The Romantics

by Galt Niederhoffer

  As she waited, Weesie surveyed the house in detail for the first time: A framed nautical map was covered by a pane of glass with a sliver down its center; in the corner of the floor, wide pine floorboards had been patched with newer, narrower planks. Every detail increased Weesie’s sympathy for Augusta. There was no denying the Gettys had let their house go to pot.

  “He’s not here,” Pete said when he returned. He wore a look of satisfied certainty that Weesie had never seen on her husband.

  “He’s not?” said Weesie. “Are you sure?”

  “I checked every room,” said Pete.

  Weesie said nothing as she digested her disappointment, and entertained a new concern. What on earth would they talk about now?

  “Are you worried?” asked Pete.

  “No,” Weesie lied. “Not at all. Are you?”

  Pete pursed his lips and shook his head in a show of masculine bravado.

  “Where do you think he is?” Weesie asked.

  “That’s a very good question,” Pete said. “One I need to sit down to consider.” He collapsed onto a chair as though settling in to watch a movie.

  Weesie’s spirits lifted as she followed Pete’s example and took a seat on the sofa. The subject of Tom’s whereabouts would provide some fodder for conversation.

  Fear of not having something to say was, in many ways, the guiding force in Weesie’s life, second only to her fear of saying something stupid. Her father, a senator for Virginia, had taken every measure to teach his three daughters the art of sparkling conversation. The dinner table was their training ground, boot camp for political banter, polite small talk, eloquent summaries of current events, and pithy contributions about their feelings. Frequent, exotic family vacations endowed the girls with an impressive arsenal of conversation topics. Washington’s Cathedral School provided the polish and the forum for debate.

  Of the three girls, Weesie was the only one who had strayed from the political arena. And the choice had cost her, if not the affection of her father, certainly his attention. She dreaded the compulsory one-on-one dinners they shared when he came to New York. For the week leading up to their scheduled meal, she studied the newspaper feverishly, committing editorials to memory as though preparing for an oral exam.

  To some degree, she felt this anxiety with everyone she knew, as though she were bombing a very important job interview. This feeling compelled her to act oddly in most social situations. She adopted a bizarre faux-English accent, peppered her language with overly decorative words, and introduced lofty topics that were of little personal interest. At worst, the habit made her sound pretentious, at best, charmingly confused. But over the years, it had become habit, and she reverted to it unless she was in the presence of the handful of people—Jake, Lila, Laura, Tripler, and Annie—with whom she felt comfortable.

  “Tom won the Rose Cup four years in a row,” Pete announced. “He could have swum that with his eyes closed.”

  “You think?” asked Weesie.

  “I know.”

  Weesie nodded slowly.

  “For all we know, Tripler and Jake have already found him. Knowing Trip, she’s got him tied to a chair, doing shots.”

  Weesie smiled as caution gave way to consolation. She consciously relaxed her arms from their clenched position.

  “So where do you think he is?” she asked.

  “My bet is this is a prank. He loves dumb shit like this,” said Pete. “Always has.”

  “So you’re not worried?” she repeated. “No,” said Pete. “I’m not.”

  Satisfied, Weesie prepared to relinquish her anxiety. But she summoned another potential concern—it seemed like the responsible thing to do. “He didn’t make a toast at the rehearsal dinner. I found that odd. Didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t make a toast at my rehearsal dinner.”

  “Oh really,” said Weesie. “Why not?”

  “Tripler’s dad had his eye on me the whole time like he was daring me to screw up.”

  Weesie giggled and tried to conjure a clear image of Pete and Tripler’s wedding. Tripler had enforced a strict October theme and dressed the bridesmaids in pumpkin orange—a shade that was only a touch more flattering than Lila’s beloved pewter. The centerpieces, Weesie vaguely recalled, were enormous horns of plenty, stuffed with Indian corn, colored gourds, and—was it possible?—Halloween candy. Relaxing slightly, she pressed her point. “Still, he seemed a little off. That thing he said on the raft.”

