The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  “May I help you with anything?”

  “Oh, uh, I’m here to check in.” She clears her throat. “I’m staying here for the next week or so.”

  She wonders how long she’s been standing here, staring up into space.

  Anne nods and presses her hands together at her waist. “Of course. How lovely. Right this way, then.”

  Alice follows her across the hotel’s lobby and past a wide, curved staircase. On either side of the room, men in suits huddle around low glass tables and leather-backed chairs. She intentionally catches their eyes as she passes them, and she tries to imagine who they think she might be, what they might think of her. Listening to her footsteps echo in the airy space, she fantasizes what it will be like to bring Eloise here, of the look on her sister’s face when Alice walks into the place like she owns it. She’ll wait a few days. Four, maybe. Long enough for the staff to learn and remember her name. She wants the doorman to be able to call out to her when he sees her and Eloise approaching.

  Anne stops in front of a low mahogany desk set beneath a pair of white columns. A young, mid-twenties man with red hair and thin, frameless glasses squints at a keyboard.

  “This is James,” she says. “He’d be happy to get you settled.”

  James looks up from the screen, stands, and fastens the top button of his blazer.

  “Welcome to Claridge’s, miss.” He shakes her hand and motions to the chair across from him.

  Alice sits. She sets her purse in her lap and glances over her shoulder to see if Dennis has found a seat in the Foyer. She wonders if he’s managed to order them a pot of coffee. She needs to clear the cobwebs from her brain.

  “Right, then,” James says, repositioning his chair. “First things first. Can I have the name the reservation was made under?”

  Alice gives the man her name. She fishes around her purse for her wallet and finds her Visa. “And here’s a credit card, if you need one for, uh, incidentals or something.”

  James strikes a few keys, scrolls farther down the screen, and raises an eyebrow.

  “Actually, I don’t think we will be needing a credit card.” He smiles. “Your stay with us, along with any subsequent charges that you might incur during your time at Claridge’s, have been arranged for in advance.”

  The back of Alice’s neck grows warm. She worries that there’s been some kind of mistake.

  “I’m sorry, but I—”

  “Not only that, but it looks as though you’ve been upgraded to one of our Mivart suites.”

  For a hopeful, devastating moment she thinks of Jonathan, calling Claridge’s from his gleaming glass office in L.A. But that fantasy fades as quickly as it materializes, and in the blank void of disappointment it leaves in its wake, the pieces come together, and things suddenly make sense.

  “Would you mind telling me who covered the expenses and paid for the upgrade?” she asks—though, really, there’s no need; she already knows the terrible answer.

  “Surely,” James says. He double-clicks the mouse and leans an inch closer to the screen. “Says here that the charges were made by a … a Miss Eloise Lafarge.” He looks up at Alice. “Quite the guardian angel you’ve got there.”

  She white-knuckles the handle on her purse to keep her hands from shaking, and when she opens her mouth to speak, she worries that she’s only got the capacity to scream.

  “She’s my half sister,” she manages.

  “Well, lucky you.” For a moment, James’s voice sheds its practiced Mayfair accent and slips into a lilting Cockney. “The only thing my half sister’s good for is polishing off a box of biscuits.”

  Alice turns around again, and this time she catches sight of Dennis, who has found a table near the entrance of the Foyer. Before him sit two steaming cups of coffee and a basket of assorted pastries, and Alice watches as he picks at crumbs from a blueberry muffin. She calculates her chances of making it to the elevator on the opposite end of the lobby unnoticed.

  “Can you tell me how to get to my room, please?”

  For a moment James looks confused by Alice’s sudden change in mood, but soon professionalism takes over; he gives her a curt nod, provides her with clear directions to her suite (seventh floor, take a left, room at the end of the hall. You’ll see the plaque) and asks how many keys she’d like.

  “Two, I guess,” Alice says. “Or, one. One’s fine. Really, whatever’s fastest.”

