The People We Hate at the Wedding
Page 22
Eloise wraps her arm around Alice’s waist and rests her head on her shoulder. She smells like expensive shampoo and champagne and exhaust.
“Alice, Alice, Alice.”
An errant strand of Eloise’s hair floats into Alice’s mouth. She removes it.
“What, Eloise?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I am not.” She giggles. “Okay, maybe I am a little. But that doesn’t mean I’m not sorry about what I said.”
When Alice doesn’t respond, Eloise lifts her head and says, “Did you hear what I said? I said that I’m sorry, Alice. Please don’t be difficult.”
“I heard you.” Alice swallows. “Thank you.”
Eloise relaxes and replaces her head.
“Are you having a lovely time?”
“The loveliest.”
“I’m glad to hear that. My friends adore you.”
“That’s a load of bullshit.”
“It is not.” Eloise sighs, exasperated, and Alice feels her breath, warm and sticky, on her shoulder. “I know they may seem like a handful,” she says, “but they really are good people.”
Alice opts against pointing out the obvious to her sister: that if you have to describe a person as good, then chances are she’s not. And yet, she finds little comfort in knowing that she’s likely lived her life without earning such a characterization.
“Anyway,” Eloise says, “I wanted to tell you something.”
“That you’ve somehow entered me into the running to be Britain’s next prime minister?”
“You’re awful.” She pinches Alice’s thigh.
Flossie hollers something at two men jogging along the canal. They both flex their underfed biceps, and Henny shakes her head, disappointed.
“What is it?” Alice says.
“I just … I feel like there’s been a wedge between us or something, and it’s because I wasn’t there for you in Mexico five years ago. And it’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up to you for a long time, and I’m sorry that I’m just doing it now.”
She’s known the entire afternoon that this moment was looming, ever since Eloise grabbed her knee beneath the table at lunch and saved Alice from laying bare her sadness to the circling pack of wolves. She knows she should be thankful. She knows she should have reached down and taken hold of Eloise’s hand, and squeezed it in return. Done something to signal that she recognized and appreciated how her sister had just saved her. She didn’t, though; her body didn’t let her. Her rage toward Eloise’s perfection, toward her kindness, was too all encompassing. Instead, she brushed her sister’s hand away and crossed her legs.
They reach St. Pancras Lock, and the boat stops. Gates close, and water spills on all sides of them. Alice feels as if she’s rising and falling at once.
“Don’t worry—” she begins to say, but Eloise cuts her off.
“Because I feel awful about it. I’ve told you that before, but I want to say it again. I let you down, and I’ve never stopped feeling awful about that.”
The boat lurches, and Eloise stumbles back. Alice grabs her wrist to stop her from falling.
“Anyway,” Eloise says, steadying herself. “That’s all I wanted to say. That, and that I love you.”
Alice doesn’t say anything; she just stares forward to the point where, past the lock, the canal vanishes behind a shallow curve.
Mark
July 7–July 8
Mark blows a wisp of steam from his cup of coffee and watches as cars queue at a traffic light on Bermondsey Street. Paul had been cajoled into running errands with Eloise, and so he’s alone, occupying a single seat at a table meant for four, at a nearly empty café two blocks from Alcott’s apartment. He’s pleased to be by himself, though; since arriving in London a week ago, he’s hardly had a single moment of privacy, and now, more than ever, he needs the headspace to hear himself think.
Had Friday night met his expectations? No. But then, what had his expectations actually been? He’d consciously tried to rid himself of any preconceived notions of the event before it happened; he knows from experience that the key to happiness is setting a low bar. But still, even with rather opaque ideas of what it would be like, it wasn’t what he had allowed himself to fantasize. Expectations aside, what amount of utility had been derived from the event? This is a question that’s more difficult to answer.
With his spoon, Mark pokes at the yogurt parfait that he ordered along with his coffee, mixing soggy bits of granola into a blob of apricot compote. Once he’s made a mess of it, he sets the spoon down without taking a bite.
