The People We Hate at the Wedding Page 4

  She imagines that someone else is telling the story, as if she, Alice, is watching some simulacrum describe the death of someone who had her father’s name, and who had her father’s disease, but who, aside from those two inconsequential details, is a complete stranger. She thinks how she’d judge the abilities of this impostor, this made-up version of herself: how well she played with the tones of her voice, how she milked compassion from her audience. This, she tells herself, is a trait she inherited from her father. While Paul prides himself on his emotional hysterics—his keen sense for holding a grudge, for painting himself as the family’s black sheep—Alice has her dad’s knack for maintaining a corpselike calm.

  She remembers when he went in for stomach pains and, a week later, the doctors told him he had three months. Her mother was crying so hard that she wasn’t able to drive home from the hospital. So Dad asked her to get into the backseat so he could drive—there was a Cubs game starting in twenty minutes. Alice, who had come home to be there for the test results, had sat next to him on the couch for nine interminable innings. They finished a twelve-pack of beer and half a pack of Marlboros. During the game’s recap, she asked him if he needed anything and he told her to make him a ham sandwich.

  She catches a reflection of herself in Jonathan’s eyes, and wonders, briefly, if she’s coming off as a bitch.

  “You think I’m heartless,” she says. “For what it’s worth, I also go to a support group. Something to help me deal…”

  “Is that where you go on Tuesday afternoons?”

  “You’ve noticed?”

  He smiles. “I like to keep tabs on you.”

  Alice smooths her napkin across her lap. “This is humiliating.”

  Beneath the table he grabs her hand. “Look, I think we all deal with shit like this in different ways.”

  She appreciates his diplomacy and squeezes his hand.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “Anyway.” He’s still holding her hand. “Your brother and your mom…”

  “Oh, right,” she says. “He doesn’t approve of how Mom handled it all. So he’s not speaking to her.”

  “And how did she handle it?”

  “Another story that’s too long.”

  “And your mother wants you…” He trails off.

  A strand of hair tickles Alice’s chin, and she hooks it behind her left ear. “To somehow make things right, I guess? It’s all because of Eloise.”

  “Oh, right.” With his free hand, Jonathan reaches for the bottle and pours himself another glass of wine. “The Wedding of the Century.”

  He sips and smacks his lips.

  Suddenly self-conscious, Alice gently pulls her hand away and sets it in her lap. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You’ve heard all this before. I don’t want to bore you.”

  “You’re not.”

  Alice chews on the inside of her lip. “Well, I’m sort of boring myself, to be honest.”

  “We can talk about something else.”

  “Would you mind?”

  “Of course not. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Anything,” Alice says. She reconsiders: “Or, no, not anything. Talk to me about big data.”

  The corners of Jonathan’s mouth twitch as he tries to suppress a grin. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  “Sure I do. You know how much I love the story.”

  And so he begins recounting his own personal history, or mythology, which, by this point, has become so familiar to Alice that she occasionally has to fight the urge to interrupt him and correct facts that he so endearingly fudges. He narrates his first few years after Stanford, when he held jobs at a handful of fledging start-ups, all of which ended up folding on account of (according to Jonathan) their inability to “procure and creatively interpret substantial masses of incongruent data.” Then there was the pivotal trip to Australia (Jonathan says that he started in Sydney, though from past tellings of the story, Alice knows that he flew into Melbourne), where, totally by chance, he met Vishnu Goyal (the Vishster!), a Berkeley grad who’d just fled Google, and with whom Jonathan shared any number of acquaintances back in the Bay Area. They bummed around together for about a month, hitting Brisbane and the Great Barrier Reef, staring at the sunburned faces of Ayers Rock, until, on January 2, they found themselves at a bar in Auckland, hatching a plan for what to do with the rest of their lives.

