The People We Hate at the Wedding

by Grant Ginder

  He stands, wobbles, and regains his balance before steeling himself. Paul has made a decision. Paul is a man possessed.

  “Excuse me.”

  He jabs a finger into Henrique’s shoulder, and Henrique detaches himself from the girl’s neck. Paul’s drunk, but his double vision can see the first bruised marks of a hickey.

  “Yes?”

  “What—what do you mean yes?” Paul focuses on appearing stern and disappointed, and on not slurring.

  Henrique blinks. “Paul,” he says. “I didn’t recognize you. Why aren’t you at the party? You look unwell.”

  “And who’s your—your friend?”

  “Paul.” Henrique leans forward and puts a hand on Paul’s shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Let us call you a taxi. You’re drunk.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re an asshole.”

  A single couple occupies the pub’s small dining room, and they look up from their menus.

  The English rose clears her throat and tucks her clutch beneath her left arm. “Maybe I should go,” she says.

  “You stay right where you are,” Paul says, blocking her way. “I won’t be long.” He turns, once again, to face Henrique. “You’re an asshole.”

  Henrique straightens his lapel and licks his lips. “Your mother and I had a lovely day,” he says.

  “Not that lovely, evidently.”

  “Are you going to let me finish?”

  Paul raises an eyebrow.

  Henrique continues.

  “We had a lovely day. But sometimes these things … they don’t work out.”

  “Yeah?” Paul rocks back on his heels, and then forward onto his toes. “Does she know that?”

  “I—I’m sure she’ll understand once she does.”

  Paul tries to decipher what song is playing. He listens for recognizable chords or lyrics, but the sounds are all blending together into a mess of clanks and strums and crashes.

  He wipes his nose and says, “She deserves—deserved—better than you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’s a good lady.” He shoves his finger at Henrique again, this time burying it into his sternum. “The best lady. And she deserved better.”

  Henrique knocks Paul’s finger away. “Oh-ho! Better, you say!? She deserved better? And what does this ‘better’ look like, Paul? No—don’t walk away. Please, tell me this. What does this better look like? Does it look like you, Paul? Or Alice? Is that what your mother deserved? Because…”

  But his voice becomes just another sound in the knotty maze of the music, so Paul stops listening. He watches Henrique’s mouth move, but he relieves himself of all responsibility for making sense of what he’s saying. Instead, he does the only thing he deems logical—the only thing that, in his compromised state of consciousness, where reason is reduced to dos and don’ts, to eithers and ors, makes absolute sense: he whips out his dick and starts pissing on Henrique. He had to go anyway, he figures, and what better place to go than this.

  The English rose screams, but Paul doesn’t stop; he believes it’s always better to finish what one’s started. Soon, though, he senses a greater commotion gathering around him: the bartender, rushing out from behind the bar; patrons shouting, pointing; a chair being knocked against a stuffed stag head; and finally, Henrique’s fist, clocking him squarely on the left side of his jaw. He feels the vague and far-off chatter of his teeth rattling and of the room spinning away from him; as white glacial light closes in around him, Henrique’s piss-soaked suit sinks farther and farther into the distance. He falls backward, then, as his vision becomes a pinprick of something resembling the truth. And within it all—thanks be to karma, or to a God Who Understands, or to that strange and imperfect force that governs when sunflowers bloom in August and when lilies die in fall, there’s a final and unexpected touch of grace: in the split second before Paul’s head smashes miserably into the cold wood floor, the lights—blissfully—go out.

  Alice

  July 11

  “I don’t think I’ve ever bailed anyone out of prison before.”

  Alice shuts the door of the Peugeot, buckles her seat belt, and slips the keys into the ignition. But she doesn’t start the car.

  “I’m sure that’s not true. And it’s not prison. It’s jail.” Paul leans his head against the window and gazes forward at the small, squat police station where he spent the night. Alice can still smell the whiskey on his skin; she’s pretty sure he’s still drunk.

