The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  Paul’s peeling the label from his bottle of Perrier. He rolls the paper into a tight cylinder and drops it into the bottle.

  He says, “Look, I know what you’re doing, all right?”

  Mark lets the chair’s front legs drop back to the ground. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, come on, Mark.”

  “Seriously, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “A little subtlety never killed anyone,” Paul says. He stands and gathers the three empty bottles. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  Alice

  July 2

  The customs agent flips through Alice’s passport, first assessing her biographical information and then glancing at her photo. Alice wants to point out that she was ten pounds heavier when the picture was taken, and that she was going through an unfortunate flirtation with bangs, but she keeps her mouth shut. This woman’s seen worse, she tells herself, turning to glance at the line of haggard travelers behind her. She sees worse every day.

  The agent examines the rest of the passport, and Alice thinks of her paltry collection of stamps: evidence of travel in exotic places like Canada, and Mexico, and the Bahamas. She clears her throat.

  “It’s a new passport. My old one was practically overflowing with stamps,” she lies. “Qatar was my favorite.”

  The agent tucks a loose curl of red hair back into her cap.

  “Business or pleasure?” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Are you here for business or pleasure?”

  Alice considers the question. She rolls her left shoulder back and feels the joint pop in its socket. Behind her she hears the tired, gray discontent of people who’ve spent twelve hours on a plane to wait in a line, a sound that she finds not entirely different than a hospital ward. The same squeaking shoes, the same cavernous halls.

  “Well?”

  “I’m here for a wedding,” Alice manages.

  “So, pleasure.”

  “I—”

  But the agent’s through with listening. She stamps Alice’s immigration form and her passport, and motions for her to clear the line. Walking down a sterile corridor, she joins a growing trickle of other groggy, red-eyed travelers. This is the part of traveling she hates the most, she thinks, as she adjusts her purse. Not the crowds, exactly, but the stark realization that she’s just like everyone else. She passes a single mother wrangling a pair of screaming toddlers in matching Lacoste polos, and she considers nipping off to the bathroom for a Klonopin before remembering, with crushing devastation, that she’d stupidly packed the pills in her checked bag. On the opposite side of two glass doors she emerges into Heathrow’s international baggage claim, a labyrinthine mess of luggage and indecision against which Alice closes her eyes for a few stabilizing moments. She hears the dull thud of traveling bags and roller suitcases being belched onto conveyer belts; of achingly polite British women announcing flights arriving, flights boarding, flights departing; of people haggling for space in nonexistent lines; of a hundred different voices speaking a hundred different tongues, all homogenized by irritation and annoyance—those wonderful global neutralizers that, like smiles, transcend the binds of language. And then, within it all, her name:

  “Alice!”

  She opens her eyes and sees the young man who sat next to her on the plane waving. They’d talked briefly—he had woken her up when the flight attendant passed through the cabin with cups of lukewarm coffee—though she can’t remember his name for the life of her. He’s some sort of consultant—that she knows—and he travels often, he’d mentioned that during their short conversation, but God, what was his name? It sounded like a consultant’s name, she remembers. Something inoffensive and milquetoast and easy to pronounce. Daniel? David? Or, no: Dennis. It was Dennis.

  He maneuvers around a man unfolding a stroller and makes his way to her.

  “I was getting worried they’d detained you back at immigration,” he says. His voice has a friendly, Midwestern lilt.

  She smiles, wanly.

  “I, uh, I guess I got stuck in the back of the line.”

  Cracking his knuckles, he reaches into his back pocket for a piece of gum. He offers one to Alice, but she declines.

  “Really? I’ve always got the worst taste in my mouth after those long flights. Anyway, the trick to immigration is not to hit the bathroom between the tarmac and customs. People always want to stop in, wash their face, brush their teeth. All that kind of stuff, particularly on these red-eyes. You’ve gotta just plow through, though. Otherwise you get caught waiting for an hour just to have your stupid passport stamped.”

  Alice nods and raises her eyebrows.

