Chum

by Jeff Somers

  “So the secret of a successful marriage is psychotically spitting anger at each other at the slightest irritation, and marriage equals death. Thanks.”

  He shrugged amiably. “Hence: cocktails.”

  The passenger door tore open, and Denise threw herself into the car. She held up a scrap of paper triumphantly. “Details!” she announced. “We’ll get there yet!”

  I smiled. “I don’t know. Tom has been informing me how depressing weddings are. I’m not sure I want to go anymore.”

  She continued to settle herself damply. “I’m sick to death of this poison-pal relationship you and Tommy have. Shut up and drive.”

  Tom hit me lightly on the back of my head. “Cocktails, dummy!” he hissed jocularly. “To stave off ennui!”

  “You just shut up,” she snapped.

  • • •

  I was trying, unsuccessfully, to identify the vegetable on my plate when Flo crept up to our table with a handful of skirt. She leaned in to whisper in Denise’s ear, and then Denise wiped her mouth and stood.

  “Be back,” she said in my general direction. “Girl business.”

  Instantly, Tom was sitting in her vacated seat. “My God, man, look at the people at this table! It’s Gabba-Gabba-Hey time here. It’s the Freaks and Geeks table. How’d this happen to you? You used to be cool.”

  “I’m obviously being punished.”

  “Maybe Denise is being punished. Let’s have a shot of something horrible.”

  I stood up and we made our way to the nearest open bar, where a perky brunette kid smiled wickedly at us as we approached, dollar signs in her mercenary eyes.

  “Hi!” she chirped. “What can I get you handsome men?”

  Tom pretended to peruse the bottle lineup behind her, then slapped a fiver on the bar dramatically. “Three Kings, baby. We need inebriation.”

  She lined six shot glasses—plastic medicine cups—on the bar and began pouring whiskey. “One of you guys mourning the bride here?”

  Tom shook his head. “We can’t dance unless we’re drunk.”

  She paused to study us carefully. “Are you guys related?”

  I blinked. “No. Why?”

  She shrugged. “You should be.”

  Tom and I each took a shot glass and turned to regard the reception hall. I raised my shot into the air. “To Mare and Bick! Let this not be the happiest night of their lives.”

  We drank, winced, coughed.

  Tom nudged my elbow, handed me the second shot glass. “Is it me,” he asked wetly, “or is Kelly like the über-Kelly tonight?”

  I followed his small eyes to the dance floor, where our favorite friend-of-a-friend was kicking up her heels in a group of debauching girls, laying the boogie down. I gave her my professional lecher’s eye, which didn’t creep out often with Denise around.

  “It’s a Wedding Glow,” I decided.

  “A what?” he asked, and we tossed back our second shot, which was infinitely worse than the first. I gagged and struggled to breathe.

  “A Wedding Glow,” I croaked. “The smell of sex is in the air, eh? The whole place here is just filled with pheromones. Fertility. Family. Marriage. Formalwear. It’s like the prom, but we’re adults now. The whole ceremony, you know, designed around reproduction. Girls start breathing the air in this tight, confined space, and they just get hot and bothered. Hence, the Glow. That’s why so many unhappy affairs begin at weddings, you know.”

  Tom absorbed this manfully. “I’ve never had an affair at a wedding,” he said sadly. “You’d think, what with all the booze and the dancing and the reluctance to tell the truth and the available rooms that it would happen, once. But no dice.”

  “No dice on what?”

  I blinked in the face of Miriam’s sudden arrival at the bar. I opened my mouth, but nothing came to mind.

  “Consummating my unrequited love for you, Mare’s little sister,” Tom supplied. “Shot?”

  Miriam nodded. “God, yes. You have no idea the stress on the unmarried sister at these things. No one does. I didn’t, until today.”

  I nodded and kept a careful smile on my face. Tom handed me my third shot, and I held it politely until he’d procured one for Mir.

  “Uh,” I said, sensing the need to say something. “Uh, having fun?”

