The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  Framing the perimeter of the lawn are the long strings from which half the lit votives will eventually hang. The other fifteen hundred will illuminate paper lanterns dangling from the branches of the property’s elms. No one will notice the candles are crème instead of white. And if they do, fuck them; they should be enjoying the free wine, instead of inspecting the color of her votives. So yes, fine—Eloise is being crazy. Not just detail oriented, but certifiably crazy.

  Unfortunately, this has been a feeling to which she’s become more and more accustomed. Lately, there have been a few nights when she’s found herself second-guessing her decision, and they’ve shaken her. She reminds herself, though, that they’ve only occurred during the two weeks when her own mother and siblings have been here, in England. And that makes sense; that’s reassuring. Who wouldn’t be apprehensive about starting a family after seeing how Alice behaved at her hen do, or witnessing the spite with which her siblings spoke to their mother? Who in their right mind would want to get married and have children, only to have those children turn around and spit in their face? She’s quick to catch herself during these moments of panic, though, reminding herself to look at Ollie’s family and the easy respect they have for one another. And she tells herself that for her that’s not far off: only three thousand tea lights and a walk down the aisle away.

  And perhaps there’s hope for her own family, too—she must keep reminding herself of this. Earlier today, as she was driving to Sherborne, she received a text from her mother saying that she and Henrique were having a wonderful time. Okay, fine—the communiqué was a bit more guarded than that (wonderful was never once used), but Eloise could read between the lines: Donna was happy to see Henrique again.

  She’s also made significant headway with Paul. First, she helped to rid him of that awful boyfriend—maybe not directly, but surely her coldness toward Mark at dinner had played some sort of role in effecting the split. And thank God she had the good sense to do that, she nearly says aloud. The prospect of having to attend family gatherings with that farce of a man was enough to send her screaming for the hills. She thinks back to a few days ago when Paul had called her to ask, sheepishly, if he could stay at her flat. Incrementally, her brother has been warming to her—or at least she senses that he has—which, she hopes, bodes well for the next few days. Last night, when she was drunk, she asked him if he’d give a few remarks at the wedding reception. At first, he’d looked at her incredulously.

  “You mean, like, a speech?” he’d said.

  “Yes. A speech.”

  When she awoke this morning, though, she was terrified that she’d made a horrible mistake—that somehow he’d find a way to humiliate her, or their mother, or both of them. But now, remembering how she had let Paul cry in her lap after watching Mark pull away in a cab, she allows herself to be cautiously optimistic. Debts need to be repaid, and he owes her this. He owes her a goddamned speech.

  From the house, Ollie calls to her. The ice in her gin and tonic is melting.

  Ollie

  July 10

  He pulls aside the curtain and looks down onto the lawn, where the rehearsal dinner is already in full swing. Guests—most of whom he knows, some of whom he doesn’t—gather around high-topped tables as black-tied cater waiters bob between them. The sinking sun turns the gray bricks of Horwood Hall lavender, and the branches of the trees that line the lawn stretch their arms into endless shadows. He often forgets how much he loves coming home; when he’s living his life in London it’s so easy to write off Dorset as a bumbling backwoods, a place that’s fine to visit, but that he’d just as soon relegate to the confines of his past. Standing here now, though, it’s impossible to imagine ever doing such a thing—instead, he finds himself nostalgic for the southwest’s idyllic pace. Let the rest of them have London, he thinks, pulling the curtains wider apart. The traffic clogging up anemic alleyways that lead to nowhere; the persistent and suffocating smog. Sidewalks filled up with people who never look anywhere but past you, their eyes cutting through you like you’re nothing but smoke and mist. Buildings built on other buildings, towers of steel and glass that reduce history to foundation in the crudest sense of the word. The relentless and insatiable appetite of a city whose ambitions are too large, too ravenous, for the quaint island that houses it. Yes: fine. Let them have it. Ollie, though? He’ll take Dorset; he’ll take the southwest, yokel-stocked backwoods and all.

