The Weddings (Inheritance collection)

by Alexander Chee

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Alexander Chee

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542008488

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  The two weddings Jack and Caleb attended in the first year they were together would each become stories they told again and again in the years to come, until the weddings came to seem like visitors at the cradle of their own relationship, conferring gifts and wisdom, and not at all like the awkwardly human social events they had once been.

  The first wedding had been for friends of Caleb’s, two white gay men who had been together ten years, able to marry at last. In a Catskills campground rented for the ceremony weeks after the Supreme Court ruling, the couple declared their handwritten vows to each other in front of a massive wooden bear carved by a chain saw, a gold necklace with the word love hanging from its neck and a bouquet tied to each paw. Each groom threw one to the crowd after they were married. The happy couple drove off in a vintage Corvette convertible, strings of cans clanking as they left, and then drove back, horns honking, to the laughter of the assembled group, and the celebration began. The party lasted well into the morning. The ceremony was intimate and funny and full of people who had all known each other a long time, except for Jack, but everyone treated him as if he’d always been there.

  This was Jack’s first gay wedding somehow, and while it was perhaps the most fun wedding he’d ever been to, Jack knew that as Caleb’s plus-one he was being scrutinized carefully by Caleb’s friends, in some new way he never had been before: as a possible husband. They joked about his suitability for Caleb, and at some point he understood this was what it was like for his straight friends—what it had always been like.

  While no previous boyfriend of Jack’s had ever bothered with the question of whether Jack might be suitable to marry, at least that Jack knew of, Jack had never asked this question about them, either. And that he was now getting this treatment because it was the first year of “federal marriage,” this felt almost ominous. At age forty-two, he felt as if he had moved to another country while staying in the same place.

  What was a federal gay marriage like? If this was any example, it involved a wedding with line dancing, a glitter cannon, Frozé and cheeseburgers served at midnight, and then afterward, everyone got high around a campfire and wandered back to their rented cabins, mostly with the people they came with. There had been two stag parties that became one as the strippers hired for the weekend led each groom to the other, symbolic of the night they’d met at a club with go-go dancers—and the strippers were friends of the couple and a couple themselves, recently married, as he learned at the reception. There was rehearsal-night karaoke, with Caleb absolutely nailing “Hot Child in the City,” and Jack receiving much applause for “Over the Rainbow,” sung with a recklessly improvised falsetto that made him a hero to many there. As the assembled group congratulated him, Jack understood he was at last inside a story like the ones he’d been seeing in the newspapers, stories of longtime queer couples marrying after many years together. The ordinary heterosexual marriages, on the Vows pages, describing couples who had met a year or two previous, now seemed too abrupt, unions made hastily.

  Jack did have another mission, if a quiet one. It was almost as simple as How many Asian American friends does Caleb have? But in fact it was more complex than that. Jack had put Caleb through a protocol he hadn’t described for him. He’d checked his photos for past Asian American boyfriends (one, also Korean, like Jack). Checked his friends group for other people of color (many). He had only ever dated a bona fide rice queen once, and he never wanted to make that mistake again. That someone might like you just for your ethnicity was its own violence. But the diverse crowd of celebrants reassured him that what he wanted to believe about Caleb was true, and so he let this fear go.

  By the time Caleb fell asleep on Jack in an Adirondack chair at the reception, Jack was entirely enchanted by the idea of marrying, and marrying Caleb in particular. They had been sitting talking about something Jack no longer remembers. He sipped at his drink in a careful way so as not to rouse Caleb, content to watch him sleep. It was even suspenseful: Caleb had a full glass in his hand and hadn’t dropped it the whole time, which both impressed and moved him. In the first minutes, he imagined Caleb had to be awake still in order to hold the glass, and was simply enjoying the contact of their bodies like Jack was. The bright line of it was like if you could feel the first light of dawn in the space between two people. But Caleb was truly asleep, and once Jack knew this, he stayed put. Besides, the line had become richer, and the bright seam grew to be a river of light and warmth. Waking him meant interrupting this, and Jack wanted to go wherever this river was taking him. A secret he had not yet admitted to Caleb: it felt healing to be pressed against him. As if some wound he never knew he had healed itself more each time they touched.

  “This is so adorable,” a woman friend of the newlyweds who’d danced with them earlier said as she passed by. He nodded, and she winked. But Caleb didn’t feel that way when he woke up. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he asked Jack. He felt a little betrayed, even a little embarrassed that the other guests had been dancing around him while he slept.

  “I . . . like watching you sleep,” Jack said.

  “That’s creepy,” Caleb said, frowning. And then he took a sip from his carefully held glass of wine, giving him a look of mixed suspicion and affection. “Cheers.”

  “Jack was entirely enchanted by the idea of marrying, and marrying Caleb in particular.”