  Mir dazzled me with a smile. In one sense, Mir was like her sister: blond, with big brown eyes that did most of her communicating, and perfect posture—the Harrows sisters walked ramrod straight wherever they went, the lasting gift of their largely unamused mother. But where Mary was angular, the fine lines of her face clear-cut and stark, Miriam was blurrier, softer, rounder.

  Tom handed her a little plastic glass with overdone ceremony, to which she offered a half-assed curtsy. Then she brought the shot up to her nose and sniffed it.

  “What is this?”

  “Take a chance. Chin-chin!”

  We drank. Mir coughed, once, ladylike, and laughed.

  “That was good, actually,” she announced. “Tommy, you’re my mixologist. I’m appointing you right now. I’m in your hands.”

  Tom leered in a friendly way. “How old are you again?”

  She ignored him professionally. “Henry, you’re quiet.”

  I was, in all honesty, suddenly and forcibly drunk.

  “I propose a pact,” Tom announced. “Throughout the evening, on the hour, we three will gather here and have a drink in honor of the Bick-Mare union and all the joy we intend to get from it via merciless and often vulgar jokes at their expense.”

  “You’re on,” I agreed immediately.

  “Agreed,” Miriam giggled.

  “What are we agreeing on?”

  I felt Denise before I saw her and was seized by a spasm of inexplicable guilt. To cover I put my arm around her and said loudly: “Tom is causing trouble and I’m supervising.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Neesie. We’re forming a drinking club here at the reception, invitation only. Care to join?”

  Denise made a face, her arms sliding around my waist. “Lord, I can’t drink like that. I’d be in a hospital.”

  “I’ll see you guys back here later,” Mir announced. “I’ve got maid of honor duties, you know.”

  I studiously did not watch her walk away. “So, how was the girl business?”

  Denise shrugged. “Buy me a drink, sailor. You don’t want to hear about all that stuff.”

  “Sure we do,” Tom protested. “Hot chicks in formal wear—lacey underthings, all that jazz. Pillow fights, I’m guessing, and lesbian experimentation. We want to hear it!”

  Neesie rolled her eyes at me. I ordered her a white wine, and we went back to our table of freaks and losers, very obviously the people that Mary wanted nothing to do with.

  • • •

  “What do they do? It is so mysterious,” Luis asked me with inebriated solemnity. The girls had once again abandoned us for unknown reasons—cavorting, fights, desperate boyfriend-and-husband swapping arrangements—none of us knew. Luis had joined me at my Loser Table with heavy effort, sitting down and sighing. He was drinking martinis.

  “I look around, and all of the hot women have gone away,” he observed mournfully. “If we knew where they went, we could go there too.”

  This I could not argue with. “It’s obviously me,” I said with equal gravitas, leaning over drunkenly to speak into his ear. “Every time I show up, the women run for cover. Even Neesie.”

  Luis nodded gravely. “Yes, this is true.”

  “Thanks.” I looked around. “I’m going to have a cigarette. Want to join me?”

  He shook his head. “I will wait here and see if the women return when you are gone.”

  I slapped him on the back as I stood up. “I knew I could count on you.”

  I wandered out into the lobby, shaking out a cigarette. Outside the hall, it was a muted hurly-burly, a sealed-off noise with a thick maroon carpet and vague strangers walking on their own. I stood and lit a cigarette in clear violation o
f the law and the rules of polite society and watched other overdressed people walk around and ponder their place in a world where you end up at a ridiculous affair like this.

  “Got another one of those?”

  I turned and coughed a little in the face of Miriam. She was a little flushed, her cleavage heaving fresh from the dance floor. I once again felt my voice leaving me and stood for a moment making “ums” while patting myself down for cigarettes.

  “God, it’s good to get out of there,” she breezed, accepting one from me and lighting it from mine. “Family family everywhere and not a place to hide, you know? Jesus! Not to mention the marriage thing. Mom just staring at me the whole day, mentally matching me up with every guy. I’ve been introduced to more goddamn men tonight than through an entire year of college.” She sucked in a deep drag. “And that’s a lot.”

  I stared dumbly until it dawned on me that a response was expected. I struggled to formulate one. Finally, I said “Yeah.” She smelled like salt water.

