The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  * * *

  It’s 4:07. No. Now it’s 4:08. From the orange couch in Alcott’s living room, Paul watches another minute blink by on the clock above the stove. Alcott sits next to him, his arm draped over his shoulder; on the other side of the coffee table, Mark drinks from his beer. A half-finished cigarette burns, neglected, in an ashtray. The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac has been playing for the past twenty minutes, and they’re all doing their best to ignore the lyrics to “Gypsy.” Paul wonders what time the sun comes up in London. He wonders if the Thames turns blue at the first light of dawn, or red.

  How many bars did they go to once they left the Looking Glass? Four, Paul counts. Or: three bars, and one dance club. A place with strobe lights and a moody fog machine, where Alcott started getting handsy with Paul (pushing his groin against his thigh as they danced, slipping his fingers through his belt loops, working his palm up under his shirt, etc., etc., etc.) while Mark made an extended trip to the bathroom. Paul had done more Meow Meow, but he considers his decision to be one fueled by self-preservation, as opposed to pleasure seeking. Twenty minutes after his initial three bumps, a jolt of euphoria shocked him, much as Alcott said it would, and Paul found himself smiling involuntarily, and saying fascinating things, and wanting, more than anything else, for everyone to just be friends. He knew he was buzzing, and he could tell Mark was becoming mildly irritated, but the prospect of shutting up, of not sharing everything that he was feeling, struck him as actually impossible, and so to help temper that impossibility, he ordered himself two more vodkas and some tequila. It turned out, though, that he overshot that decision—about thirty minutes later he nearly fell asleep in the back of a cab—so when they arrived at the next bar, he promptly found an unoccupied stall and cut himself a line of not-insignificant size, just to level himself out. The rest of the night followed a similar seesaw pattern, with Paul and Alcott and Mark snorting and drinking and groping in search of an acceptable high until, sometime around three thirty, the mephedrone disappeared and Alcott couldn’t get a hold of his dealer.

  “The bloody son of a bitch,” Alcott said, furiously staring at his phone after trying the man for the seventh time. They were standing on Hollen Street, three blocks from where Paul and Mark had eaten dinner earlier in the evening. “What else could he possibly be doing?”

  A minute later, Alcott proposed that they return to his flat and drink whatever he had lying around while they waited for his dealer to return his call.

  And now what? 4:08 flips over to 4:09, and it becomes clearer and clearer that Alcott’s dealer—a Mancunian called Jose—has called it a night.

  Mark finishes his beer and looks at Alcott. Alcott smiles and looks at Paul. Paul does his best to look at neither of them, and in the process looks at both of them.

  They’ve been doing this for the past fifteen minutes, ever since they finished the sambuca stashed behind the coffeemaker on the top of Alcott’s fridge. Passing the baton of furtive looks, Paul thinks. It reminds him of the gym he used to go to in New York, where old married men would spend hours in the steam room, staring each other down, giving each other peeks of what lurked beneath their towels. A few times after he had finished working out Paul had joined them, under the pretense of needing to sweat out some imaginary cold. Beyond the sadness of the experience, what struck him most acutely was its sheer tedium: here were a bunch of dudes staring at each other—literally, staring at each other for an hour—without actually ever doing anything about it. For God’s sake, he remembers wanting to scream, just whip it out already. We all want the same thing, don’t we?

  And indeed: Don’t they? Honestly, though, Paul’s not sure. He knows what Mark wants—he’s hardly been subtle about it. And he suspects that Alcott’s gunning for the same, multilimbed outcome. But what about him? What about Paul? He doesn’t want Mark to think that he’s won, but if this thing happens, Mark’s sense of victory will be impossible to prevent. But then, his desire to prevent his lover from feeling a sense of accomplishment seems like a petty reason for not pursuing an experience. That desire, though, which is very real and which Paul admits he should probably address at some point, skirts the more pressing issue, the more pressing question: What does Paul want? Objectively, sex with two (or more) people sounds fun. The logistics might prove to be a little stressful, but still—fun. To say otherwise would be to lie. Wendy was right about that. So, yes, from a purely primal sense, this is something that Paul wants. Yet obviously it’s not that easy; Paul’s not a purely primal being. None of them are. They are all cursed with the ability to reason what unreasonable consequences might ensue if they end up sleeping together.

