The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  “Paul.” Mark sighs. People have started to watch them. Not ostensibly—a crowd hasn’t gathered—but still, he’s caught the discreet turning of a few heads. Some raised eyebrows. He was really, really, really trying to avoid this. “This is just what I want.”

  “But what about what I want? Since we moved to Philadelphia it’s been entirely about what you want. Why, for once, can’t it be about what I want?” He’s close to shouting now, and tears soak his face. His distress tugs at Mark’s prick—seeing Paul upset has always been a turn-on—and Mark does his best to resist the very real urge to have sex with Paul; to find somewhere discreet and fuck him one last time.

  Calmly, he asks, “And what is it that you want, Paul?”

  “To be with you! To keep living our lives together! To keep watching you cook, and listening to your stories about your students, and going to Maryann’s with Preston and Crosby. To just … to just keep loving you.”

  “You hate Preston and Crosby.”

  “That’s not the fucking point!” he screams.

  Mark buries his face in his hands and shakes his head. He says, “This isn’t how this was supposed to work out.”

  Paul’s quiet for a moment. He sniffles once, and then asks, “What did you say?”

  Mark takes his hands away from his face. “I said, this isn’t how this was supposed to work out.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t?” Paul wipes his nose with his shirtsleeve. “Geez, I’m sorry to hear that. Would you like to start over then?”

  “That’s not what I meant, Paul.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me what the fuck you did mean, Mark?” He’s still crying, but his devastation seems to be giving way to a heated anger. Mark had anticipated that this might happen, but now, seeing the rage in Paul’s eyes, he’s not sure if he’s entirely comfortable with the shift. At least a few minutes ago he could still fantasize about the possibility of breakup sex.

  He says, “I just … I just mean that this is starting to get uncomfortable. That’s all.”

  “For you?” Paul says—shouts—incredulously. “Because the last time I checked, you weren’t the one getting dumped in front of an audience on the London Bridge four days shy of your sister’s wedding, just because you weren’t quite willing enough to have a stranger’s dick in your mouth.”

  “We’re on the Millennium Bridge. The London Bridge is in Southwark. And please, Paul. Keep your voice down.”

  “No!” Paul shouts, and people around them turn their heads. “Fuck you, Mark. I won’t keep my voice down. You don’t get to tell me that, do you hear me? You don’t get to tell me that ever again.”

  Eloise

  July 8

  Mark suddenly dumping Paul is costing her six hundred pounds. She figured that out last night after Paul called, crying, to tell her that they’d broken up, and that there’d be an empty place setting at the wedding, and that he, Paul, needed somewhere to stay. She doesn’t care; she would’ve happily paid double that amount to not have that son of a bitch there. In fact, she’d be fine giving Mark twenty thousand bucks if he promised to never speak to Paul again. But then, she stops herself: she’s always considered it tacky to think about all the things she’d do with her money, so long as no one else was watching.

  She watches as a car across the street tries to parallel park between two black sedans. Ollie left half an hour ago—he had an early-morning meeting—and after following him out to their building’s front stoop to say good-bye, she decided to stay, to sit and bear witness to the morning unfurling itself. She’s not properly dressed—she’s wearing an old Yale shirt and a pair of running shorts—and if anyone she knew were to walk by, she’d be mortified. Still, she stays where she is, blowing into her mug of coffee to cool it, even though it’s already grown lukewarm. She wants to be here when Paul gets here—she figures that’s the important thing. She doesn’t want him to have to climb the stairs up to her flat (and away from Mark) alone.

  She hopes he showed a little strength: that’s what she’s been thinking all morning. When Mark dumped him, she hopes Paul showed a little strength, and told that prick to fuck off. She knows, though, that’s likely far from what actually happened; probably, Paul had caused a scene. Something’s happened to her brother recently, though she can’t quite articulate what. To put it vaguely, he’s become curiously unhinged since his father’s death (she closes her eyes as she remembers the funeral and the awful secret her mother told her); it’s as if Bill’s passing robbed Paul of whatever necessary fiction he’d been using to keep his life together. The fact that he endured dating Mark for so long is evidence enough to convince Eloise that something crucial has shifted, but there are other signs, as well. In the few times she’s seen him over the past three years, she can’t help but sense that he’s blindly groping for something—an explanation, someone to blame, a metaphorical or literal lifesaver. Just—something.

  He’s so quick to anger now, she considers as she pulls her knees closer to her chest. Take the other night at Dean Street Townhouse, when he’d chastised Donna for harmlessly referring to Mark as his friend. The old Paul would’ve never reacted like that; the old Paul would’ve made an offhand comment, would’ve laughed at himself; the old Paul had a sense of humor. Now, though, it’s suddenly become impossible to say or do anything without offending his sensibilities in some convoluted way. He’s subscribed, she’d argue, to a policy of unabashed and unapologetic victimhood. She does her best to convince herself that the old Paul is still in there, somewhere; that, beneath the layers of shit and shame that have accumulated, her little brother’s hiding, waiting to emerge. She thinks back to how fun, how easy he was in high school, when Bill was still alive. For better or worse, she hadn’t been around much then—she was living her own life in New Haven—but she’s still keenly aware of the mythologies that emerged from those years. The family stories that Alice and Paul continue to tell and retell. The same stories that leave Eloise feeling like she’s destined to forever be on the outside looking in.