  “You know, it’s true what they say about brides. They’re nightmares. Mare’s always been a bitch of an older sister, but these past few months …” she snorted.

  “Hard, huh?” I managed.

  “You have no idea,” she laughed. “All I can say is I feel a little sorry for David. He’s soft, you know? And I swear if I have to hear my mom refer to me as ‘the single one’ one more time … I’m eighteen! I’m supposed to be out at bars, doing shots, having sex, not getting married!”

  I perked up a little.

  “I mean, I think Mare’s nuts for getting married this young. Twenty-eight! I say, wait until your thirties, you know? Enjoy yourself a little and then get married.”

  I nodded. “Are you enjoying yourself tonight?”

  She snuffed out her cigarette on her shoe. “A few more drinks and I will be.” She paused and put a hand on my shoulder. “Henry, you’re sweet, you know that? Thanks for letting me prattle on like this.” She leaned up on her toes and kissed me lightly on the cheek, and I had a heady rush of images: cheerleaders, Catholic schoolgirls, Girl Scouts selling cookies. It was one second of pedophilic euphoria that reminded me forcefully that Miriam was eighteen, firm, and illegally drunk.

  Then she was twisting back toward the ballroom, and I needed another cigarette.

  I sat down and felt the cool breeze immediately. When Denise looked over at me sweetly and said, “Have a nice chat?” I stood up again. “Tom needs me at the bar,” I croaked.

  “You have fun over there,” she chirped.

  I staggered over to where Tom and Mike were more or less holding each other up near the bar. I took Tom’s shoulder and leaned in close.

  “Emergency. Come on.”

  Once in the bathroom, Mike and Tom weaved by the sinks and I paced before them.

  “So what’s the emergency?” Mike asked. Tom seemed beyond speech, peering owlishly at me as if I were some wondrous hallucination come to deliver the word of God to him personally.

  I stopped. “All right. You know how Neesie … and Miriam …”

  “Oh, shit,” Mike wailed, looking down at the damp floor. “Henry, what did you do?”

  I threw my arms out helplessly. “I talked to her! I had a cigarette with her! It wasn’t anything … it wasn’t my fault!”

  “She’s eighteen, man.” Mike shook his head at me. “You’re twelve years older than her. When you were twelve, she was just born.”

  I just stared at him in amazed shock.

  “When you were eighteen, she was six,” Mike added.

  “I didn’t molest her, you ass,” I said pleadingly. “I talked with her. She pecked me on the cheek.”

  “Saint Pats,” Tom gurgled. We looked at him. He was goggling at us in an amused way that implied a lot more than those two words seemed likely to convey.

  I nodded. “Saint Pats.”

  Mike sighed. “Right. Well, you didn’t do anything, right?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck it,” Tom suddenly slurred. “Let her fume. You’re innocent. Go back to that table like a man and tell the woman to shut the fuck up.”

  There was a moment of unbelievably awkward silence. I felt it on my skin like something sticky.

  The door burst open, and Bick marched in, his almost-white hair standing up in a gummed mess of hair spray and sweat. He stopped before us in his half-undone tuxedo, panting, his usually pale face red.

  “That’s it,” he said thunderously, “I’m getting a divorce.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tom hissed. “Have a cigarette.”

  “Who knew what a wedding could do to a woman?” Bick continued, snatching the lit cigarette from Tom’s palsied hand and taking over my pacing. “I have witnessed a slow descent into monster by Mary Harrows. She is now a monster. She isn’t human anymore. I have just married a monster.”

  “Better send out for supplies,” Mike said tiredly. “Looks like we’ll be in here for a while.”

  “How did this happen?” Bick went on. “Why didn’t one of you stop me? Why am I just now finding out she’s a monster?”

  “What happened?”

  Bick rounded on me. “What happened? My God, haven’t you been listening? She’s become a monster! She put on a white dress and became a monster!”

  “I think we all need to calm down,” Mike announced, putting his hands up in the air as if a crowd of people were threatening him.

  “Oh, try to expel that pole from your ass, Mike.” I scowled. “I’m going to be punished by Denise simply for being stupefied in the face of stunning gorgeousness, and Bick has legally committed himself to a Pod Person with a striking resemblance to Mary. We’re also fabulously drunk. Anything I missed?”

