by Tom Perrotta
The “Magic Chair” sequence followed the bouquet toss. Despite its lascivious overtones, the whole rigamarole seemed so tedious and time-consuming—bride sits in “Magic Chair,” groom removes bride's garter, groom tosses garter to assembled single men, man who catches garter places it on leg of woman who caught bouquet, who is herself now seated in “Magic Chair”— that Dave wondered how it managed to survive for however long a practice like this had to survive to become a tradition. He tried his best to float above it, playing the inevitable can-can music on auto pilot, tuning out Ian's tired spiel about the bride and groom receiving ten years of happiness for every inch the garter traveled on its journey up the thigh of the woman who caught the bouquet.
When all of that was put to rest, the band, with the exception of Ian, vacated the stage for the breaking of the Ceremonial Wishbone. Dave fled immediately to the downstairs rest room, less out of necessity than a desire to avoid a lecture from Artie on the importance of punctuality. He thought about heading out to the patio to check on Gretchen, but wasn't sure he'd be able to make it there and back before it was time to climb back onstage and play some real music for a change.
The Ceremonial Wishbone was a corny gimmick Artie had cooked up about a year before, much to Ian's dismay. Central to the ritual was the bone itself, which Ian and the bride broke onstage. It looked like something from The Flintstones, a three-foot-tall segmented piece of V-shaped plastic, held together by a nearly inconspicous velcro fastener. The joke was that Ian always got the longer piece and therefore got to make the wish. He made a big show of it, scratching his chin and gazing off into the distance, then asked the bride if she wanted to know what he'd wished for. She always did.
“On behalf of the band,” he'd tell her, “I'd like to wish you and your husband a lifetime of health, happiness, and joy. May your marriage always be graced by the music of love.”
Ian didn't have a problem with any of that. What he objected to was the second half of the ritual, which called for him to serenade the bride with an a capella rendition of “You Are So Beautiful.” Some of them cried, but most just stood there, still clutching the losing end of the wishbone, looking troubled and perplexed by this unexpected turn of events.
Dave splashed some water on his face and checked in with the mirror. He was still more stoned than he wanted to be, but the buzz was quieter now, a little less distracting. He rarely smoked dope anymore, and every time he did reminded him of why he'd stopped in the first place—he'd reached the point where coming down was the best part of the experience.
Artie was waiting at the top of the stairs, arms crossed, a stern expression on his face. Dave cursed under his breath. He was in no mood to bow and scrape to the great leader, begging forgiveness for the two minutes of inconvenience he'd inflicted on the universe. Artie snagged him by the coat sleeve as he tried to hurry past.
“Hold on,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
Dave let go of a deep breath, the long day catching up with him all at once. He felt limp, wrung out.
“I had a stomachache,” he explained wearily. “I lost track of the time.”
Instead of arguing, Artie gave a distracted nod. His mind was elsewhere, his voice more worried than angry.
“What's happening to us?”
“Huh?”
“The band. I think we're falling apart.”
“Come on,” said Dave. “Don't be ridiculous.”
Artie shrugged. “Just look at us. Stan's a wreck, Buzzy's a drunk, Ian's out in left field somewhere, and now you're starting to act up on me, too. Where's it gonna stop?”
Dave shifted his gaze to the floor, then forced himself to look back up.
“You really think Buzzy's a drunk?”
“I think he's got a problem, yeah.”
Dave peered down the corridor. Stan and Buzzy waved hello.
“The band seems pretty solid to me.”
Artie wiped away the mustache of perspiration that had formed above his upper lip. He was good-looking in a bug-eyed, slightly unsavory sort of way, and believed in smelling nice for the ladies.
“I hope so. It took me four years to put together this lineup. All of us worked too fucking hard to get where we are. I'd hate to see us screw it up now.”
Dave couldn't decide if Artie was asking for reassurance or trying to make him feel guilty or trying to do both at once. Whichever it was, his concern for the band seemed genuine.