  He has a headache. He hopes against hope that Jose calls back.

  More than anything, he thinks, he wants to be done with it. With all of it: the parsing out of why Mark wants this; the dissecting of what prevents Paul from having Mark’s confidence; the infinite permutations of what if and how about; the millions of outcomes that he can’t stop himself from imagining. He just wants it all to be done.

  The song switches over to “Second Hand News” and, in what Paul will later remember as one of his more graceless maneuvers, he leans over and shoves his tongue down Alcott’s throat. He’s not sure if the drugs and alcohol have blunted his ability to appreciate nuance, or, alternatively, if this is just the way things are, but he’s surprised to detect very little difference between drunkenly kissing Alcott and drunkenly kissing Mark. There’s the same eager pressure of lips, the same frantic exploration of tongues and teeth. Paul feels a hand work its way up his knee, and then his inner thigh, before Mark gently pulls Alcott away and starts to kiss his neck. Paul’s initial impulse is to cry out: Here my boyfriend is, sucking on another man’s Adam’s apple! But then he remembers that approximately two seconds ago, he kissed Alcott—that, when it comes right down to it, Paul started all of this—and so to stop Mark midhickey would be to betray a level of inequitable jealousy that, while very real, even Paul is uncomfortable voicing. So he lets Mark continue exploring Alcott. He lets him peel off Alcott’s jeans and kiss the inside of his thighs and wiggle a few fingers beneath the elastic band of his underwear. Unsure of what he should be doing during all of this (moaning, even though he’s not the one being touched? Providing Mark with some canned suggestions, some encouragement? Neither strikes him as the right option), Paul struggles to take off his own pants and, after nearly falling onto the coffee table, finally kicks them to the floor. He’s impressed by the gusto with which Mark is presently inhaling Alcott, and tries to remember a time that his boyfriend gave him such an enthusiastic blow job. But this leads him back into that same murky jealousy he’s trying to convince Mark that he’s shed, and so instead of focusing on how Alcott’s head is thrown back, or how his eyes are closed, he tries to think of something else. He wonders, for example, if anyone would like a glass of water.

  It’s Alcott who eventually pulls him into the fray, grabbing Paul by the back of his neck and shoving his face toward Alcott’s crotch. At first it’s crowded: Mark’s still attacking Alcott’s dick, so Paul awkwardly maneuvers himself onto the floor in order to get himself within tongue-length of the action. Once he’s there, and once he’s found a position that’s not too uncomfortable on his knees or lower back, he does his best to emulate Mark’s vigor—or, actually, to surpass it. Now that he’s got part of Alcott in his mouth, and now that Mark’s chin is knocking against the top of his head, he becomes quickly aware that, unlike most blow jobs he’s given, this one has turned into a fierce competition. His mouth too stuffed to actually say anything, Mark lets out a low, performative groan, and Paul realizes that he’s yet to make a sound. Does Alcott now worry that Paul’s not enjoying himself as much as Mark is? Does he think that Paul looks at licking his crotch as some kind of chore?

  He frees his lips for a moment.

  He says, in a voice an octave lower than normal: “Your balls taste great.”

  Mark grinds his knee into Paul’s ribs to shut him up
, then comes up for air. Paul hears the wet pop of lips against skin; his vision limited to Alcott’s groin, his inner thighs, the light hair sprouting on his belly, he assumes that Mark has resurfaced to kiss Alcott, leaving Paul to continue the job at hand alone. And so Paul does: with Alcott now totally fair game, he gets on his knees and swallows as much of him as he can, determined to best Mark’s efforts. He’s doing well, he thinks, taking special care to avoid the little faux pas that characterize Mark’s oral abilities (too much spit, not enough hand. Teeth). That’s not to say all this isn’t strange, because it is—it’s really fucking strange—but he’s doing what he can to make the most of it, to enjoy himself.

