The wedding people, p.31
The Wedding People, page 31
“When else am I supposed to be doing it?” Gary asks. “If I don’t do it now, when do I do it?”
The door dings. Nick is back.
“You got to use a fucking credit card now,” Nick says. “So, the usual?”
“The usual,” Gary says.
Gary gets up, slowly. Phoebe watches as Nick takes the clippers to the thick mass of Gary’s beard. Phoebe watches Nick work, like a sculptor, who is trimming off layers of Gary, until he arrives at “the usual.” It makes Phoebe nervous, seeing pieces of Gary fall off in giant clumps to the floor. After, Nick puts a towel over Gary’s face and, for some reason, when he starts to shave him, Phoebe can’t watch. Looks down at her magazine. She has always liked the sound of the razor against a man’s stubble. Like the sound of a mason spreading mortar on a brick.
When he’s nearly done, Phoebe looks up, and they lock eyes in the mirror. They stay like that for a moment, just looking at each other. Nick nicks him on the back of the neck. Phoebe instinctively leans forward as if to help with the blood. But Nick’s got it.
“Happens all the time,” Nick says, and puts a towel to his skin.
“I’m not sure I’d go around telling your clients that,” Gary says, and the two men laugh.
“So you’re still a wise ass,” Nick says.
* * *
THE WHOLE WAY home, it’s like driving with a different Gary.
“Is it weird?” Gary asks. “Do I have beard face?”
“What’s beard face?”
“It’s like glasses face. When you’ve only seen someone with glasses and they take them off, and all of a sudden, they’re a different person.”
“Maybe,” she says. “I think it’s more like when someone brings a dog to the groomer and the dog comes out looking like it’s been robbed.”
“Oh, gee, thanks. A dog that’s been robbed. Totally the look I was going for.”
They laugh. He looks at himself in the mirror, rubs his chin, like he can’t get used to it.
“I do feel a little like I’ve been robbed,” he says.
Maybe this is when one of them would have started up their conversation from Nick’s again, but Gary says, “Shit, I forgot about cash for the vendors. I’m sorry. One more thing.”
“No problem,” Phoebe says.
* * *
THEY CAN’T TAKE out enough cash at the first bank, so they drive to another bank, and at the second bank, Phoebe just waits in the car. She watches him disappear into the building, and then studies the strangers on the road. She sees families on vacation. Non-wedding people eating ice cream. Collagen shot lattes. People just shopping, carrying on. People who have no idea that Lila and Gary exist.
Amazing to think that just last week, Phoebe was one of those people, too. She had been so bold then, doing exactly what she wanted for maybe the first time in her life. She wants to feel that feeling again, the one she felt in the elevator, the one she felt in the tub, the feeling of standing up proudly in her lingerie, of owing Lila absolutely nothing, being loyal to nobody but herself. Because Phoebe knows what Lila cannot know yet: There is no reason to make decisions you don’t want to make at twenty-eight. No reason to marry a man with gray sideburns if you hate the look of them. They are only going to get grayer.
Yes, Lila will be just fine, she thinks.
But then she sees Gary come out of the bank and put the money in his wallet, the wallet in his pocket, and something about this looks so final to Phoebe. He looks like such a groom, clean-shaven, putting money in his wallet to pay the vendors for his wedding. And Phoebe feels like the maid of honor again, with the box of booze heavy in the back seat.
She is loyal to Lila now. Loyal to the production that is this wedding—that’s the truth of it.
When Gary gets back in the car, he says, “Should we finish our conversation?”
But Phoebe says no. “I honestly don’t think there’s anything left to say.”
Phoebe just drives.
* * *
WHEN THEY STEP in the lobby, the hotel feels very empty. Like a stage just before the big performance. Everybody must be off doing their last-minute tasks before the rehearsal, getting dressed in their costumes.
Gary and Phoebe are quiet in the elevator, quiet as Gary carries his tux and Phoebe carries the box of liquor down the hallway. Gary says, “Do you mind holding this?” and gives her the tux as he gets his key. It feels so intimate, like they are opening the door to their home after a long day of errands.