“We'll be all right,” Dave told him.
Artie made a halfhearted stab at smiling and put his hand on Dave's shoulder.
“Help me out, okay?”
Before Dave could reply, Gretchen snuck up from behind and grabbed hold of his elbow, squeezing it in a way that made him forget all about Artie.
“I'm back,” she said brightly. “Did I miss anything important?”
BY THE WAY
Cresting the Verrazano, a bridge he'd never crossed at night, Dave was astonished by the beauty of Brooklyn spread out below, a vast carpet of darkness dotted by an infinitude of lights, a galaxy of earthbound stars.
“I had no idea,” he muttered.
“Look.” She directed his gaze along the serpentine coastline, past a range of high-rise apartment buildings to a Ferris wheel spinning slowly through the night. “You can see all the way to Coney Island.”
Dave understood that he was hurtling toward uncharted territory, and this knowledge filled him with exhilaration. His head felt clear; his body hummed with the alertness of a second wind.
“I can't believe I ate the blueberry pie and the chocolate mousse cake,” she groaned. “I haven't had the munchies like that since high school.”
“It's an occupational hazard. Before I started playing weddings, I used to have a washboard stomach,” he lied, patting himself sadly on the cummerbund.
The reception had concluded with a dessert buffet of memorable proportions, and the maitre d’ kindly invited the Wishbones to partake of the leftovers after they'd played the last dance. Dave was busy assembling his plate of goodies when Gretchen appeared at his side and asked if there was any chance of her bumming a ride to the train station in Elizabeth.
“Now?” Dave knew the Elizabeth station; it wasn't a place you'd expect to see a lone bridesmaid at this time of night.
“Whenever,” she said. “No hurry. If you can't do it, I guess I can call a cab or something.”
“You live in the city?”
“Brooklyn. Park Slope.”
“You're really gonna take the train back to Brooklyn tonight?”
She licked blueberry filling off her fingertip and leaned in close to him. She smelled like a vague, pleasant memory he couldn't quite identify.
“I'm supposed to stay at Heidi's, but the whole wedding party's going back there to watch the video of the ceremony. I think I'd be a lot happier waking up in my own bed tomorrow.”
He looked past her to the opposite end of the buffet table, where Buzzy was performing surgery on a whole pineapple with a Swiss army knife. Dave couldn't see any reason why someone else couldn't give him a ride home for a change.
“Forget the train,” he told her. “I can drive you to Brooklyn.”
He expected her to argue, to say she wouldn't dream of imposing on him like that, but all she did was smile with relief
“Great. I'll go get my bag.”
Gretchen didn't drive much and wasn't sure how to get from the Verrazano to Park Slope, though she was certain it could be done. She was impressed by Dave's ability to negotiate the maze of highways branching off from the bridge and his rudimentary knowledge of Brooklyn geography, which got them close enough to her neighborhood that she was able to direct him the rest of the way.
“That's amazing,” she said. “The last time I tried that we ended up in East New York.”
“I'm a courier. I do a lot of driving around the city.”
“Really? How convenient.”
“Convenient?”
“Make a left up here.
I'm four blocks up on the right.”
He didn't press her. He knew exactly what she meant by “convenient,” and would even have agreed with her, if not for the inconvenient fact that he was engaged to be married in three months. Somehow or other, he'd neglected to apprise her of this important biographical note. All through the drive he kept waiting for the right opportunity, and it kept not appearing.
“If you see a space, grab it,” she told him.
Park Slope didn't look like Dave's idea of Brooklyn. The streets were lush and tree lined, almost suburban, except that the houses were attached brownstones, set back from the sidewalk, with wrought-iron fences and imposing front stoops. The people walking by looked young and prosperous, able to afford high rents. He found a spot about halfway up the block, on the opposite side of the street. It was a tight squeeze, with maybe two inches to spare on each bumper.
