The People We Hate at the Wedding Read online

  * * *

  An hour later, and the crowd’s picked up a bit. It’s nothing like a Friday or a Saturday night, but at least there are enough people milling around that Paul no longer has to worry about Preston speaking too loudly; other voices are drowning him out. He sucks down the dregs of his third whiskey and winces as it stings his throat. He’s still smarting from Mark’s performance, not so much because of the way he characterized his relationship with Eloise—that was all spot on—but rather because of how wantonly he glossed over the issue of his father’s death. Mark knows how devastating that was for Paul, not only the death itself, but how his mother had reacted to it; how, once Bill was finally buried, she took every effort to erase any sign that he’d ever existed; how, when Paul accused her of rewriting history, she’d said those things, those terrible things, that characterized her marriage to Bill—and thus, by extension, Paul and Alice’s existence—as some lowbrow mistake. How she’d given him no choice but to ignore her, even here, even now, as she calls him repeatedly from a fake Indiana number on a random Tuesday night.

  Thank God for bourbon, though, he thinks; his irritation and hurt toward Mark’s callousness are becoming foggier, to the point where he’s quickly forgetting their nexus. He smiles to himself, drunkenly, stupidly. Mark also probably had a little bit of a point, he thinks: Paul occasionally has a tendency to draw stories out. Not without reason, he’d argue. But he would admit the tendency is there.

  He feels Mark’s hand grip his thigh. “What’re you grinning over?”

  “Just thinking about the whiskey you’re about to get me.”

  Mark squeezes his knee. Paul spills the two ice cubes that are left in his glass. They both laugh.

  “Is that so? By my count it’s your turn to buy a round.”

  Paul lets his chin hang down to his chest, and he frowns.

  “Oh, all right, but only because you’re cute when you’re upset,” Mark says. “Actually, let’s wait a sec. I want to enjoy the show.”

  Paul glances over at the bar, where Mark is looking, and sees Crosby and Preston talking to a brunet twenty-something in a leather jacket. He’s empirically cute—his face is symmetrical and he’s got nice hair—and well dressed in that way where he can probably make cheap clothes look expensive, and they’ve got him sandwiched between the two of them, laughing.

  “Oh, come on,” Paul says. “We know how this plays out. Just get me my whiskey.”

  Mark leans forward. “Hold on, this is where it gets good. Preston’s going to go to the bathroom, and Crosby’s going to go in for the kill.”

  “You make it sound like a fucking nature documentary.”

  Still, he watches, though he hardly needs to; Preston and Crosby have their act down to a fine science, and Paul’s seen it in action enough times to know what comes next. As Mark predicted: Preston excuses himself and slinks away from the bar, letting his hand lightly brush the kid’s shoulder as he heads to the bathroom. Once he’s gone, Crosby edges an inch closer, repositioning himself so he’s facing the kid head-on. He runs a hand through his own hair, which is just long enough, and just floppy enough, to make running a hand through it acceptable, and then he lets that same hand fall to the kid’s waist, where it rests casually on his hip. The kid looks startled at first—he flinches—but Crosby keeps right on going, as if his hand has been there for the past hour, as if he’s got some basic right to be touching him. He flexes his biceps intermittently, like he’s got some weird twitch—still, weird or not, when he does this, Paul finds him suddenly more attractive, in the same way he’s turned on by undergrads on spring break in Daytona Beach who’ve got bad tattoos, or the gay-for-pay porn actors on the amateur sites he pays to watch when Mark’s away (and not away). Crosby pulls the kid’s head closer so he can whisper something. The kid laughs and turns to see if anyone else heard what he just heard, and Paul, at least for a moment, quietly seethes over the fact that Crosby has never whispered in his ear, and he likely never will, so Paul will have to go on guessing as to what it is that he actually says.

  Mark taps Paul’s knee. “Here comes Preston. Lock and load.”

  He’s already got his jacket on, and he stands for a moment by the bathrooms, eyeing Crosby with an air of paternal pride—a father beaming at a son who just shot a three-pointer to win a high school basketball game. The bar’s air-conditioning whirls to life, and Paul feels a goose-bump chill raise the hairs on his arms.