  “It would be weird if he was acting normal,” said Pete. “The man is getting married tomorrow.”

  Weesie smiled. She had always admired Pete’s dry sense of humor but had never recognized it as generous until now. He had an amazing talent for making the most dour situation seem light and breezy. Jake did not have this talent. “I think my husband still suffers from that.”

  “Oh no,” said Pete. “Don’t worry. Your husband was like that before you met. I roomed with him freshman year.”

  Weesie nodded conclusively—it was inappropriate to indulge a more pointed dig at Jake in his absence. Even so, she wished Pete would keep talking. Laughter was incredibly relaxing, and she appreciated his solidarity. “Did you freak out when you got married?”

  “I spent the morning of my wedding in a closet,” Pete said. “Of course, Tripler locked me in it.”

  “But things got better when you said ‘I do’?” Weesie pressed, playing along.

  Pete shook his head solemnly. “Things never got better.”

  Weesie giggled. She had never before quantified the value—and the calming force—of a great sense of humor. Compared to Jake, Pete was completely hilarious—or Jake was painfully boring.

  By most accounts, Pete was the funniest person in the wedding party. His wicked sense of humor grew out of an instinctive aversion to the emotional realm, an allergic reaction to all things serious and somber. He visibly bristled at the first twang of earnest conversation, tempering it with levity like a chef adding spices to a bland dish. During college, he fine-tuned this aversion to sincerity into a dry, facetious wit and deployed it to detonate gravity before it could kill the mood. The quality of social exchange, he felt, was inherently degraded by sentiment. For him, this was not a belief, but a bodily sensation.

  The condition all but sealed his romantic fate. Though many women appreciated his jokes, few shared his distaste for sincerity. In Tripler, Pete found the ideal counterpart, the only woman in the world who shunned emotion more desperately than he. Together, they constructed a protective bubble of sarcasm and disdain. They spent the better part of college snickering among themselves, pointing out the fallacies of the group. Their off-campus apartment functioned as a clubhouse, a refuge where the huddled, hungover masses could find reliably mellow ennui and a massive frittata every Sunday for brunch.

  When Pete and Tripler married, two years after graduating, Pete’s mother offered a single piece of advice: Sarcasm, she said, was the single greatest threat to a happy marriage. Her own marriage, she claimed, had survived due to a honeymoon vow to abolish it. They had promised never to answer each other in irony or jest, but rather to treat every exchange as sacred and literal. At the time, Pete dismissed his mother’s advice as antiquated and simplistic. It certainly explained the sickly-sweet quality of his parents’ every exchange. But four years later, he wondered if this had been a foolish mistake. The cumulative effect of so many cutting comments had settled on his marriage like smog, creating a film of anger, a shortage of pleasantries and sex, and lately—he had begun to fear—love itself.

  In the last few months, he had found himself fantasizing compulsively about other women, plagued by vivid daydreams about strange girls in filthy positions. But he feared the fantasies revealed more about himself than the state of his marriage. That he and his wife of four years had tired of each other’s bodies was understandable; that he was sneaking into the bathroom to jerk off at eleven o’clock in the morning—that was a different issue altogether.

  �
�So you think he’s fine,” Weesie pressed.

  “I think he’s alive,” Pete clarified. “I never said he was fine.”

  Weesie sighed and cursed herself for her greediness. It was horribly selfish to pawn off her concern so quickly. Tom had disappeared in the middle of the night in a turbulent bay. He was likely hurt—maybe even dead. How dare she let herself off the hook so easily. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “I dunno,” said Pete. “Just that he’s probably somewhere nearby, wringing his hands and pacing.”

  Weesie sighed, somewhat relieved by the new theory. She voiced her next thought before she could censor herself. “Laura must be freaking out.”

  “Laura?” asked Pete. “I’d say Lila’s got more to worry about right now.”

  Weesie looked down, willing Pete to infer her meaning without forcing her to voice it out loud. “You realize how close they are,” she pressed.

  “Tom has tons of female friends,” said Pete.

