiana area code—some telemarketer, he figured, wasting away behind a desk in some nameless office park. The five remaining calls came from his sister, Alice, and he dutifully ignored each one. Eloise, their half sister, was getting married—and in England, no less. There’d be expensive hotels where he’d be afraid to touch anything, and embroidered cloth napkins, and a reception at some estate straight out of Masterpiece Theatre. He’d told Alice once already that he sur
e as fuck wasn’t going, and he suspects that’s what she wants to discuss. So far, she’s left two messages—the first politely asking to speak, the second threatening him with physical violence if he failed to call her back. Now, it seems, she’s switched to a strategy of pure harassment.

  “Is that it?” Wendy asks. She’s still balanced on her heels and toes, and now both her hands are gripping the hems of her shorts, which she pulls higher and higher up her thighs.

  Paul says, “It’s not.”

  “Then…”

  “I’m going to need you to step into the trash can,” he says.

  Wendy doesn’t say anything.

  “You can use my shoulder to balance yourself, because I realize it’ll be a … a big step. But I’m going to need you to climb into the trash can.”

  “I can’t do that.” Wendy shakes her head.

  Paul says, “Then you don’t have to.”

  This, he admits, is off-script. If Goulding were here he would’ve insisted that Paul pushed harder before offering a way out, and ostensibly for good reason. But with Wendy—well, with Wendy.

  He slaps at another mosquito, this one on his neck.

  “Remember, this is entirely voluntary. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do. If it’s too difficult, you can walk away, and we can suggest some other treatment options. You don’t have to do it.”

  “Yes, I do,” she says.

  “You really don’t, though.”

  She glances up at him. “You know how much I’m paying for this bullshit? To crawl into a goddamned garbage can, and with no refund policy, no less?”

  “It’s expensive because—”

  “You do. You do know how much I’m paying. So don’t go saying I don’t have to do this, because you and I both know damned well that I do.” She adds: “Besides, I’m getting sick and tired of washing my hands. Every month I spend as much money on soap as most people do on car insurance. And if I burn away any more skin from my fingers the only thing I’ll be left scrubbing is bone.” She stares down at her hands. “So I have to do it, all right?”

  Paul nods and takes a step forward. Now he is standing directly beside Wendy. Her Yves Saint Laurent mixes with the sourness of overripe cabbage. She grips his left shoulder and, bearing firmly down on him, lifts one leg into the steel bin. She stands like this for about a minute—one leg in, one leg out—catching her breath, repeating wordless mantras to herself. Paul still supports her, and as he feels her weight on him, he thinks of what else he put in the trash can earlier that afternoon: half a roasted chicken, week-old mashed potatoes from the clinic’s kitchen, the assorted contents of waste bins from three different women’s bathrooms. There is more, he knows—stuff that he pulled out of the Dumpsters behind the clinic that morning—but he prefers not to think about it. Because here is Wendy, who forked out over twenty thousand dollars just for the privilege of lowering her second leg into that mess. Paul sucks on his teeth: How much would someone have to pay him to stand in a trash can in suburban Philadelphia? It would have to be a lot of money. Too much money. And unlike Wendy, he is someone who has a relatively healthy relationship with germs. Sometimes he can’t even be bothered to wash his hands after taking a piss.

  He sucks on his teeth harder. Flattens out his grimace into a straight face.

  “How you doing?” he asks.

  She doesn’t answer, and he looks down into the bin. A half-eaten Big Mac has split apart, and bits of orange cheese and beef cling to her calf.

  “You’ll be here for twenty minutes,” he says, returning to Goulding’s script. “And in that time I want you to imagine all of the possible germs and all the possible diseases that you’re standing in right now, and that are touching your bare skin. As they come to you, say them out loud. I’ll be recording them here, on my clipboard. Do you understand?”

  Wendy takes her hand away from Paul’s shoulder and lets it lie limp against her side. Still, though, she is silent.

  “Wendy,” he said. “I need you to tell me that you understand.”

  She doesn’t, though. She keeps her lips pressed shut and her gaze fixed forward. After a minute or two, she shifts her right heel; something beneath it pops, and she begins, quietly, to cry. Paul looks back toward the clinic’s main facilities, where a few lights have flickered on. He licks his lips and reaches into his pocket. Discreetly as he can, he works his fingers into a clean latex glove. Then, using his clipboard to shield himself from any observing eyes, he reaches out and takes hold of Wendy’s hand, which he gives a good, firm squeeze.

