The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  Despite his frustrations with Alice, despite all the confusion she causes him, he knows that Eloise’s relationship with her brother and sister is infinitely more complicated. He tells himself that this complication is normal, and that as an only child he’s in no position to understand it. His parents had done a remarkable job shielding him from the uglier parts of familial life—he never did know what his father had actually been doing in Rwanda, or why his mother often spent her nights holed up alone in her room—and for this he was both thankful and scornful: on one hand they facilitated, indeed helped craft his formidable and unwavering bliss; on the other hand, they’ve left him feeling terribly isolated from the anxiety Eloise feels toward Paul and Alice. She speaks of them—she’s always spoken of them—with the same mash-up of conflicting claims: they are the only people who understand her, and the people who understand her the least; she needs to speak with them immediately, and she’d be lucky to never speak with them again; she craves their affirmation—more than anything in the world—but once she gets it, she doesn’t know what to do with it.

  Straightening his tie, he begins to pick his way through the crowd over to them. He stops, though, when he sees that Eloise has beckoned his parents over; Jane and the Admiral haven’t spent much time with Paul or Alice, and he wants them to be able to know one another—to like one another—before the ceremony tomorrow.

  Within moments, though, his hopes are dashed: Paul says something, and Jane looks down.

  Eloise grabs her brother’s arm and begins dragging him toward the kitchen.

  * * *

  He arrives just in time to see her push Paul against a cupboard and yell, “What the actual fuck.”

  The caterers scatter to the far corners of the kitchen and busy themselves by rearranging rows of gougères on their trays. Ollie considers intercepting Eloise (and saving Paul), but stops himself just short of doing so; he doesn’t know the language of familial discontent. Instead, he hangs back and watches, uncomfortable with his own presence but unable to pull himself away.

  “The, uh…” Paul sounds sauced. Contrite and apologetic, but sauced. “I guess I overshared.”

  Ollie pictures a puppy, its tail hidden between its trembling legs.

  “You guess? You guess!?” Ollie shudders. Rarely has he found himself the target of Eloise’s ire, though that doesn’t stop him from sympathizing with those who did.

  “I’m … I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” Paul says.

  “I can’t imagine why you think you might’ve embarrassed me, Paul. Could it be because you opted to tell the story of your first threesome to my future in-laws? To actually use the phrase ‘fucked from behind’ with a woman who hasn’t had sex since Thatcher was prime minister? Or, I don’t know, is it because you thought it wise to condemn the entire institution of marriage on the eve of my wedding? Or, wait, wait, I’ve got another total shot in the dark: maybe it’s because—”

  Ollie tries not to think of Paul in sexually compromising positions, which only leads him to think of his mother in equally lurid ways. He stifles a laugh—Eloise hasn’t seen him yet.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Sorry because you’ve turned my wedding into some horrible movie? Sorry because—”

  “Please stop, Eloise.”

  Hearing Paul’s voice crack, Ollie winces.

  “You’re a selfish prick, Paul,” says Eloise. “You’ve always been a selfish prick.”

  “Oh, I’m the selfish prick.” Paul’s voice picks up, and Ollie once again considers stepping in. “Last time I checked, I wasn’t the one who cited some bullshit work excuse when my own sister had a miscarriage and needed me.”

  “I can’t believe you’re still lording that over me.”

  “I’m not lording anything over you, Eloise. It’s the goddamned truth. You’ve always acted like you’re too good for us, like you haven’t got time for us. I mean, fucking hell—you sit on a trust fund that you’re literally doing nothing with while Alice goes twenty thousand dollars into debt.”

  “What, I’m supposed to bail her out? I’m supposed to feel guilty and charitable because Alice can’t act like a responsible adult? Ollie got her a fucking job opportunity in London, and she threw it back in my face.”

  “My GOD! You just don’t get it, do you?”

  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS THAT I’M SUPPOSED TO FUCKING GET! YOU’RE BLAMING ME FOR THINGS I CAN’T CONTROL!” Suddenly conscious of the people around her, the caterers pretending to ignore her, she lowers her voice. “Why can’t you just be happy for me?”