  “Platinum status on Delta, remember?” He winks at her. “I’ve got all kinds of secrets.”

  How old is he? Alice thinks. When they were in the air she pegged him as mid-thirties—but that was under the weird, blue glow of airplane lighting, where everyone, with the exception of the very young and the very old, bears the same tired pallor of middle age. Now, on the ground, she’s sure he can’t be older than twenty-three. His clothes—a pair of gray work slacks and a blue button-down with a faint sheen—look vaguely expensive, and nice, but nice for a fifty-something white guy who’ll never climb above middle management. Alice guesses that his dad bought him the outfit—a sort of go-get-’em-son present for Dennis’s first job after finishing undergrad. From his shoulder hangs one of those tech-y messenger bags that consulting firms always give to their employees so they’ll appear hip or edgy when they’re competing with Google, or Facebook, to recruit new talent from business schools. Alejandro used to bitch about his all the time, Alice remembers, but that didn’t keep him from lugging it to every corner of Mexico City.

  The same black roller suitcase, marked by a silver ribbon tied clumsily around its handle, begins another lonely rotation along the conveyer belt. Alice wonders how many times she’s seen it. Three, she thinks. Maybe four.

  “I forgot how annoying it is to wait at baggage claim,” he says. “Normally I’m only at a project site Monday through Thursday, so I just need a carry-on.” Next to him, a woman’s suitcase topples over. Alice reaches down to help right it, and Dennis keeps talking. “But this time I’m going to be here for two weeks. Because it’s an international project. Man, the points that I’m going to get from this thing.”

  Alice grins again and grants Dennis a small laugh. He’s got a gash of razor burn just beneath his chin, and he’s smiling more than any adult should. Maybe he’s cuter than she initially thought he was. Maybe the airport has lowered her standards of cuteness to a thrilling level of mediocrity. Either way, he’s noticed her staring. She reaches down to adjust her shoe and, in doing so, balances herself on his shoulder, kneading his muscles slowly with her fingertips as she stands up straight again.

  She feels compelled to say something.

  “Where are you staying?” she asks.

  “The W. Leicester Square.”

  This makes sense, Alice thinks. She’d originally predicted the Westin, or maybe a Sheraton. But the W: this makes sense.

  An electric siren whirs, and new bags join the black roller suitcase with the silver ribbon. They tumble forward on to one another at awkward angles. Passengers jostle for a spot along the belt. Alice watches as, within seconds, a hundred little traffic jams erupt.

  “How about you?” Dennis says.

  “Claridge’s.” Alice clears her throat. “In Mayfair.”

  “Whooooooa.” Dennis winks again. “Fancy.”

  Alice smiles again, this time genuinely. Claridge’s. It is fancy, isn’t it? She pictures the website where she’d booked her room: rotating pictures of the hotel’s grand brick façade, a line of Maseratis and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces guarding the entrance. Tiled interiors spotted with fresh flowers, leather armchairs, and portraits of British Ladies with tight faces and round asses. The room costs upward of six hundred pounds a night, which she can’t afford, particularly given that she’s staying for
the full week before trekking down to Dorset. She suspects, in fact, that once she pays the final bill, her debt, which has already settled solidly around twenty thousand, will teeter over toward twenty-six thousand dollars. She feels a sudden tug of anxiety, but she calms down by focusing on Dennis, and by telling and retelling herself that the debt’s worth it; that if Claridge’s won’t impress Eloise, then nothing will.

  When her sister had first invited her to be in the bridal party, Eloise insisted that Alice bunk at her flat in London for the week preceding the wedding.

  “It’ll be fun,” Eloise had crooned. “We’ll get ready for my hen do together and go to yoga in the mornings. It’ll be like when we were kids.”

  Alice had politely declined, and reminded Eloise that they had never done yoga together. Not even once. A week later, she phoned her back to tell her where she’d be staying.

  “Claridge’s!” Eloise had exclaimed. She relished the shock and undertones of envy in her sister’s voice. “How … my God, how lovely!”

