The Weddings (Inheritance collection)

by Alexander Chee

  It had seemed like fun. More than that, actually. The image of Scott as he had been that morning, wrapped in a sheet, grinning, as if what had happened between them was almost ordinary, returned. His sheepishly happy face. The blue eyes glowing at him with promise as the door closed.

  They were supposed to hang out that summer after graduation but Scott had gone home to San Bernardino and had not come through New York as he’d promised. A season turned into a year, and then two, and then a decade. Jack went from embarrassed to devastated to abandoned, and it was a feeling he was alone with, partly because of himself. He had told people about the night, and all of them registered it as a triumph, and that was easier and less painful than telling them the truth. Yes, let it be a victory of some kind. Yes, wasn’t it so great, high five, way to recruit. His audience acted as if the one time was something he should be satisfied with, but as the most visible gay man of his class in college, he’d been a target for men looking to experiment. He’d had a lot of one-times. He didn’t think he had the right to feel abandoned, but as the months and years went on, he did.

  He had never wondered if Scott had also been changed. But he did now. All those years leading up to it, of telling other people, of analyzing his feelings, laying the path down that Jack had followed to his door. What was it like for him—what had it meant to him?

  After their phone call, Scott finally came to visit. He was an older, more muscular version of himself. Better dressed, better glasses, but the same slightly shielded smile. Still wearing pleated pants. They met up and hugged fiercely, and then walked around New York together, telling each other their stories of the last ten years. Jack’s story was of working in LGBT media and magazines there in New York, trying to put together a revolution advertisers could support. Scott’s story was about his attempt to put his family’s small California bank into the big leagues, fulfilling his father’s dreams by enlarging its assets. He’d been in San Bernardino, at that bank, at work when Jack had called him. But he was not a stranger to New York. He even had an apartment here for when he was in town for deals. In Brooklyn Heights.

  “How long have you had the apartment?” Jack had to ask.

  “Oh, probably four years.”

  The hundred-hundred moments he might have accidentally run into Scott and hadn’t, these began to populate his mind, resolving into the time he had stood and wept at the edge of the Brooklyn Heights overpass, staring out into the water, begging to be rid of the love he had for an ex. What it would have been like to run into Scott that night.

  They made a plan to go to dinner, and the weather got colder. Scott was dressed for it but Jack wasn’t. They could have split up, but instead Scott followed him back to his apartment. Jack changed clothes in the bathroom—it was a studio—out of some odd sense of modesty, and when he emerged Scott was sitting on his bed, reading one of his porn mags. Something he had to dig for to find. Which meant he’d been nosing around the apartment.

  “Ready to go?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t see a lot of dick in Fresno,” Scott said with a smile, as if that explained it, and wistfully closed the magazine, setting it back in its hiding place.

  Jack wondered if that was even possibly true, as any number of other reactions pushed up to the surface. Wasn’t there lots of dick everywhere? Especially online? Wasn’t that just the world? Certainly in New York, where Scott also kept an apartment. And also, why was he in Fresno?

  Together, Scott and Jack had been the white boy who wanted to become Korean, and the Korean American boy who wanted someone to think he was normal, even admirable, and they had seen each other through that period. And become something else.

  Over dinner, they talked about the night itself. “You know, you’re still the only guy whose dick I’ve touched.”

  Jack blinked, wondering if anyone at a nearby table had heard this. “The only one?”

  “The only one.” Scott toasted him. Jack would swear he had blushed.

  Next, they made an attempt to address the years-long silence. Jack said he felt like he couldn’t search for him, feeling that he had perhaps ruined their friendship by letting something happen that he shouldn’t have let happen. Scott surprised him, even did better than Jack did, offering a fairly sophisticated piece of self-analysis that concluded with him saying he believed it was an intimacy issue. Specifically his willingness to retreat from anyone he cared about. A way of testing them. “I’m in therapy for this, so, please forgive me, but it seems it’s a sign of how much I love you if you don’t hear from me.”

