by Dan Chaon
LATE FOR THE WEDDING
Trent was having an affair with an older woman. Fifteen years older. People who knew about it were titillated. They asked prying questions, and Trent would have to admit that yes, Dorrie was a teacher at the small college where he had been a student. And yes, he had been in a class of hers, though he’d dropped out before they ever got involved. What did people want? Yes, Dorrie had been married before; yes, she had a son, who was only five years younger than Trent himself; yes, it was kind of weird. He didn’t know what else to say. People would compare the situation to various movies they’d seen. Was it like The Graduate? they wondered. Was it like that one movie with Susan Sarandon and the young guy? No, it wasn’t. If it was like a movie, it was one that he didn’t belong in, one he’d stumbled into by mistake, an awkward and unprepared understudy. He spent a lot of time alarmed with love, a nervous, uncomfortable feeling, as if a warm piece of smoky glass were lodged in his chest. His mind frequently produced such poetic images, and they humiliated him with their dorkiness.
Which is why, after a time, he didn’t really talk about Dorrie with people he knew. Things kept happening—they got into fights, they made up, they moved in together—but he kept that part of his life pretty separate from his friends and coworkers. He didn’t tell anyone, for example, when Dorrie’s son decided to come out for a visit. He didn’t want to hear what they would have to say—he didn’t want to imagine them gleefully discussing it behind his back—and so he kept quiet, even though he was in a terrible state of anxiety. Whose advice could he ask? He thought about telling it to Courtney, the young woman who bartended with him, but then thought better of it. He thought that she had her own agenda.
He had decided that he wouldn’t go with Dorrie to the airport. This was the first time she’d seen her son in many years, and Trent would have felt intrusive. So he told Dorrie that he couldn’t get out of work, and he told Courtney nothing, though she raised an eyebrow when he began to obsessively wash the used beer mugs that were submerged in a bus tub full of gray, soapy water. She watched as he moved a rag in and out of the opening of a glass.
“How are things going?” she said as she scooped a few quarters’ worth of tips into her palm. “You look depressed lately,” Courtney said.
“I do?” Trent said. He looked over his shoulder at the large mirror on the wall behind the liquor bottles. His face did look a little pinched, he thought, and he frowned. “No,” he said, and shrugged, smiling up at a fraternity guy who was standing at the bar, expectantly gripping a twenty. “I’m fine,” he told her, and she waved her hand.
By the time he got home that night, Dorrie and her son were already asleep. It was just as well, Trent thought. This way, they’d had a chance to reacquaint themselves again, without him hovering around. Still, as he walked into the darkened house, he felt uncomfortable. He didn’t even turn on the television. He just sat on the sofa, drinking a beer to unwind, feeling like a person in a waiting room.
This wasn’t an unusual feeling for him, actually. Though he’d been living with her for almost six months, it was still Dorrie’s house. The house hadn’t absorbed much of him yet. It was still her furniture, her dishes, her wall hangings and bric-a-brac. He sat staring at a small sculpture that had been given to her by a friend from New York who was now almost famous: an abstract piece of polished marble, which looked vaguely like a naked body.
Earlier, before the son had arrived, Trent had said: “I shouldn’t be living here when he comes, do you think?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dorrie said. “Where would you go, at this short notice?”
“I could probably find some place.”
“It’s all right,” she said. But, remembering her tone of voice, he didn’t go into their bedroom to sleep beside her. Instead, he fell asleep on the couch.
• • •
In the morning, he woke to the smell of coffee. Opening his eyes, he was disoriented to find himself sprawled on Dorrie’s sofa. Trent had been dreaming of his mother and, for a moment, he expected to be fifteen years old, living in the back room of his mother’s trailer house, staring up at the stains on the corkboard ceiling. In the dream, his mother was getting ready to pour cold water on him.
So he sat up abruptly, and the image of his mother vanished. He could hear coffee perking, and he rubbed his palm against his hair. Then he padded barefoot into the kitchen.