  Alice

  May 3

  She pokes her head beneath the stalls to make sure the bathroom is empty, and once she’s sure she’s alone, she turns on the faucet farthest from the door, takes a Klonopin, and throws some cold water on her face. She does this a few more times—filling the cup of her hand, letting the frigid splashes sting her cheeks and hang from her eyelashes—before she turns the water off and ventures a look in the mirror. There have been days when she’s looked worse, she tells herself, tilting her chin left and then right. But then, there have also been days when she’s looked a hell of a lot better. Her skin, which two days ago sported an early-summer tan thanks to a Sunday spent in Santa Monica, now looks red, blotchy. And her hair—God, if all the men who’ve called it “honey” could see it now. A bucket of dirty dishwater, hanging limply to her shoulders. She leans in closer and pulls the skin away from her eyes. Miraculously, they’re fine: still that pale shade of blue. Free of the red spiderwebs you’d expect if you hadn’t slept the night before (she didn’t) or hadn’t spent the last nine hours staring at an Excel spreadsheet (she has).

  The door swings open and Alice jolts; she stands up straight and makes like she’s drying her hands. Nadine, the new hire in marketing, smiles at her shyly and disappears into one of the bathroom’s two handicapped stalls. Alice stares up into the fluorescent light above her until she sees spots, and when she hears the toilet flush, she leaves.

  Back in her cubicle, she drums her fingers lightly on her desk and compulsively checks for new e-mails, of which there are none. Slyly, she rolls her chair backward and cranes her neck so she can peer down the long row of cubes, past the neon THINK BIG! sign, and into Jonathan’s glass-enclosed office at the northwest corner of the floor.

  He’s on a call: she can see him standing, wearing his headset, arms gesticulating fluidly, his white shirt unbuttoned to show just enough of his chest. Behind him, the Hollywood Hills, with their quilts of mismatched houses, are obscured behind a screen of smog. In half an hour, Jonathan will flip a switch and a vanilla scrim will slide over the windows, blocking that same view (“It saves energy,” he told her once. “Gotta think green”). Then he’ll emerge from his office, navy blazer hooked over his shoulder, and saunter over to her cube. He’ll knock lightly on the squat gray wall, as if there’s a door to open, and ask her if the status reports for the Beijing accounts are ready yet (or maybe he’ll ask for the Paris accounts, or the Rome accounts—it all hinges on where she’s asked him to take her to dinner). She’ll tell him it will be another fifteen or thirty minutes, depending on how much gussying up she thinks she needs before meeting him downstairs in the parking garage. (Time which, over the past eight months, has become less and less important, mainly because she likes to see what she can get away with: if, between cocktails and appetizers at Mélisse, he’ll still want to slide his hand under the table and up her skirt if she decides to forgo eye shadow and blush. Even today, when she looks halfway like shit, she promises herself she won’t reach for the tube of lipstick rolling around in her desk drawer.)

  The whole charade has reached a point of predictability—honestly, at this point, Alice is shocked they haven’t been caught—but that doesn’t bother her; the Thrill of the Illicit wasn’t the reason she started fucking Jonathan, anyway.

  It was more the ever-changing power dynamic that first drew her to him, the idea that at one moment he might be screaming at her in
the middle of a meeting for missing a deadline, and forty-five minutes later she’d be pinning him down against the shotgun seat of his Alfa Romeo, riding him to the precipice of climax, but never actually allowing him to come. She thinks of what Paul told her when she asked him what he liked most about having sex with another man; he described this feeling of being challenged, and the anticipation that at any moment the balance of control and dominance could shift.

  At the time she accused him of being a gay misogynist (she was a junior in college and exclusively reading Susan Sontag); she said he was implying that a woman was expected to exercise docility in the bedroom, and only men—two men, for that matter—could be sexually aggressive. And while she still sort of agrees with all that (she continues to flip through Styles of Radical Will every now and then), she now understands a little bit more of what her brother had meant. Looking back, she’s lost count of how many times at UCLA she had some half-drunk frat boy lying on top of her, squashing her tits as he pumped his doughy thighs to an awkward beat. Each time she’d wanted to do something to shake things up—roll on top of him and hold him down; work a finger up his ass, just to the first knuckle; something, anything, to break the monotony of being controlled. Whenever she did, though, the guy would freak out. Would rip himself out of her and stand abruptly, protesting that he wasn’t into whatever it was she was trying to do to him, professing with slurred consonants how he was just looking for a nice girl (the implication being that a nice girl is something Alice is not). And while admitting so is a massive disappointment, things haven’t changed much in the twelve years since she graduated. Despite their claims of sexual adventure, their organic diets, and their liberal voting records, the men Alice has encountered, at least until Jonathan, have all been beleaguered with the same redundant hang-ups. A bunch of perpetual eighteen-year-olds who, in the safety of their own darkened rooms, jack off to the nastiest shit they can find online, but who, once the lights are flipped on, squirm at the idea of eating her out.