  “Because you make it too goddamned hard. You’ve never understood us,” her brother says. “You’ve never even tried to understand us. You were our holiday sister. We called you that, you know? Our holiday sister. The whole school year, while we were fighting over who got to drive Mom’s Volvo to the movies on a Saturday, you were … Christ, I don’t know … eating fondue in the Swiss Alps. And okay, sure, you were around for Christmas, and sometimes Thanksgiving, and maybe a few weeks at the end of summer, but that’s it. That’s all we’d ever see of you. We’d just be getting back from Tampa, and you’d fucking waltz in from Saint-Tropez. And the whole time—the whole goddamned time—you’d try to act like we were all exactly the same.”

  “Who understood you, then, Paul? Tell me. Because at this point, that’s looking like a pretty impossible task.”

  There’s a pause, and then Paul says: “Dad. My dad understood me. While Mom was too busy worrying about all the shit she gave up when she left Henrique, Dad was there for me. He got me.”

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah. Dad.”

  One of the caterers uses the brief silence to escape the kitchen. The door swings open, letting the rest of the party in, then slams shut.

  “All right, Paul, how about this: your father, who you worshipped, whose opinion meant everything to you, died hating you.”

  Ollie closes his eyes.

  “You’re a fucking cunt, Eloise.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But that doesn’t change the fact that the one person who you claim understood you went to his grave never wanting to see you again. No—don’t turn away from me. Don’t you fucking turn away from me. He hated you, Paul. You told him you were gay, and he hated you. Said he didn’t want to see you again until you changed. Until you stopped becoming yourself.”

  “Yeah? Then why’d he never tell me that?” Paul’s crying now.

  “Because Mom didn’t let him,” Eloise says. “I’m telling you right now, kid, if you roll your eyes at me one more goddamned time, I’m going to rip ’em square out of your face.”

  She continues: “Are you listening? Mom didn’t let him. She told him that if he so much as looked at you wrong she’d divorce him and tell both you and Alice why she was leaving. So he kept his mouth shut, and so did Mom, and they went on like that until he died, just so you could be protected from the truth.”

  There’s a second brief silence, and the door opens again: crickets dissect the night, and on the other side of the house the cello moans.

  “So how about that,” Eloise says. “The woman you’ve spent three years torturing is the same one who saved your life.”

  Ollie thinks: Fuck.

  Paul

  July 10

  His sister’s lying. She must be. His father had been his ally, a source of certainty amid what was otherwise a jumble of female ambivalence. He didn’t miss a single one of Paul’s high school soccer games, and when Paul played in college and his team had a match somewhere in the Midwest, Bill would often drive five, six, seven hours to watch Paul take the field. He cried when Paul graduated, and tried to convince him, in his own stoic way, not to move to New York.

  “Why do you want to go all the way out there?” he’d said. “You’ve got everything you need right here.”

  How would they keep up their tradition of going to Pete’s for a full rack of ribs on Saturday afternoons if Paul were living a thousand miles east? How wou
ld they go on one of their long, itinerant drives, those nomadic wanderings past suburbs and strip malls and into the belly of Illinois’s heartland? Still, Paul left. He had to. He had to find a place where he could start the process of unknowing the person he’d been pretending to be. When his dad dropped him off at O’Hare, Paul promised that he’d call twice a week, and it was a promise that he kept, right up until the Saturday morning in April when he phoned to tell them he was gay.

  It wasn’t a big deal—those were the first words out of his mother’s mouth, and he believed her. It wasn’t even a deal, at all. Christ, they probably already knew and were just waiting for him to tell them on his own terms. That’s what his friends in New York told him, at least. Parents always know. His father had been more or less silent as Paul blubbered through the confession, but that in itself wasn’t all that surprising: Bill was a quiet kind of guy. He’d just wanted to give Paul room to talk, room to explain himself.

