The Road to Amazing

by Brent Hartinger

  "Yeah," I said, blushing. "It always was."

  "'Always'?" Ruby said. "You mean it was more than once?"

  "It was back in high school!" I said. "Where else were we supposed to go?"

  Kevin looked at me. "Actually...."

  I thought about it. "Oh, right." I looked sheepishly out at the audience. "We may have been there since school too. It's complicated."

  Everyone howled. I was starting to see why the show made a point to ask questions about sex: even when the couple knows everything about each other, like Kevin and I did, it could still be pretty entertaining.

  "Thinking about your partner's total number of sex partners," Otto went on, reading from his phone, "are we talking single digits? Double digits? Or — God forbid! — triple digits?"

  Kevin and I both made a point to blush and shift around awkwardly in our seats, then we turned to the dry-erase boards.

  But honestly, I knew the answer to this too. I wrote down my answer on my board.

  "So, Kevin," Otto said. "Single digits, double digits, or have you hit a triple?"

  "Hmm," he said, then he made a big show out of counting it out on his fingers, making it seem like it was going on and on and on, and when people realized what he was doing, he got a good laugh.

  "Single digits," he said at last. "Six guys and three girls."

  "Three girls?" Nate said. "Is this why I had such a hard time getting dates when I was living with you in college? Bloody hell! You were cock-blocking me?"

  "They were all back in high school," I pointed out, holding up my board.

  Single digits, it read.

  "And you never had a hard time getting dates in college," Kevin said to Nate.

  "And Russel," Otto said, "what about you? Single, double, or triple?"

  "What?" I said.

  People laughed like I was making a joke, but I wasn't. I'd honestly forgotten that I had to answer the question too.

  Here's the deal. Kevin was an extremely sexy man, but he was also a date-before-sex, one-on-one kinda guy. Which, frankly, was part of what made him so sexy: when you were with him, he made you feel that he was really with you, that it was all about you. Not like you were just a body, or another conquest, or a notch on his nightstand. So it was no surprise to me that he'd only ever been with five other people (the three girls didn't really count, because he'd been closeted and had only been doing it for appearances).

  As for me, well, I was a one-on-one kinda guy too, and I've already said how Kevin and I were monogamous. But Kevin and I had been on-again-off-again for ten years. Which meant that there was plenty of time in there when the two of us were "off." In that time, I'd had a series of pointless relationships, and I may have fired up a hookup app once or twice (or a few more times than that).

  The point is, I wasn't in the single digits anymore. (It's not like I was in the triple digits either! Basically, I was in the low double digits. Exactly how low is none of your damn business.)

  "Double," I said to the gathering.

  There was a moment's hesitation. Outside, the rain pitter-pattered, and something in the woods creaked.

  Then everyone started oohing and ahhing.

  "Russel!" Min said, but I had a feeling she was faking it. I used to live with Min and she was no dummy. She had to know the truth about my sex life.

  Anyway, I had officially shocked my friends — and hopefully Kevin too. Truthfully, I was kind of happy that I still had some mystery. Maybe that meant our marriage would be an exciting one after all.

  Then Kevin flipped over his dry-erase board.

  Double digits, it said.

  I stared at him, a bit dumbfounded. "How—?"

  He grinned like someone stoned. "Seriously? You think you have secrets from me?"

  I'd thought I did! And, honestly, I'd sort of hoped I did. What did it mean that I didn't?

  "Next question!" Otto said. "It's fifty years from now, and of course you guys are still married. Are you Fit and Fabulous? Dirty Old Men? Or Get Off My Lawn?"

  Kevin immediately started writing on his board, but I hesitated. How did Kevin see us in fifty years? It was Fit and Fabulous, right? Or maybe Dirty Old Men — in a reclaim-the-slut-shaming-sex-negative-terminology kind of way.

  But what if it wasn't? And no matter what he thought, what would we actually be? What if we did end up as two grumpy old men? Making whoopie — er, fucking — at the Stinky Picnic Gazebo had been pretty naughty, but was that the naughtiest thing we were ever going to do?