But before they enter, there is Lila coming out of her room. Lila looks at Gary and then back at Phoebe. A flicker of realization—Phoebe is certain that she saw it. Certain that Lila knows. Women can feel these things. They know. Phoebe knew. Phoebe knew in that moment when she saw her husband laugh with Mia. Love is visible—it paints the air between two people a different color, and everyone can see it.
But all Lila says is, “Gary, oh my God, your face looks so different!”
“Good different?” Gary asks. “Or bad different?”
Bad different, Phoebe thinks. He is the clean-shaven groom ready for his ceremony. A man she will probably never get to know. By the time the beard starts to grow back, they will be strangers again.
“Good different, of course,” Lila says.
Phoebe puts the booze down on the desk. Outside through the window, Phoebe can see Carlson setting up the chairs for the rehearsal dinner tonight. Phoebe feels a fog of grief, a sudden depression moving in like an afternoon storm. Like if she doesn’t run now, it’ll take her alive.
“I should go get ready,” Phoebe says.
Lila gives Phoebe a big strong hug like she did the first day they met. Maybe Lila doesn’t know. Maybe all Lila can feel right now is fear of what Lila doesn’t want, all the bad things circling around her like a boa constrictor, closing in tight.
“Two things,” Lila says. “It’s just you and me driving to the wedding tomorrow. And can you make sure my mother doesn’t get too drunk tonight? Apparently, she started drinking at two. Why does she do that?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but Phoebe can’t help herself.
“She can’t drink at night,” Phoebe says. “You’ll understand, when you’re older.”
Lila’s mother is sober by the time they get to the Breakers.
“Honestly, I’m ready for a nap,” Patricia says to Phoebe.
In the Great Hall, the wedding people are all lined up in order of importance, as decided by Nancy, the events planner for the Preservation Society. First there is Gary’s cousin Roy, the officiant for the wedding, likely the only family event at which he has been deemed the least important. Then the groom’s parents. The flower girl, the ring bearer. The bridesmaids. The maid of honor. The mother of the bride and her grandmother. And, then, of course, the bride.
“Do not touch the walls. Do not touch the windows,” Nancy says. “Do not touch anything here but your spouse! I find that’s generally a good rule for life, and also the Breakers.”
Everyone laughs.
“I’ll be back,” Nancy says. “And when I come back, be ready.”
As soon as she leaves, people slacken. Marla walks over to introduce her son, Oliver, to Phoebe, because Phoebe is a professor of literature. Oliver gets excited about this in a way a twelve-year-old child normally does not.
“I’ve read all the Percy Jackson books,” Oliver says. “My favorite by far is The Titan’s Curse. Have you ever read it?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t,” Phoebe says.
Oliver looks disappointed but then runs off with Juice to see who can get closest to the walls without touching them.
Bootsie starts pointing out the things she finds most objectionable about the Breakers to Lila and Patricia, while Phoebe gets a phone call from her husband. She puts her phone on silent. She doesn’t want to hear his voice tonight. Not here, in this Great Hall, which feels more like a courtyard. Not now, not tonight. Phoebe is already confused enough. She drops the phone back in her purse, and Marla pulls out hers.
“I sent my last sext to Robert before he got on the plane this morning,” Marla whispers to Phoebe. “He hasn’t responded since, and now I’m worried it’s weird.”
“Why would it be weird? Isn’t he right there?” Phoebe asks, looking at a tall, thin man who has walked over to get the kids away from the walls.
“Yeah, that’s why it’s weird. I told him that my tiny little pussy is wet and waiting for him, and then we just greet each other at the Breakers with dry kisses on the cheek,” Marla says. “I mean, shouldn’t we be beyond this stage now? We’ve been married for fifteen years.”
“Maybe it’s the right place to be,” Phoebe says. “If you’re starting over, you’re starting over.”
Then Nancy returns and says, “Go, go, go!” as if they are kids entering a soccer field for the big game. When Phoebe walks past Nancy and through the door, she waits for a slap on the ass that never comes.