  Preston swoons toward them.

  He says, “Well, I think it’s about time the missus and I call it a night. Early classes tomorrow and all.”

  “Oh yeah? How early?” Mark winks.

  “Dreadfully early, I’m afraid.” Preston smiles wryly. “Breakfast-time early. Pre-breakfast-time early, even. You know how these young ’uns can get.”

  “Eager beavers, they are.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “And all for lessons on the significance of a teaspoon in The Mill on the Floss.”

  “Yes,” Preston says, as Crosby and the kid materialize beside him. “Well. Among other things. Mark”—he sticks out a hand—“see you on campus tomorrow. And Paul”—he plants one on his cheek—“call your mother back.”

  Once they’ve left, Paul asks, “Do you think that they ever go home with just the two of them? Like, on their wedding night, do you think they’ll come to Maryann’s after the reception to find some twink to sleep with?”

  Mark collapses into the sofa, the cushions swallowing his head, his neck, and he grins. “We-ell, whatever works, right?”

  “We-ell, somebody’s changed his tune.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Paul settles into the devastating realization that he’s not going to be getting his whiskey anytime soon. “I just mean that when you first saw them skip off with someone at that house party in Rehoboth, your opinions were a little more…”

  “Homo-normative?”

  “I guess that’s one word for it. I was going to say traditional.”

  Mark shrugs. A black leather ottoman sits in front of him, and he tosses his legs atop it.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “People change their minds.”

  The air-conditioning dies, and other noises emerge from the silence in which they’ve been hiding: beers fizzing, bottles opening, Tina Burner muscling her way through the last hour of her set.

  Mark continues, his voice acquiring a lilting, pedagogical edge: “Just last month I was reading this article—or, essay, I guess; it wasn’t like some peer-reviewed thing—that Alcott Cotwald published in Brain World—”

  “I thought you said that magazine’s a joke.”

  “I did. But when—”

  “When Alcott’s publishing in it…”

  Mark finishes what’s left of his Guinness and licks the bubbles from his lips.

  “He’s a brilliant behavioral economist.”

  “You like him because he’s hot and has a British accent.”

  “I’ve never even met the man. We were in Asheville when he came to Wharton to lecture.”

  “You’ve shown me his pictures. Were you ever going to get me my whiskey?”

  “Can you just let me finish?”

  Paul doesn’t answer; he stares at the bar, where half-filled bottles of vodka and rum and tequila stare at their own imperfect reflections in the mirrored backsplash.

  “O-kay,” Mark says. “Anyway. Alcott looked at the risk-reward analysis of remaining faithful in monogamous relationships. Which, I mean, that’s nothing new from a research standpoint. Graduate students have been writing subpar dissertations about that shit for years. I should know—I’ve had to sit on enough of those fucking committees. But what Alcott did that was different is that he looked specifically at couples that have some sort of understanding or arrangement when it comes to monogamy. So, he basically took all those pop-psych, ‘sex-positive,’ narcissistic Dan Savage ramblings and gave them some academic backing. Which, obviously, Savage
has just creamed himself over, but that’s beside the point.”

  Someone knocks over a Rolling Rock. The bottle rolls along the bar, gushing its foamy insides; the bartender snatches it and rights it. With an ash-colored rag he goes about sopping up the thin amber puddles.

  “Another smart thing he did was that he looked at all kinds of couples: gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, trans, questioning, queer, non-gender-identifying—fuck, am I forgetting anyone? He even took an historical account of other ethnic and cultural groups that’ve had a history with … er … different variations on monogamy.”

  Bulldozers rearrange debris inside Paul’s head—not removing it, just piling it into bigger and less organized lumps—laying the foundation for tomorrow’s hangover.

  “Yeah?” he says.

  “The Comanches, the Greeks, even the Samis. All of them practiced versions of monogamy that allowed for some … practicalities.”

  “Or some fucking around.”

  “But how is it ‘fucking around’—which, by the way, I think is a pretty vulgar description of it—if there’s an agreement that states otherwise? ‘The empty moral obligations of postwar Christian society have led to a construction of monogamy that discounts very concrete sexual realities. Even more troubling, though, is how readily we reject those realities as negatives when perhaps the real cost of the new monogamy is the death of wholly human desires.’”