  She says, “You’re right. Sophomore year of college I bailed Jackie Rubenstein out of jail in West Hollywood after she handcuffed herself to a lamppost on Santa Monica and Robertson. But that was different. Jackie was protesting changes to the water rights legislation in the Central Valley. I should have said that I’ve never bailed someone out for peeing on a man.”

  The clock on the dashboard reads 8:05. She’s due at Horwood Hall in an hour to get her hair and makeup done with the rest of the bridal party, and she still hasn’t showered. Paul just keeps staring at the window. A bruise is starting to bloom along the right side of his jaw, where Henrique clocked him.

  “No one’s going to press any charges,” Alice says. “I mean, you got drunk and pissed on someone in a country that’s full of drunks who piss on people. The woman at the front desk in the station hardly batted an eye about the whole thing. This is standard fare for these folks.”

  “Fuck,” he says, and rubs a hand over his face, like he’s trying to erase it.

  “You’ll be okay.”

  Finally, Alice starts the car.

  “Did you hear what Eloise said?” Paul asks.

  “I did.”

  She thinks back to last night, the rehearsal dinner, when Eloise approached her. Alice had been huddled over an empty cocktail, digging through her purse for a Klonopin, when her sister grabbed her arm and dragged her into a bathroom. I think I just did something terrible, she’d said.

  They’d spoken about it again this morning. At a quarter to six, just as the sun was beginning to crest the low eastern hills, Eloise had crept into Alice’s room at Tenderway Glen and woken her by gently shaking her shoulder.

  “What the—” Alice blinked and rubbed her eyes.

  “I have a key,” Eloise said, and then climbed to the other side of Alice so she could lie down next to her and stare at the ceiling. “I’m worried about Paul. He’s not in his room.”

  “He’s probably just licking his wounds somewhere.” She was still half asleep. “Does Mom know you’re here?”

  “No.” Eloise reached behind her for a pillow and held it over her face. Releasing it after a few seconds, she said, “Do you really think he’s okay? I can’t believe I said all that to him. God, I hope he’s okay.”

  “I mean, what he said to Ollie’s parents was insane. But yes. I think Paul is okay. We’re basically just surrounded by a bunch of sheep. What could possibly happen to him?”

  “But still, what I said was awful.” She picked a feather from the pillow and turned it over on her palm.

  Alice said nothing. Instead, she watched as a sliver of light stretched across the room’s western wall. As it grew, she thought of what Jonathan said to her two nights ago, how he’d written her off completely. She thought of her phone, currently balanced on the windowsill—a two-inch-thick piece of wood—because that’s the only place in the bedroom where she gets any service, and, until she finally fell asleep last night, she was still toying with the notion that Jonathan might call back to apologize.

  Jonathan. She replayed their conversation again, turning it over in her mind until the words lost their meaning. She remembered the part where he implied that she was some sort of whore; she remembered loathing herself enough to believe him. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  Before she could stop herself, she said, “Do you think I might be able to talk to Ollie about that job still? Just to find out more about it, I mean. Like, does that offer still stand?”

  “I don’t
see why not.”

  “Well, I’d like to, if it’s okay with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that for me.”

  “That’s not why I’m doing it,” Alice said.

  “I thought you said you liked L.A.”

  “I was kidding myself. It’s an awful place. I’m tired of the beach.”

  “Ollie—both of us—we just … we thought it would be a good fit, you know. No one thinks you’re not capable—”

  “I know. I realize that. I’m grateful.”

  They lay there on the bed together for a few minutes longer, afraid that if they rose they’d disrupt the mutual understanding of each other into which they’d just stumbled. And now Alice suspects they would have kept on lying there—not speaking, just listening to each other breathe—right on through that afternoon’s ceremonies had Paul not called (collect) to inform Alice of his whereabouts.

  “You can go back to your normally scheduled wedding,” Alice said once she hung up the phone. “Our brother’s just in jail.”

