The Privileges

by Jonathan Dee

  But Adam is not embarrassed by them in this setting, as his brother is, because he doesn’t really associate them all that closely with himself anymore. He is amused by their helpless compulsion to be themselves, and will wind them up like a music box at any opportunity. “Hey, you know what I found in my room?” he says. “In the dresser drawer? A list of room rates. Did you guys see that? Do you have any idea what this place costs?”

  “Oh, Adam, please,” his mother whispers, “today of all-”

  “As it happens, I did,” his father says, reddening. “I’m just glad I’m not the sap paying for all this.”

  “More reason to be glad we never had girls,” his mother says, and laughs as if she were being filmed laughing.

  “That wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to me,” Mr. Morey says. “I don’t have to put on a show for anybody. I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not.”

  Adam abruptly stands up. “Oh look, there’s Mr. Sikes,” he says. “Excuse me. I’m gonna go practice calling him Dad.” And he crosses the room to where the bride’s dapper father sits at a table by himself, reading the paper. Conrad watches him leave in disbelief. His parents stare accusingly at each other. A moment later the waitress comes by and fills Adam’s coffee cup.

  The doors to the hotel ballroom are shut, and behind them, in moments of silence, one can hear the vacuum cleaners run. Teenage girls in stiff black skirts walk from table to table, checking the place settings, counting on their fingers. They work slowly; the air conditioning is turned up all the way, and with the room not yet full of bodies it is exotically cold, the coldest place in the hotel. Only those most desperate for a cigarette pass through the double doors to the infernal kitchen and the steaming alley beyond.

  At the hotel bar sits the wedding planner, habitually early, having sent her son and his friend to the florist’s in her van, praying they haven’t stopped to get high along the way. It’s why she doesn’t pay them in advance. The bar isn’t officially open yet but Masha knows everyone at the Athletic Club; this will be her fourth reception there this year. Though it’s before noon, she feels like (as her father used to say) a drink drink, and Omar the bartender would certainly comp her one, but while she’s on the job alcohol is out of the question. Something like that gets out and your reputation is shot. True, the bride-whose superior attitude Masha doesn’t especially care for-isn’t even from Pittsburgh and acts as if she might never set foot here again after today; but the stepfather, whose name is on the checks, is some rainmaker at Reed Smith, and the mother, whose superior attitude she doesn’t much care for either, is one of those chronically unsatisfied types who love nothing better than to nurse along some scandal, substantiated or otherwise.

  But that’s the secret to Masha’s success: you get invested not in the people, who can let you down, but in the ceremony, which never does. She doesn’t say it out loud very often but she thinks of herself as a guardian of something, a finger in the dike holding back total indifference toward the few things that have always mattered, ritual and devotion and commitment. When you thought of it that way, the less you happened to care for the families themselves, the more noble your work became. Her own marriage ended after nine years, but that detracted in no way from the beautiful memory of her wedding day itself; in fact, that’s what you were left with, she thinks, that and a beloved if somewhat less than reliable son. Besides, if it were up to her they would all still be together, husband and wife and child, through happy and contentious times alike. But not everything is her decision.

  A couple around the bride and groom’s age walks into the bar and Omar tells them that he’s closed. The boy looks ready to argue the evidence, but the girl says, “Forget it. I need to go upstairs and take another shower anyway.” That’s what today’s going to be, Masha thinks: a pageant of sweat. Eighty-eight already, according to the silent TV screen above Omar’s shaved head. That was part of the risk they all assumed when they booked the most beautiful old unmodernized Catholic church in Pittsburgh. That’s why she is waiting until the last moment with the flowers. She couldn’t book them the weather. Not that that would stop the mother from blaming her for it anyway.

  Across town Cynthia and Marietta sit bemused and intimidated, shirtless, their heads poking through holes cut in old bedsheets, as a tight-lipped Polish woman (recommended by Masha) and her young assistant do their hair. They tease each other with stories from their college days; all the stories involve embarrassment or regret but none of them can’t be laughed at. Only a few of them are about men because Cynthia and Adam started dating sophomore year. The Polish women, in a kind of secondary theme, speak in unsmiling Polish about God knows what, at least until Cynthia says something about how badly this whole ordeal makes her want a cigarette.

  “Please no,” the older one says, her scissors in the air. “Big kiss on altar, your husband think hey, my wife’s head smell like fucking ashtray.”

  Their eyes meet in the mirror, already retelling it.

  The doors to the church stand open, for circulation’s sake, but the dust hangs motionless on the ramps of light that slope down from the tall windows. Masha watches her red-eyed son and his Mexican friend, whom she secretly calls Señor Detention, try to get the white runner straight atop the sun-bleached carpeting between the pews. She pulls a creased checklist out of her jacket pocket and walks past the kneeling boys to the pulpit; turning to face the rows of empty seats, she solemnly taps her finger on the live microphone.

  “Stay out of heat,” the Polish woman says hopelessly as Cynthia and Marietta button their shirts back on. “Whole thing fall down.”