  On the far end of the green, beneath the leaves of a knotty old wych elm, he spots Donna, his future mother-in-law, huddled over her purse. Above her a thousand tea lights cause the elm’s leaves to shimmer in a gorgeous cascade, but Donna’s not paying them any mind—she’s too busy with whatever’s occupying her hands. Probably rolling a joint, Ollie thinks, smiling.

  Two nights ago he pointed out to Eloise that her mother had become a certified pothead, and she’d been terribly offended.

  “Knock it off, Ollie,” she’d said. They’d just arrived at Horwood Hall and were unpacking their bags in Ollie’s childhood room, where he’s presently standing, spying on the proceedings unfolding below him. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “Why?” He’d laughed. “I think it’s brilliant that she managed to smuggle a few emergency joints through customs. Besides, didn’t you smell her when we had lunch at the Shard? I thought I was liable to get a contact high just by giving her a hug.”

  “I asked you to please stop,” Eloise said, hanging up a dress. And so, he did. He set down the shoes he’d just retrieved from his suitcase and walked over to hug her from behind, holding her until he felt her muscles start to soften.

  Hiding behind the trunk of the elm, Donna leans over and licks something. Absolutely a joint. His smile broadens.

  He lets the curtains fall back and tries to remember, against the odds of all the champagne he’s had, why it is that he came up to his old room in the first place. Something about fetching a book. Yes, that’s it: his old German exercise book from lower sixth form. His mother had invited his old German teacher from Sherborne to the wedding (they belonged to the same gardening club, as Ollie understood it), and five minutes ago Frau Winkler had cornered him and asked him if he had any of his old work lying around.

  “Your declension work was lovely,” she said, her breath smelling like vodka and butterscotch candy. “You managed to screw up in the most gorgeous ways. Really, I’ve just got to show Jane.”

  He looked over at his mother, smiling shyly behind Frau Winkler, then said, “Let me see what I can find.”

  In his room he scans the titles on his bookshelf—an old copy of Canterbury Tales, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, three Hardy Boys novels, a bunch of other shit he’s never read—until he finds a small black notebook with his name and GERMAN scrawled across its cover. He knows that he should be surprised that he still has it—he’s cleared out this bookshelf more times than he can remember, keeping only the titles that either (a) are intellectually impressive or (b) have sentimental value—and yet he’s not. He has a knack for having what people need, and, in this case, Frau Winkler needed his lower sixth German notebook. It’s a strange talent he’s had ever since he was an infant (his mother likes to talk about how, as a newborn, he always seemed to sense her moods, often predicting her needs before she knew them herself), and which he became consciously aware of as a teenager. People needed someone to have a pint with—he was there. People needed someone with a joke—he had one. It’s for this reason, he suspects, that so many people call him likable, that tag that he used to associate with boring, but that now, after having met so many insufferably interesting people who are dreadfully mean, he’s proud to have earned. People like being around him. They like that he’s not the smartest guy in the room, but that he’s not a dolt, either. They like that they can safely expect him to succeed, to be impressive but not threatening, without pinning their hopes for the world onto him. In other words, they like that he’s easy. They like that his life is easy.

  And it is easy—almost em
barrassingly so. This used to be a fact that caused him great consternation. Once, when he was fifteen, a fifth-former from the girls’ school had told him that he would never understand what it was like to suffer.

  “Everything’s been just given to you,” she’d said. He was sitting with her and a few friends on the rugby pitches that separated the boys’ school from the girls’. Her father, a Russian oilman, had just been thrown in prison in Moscow, and she was sobbing. Her name, he thinks, was Tatiana. “You’re gorgeous, and rich, and don’t have any siblings to contend with, and you’re captain of the football team even though everyone knows Thomas Dodge is the better player.” Ollie looked at Thomas; Thomas looked down. “So just face it, Ollie, when you tell me that everything will be all right, you’re lying, because you don’t actually know what it’s like for things not to be all right.”