Paul hadn’t enjoyed himself. He claims that he did—in fact, since Friday he’s put on quite a show of asking when they’ll have a chance to give the whole thing a second go-round—but Mark knows better. After Alcott passed out and Mark and Paul set up the sofa bed, Paul had been restless. While Mark feigned sleep, Paul tossed and turned, and eventually got out of bed and padded over to the kitchen. With one eye open, Mark watched as he opened and closed the refrigerator, drank a glass of water, and, finally, dialed a number on his phone.
“Uh, hi, Wendy, it’s Paul Wyckoff,” Mark heard him say. “I know it’s late there and you’re sleeping and you won’t get this message until tomorrow morning…” Paul spoke into his chest to muffle his voice. It wasn’t working—Mark could still make out the awkward moment when he started to cry. “Oh, Wendy. I think I’ve made an awful mistake,” he said. “A really awful mistake.”
Mark sips his coffee and watches a young man tumble from his skateboard.
There have been more calls since then. More calls to Wendy. At first Mark found this phenomenon curious; if he insisted on rehashing his anxiety, why call a germophobe in Philadelphia, as opposed to, say, Alice? The more he thought about it, though, the more he supposed it made sense. After all, who else was there to better empathize with Paul’s paralyzing logic than a woman who lost her mind every time she had to take out the trash?
As for himself, he’d had fun. There were moments when Paul’s performance was less than spectacular (Mark cringes thinking about his stilted voice tripping over the phrase your balls taste great), and when Mark felt a strange competitiveness emanating from him, but as a whole he’s pleased. It satisfied the newness that he’s been desperately craving, the desire to shatter the monotony of monogamy that he finds so wholly suffocating. He thinks again of the moment he pulled out of Paul and instructed Alcott to take his place. How thrilling that had been! The exhilarating notion that he, Mark, was controlling two men so fully and completely; determining who experienced pleasure, and when!
“How’s the yogurt, sir?” a waitress asks him.
“Inedible,” Mark says.
“I, uh—”
“I’ll take some more coffee, though.”
Would Paul be willing to be so controlled again? To submit so fully to Mark’s sexual orchestrations? Despite his bravado during the past forty-eight hours, Mark suspects not. There have been too many hollow proclamations. No, he and Paul are headed in different directions. Friday night made that fact clear and now, watching the waitress refill his mug, Mark is even more convinced of the rightness of the decision to leave Paul. He needs someone with a sexual appetite that’s as modern as his is. Someone who hasn’t thrown all his emotional stock into the concept of intimacy, only to cheapen it by equating it with monogamy.
He thinks of Alcott, and of how easily he’d given himself over to the events of Friday night. There’d been no mental hairsplitting, no infantile second-guessing; rather, mouths were kissed, pants were removed, and that was that. The morning after, there hadn’t been any awkwardness, any unnecessary small talk. Instead, they drank coffee and ate cereal and read the paper with the same ease as the previous morning; only Paul chattered incessantly. Put another way: Alcott is game in a manner that Mark finds alluring and that Paul could never hope to emulate. Granted, there are also physical dimensions to Alcott’s attractiveness that Mark f
eels obliged to recognize. The way sweat seemed to highlight the crevices of his musculature, for instance, or how his ass flexed as he had his way with Paul. But it was more than that, Mark reminds himself; it’s not just some bodily lust that draws him to Alcott. It’s a meeting of minds, a sense that he’s found someone who understands and shares his evolved worldview.
Christ, he thinks. Listen to yourself. A meeting of minds. Is he falling in love with Alcott? He snorts and nearly spills his coffee. Falling in love with Alcott: it’s an absurd proposition; despite the closeness he feels towards him, he hardly knows the man. And even if there is an ounce of truth in it (he will admit that he’s had a difficult time not thinking of him since Friday), it would be wrongheaded and impossible to equate what he’s certain he now shares with Alcott to what he once shared with Paul. Because what had that been? Puppy love, really. The sort of doe-eyed infatuation that causes men in their twenties to abandon important life plans. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that kind of love, Mark figures, so long as one’s view of it matures to account for the nuances and complexities of one’s needs. The problem with Paul, of course, is that his view of love has never matured. He’s still stuck in an uncertain adolescence, a perpetual state of unknowing where he’s only comfortable when his own needs are subsumed by someone else’s. Alcott, on the other hand …
Mark looks down into his coffee cup. Flecks of ground beans float along the milky surface. He thinks of a few mornings ago, when Alcott flicked soap away from his bare thigh, and he smiles again.