  * * *

  Waiting for her in the suite’s sitting room are a bottle of champagne in a pewter ice bucket and a plate of fresh, halved strawberries. She kneels down next to the coffee table and pushes the gift aside, leaving wide streaks of condensation along the glass surface. Then, Alice notices something else: a note from Eloise, typed on Claridge’s thick, pulpy stationery, welcoming her to London and begging her to enjoy the booze and fruit. She rips the envelope in half and uses the card to cut the dust from two crushed Klonopins into a trio of fat yellow lines. With a rolled-up five-dollar bill she snorts the first of the lines and collapses back onto a sofa. Letting her head fall against the cushions, she tastes the drug’s cloying sweetness as it worms its way through her sinuses and trickles down the back of her throat. The real effects—the sensation of walking on pillows of air, of being cloaked in a thick, invisible armor of ambivalence—won’t come for another five minutes. And when they do, they won’t hit her squarely, like cocaine, but will rather wash over her gradually, cleanly; chances are she’ll hardly notice them at all until, suddenly, she won’t be able to imagine living without them. Still, even as she waits for that blissful state of uncaring, she starts to feel better, somehow put back together. Her anger continues to lurk, but it’s focused now, and more resolved.

  Outside, she hears the faint whine of a siren. She listens to it echo down Brook Street and then dissolve into the rest of London. She worries that the Klonopin’s taking longer than usual. Lurching back to the coffee table, she positions herself over the second line. There’s no harm, she figures, in helping the drug along.

  Wiping her nose, she reaches for the bottle of champagne. A Pol Roger Réserve Brut that would typically go for forty bucks. Given Claridge’s extortionate markups, though, Alice guesses Eloise paid nearly five times that amount. But then, what was two hundred dollars to her sister? What was a Mivart suite to her sister? What was struggle, what was shame, what was empathy? She uncorks the bottle and fills her mouth with so much champagne that she worries her cheeks might burst. Then, in a moment of perfect clarity, she sprints to the toilet and spits it out. The water turns to a cheap, evanescent gold, which deepens to a brass as she empties the rest of the bottle.

  In the living room, she polishes off the third and final line. Her rage now a fierce point of medicated light, she asks herself the same questions she’s asked herself for years: How can her sister’s compassion be so profoundly and selfishly misguided? Is she really the only person to realize that behind all Eloise’s giving and caring is a subconscious, though thinly veiled, scheme to lord privilege over her siblings? It’s a sort of false altruism, Alice considers, that’s actually blind to the complications and nuances of other people. What infuriates her more, though, is how Eloise’s goodness shields itself from reproach or criticism. After all, isn’t she—Alice—presently lounging in some doped-up, drugged-out state in one of the nicest suites in London? Didn’t she just squander a bottle of mediocre, overpriced champagne during what is surely only the beginning of an adolescent temper tantrum? And hasn’t she been afforded the opportunity to do it all—to keep doing it all—on Eloise’s dime? Never mind that Alice wanted to impress Eloise, to show her that she was just as capable of having nice things, and that Eloise brutally robbed her of that chance with her unwavering generosity. Never mind those facts. Because from the outside, if anyone’s acting like a bitch here, it’s her, it’s Alice. What’s worse, there’s no way around it. No way to argue her way out of it. Nothing pisses her off more.

  She stands up and begins pacing the sitting ro
om, banging her knee against the wooden leg of an armchair in the process. She kicks it and feels pain radiate through her toes and ankle. The room feels overcrowded: every corner has a chair, or a love seat, or a settee. From where she stands next to the window, she can see her red face reflected in three separate mirrors. She hates it; she hates her sister for upgrading her. Suddenly, she craves the cool, sterile simplicity of a room at, say, the Marriott. The air-conditioning cranked up too high, the sheets an unnatural shade of white. Bad, mass-produced art on two of the four walls.

  She remembers Dennis, and wonders if he’s still sitting downstairs, waiting for her, watching her coffee get cold.