  “You’ll have to come over one afternoon for tea,” Alice said. She was still clicking through images of the hotel on her computer screen. She wondered how the doormen and porters would be dressed during the summer. She hoped they’d still wear their wool coats.

  “If you’ll have me!” Eloise laughed. “I haven’t been to tea at Claridge’s in years.”

  Alice promised her sister that of course she’d have her—that it would be her treat—and then hung up, feeling warm and satisfied.

  Dennis threads his way through the crowd and returns with a bulky gray duffel bag.

  “You see yours?” he asks.

  She does: on the far side of the conveyer belt, a black, expandable upright, buried beneath a purple backpack.

  “There it is.”

  “Which one?” Dennis says. “Let me—”

  “I can get it.” She touches his wrist, stopping him. “I’ll just wait for it to come back around.”

  Dennis nods. “Claridge’s. Nice.”

  Alice tucks her hair behind her ears. The suitcase disappears around a corner. She says, “Want to come see it?”

  * * *

  The porter closes the trunk, and Alice watches as the cab lurches away from the curb. On the opposite side of Brook Street, an early-morning street sweeper churns up dust, chewing gum wrappers, and other detritus of the city. There’s a breeze—easy gusts that slice through the July heat. Above her, Alice hears the flags on the hotel’s awning whipping in the wind.

  She turns to Dennis, who hasn’t stopped grinning since they escaped baggage claim at Heathrow.

  “Uh, just wait here, I guess,” she says.

  “What, on the street?”

  “I guess that’s probably unnecessary.”

  He takes a step toward her and lightly touches her arm. His bag balances on his left shoulder. It sways, and Alice worries that it might fall.

  “Why don’t I get us a table in the Foyer? You can check in, and then we can have some breakfast. In fact, I’ll even expense it.” Flashing his corporate AmEx, he winks, and it’s awkward, painful. Still, Alice finds the whole mess charming. Or maybe it’s not the wink that’s charming, exactly, but rather Dennis’s flagrant desire to be charming that hooks her—like watching a puppy who can’t quite climb a set of stairs try, and try, and try, anyway. Whatever the reason is, she grins. She agrees to his plan.

  But like so many of her resolutions, this confidence is short-lived. Once she’s inside the hotel lobby, once she’s got her neck craned back so she can gaze up at the gilded chandelier dangling above the sleek marble floor, she asks herself, in so many words, what the fuck she’s doing. What, precisely, does she expect to happen? What outcome is she trying to coerce into being? At the airport, she liked the way Dennis was so taken, so thoroughly impressed by her staying here, at Claridge’s. She’d impulsively reasoned that it would be fun to bring him here, to bask in his idolization of her as she threw down her credit card and checked in to one of the poshest hotels in a city of posh hotels. But now that he’s here, she doesn’t know what to do with him. Instead of Dennis bumbling around like an idiot, it’s Alice who feels out of place. Christ, is she planning on fucking him? She’d be lying if she said the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. In fact, twenty minutes ago, as they sat knee-to-knee in the back of the cab, she’d considered sleeping with Dennis a real and viable possibility. The sex wouldn’t be good; once she got him naked and exposed, his confidence would sink and she’d be left to direct him, rearranging his soft limbs into a series of positions that both prevented him from coming too soon and allowed her to maximize whatever minimal pleasure she was able to mine from the encounter. The alternative, though—sending Dennis away so he can jerk off to whatever porn he has stashed on his iPhone once he reaches his hotel—is too dismal for Alice to consider. And besides, she’s lonely. She can say that, right? Yes. She’s self-aware. She’s in touch with her emotions. She attends a support group with semi-impressive frequency. She can say that: she’s lonely.

  A week before she left for London, she’d asked Jonathan to dinner, which was a first—he was the one who, up until now, had done the asking. Still, on a Wednesday afternoon, she’d put on some lipstick, gathered herself, and marched into his office. There was a Mexican place she loved in Venice, two blocks north of Abbot-Kinney. The décor was a little kitschy, but the chef served a mean tacos al pastor. A hidden gem, she told him. One of her favorite places in West L.A. And you know what? It would be her treat. (She left out the fact that it was the only place she could afford.)