* * *
“It’s a possibility, though,” Paul says.
“I can’t keep having this conversation.”
“Admit that it’s a possibility, and I’ll stop.”
“I’m not admitting that.”
Paul rests his elbows on the guardrail of the Millennium Bridge. Below them, the Thames swirls in loops of brown and gray. A tour boat disappears beneath their feet.
“You’re acting like I don’t have a right to be worried,” Paul says. “But I think I have a right to be worried. I mean,” he lowers his voice here, “he fucked me without a condom, Mark.”
Mark instinctively reaches out to rub Paul’s back, but stops himself short of actually touching him; he doesn’t want to convey conflicting messages, particularly given what he’s brought him here to say. Behind him, two tourists snap a series of photos, and Mark wonders if he’s in them—if the back of his head features prominently in shots of the British Parliament.
Paul continues, “I could have AIDS.”
“You don’t have AIDS.”
“It would be HIV, I guess. But still, it’s a possibility.”
“It would only be a possibility if Alcott were positive, which he’s not.”
Paul scrapes a marred spot along the metal railing.
“Do you know that?” he asks. “Have you asked him?”
Mark’s patience burns low, and he considers chastising Paul for his ignorance. Again, though, he exercises restraint. The last thing he wants is for Paul to run and tell their mutual friends that Mark put him in harm’s way—that he threatened Paul with disease—before leaving him. Better to hedge his bets, Mark thinks. Better to suffer through a little more empathy so as to save some face in what will inevitably be a face-decimating few months.
“I haven’t,” he says. “But I can if it’ll make you feel better.”
“No, don’t. Oh, God, please don’t. I’d never get over the humiliation.” Paul sighs. “I’m such a hypochondriac.”
“It’s endearing.”
Mark looks left. Sun reflects off the Shard in broken slivers of light. For once, London’s skies are cloudless.
Paul says, “No, it’s neurotic. Do you know that after I kissed my first guy I went and got tested?”
Mark can’t fathom how many times he’s heard this story. He masks his annoyance by reminding himself that this is the last time he’ll ever have to suffer through it.
“I vaguely remember you mentioning that,” he says.
“I was sixteen, and I went to Boystown with this kid from my soccer team. Scott Reardon. Anyway, Scott got so drunk on the frozen slushies at Sidetrack that he puked in his mom’s Accord, and I spent the whole night in the corner of some bar with a thirty-two-year-old French Canadian.”
“That’s right. It’s all coming back to me.”
“Every day for the next week I called the AIDS hotline. The one that the CDC runs. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I do.”
“Anyway, I’d tell whatever poor son of a bitch picked up that I had this friend who made out with a guy, and who was worried that he might get sick. And then they’d give me this whole runaround about how low the chances are of getting HIV like that, and how it would require that both guys had, like, bleeding open sores in their mouths.” Paul rips off a shred of fingernail with his teeth and flicks it into the Thames. “Still, though, they’d never actually say it was impossible. I’d try to get them to say that it was. I’d ask the question in, like, twenty different ways. Still, they’d stick to their line: there have been no reported cases, and the likelihood is very, very low. Which, I mean, obviously wasn’t good enough for me; I still stayed up at night wondering how I was going to tell my mom and dad that I was gay and that I had AIDS in the same conversation.”
Silently, Mark tallies what details are left; he maps out how many plot turns he must endure before Paul’s story reaches its merciful end.