  Back in the Peugeot, she cranes her neck from side to side and squints into the sun.

  Next to her, Paul says, “Thanks for coming to get me.”

  “What was I going to do, let you rot away?”

  “I couldn’t call Eloise,” Paul says. “And Mom … oh, God…” He trails off.

  Henrique hadn’t needed to call anyone; he had a thousand pounds in the breast pocket of his blazer and had been able to arrange for his own release. Paul, though, had only had the five quid that Ollie had given him outside Horwood Hall, which he’d already used on the taxi that brought him to the Thirsty Lion—where, incidentally, he’d left his tab unpaid once he was arrested.

  Paul asks her, “And did you know about Dad? Had you known?”

  Alice turns the car off again. She knew he was going to ask, she was just hoping that they’d already be somewhere along the highway when he did so she could feign concentration on driving and avoid the sort of authenticity the conversation demanded. Had she known? It’s an excellent question to which she’s certain her brother deserves an answer. Yes. She had. Not explicitly—Alice learned last night that Donna had only told Eloise—but that didn’t matter; theirs was a family that communicated most effectively via the implicit, anyway. If anything, she was surprised at her brother’s willful ignorance.

  “I think … I think I figured it out,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  Paul chews on a fingernail and spits it out the window.

  “I’ve been so terrible to Mom,” he says.

  “We both have.”

  “Does she know about Henrique and that girl?”

  Alice shakes her head.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She can’t know,” Paul says. “At least not yet. We have to—I want to protect her from that.” He adds, “I just want her to enjoy the wedding.”

  “Okay.”

  Paul slumps down in the seat.

  “I was going to call her instead of you. To pick me up, I mean.”

  “I think it’s good you didn’t.”

  “When she does find out, she’s going to be devastated.”

  “I hope not,” Alice says. “But yes, probably.”

  Paul leans forward and presses his forehead against the dashboard.

  “Oh, God.”

  Alice reaches forward and grabs his shoulder.

  “Hey, look at me,” she says. “Look at me. What you did?” She nods toward the police station. “What you did for Mom?”

  Paul looks at her. His eyes are all veins.

  “You did a good thing.”

  Paul

  The Wedding

  Sherborne Abbey traces its roots back to A.D. 705, when Saint Aldhelm arrived in Dorset with his educated and cosmopolitan brand of Christianity. Still, people who concern themselves with the vague and foggy past of the church say there’s every reason to believe that some other pile of bricks stood in the abbey’s place before his arrival; some testament to a Celtic and barbarian form of worship.

  If they’re right, if some earlier church did exist, then Aldhelm got rid of it. In the same way sixth-century Christians conveniently turned the Parthenon, that improbably gorgeous tribute to Pallas Athena, into a temple for the Virgin Mary, Aldhelm insinuated himself into religion’s epic tradition of reappropriation. Appalled by the barbarism he saw among Dorset’s shallow hills and hollows, he wrote off the backward breed of Christianity being practiced: sacraments wantonly breaking stoic rules of orthodoxy; toothless locals celebrating Easter in July. And so he, at the behest of his superior, one King Ine of Wessex, took it upon himself to build a cathedral.

  None of that original building exists anymore. In fact, the Saxon architecture around the abbey’s western door was actually taken from a building that postdates Aldhelm’s reign as bishop of Sherborne. That doesn’t mean the structure isn’t old—two of the chapels were built in the thirteenth century, and the choir was finished sometime in the 1400s. Still, none of it can be traced to when Aldhelm first rode into town. Since then, thanks to a series of political maneuverings and redistrictings; to royal christenings and marriages and—in the case of Henry VIII—divorce; to the sort of backroom decisions and betrayals that turn England’s idyllic countryside into a chessboard, the abbey has changed. Now, like much of England, it’s as much a mausoleum as it is anything else, a crypt that holds a country’s disintegrating foundations as a relentless and horrific future barrels in.