  With the car’s air conditioner at full blast, Marietta pulls into the Harrises’ driveway again. Standing outside the kitchen door on the tiny landing, flat against the wall in the scant shade of the eaves, Deborah is standing among the rain boots and gardening equipment, smoking a cigarette. She is already wearing her bridesmaid’s dress. Eyes barely open, she glowers hatefully at the tinted windshield of the car.

  “What is she doing?” Marietta says. She sounds almost scared.

  “I don’t know,” Cynthia says wearily. “There’s always some grievance.”

  “But why is she smoking outside in this heat? Is smoking not allowed in your mom’s house or something?”

  “ Warren smokes. He smokes in the house all the time.”

  “Then why is she-”

  “You know what?” Cynthia says. “Pull out. I can’t even deal with going back in there right now. Go on, back out. I know someplace we can go.”

  Deborah watches them leave and smiles at the prospect of her stepmother’s panic. Mother and daughter are so alike. No capacity for seeing themselves through others’ eyes, no interest in it. No one ever opens a book in that whole god damned stunted hell-bound house, including her father, whose idea of self-betterment is watching Unsolved Mysteries. The aspect of him she’s always cared least about is his money, but now that he’s letting these two spend it like it’s theirs, she resents them as climbers, her nominal stepsister especially. She knows this pains him. Make an effort, he keeps telling her, but no effort is necessary to understand the likes of Cynthia and her friends. One day it will hit them that high school is over.

  Adam sits on the bed in his underwear. He’s watching the Pirates game on TV. He considers masturbating, out of boredom, but there is too great a likelihood that Conrad or someone else will knock on his door. There is a great sense of bustle in the walls around him but nothing seems to require him right now. It’s far too awful outside to go for a run. Why did they schedule the wedding for four in the afternoon, anyway? Solitude and inactivity make him restless. At his bachelor party last weekend-a rafting trip on the Delaware with his six groomsmen-there was never a moment of idleness; gloriously exhausted, they slept in tents, some expensive Scotch but no real drunkenness, the whole thing put together by Conrad, one of the two or three best nights of his life. They’d cheerfully teased him by recounting old hookups, old b
inges, old mortifications. There was some ritual sarcastic mourning of all the sexual freedom he was waiving, but he could tell-it makes him smile now to remember it-that their hearts weren’t in it, because none of them really thinks he is making a mistake. He’s slept with other women, before he and Cyn met and, truth be told, for a short time after. What’s left to mourn there? Just an adolescent obsession with variety, and he is past that point. They are meant for each other: he feels it so deeply that he’s not quite able to say it, not even to her. She’s like one of those horse whisperers, he thinks, only it’s just him, he’s the only one it works on, she’s the only one he will let speak to him that way. It would seem juvenile to go back to wanting anything other than what he has. He also has a home, and a job, and he is impatient, in possession of these things, to leave his childish self behind and get the future under way in earnest.

  He finds his phone on the dresser and calls her again. “I talked to your dad at breakfast,” he says. “You should give him a call.”

  “I’m going to.”

  “Where are you?” he says.

  “At the airport. Don’t try to have me followed.”

  “No, seriously.” He strains to make out the background noise, then realizes it’s the same as the background noise in his own room. “Are you at the Pirates game?”

  She laughs. “I’m in a bar with Marietta. We’ve had our hair done, but we’re not ready to go back to the House of Pain just yet.”

  “What bar?”

  “In your dreams,” she says.

  “Well, okay, but just don’t show up drunk at the altar, because my last wife did that and, let me tell you, it really lowered the tone.”

  She smiles. The TV plays on a shelf above the scarred oaken bar, in the wonderful, midday, reptile-house gloom. With her fingers she ruins the circle of condensation that her vodka-and-soda glass keeps leaving on the wood. She knows why he’s calling. “So,” she says, “you’re doing okay?”

  When she says it she swears she can hear his breathing slow down. “Sure,” he says. “I’m fine. I just don’t like all the waiting.”

  They go over the schedule again and hang up, and Cynthia notices her maid of honor staring at her. “He’s nervous, huh,” Marietta says. She drinks. “So, are you nervous?”

  Cynthia’s first reaction, she has to admit, is to deny it without thinking about it, because she knows this is how she and Adam figure in the lives of their friends: as the fearless ones, dismissive of warnings and permissions, the ones who go first. But when she does think about it she realizes that the answer is still no. They are perfect together.

  “He makes me laugh, and he makes me come,” she says. “And he needs me much too badly to ever fuck things up.”

  “Well, I’ll drink to that,” Marietta says, but then she doesn’t drink. Her own date is spending the morning in the hotel gym; nothing about this whole weekend will please him as much as the discovery that his daily workout routine doesn’t have to be altered. She stares into the cloudy mirror behind the bar, where their elaborately coiffed heads float as if in an aquarium. In this splendid dump they look like extras who have wandered off a movie set. “Hey,” she says. “Your head smell like fucking ashtray.”

  As the heat peaks the city takes on a dirty sheen. Behind the haze the sun can only be approximately located, like the source of a headache; on the sidewalks each citizen moves forward in a kind of cocoon of dampness. The wedding guests have abandoned any halfhearted plans to see some more of the city-the church is just a three-minute walk across the park from the Athletic Club and they will wait until the last minute even for that. Unhurriedly they take the tuxedo shirts out of their boxes, recount the studs and the cuff links, hang the dresses on the bathroom door and turn on the shower to steam the travel wrinkles out of them. With nothing else to do they prop open their doors and turn the place into a dormitory. Someone puts on some music and the first complaint from the front desk arrives. They have begun drinking. Special occasions are marked by feats of excess.