  “That doesn’t sound like your prose,” Paul says. “You hate the word society.”

  “It’s a quote from Alcott’s essay.”

  The bulldozers continue their industrious dozing. Paul scratches at the plots of stubble on his cheeks.

  “So what are you saying, exactly?”

  “I don’t know.” Mark shrugs. “Maybe that Preston and Crosby and all our friends who are like them are on to something? Maybe they’ve got, like, a more evolved view of relationships than this puritanical one-person-for-the-rest-of-your-fucking-life routine. I mean, you figure that they both want to be with each other, and they realize that this … this other thing is just sex. Or, no, that’s discounting it. It’s not just sex, it’s actually a very real desire that they’re acting on within the confines of a set of rules that they’ve established, instead of society—”

  “Society.”

  Mark plows on: “And honestly, I imagine the costs of that decision are far less than the costs of, say, your standard, Middle American, heteronormative, monogamous marriage, where these feelings are repressed, and someone ends up ‘cheating’ or ‘straying,’ because, really, you can only repress something that’s inherently human for so long. And then the ‘affair’—God, what a terribly vague term that is—ends up defining the rest of the marriage, if, in fact, the marriage manages to last at all.”

  Paul doesn’t want to ask. He feels like he’s standing ten feet away from the mouth of a deep chasm, and he hates heights. “So you’re saying this is something you might want one day. This Alcottian view of monogamy.”

  “I think so. Yeah, I do. It just seems to make sense to me.” Mark reaches over and wraps his hand around Paul’s inner thigh. He kisses his neck, sweetly, and swipes his empty cup. “Now I’ll get you that whiskey.”

  Paul takes the glass back from him and sets it on the floor next to the couch. “You know, actually, it’s late. Let’s just go home.”

  Mark kisses him again, this time on Paul’s cheek. His lips feel dry. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I can already tell that I’m going to feel like shit tomorrow.”

  Mark smiles and helps Paul up off the couch. “Such an adult these days.”

  A layer of fog floats over the Delaware, pooling along the hulls of container ships. In Center City, the thousand lights on the Comcast Building, the Circa Center, and One Liberty Place form bright smoky clouds that stamp out the dark patches of the skyline. They walk west up Pine Street, and as they cross Broad, Paul glances north, toward City Hall, where arches are tiered upon arches: a wedding cake of a monument.

  At the intersection of Pine and Eighteenth, his toe gets caught between a slab of asphalt and an upended cobblestone, and he stumbles.

  “Nice save,” Mark says. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.” He steadies himself. “I’m fine.”

  * * *

  Paul rubs his eyes and gazes skyward. Somewhere, an airplane thunders and yawns; a pigeon that was picking its way across the clinic’s parking lot floats upward and settles on a power line. On Route 7, a car honks, and Paul feels it poke holes in his brainstem. He forces himself to blink. He runs his tongue across his teeth; his mouth is dry, filled with the dust of last night, and each time he yawns he thinks he tastes bourbon. He’s forgotten what it’s like not to worry about hangovers.

  “Do I have to get in now?”

  “What?” He looks at Wendy, who has her trembling arms wrapped around a trash can. The loose skin around her triceps flattens out against the tin like a pair of fleshy wings.

  “Jesus, Paul, could you pay attention?” Her nostrils flare. She breathes deeply. “I asked if I had to get in again.”

  Paul clears his throat and swallows. “Oh, right,” he says. “Yes, I’m afraid you do.”

  Wendy’s head hangs. “I knew it.”

  Paul tries to regain his footing. “It’s part of the treatment regimen. If at any point you—”

  “Save it.” Wendy lifts up a hand, but she doesn’t look at Paul. “I’ll do it.”

  Paul adjusts his belt and starts to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. “You need some help getting in there?”

  “I’ve got it,” Wendy says, shooing him away. “Wouldn’t want you to break a sweat.” She looks down at her khaki pants and white Keds. “Can I keep my pants rolled down?”

  “We’d prefer it if you rolled them up.”