  Behind Paul, Mark uses one hand to tilt his hips up and the other to press down hard on his lower back. Before he has time to turn around, he feels pressure against his ass and then an unmistakable and familiar jolt of pain.

  “Jesus, Mark,” he says. “A little—”

  But Mark just pushes Paul’s face back down.

  Although he’s currently too preoccupied to at least consciously consider such things, later Paul will reflect on this moment. He’ll wonder, primarily, about what’s going through Alcott’s mind. If he considers himself an intruder, or more of a guest star. If he’s turned on by observing, firsthand, the cruel and subtle intricacies of Paul and Mark’s relationship, or if he’s too wholly consumed by pursuing his own pleasure to notice the finer details.

  Right now, though, there’s no time for that. Right now, he’s too busy focusing on the irregular pace at which Mark is fucking him.

  He’s thirsty. He should have gotten a glass of water when he had the chance.

  There’s a silence in which all he hears are the strange, squishy sounds of sex. Then: the first four chords of “Gold Dust Woman.”

  “Come here,” Mark says, pulling out of him. Paul starts to stand, but Mark holds him down. “No. You stay where you are.”

  Mark repositions himself farther down along the couch, where he watches with a sort of crazed possession as Alcott slips into Paul.

  He’s concerned about the condom situation (namely: there isn’t one), but it also gets him off, in that shameful way he imagines most gay men experience when they realize they’re flirting with the thin boundary between sex and death. So he tries not to think about it; he tries instead to concentrate on noticing the differences between Mark and Alcott’s styles, their ways of finding and losing rhythms.

  But then it stops. Before “Seven Wonders” even reaches the bridge, Alcott pulls out and crawls up to the couch, where he sits next to Mark and starts jacking off.

  “Come on up here,” he says to Paul, and Paul does. Because, really, what other options are there?

  He doesn’t know how long they sit there. At least through the rest of “Sisters of the Moon,” and the entirety of “Family Man.” Occasionally they’ll reach across a leg and touch one another, but mostly they touch themselves. No one actually climaxes—among the three of them, not a single person comes. Rather, at some point during “As Long as You Follow,” Alcott says that he’s got to piss, and excuses himself. Five minutes later, when he still hasn’t returned, Mark goes in to check on him. He comes back moments later and tells Paul that he’s fallen asleep.

  “He’s passed out naked on his bed,” he says, dryly.

  Paul bites his lip. “Well, that doesn’t mean we can’t finish…”

  Mark scratches his left knee. He doesn’t smile. “I don’t think I’ve got it in me,” he says. “Must be the drugs.”

  “Oh.”

  Paul looks down. The hair on his lower abdomen and thighs is coated with sweat and lube. Suddenly he wants, more than anything, to be clean.

  Coming over to him, Mark digs through the heap of discarded clothes for his underwear.

  “Get up,” he says. “Help me make up the couch.”

  Alice

  July 6

  She can’t see her toes. The robe they gave her to wear after her massage is long enough that it bunches around her heels, and she nearly trips on it as she shuffles, spaced out and bleary eyed, from the treatment room to one of the recliners in the spa’s lounge. A walking terry-cloth pillowcase—that’s what she imagines she must look like. An attendant asks her if she’d like a glass of cucumber water, and she says yes because she thinks she’s supposed to, and as she waits for the girl to return with it she traces the spa’s logo embroidered on the robe’s belt. The room’s dimly lit, and cold, and this latter point puzzles her; in a place where people spend most of their time naked, or at the very least covered in a paper-thin sheet, shouldn’t there be a little heat? On the other side of the room, next to a vase holding a lone orchid, sit two other women, flipping through copies of Tatler and British Vogue. Alice doesn’t recognize them—they aren’t members of the bridal party—but she does notice how they’ve both got their legs crossed in front of them, instead of folded up beneath their chins, and so she quickly corrects her position.

  The attendant gives Alice her water. She sips from it and smiles. She knows she’s supposed to like it—she knows it’s supposed to make her feel relaxed, or rejuvenated, or youthful, or something. Still, staring at the cucumber slice floating among the cubes of ice, all she can think of is the shitty salad bar on Wilshire where she usually gets lunch during the workweek. From a collection of hidden speakers, water trickles through imaginary brooks. Reeds blow in electric winds. Zen is carefully and laboriously digitized.