  My eyes met Min's, and she sort of scowled at me, like she knew I was thinking about the conversation we'd had before, my worrying about growing older and becoming boring. She had a point: this was a stupid train of thought, even for me. And — maybe, just maybe — it was an outright neurotic one. It was a silly question in a stupid Bachelor Party game, made all the more stupid by the fact that, only minutes before, I'd literally been totally turned on watching my future husband lick sweat off his shirtless straight best friend's torso. Why would I think that Kevin's and my sex life would ever turn dull?

  Then again, maybe it wasn't necessarily Kevin I was worried about making our life boring. Maybe it was me.

  I'm definitely over-thinking things again, I thought, like with the striptease. But I should point out (again) that these were fleeting thoughts, barely worth mentioning

  I uncapped my dry-erase pen, and sat poised to start writing.

  But before I could write a single letter, the lights flickered once, then went completely dark.

  "Oh, no," Kevin said, and I could already hear a note of panic in his voice. "I think the rain just knocked the power out."

  CHAPTER TEN

  "We don't know it was the power," I said, sitting there in the darkness of that house. "Maybe we just blew a fuse."

  "No," Gunnar said as I heard him moving around in the shadows. "It's out all over the house." He walked to the window and looked outside. "I don't see any lights at all. Yeah, I think the power's out."

  "An isolated house in the woods and the power goes out?" Vernie said. "That's never good."

  "What do you mean?" Kevin said.

  "Oh, I'm just kidding," she said. "I meant like in the movies. I'm sure it's fine."

  "Yeah," Gunnar said, "it's probably just a line down somewhere." This was funny, though, because the rain now sounded like it had died down a bit, like the fever outside had broken. Still, with all the trees, power lines probably went down all the time on Vashon Island.

  "But what do we do?" Kevin said. "Are we supposed to just sit here?"

  The panic in his voice was more obvious now. Which made sense: he was thinking about the wedding tomorrow. It was one thing to move the ceremony inside because of the rain. If there was still no power by then, could we hold the wedding at all? It would be a challenge for the caterers, that's for sure. And I had a vague memory of Christie saying something about how the house was on a well. Didn't you need electricity to draw water from a well?

  "They'll get it fixed," I said. "The wedding's not for another sixteen hours."

  "How can you be so sure?" Kevin said. "Things are different on the island. And we're not even on the populated part of the island."

  No one said anything. The fact is, Kevin had a point. Growing up in the Seattle area, I'd been reading all my life about people in the rural areas who lost their power and didn't get it turned back on for days or weeks.

  One by one, my friends switched on their phones, adding light to the room — soft, colorful glows.

  I shuffled closer to Kevin and laid my hand on his back. "It's going to be okay," I said. "I'm sure they'll get the power back on in time."

  Even now, I was determined to keep reassuring him. But Kevin was sweaty, and it wasn't from Nate's striptease anymore. He was so anxious the tension pulsed off his body.

  If reassuring him wasn't working, maybe I could try to distract him, the way Ruby had distracted Min at dinner.

  I looked around the room. "I see candles. Le
t's see if we can find some matches."

  "I'm on it," Ruby said, heading to the kitchen where she fumbled through some drawers. "Got 'em," she said a second later.

  She returned and started going around the room, carefully lighting all the candles and kerosene lamps. We all watched her in silence, like it was some kind of ritual in church, the preparation for some ceremony. Now it sounded like the rain outside had stopped completely, the only sound being water dripping from the gutters — er, rain dispersal system. I guess the weather gods had accepted the sacrifice of the island's power grid, and they were satisfied for the time being.

  Ruby kept lighting candles and lamps — there were a lot more of them than I would have guessed. Most of the candles were at least partially burned down. I hadn't noticed any of this before — some detective I was! — but now I realized that probably meant they had a lot of power outages at the Amazing Inn. In terms of the wedding, I couldn't decide if all those candles were a good thing or a bad one.

  While Ruby lit the candles, I moved Kevin's and my padded chairs back to the dining room table.

  Finally, the whole room was lit. It throbbed with light, all of it flickering and glowing. It was vibrant, but not bright, and the burning wicks hissed ever so slightly. It felt a little like we were all in the middle of a neon sign.