  “Of course you would.”

  Wendy kneels and forms high cuffs with each hem. Blue veins draw maps across her ankles.

  Paul looks up again and tries to determine how the clouds shift.

  “All right,” Wendy says. “All right.”

  She grips the rim of the bin and braces herself, tightening her hold until her knuckles fade to white. (Paul wants to point out what an improvement this fact alone is—two weeks ago, the thought of holding a trash can as if it were a lifesaver would’ve sent her into a tailspin!—but he resists; she needs her focus.) Lifting one foot and then the other, Wendy lowers herself into the abyss.

  “An eleven,” she says.

  “An eleven?”

  “I know you’re going to ask what my anxiety level is, so I thought I’d tell you. It’s an eleven. Write that down. Eleven.” She raises her arm and hides her face in the crook of her elbow. “Christ, the smell.”

  She’s right—it’s bad today. Paul woke up late this morning, and Mark took forever in the shower. He missed the eight o’clock SEPTA and had to catch the eight fifteen, which ran local—hyperlocal, even—stopping not just at the less-trafficked stops, but at stops Paul didn’t even know existed. All of this added up to Paul being robbed of his standard half hour to Dumpster-dive when he got to work this morning. Instead of searching for junk in his preferred roster of places (the Bala Cynwyd SEPTA station; the parking lot of a Fresh Grocer a half mile away; the women’s restroom at the clinic), he barely had enough time to grab two bags full of shit from the Dumpster outside the Macaroni Grill next door. So: it’s all half-curdled alfredo sauce for Wendy today, Paul figures. And, by the smell of it, a few loaves of stale focaccia. Some raw chicken breasts in an unpleasant state of decay.

  Paul nods at Wendy and suppresses a gag.

  “Still an eleven?” he asks.

  Her face is still hidden by her arm. Still, she manages to say: “A fucking twelve.”

  He scribbles the figure down on his clipboard, even though he knows Goulding will yell at him later for it. (“Our scale goes to ten. Accepting a score of twelve allows them to hyperbolize their anxiety, which is exactly what we’re trying to prevent.”) A
cross the lawn he sees Goulding in his office, seated behind his desk. His fingers are pressed together so his hands form a sharp triangle, and he nods as the man and woman sitting across from him speak. Or, more accurately, as the woman speaks: the man’s not saying anything, so far as Paul can tell; he’s slouching, in his own world, as he stares at the giant globe Goulding keeps in the corner of his office. One of those ancient ones where all the countries are in sepia tones and the ocean’s the color of parchment paper and Zimbabwe’s still labeled Rhodesia. A new victim, Paul thinks. The man.

  * * *

  He watches the woman sit down again and reach for her purse. As if Goulding can feel Paul’s gaze, he turns in his chair and locks eyes with him. Paul blinks first, and looks down.

  “Paul, are you listening to me?”

  Wendy still stands in the trash can. She looks taller than normal; her hipbones are an inch higher than the rim’s bin.

  “Wendy,” Paul says, “get down off your tiptoes, please.”

  “Why should I? You’re not even listening to what I’m saying to you.”

  He says, “That’s not true. Of course I am.”

  She lowers herself back to her heels, slowly. “Yeah? Then what’d I just ask you?”

  Paul sighs. The clouds have stretched themselves out into thin, barely there scrims. He squints and wonders how long he can get away without answering.

  “Well?”

  Not very, as it turns out.

  He says, “You’re right. I’m sorry. I wasn’t really listening.”

  Wendy shifts her feet, and Paul hears something squishy and wet: the sound of toes sinking into pasta and soggy calamari.

  “What’s with you today?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I’m hungover.” Paul sits cross-legged in the grass. He tilts his head back so he can look up at Wendy, and with his right hand he shields his eyes from the sun. “Wendy, how long have you and Hank been married?”

  “Have Hank and I been married?”

  “Yeah. How long?”

  She glances down at her ankles, at the filth that Paul imagines is swarming around them, and she scrunches up her nose like she’s just smelled something obscene. “Thirty-seven years,” she says. “It’ll be thirty-eight in July. Can I get out of here, please?”