The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  “No,” she says. “No, you listen to me. I come to this restaurant multiple times a week, do you hear me? These are my people.”

  He starts to speak, but she clenches down harder.

  “What’s more, this is my wedding. I’m going to repeat that, so you fully understand it. This is my wedding. Do not fuck this up, Paul. Do you hear me? Do. Not. Fuck. This. Up.”

  She loosens her grip just enough for him to yank himself away. With his other hand, he rubs the wrist that she was holding, which is now tattooed with deep purple crescents.

  “You’re insane,” he says, and she does her best to ignore him. Then, after he’s stared at her a little longer: “God, your hair.”

  She says, “What about it?”

  “How does it always look so good? It fucking kills me.”

  Paul

  July 4

  Paul fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette, but quickly remembers that he’s with Mark, who hates it when he smokes. Instead, he locates a lone piece of gum and pops it in his mouth.

  “It’s just so bouncy, is the thing. Even in this humidity it’s just so bouncy.”

  “It didn’t look that bouncy to me,” Mark says.

  “Her hair’s always been like that, though. Even when we were kids. She must get it from her dad. He must have bouncy hair. Because, I mean, look at Alice. Look at me. It practically looks like someone crowned us both with mops.”

  “I think you have very nice hair.”

  Mark’s not paying attention. Instead, he’s looking up and down Shaftsbury Avenue for a taxi, of which there are none. Less than none, it seems. In fact, Paul thinks, the street’s crammed with so many people and so few cars that he suspects they’d have better luck finding a rickshaw, or hitching a ride on some strapping Londoner’s back, than hailing a cab. And yet, still Mark appears determined—he’s got his hand shoved into the air like a hitchhiker—so Paul indulges him; he stands by his side and chews his gum.

  “I wonder if we should have stayed,” he says, suddenly thinking about the end of dinner. Eloise snatched up the bill and invited them all over to her flat for coffee and scotch. Alice and his mother had agreed to go—but then, Donna’s also staying there, and Alice has the unfortunate duty of being a bridesmaid. Before Paul could even weigh the option, though, Mark had declined on behalf of both of them.

  “We’ve got plans to meet a friend of ours,” he’d said, matter-of-factly.

  Eloise had stared at Paul, and the only thing he could think of was how the restaurant’s low lighting, coupled with the spectacular volume of her hair, created the impression that her head was exploding.

  On Shaftsbury Avenue, Mark pauses from his taxi hunt to turn and gawk at Paul.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “She’s just trying so hard,” Paul says, a little astonished by how quickly he’s leaping to his half sister’s defense. “If having a glass of expensive scotch in her palatial apartment makes her happy, it seems like it’s the least we could do.”

  “She’s an awful snob.”

  “Oh, come on.” Paul smiles and kisses Mark’s cheek. “You’re only saying that because she managed to out-snob you.”

  Mark pulls away. “No, I’m saying it because she’s insufferable.” He straightens the lapels on his blazer. “Besides, my God, Paul. She practically assaulted you. I’m surprised she didn’t draw blood when she grabbed your arm.”

  Paul rubs his wrist. The little crescents still remain. “She was just excited,” he says. “I mean, like I said, she’s trying so hard.”

  “Are you listening to yourself right now? She abuses you, Paul. She bosses you around, and she abuses you. Sometimes I think you actually like being pushed around. Christ, look at how Goulding treated you.”

  Paul’s puzzled. “I threw a mannequin at his head. I broke his nose.”

  “Only after he treated you like a halfwit pack mule, no doubt. You truly are a glutton for punishment.”

  A cyclist swerves toward the curb and nearly crushes Mark’s foot. He curses.

  “Yeah, ha, look who I date.”

  But Mark’s still screaming at the errant cyclist, who’s disappeared behind a bus. When he’s finished, he turns to Paul, red-faced, and huffs. “What’d you just say?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.” Paul thinks. He takes a breath and says, “Maybe we should just go home.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “I’m serious, Mark. You’re in a bad mood—”

  “I’m not in a bad mood.”

  “—we’re already late, and there are literally zero cabs in this city. And besides, what are we even planning on doing? We’re just going to end up getting drunk in a crowded bar, which is what we do every Saturday night at home, anyway.” He kicks a piece of gravel off the curb. “I’m exhausted, too. Maybe we should just go home.”