  Still, no one said anything. We all sat down again, positioning ourselves in chairs and on couches so we were more or less in a circle now.

  It was funny: we could have easily kept going with the bachelor party, with whatever else our friends had planned. The fact that the power was out didn't really change anything. We'd turned down the lights before for Nate's striptease, and Min's party-light music speaker had a battery, so we could turn that on again if we wanted.

  But the vibe in the room had changed into something different — more subdued, more sober. Somehow the bachelor party part of the evening was over, and we all knew it, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was a prelude to something else, only the first course of a gourmet dinner. The difference is, I don't think anyone, not even Min and Gunnar, knew what came next.

  "That was really fun before," I said at last, meaning the bachelor party. "We really appreciate it."

  Kevin looked up. "Yeah," he said. "Totally unexpected."

  "Although I'm disappointed we didn't play Pin the Cock on the Jock," I added.

  The second the words were out of my mouth, I remembered the room included a seventy-four year-old woman, Vernie. But of course she laughed harder at my joke than anyone else, and I reminded myself that I needed to stop worrying about her, that she could more than hold her own in this crowd.

  "It was Gunnar's idea," Otto said.

  This made me smile, the idea of Gunnar planning all this. He'd also managed to use the party to diffuse the tension at dinner earlier — something that had been beyond me.

  "No," he said. "Everyone helped. We did it via email."

  In the silence that followed, the candles hissed and the rain dispersal system trickled.

  Talk about a different vibe, I thought. I glanced over at Kevin, but he still looked anxious, worried about the wedding.

  "I wasn't sure I wanted to come this weekend," Ruby said quietly. "I didn't know what it was going to be like. I don't know anyone except for Min. And this is someone's wedding weekend. I didn't want to intrude."

  "Well, we're glad you did," I said. "Really glad."

  "Me too," Ruby said. She took a sip from her beer bottle. "It's hard for me, being around people I don't know."

  "Don't take this the wrong way," I said, "but that surprises me. You seem like one of the most confident people I've ever met."

  She smiled. "That's what everyone thinks. But I was always the shyest kid in my class. I hated recess so bad, because you had to talk to people. I hated lunch, because you had to find a table to sit at. Whenever we had to give a presentation in class, I got so sick I couldn't go to school. At the end of the eighth grade, the class did one of those end of the year lists, where the whole class votes: Most Likely to Succeed, Cutest Smile, Best-Looking, things like that. It was the eighth grade, so the teacher said there had to be enough categories for everyone — everyone had to be picked for something. One of the categories was Shyest Girl, and I remember thinking how unfair that was. All the other categories were something positive — Best Personality, Best Dressed. But being shy wasn't positive, and it was the only category that wasn't something positive. Anyway, everyone voted, and the end of the year came, and they passed out the list, and there I was, expecting and dreading that I'd be named the Shyest Girl in class."

  "And?" Min asked.

  "They forgot me completely!" Ruby said. "They'd voted Marguerite Dunn as Shyest Girl. I was so shy that people didn't even remember I was there! I didn't say anything, and the teacher never noticed either."

  Min reached over and took Ruby's hand, holding it tight.

  "At one point, my parents brought me to a psychologist," Ruby went on. "She said I had extreme social anxiety. They tried therapy and medication and hypnosis, but nothing worked. The worst part was I could tell how disappointed my parents were. They weren't these big social butterflies — none of my family was — but they had no idea what to do with me, which made me feel even worse, made it all even more of a clusterfuck."

  "What changed?" Vernie asked.

  "One day when I was about fifteen, I woke up, and I just felt...different. I was tired of being invisible. It wasn't a conscious decision, like I woke up and said, 'From this point on, people will not ignore me! I will never get anxious in crowds again!' It was more like something in my brain had changed. I think it did. I went to school that day, and I felt like a different person. I looked people in the eye, I talked to them. And the thing about being so shy before, so invisible, was that it was almost like I was a new student. People had ignored me so much that they didn't really have an opinion of me. So when I started talking to people, it was like a fresh start. And in a couple of months, I had a whole circle of friends."