Dorrie’s son, David Bender, was standing at the counter in a velour bathrobe, and he turned expectantly as Trent came to the door of the kitchen. He looked a little like Dorrie in the face—something about the slant of the mouth. Their eyes were similar. But he was also different from what Trent had imagined. He was taller than Trent, for one thing, and his hair was thinning, so that for a moment Trent thought the boy was thirty years old or more. They were not that far apart in age—Trent was twenty-five; David Bender was twenty. But for some reason, Trent had been expecting a kid.
“Hullo,” David Bender said, and Trent felt conscious of standing there in his boxer shorts. “You must be Trent. I’m David.”
Trent stepped up, awkwardly, and shook David’s hand. “How do you do?” Trent said.
“I do fine,” David Bender said. “Want some coffee?”
“That sounds good,” Trent said, and wished that he’d pulled on his jeans before he’d come in. David Bender handed him a cup of coffee, and Trent nodded thank you, shifting from foot to foot. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Well, this is an uncomfortably Freudian moment,” David Bender said. “Maybe we should both take off all our clothes and brandish our dicks at one another.”
Trent wasn’t sure what to make of this remark, and so he just stood there. “Ha!” he said.
“I’m sorry,” David Bender said. “That was assholish of me, wasn’t it? I don’t mean to be passive-aggressive.”
Trent put down his coffee cup. “No, no,” he said. “I’m thinking about maybe getting showered and dressed, though.”
“That might be a good idea,” David Bender said thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll think of some conversation.”
“Me, too,” Trent said.
By the time he got out of the shower, Dorrie was awake. She and David were sitting at the kitchen table, and they looked up as Trent entered. It was another moment when Trent wished himself somewhere else, and they all froze, as if in some terrible, stagy tableau.
“Trent,” Dorrie said. “I think you’ve met David?”
Dorrie was nervous, and had been nervous for weeks. She did not see David Bender often, and he had not been to visit her since she’d taken her assistant professor position at Western Nebraska State, three years ago. Apparently, there had been tension between Dorrie, David, and David’s father, Robert, for some years by that point. She was vague when she told him about it, but Trent had gathered enough facts that he could put together a skeleton of a history. He knew, for example, that Dorrie had dropped out of college to marry Robert Bender, whom she called a “financier,” some twelve years her senior; that, shortly after David was born, they’d separated; that a lawyer friend of her ex-husband had Dorrie declared an unfit mother some time later and that her visiting rights had been circumscribed; that David called his stepmother, Robert’s third wife, “Mom,” even though the stepmother was also divorced from Robert Bender; that Dorrie and David had a stormy relationship when he was in junior high and high school; that an ongoing e-mail exchange had led to a kind of reconciliation, which eventually culminated in David’s visit.
These were the facts, as Trent knew them. He hadn’t asked her more than she offered, respecting her silence, knowing that the subject put her on edge. It made her snappish, he thought, such as the day before David arrived, when she came home from the grocery store in a foul mood because of the lack of fresh produce. David was a vegetarian, and she hadn’t been able to find ingredients for a number of dishes she planned to prepare.
“Well,” Trent had said. “Is he the kind of vegetaria
n who won’t eat meat at all?”
“Yes, Trent,” she said. “I believe that’s the definition of the term.”
“Okay,” Trent said, and held up his palms in a gesture that men used to use to show that they were unarmed. He had noticed before that Dorrie’s anxiousness came out in the form of a kind of distracted disdain for people, a sharpness that, Trent had realized, was why she always did so poorly in job interviews. That was why she had ended up at a Nebraska state college, in the middle of the sandhills. Trent understood this about her, and even felt strangely tender toward her moody skittishness. It was something other people didn’t know about her. But he did.
Now, sitting in the kitchen, he could sense the effort she was putting into containing herself. She chatted affably, she smiled, she touched her hand to Trent’s arm, she put her palm on the back of David’s neck. But when she put her fingers on the handle of her coffee cup, he could see her grip tighten, until the pads of her fingertips blanched.