“So what about you?” he asked, yanking on the emergency brake as if trying to rip it out by the roots. “What do you do for a living?”
She rolled up the window and groped blindly for the door handle. He reached across the car to pop it for her, his arm brushing across the staticky fabric of her skirt.
“Freelance copy editor,” she said, pushing the door open on its dry, protesting hinge. “By night I'm a poet.”
Her third-floor apartment was bigger than Dave expected, and fully furnished. On the stark white walls of the living room hung numerous black-and-white framed photographs of stingray bicycles.
“I used to have one of those,” he said.
“My roommate's boyfriend takes them. He calls it his Banana Seat Series. A couple of galleries were interested last year, but nothing really came of it.”
“You have a roommate?”
“The perfect kind,” said Gretchen. “She's almost never home. She basically lives with Dex in Williamsburg.”
She got him a beer, put Shawn Colvin—not one of Dave's favorites—on the CD player, and excused herself to get out of the dress. He wandered around the room, taking a closer look at the photographs. All of the bikes were leaning against the same chain-link fence, with a litter-strewn vacant lot in the background. Most of them were rusty and beat-up, with flat tires or ripped seats or missing pedals, though one was in mint condition, with horse-tail streamers shooting out from the handlebar grips. There was something desolate about the pictures, as though the real subjects weren't the bikes at all, but the kids who'd lost or outgrown or forgotten all about them.
Gretchen emerged from her bedroom wearing a short, silky gray robe, and sat down on the couch. Without thinking, Dave took the chair by the TV, making an effort to appear unfazed by the fact that she'd actually “slipped into something more comfortable,” a tactic he'd only witnessed in old movies. He felt himself at a disadvantage, an overdressed suburbanite on alien turf, surrounded by depressing folk music and sad pictures of bicycles.
“So tell me,” he said. “What does a copy editor do?”
She lit up a Parliament and exhaled in his direction, as though that were a reply in itself. There seemed to be a lot less of her now that she'd escaped from the puffy dress. She was slender, verging on slight, her body lost inside the shimmery robe.
“Spelling, punctuation, house style,” she said with a bored shrug. “All the crap nobody else wants to deal with.”
“Pay okay?”
“Compared to what?”
He nodded, as if she'd said something profound. She took a long drag from her cigarette, then leaned forward to stub it out in a saucer resting atop some books on the coffee table.
“You know,” she said, sitting up straight and smoothing the robe over her thighs, “it's kind of hard to kiss you from across the room.”
Dave was vaguely aware of standing up and moving toward the couch. She stood up, too, holding out her arms as if to catch him. Her body felt warm through the silk, thrillingly unfamiliar. Her mouth reminded him of something.
“I can't believe this,” she whispered. Her glasses were crooked on her face; one lens had fogged over. “I don't even know you.”
They kissed again. She wrapped one leg around him as if preparing for a judo throw, making throaty murmurs of encouragement as he slipped one hand into the robe and found her breast. Her mouth tasted of tobacco on top of alcohol, a combination he hadn't experienced since Julie quit smoking five years earlier, mainly to get him to stop bugging her about it. She'd done it cold turkey, chewing gum like a demon, biting her nails until they bled, sometimes crying out of sheer desperation. Gretchen did something with her leg, and the next thing Dave knew he was flat on his back. She kneeled over him, straddling his waist as she went to work on the buttons of his ruffled shirt. For the first time in hours, Julie was a vivid presence in his mind.
“I'm engaged,” he said, reaching up to grab hold of Gretchen's wrist.
“What?”
“To be married.”
She took it pretty well, allowing her face to register only the briefest flicker of surprise before prying his fingers from her arm and undoing the belt of her robe.
“Congratulations,” she said, closing her eyes and rubbing against him in a way that interfered with his ability to continue the conversation. “Who's the lucky girl?”
