The People We Hate at the Wedding Read online

  “How are those Tokyo accounts coming?”

  Alice looks up to see Jonathan smiling.

  “Twenty minutes,” she tells him, perhaps a bit too flatly. He winks at her, nevertheless, and saunters toward the elevator.

  She glances down at the clock on her computer screen: it’s nearly five o’clock in L.A., which means it will be coming up on eight in Philadelphia. If he isn’t home by now, then something has happened. He boarded the wrong train and ended up in the middle of New Jersey, or drowned in one of the two rivers that run through the city. Knowing Paul, either option is plausible. How long has it been since she tried him last? She looks at the clock again: ten minutes since she tried his cell, twenty-seven since she called the landline in the apartment, when Mark answered and told her that Paul wasn’t home yet. If Mark picks up again, she’ll likely get an earful. Or not an earful, exactly. But he will do that thing where he explains to her again that Pauly isn’t home, but that he’s expecting him to walk in the door any minute, and in the meantime, is there anything he can do to help. And it will all be said in that lilting, condescending tone that he managed to pick up at Columbia and that she and Paul have too much fun imitating whenever they happen to be on the same coast.

  The phone rings once, and she hears the receiver on the other end click.

  “Alice. Thirty minutes. Right on time.”

  “Mark, I—”

  “No, no. It’s fine. He’s here. Hold on.”

  Needing something with which to busy her hands, Alice reaches into the drawer for her lipstick. She holds the tube out in front of her, letting it roll back and forth across her palm.

  “Yes?”

  She hears him crunch into something hard. A carrot. He always eats while talking on the phone. He could be having a conversation with the Queen of England, and he’d still have half a goddamned Twinkie stuffed between his cheeks. It drives her nuts.

  “You’re home late,” she says.

  “Am I?”

  “It’s after eight there. And Mark said you got out of work early.”

  “Did he?” A pause. “We-ell, sometimes the train takes a while.”

  “Don’t do that,” Alice says. “Don’t do that we-ell thing. It’s irritating. It makes you sound like Mark.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know exactly what it means. It’s that same voice we—”

  “Is this why you were so desperately trying to get ahold of me? To berate me?”

  Alice takes a breath and closes her eyes and calms herself by trying to determine whether she can hear the traffic building up on Wilshire.

  “Al?” Paul says.

  “I’m here.”

  “So is that why you called?”

  “You know that’s not why I called, Paul.” She sets the tube of lipstick on the desk and spins it in a circle, watching it as it pinwheels.

  “I already told you: I’m not going to that wedding.”

  Alice pivots. “That’s not why I called, either.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s not,” she says. “I called because Mom’s been trying to get ahold of you.”

  Paul is quiet for a moment, and in the background she can hear the soothing monotony of All Things Considered.

  Then, Paul spits: “Donna?”

  “Yes. And for fuck’s sake, can’t you just call her Mom?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Alice’s cell phone vibrates against her desk, and she rolls her chair over to it. On the screen blinks a message from Jonathan—Ready when you are =)—that she quickly deletes.

  She says, “There’s got to be a statute of limitations on these things.”

  “On what?” Paul says. “Being some frigid cunt?”

  Alice pinches the bridge of her nose. In the Relaxation Station, on the other end of the floor, a pair of interns start a game of Ping-Pong. “We’re not talking about this right now. I didn’t call to rehash this.”

  “You still haven’t clarified why it is, exactly, that you’re calling.”

  “Yes, I did. I said that Mom’s trying to get ahold of you.”

  “And that’s it?”

  More crunching. A new carrot.

  “She would appreciate—and I would really appreciate it—if you called her back.”

  “But I haven’t—”

  “Paul, can you please swallow before you speak?”

  He coughs gutturally. Alice rolls her eyes.

  “Better?” he says.

  “Much.”

  “Good. In any event, as I was saying, I don’t have any missed calls from her, so she couldn’t have been trying that hard.”

  Alice thinks for a moment, considering the most strategic way to frame what she has to say next.

  “She—she got a new phone,” she offers, weakly. From here, she knows, it’ll all be downhill.

  “Well, good for her. Surely the number’s the same, though, and I would have seen it if—”

  “I’m sorry, I should have been more specific. She got a new phone with an Indiana area code.”

  “Well, that makes absolutely no sense. Why would she—” Paul stops himself for a moment, and Alice waits for him to jam the pieces together. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” She bites her lip hard, just short of drawing blood. “She drove to Indiana to get a phone without a Chicago area code so I wouldn’t know it was her who was calling me. You’re kidding me, Al. Please tell me you’re fucking kidding me.”

  In the Relaxation Station, a Ping-Pong ball bounces off the table and into a planter filled with bamboo. One of the interns throws his paddle against the wall. Alice lowers her forehead to rest against her desk.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” she says.

  “This is … this is unbelievable. I mean, just when I think that woman has written the book on passive-aggressive manipulation.”

  “She just really wants to talk, I guess.”

  “We-ell, evidently, Alice.” She cringes. “Do you know what even about?”

  “I’m assuming the wedding.”

  “Tell her what I told you: I’m not going.”