  Much of what Jack found charming about the wedding, when they compared notes the next morning, put Caleb on edge. Caleb, Jack discovered, was a monogamist who was also against marriage, but Caleb eventually admitted in the car back to New York he was at least intrigued by the way the wedding was so intimately a product of the couple’s lives. A conversation about marriage, the seemingly inevitable by-product of attending one together, had begun, and it would continue over the years.

  Caleb’s passing compliment about the quality of his friends’ nuptials was enough for Jack to keep feeling something like the hope of getting married to Caleb, even though he had said in the same conversation that he didn’t want to marry. And yet the feeling of wanting to marry someone was so unfamiliar, it was terrifying, and so he pushed it into a little box behind his heart for two months, and he kept it there until this next wedding invitation arrived, from Scott. When he took it out again.

  Scott was Jack’s white friend from college most likely to end up in a Korean wedding ceremony. He had dated a series of Asian women for his entire life, as if auditioning them for a role, and most of them were Korean. He called Jack personally from his office in Palo Alto with the news that he was going to be married “at last.” Would Jack come? And of course, he could bring someone. Jack said yes and thanked him before he could stop himself.

  He recalled that the last time they’d seen each other, Scott, who worked in private equity, had just begun dating his bride to be, Soon-mi, anot
her private equity fund partner, from a different fund—they’d met on a deal. She was a Korean American woman from the suburbs near Niagara Falls. The wedding would be there and last a weekend. There was to be a Korean ceremony and a Western one, and Scott expressly hoped Jack would be there for the Korean ceremony, as he was, as he put it, “my first Korean friend.”

  “I have to carry my future mother-in-law on my back,” Scott said and laughed knowingly, as if of course Jack knew he’d have to do this—though Jack did not in fact know this. Jack’s mother and father had never spoken to him, not once, about how Koreans married, and his siblings had both chosen to marry “in a Western way” without once seeming to consider a traditional Korean wedding. It had never come up. He had come out to them at an early age, and so maybe they’d decided he didn’t need to know. But this was the sort of guessing he was used to doing with his parents, who had emigrated in the 1960s, and were more committed to assimilation than later generations. They tended to treat their Korean heritage like they were in the witness protection program and could never speak of their country of origin, at least not in any detail to anyone who didn’t already know about it. Their children included. This had meant he felt uncomfortable even asking questions about Korean culture, and the resulting silence was something he still didn’t know how to break, for the way that it had grown up around him. He wondered what they’d think of this split ceremony, and hoped to tell them about it after he’d seen it.

  After he and Scott said goodbye, he stared at the phone in his hand as if it had betrayed him. This invitation had startled Jack. He and Scott had been repairing their friendship slowly for years and then had just kind of stopped. It had been almost two years since he’d heard from Scott, and Jack’s understanding was that nothing was wrong—they had just become very different people, and there was almost no way to explain that, and also, no need. But then why had he said yes?

  He texted Caleb. Do you want to go to another wedding? They’d had so much fun at the last one, it was almost a promise of new fun.

  Ok fine, Caleb wrote back. Who is it?

  Early in their relationship Jack and Caleb had completed what Jack thought of as their gay family tree—naming their serious boyfriends and first loves, and telling some of their stories. But Scott was like a secret Jack had only half told to himself, outside of any ordinary recount. There was a story Jack usually told about Scott, when he did, and it was in no way going to be sufficient for Caleb. And it would not explain why he had accepted the invitation, or invited Caleb—it would only create more questions.

  At the time Jack met Scott on the novice crew team, he was unlike anyone he’d ever met. Most of the team didn’t have much muscle when they began, but Scott did. He wore gold wire-rimmed glasses, liked listening to Def Leppard, played Dungeons & Dragons, often argued the conservative position in disagreements about politics, and wore pleated pants. A giant nerd with a radiant boy-next-door sexiness, his button nose was the kind people would bring a photo of to their plastic surgeon, and the tan line at his waist would flash as his shirt rode up, front and back, in ways Jack has never forgotten. They rowed bow seat and two seat, and Scott, technically shorter by an inch, sat behind him. But there was something else that set him apart.

  “I feel Korean inside,” he told Jack early into their friendship, which had made Jack so confused it was almost easier to just accept it. They laughed together the first time he said it, as if at a shared joke, even as Jack struggled with the questions he didn’t even know how to ask himself. Had he himself ever felt Korean inside, for example? How would he know? Wouldn’t it just feel like . . . himself? Whatever he’d felt, it was probably not what Scott felt. But also, he was Korean American, not Korean, a distinction he had never been able to explain sufficiently to the white people in his life so far, but then again, he had never met anyone white who had asked, or was even this interested in Koreans, much less someone who wanted to become one. In Maine, where he was from, most of the white people his own age in the 1970s didn’t even know how to pronounce “Korea.”