Trent could not contribute much to the conversation. Mostly, they were talking about New York City, where both David and Dorrie grew up, and where David now attended college, at Columbia. Trent had never been there; had never, in fact, been east of Omaha. Dorrie had once said that she found this “refreshing,” though she also tended to become barbed at his ignorance, as when he called Staten Island, “Satin Island.”
“Oh, yes,” Dorrie said. “That’s where the old lingerie goes when it dies.”
Such gibes bothered him more than he cared to admit, and so he found himself remaining thoughtfully silent as they talked. He wondered if he was coming across as oafish and dull. He kept waiting for a moment when he could chime in with something clever, but the opportunity didn’t come. From time to time, he started as if to speak, but he was not quick enough. The conversation was already off in another direction.
He had been considering asking Dorrie to marry him, probably sometime after David Bender left. He didn’t know whether he would really go through with it, and even if he did, he wasn’t sure how Dorrie would react to such a proposal. Nevertheless, it occupied him as he listened to them banter. They were not talking about anything important and yet he recognized that something significant was happening. This was the way that Dorrie talked to him in the first few months that he’d lived with her. It was the way she established love: She paid attention, and Dorrie’s attention was wonderful.
When he first moved in, Dorrie and Trent would walk in the morning down the narrow old wagon trail that traced the alfalfa fields behind her house. The wheel ruts had become deep and bumpy with disuse, eroded by wind and rain into valleys that were miniatures of the low, hill-lined valley where they lived, and in which the town rested. Between the wheel ruts, the sod had grown dense and weedy, and though they walked side by side, it was always as if there were a low hedge between them. They joined hands over it despite the fact that it hindered their steps somewhat and slowed them. But it was all right. He liked that feeling.
Dorrie did most of the talking. She spoke of her life, of growing up in Manhattan. She told long stories about her former lovers and commented on film, on books and politics, and works of art. Trent felt like he was always learning.
This was one of the first things that he noticed about her, even before he was really attracted to her physically—that she could hold forth on any subject. When he was in her class, he’d found himself listening despite the fact that he didn’t really want to be there, fascinated by the way she could stretch a train of thought between some personal experience she’d had and an abstract idea they were studying, until there was a kind of cat’s cradle between the two.
Dorrie didn’t suffer fools gladly. That was what she said on the first day of her class, and he remembered folding his hands over the syllabus grimly. It was another class he’d have to struggle to earn a C in, he thought, though he never did find out because he’d dropped out of school about halfway through the semester.
That was how they’d met. A few months later, he happened to be sitting in a café near campus, waiting for his shift to begin at the bar when Dorrie passed him, carrying a cup of coffee. He’d nodded at her when she looked at him, the way you do with people you vaguely know, but instead of merely nodding back, she paused.
“Isn’t your name Trent?” she said, and he’d been taken aback that she remembered him.
“Yeah,” he said. She gave him a funny look.
“So what happened to you?” she said. “You disappeared out of class, and I never heard from you again. You just a fly-by-nighter, or what?”
“I don’t know,” Trent said. He knew she was from New York, with that pushy way of talking. “Actually, I kind of dropped out of school.”
“That’s terrible!” she said, and her face grew serious and concerned. “What happened?”
“Just money, I guess,” he said, and shrugged. “I don’t think I’m much of a student.”
A person was behind Dorrie, waiting impatiently to get past her in the narrow aisle, and she glanced behind her; then, as if making a decision, she sat down in the chair across from him.
This was how it started, according to Trent’s version of the story. He didn’t know where her version would begin. He didn’t even know if she thought of it as a story. What would they say, if things continued on? People would ask, and he’d have to say, “Well, actually, I was Dorrie’s student.…” And they’d raise their eyebrows.
David Bender didn’t raise his eyebrows. He was as confident as Dorrie, though less serious. Trent couldn’t get a fix on him. At first, he had a clear impression that David Bender disliked him. But then, when Trent went outside to have a cigarette, David Bender followed him.