  This notion that his own coddled life was preventing him from understanding the plights of others pained Ollie greatly. It threatened, in so many ways, his own likability, the sole part of himself that, at the very unsure age of fifteen, he was absolutely sure of. For the next year he did everything he could to pop the bubble in which he’d been accused of living. At night, while his friends were sneaking cigarettes behind the abbey in town, he stayed in his room and struggled through books that might, somehow, open his eyes to a world that had heretofore gone unseen. God, the things that he read during those twelve months! Things Fall Apart. The Joy Luck Club. Notes of a Native Son. They were moving, surely, but also so terribly sad. Halfway through Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (a book that was, he admits, already pretty slim), he decided it was probably best to just give up.

  The thing that he figured was most important was that he was good, and kind, and above all else likable. People expected him to be easy—they expected him to be happy, and fun, and always ready for a good time; all those things that he felt he already naturally was without having to cringe over tragic literature—and so those would be the things he would focus on being.

  And it seems to have worked out, he thinks now as he tosses the German book up into the air and catches it. After Sherborne he’d gone to Oxford to read economics, a subject in which he received passable (if not outstanding) marks, and which interested him just enough to hold his attention. From there, he moved to London, where, with the help of an old naval buddy of his father’s, he landed a job in the analyst program at Barclays. Much as before, his life during these nascent stages of adulthood seemed to follow a path of negligible resistance. He received promotions, raises; his financial security was such that he never had to live with a roommate. He knew he’d never become a managing director at the bank—his reviews were always impressive, but very rarely stellar—but that didn’t cause him any lost sleep. He saw the work it took to climb to Barclays’ upper echelons, and it was work that, quite frankly, he knew he wasn’t cut out to do. Perhaps more accurately, that he wasn’t willing to do. Occasionally, he’d remember the things that Tatiana had said to him; he’d recall the scathing tone with which she berated him, and he’d feel a lingering shame. These moments, though, weren’t too dreadfully difficult to mediate. There were enough charity dinners and galas and auctions happening at any given moment in London, and he found that all he need do was shell out five hundred pounds for a ticket to one, and partake in whatever picturesque version of Good it was selling, to alleviate a solid dose of that Tatiana-bred guilt. The events also had the added benefit of being, well, fun; they gave him an opportunity to wear his tuxedo, and get sauced on champagne, and cavort with his mates, a group of people who apologized for the trappings of their upbringings by making a deliberate show of them.

  It was at one of these events (he can’t remember which one—they bleed together, like most of his twenties) that he first met Eloise. He knew after two years together that he wanted to marry her. Like so many decisions in his life, this was one that he didn’t think about particularly hard, or for particularly long. While they may not have been a perfect match (she got annoyed with his partying; he got annoyed with her getting annoyed with his partying), he was starting to suspect that perfect matches didn’t actually exist, anyway—at least, not when two sentient people were involved. In this way, he concluded, they were likely the best that either one of them was going to find, and thus the prospect of forgoing her and trying to find a relationship that was in some way a little closer to perfect only to later realize he’d let something wonderful go … well—one in the hand, as they say.

  Besides, he thinks now, as he descends the stairs from his room to Horwood Hall’s kitchen, he loves her. He loves his life with her. A month ago they met for the second time with an adoption agency (an adoption agency! If only he had Tatiana’s address), and the very real potential of beginning a family together had him nearly combusting with excitement. A son! he kept thinking to himself, as the woman across the desk from them—a dowdy northerner named Fern—explained endless reams of paperwork. A son, a son, a son! In the cab on the way back to their flat, he hadn’t been able to stop shaking his leg, so gripped was he by excitement.

  “You’ve got to stop doing that,” Eloise had said to him, resting a hand gently on his knee. “You’re driving me nuts.”

  “I’m sorry.” He stopped shaking and gripped his thighs to hold them still. “This is all just so exciting.”

