She tilted her head at a skeptical angle, backing away. “There is something wrong with your animal,” she said.
Rogaine was pacing back and forth across the rug in a semi-crouch. This was a telltale signal: Fitger could either take him outside or he would shit on the floor. “Do you mind going out for a quick walk?”
Marie Eland tossed her cigarette into the sink, refilled her wineglass to bring it with her, and they put on their coats.
Outdoors, Rogaine pulled at the leash, dropping into a squat every few yards but apparently not finding the ideal location to make a deposit. They walked through a playground.
“If you are going to fuck with Roland and QUAP,” Marie Eland said, “let us do it together. It will be best to share information, to tell what we know.”
“I’m not sure I know anything,” Fitger said.
“I am sure you hear things. You have conversations.”
Rogaine selected a patch of ground and then locked eyes with Fitger while he did his business. Fitger scooped up the steaming burden with a plastic bag.
“I will give you an example.” Marie Eland gestured with her wineglass. “Here is a piece of information I have recently learned: the dean is not going to be dean anymore. He will return to his beloved Department of Music—which will not be subject to a QUAP review.”
“I thought every department was subject to review.”
“No. Some receive—what do you call it?—immunity, because of favors traded back and forth. The dean has given something to Roland.”
Rogaine led them to a malodorous area at the edge of the park, near a set of trash cans. Fitger tossed the bag of dog shit into one of the cans. Given something to Roland?
“So you see why we need to work together.” Marie Eland took his arm as they stepped off a curb. “Anything you can learn, I promise to share only with Gusev and one or two others. You have such a source…”
“A source,” Fitger repeated. He was conscious of a smear of shit on his sleeve. Was she referring to Janet? Because he couldn’t…Or, rather, he had already tried to wrest information from her but could no longer put their ex-marital relationship to that kind of use. Where Janet was concerned, he wanted to have a clean conscience. He knew she was in intimate, daily contact with the dean—not that he understood what she could possibly see in Phil Hinckler—but the truth was, his feelings for his ex-wife were complex. In fact, he sometimes—
“No.” Marie Eland tugged at his arm. They had left the park and the playground behind and begun to cross the street at a four-way stop. “There is the beauty. They are not together anymore. You didn’t know? She has broken off their relations.”
Fitger took the wineglass from her hand and drained it. “Janet broke up with him? With the dean?”
“Several weeks ago,” Marie Eland said. “Watch: be careful.”
A car pulled up at the four-way stop, and a familiar face turned aggressively toward them. It took Fitger a moment to recognize his former father-in-law, “Bulldog” Matthias, who formed a gun with his thumb and fingers and pointed it at Fitger, through the window. He was riding shotgun, with his daughter, Janet, who was looking at Fitger also, at the wheel.
FOURTEEN
The wedding wasn’t going to be the kind with the white dress and the veil and the row of bridesmaids and groomsmen arranged by height in pastel colors. It wouldn’t include matching nosegays or music from the pipes of an organ, or champagne served in skinny glasses, with people making toasts and tossing rice. But that was fine: Angela knew it wasn’t the trimmings that mattered; it was the seriousness, the promises made in front of witnesses, the troth. Was that actually a word? “Troth”? Wiping her face on a clump of toilet paper, Angela thought it probably was a word, but she would have to remember to look it up later. That was something her mother had taught her from an early age: Need to learn it? Look it up!
But she couldn’t think about her mother, not with the ceremony only fifteen minutes away; it would make her cry, and she had already spent most of the morning in tears. Her mother had prayed hard about her decision and finally told Angela that she wouldn’t come to the wedding. Of course she loved Angela and always would. But there were moments when a parent had to stand up for and demonstrate her principles; and it was too painful, she said (at this point both Angela and her mother were crying), to see the values she had tried to instill in her daughter—as well as the dreams she’d had on Angela’s behalf—cast so quickly and so carelessly aside. She had thought she knew Angela. She’d thought she could trust her. The fact that Angela had lied to her, all through the fall and especially at Christmas, not saying a word! And now she wouldn’t even talk to her mother about her decision, or lack of decision, regarding the baby, which (who knew?) might be Angela’s mother’s only chance for a grandchild…Well, she needed some time by herself, to think things over. And she would be praying for Angela, as she did every day, but from a distance—the distance apparently being something that Angela had been wanting, herself. Besides, Angela’s grandmother was running a fever. It was probably not serious, but the trip was too long for her just now; the hours in the car on top of the news of Angela’s pregnancy (and they knew nothing about the boy, Trevor, she was marrying, or about his family)—it would be too much.