CARLOS AND STEVIE RAY
For two and a half weeks he had somehow kept himself from calling her, even during his runs into the city, even when his pockets were filled with quarters and there seemed to be an unoccupied phone booth on every other corner. They'd had their fun and he wasn't sorry about it. But he couldn't allow himself to get tangled up in an affair just a few months before his wedding. He wasn't going to be that stupid.
That evening, though, the phone had rung during dinner. His mother picked it up. Right away, Dave knew who it was.
“Yes he is,” she said, handing him the phone across the table, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. He stood up, turned his back on his parents, and moved as close to the hallway as the cord would allow.
“I know you can't talk,” she said. “Come to my apartment tomorrow night. There's something I want to show you.”
Dave didn't hesitate. “Okay.”
“Seven o'clock.”
“Okay.”
“Pretend this is a solicitation. Say, ‘Sorry, I'm not interested.’ “
“Sorry, I'm not interested.”
“Bye, Dave.”
“Bye now.”
Both his parents were watching him as he hung up the phone.
“Replacement windows,” he reported, shaking his head. “They seem to think I'm head of the household.”
His father raised one finger while he finished chewing.
“All they have to do,” he said cheerfully, “is take one phone solicitor out to the town square, stand him up in front of a firing squad, and blow his brains out.” He looked around, apparently expecting an objection. “You think I'm kidding?”
They returned to their meal, a nameless concoction of egg noodles, ground beef, and cream of mushroom soup that Dave's mother had discovered in a women's magazine in the early eighties and had been serving on a weekly basis ever since. Amazingly, Dave still wasn't tired of it. He stared down at his plate, unable to look up for fear that his face would give everything away—his guilt and excitement, his utter, paralyzing relief.
The silence deepened around him. He moved some noodles around with his fork. He hadn't felt this self-conscious in years, not since the days in high school when he used to come home stoned and had to monitor his every move at the dinner table to make sure he wasn't doing something really strange, like staring at a brussels sprout for a suspicious length of time, or saying the word “potato” over and over again until he dissolved with laughter.
“I'm going over to Glenn's tonight,” he announced, his voice cracking from the strain.
“Take ‘em out and shoot ‘em,” his father repeated. “Put it on national television. That's when people in this country will finally be able to eat in peace.”
; Glenn Stella's parents had retired to a planned community in North Carolina with an eighteen-hole golf course and state-of-the-art health facility. Instead of selling their house in Darwin, they allowed Glenn to keep living there on his own, with the stipulation that he pay the property taxes, keep the place in good working order, and not mess with the decor. This arrangement was fine with their son, who made a more-than-adequate living as a computer programmer, had no interest in redecorating, and liked to be left alone.
For the past year or so, Dave had found himself vaguely depressed by his periodic visits with Glenn, even though they did the exact same things they'd been doing since they were twelve—listen to records, talk about music, and play guitar in the basement. There was a static quality to their friendship that had become eerie rather than comforting now that they were over thirty, at least for Dave. Glenn didn't seem to notice, just as he seemed oblivious to the fact that he wasn't going to meet any women if he never left his house, or that a healthy diet included foods other than Campbell's Tomato Rice Soup, Weaver's Zesty Wings, and Mr. Salty Pretzels.
Not long ago, Julie asked Dave if Glenn had ever considered seeing a therapist.
“I don't know. I never asked him.”
“He must be so unhappy.”
“You'd think so,” said Dave. “But actually he seems okay. Not happy. Just okay. Same as always.”
“Isn't he lonely?”
“He never complains about it.”
“What about women? Does he go on dates?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Don't you ask?”
“I figure he'd tell me if anything important came up.”
“I don't understand,” Julie told him. “How can you guys be friends and not talk about this stuff?”
Looking at it through her eyes, Dave saw that there was something lacking in his interaction with Glenn. But it never really seemed that way when they were together. For the most part, they found enough to talk about without venturing anywhere in the vicinity of dangerous subjects like women or loneliness or maybe going to a therapist. And if words failed them, guitars never did.