  “I’m nauseous,” Tom offered with a grunt.

  “And Tom’s nauseous, dammit. So Mike, can the happy bullshit, and let’s crack open the fucking suicide pills, okay?”

  Bick sat down on one of the sinks and smoked. “You don’t get it, Hank. We’ll never get out of here alive. There’s a monster out there, and she’s in charge.”

  “What happened?”

  Tom held up a hand. “Excuse me.”

  He slumped into one of the stalls and began retching.

  “Well,” Bick continued, “screw it. I’m married to her now. So what if she’s a little controlling, right?”

  I slapped him on the back. “Absolutely, my pasty friend. Certainly none of us care.”

  “It’s settled then,” Mike sighed, “we’ll never know what she did.”

  The door cracked open, and Luis poked his head in. “I have been sent to retrieve the men. The women are quite unhappy with the lack of men on the dance floor.” He pushed his way in and leaned against the door. “What is that terrible noise?” He paused and smiled slightly, nodding. “Ah: Tom.”

  “I don’t know,” Bick said. “I guess I’m happy to be married, you know? But she was such a pain in the ass this morning, moaning about having doubts, being unsure. And now that we actually said the words, she’s been acting like I’m a moron she’s saving from himself.” He snuffed out his cigarette. “Granted, it’s only been a few hours.”

  “Hey, Luis,” I called out. “Did Denise say anything?”

  “No. She is apparently no longer speaking to men.”

  Mike looked at his watch. “Guys, I hate to be the voice of reason, but we can’t stay in here forever. We have to leave the bathroom.”

  “Shit,” Bick groaned. “He’s right.”

  A gloom descended on us all. Tom flushed the toilet but remained on his knees in the stall, moaning. Mike rubbed his bald head nervously. Bick sat staring down at his shiny black shoes. Luis seemed casual and at ease, hands thrust into pockets. I ran a hand through my hair over and over again.

  When Tom joined us silently, straightening his tie, we all pretended not to notice.

  “Well,” Luis announced, opening the door and backing out of the bathroom. “I am going to dance with your women.”

  “Hel
l, let’s get a drink,” Tom added, proving once again that he was a remarkable organism.

  Bick slid off the bathroom sink. “Come on, let’s face it like men, then, eh?” He pointed at Tom. “Don’t let him have another drop. That’s an order.”

  I glanced at Luis. “An order. Thank goodness for the suicide pills.”

  Luis paused in the doorway and placed a hand on my shoulder. “What is wrong? Tell Luis what troubles you.”

  Exasperated, I shrugged him off. “Come on, men. Time to face the Troubles with dignity.”

  “And cocktails,” Tom breathed heavily.

  • • •

  I marveled at Bick as he swept Mary across the dance floor. Sweating like a pig, cigarette dangling from his lip, he was red-faced and grinning, a charmless man who nonetheless got by on sheer self-confidence, a man who convinced you to like him simply because he liked himself so damned much.

  I sat alone at my table, all the other guests somewhere else, and Denise also missing, possibly even driving home without me, for all I knew. I sat at ease, legs crossed, burning cigarettes and drinking steadily, trying to project a nice Hemingwayesque aura of rugged ennui.

  “My, we’re grumpy.”

  I froze and looked up from the floor. Shiny black shoes. Perfect, hose-clad calves. Ridiculous maid of honor dress. Miriam, grinning at me, listing slightly as she attempted to remain standing under her own power. Her eyes were squinty, her cheeks bright red.

  I opened my mouth in terror. She was gorgeous, and I couldn’t remember my own name. She took this as a sign, stepped forward, and sat down in my lap, her arms around my neck.

  “Henry,” she breathed, “you’re so nice.”

  “Oh, Lord,” I exclaimed. “I’m really not.” She felt delightful, a wonderful weight. Dread seeped through me.

  “Yes, you are. You are!” She gazed down at me with a serious expression, intently drunk. “You are, Henry. You’re so nice. You’re the nicest guy I know.”