Outside, the sun is bright. She takes slow steps toward the pergola. She pauses in front of it, in front of Gary. She looks at Gary’s face, but the sun is too bright behind him. She keeps her eyes low, focused on Jim’s shiny shoes. She wonders if they were the same ones he wore to Wendy’s funeral.
Phoebe walks to the left, completes the line of women that will stand at Lila’s side. From there, she watches Lila walk slowly up the aisle in her white reception dress. Lila beams at Gary so brightly, it feels like the moment in the barbershop is long forgotten. It feels like all of the moments that came before this one are irrelevant. This is what the wedding ritual does to Phoebe—even just the rehearsing of it: Nothing can compete.
“Okay, then we’ll cut the music and you stand here and look deeply into each other’s eyes,” Nancy says, and she turns to Roy. “Then you will say whatever meaningful thing it is you are going to say.”
“And then we’ll be married and hooray,” Lila says.
They kiss, just for good measure.
It is over, and they walk out, one by one, each woman pairing up with a groomsman. Phoebe links arms with Jim. His arm feels good in hers. It is solid, the arm of a man who probably balances well on a ridgeline.
Maybe tonight I’ll sleep with Jim, Phoebe thinks.
She’s surprised by the thought. Jim feels more like a brother to her. But maybe they both need to redirect their desire. Have a night with each other. She’s never had sex with a younger man before. Something about spending too much time around students. Their youth was appalling to her. How much they didn’t know. How little they thought about the Battle of the Bulge.
But Jim is a good man. An engineer. He is building a seaplane.
“You ever finish that speech?” Phoebe asks him as they turn the corner back into the Great Hall where they started.
“I did, actually,” Jim says, and he sounds proud.
* * *
BACK AT THE hotel, the patio has been transformed into a magical fairy-tale forest for the rehearsal dinner. Oak farmhouse tables, set up in rows, torches lining the border of the stone floor. White roses hanging from the balconies above. And right in the middle of it all stand Lila and Gary, staring at the giant painting of Patricia naked.
“Who brought this painting here?” Lila asks when Phoebe and Jim join them. “I did not ask for this to be brought here.”
“It was your mother’s idea,” Gary says. “She wanted to surprise you. She knows how much it means to us.”
“Right,” Lila says, and nods slowly. “But there are children here.”
“Technically only two,” Jim says.
“Juice has seen this painting a million times,” Gary says, confused.
“And Oliver seems … advanced,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe looks at the painting of Patricia for the first time. There stands the cubist abstraction of a naked mother in the bright sun of a hyperrealistic garden. If the mother didn’t look so fragmented, or if the garden didn’t look so dead, it wouldn’t work. But it does. It’s beautiful. And sad. Beautiful because it’s sad or sad because it’s beautiful.
“I’ll grab us a drink,” Gary says to Lila.
When he walks away, Lila says, “I just don’t understand why my mother must make even my wedding about her naked body.”
Jim walks closer to the painting as if he might figure it out.
“Please do not get so close to my mother, Jim,” Lila says.
He points to the book that Withers painted in Patricia’s hand.
“Is the title of this book really No One Gardens Alone?” he asks.
“Wait, seriously?” Lila asks. She bursts out laughing. She looks closer at the painting. “I bought my mother that book for her birthday. I thought she might like, need a hobby or something.”
Jim looks at her. “See? In that way, this painting actually is all about you.”
“From one bullshitter to the next, that is some serious bullshit,” Lila says.
He laughs.
“But thanks for trying,” Lila says.
She stares at Jim tenderly, and Phoebe looks away as if she is witnessing a private moment she shouldn’t. Something about the exchange, the meeting of their eyes. An uncanny moment when the universe is presenting the right order of things, or at least another possible order of things. If Lila’s father had chosen a different doctor. If Jim hadn’t brought Gary to the gallery that day.