  Jack held his breath.

  “I . . . guess if you don’t hear from me, I love you a lot.” Scott’s beautiful eyes were wide with fear as he said it.

  How long he had wanted to hear something like this. But that made him mistrust it. He still loved Scott, so much, and yet as he examined the pain spreading across him in the aftermath of this confession, he was, yes, hurt to think Scott had been here so often but another realization made its way in front of these thoughts: Scott was so much trouble, whatever the reason was. A beautiful disaster. This Brooklyn apartment probably wasn’t even the only secret apartment. Who knew what was in Fresno. The long silence was perhaps the least of what could have happened to him. And then came a last thought. Is he performing for me?

  “Cheers to knowing that,” Jack said, realizing he hadn’t said anything at all. And raised his glass.

  The last time he’d seen Scott, they were celebrating their fortieth birthdays together in San Francisco with friends from college. This was two years ago. After deciding to celebrate their birthdays together, they’d expanded the party and invited their entire old crew from Wesleyan, all somehow living out there now. Scott paid for the penthouse at the W Hotel, and all five of them, all turning forty, showed up. They hadn’t all been together in eighteen years.

  During the planning, they had acted as if they intended to have something of a rager. Instead, they had excellent sushi and cocktails, and much conversation, catching up. Scott invited Jack to stay in the hotel suite with him since everyone else lived nearby, and Jack took him up on it. Jack had wondered if Scott still felt anything for him, in a half-hearted sort of way that was also a way of taking it seriously. What would it mean or could it mean if they hooked up again all these years later? And the penthouse itself implied it might be on his mind. Jack was single that year and vulnerable in some way he hadn’t anticipated.

  He was talking to Scott in his bedroom on the second night of the birthday weekend when he noticed a large duffel bag by the far side of the bed. A dildo was visible, gleaming through the open zipper. Also the buckle of a harness. What else was in the bag? He tried to master his face, but Scott noticed Jack noticing. He grinned as he turned back to the bag and zipped it shut. “Whoops.”

  “Whoops?”

  Scott blushed to the roots of his ears. “Soon-mi likes them,” he said. “I mean, I like them too.”

  Jack felt trapped.

  “She’s coming here after you leave,” Scott added.

  “Oh. Well, that’s great that she’s into it also.” What else could he say? The moment passed so quickly he barely knew how to think of it. Mostly what he asked himself was: Why were the toys there, where he could see them? How had that come about? Had Scott left them out on purpose? Did the open bag mean he had just used them, the gleam coming from them being freshly cleaned or . . . or not? He circulated back and forth between the most and least likely interpretations and each time he felt close, the game flipped.

  Scott stood then and there was a wave of feeling between them so vivid it shocked him. He had to have planned the revelation.

  “We’re getting married,” Scott said.

  Jack almost asked, Who’s we? But then he remembered the name. Soon-mi.

  “Oh! Congratulations!”

  “No, I mean, I want to marry her. I will marry her. She’s so beautiful, Jack, you can’t believe it. I haven’t asked her yet, but this might be the time.”

 
; “That’s great,” Jack said, and then he wandered back to his side of the penthouse, confused. Scott was readying the toys for her, the woman he wanted to marry. Or he was coming out to Jack as being into BDSM. Or . . . it was exactly what it looked like.

  “There was a wave of feeling between them so vivid it shocked him.”

  When he finally told Caleb about Scott, he made it a story about sexual experimentation with straight boys who were possibly closeted. Caleb listened carefully, laughed at the right places. He, like Jack’s friends, saw the story of Scott as the story of a victory for one night. When Jack got to the part about the birthday weekend, Caleb said only, “If I’d brought a bag of sex toys with me, no one would see it. Unless I wanted them to.”

  The feeling he’d had in the hotel that night surged through him again, as if it were waiting all that time.