  But then: oh, the insidious sting of truth as it crawls into the light. Because now, as he weaves together memories of his father, discrepancies arise that had previously gone unnoticed: Bill declining Paul’s invitation for ribs when he was visiting for Christmas, claiming some unmemorable excuse—high blood pressure. Bill standing up from his blue La-Z-Boy and leaving the living room whenever Mark phoned during the holidays. Bill returning every other call, then every third, then every fourth. Bill losing interest, fading away.

  The moon throws shadows that splice up the field in pieces. Paul presses the heels of his palms to his eyes.

  How could he have ignored all this so willfully? How could the truth be so arbitrary as to subject itself to the whims of his own idealizations? Is knowing what people think of you really such a deceptive negotiation of self, a bartering between the knowledge that you have and the knowledge you choose to accept? Because now he wants to know what his father said about him during those last deceptive years—he wants it all laid bare and gruesome before him, like a corpse, decayed and dissected. Bill belonged to a club—not the best one, he couldn’t afford that, but a fine one, filled with like-minded men. Paul wants to know what Bill told them, how his dad talked about him after he knew. How many times was he called a disappointment, he wonders; how many times had Bill received the sympathy of others, simply because Paul existed? He wants to dig his dad up from his grave, tie him down, and ask him every question he’s thinking at once. But then—no. He doesn’t. Not really, anyway, because the answers that he’s looking for don’t exist. They rarely ever do.

  “Hey, Paul.”

  Ollie stands over him, his broad silhouette blocking out the moon. Paul scoops up a handful of gravel from the house’s driveway and transfers it from one hand to the other.

  “Hey,” he says.

  Ollie shoves his hands in his pockets.

  “Everything all right, then?”

  “Just getting some air,” he says, and looks back across the field.

  “Right. Can get, uh, ha, can get a bit stuffy back in there. That kitchen’s pretty tight.”

  “Have you got a cigarette?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A cigarette.”

  Ollie nods, as if he’s suddenly understood the language Paul’s speaking.

  “A smoke! Right. Yeah, hold on.” He digs in his pockets and pulls out a bent Camel Straight, which Paul takes, and a matchbook, with which Paul lights up.

  “Your sister’ll kill me if she knows I’m smoking, but, ha, hey. Last night of freedom or something, right?”

  “Thanks,” he says, and exhales. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your guests or something?”

  An airplane passes overhead, its lights upstaging the stars, and Ollie rubs his head.

  “Yeah, probably,” he says, but doesn’t move.

  Paul holds the cigarette in front of him and watches it burn. It’s stale—he wonders how long it’s been stashed away in Ollie’s pocket—but all he can think is that he hopes it lasts forever, because when it’s over he has to go back to worrying about the mess he’s made.

  “How long were you standing in the kitchen?” he asks.

  “Oh, me? Not long. Just came in to see how the gougères were shaping up and saw you and Eloise talking. Probably about five seconds.”

  He’s lying, which means he heard everything, Paul thinks. Suddenly, he wants Ollie to stay.

  “You coming back in?”

  Paul watches smoke drift skyward. “Not for a while, I don’t think.”

  He feels a tap on his shoulder. When he turns, he sees Ollie is holding out a five-pound note.

  “There’s a pub about two kilometers down the road. I’ll go inside and call you a cab,” he says. Then: “And, Paul, she means well. I know sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, but I swear to God she does.”

  * * *

  The Thirsty Lion is a forgettable, prosaic place, which suits Paul’s mood. Exposed wood beams and dank green walls. A long wood bar and a rectangular dining room with mismatched vinyl chairs. Above the cashier, a casual coat of arms. The smell of beer and Lysol—an army of cleaning solutions fighting an uphill battle. Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” warbling on the room’s single speaker. He orders a whiskey.

  There’s a part of him that’s still furious at his mother. She deceived him, goddamn it. She conned him into thinking one thing in order to shield him from another; she treated him like a child. Had he just known what Bill had said, how his father had felt, he could have started some process of healing. At the very least, he could have avoided being eviscerated by Eloise in a country from which he can’t wait to escape. His mother had robbed him of that opportunity, though, and had taken it upon herself to decide what was best for him. It was an exercise in parental tyranny, he thinks to himself. Plain and simple.