“Hey, man,” David said. “Do you have a cigarette?”
Trent handed him his pack, and David Bender took it with a small, secretive smile. “Wow,” he said. “Cowboy smokes.” But he put the cigarette into his mouth, nevertheless, and lit it, gazing at the horizon. “What a place,” he said. “Spooky.”
“Really?” Trent said. He looked out, trying to see what David might be seeing. There were times when he didn’t realize that the place he lived in might be considered strange. It was just prairie—you couldn’t see a tree from Dorrie’s backyard, or another house. A barbed-wire fence separated Dorrie’s property from the cow pastures and fields that surrounded her. It was a place that pioneers had passed through, a hundred years before, not stopping.
“So,” David Bender said. “Tell me about yourself.”
Trent cleared his throat. “What do you want to know?” he said. “I’m a bartender. College dropout. Maybe I’ll finish if I can get the money together. And if I can decide what to study. Dorrie’s probably told you most of the basics.”
“A little,” David said, and he bent down on his haunches to examine a large grasshopper. He picked it up, and it spit a brown substance, what kids in Trent’s grade school used to call “tobacco juice,” from its mandibles. He dropped it.
“Dorrie tells me that you grew up in a trailer house,” David said. “That must have been interesting.”
Trent stiffened a bit. “Not really,” he said.
“I don’t mean to sound snotty,” David said, and he straightened up. “It’s just not something I’ve ever had experience with, except, you know, via clichéd movies and so on. It’s just, in terms of Dorrie, it’s interesting. Your backgrounds are so different.”
“I suppose,” Trent said, and David Bender gave him a disarmingly friendly smile.
“It’s a good thing, I think,” David Bender said. “Dome’s been having affairs with her students for as long as I can remember, but you’re the first one that she’s actually introduced me to. So that must mean something, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Trent said. He crushed his cigarette under his shoe, thoughtfully. He didn’t know that Dorrie had had other affairs with former students. “What do you think it means?”
“Well,” David Bender said, “it seems th
at she’s more serious about you. Don’t be threatened. She’s told me a lot about you, that’s all.”
Early on, when David Bender was just a figment of Trent’s imagination, he had built up a whole scenario. He had imagined confiding in David Bender, telling him confidentially that he’d planned to propose to Dorrie. He had the idea that it would be a kind of bonding moment. The David Bender of his imagination was a lanky, friendly, streetwise kid with a thick New York accent and an angular grin, someone who might have been portrayed by a younger, nonviolent Robert De Niro, someone who would clap him on the shoulder heartily and grin. “Mazel tov,” his imaginary David Bender said. “Dorrie, she needs a guy like you!”
He realized that this was ridiculous. But he was still a bit surprised by the actual David Bender. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he thought.
Dorrie had spent weeks trying to think of ways to keep David Bender entertained while he visited. There were no restaurants of note and only one movie theater, which consistently played films that Dorrie scorned. “My God,” Dorrie said. “This town is full of twenty-year-olds! What do they do with themselves?”
“Well,” Trent said. “I guess that mostly they drink. That’s why I’m making a living.”
And so it fell to him. As afternoon approached, Dorrie said, “So, what do you want to do today?” And David Bender said, “I don’t know. What is there to do?” And Dorrie looked at Trent helplessly.
He had talked to Courtney about it, but she had been very little help, though she’d offered to sell him some marijuana. “Get him stoned,” she said. “He’s from New York, and he’s going to be expecting a hick town. So what can you do? I’d say, get him good and stoned and then take him out to the bars. Not the college bars, either—the cowboy bars: Green Lantern, Dude’s, that kind of place. At least it will be something he’ll remember!” Courtney looked at him and smiled in a kind of sleepy, suggestive way—she was attracted to him, he guessed; she wondered what he thought he was doing with a person like Dorrie, expected, perhaps, that it wouldn’t last long.