  He knew he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell himself what it all meant. That this made it hard to tell other people, well, this was even harder to explain. It wouldn’t ever be a whole story, he told himself, as he and Caleb began making their preparations to go to Niagara Falls. And it wasn’t going to be the same sort of thing as Caleb’s friends’ wedding. Not at all.

  There had been no traffic for most of the drive from New York up to Niagara Falls until Corning, when a storm came up just as Jack and Caleb approached the town, and the rain fell with such sudden violence, the river flooded until escaping residents filled the highway. The map apps on their phones were immediately useless as roads were closed and the traffic rerouted, and the radio lacked for emergency instructions, as if abandoned. They soon found themselves in the same traffic as the evacuees, and for a few hours it felt as if they also were evacuating. They did the only thing they could do, and followed the movement of the cars ahead of them, crisscrossing the open overpasses in a state of subdued nervousness, until they made their way to the other side. Eventually they were let out onto the highway again, and the trip—and the world also—returned to normal.

  This of course added three hours to the drive that was already six hours, which meant they would arrive too late for the Korean wedding ceremony, but in time for the dinner after. Jack had called Scott in order to warn him, and didn’t hear back until they were outside Buffalo, when Scott eventually texted, telling him not to worry, that he would be able to see the Western ceremony the next day at the nearby golf course. But the text unnerved Jack. The Scott he knew would never have taken this that lightly.

  “Everything okay?” Caleb asked after he’d read the text.

  “Yes,” he said, aware that he didn’t believe it. Jack had the feeling of having ruined the whole weekend by being caught in a flood. Maybe even more than that. The Korean ceremony, well, it was the whole point of his being invited.

  The drive up until the flood had been fun, with them taking turns at the wheel, and once they were out of danger, Caleb proposed they choose karaoke songs for each other, which essentially involved singing along to songs on the radio at the command of the other person. Caleb liked to sing karaoke and was startlingly good at it, having been in show choir as a teenager, and while Jack hadn’t sung much in this life, at least in front of other people, he had gone out to karaoke with Caleb several times since the first wedding, and, after taking a few risks, learned he could be good at it too.

  A Sinatra song came on, “(Love Is) The Tender Trap,” and Caleb nodded at him. “This one is all you.” Jack rolled his eyes but to his surprise, it suited his voice perfectly, and after it was over, he found he could repeat it effortlessly from memory, even lingering on some of the verses. Like he was suddenly a character in a musical.

  “Look at you, Sinatra,” Caleb said. “Maybe you can sing it for the newlyweds.”

  Jack wasn’t used to weddings. His friends were mostly people who didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t—until this year—marry. Now that he was going to weddings, he had become aware there was an etiquette to them he didn’t know or understand, small ways he had screwed up even with his brothers’ weddings that haunted him still. He hadn’t known about the etiquette around gifts, for example—to ask if there was a registry, and to buy the gift within the year. The RSVP card for Scott’s wedding was in his bag, as if he could hand it over when he arrived.

  But for all that he was unused to weddings, he liked how he and Caleb already felt like old hands at attending them together. This was only their second as a couple and yet their luggage sat comfortably in the back of the rental car, even familiarly so, and their suit bags hung together off of the window hook behind the driver’s seat. But when he turned onto the street Google Maps had led them to, and the “Done” icon appeared on his phone as they pulled up to the bride’s parents’ mansion in suburban Buffalo, he knew this feeling had lulled him into a false sense of calm. He hadn’t acknowledged, even to himself, much less Caleb, how little he knew about who his old college friend Scott was now. Jack was almost sorry to arrive.

  A large and unfamiliar crowd wandered in and out, like at a busy open house. As they grabbed their suit bags and headed inside, Jack searched the lawn for even a sign of the end of the Korean ceremony, but the mostly white crowd suggested to him not only that the ceremony might still be going on but that perhaps the white guests had felt somehow absolved from attending. Or had they not even been told? There was not a single person Jack knew in sight, not even Scott’s parents.