  “Who talk and e-mail every day?” Weesie asked. “Probably more than Lila and Tom.”

  “That’s just Tom screwing off at work. He’ll waste anyone’s time who lets him.”

  “They went away together last year,” she said quietly. “Twice. That I know about.”

  Pete leaned forward in his chair, engaging finally. “Really? Where did they go?”

  Weesie shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s all she told me.”

  Each new betrayal filled Weesie with more nauseating shame. But it also produced a feeling of relief, releasing her somehow of the burden of blame for anything that had happened—or might happen—to Tom. She fumbled to change the subject but produced a confession instead. “I sometimes feel like we played a part in it.”

  “In what?” Pete said.

  “In making Laura.” Weesie paused. “You know. The way Laura is.”

  “Oh God,” said Pete, leaning back in his chair. “What did you guys do to the poor girl?”

  This was not the response Weesie craved. She had anticipated gentle dissent, a cursory vindication. But she continued anyway, eager to be absolved. “It was March of sophomore year, and the deadline for rooming paperwork was coming up. We had decided to live together the next fall. All five of us in one suite. It was going to be tight but everyone was up for it. We were shooting for one of those massive suites in Cavanaugh Hall.”

  Pete shifted his position, extending his legs to hang over the side of the chair.

  “That same week, Tom broke up with Laura and started dating Lila. Laura was a total wreck. Didn’t shower for God knows how long. Basically lived in the library. At one point, Lila wanted Tom’s varsity jacket, and Laura wouldn’t give it back.”

  “God, I remember that.” Pete winced.

  “So, the night before the submission deadline, four of us called a meeting. Lila, Annie, Tripler, and me. And we didn’t tell Laura. We decided she was too unstable, that living with her could be a drag. So we handed in our paperwork without her name, submitted for a quad. By the time she found out, the deadline had passed. She had no choice but to live alone.”

  “Wow,” said Pete. “That’s awful.”

  “I know,” said Weesie. “It is. And I know this sounds weird, but she’s never really been the same since.”

  “You girls are heartless,” Pete teased.

  “Don’t make me feel worse,” said Weesie. “But the strangest thing was that Lila felt bad, I guess because she got Tom. So she opted out of the quad, asked Laura to room with her after all. That’s when they moved off-campus.”

  Pete said nothing, appearing to sit in silent condemnation. Weesie shrank into the sofa, digesting her remorse. But in fact, Pete was already focused on something else: a cold, hard object pressed against his ribs from inside his coat pocket. He had been prescient—and stealthy—enough to secure an extra bottle of wine before the group abandoned the raft. Reminded of this, he grinned and produced the bottle, then held up a finger, a signal to wait, while he bolted toward the kitchen.

  Weesie waited in her seat while cupboards opened and closed.

  “Aha!” Pete yelled.

  “What are you looking for?” Weesie shouted.

  Another cupboard door slammed shut. “A corkscrew,” Pete shouted.

  He returned seconds later, carrying two wineglasses and an open bottle. He filled the glasses, handed one to Weesie, and raised his cheerfully.

  “To friendship,” he said.

  “To friendship,” she said and, with that, she resolved to drop the subject of Laura.

  NINE

  During the weeks preceding her sister’s wedding, Margaret Hayes had been asked the same question at least one hundred times. A woman in faded tennis attire would peer out from under a large straw hat and raise her voice to a volume she presumed best for communicating with children. “Is it hard sharing the house with your sister?” she would ask while swirling the ice in her glass. “Now that you’re used to ruling the roost, it must be quite a shock.”

  Minnow would shrug and curse her mother for welcoming the intruder into her home, then the intruder would exchange a knowing look with Augusta and down the rest of her drink.

  The insult of the query was doubled by the condescending gestures that followed: a furrow of the brow, a wrinkle of the nose, or worst of all, a pat on the head.

  “Hard?” Minnow yearned to reply every time. “Hideous would be more accurate.”

  Instead, she would simply smile and explain that no, it hadn’t been difficult. Believe it or not, she would declare, it had been an enormous relief; Lila’s demands on everyone else just meant she was left blessedly alone.