  "Fascinating," Vernie said. "And you never felt shy or anxious again?"

  "No," Ruby said. "It wasn't like that. I definitely get nervous. I still don't like parties, and I almost never go out to clubs or bars. But it feels more 'normal' now. Honestly, when I think back on myself, it really does seem like I was a different person. I don't judge her though, and I don't judge other people like that. I've never thought, 'She was so stupid, she wasted all that time!' She did the best she could. I feel sad for her more than anything. Like I said, it doesn't feel like I made a choice or did anything at all. I woke up one day feeling different. I guess that's the other thing that's sort of interesting. After a few weeks, I didn't worry that I'd turn back into that other girl, and I still don't, because like I said, it doesn't feel like it was me. It feels like someone else."

  We all fell silent. It was a pretty great story, but I wasn't sure what to make of it.

  Finally, Vernie said, "I wasn't sure I wanted to come either. I didn't think I'd fit in."

  Part of me wanted to object, to say, "Vernie! Of course you would!" But something kept me quiet. It seemed like the evening had entered its Total Honesty phase, so I decided to let her talk.

  "It really stinks getting old," she went on. "But sometimes I think the aches and pains, the physical stuff, are the least of it. It's the way people treat you. Or maybe it's not that at all — maybe it's the way you start to see yourself. Like most of your life is over. Which it is. You ask yourself, 'Are the best parts over? Have I already done the most important and interesting things I'm ever going to do?' And you can lie to yourself and say, 'No! Jessica Tandy won an Oscar when she was eighty years old!' Or you can be honest with yourself and admit that, yeah, the best part probably is in the past."

  Now I wanted to reach over and take Vernie's hand, the way Min had done with Ruby. But she wasn't sitting next to me and I didn't want to make too big a show of it.

  "I met my husband at a friend's wedding,"
Vernie said. "I was twenty-two years old. He was a friend of a friend of a friend, and I thought he was so handsome. We talked and laughed, and he lit a match from a box of matches using only one hand. The wedding ended, but the night did not. We went out drinking and dancing, and we broke into the Japanese garden and drew our names in the sand, but the night still wasn't over. It wasn't the first time I'd had sex, but it felt like the first time I'd chosen to have sex. I felt like a woman for the first time in my life — no, I felt like Wonder Woman, strong and beautiful and invulnerable, like there was nothing in the universe that could stop me." She looked at Ruby. "It was a little like what you said. I went to bed one person and I woke up someone else, someone I liked a lot better than the person who had gone to bed."

  We all nodded, but no one smiled a knowing or dreamy smile. It was something about the bittersweet note in Vernie's voice. We knew something bad was coming.

  "I got pregnant, of course," Vernie said. "From that very first night. And Fritz and I got married, after knowing each other all of three months. I knew in my heart it was a terrible idea, but everyone told me it was the right thing to do — that it was all my fault to begin with, and it was the best thing I could do for the child. But it was a terrible idea. Fritz and I were nothing alike. The only thing we really shared was that single night — and a desperate loneliness and a feeling of wanting more. I didn't feel like Wonder Woman after that. I felt trapped and angry and resentful, not just at Fritz, but at the whole universe, one that had played such a cruel trick on me, making me feel so good, giving me a taste of freedom, then snatching the goblet away again."

  We all listened to Vernie's story, breathless.

  "I was depressed for years," Vernie went on. "Forget feeling like Wonder Woman, I didn't even feel like a woman, like a person. I felt like a cloud of dust wafting around the house, only visible in the sunlight. But then I found something that changed everything."

  "Writing," I said.

  Vernie nodded. "It saved my life. Writing finally made me a person again, it made me whole. It also ruined the lives of my children, but that's a whole other story. Anyway, this is all another reason why I didn't want to come this weekend. When I think of weddings, I think of that wedding where Fritz and I met all those years ago, and then our own pathetic wedding a few months later. To tell the truth, I haven't been to a wedding in more than thirty years. Can you believe it? But I'm so glad I came to this one. Because now I finally get to see how weddings can really be, what they're really all about. So I guess I was wrong before when I said that the best was all behind me. Because this is one of the best weekends of my life."