  And yet, curiously, his rage, the white-hot indignation that’s fueled him for the past three years, is fading fast. Because once he strips away his knee-jerk anger, his contrarian disposition, how terrible had Donna’s decision actually been? How justified is Paul in vilifying her? She had lied—that much is true. It was a lie of omission, but it was still a lie. But the intentions of that lie were purer than any truth he can presently conceive: to protect him from his own ruin, a propensity for self-destruction that she understands better than he ever will himself. Eloise was right: she had saved him. It was a salvation based on false pretenses, but does that necessarily make it any less real? Was he not spared regardless? Can you smoke in this place? He looks down the long stretch of bar and doesn’t see a single ashtray. He sucks on a fistful of peanuts instead.

  God, he’s been awful to Donna. If he could disappear into the glass in front of him, he would. Just crawl beneath an ice cube and let the whiskey wash over him. He closes his eyes and thinks of how certain he’d been of his anger toward her. “She erased Dad from our life, so I’m erasing her from mine”—those had been his words to Mark, the reductive and solipsistic foundation for his righteousness. How many of her calls had he let roll over to voice mail? How many of those voice mails did he delete before listening to them? During the holidays he never opened her Christmas cards; he threw them into the trash with pamphlets of Best Buy coupons and direct-mail ads from real estate agents. Whenever Alice passed along news about her—that she was remodeling the kitchen, or that she was spending the weekend in Indiana—he consciously forgot it. A sudden, drunken epiphany: Paul can’t account for two years and eight months of Donna’s life; two years and eight months estrange them.

  He’s already drunk, but that doesn’t stop him from ordering a second whiskey as he tries to anticipate the next song on the pub’s playlist. Sting and the Police, he wagers. “Roxanne.” Closing his eyes, he listens and holds his breath. The silence lasts a second shorter than forever, and finally he hears the song’s first few notes. Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” Foiled again.

  Taking his phone out of his pocket, he drops it, retrieves it from the filthy floor, and squints at the screen. The images are blu
rry, and he tries to focus through the boozy fog. He wonders if he should call Mark. The day before, as they were driving to Dorset from London, Alice had made him promise that he wouldn’t; she knew it was something he often did.

  “You get drunk, and sad, and you call people,” she’d said. They were at a gas station, filling up the Peugeot. “Just … don’t do that this time around. In fact, give me your phone.”

  “Knock it off.”

  “You’re going to do it.”

  The pump clicked; the tank was full.

  “I am not,” Paul had said.

  “You will, and you’ll regret it in the morning. It’ll just be another story for Mark to tell.”

  Now, swaying on his stool, typing and retyping his password into his phone, he thinks, What the fuck does she know? He needs to talk to someone, someone who knows him, and Mark knows him. They were together when his dad died, and Mark watched Paul grieve. Yes, he thinks. Mark. He’s the right person to call.

  He’s seeing double, so he closes his left eye and concentrates on finding his contacts. Scrolling down, he finds Mark’s name.

  A woman’s shrieking laughter diverts his attention, and he drops his phone again.

  “Shit,” he slurs, and glances over to where the sound is coming from. The woman laughing looks to be about his age. She’s an English rose type—delicate features, with a lithe, boyish body in a slim blue dress. A man’s arm is wrapped around her waist, and he’s kissing the spot where her neck meets her shoulders, and Paul’s got to blink twice and rub both his eyes before he can put two and two together and realize that the man is Henrique.

  Henrique. Wait, he thinks. And then: shit. Because Henrique is supposed to be with Donna—yes, this much he knows. And more important, he should be at their daughter’s rehearsal dinner. He drags his mind through the sludge and tries to get his bearings, his sense of who’s currently being wronged and whom he should currently hate. Donna had spent the day with Henrique, and came back flushed and excited. And now he’s here, sliding into second base with some cut-rate Kate Moss, while Donna wanders around an old British manse, munching on lukewarm cheese puffs, alone. No, Paul decides. Firmly: no. His mother’s suffered through enough without having to contend with a replay of Henrique’s philandering. And besides, if anyone has a monopoly on fucking her over, it’s him.