  On the opposite side of the street, two women spill out from a pub door. One of them drops her purse; her friend laughs and stumbles backward.

  “Five minutes ago you were practically begging me to go to your snob-of-a-sister’s house,” Mark says. “And now, when we’re on our way to meet Alcott and actually do something fun, you tell me that you’re tired and you want to go home?” He spots an open cab turning onto Wardour Street and he nearly throws himself in front of it. Craning his head around to face Paul, he calls out, “When did you become so boring?”

  * * *

  Is he boring, though? If that’s the case, it’s certainly not due to a lack of thinking, of considering, on Paul’s part. In fact, if anything it’s because he’s plagued with this tendency to mull things over that he frequently finds himself in a state of overwrought paralysis.

  “Here you are.” Alcott hands him a vodka soda. “Bottoms up.” He winks. Next to Paul’s left shoulder, an old Spice Girls song warbles on a stand-alone speaker. This, from a country that produced the Sex Pistols and the Rolling Stones.

  He must become different, Paul thinks. He can’t allow this dreadful ambivalence to dictate his nondecisions—his boringness—any longer. He needs to start making choices. Start acting. Throw more proverbial mannequins in the faces of sadistic psychotherapists, so to speak. He must show Mark that, despite what he might think, Paul is not dull. And he must do it defiantly. But how? What’s the first step toward unshackling himself from, well, himself? For starters, he’ll drink this vodka-soda as fast as he can. Then he’ll order another one, and he’ll drink that one even faster. A little lubrication, a little loosening up, might do him some good, he figures, particularly as he enters this new Era of Not-Thinking. Besides, Mark hates it when Paul drinks too much, which is, currently, a perfect excuse for drinking too much. And then what? He’ll dance. Yes. Rather than concern himself with how he moves his hips (awkwardly, like he’s squeezing between two chairs), or how much he’s embarrassing Mark (a lot), or the state of the bar’s music (terrible: the Spice Girls have stepped aside for S Club Seven), he’ll wend his way through the crowd of twinks to the dance floor, where he’ll bask in the comfort of knowing that regardless of the country gay bars everywhere are all more or less the same. The only thing he has to do first is get out of his own way.

  He sips his drink and takes a breath. Exhaling, he imagines his old ambivalent self, fleeing his body.

  “Let’s leave,” Mark says.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Alcott says this place is awful tonight, and I agree.” Mark finishes his beer and leaves the bottle on the bar. “He knows of some other place. We can walk there.”

  “But I was just going to—”

  “Come on, Paul. Finish your drink.”

  Christ, Paul thinks once they’ve made their way outside, he’s being especially dickish tonight. With a silver lighter, engraved with something in Latin that Paul can’t read, Alcott lights a cigarette, and Paul must resist the very real urge to tackle him to the ground and snatch the thing from his long, British hands. What has gotten into Mark, though? Eloise had embarrassed him—t
hat happened—and while Paul had assured him that his sister’s slight wasn’t intentional, privately he knew the truth: Eloise hadn’t taken to Mark. She thought he was a phony. This in itself doesn’t surprise Paul: Eloise is a subtle bitch—which, in his opinion, is the worst kind of bitch a person could be. What does surprise him, though, is how mixed his emotions are toward Eloise’s judgment of Mark. On the one hand, he’s fiercely loyal to his boyfriend, despite how douchily he’s currently acting, and wants, desperately, to eviscerate Eloise, to give her a piece of his mind. On the other hand, for the first time he finds himself suddenly curious about his sister’s opinion. How, exactly, is Mark a phony? In which categories of class and culture does she find him lacking? What specific breed of awfulness does she attribute to him? Because if he’s being totally honest, he suspects that whatever she thinks of Mark, whatever her judgment of him may be, he might, for the first time, actually sort of agree with her. He is kind of awful—and not just momentarily, but generally, perpetually. For the first few years of their relationship he did a commendable job of keeping his awfulness at bay, of convincing people that there was another side to him, and that his undesirable qualities only came out when he was tired, or annoyed, or hungry. Lately, though, it seems to Paul that Mark’s stopped giving a fuck, that enough of the Prestons and Crosbys and Alcotts of the world have responded positively to his douchiness that he’s no longer concerning himself with what it means to be a decent human being. These are obvious truths, he knows, but he feels suddenly that he’s confronting them for the first time, and he dreads the nagging existential doubts they’re bound to leave in their wake.