  “It’s all just putting on a show,” Caleb observed as they entered the house. “A play. Here we are backstage, our entrance is next.” And with that observation, it did seem magically to become one. They passed a line of waiters, all in black, like a troupe of attractive formal mimes, who observed them silently in return. He had the fantasy of starting up a verse from “(Love Is) The Tender Trap,” and leading them all into the main room for a rousing musical number, like in an Elvis musical. Instead, the catering captain directed them to a massive bathroom off the kitchen where they changed into their suits, and he smiled gamely as Caleb snapped a selfie with them both.

  “Is there a wedding hashtag?”

  “I don’t think it’s that kind of wedding,” Jack replied.

  He watched as Caleb edited it for Instagram, the colors and textures changing as he did so. They looked good together in the photo—Caleb had red hair he’d let grow long that summer, down to his ears, and his blue eyes matched his royal-blue suit, which he’d worn with a beautiful white shirt that Jack coveted. Jack had chosen a khaki suit with a purple gingham shirt, and had gone to the barber for a fade haircut like the one he remembered from his father’s old Korean army photos, and he liked the result. When Caleb hit “Post,” he said, “We look like we’re the ones getting married.”

  “We can go to the quickie chapels in Niagara this weekend and make it a surprise,” Jack said, and kissed his cheek, nervous at his joke. He watched it float out across the space between them.

  “Hey, surprise! We’re married too. Can you imagine?”

  “Is that the caption?”

  “Oh, hell no. My mom would die. Or drive here to kill me for marrying without her.”

  They walked outside to a backyard full of round tables set up on the grass, the guests walking up to them to leave a wineglass at a place setting and then line up for the ample buffet. If it was all just putting on a show, Jack knew he didn’t know his lines yet. It was August, a hot time for a wedding. Jack and Caleb followed suit—at last, a clear thing to do!—and found the sort of food that both surprised Jack even as it was what he expected: salmon in trays, rice pilaf, steamed broccoli, salad, pasta salad. There was a notable absence of Korean food despite this being the dinner after the Korean ceremony.

  He scanned the party for the Korean faces he kept expecting, but again saw only white people. Was there some separate Korean-only buffet line no one had told him about? Was it because he was late?

  Why am I even here? he asked himself. What am I doing?

  Caleb had entered Jack’s life somewhat accidentally. One day he noticed a young m
an he didn’t recognize down by the mailboxes in his building’s entrance, but with a dog he did recognize: Sheila, a snuffly French bulldog he could usually hear in the hall from his bed. They made small talk, and he reached down to rub Sheila’s ears, and when he stood up again, he noticed Caleb sparkling at him, as if he were capable of summoning a cloud of glittery allure, just like that. It was of course his mind doing this, or so he told himself, but it seemed to happen most of the time he saw Caleb in the hall. And then one day he wasn’t there anymore, and Sheila showed up with her regular owner, Tommy, a neighbor, both of them survivors of the succession of landlords who had tried to break their leases there in Park Slope. They had nodded at each other for almost two decades.

  “Who was your dog-sitter?” he asked.

  “Oh, my ex, Caleb. We share dog custody of Sheila.”

  “Oh,” Jack said, uncertain how to act. He couldn’t recall having seen Caleb once before last month. Had Tommy really had a whole relationship and he’d never noticed? “How long did you date for?”

  “Four months.”

  “You guys got a dog before you were together for four months?” He instantly regretted saying this.

  Tommy shrugged. “Listen, that little redheaded boy can make you do anything.”

  Jack nodded. He had planned to ask Tommy for Caleb’s number, but this was absolutely out of the question now. There was nothing to do then, but . . . go to all the bars in the neighborhood and act casual, meet up again, away from the building, fall in love, move in together, and hope Tommy would move out around the time they wanted to move in together.

  And that was approximately what happened, except Tommy did not move out. Which at least made it easy when they needed to go to a wedding and someone had to take care of the dog.