  Paul’s taxi pulls up in front of the apartment, and she sets her coffee down and gets up, wiping dust from her shorts.

  “Hi, Paul,” she says, once they’re both out of the car.

  He glances up at her, but doesn’t say anything. Instead, he turns to Mark with an expectant look. She wants to run down to him and tell him to stop, to save himself the humiliation of having to beg. She doesn’t, though, for as awful as Mark is, she knows that running to Paul’s rescue would only compound his humiliation. And so she stays where she is at the top of the stoop and looks on as they lock heads in some hushed, private conversation. What draws Paul to Mark? Or, perhaps more appropriately: What drew him? While she knows she’s predisposed to be a little biased (Paul is, of course, her brother), she can’t help but think that he is, objectively, a better person: better looking, better intentioned, better behaving (mostly). And yet, still there’s something that prevents him from recognizing his own worth, or from seeing himself in the same light in which Eloise (and presumably others) see him. Still there’s something that makes him believe he doesn’t deserve better.

  Mark tries to reach down and grab her brother’s bag, but Paul won’t let him; he hauls it over his shoulder and climbs up the stoop. Once he reaches Eloise he tries to wordlessly slip past her, but she stops him.

  She kisses his cheek and squeezes his arm and says, “The couch is all made up,” before allowing him to retreat inside.

  A moment later, she hears her front door open and close.

  From where he’s standing on the sidewalk, Mark clears his throat. “Well.”

  “Well,” Eloise says, looking down at him. She folds her arms across her chest; the A in YALE gets pinched between her breasts. “I guess we won’t be seeing you at the wedding, then.”

  “That’s not looking likely, no.”

  He stares at her intently, as if he’s expecting her to say something else. As if he’s been fantasizing about confronting her since she humil
iated him at the restaurant the other night. She’s above this, she tells herself; she’s above granting him that satisfaction. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though, resisting the very real urge to say something so crippling as to leave him second-guessing himself for months to come. And God, could she do it. Looking back at his smug, shit-eating grin; at the tacky summer scarf he’s got looped loosely around his neck—God, could she destroy him.

  “Right then,” she says. “Can I help you get a cab back to wherever it is you’re staying?”

  He searches her face. That’s it?

  “No,” he says. “It’s just that—no, I don’t need help getting a cab. Thank you, though.”

  Disappointed, he turns and steps out into the street and shoves his fists in his pockets.

  Fuck it, she suddenly thinks. She waits for him to wave down a cab and duck inside of it before she calls out, “Mark.”

  He leans forward to say something to the driver, and then rolls down the window.

  “Yes?”

  “I hope you’re better off,” she says, thrilled for a few glorious moments that she still knows how to be a bitch. “I know Paul will be.”

  She tries not to smile. She’s unsuccessful.

  * * *

  Paul lies on a love seat in the living room, with his feet dangling over one of the armrests and his head and neck bent at a painful angle against the other. His eyes are closed, and when he hears Eloise close the front door he pulls his left arm across his face.

  “You can move to the couch, you know,” she says. “It’s longer. You don’t really fit on that thing.”

  Paul doesn’t say anything—he just buries his nose deeper into the cushions.

  “Oh, come on, Paul. Get up.”

  She reaches down to stroke his head, but he bats her hand away.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he says.

  “Have you eaten anything?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “How about something to drink, then?”

  He buries his nose in the pillow again, which she takes as a yes, so she pushes herself off the love seat and goes to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice.

  As she opens the refrigerator, she hears him yell, “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s at the National Gallery,” Eloise says as she fills a glass. “She wanted to see the Turners, so I had Alice take her.”

  “You sent her away, is what you mean.”

  Eloise thinks for a moment, then opens the freezer, where there’s half a bottle of Grey Goose. Uncorking the top, she pours about a shot glass’s worth of vodka into Paul’s juice.

  She calls back, “What, you’re telling me you wanted her around when you got here?”

  “No,” Paul says. She returns to the living room and, as he sits up, she hands him the glass. “I guess not.”

  “Don’t worry about it. She understood.”

  This isn’t the whole truth. Earlier this morning, when Eloise had told Donna that Mark and Paul had broken up and that Paul was coming to stay at the flat, she’d insisted on canceling her plans for the day.

  “He’ll need me,” she’d said. “He’ll need his mother.”

  Gently, over the course of poached eggs and a pot of coffee, Eloise convinced her otherwise. Or, if not entirely otherwise, she at least convinced her to leave. She stopped short of explicitly explaining to Donna that she was the last person Paul needed; that, after waging a cold war with his mother for close to three years, falling into her arms after failing at love would be the cruelest kind of defeat. Instead, Eloise told her that Paul needed space. He needed to cry without someone hovering over him, and surely that was something she understood.

  Paul takes a sip of his orange juice. He swallows it, and shivers. “You put vodka in this.”

  Eloise sits on the love seat next to him. Their knees touch.