  And apparently, Paul thinks, it’s a future without air-conditioning. He glances back down at the wedding program, on the back of which is printed this brief sketch of the abbey’s past—a history that he’s read and reread no fewer than ten times. He fans himself with the thick card stock, but it only makes him hotter. He checks his watch. He’s trying to ignore his hangover; he’s trying to be a good sport, but what the fuck: the wedding was supposed to start fifteen minutes ago.

  He wipes sweat from his forehead and the back of his neck. Five minutes earlier, a small commotion broke out in the back of the church, and when he turned around he saw an elderly woman being led outside, her fascinator lying impotent and forgotten on the stone floor. Fainted from the heat, he heard someone say from where he was sitting, in the pew at the front of the church. And Christ—he believes it. He can’t remember the last time he was so hot. On the drive over to the church he heard a BBC report on record temperatures sweltering all over the country. Really, it’s this goddamned morning suit. No man should be required to wear a waistcoat and a morning coat with tails down to his ass on a day when you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. He dries his palms on his trousers, which are pin-striped and cut from thick, scratchy wool. Like pajama pants, he thinks. Ones I’d never be caught dead in.

  Turning around, he looks toward the church’s entrance, past rows upon rows of similarly miserable men and women. He scans the pews, searching for Henrique, and gives up when he can’t find him. Probably fucking the twenty-year-old from last night in the rectory. Paul lifts an eyebrow; he shouldn’t be crude, at least not here. He’s not religious, but his natural inclination for guilt takes over whenever he’s in church.

  A drop of sweat works its way down his spine and settles near the top of his ass. He turns back around.

  The string quartet in the north aisle of the nave cues up Chopin’s Nocturne in E-Flat Major for the fifth time, and Paul closes his eyes, lets himself, and his hangover, get lost in the pockets of the wide melody. He sinks down and rests his neck on the back of the pew; when he opens his eyes again, he’s staring at the ceiling. There’s an instant when he’s sure he’s going to be sick—the abbey’s fan vaulting is that dizzyingly intricate, that spectacular. Lines spread out and converge again like hands folding, and in the spaces that those lines create Paul sees tiled mosaics, blocks of deep blue and crimson and green and gold.

  He checks his watch again. Another five minutes have ticked by, and there’s no sign that anyone plans on starting soon. No priest; no groom;
no Pachelbel’s Canon. Where the hell is everyone? he thinks. It makes sense that Alice isn’t here, given that she’s a bridesmaid. But what about his mother? What about Ollie’s mother? What about fucking Eloise?

  He hears footsteps echoing in the north aisle of the nave and sees Donna scurrying past the string quartet. Nearly knocking over the cellist’s music stand, she stops to apologize, then keeps moving.

  “What’s going on?” he whispers once she’s slid into the pew beside him. Peeling himself away from the pew, he feels his shirt cling to his back. “I’m melting in this goddamned suit.”

  “I don’t know.” Donna’s cheeks are flushed, and Paul can see faint paths where sweat has streaked her makeup. “She’s just—she doesn’t want to do it.”

  “Doesn’t want to do what?”

  “This!” Donna juts her chin toward the altar and then dabs at her forehead with a handkerchief. “She says she doesn’t want to go through with it.” Then, in case Paul didn’t understand her: “She’s saying she doesn’t want to get married.”

  “Does she know that people are literally fainting from the heat in here? An old lady collapsed on the floor. Ruined her goddamned fascinator and everything.”

  “Ollie’s aunt is fine. I saw her outside drinking water. And please stop saying ‘goddamned’ in church.”

  “Well, does Eloise know?”

  “Of course she knows.” Donna folds the handkerchief and slips it into her purse. “But right now she’s got other things on her mind.”

  “Well, what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” he asks his mother.

  Donna says, “Wait. I tried talking to her, and Alice is out there now. In the meantime, there’s nothing we can do but wait for her to make up her mind.” She adds, with less than perfect conviction, “It’s her decision, after all.”