“So I got tested. After two months of total misery, I told my mom that I had to go back to Chicago for some research paper, and I went to a free clinic in Boystown, a block away from the bar where I made out with the French Canadian. The woman who took my blood was this hippie earth mother named Kat. While we waited for the results—it was one of those ten-minute things—she sat me down in her office and gave me little packets of lube and talked to me about wearing condoms during oral sex, which, I mean, can you even imagine?” He adds: “I actually went back to see her every time I was home from college. Two weeks ago she added me on LinkedIn.”
Mark nods. He says: “I think we should end things, Paul.”
Below him, another boat passes. He glances down at the tops of a hundred heads.
Paul’s silent. He stares at Mark wide-eyed, his shoulders bunched up around his ears.
Mark recalls all the words he practiced reciting the night before, the delicate balance of his reasoning and rhetoric.
“I care about you,” he says. “Deeply. Very deeply, incidentally. But we’re two different people. We’ve grown into two different people.”
Of all the canned phrases he’s prepared, this is the one in which he believes the most. They have changed, they have grown—or Mark has, at any rate. Indeed, what’s surprised him the most over the past three days is how swiftly his categorization of Paul has changed. Alcott’s presence has reminded Mark of how intoxicating new lust is, and has cast his fraternal love for Paul in a dull, bloodless light. If anything, Paul has become a barrier: he’s the guy who Mark regrettably asked to dinner, and with whom he’s thus obliged to dine, even though the only person he’s actually interested in talking to is the waiter who winks at him every time he refills his water glass.
“But I…”
Paul’s voice cracks, and Mark’s muscles tense: Paul mustn’t cry. That’s a fate that Mark was actively trying to avoid by bringing him here, to the Millennium Bridge, one of the busiest pedestrian walkways in the city. He’d hoped that the scrutiny of strangers would keep Paul in line. Besides, he figured that monumental events should take place at monumental locations. And for Paul, this afternoon is sure to become a monumental event.
“But what about Friday night?”
Paul is pleading now, and Mark wants nothing more than to shake his shoulders, to tell him to stop. He wants to tell him that the most important thing now is to show a bit of dignity, for Paul to think of his future self looking back on this moment without shrinking from shame.
“Fuck you for saying that. I wanted to do it.” Paul’s choking back tears. He speaks as though he’s been in a terrible car accident, emerging from a state of shock. “And even if what you’re saying is true, why isn’t that enough? Why isn’t wanting to make you happy enough?”
“Because that’s not how things work.”
Mark watches as the gravity of Paul’s misfortune crests over him. Finally, he cries—softly at first, but then he sobs. Yet, while Paul mourns the destruction of something communal, something vital and shared, Mark’s experience is more akin to explaining the death of a pet to a child. Logically, he understands the source of Paul’s unhappiness, but that’s where their common ground stops. Paul’s pain has grown too foreign to elicit Mark’s empathy.
“Are you in love with Alcott?” Paul asks. His blond hair is matted against his forehead, and Mark realizes that he’s sweating.
“Stop it.”
“Tell me.”
“Of course not. I just—I’ve come to the conclusion that we conceive of relationships in different ways.” He searches for the explanation he crafted earlier. “It wouldn’t be fair to manipulate you into some version of a coupling that you weren’t comfortable with.”
Paul refuses to listen. “Is that why you’re leaving? Because of him? Answer me that.”
“Paul, please don’t cause a scene. You’re better than that.”
“Isn’t this what I said would happen?” His voice isn’t accusatory: it’s defeated. “Didn’t I say that we’d do this thing, and that it would end in tears? That you wouldn’t be able to resist the—what the fuck did you call it?—the newness of it?”
“I’m not going to answer that question,” Mark says. “I’m not going to dignify it. I care about you; I’m going to save you the embarrassment.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.” Panic creeps into Paul’s voice. “Could I have been better? On Friday, I mean? Is this all because I wasn’t that great at … at getting fucked by Alcott, or something? Because I can be better, Mark. It was my first time with all that stuff, and the drugs certainly weren’t helping anything, and I—”