  But oh, God: here he is, thinking himself into a standstill all over again.

  He stands behind Alcott and gulps up a redemptive cloud of secondhand smoke to calm his mind.

  “Right then,” Alcott says, flicking the cigarette into the gutter. “Here we are.”

  He leads them into a dim bar with mirrored walls and a low, baroque chandelier. The room is sparsely populated—only a few men occupy the barstools scattered around the curved black bar—and its walls are painted with silver fleur-de-lis whose petals interlock to create dizzying and unpredictable patterns. Paul blinks and, quickly recalling his mission to dispel Mark’s notion of him as boring, he announces that he’ll be buying the first round of drinks.

  “The cocktails here are delicious,” Alcott says. “Very inventive.”

  “What’ll it be, then?” Paul does his best to sound carefree. Jocund.

  Mark says, “Why don’t you just surprise us, Paul.”

  The drink list is daunting: over eighty cocktails divided into one-term, self-conscious categories: bubbles, risky, foreign, medieval. He scans the menu, flipping through the pages, his eyes tripping over words like coriander and cloudberry. He mustn’t look too long at it, Paul knows, lest he find himself paralyzed by choice, and so when the bartender asks him what he’d like, Paul tells him three Orange Willys, even though the only ingredient he recognizes is gin. Between his two hands he balances the three drinks, all of which are the color of dusty, smoggy sunsets, and by the time he’s reached Alcott and Mark, he hasn’t spilled a single drop, and although Paul’s duly impressed with himself, the two men are too engrossed in a whispered conversation to notice.

  Paul sets the three coupes on the table around which Mark and Alcott are huddled and says, “What are you talking about?”

  Mark’s head shoots up. “Nothing. Forget about it.”

  Alcott rolls his eyes and laughs. “Oh, come on, Mark. He’s not a child.” Then, glancing down at the cocktail, he says, “An Orange Willy, eh? Bold choice.”

  “What aren’t I a child about?” Paul asks.

  Alcott grins at Mark; Mark frowns at Paul.

  “I’ve brought us a little surprise,” Alcott says. “Just to make the evening a bit more interesting.”

  “What kind of surprise?” Paul sips from his drink: it tastes like fermented orange cough syrup and burnt rosemary.

  “Have you ever heard of mephedrone, Paul?”

  “No, I don’t—”

  “You Americans.” Alcott laughs. “So unimaginative when it comes to your drugs. If it’s not coke or hash or heroin, it might as well not exist. Hmm … I’d forgotten how … chemical this drink tastes. In any event, mephedrone. A lovely stimulant that makes its home in the amphetamine and cathinone classes. Typically snorted, it carries a high not entirely dissimilar to ecstasy or cocaine. For years it could be bought, legally, as plant food—”

  “Plant food.”

  “Yes. Plant food. But then, well, you know how these things go: some bloke up in Manchester took a little too much and ended up cutting off his own thumb before stabbing his mother eight times. The authorities stepped in, made the drug illegal, and ruined the fun for those of us who are capable of holding our substances in a more responsible fashion.”

  Paul swallows another mouthful of Orange Willy. Viscous syrup coats his mouth, his throat. “And you said it’s called mephedrone?”

  “Yes,” Alcott says. From his pocket he produces a small plastic baggie, the sort that Paul’s used to seeing filled with coke, except the substance here is light brown, the color of weak coffee mixed with too much milk. “A lot of folks call it Meow Meow, but frankly I can’t imagine a chavvier name, so I stick to mephedrone.”

  Discreetly glancing over his shoulder to ensure no one’s watching, Paul takes the baggie from Alcott. The drug’s not as fine as coke; instead, it clumps together in rocky crystals.

  “You’ve got to crush it up, obviously,” Alcott says.

  “And you say it’s like ecstasy?” Paul tries to remember the last time he did ecstasy.

  Alcott nods. “A bit. With the mental acuteness of blow.”