  And it was there, over greasy tacos and Mexican Cokes, that she’d floated the suggestion that, maybe, he’d like to be her date to Eloise’s wedding. The idea itself was one that she’d been wrestling with for the past three weeks. At first glance, she admitted it seemed preposterous: a married man flying halfway around the world to attend a wedding with the woman he was fucking on the side. But then surely in the grand history of affairs much crazier arrangements had been made. And besides, the last three times they’d been together, Jonathan had stressed, and then stressed again, how suffocating and beleaguered his marriage with Marissa had become. For fuck’s sake, he’d said—verbatim—that sometimes he thought it would just be easier to call it quits. So—no, Alice had finally decided. Her invitation to Eloise’s wedding wasn’t out of line. It was, in fact, perfectly logical.

  She waited until his mouth was filled with pork and pineapple before she came out with it and asked.

  “It’ll be fun,” she said, watching him chew. “Well, I don’t know if that’s totally true, ha ha. Really, I just don’t know how I’ll get through it without you, I guess.”

  He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.

  “Wow,” he said.

  She’d doused her tacos with too much Sriracha sauce. She was starting to sweat. “I’m sorry. Too much, too soon.”

  “No! That’s not what I meant by wow.” He picked up a lone piece of pineapple from Alice’s plastic basket and popped it in his mouth, before leaning across the table to kiss her—he didn’t need to worry about getting caught out in public; Marissa didn’t come to Venice. “I think it would be a blast!”

  “But…”

  “No ‘but,’” he said. “It would be great to get away with you. I’ve been actually trying to devise a way to do it myself. You just beat me to the punch.”

  There was a but, though, and it came out once they finished their second round of tacos. The more Jonathan thought about it, he explained, the more he couldn’t help but think that—maybe—they should hold off. On traveling together, that is. What if he were to run into someone he knew (“It’s a terrible thing being the head of the company, Al—Big Data, Big Social Circle!”)? What if pictures were posted online? Yes, he repeated, this time with more reluctance, they should really wait before they take a trip together. At least until he’d taken some action on the Marissa situation (“which won’t be long now—you should have seen t
he way she acted the other night at dinner. The kids are terrified of her. I think, generally, she’s just an unhappy person”). That seemed only fair, didn’t it? He was having an affair, but he was still a good person, for Christ’s sake. He’d call Alice as often as he could, of course, and they could Skype whenever he was in the office. She understood, didn’t she?

  Alice picked a wilted piece of cabbage out of her taco. “Of course I do.”

  Now, standing in Claridge’s, she feels a wave of nausea when she thinks of him—or, more specifically, when she thinks of how she might soon, in a matter of minutes, be fucking someone else. She tries telling herself that she knows how all this plays out: Jonathan never leaves his wife, and Alice is left alone. She’s seen too many TBS Saturday afternoon rom-coms and has known too many Other Women to think that it ends any differently. Still, there’s this awful voice in her head that keeps suggesting that there might be a chance, that she’s got reason—however illogical—to hold on to hope. In the meantime, though, she figures she’s entitled to this; if Jonathan’s still working things out with Marissa, then Alice is allowed to work things out with Dennis. She’s entitled to fuck a twenty-three-year-old idiot in a hotel room that’s causing her to spiral further into debt.

  She blinks, and when she opens her eyes, the chandelier is still there, staring back at her with fifty bright eyes.

  The Sleeping-with-Dennis Question will be a game-time decision, she decides. She’ll let him expense their breakfast, because, well, why not, and then she’ll just see what happens.

  She checks in to Claridge’s on Facebook and prepares herself for the worst.

  “Miss?”

  A woman a few years younger than Alice smiles at her. She wears a white silk blouse tucked into a pair of pressed black slacks. She’s pretty, in an English way: fine blond hair, red cheeks. Possibly malnourished, though certainly not on account of having too little food. A name tag pinned over her right nipple reads Anne. Alice smiles back.