  Where is Eloise? Where are the other bridesmaids? A minute ago she heard a door open and close, and then the soft shuffling of slippered feet, but no one materialized in the waiting area; still, the only company she’s got is the pair of Tatler readers. Maybe that’s for the best, though, Alice thinks. Maybe it’s better that she spends some time alone. The past four hours have been exhausting, and the massage—forty-five minutes of being pummeled by a Finnish Vikingess called Majia—did nothing to change that. She needs a rest, a breather, a pause. A break from conversing with Eloise’s friends—an act that feels more akin to moonwalking on a tightrope than talking.

  There are three of them, and they’re nice enough. And when they’re not being nice, it’s out of ignorance, as opposed to some classist form of malice: this is what Alice needs to keep reminding herself. She’ll admit, when she first met them at eight o’clock this morning at Eloise’s flat, their names—the sheer things that they called themselves—almost sent her running for the hills. Minty, Henny, and Flossie. Christ—she knew they were nicknames; that they stood for slightly more normal things like Henrietta, or Florence, or Matilda, but still. How could they introduce themselves with straight faces? How could they spend an hour with their parents without breaking down in tears? Without shouting Good God, what were you thinking? Shaking their hands and kissing their cheeks, Alice could feel the bemused shock creep across her face, but she stopped herself at the edge of becoming transparent. This was not how she wanted to start the day.

  Because the night before, sitting alone at the bar at Claridge’s, she’d reached the unfortunate and dreadfully boring conclusion that she needed a change of attitude. She was humiliated by how she’d acted since arriving in London. Storming her room’s minibar; gorging herself on eggs and buttered toast until she made herself sick, only to then wipe spittle from her mouth as she reached for a slice of bacon; employing gluttony as an act of retribution against her sister—that was just the start of it. There was also that dinner two nights ago—the one that Eloise planned at that awful, crowded restaurant in Soho. An hour and a half before they were all scheduled to meet, Alice found a hole-in-the-wall pub half a block away, where she fortified herself with two bourbons and a Klonopin. At the time she considered it a necessary move: this was the first time she was seeing her family—her whole family—in three years. There was bound to be some inevitable awkwardness (Paul seeing Donna; Eloise seeing Paul; Paul seeing everyone), and Alice considered getting too blitzed to feel that palpable discomfort to be a matter of pragmatic strateg
y.

  The plan backfired. She hadn’t anticipated having to down another bourbon once she arrived at the restaurant—Eloise had stressed how important it was that everyone showed up on time. But she did, and she suspects that was the drink that tilted her over the edge. At dinner she nearly passed out in her soup, and whenever anyone asked her a question, the most she could manage were monosyllabic responses. When she woke up foggy and cotton mouthed the next morning, the only things she could squarely remember from the evening were the knowing, dickish looks that Mark had shot her from across the table.

  Today will be better, she tells herself again, fishing the slice of cucumber out from the cup and crunching down on it. Today she’ll act like an adult. And so far the plan has worked out well. Or, if not well, then at least okay. She does worry that she made a fool of herself during the day’s first scheduled event—a private yoga session that Minty had arranged at a studio in South Kensington. The instructor, a bald, sinewy man named Linus, kept coming around to correct her poses. Whereas Eloise and her friends glided through their sun salutations and crow poses and downward dogs with gelatinous flexibility, Alice’s body seemed hell-bent on being uncooperative. “Breathe into it,” Linus kept telling her, as he pressed his palm against the base of her spine. “Let the breath guide you.” And each time, Alice did: she’d exhale long, and hard, and loud, as she imagined slugging the son of a bitch in his smug, enlightened face. The whole thing was made doubly problematic by how boastful she’d acted before arriving at the studio. When Flossie (was it Flossie?) asked her if she’d ever done yoga before, she scoffed and explained that in L.A. yoga was performed on the beach, at sunrise, most mornings before work. “I just hope I’ll get as good of a workout,” she said. “On account of there not being any sand.”