  “Oh.” Paul grimaces. “Blow gives me the worst hangover. It makes my soul feel like it’s drained, or something. And the headache. Jesus.”

  He starts to pass the baggie back, when Alcott says, laughing, “Oh, come on, Nervous Nelly. Don’t be such a bore!”

  Paul looks over at Mark, whose glass is empty and whose eyebrows are arched, knowingly, glibly.

  “I’m not a bore.” He snatches the baggie back. “Where the fuck is the bathroom?”

  “It’s on the other side of the looking glass.” Alcott digs into his pocket. “Here, take my key.”

  “The looking glass?”

  He points to one of the mirrors along the wall, this one framed in chipped gold paint.

  “Push that mirror open—it’s actually a door. On the other side there’s a small back bar. Next to it you’ll see signs for the bathroom.”

  Paul does as Alcott instructs—he leans his weight into the heavy glass—and, after the door groans and swings open, he emerges into an even dimmer room, this one entirely empty, with the exception of a sole, lonely bartender, dicing up cilantro beneath the faint green glow of a banker’s lamp.

  “Loo?” he says, glancing up.

  “Er, yeah.”

  The bartender nods toward a corner of the room, where there’s a row of three identical stalls. After locking himself in the one farthest to the left, Paul scrambles in his pocket for the drugs. Two sconces are affixed to the wall on either side of the sink, but the light they throw is anemic, so instead he huddles around a candle that reeks of patchouli and inspects the mephedrone. He shakes the bag so the chunks gather at the bottom, and he’s reminded of how this moment was often his favorite part of doing coke, back when he did it more frequently than he should have, during those wilderness years of his early and midtwenties: the standing-alone-next-to-a-cheap-scented-candle-in-a-bathroom-with-which-you’re-quickly-becoming-too-familiar-wondering-if-you’re-taking-too-long-wondering-if-the-cilantro-dicing-bartender-will-start-to-suspect-that-you’re-doing-a-little-more-than-taking-a-piss. That’s not to say he didn’t like the instant the drugs kicked in, that devastatingly beautiful split second when he swore he could feel his arteries tighten and his mind burst open with clarity. The pro
blem, though, was that as soon as he felt that moment he simultaneously began to anticipate its inevitable death; he saw before him the twilight of the high where instead of feeling phenomenally interesting he started worrying that he’d made a terrible—and predictably boring—decision.

  “You’re bad at doing drugs,” Alice said to him once, when he explained all this to her. “Some people are good at drugs, and some people are bad at drugs. You’re bad at drugs.”

  He disagreed. “No. People who are bad at drugs start doing them in their thirties, and then talk about them with the same immature excitement that we had about stealing Dad’s vodka when we were teenagers.”

  Alice shook her head. “No. Those people are just tacky.” She repeated herself. “You’re bad at drugs, Paul. I’m bad at doubles tennis, and you’re bad at drugs. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—it’s just the way it is.”

  Watching the light from the candle cast shadows across his fingers, he still disagrees with her. He’s not bad at drugs so much as he appreciates them in a different way. As opposed to deriving his high from the substance itself, Paul’s tastes are finer, he tells himself, more refined; he appreciates the preparation, the chase, the anticipation. That sliver of time when he can be sure of his decision without having to concern himself with its consequences. But then, what was he supposed to do: give Alcott a full bag of the stuff and say that the thought of snorting it was enough? How dull, he imagines Mark saying. How boring.

  Using the toilet seat as a makeshift table, he uses his credit card to crush the mephedrone. The more he works it, the whiter the crystals turn, and Paul questions, briefly, the merits and pitfalls of inhaling such a chameleonish substance. But before he can think any longer, he pries open the baggie and plunges the long end of the key into it, scooping up a healthy pile of speckled dust. The first bump he does is borderline unbearable: it burns worse than cocaine, and instead of blow’s familiar gasoline-y drip, Meow Meow (can he call it that?) tastes and smells like artificially sweetened stale piss. Still, after snorting a few gulps of air to clear his sinuses, he convinces himself to snort a second bump, and then a third. He wants there to be a noticeable dent in the stuff by the time he slips the baggie back to Alcott. He wants them to see just how fun he is.