“Hey. Are you still in there? You don’t want to make me get a crowbar, do you? Come on: let’s see how you look.” The voice on the other side of the women’s restroom stall belonged to Angela’s resident adviser, Brandi, who had offered to leave her Spanish class ten minutes early and help Angela get ready at the campus chapel. Brandi was the only student (other than Trevor, the groom) whom Angela had invited to the wedding—not because they were friends, but because Brandi, during a weekly check-in with all the girls on her hall (a ritual that typically involved advice about hangover remedies), had knocked on Angela’s door and, with a thumbs-up for emphasis, recited her usual question: Was Angela going to make this week a good one? Was she going to kick this upcoming week in the ass?
“I think so,” Angela had told her. “I’m getting married on Wednesday.” Brandi had tossed back her head, her mouth opening wide, as if on a hinge. “Hilarious.” Then she noticed Angela’s expression. “Are you shitting me, Glowworm?” She took a few wary steps into Angela’s room, noting the bookshelf with its row of books in alphabetical order, the bed with its hospital corners perfectly made. Angela—who had been wearing an oversized pullover sweater for the past six weeks—had stood up and smoothed her hands over her stomach. “Oh. Okay. Wow,” Brandi said. “So: I guess this is for real?”
They talked. Aghast at the idea that Angela had no bridesmaids or attendants, Brandi had volunteered for the job.
Now, in the women’s lounge at the back of the chapel, Spanish flashcards in the pocket of her jeans, Brandi hummed “Here comes the bride” as Angela, eyes almost crimson from the effort not to shed tears, emerged from the toilet stall. “All right, then,” Brandi said, looking Angela over. “So far, so good.” Brandi had gone above and beyond her resident adviser duties by taking Angela wedding-dress shopping: they had started at a discount bridal store but ended up at Goodwill. They had ultimately settled—for seven dollars—on a lemon-colored knee-length shift with yellow-and-white cloth daisies at the neck and hem. In the store it had seemed to Angela a sweet and simple dress, appropriate for a modest afternoon wedding. But now, catching sight of herself in the mirror over the sinks, she knew the dress was more comic than graceful: it emphasized the bump of her stomach and might have been borrowed from an overweight ten-year-old girl.
“Okay, my turn.” Brandi peeled off her jeans and pulled her T-shirt over her head, her breasts nearly tumbling over the scalloped rim of a black lace bra. She dug through her backpack. “I wore this for my cousin’s wedding last October.” She held up a red cocktail dress with a slit up the thigh and made a va-va-va-voom gesture with her shoulders. “Dang. We shou
ld have brought flowers.” She pulled the dress on over her head (the black bra still visible, Angela noticed, but maybe that was a style), then discovered a plastic bouquet in a vase by the sink. She rinsed a few years’ worth of dust off the flowers, shook the water into the sink, then ripped the bouquet in half at the stem. “The bigger one’s yours,” she said. “That’s one more thing taken care of. Now: let’s see who’s here.” She cracked the restroom door and peered into the chapel. “All right. We’ve got a few people in the second row. And, yup, there’s your groom, Shy-Guy Thurley. That’s a heck of an overbite. He sat across from me in Bio-Chem in the fall.” She turned to face Angela again. “Are you sure you’re okay about this? And is Thurley okay”—Brandi gestured toward Angela’s stomach—“you know, with the bump?”