  “We just saw a need, I guess you could say,” Jonathan says. “Just … this space for a company that could collect and interpret data the way that we do. Sure, there were a few big data companies then, but they still seemed to be stuck in the past, you know? Using metrics like page views and click-throughs. Prehistoric shit, really. No one was thinking as far out of the box as we were.” He takes a sip of wine and smiles. “Anyway. The rest is history that you already know.”

  Alice considers what this means: how, in eight years since he started the company, Jonathan has turned Think Big Data from a two-man shop into one of the tech industry’s leading big data firms. (Vishnu sold his shares in the company a few years ago for a reported thirty million after some shrouded dispute with Jonathan over a contract that he, Jonathan, had accepted from the NSA. Moral disagreements were the words that Alice had heard thrown around. She doesn’t know many more details of the argument—Jonathan doesn’t like to talk about it—but his friendship with Vishnu seems to have emerged from it unscathed. They still send each other holiday cards and meet, occasionally, for dinner.) The company’s client pool ranges across fields (hospitality, retail, governmental) and across continents. (Diplomatic issues are currently preventing them from doing the sort of work in Russia that Jonathan had once envisioned. He’s working on it.) She knows that Ad Age and Forbes have both run profiles of him, and she has heard how he’s often invited to speak on panels whose names too often incorporate some iteration of the phrase What’s Next? He’s told her how he doesn’t own a single item of clothing—not even a pair of shorts—that hasn’t been custom tailored. How he doesn’t have to vacation in spots like the south of France or Santorini or Fiji anymore because he can afford the places that no one’s heard of yet.

  Typically, confronting unchecked privilege sends her into a rage, a downward spiral that begins with frustration over the moral wrongness of global inequality and ends with (and she knows this is bad) a sort of solipsistic meditation on all the nice things she can’t afford, but others (read: her sister) can. Or, it’s not that she can’t afford them—she’s making more money than she ever has before, so to blame her current monetary chaos on sheer lack of funds is, frankly, letting herself off easy. The real problem is that, lately, the only way she’s been able to quell this financial anxiety is through acts of flagrant consumption, these binge sessions of buying expensive dresses and handbags and (in one terrible case) a new Prius—things that she doesn’t need, or even really like, but that nonetheless temporarily fill some shapeless void; that remind her that she has the same right to entitlement as everyone else, even if it’s put her twenty thousand dollars in debt. Curiously, though, when Jonathan talks to her about his life she doesn’t resent his wealth. She suspects, sheepishly, that there are two root causes for this: (1) more often than not, he’s spending his money on her; and (2) she’s in love with him.

  He smiles at her. His teeth are stained red.

  You can’t call him arrogant, Alice thinks. Or, you can, but to do so wouldn’t be fair. Arrogant is a tag reserved for people who are profoundly certain and aware of how far their accomplishments set them apart from others. Jonathan, meanwhile, still has a sense of being in awe of himself, as if he’s just as surprised as the next person by what he’s actually pulled off. Watching him talk, watching his hands move, she’s reminded of Paul as a kid, before he became jaded and self-conscious, when he liked to construct elaborate forts out of sheets and pillows and unbent hangers. He’d wake her up early on Saturday mornings and pull her into the living room and point at the thing he’d built, the whole time scratc
hing his head and laughing, bewildered by his own genius.

  “Should I keep going?” Jonathan asks.

  “I’m not stopping you, am I?”

  He grins.

  They started sleeping together last September: two years after her dad died, and six years to the day after the disaster in Mexico City. At that point, Alice was still considered a newish hire; she’d joined Think Big five months earlier, after having spent almost five years doing sales for a hospitality start-up that sold consumer insight to hotels. The jobs were similar enough (in both cases she convinced people to pay absurd amounts of money for access to information that she herself didn’t understand) and toward both of them she felt the same lukewarm ambivalence—which, she knows, is what makes her so good at what she does. Doing what you love for a living: what a terrible mistake. That was one of the many hard-earned lessons she gleaned from everything that happened in Mexico. The second you slap a paycheck onto a passion, something changes. The stakes become too high. No, Alice thought, better to get yourself involved in something comically dull, something in which you feel zero personal investment. That way, you have no qualms about taking risks, because if you end up losing everything, it was never very much at all, anyway.