  Her pulse drums at the base of her throat—she can feel it—and she considers crushing up another Klonopin, but she stops herself. Three might be overkill, even with her liberal standards. There’s also the matter of logistics, she thinks: she’s got two weeks ahead of her. Two weeks of hen dos, and dress fittings, and speeches, and Eloise’s simpering magnanimity. And Alice would rather throw herself into the Thames with a hundred open wounds before enduring that shit show sober. No, she’ll save the pills that she has left, let the supply that’s already in her take its course. Besides, the rage and self-pity that she’s feeling are drugs unto themselves. After all, there’s a certain high that comes from knowing that no one could possibly understand what you’re feeling. She imagines this is what Paul must feel like most of the time—and if that’s the case, there’s a chance that here, today, she understands her brother a little better than she did before. In fact, maybe Paul’s had it right all along: while Alice has been tripping over herself to pretend everything’s okay, maybe the better solution is to be perpetually pissed off.

  The drugs are definitely not working as well as they should.

  She walks to the other side of the room, where there’s a small leather portfolio containing the menu for room service and the suite’s minibar. Leaning against the wall (there’s the Klonopin), she opens it. As expected, the prices are exorbitant. Ten pounds for a packet of peanuts. Fifteen for fifty milliliters of Beefeater gin. She flips a few pages further, to the midmorning offerings. A standard English breakfast goes for thirty eight pounds. Christ, Alice thinks. Over fifty dollars for a pair of soggy scrambled eggs, a charred tomato, and an assortment of shriveled meats. Throw in a bowl of berries and a glass of orange juice, and she’s basically looking at what she pays to rent her studio in Westwood.

  She sets the menu down and chews on her thumbnail. She can’t, she thinks. Or can she? No—no, she can’t. This … it’s too vindictive. Paul vindictive. She doesn’t do things like this. She doesn’t order twenty-pound pieces of toast just so her sister will have to pay for them. She doesn’t consume as a means of revenge. Not even now, when she’s been wronged in such a profound and inexcusable way and she’s two Klonopin deep. There are still some standards she’s got to maintain. And besides—think of the calories.

  There’s a chair next to the telephone, and she perches unsteadily on its left arm.

  The operator at the restaurant answers on the first ring.

  “Good morning, Miss. How may I be of service?”

  Alice coughs. “I’d like five English breakfasts, please. All with scrambled eggs, all with white toast.”

  “Certainly. And will that be all?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Or, no. Five orange juices, five pain au raisins, and five orders of the Welsh Rabbit.” She glances down at the menu. “Can you add bacon to the rabbit?”

  “Of course. Though, that’ll be an additional five—”

  “Double the bacon, then.”

  “Certainly. Anything else?”

  “No. Not now at least.” She clicks her teeth, thinking. “You deliver room service all day?”

  “Whenever you’d like.”

  “Wonderful,” Alice says. “That’s really, really wonderful.”

  “I’m pleased you think so.” An awkward pause ensues. “You can expect your breakfast to arrive in the next half an hour. I assume you’d like multiple sets of cutlery?”

  “I—” She can’t possibly request a single fork, can she? No, she can’t. There’s something to be said for keeping up appearances. “Yes, please. Five sets.”

  She hangs up.

  This is absurd, she thinks, both grinning and grimacing. Does she actually think a thousand-pound room service charge will register anything more than a blink from her sister? Eloise’s father has clogged her trust fund with enough cash that Alice could probably buy the whole goddamned suite before Eloise suspected any suspicious activity. But it’s the principle of the thing, Alice thinks as she opens the minibar and unscrews the cap from a twenty-pound airplane-sized bottle of Grey Goose. If Eloise wants to taunt Alice with generosity, then Alice has a right to show her where such loathsome and self-serving generosity leads.

  She finishes the Grey Goose in a determined swallow and reaches for the Tanqueray.

  It doesn’t take her long to get drunk—thanks to the Klonopin, she’s already feeling good and wasted once she’s polished off the Tanqueray. Still, she’s driven by a sense of duty, so she swallows half a bottle of Kahlúa before deciding that she needs something to eat while she waits for her breakfast. Rummaging through the minibar, she finds a canister of almonds and, peeling away the can’s tinfoil top, pops a handful into her mouth. They’re salty, too salty, their rough skins coated with crystals, and despite all the alcohol she’s just drunk, her mouth is already bone dry. She eats them anyway and muses over how she feels simultaneously full and empty; each nut feels at once like a drop in the bucket and a stone in her gut. The drugs, she figures, must be really kicking in.