Well, there wasn’t much he could do about it, Angela said. He was surprised, of course, when she told him. She had gone to his room to deliver the news, and had found him walking down the hall with a toothbrush (it was the middle of the day, but Trevor liked to brush his teeth after lunch). In order to be alone they had gone into the dorm’s kitchen, which smelled like sour milk and burned food, and Trevor had stared at the floor, the toothbrush clutched in his fist, while she explained—it sounded so odd—that they were going to be parents. She was four months along. He hadn’t doubted her or questioned her at all.
“So…he just stood there?” Brandi shook a few drops of water from the plastic flowers. “What did he say?”
“I don’t remember. I was so nervous,” Angela said. Trevor—even before she broke the news—had seemed nervous, too. When she said the word “pregnant,” he twitched; when she finished talking, he told her he had to call his mother. Angela had followed him to his room (would his mother want to talk to her also?), but he asked her to wait in the hall. Their conversation—through the door, she could hear Trevor’s voice rising and falling but she couldn’t hear what he said—went on so long she eventually gave up and went back to her dorm. Several days later, Trevor e-mailed. His mother had spoken to their pastor, and in light of the sin he and Angela had committed it would be best if they married. Trevor had asked about Angela’s class schedule and compared it with his, and it turned out that a Wednesday between two-thirty and four—Trevor offered to reserve the chapel—would probably work best.
“Pretty freakin’ romantic,” Brandi said. She outlined her mouth in a bright shade of red and held the lipstick out to Angela, who declined. “What is it?” Brandi asked. “What’s wrong?”
Angela had pressed her hand to her stomach. There it was, that otherworldly sliding motion, a knee or elbow carving a subtle arc from within. She stood still in order to pay closer attention and felt it again—some half-formed creature navigating an ocean inside her, making her feel as if she had swallowed a globe. “I’m fine,” she said. She blew her nose and clutched her half of the plastic bouquet.
Still studying Angela, Brandi cracked her knuckles and then moved up her skeletal chain of command, cracking her wrists and her shoulders and ending by wrenching her neck to the left, her bones giving way with an audible pop. “You know, I’m way over my head in all this,” she said. “During the resident adviser training they didn’t talk to us about students getting married.”
“I appreciate your being here,” Angela said—though she wondered if it might have been easier to have gotten ready alone.
Brandi opened the restroom door again, giving Angela a glimpse of the minister—someone from Trevor’s family’s church—making his white-robed way down the aisle.
“Are we supposed to go in now?” Angela asked.
“Not yet.” Brandi stood in front of the door. She was taller than Angela and was wearing heels; Angela stood face-to-face with two sizeable breasts. “Before we walk out of this room, I want you to give me three reasons. Three good reasons, other than that”—Brandi nodded at Angela’s stomach—“to explain why you’re ready to marry this guy.”
“Well,” Angela said. She remembered lying on her back in the tangle of sheets, with Trevor’s garlicky breath in her ear. She had thought that having sex would be graceful, like dancing, the way it looked in the movies, but she’d found the configuration awkward: she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with her arms, and Trevor’s knee had kept pinching the skin of her thigh. Their stomachs had slapped together once, making a farting noise, and when they were finished (it had only taken about thirty seconds), there was the condom, still partly rolled up, beached on the sheet like a fish at low tide. “He’s smart,” she said. “If he weren’t smart he wouldn’t be in college.”
Brandi said something about Payne not quite being Yale, but told Angela to go on.
“And he’s…a nice person. He didn’t doubt me when I told him.”
“The fact that he didn’t call you a liar about being pregnant is a real plus,” Brandi said. “But I wouldn’t call that a reason. I’m going to say you’re at one and a half.”
Out in the chapel, a CD player switched on. Angela had asked Trevor to play “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”—one of her mother’s favorites—but heard something dark and Wagnerian instead.