  One-forty and no one knows where the bride is. Deborah hasn’t said a word; she lies on the couch in her bridesmaid’s dress, reading Walter Benjamin and drinking a Diet Coke. Ruth feels as if her brain is going to blow out of her head like a champagne cork. At the same time she feels justified in some way by the threatened emergence into reality of her vision that this whole day would end in disaster. Her daughter left the hairdresser’s more than an hour ago. Fine. It upheld Ruth’s view of life, her own life at least, to think that the things that mattered to her were, in everyone else’s estimation, a joke. Thirty-eight thousand dollars her husband has sunk into this day-more than the old days gave them any right to dream of-and Cynthia has barely acknowledged him; as for Warren, he has been putting on his tuxedo in the bedroom for an hour now, which, since he is a man who knows how to wear a tuxedo, suggests to Ruth that he is avoiding her. What’s worst, though, is her full awareness, even at a moment like this, of her daughter’s supreme, blithe competence. In another few minutes, with no word from her, they will have no choice but to proceed to the Athletic Club for the photo session as planned, and Ruth knows, in her heart of hearts, that Cynthia will be there. Of course there will be no real disaster: instead there will be the vindication of that refusal to take any of it seriously, to treat respectfully the day that marked the end of motherhood. Till death do us part. Big joke.

  The only one who has already braved the walk from hotel to church, several times today in fact, is Masha. Wearing a maroon blazer-a little heavy for a day like this, but the item in her closet that came closest to matching the burgundy of the bridesmaid’s dresses-she is losing the battle to maintain a fresh, unruffled appearance throughout the day’s events, that projection of capability that’s normally a key element of her job; but today, she keeps telling herself, is a special case. She’s sent her son to Wal-Mart, even though she knows he’s high, to buy every standing fan they have. She’s glad the groom is a little late for their meeting before the photo session. She doesn’t particularly care anymore how it might look that she’s waiting for him in the hotel bar. She drinks club soda after club soda and watches the guys in the band carry their own drums and keyboards and amplifiers into the ballroom, gasping and swearing, while she tries discreetly to check the size of the sweat stains under her arms.

  Then the groom enters, black-tied, a very handsome boy with a highly developed sense of charm. “The wedding planner? Oh, she’s in the bar,” he says as he holds out his hand. It comes back to Masha that he is from New York City and has a way of speaking that’s sometimes difficult to follow.

  In the Trophy Room they find Ruth and Warren and Warren ’s mother, who at eighty-seven has lost track of time’s more incremental movements and thus is as pleased to wait there indefinitely as her daughter-in-law is perplexed and insulted. They are more or less flattened against the wall by the door in order to avoid inconveniencing the photographer as he testily moves the lights and rearranges the furniture. No one else is there. The photographer, a short man with a neat mustache and a drinking problem whom Masha has worked with many times, is pleased to see her because here at last is someone with whom he may safely lose his temper.

  “She has something better to do?” he says, smiling tightly, speaking of the bride. “There’s maybe something good on TV?”

  With her back to Adam, Masha lifts her eyebrows at the photographer as if to say what can we do, this is what we’re working with; and she says, “Allow me to introduce the groom, Adam Morey.”

  The photographer’s mood is softened by Adam’s charisma only because he sees that here is a young man obviously not averse to having his picture taken. The groomsmen file in; he can tell, mostly from their adolescent nudging, that a few of them are drunk. Who gives a shit, he reminds himself, and grabs one of them and points to his mark on the floor. He makes a note of the groom’s parents (the father has the same strong chin and small mouth, the same convex hairline) standing with their backs to the wall,
gazing at their son as if from a great distance, as if crowds were cheering, as if they were standing on an ice floe.

  Then the bride walks in, ahead of her own entourage like a prizefighter, in the dress, the makeup, the veil and gloves, the full regalia. Masha and Ruth together make a gasping sound that’s as unrehearsed as anything they’ll say or feel all day. “No rush,” says the photographer, but already his sarcasm is losing its edge-his work bores and harries him but he is not inured to beauty-and he goes to look at her through the camera. Behind Cynthia come the six bridesmaids, Deborah several steps in front of the rest in her eagerness to get out of that awful suite where the beautiful ninnies chattered. The bridesmaids fan out by the door, sharing one of those gigantic bottles of water, picking at the sleeveless wine-colored dresses that are already darkening in spots.

  This is why they are late: on her way to the suite set aside for the bridal party’s preparations, Cynthia had finally stopped and knocked at the door to her father’s room; he had opened the door in his tuxedo, looking like a movie star, though also older and thinner than she remembered him; and then, as she’d known all along she would without quite knowing why, she collapsed in tears. He took her in his arms and shut the door and whispered the little things that only he could get away with and then a few minutes later she reemerged and went to the elevator bank to go get her makeup applied.