  “It is.” She smiled, warily. “Still, I just … I don’t know.”

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s going to be great.”

  * * *

  “Danke!” Frau Winkler kisses his cheek and takes the notebook from him.

  “Bitte,” he says, grinning broadly. Having forgotten the rest of his German, and gripped with a very present need to escape the Frau’s butterscotchy breath without appearing rude, he says, “If you’ll excuse me, word is the speeches are about to start, and I worry if Eloise has to sit through Bixby’s toast without proper fortification there might not actually be a wedding tomorrow.” The Frau laughs; Ollie’s grin widens, and he winks.

  Turning, he nearly knocks over the cello player that they’d hired for the evening—a striking, raven-haired beauty in a black dress and a gold necklace who Eloise met four months ago while she was planning a dinner for Mission: Breathe. Ollie raises an eyebrow and mouths oops; the girl smirks and lifts both eyebrows in response. As she readies her bow against the instrument’s strings, Ollie steals a peek at her ass and steps out onto the lawn.

  He did want to find Eloise—that wasn’t a complete lie—though he has no idea when the speeches are set to start, or if there are to be speeches at all (there’s meant to be; after the fourth round of canapés circulate, Andrew Bixby is indeed expected to propose a toast. Andrew Bixby, though, is hardly reliable, particularly when free champagne’s involved). Really, he wanted to find her simply to be with her. His friends often mocked him for this sort of romantic sentimentality; most of them had been married for a few years already, and they constantly harassed him for his desire to start the rest of his life at the expense of his freedom.

  He finally spots her on the opposite end of the lawn, where she’s standing with her siblings. She’s talking to Paul, and she looks tense—her shoulders are up near her ears—and this, again, makes Ollie smile. He likes Paul. He knows that lately she’s found him trying; she speaks often about a monumental shift that happened in Paul at some point during the past three years, this transformation from the brother she thought she knew into a neurotic, narcissistic stranger. Ollie doesn’t know about all that—he didn’t grow up with Paul (but then, neither did Eloise, really), so he hasn’t got much of a frame of reference. He thinks Paul’s funny, though. Hilarious, even. Fifty percent crazy, maybe, but Ollie knew enough sane people already. Besides, crazy could be fun, particularly when you only had to encounter it during holidays. And even then, didn’t he have a right to be a little bit nuts, what with his dad dying having basically disowned him? Sure, Eloise has said that Paul doesn’t know the things his father said about him; she�
�s said that Paul can never know. But then, how reasonable is that assumption? Ollie’s not the brightest—he freely admits that—but he suspects that if he were in Paul’s shoes, he’d know. He’d just have to. There’s never not-knowing a thing like that.

  (Thinking of all this now, as he watches Eloise speak to her brother, Ollie congratulates himself on what he said to her when she recounted the whole sordid history between Paul and his father; how he told Eloise that if they adopted a gay son, he’d embrace him and love him from day one. He makes sure to mention this in passing to Paul whenever they’re with each other—just that he’s okay with gay people, and all. He thinks that it’s important.)

  Alice, though. Eloise’s sister. She’s a tougher one to crack. The few times that they’ve all been together it’s seemed to Ollie that he can hardly glance at Alice without catching her glaring at him. Eloise has assured him that his fears are misguided, and that his paranoia is a product of his own thinking—“If she hates anyone,” she told him, “it’s me.” For whatever reason, though, this has done little to assuage his misgivings. Eloise had mentioned that she suspected Alice loathed her life in Los Angeles, and so he’d nearly tripped over himself getting her that job with Xavier Wolfson’s production company. Whenever he saw her, he unleashed his usual charm offensive—the smiles, and jokes, and compliments that had won over so many skeptics in the past. And yet, still she seems dead set on freezing him out. It drives him insane.

  He continues to watch as a caterer, a lanky red-haired kid in a coat two sizes too big, offers Eloise and her siblings glasses of champagne. Paul reaches for one, but Eloise bats his hand away.