  “I figured it was the least I could do.”

  He looks into the glass, at the shreds of pulp slowly separating, sinking to the bottom, and then takes a longer drink.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” he says, swallowing.

  “There’s not, Pauly. He was an asshole.”

  “He may have been an asshole, but there’s still something wrong with me.”

  She pulls his head to her shoulder and runs her fingers through his hair. She wants to say something, but she can’t. Comforting her siblings—a task that, as the eldest sister, she knows falls squarely on her shoulders—has always confounded her. On the one hand she wants to fix them, to save them, to pull Paul and Alice up and out of the messes they’ve made. On the other hand, though, she worries that her own gilded life somehow prevents her from empathizing with them as deeply as she should. More than that, she worries that her siblings’ perception of her life puts her at an inevitable and insurmountable disadvantage: she has, and that means she can’t.

  Paul finishes his orange juice, and she thinks of the things Alice said to her in the bathroom during the hen do. You just don’t get it, Eloise. You just don’t fucking get it.

  Maybe they’re right, she thinks, as she slumps farther into the couch and Paul starts to cry. Maybe I just don’t get it, and maybe I never will. After all, here’s Paul, her little brother, weeping on her shoulder, and she can’t think of a damned thing to say. She knows what she should tell him. She should give him some pep talk about being okay, about everyone being okay. She should talk about how awfully banal breakups are, and how that fact is actually entirely humanizing. She should remind him how heartbreak is a universal emotion; how everyone, everywhere, has experienced what he’s feeling at this exact moment, and in that way Paul, through his pain, is becoming part of something larger than himself.

  The problem is that it’d all be a lie. She’d be rehashing a speech she gave to a suitemate at Yale whose boyfriend broke up with her in the middle of freshman year. Some girl whose name she can’t remember. The fact is that Eloise has never been dumped. She’s broken up with people, sure, but it’s always been amicable, at least on her end; and now, watching her brother cry, she suddenly suspects the only people who share her holistic and delusional perspective on heartbreak are people exactly like her—people who’ve never actually been heartbroken.

  The only thing she can do, she realizes, is let him cry—let him cry and, when he asks if he can smoke a cigarette out of her bathroom window, answer with an empathic yes.

  “In fact,” she says, “don’t worry about going to the bathroom. Let me just get you something to ash in.”

  She goes to the kitchen and returns with an old mug.

  “Won’t Ollie be mad?” Paul looks up at her with red eyes. “About the smell, I mean.”

  “He’ll understand. Besides, I think I’ve got some air freshener under the sink.”

  He lights his cigarette and collapses into the love seat. Eloise sits next to him, pulling her feet up and holding her knees to her chest. The sun coming through the windows illuminates streaks of dust on the coffee table in front of them.

  “What if I’m unlovable?” he says. Ash falls onto his shirt.

  “Oh, come on. Of course you’re lovable.” She reaches over to brush hair out of his eyes.

  “You don’t know that. The only thing you’ve ever been is loved.” He blows out a long, thin cloud of smoke.

  “That’s not true.”

  He doesn’t answer her—she wasn’t expecting him to. Instead, he says, “Or maybe it’s not that I’m inherently unlovable. Maybe it’s that I make it too difficult to keep on loving me.” More ash falls to his shirt. “I think I’ve somehow become my own worst enemy.”

  “Mark was an asshole, Paul.”

  “I think that’s probably true.”

  “So you should be happy that you’re done with him.”

  He’s only halfway through his cigarette, but he drops the rest of it into the mug, stubbing the butt against the cracked porcelain.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the way it works,” he s
ays.

  “It is if you want it to.”

  “God,” he says, his voice cracking, “I wish I knew what it was like to be you.”

  PART THREE

  If a man’s character is to be abused, say what you will,

  there’s nobody like a relative to do the business.

  —WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Vanity Fair

  Paul

  July 9

  “I can’t fit back there.”

  Paul looks into the backseat of the Peugeot, cupping his hands on either side of his eyes as he presses his face against the window.

  “A fucking Chihuahua couldn’t fit back there.”

  “Well, this is the car that Mom’s rented.”

  Alice glances down at her phone before slipping it into her purse, discouraged.

  “Well, go tell her to get a bigger one.”

  “Too late,” Alice says. She’s wearing dark glasses that hide half her face. “This is the last one they’ve got.”

  Paul stands up straight again and wipes sweat from the back of his neck. Slough spreads around them on all sides, the British equivalent of the same Midwest suburbs where he and Alice wallowed away eighteen years of their lives. A plane of gray duplexes and strip malls, dotted with ancient brick houses and the occasional medieval church. He looks across the Hertz parking lot and counts the number of full-sized sedans he sees.

  “There are sixteen other reasonably sized cars here,” he says. “And that’s just on this side of the rental office. Who knows what sort of glorious minivans we might find on the other side.”

  “They’re all rented.” Alice leans against the Peugeot.

  “Every single one of them.”

  “It’s vacation season, Paul. Everyone’s driving to the beach. They need cars.”

  “Well, I need leg room. And I’m grieving.”

  When Alice doesn’t respond, he asks, “Why is this thing in Dorset?”