But in this universe, she watches the two of them walk away from each other. Lila headed for her drink at the bar, Jim looping arms with Gary’s mother. She wonders what will become of Jim, and worries that losing Lila might set him back another decade. Imagines he might become a man who finds it easier to build a seaplane before he builds a family. The kind of man who lives alone for so long, he ends up treating his own house like a country, carrying everything he needs as he walks the perimeter, his loud laugh the anthem the neighbors hear from afar. But maybe one day, he’ll finally scrub the oil off his hands for the last time and think, Where did everybody go?
And Lila—where will she be by then? Ten years into marriage with Gary. Perhaps with two children. Already on her second sleeping pill in the upstairs bedroom. Starting to understand why her mother day drinks.
* * *
“SO, WHAT DID it actually feel like to be a sniper?” Phoebe asks Roy by the appetizer table. Maybe she’ll go for Roy instead, she thinks. Roy is the only man here seemingly not in love with someone else. And he is big, tall, like some action hero who is too large for every suit in the known world.
“It was phenomenal,” Roy says.
“Phenomenal?” Phoebe says. “You mean in the traditional sense of the word?”
“What do you mean, in the traditional sense of the word?”
“Like when people back in the day used to say phenomenal to describe something celestial made visible.”
“Huh?”
“Like a shooting star was phenomenal, because they believed it to be a sign from God.”
Roy gives her a long look like maybe he understands what she’s trying to say. But then he leans in and whispers, “Want to fuck?”
Perhaps it is not so strange of a request, two people at a wedding not their own. It happens in movies all the time. It probably happens to Roy all the time.
“Do people fuck you just because you ask?” Phoebe asks, genuinely curious.
“The ones who look me in the eye,” he says. “In Iraq, the only women who look men directly in the eyes are prostitutes.”
“That can’t be true,” Phoebe says.
“It is,” he says.
He thought it was weird at first but then got used to it and thought it was amazing what you could get used to over time. He says it’s really hard being back in the States.
“Women here have no problem looking you in the eye,” he says. “Like you, right now. You’re doing it. What does it mean?”
He says he can never tell who wants to fuck him and who is just being polite.
“That must be really hard,” Phoebe says.
* * *
PHOEBE MAKES HER way back to Jim at the bar. She passes Nat and Suz in floral dresses down to their ankles. Marla and her husband, picking at the olives, trying to talk in real life. Then Gary and Lila, who have become unreachable during the height of cocktail hour. They stand near the door, greeting new people, holding drinks that match the sunset. When Lila laughs, Gary puts his hand on her back like he did on the boat. They already look married. She remembers her own wedding, how just making all those decisions together in some way married them. Each handshake was a way of saying, I do, I do, I do.
Phoebe orders a margarita. She wonders if she’ll ever be able to drink gin and tonics again. She watches the bartender squeeze the lime.
“You finish your speech?” Jim asks.
“I did,” Phoebe says. “And I learned never to write a speech after I’ve had two weeds.”
Jim laughs so explosively, it seems like there’s a good chance he might die before the end of it. Even Gary and Lila look over as he holds his chest. They all watch as it trickles out like exhaust from a tailpipe. But he survives. He puts his arm around Phoebe, and Gary looks over. They meet eyes, but then comes another wedding person to shake Gary’s hand.
“You make me laugh,” Jim says. “Sit next to me tonight.”
“I think we have assigned seats,” Phoebe says, picking up the card with her name on it. Phoebe feels proud to be at Table 1 for the first time in her life, assigned to the seat directly across from the bride and groom. Jim is seated beside her.
“It’s fate,” Jim says.
Lila picks up her glass, clinks a spoon against it. Gary raises a champagne flute.
“We can’t tell you how grateful we’ve been for your support and your community this week,” Gary says. “It’s wonderful to be here, in this beautiful hotel, with you all.”
When talking to his guests, it feels like the Gary who was sitting next to her in the barbershop is truly gone. This Gary is beardless and has nothing to do with Phoebe at all. But when Gary turns around to gesture at the magnificent ocean behind them, Phoebe sees it: the tiny spot of blood where the barber nicked him earlier.