  Three-quarters of the way through the container she reminds herself that she needn’t eat the whole thing to incur the full charge for it—she only needs to open the canister to rack up ten pounds. With a mixed sense of defeat and victory, she sets the almonds aside and unwraps three wheels of Brie. Using a wheat cracker, she breaks off a creamy glob from one of the wheels and scoops it into her mouth.

  She leans back again, works the cheese over her gums and her teeth, and then swigs from a bottle of Perrier to rinse out her mouth. She tries to remember what she ordered from room service, but she’s having a hard time thinking of it. Typically this is her favorite part of getting high, the moment where her short-term memory, the events of the past hour, seem to blur into an unrecognizable nothingness somewhere along the horizon of her mind. The Forgetting, is what she calls it. Forgetting what Paul was just bitching about, or the strange way Jonathan just looked at her, or—in this case—how she just squandered her sister’s money. She tries to push the wall of short-term nothingness further; she wills it to consume her anger toward Eloise and her narcissistic altruism. It’s not that she wants to forgive her sister, or that she wants to dispel her own rage—rather, she’d prefer to feel nothing at all.

  But her efforts are useless. She swallows the mouthful of cheese and, looking at the mess she’s made, is suddenly embarrassed and filled with a foggy, drunk sense of disappointment. Empty bottles are turned on their sides. Melted caramel glues torn candy wrappers to the glass table. She sinks further into the sofa and lets her shoulders slump. Crumbs form trails down the front of her shirt. Catching a glimpse of herself in the blackened television’s reflection, she thinks: This isn’t me. This can’t be me. I don’t know who it is, but it’s not me.

  Or maybe it is, and maybe that’s the awful truth. Maybe instead of diluting her, the drugs actually coax her closer to a purer state. Her stomach clenches at the thought. Still, a question pesters her: Besides money, what does Eloise have that she, Alice, is lacking? She’s as pretty as her sister, isn’t she? Maybe not in some classic, Audrey Hepburn Waiting Outside of Tiffany’s sort of way, but certainly in an early Rita Hayworth in a Bikini sort of way, and didn’t men like that more, anyhow? And in terms of intelligence, it’s not like Alice is lacking. She graduated a tenth of a grade point away from summa cum laude, and her thesis a
dvisor had told her, with undeniable sincerity, that she had been a very strong contender for Phi Beta Kappa, even if she hadn’t, ultimately, been selected. Granted, all of this occurred at UCLA, as opposed to Eloise’s Yale, but still—didn’t it count for something? Didn’t it provide some justification for her confusion when she considered how her sister was blessed with an easy, gilded life, while she was reduced to taking her (married) boyfriend out for tacos? Isn’t there some explanation for this gross inequality, other than the fact that Eloise had a rich dad and she had an accountant for a father?

  No, there isn’t. This is where her thoughts veer, where they invariably and inevitably dead-end. Just look at how her mother treats them both: Eloise like a prize, and Alice like an employee. No, there’s nothing else but the wanton and slapdash workings of Fate.

  There’s a knock on the door, and then a polite announcement of room service. She throws the empty Perrier bottle to the ground and, once again disappointed in herself, she buries her face in her hands. Her forehead feels clammy, damp, and her eyes ache when she shuts them. The world lurches, and her gut shifts and repositions itself. Another knock, another call for room service, causes her to blink and look up.

  “I’ll be right there,” she calls out.

  And she will. She’ll open the door, and invite the man in, and lift the warming covers from the army of silver trays, and eat eggs and ham and grapefruit until she makes herself sick. First, though, she reaches for her phone. Closing one eye to focus her blurry vision, she scrolls to her sister’s mobile number, opens a new message, and types: You’re 2 kind. This room is gorgeous. I’m the luckiest sister alive ☺.

  Eloise

  July 2–July 4

  Seated in the breakfast nook of her flat in Chelsea, Eloise reads Alice’s text message and sighs with relief. Smiling, she reaches for her demitasse—the white Royal Copenhagen one that Ollie had bought her last year when they’d taken a long weekend in Denmark—and breathes in the nutty espresso.