  She stabs at a piece of crab floundering in the green porridge. It’s too soggy, though, and slithers away from her fork.

  She didn’t make the decision to sleep with him the first day on the job, though it couldn’t have come long after. Still, she likes to remind herself that he was the one who made the first move. That isn’t to say she didn’t go out of her way to lay the groundwork. But still, he was the one who reached across that line, who took things from hypothetical and phantasmic to real and messy, which is, as far as Alice is concerned, the point that actually matters. It happened on a Tuesday—or, at least that’s how she remembers it. They’d been flirting for the better part of the morning on Ding Dong, the company’s intra-office instant messaging platform (she pinged him first, she admits), with Jonathan telling her the sort of lewd and sexualized things he hadn’t had the guts to say in person. She played along, laughing and occasionally rolling her eyes, right up until the point where he told her that he wanted to fill her up with his Big Data. Then, with smug satisfaction, she said—in as matter-of-fact a way as possible—that she needed to go to the supply closet.

  She knew, obviously, that he would follow her, but there was some part of her that was still surprised when she heard him sneak through the door behind her. She turned around and saw him standing there, grinning like an eight-year-old, his body framed by shelves filled with pens and staplers and red Post-its shaped like cartoon lightbulbs.

  “I just came to get some paper,” she said. “The printer in the Relaxation Station ran out and the interns forgot to fill it.”

  “That’s why I’m here, too.” He kept grinning. “My printer ran out of paper.”

  “Don’t you have a secretary who’ll take care of that for you?”

  “We call them special assistants here, Alice.” He took a step forward. “Secretary carries sexist and misogynistic undertones.”

  “How … progressive of you.”

  “And besides,” he said, “I can do things myself.”

  “Oh, can you?”

  Oh, can you? It was the sort of line she’d normally cringe at. The sort of coy flirtation that made her hate girls she saw in bars. But here, under the fluorescent lights of the supply closet, she told her better self to shut up; she just went with it. Moaned at all the right times as he kissed her neck; gasped theatrically as he slid a hand up her skirt. Closed her eyes and leaned her head back against a half-furled THINK BRIGHTER poster when he buried his head between her thighs. And when it was over, and she was wiping herself off with Kleenex from a box she’d just opened, she realized, with a sort of lightness, that for the first time in six years she felt good about what had happened. Better than good, even. Happy.

  Though maybe not entirely. There is, after all, the issue of the ring, which she spotted the first day she saw him in the sales meeting—a thin gold band, strapped around the fourth finger on his left hand. And there’s what he said last week when they walked down Wilshire to get coffee after her team’s morning meet-up. The quiet implication that things weren’t great at home. She feels badly about that—though, if she’s being honest with herself, probably not as badly as she should, particularly because alongside that guilt is a sense of thrilling excitement. Still, she knows she’s crossed a line in the sand of Womanhood—a boundary that has been delineated by feminism and sorority and, God, probably a bunch of spear-wielding, breast-heaving Amazonians. She’s turned her back on her sex, has somehow thrown a bone (ha ha) to the very patriarchy that she half-drunkenly bitches about every Friday night. She should be atoning somehow, she thinks. Call his wife (Marissa), come clean, and swear off men. Really, though, every time it happens all she wants is for it to happen again.

  “You ready?”

  They’ve finished the wine. Jonathan has finished talking. He’s paid the bill. All without her noticing.

  Alice smiles. “Yup.”

  Jonathan hates Wilshire—even though Think Big has its offices there, he calls the boulevard soulless and corporate—so he takes South Wilton to Beverley Boulevard, then heads west, toward Westwood and Alice’s apartment. It’s after ten, so there isn’t much traffic, and as Jonathan smoothly works through the Alfa Romeo’s gears the car gains speed and begins to purr. Alice rests her head against the window as they drive through Fairfax, and as they pass the cross streets she counts them and says their names silently to herself: Poinsettia. Martel. Crescent Heights. Each one stretches out toward the hills, where the glinting light of mansions replaces the need for stars.