  At this, the offending party would burst into charmed laughter and declare that Minnow was so grown-up, just looking at her made her feel old.

  In fact, the months leading up to the wedding had been nearly unbearable. Lila had invaded Northern Gardens and taken the family prisoner. With Lila in residence, the typically tinkling chime of summer activity revved up to a roar. Lila’s demands on the family were par for the course. She had always required a large portion of her parents’ attention, but over the years, Minnow had learned how to require just a little bit more. Unfortunately, the planning of the wedding had completely transfixed Augusta, turning her into a robot set to a single mode. She had one mission: to make Lila’s wedding as perfect as she remembered her own. Minnow could have set fire to the porch, and Augusta would have looked on, bemused. That is, so long as it could be fixed by August.

  In some ways, though, the wedding had proven a boon to Minnow. The commitment forced Augusta to abandon her post as manager of Minnow’s summer schedule, releasing Minnow from her usual obligations: golf lessons, sailing lessons, the Mid-summer Mess, a sailing regatta, the July Fourth tennis round-robin, the July Fourth parade, and best of all, the club talent show, in which the Hayes family traditionally performed a mortifying musical skit. All of this amounted to more time for reading on the porch and for dangling her feet off the dock.

  Indirectly, the wedding also lessened the burden of Chip, distracting him with various errands and generally driving him out of the house. Tom, too, proved to be a pleasant enough fixture at Northern Gardens. He drove up on most weekends, not so much to consult on wedding plans as to console Lila. On Race Day at the yacht club, he was an invaluable addition to the team, and on Sundays, he treated the Hayes family to very decent banana pancakes.

  Still, regardless of these minor perks, Minnow’s greatest consolation was that one person had suffered more than she. The whole endeavor had been hardest on her father. His dependency on his wife increased with every day of her neglect, and his spirits suffered terribly. After accepting defeat to place settings and seating arrangements, he settled into a summer schedule that was even more languid than usual. He abandoned his morning golf game and slept late into the morning, ceased his daily regimen of jogging before afternoon cocktails. When he did emerge from his bedroom, he moved directly to his basement office, a spot he
had not inhabited since the early nineties, when he last worked on the musical. The occasional tinkling of the piano wafting up through the kitchen floorboards led the family to believe he had ended his ten-year hiatus and dusted off his composition book.

  And yet, every nuisance of Lila’s cohabitation paled in comparison to the one true hardship: eight yards of pure white English Victorian lace the texture and consistency of powdered sugar. As a second, third, and final blow: a crinoline of ivory netted tulle, eighty covered satin buttons, a chocolate sash made from raw Indian silk, and a train so majestic it would have humbled an Egyptian queen. The veil stood separate from this ensemble with heartbreaking indifference, resting on its own hanger, a simple mask of tulle that would flow from a crown of white roses. It was cruel enough that a dress so perfect was completely off-limits. But that it would never touch her skin was nothing short of ruthless.

  Now, as Minnow lay in bed, she cursed Lila for the insult. It would be one thing if Lila had shared the privilege, had allowed her to caress the fine fabric, to try it on and prance around the house like a cheerful princess. Instead, her sister had treated her like a contagious leper, quarantining the dress as though Minnow might damage it simply by gazing at it. It was almost as though Lila had used the dress to lord her enormous good fortune over her sister, as if to say, “No, you can’t be happy too. There is only enough happiness for me.” Curled in her rosebud duvet, Minnow attempted to quell her seething anger with a passionate journal entry. Her favored purple pen had not sufficed—red marker was necessary to convey the ignominy of this injustice.

  But even this cathartic act did little to relieve her boiling anger. She was haunted by this dress—as truly and terribly obsessed as she had once been by jellyfish. When she was seven, Chip had scarred her permanently by lifting one of the slimy invertebrates from the bay and chasing her with it, waving its slithering translucent flesh as she sprinted to the shore. She did not get back in the ocean until June of the next year.