  “Why are you being so difficult about this?” she says. “Eloise is getting married.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s our sister, Paul.”

  “Half sister. And I haven’t spoken to her in over a year.”

  Alice says, “Yeah, well. Whose fault is that?”

  Her phone, now directly next to her head, buzzes again. Another message from Jonathan. This one less playful than the first: Where are you??

  “Look,” she says, “I’ve got to go. Do whatever the fuck you want. Just—it wouldn’t kill you to call Mom back, all right?”

  * * *

  The waiter reaches forward and begins pouring a hot green liquid over the Dungeness crab. Through the steam Alice sees Jonathan looking at her. He raises an eyebrow, and she smiles before letting her eyes fall back down to the bowl, where the broth soaks its way into the crab meat, dyeing the flesh a shade of mossy green. “Sea bean porridge” is what the waiter calls it, and Alice is forced to admit (always silently, always to herself), that she doesn’t have the first clue what a sea bean is. Hadn’t been aware, really, that the sea produced beans at all—though, thinking about it now, as she watches the waiter bow slightly and vanish, she supposes it makes sense. The ocean is full of all sorts of crap she’s never stopped to consider: weeds, strange pink blossoms sprouting from coral reefs, translucent fish lurking in bottomless trenches, and—now—beans. Green little pellets that she imagines taste like everything else she’s eaten this evening: salty, and with a trace of gritty canned fish—sardines coated in sand. The trout roe with peas and lemon curd. The tuna with kale oil and quince. Despite the different ingredients, it’s all the same. It all has that flavor she can’t help but associate with the Gulf Coast of Florida, with those horrible smells that assaulted her in places like Pensacola and Panama City and Fort Walton Beach, where her father used to
drag her and Paul and their mother (but never Eloise) on vacation every summer so he could fish for tuna, and which, metaphorically, couldn’t be farther from Babél, the restaurant on Wilshire and South Wilton where she currently sits, staring at a trio of critically lauded, Japanese/neo-Nordic fusion dishes.

  Discreetly, she looks at her phone. Thirty minutes ago, she checked in to Babél on Facebook. This is nothing new: she always checks in to the restaurant when she’s out to eat with Jonathan. She likes the comments the postings garner, the jealous pleas for tips on getting a reservation, the requests for pictures of her food. More than anything, though, she appreciates the subtle message it sends to her half sister: a reminder that Eloise isn’t the only one who can eat at pricey restaurants, that Alice belongs here just as much as she does.

  Scrolling through the twenty-three “likes,” she searches for her half sister’s name. When she can’t find it, she slips her phone back into her purse, irritated.

  The waiter returns, this time with two servings of uni. Each one is balanced on its own slate slab and drizzled in almond milk. The man bows, and Jonathan lunges forward with a set of red lacquered chopsticks. Alice looks away.

  “You don’t want any?” he asks. A blob of orange clings to the left side of his mouth.

  “No, you have it,” she says. “I’m full.”

  She knows she’s being difficult, and watching Jonathan sheepishly reach for the second piece of uni, she feels contrite; she wants to apologize, to say that her brother is being characteristically difficult, which has thrown her into a dark mood—and yet, every time she opens her mouth, the only thing she’s capable of producing is some other dismissive comment, some other bitchy remark. Worse, inevitably, Jonathan will foot the bill: Alice can hardly afford drinks at a place like Babél, so he’ll have no choice but to throw down three hundred dollars to eat disgraced puddles of raw sea urchin while the woman sitting across from him more or less ignores him. And even though he knows all this—he oversees her department’s budget—he still, through some divine inspiration, manages to put on a good face. Manages to reach beneath the table and squeeze her knee between courses; manages to smile at all the right moments as he shovels bites of uni into his mouth.

  She drains her glass of wine. She’s chosen this place, which she wagers makes things doubly bad. At the time, of course, it had seemed like a good idea: she’d read about it in the Times and L.A. Weekly and on at least four of the ten restaurant blogs she had bookmarked at work. She had googled the menu and had been impressed by its absurd prices and foreign ingredients—exotic fishes and spices, frivolous vegetables whose shapes and tastes and provenances were total and complete mysteries to her. She had clicked through the interior pictures she found online and, upon seeing the careful balance of reclaimed wood, brushed steel, and poured concrete, felt the strange arousal she often experienced while flipping through catalogs from Room & Board and travel brochures from American Express. In short: she used the same process to find Babél that she uses to find any of the other overpriced restaurants in Los Angeles to which she asks Jonathan to take her. It’s a process that she previously thought served her well—how else would she have been able to develop an opinion on the proper consistency of sweetbreads?—but that now, in the dim lighting of the restaurant, strikes her as transparent and mildly pathetic. It smacks of her seventeen-year-old self, who lied about the books she’d read and who felt crippled and uncouth whenever Eloise corrected her over a mispronounced word. The same sort of girl who’d brag to her friends about being able to distinguish between champagnes, but who’d never tell them she grew up sharing a bathroom with her brother.

  She checks her Facebook post on her phone again. Still nothing from Eloise.

  She thinks: What a bitch.