“He’s—we have things in common,” she said. “I mean, our backgrounds. I met him at campus Bible study.” She hadn’t returned to the Bible study group after the night of the party (what if the other group members knew what had happened?), but it counted for something, she thought, that she and Trevor had grown up with similar beliefs. Beliefs were a way of making decisions—or having decisions ready-made for you. Furthermore, Trevor, like Angela, had grown up at the edge of a farming town. Thinking about Vellmar, bordered by crops, Angela couldn’t help but consider her pregnancy in agricultural terms. Trevor had planted a seed in her, and soon it would show itself and come to fruition. The only trouble with this analogy was the comparison of Angela’s body to dirt.
Brandi sighed. “Okay. We’ll call that two and a half reasons. What else can you come up with?”
Angela was having trouble thinking. The CD shifted from Wagnerian gloom to some sort of eerie Celtic music. Was that her cue? But Brandi and her breasts were still blocking the door. Brandi wanted to know about Angela’s plans for her wedding night and her honeymoon. Angela’s dorm was girls-only. Were they going to spend a romantic night sleeping on a couch in the student center? Or in a tent in the mud on the quad?
Well, in truth, Angela hadn’t thought about that. She had only gotten as far as the fact that it was important to be married, because having a baby outside of marriage was a sin. She hadn’t imagined sleeping in the same bed or even the same room (in twin beds?) with Trevor, and she would rather go to her chemistry lab than have sex again. The woman at the health clinic had told her that being pregnant might make her feel absentminded, and Angela had definitely found that to be the case. The only things she could keep her mind on were her classes; she sometimes even forgot, when she woke up in the morning, that she was pregnant, remembering only when she bent over to put on her shoes.
“Well, people are waiting out there,” Brandi said. “Should I tell them you’re coming? Or do you want to take a rain check and get married to somebody else in about ten years?”
Angela couldn’t think. She had already told her mother that she was getting married. And she had told and invited Professor Fitger and Ms. Matthias and Fran, and she had invited a few other professors, and the idea that they were sitting out there waiting, that she had told them to come…“Do we walk up together?” She felt her pulse thumping forcibly in her neck.
“Not unless you want me to give you away. Which I’m not going to do. I’ll walk in first, and you walk behind me.” Brandi opened the door. “But listen: if you decide to make a run for it, let me know; I can cause a distraction.”
Angela saw Trevor at the front of the chapel, wearing a shirt and tie but no suit. Shouldn’t the groom wear a suit? But she remembered her seven-dollar dress and unpolished s
hoes.
“This is it, then. Liftoff,” Brandi said.
Angela followed behind her into the church.
* * *
—
Staring into the gloomy heart of Payne’s campus chapel, Janet tried to remember—not that it mattered—whether the right or left side of a church was for friends of the bride. She had been in the chapel only a few times before: once for a terrible production of a student-directed play (the theater had been closed, as it often was, for repairs), and once or twice for a funeral. The building was more suited, she thought, to funerals: the wood was dark, and because of overhanging trees and an adjacent building, the windows admitted only a begrudging light on one side.
She had been hoping to arrive after Fitger was seated, in order to avoid him, but of course he was late. God, she was an idiot, playing that game with the Caesar salad. What had it led to? To her ex-husband e-mailing her at all hours, and to the evening when she and her father were driving home from that horrible superhero film he had insisted on seeing, and there was Jay, strolling cozily along in the dark with his little French friend while walking Fran’s dog. Janet had endured, during the remainder of her father’s visit, a Möbius strip of parental observations: he never understood why Jan-Jan had married that loser; she was obviously better off without him; her ex was a self-satisfied clod and a jackass; and who was that sexpot he was walking with? Fitger had left her a message the next afternoon, explaining that he had no idea she had broken up with Phil, and that he and the chair of Consolidated Languages had been discussing a—
Janet had hit delete without listening to the rest.
There weren’t many people in the church. On the right, a handful of undergrads stared robotically at their cell phones. On the left, Fran sat with Ashkir, her entrepreneurial office assistant; just behind them were Dennis Cassovan and Helena Stang, Stang wearing what appeared to be a full set of typewriter keys (still attached to their metal levers) like an alphabetical fringe around her neck.
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