  “You want to talk about it some more?” Jonathan says.

  “What?”

  “Your brother not calling your mom. Your half sister’s wedding.”

  They’ve crossed into West Hollywood. On Robertson, a line of men snakes around the entrance to a bar. Above them, clouds of cigarette smoke unfurl themselves like balls of string.

  “There’s not much to talk about. Paul doesn’t want to talk to Mom, and he thinks Eloise is a spoiled bitch.”

  In front of them, a stoplight turns yellow and Jonathan speeds up.

  “And do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Think she’s a spoiled bitch?”

  “Of course,” Alice says. “That’s what she is.”

  She reaches for the radio and tunes it to a Top 40 station. A song that she’s never heard is playing, and she turns it up.

  Alice turns in her seat and looks at him for a moment, at the way the dull glow from the streetlamps washes the wrinkles out of his forehead and smooths away the creases at the corners of his mouth. They stop at a red light, and she pulls one knee up to her chest.

  “You want to come up for a drink?” she asks him.

  “Huh?”

  “When we get back to my place,” she says, hugging her knee closer. “Want to come up for a drink?”

  He scratches his widow’s peak and turns back toward the road.

  “Oof,” he says. “I wish I could. God, I wish I could. I can’t, though. It’s already late. And Marissa … if she has to put the kids to bed by herself again…”

  “Right.” Alice puts both feet squarely on the floorboard in front of her. She reaches forward to change the radio station. “No, I know. You’re right. It’s late.”

  Jonathan reaches over and squeezes the back of her neck.

  “Next time,” he says.

  The light turns green.

  Donna

  May 3

  “Ma’am? Can I help you?”

  Donna looks at the crook of her left arm, where she’s slung five or six dresses. “Oh, thank you, but I’m sure I’ll manage,” she says.

  The salesgirl smiles. KIM, her name tag reads. She’s dressed all in black—everyone in the department store is dressed all in black, Donna’s notice
d—and she can’t be older than nineteen or twenty. She wears heavy eye shadow and she’s straightened her dark hair so it falls in solid curtains on either side of her face. A piano rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” twinkles throughout the store. The air’s fragrant with synthetic rosewater and sandalwood.

  “At least let me start a dressing room for you?”

  Kim’s smile widens, and she reaches for the nest of dresses, all tangled up in their individual hangers.

  “I … uh, I…” Donna stammers.

  Kim works on commission; there’s no stopping her.

  “That would be nice,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “Let me show you where I’ll be setting you up.”

  Donna follows her, watching her thin waist sway in her black pants as they slither past racks of expensive blouses and khaki trousers. Near a table stacked with neat piles of V-neck sweaters, she catches her reflection in the mirror. She’s all hips. And not good hips. Not Kim hips. But hip hips, the kind that can’t be controlled with a pair of stretchy black pants. She can’t remember when that happened—when she suddenly exploded horizontally. Hair has escaped from behind her ear and now hangs in front of her eyes: a mess of brown and dyed russet and scraggly gray roots. She’ll need to schedule a coloring appointment before she leaves for London. From the looks of it, she’ll have to schedule a lot of appointments before she leaves for London.

  “Here we are,” Kim says, unlocking the door to a small dressing room with a bench and a full-length mirror. A handful of clothing pins dot the carpet like pine needles. Kim crouches down to gather them up, and as she does so, the hem of her shirt lifts an inch, revealing the elastic band of her thong and a small tattoo. A rose in half bloom. Donna looks away, casting her eyes down to her cell phone—her new cell phone—which she’s got cradled like a relic in her right hand.

  “Expecting a call?” Kim asks. She slips the pins into her pocket.

  “Yes.” Donna blushes. “Or maybe.”