  She wants a pizza. That’s what she really wants. She wants a fucking pizza.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  Jonathan has just ordered another ninety-dollar bottle of wine. She wanted to tell him not to, that it’s an unnecessary expense, but not enough to actually stop him from doing it.

  “Talk about what?” she says.

  “Whatever it is that’s upsetting you.”

  Between them, the sea bean porridge cools and its oils begin rising to the surface, forming tiny, shimmering pools. Alice watches them as she considers Jonathan’s proposal to talk, which is something that’s been happening more and more frequently. Up until a few months ago, their relationship found comfortable footing on a foundation of adventurous sex (“the sort of sex that I’d want to watch,” Alice once said) and outrageously expensive meals. Lately, though, Alice finds herself craving the types of conversations she initially forbade herself from entertaining: these exchanges when, in the afterglow of sleeping with Jonathan, her body still slick with his sweat, she’d tell him a small secret of her life. Her admissions have been nothing significant, at least not thus far. Nothing about Mexico City, for example, or the mess she left when she fled that terrible place. Still, though, they’ve been admissions. Minor additions to the long list she lays bare for him of unsatisfactory ways her life has unfolded. About how she hasn’t read all the books she claims she’s read, or how she’s insecure about the fat behind her knees.

  “My brother’s really pissing me off,” she says.

  Jonathan wipes his mouth with his napkin and returns it to his lap. “Paul?”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  The waiter swoops in with the fresh bottle of wine, and Jonathan tastes it, swishing it around in his mouth theatrically.

  “Why’s he pissing you off?” he asks once the waiter leaves.

  “Because he’s refusing to talk to my mother.”

  “Still? That seems a little childish.”

  Alice takes a swig of her wine and realizes only after she’s swallowed that she’s finished off half the glass.

  “It is,” she says.

  “Hasn’t this been going on for a while?”

  “Three years.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And like I told you the other night, I’m meant to play peacemaker—”

  “That’s—”

  “Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, gets a little exhausting.”

  There is a brief silence, a space in which the clinking of glasses around them grows louder, and Alice worries suddenly that she’s said too much.

  Jonathan leans back in his chair and sets his hands on the table. She stares at his knuckles. The tops of his fingers are tan, moisturized, and look a solid ten years younger than the rest of him, which already looks unnaturally young.

  He says, “And this is all about your dad…”

  “Yes,” Alice says. She tries, unsuccessfully, not to be flattered by all that Jonathan remembers about the events of her life before he knew her.

  “Paul didn’t like the way that Mom handled my dad’s death.”

  She swallows the rest of her wine, briefly considers waiting for the waiter, but then thinks twice about it and pours herself a second glass.

  He runs a hand through his sandy hair. “I know I said this before, but I’m sorry … about your dad having passed, I mean.”

  Alice waves a hand in front of her face, which is something she always does when she tells someone about her dad and the person reacts in the way people are supposed to, with sincere condolences. She’s never been good with obligatory compassion; she imagines batting away words like passed as if they were flies.

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I mean, that’s nice of you to say that, but it’s fine. It happened nearly three years ago, anyway.”

  Jonathan opens his mouth, hesitates a moment, and says, “You still haven’t told me how it happened.”

  “I haven’t?”

  “No. I mean, I knew your dad died and that’s the reason you were out of the office, but … you’ve never told me how.”

  She swallows another mouthful of wine. She considers what to say, what might elicit a greater share of his sympathy: Murdered in cold blo
od. Abducted by the Taliban. A plane crash. Some Southeast Asian budget flight that disappeared somewhere near Malaysia.

  “Gallbladder cancer. Real curveball, right? I mean, who gets gallbladder cancer? Actually—I can tell you, if you’re curious. Less than five thousand people a year in the whole United States.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “It’s an anomaly, at the very least.”

  Jonathan shifts in his seat. “And they caught it … late?”

  “That’s the thing,” Alice says. “With gallbladder cancer, you never really know. Or, that’s not entirely true. You do know, when they finally tell you. It’s just that, up until then, it’s not something that they routinely check for, and the signs and symptoms aren’t exactly the same as getting a lump on your tit, you know? Harder to tell that anything’s wrong, and all that. Anyway. Yes. They did catch it late—by the time they diagnosed him, the thing had already set up shop in his liver. And by that point the only thing we could do was keep him comfortable and high enough so he wasn’t in too much pain.”

  It’s a rehearsed speech (though one that, until now, she’s avoided having to deliver to Jonathan), not in the sense that she’s practiced it in front of a mirror, but rather in that she’s given it before—to friends, coworkers, countless first dates who ask what happened. At first it was uncomfortable—she rarely wanted to say it any more than they wanted to hear it—but then a shift happened, some hardening of nerves, and she actually managed to mine a sort of perverse joy in recounting the details of her father’s death. It’s avoidance, she knows—she is averting some core emotional issue that she needs to deal with. Paul, with his bullshit master’s degree, has told her as much, and the truth is, he’s probably right. For the time being, though, avoidance seems to work for her. It isn’t fun—fun isn’t the word for it—but it is distracting, and distracting is enough. She likes testing how much she can prevent herself from feeling, how long she can keep remorse at bay.