  Scott, meanwhile, behaved like someone preparing for citizenship, or more than that really—preparing to leave not just his family but also his culture, and never return. He knew more about Korean history than Jack did, and had studied Korean in high school—something Jack had avoided, as it had usually meant going to the Korean evangelical church. This was a time when it was common for Koreans to treat Korean Americans like badly educated Koreans, and his conversations with Scott even reminded him a little of those encounters, hangouts awkwardly full of little lessons. He wanted to warn Scott off this plan, if that was what it was, but soon enough, Jack discovered Scott was not so unique—he was just the first of a kind of white man Jack would meet more of—a type. “Rice queens” were what gay men called men like this, and so when one of Scott’s exes called him a rice king to Jack, he could never forget it.

  By the time Jack might have defended himself against Scott, they were friends. And then, against his better judgment, roommates the next year. Scott favored long showers and would sit in their common area in a towel afterward, and Jack would burn each time he walked by, trying to pretend it was ordinary. He never got used to it.

  When Jack came out in the fall of that year, the group of friends he and Scott were a part of briefly underwent a transformation. All of them questioning their sexual identities, as if Jack’s admission had created some kind of gay undertow. Scott showed up at one of the men’s questioning groups on campus, but with another mutual friend, and the jealousy Jack felt startled him. What followed was a year of Scott dating a Chinese American bisexual woman—Sarah—and their joking whenever Jack arrived home that he should join them in one of their seemingly endless showers.

  Jack joked along, but never went into the bathroom. None of this was what he wanted. Instead, he chose another living situation for the next year and began a series of experimental relationships, and spent less time with Scott and his girlfriend and their shower jokes. Scott went on a year abroad after that, first to Korea and then Taiwan, and Jack graduated and moved to New York. Scott returned, and as he needed some more credits, stayed for an extra year. Jack joined ACT UP and Queer Nation, developed a new network of out queer friends, and in general felt he had left the experiments of his youth behind him, including Scott. But then he kept hearing from several different friends from school that Scott had a crush on him.

  That May, Jack went back to school to see a number of his friends graduate, especially Scott. But he was mostly there to call Scott’s bluff. The weekend began with meeting Scott’s new girlfriend, Jen, who for some reason left immediately, and Scott’s parents, who had flown in from California—a rare event. He was very aware in each encounter that weekend—too aware—of being Scott’s gay friend and also his only Asian male friend. The tiny two-person world that was his friendship with Scott reasserted itself, though, and soon everyone else felt like an intruder, or an obstacle. Finally, alone in Scott’s apartment at midnight on Sunday, Scott confessed his feelings for Jack. He had thought about it a lot, he said. He didn’t feel attracted to other men. He didn’t fantasize about other men. Just Jack. Only ever Jack. He concluded this methodical description of his own desires by then inviting Jack to take a shower with him.

  What is it with him and showers? was Jack’s first thought. He was almost too stunned to answer. The next thing he said was hilarious to him because it was true. “I . . . I don’t like to shower with other people,” Jack said. Scott’s eyes went wide. “But I’ll make an exception for you.”

  Upstairs, downstairs, in the shower, in the bedroom, on the stairs. How had their friendship been the dull bottle for this richness? And what was there to do now that they knew it could be like this? In his mind, Scott had been his crush and not the other way around. The straight boy with the looks of a young god, the smooth skin that had glowed like stone in the night with the power Jack had always suspected it had, and when touching the torso he’d seen previously
only in the middle distance, he found a rush he’d never known existed. That boy had wanted him, and only him. Jack’s idea of himself and the world turned upside down.

  Jack drove away that morning, back to his life in New York, entirely confused. Wasn’t it just another college fling? It wasn’t.

  The problem, as he understood it, had many features.

  Before Scott, he’d had lots of sex with men. And afterward too. But that night with Scott felt so different, he hadn’t felt like himself at all. It was as if he’d never had sex. For all of his activist rhetoric then about queer lives, he had never had sex with a man he loved. He hadn’t known what it would be like, or even how to anticipate it. How it would be almost like having sex for the first time, or really, the reinvention of sex, but also the reinvention of him. He’d had good sex, even great sex, and would go on to have more of it, and yet even now he would still sometimes stand somewhere and think of Scott, and the ghost of that night would glow in the dark in front of him, replaying with uncanny sharpness.

  Also, Scott had been so good at it, unnervingly so, and so much better at it than a straight man might have been. Which left Jack with questions of course, and the desire to do it all and more again.

  And then Scott disappeared from his life for ten years.

  When Jack and Scott had lost track of each other in the mid-1990s, you could expect to do that and never see someone again. Ten years later, in 2005, you could expect to find someone just by Googling him, and so he had. Jack found his number at work and called him up. Scott answered and, when Jack said hello, laughed like it was Christmas and shouted his name. “When did we last see each other?”

  Jack tried to figure out how to tell him. “We . . . it was—”

  “Boy did we have fun,” Scott said, laughing.

  Scott’s first question had shocked him. I’ve written you out of my memory, so sorry if it was an event that changed your life. The joyful laughter, though, now threw him into another universe—one in which he hadn’t been left alone all that time for being someone or something Scott regretted, much less forgotten.