The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

Margaret marveled even at the fights, staged via their planner surrogates, and what they revealed about the terrain of weddings beyond what she had even known to imagine, from the venue (a private country club nestled in the woods outside Cincinnati, with a dance hall whose ceilings went straight to the moon), to the ice cubes (truly cubed, not oblonged or crushed, and king-sized cubes for the bourbon rocks), down to whether urinal cakes were déclassé (very much so, but what did the French know, didn’t they encourage peeing in the streets?).

  Margaret had been to a few weddings of high school friends, home in Missouri over summers, and none seemed all that different from the other, save the color scheme and the church. A bride could easily step from one ceremony into another, a few readings, and vows, and even some dresses unchanged. But this, Margaret’s wedding, was a production: something to be mounted, staged. She felt some days like an understudy, even in the role of bride, like the real stars were Mac’s mother and grandmother. But even this she didn’t mind, as both women treated her with a kind of affection that, though she recognized as in part competitive, was a departure from the way they’d treated any of Mac’s past girlfriends, and how they treated most people. She’d told Mac about a recent squabble they’d had about when Margaret should change from her first gown into the one she would wear to leave, though she and Mac weren’t honeymooning until later in the month.

  “Not to mention how heated they got about the dress itself! This is just when I could duck out and change without disrupting event flow.”

  “Don’t let them railroad you, Margaret, Jesus. This is your wedding. And you’re not their pretty pet!” Mac said. “You’re mine.” He kissed her and held her face in his hands.

  “Ugh, barf,” Lainey said later. “You’re not anyone’s pretty pet.”

  Margaret had told Lainey the story as an example of Mac sticking up for her, staking her claim to the space in this family overcrowded with domineering women. But, as with so many things told to Lainey, Margaret could see now how different this looked to a woman who would never take a man’s last name.

  “It’s a term of endearment, Lainey,” Margaret said. “He’s not actually calling me a pet.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry,” Lainey said, and looked at the door again. They were at the bar in a Mexican restaurant, waiting for Alice and Ji Sun to arrive.

  But Margaret did feel like a stray dog sometimes, though she was too irritated to tell Lainey now: adopted by her roommates, and now by Mac and his family. All of them eager to provide shelter, none of them too concerned with why she might have cowered at their first tenderness. She felt her throat tighten and cheeks warm.

  “Are you okay?” Lainey asked. “I’m sorry. You know I’m trying with Mac.”

  Having Lainey notice for once was enough, and Margaret recomposed herself.

  “I’m fine, it’s okay. Emotions run high around weddings, you know.”

  “Of course,” Lainey said, and prepared for Margaret to recount in excruciating detail the difference between linen and flax table runners. She was surprised when Margaret said instead, “And I want you to like Mac.” Margaret made the kind of eye contact that typically got her what she required. “Not tolerate him.”

  “I do! You know, in my way, I do. Of course I do,” Lainey said, fidgeting with her many silver rings. “I care about Mac, and I care that he’s good to you, that you feel supported by him. That he lets you be yourself.”

  “I feel more supported by him than by anyone! More myself!” She’d intended to sound assertive, but it came out like a shriek, and it hurt Lainey even though Margaret hadn’t meant it to, and Lainey hadn’t expected it would. But it struck right on the sensitivity Lainey was feeling about Margaret forging ahead into this next phase of life, what it would mean for the four of them, and for Lainey herself.

  Of course Lainey would be in no rush to marry, Margaret thought, with parents like hers. Margaret looked for any reason to get invited back to their house, asked Lainey around every Jewish holiday whether she was going home, if her parents were hosting anything.

  But so often Lainey stayed in the city, citing vague plans to workshop a play she’d been writing for more than a year. Margaret didn’t know who she workshopped with, or what the process even entailed, and Lainey never offered up details, preferring to carve out some part of her life that was hers alone, as the others had seemed to do so much more easily, with Ji Sun traveling, Alice in med school, and Margaret ensconced already in Mac’s world. Preferring also to keep from them that there’d been no progress on the play, an uninspired imitation of This Is Our Youth that had failed even to get staged at the Quincy-Hawthorn student theater. She spent the time she claimed to be workshopping holed up in her tiny bedroom watching crime procedurals, or high on Molly and dancing at Resolution, the gay club she frequented with friends from work often enough that she’d gotten a drink—well, whiskey, Sprite, and way too many maraschinos—named for her.

  The country superstar who turned up, uninvited, to Margaret and Mac’s wedding wasn’t immediately recognizable even to the sizable percentage of guests who knew his catalogue down to the word. He wore a tuxedo like everyone else, but also a studded black Wildcats baseball cap, mirrored sunglasses, and a full beard as opposed to the artful stubble he typically sported. More obfuscating was how much smaller he was than anyone had imagined, and though they’d heard this about famous people, it was still hard to reconcile his stature as he danced up against Mac’s sisters, not even close to towering over them.

  Margaret’s mother, nearly unrecognizable to Margaret with her hundred-dollar blowout and champagne Hervé Leger bandage dress, was the first to alert Margaret to the star’s arrival.

  “Do you all know him?” her mother asked, breath smoky with bourbon and menthol. Margaret could feel the tips of her mother’s acrylic nails on the spot between her neck and shoulders where she rested her hand now, waiting.

  Her mother’s dress, a style that had been so popular a few years back, and that Margaret herself had worn to parties and weddings once Mac bought her one in red, was pale enough gold that Margaret’s older sister and aunt both advised her mother not to wear it to the wedding, said it veered too close to white for the mother of the bride.

  “It’s not silver,” Laureen had said, indignant. “Majestic bought it!”

  Margaret shrugged. She had bought it, or Mac had, technically, though Margaret swiped the credit card when her mom had visited New York, and they’d taken a taxi to Bergdorf Goodman to choose a rehearsal dinner dress for Margaret.

  Margaret had already chosen her wedding gown, with the help of her roommates and Mac’s little sisters, twins who were juniors in high school.

  “God, you can wear anything. It’s like, a bit sickening?” Ashley, who was considered by her family and herself to be the “chubbier” twin, said.

  “As can you!” Margaret said. “You’re stunning.” She kissed her soon-to-be sister on the cheek, the only place she could find much of this chub to which the family objected, and resisted the urge to say something self-deprecating, a habit Gavin, her best friend from home, had helped to break her of her first summer home from Quincy-Hawthorn, before she moved in with him.

  “Don’t do that,” he’d said, after she brushed off a compliment on her new sandals, not technically allowed in the ice cream shop where they worked together, with some comment about her gigantic feet. “It’s not a good look. It’s tiresome. On you, I mean. In particular.” Gavin had this way of speaking, all his sentences interrupted by himself. When Margaret had learned he was gay, she’d been delighted. Sex and the City had taught her that friend groups came in four, but she had been waiting for her gay best friend.

  “What, football players can be gay, too, you know. Lots of them are,” he said, and raised one eyebrow. “You may or may not be surprised.”

  He rode the bench at Missouri State, but trained like a fiend and ate buckets of
the birthday-cake-flavored ice cream, with more toppings than Margaret could believe, so many heaps of brownie, Oreo, peanut butter cups, fudge, and caramel that the cream took on a solid texture, and had to be carved rather than scooped, into the cups. She liked the birthday cake best, too, but ate it with a few cubes of yellow cake and freckles of rainbow sprinkles, as God intended, she would say, and Gavin would roll his eyes, tell her she should add fudge while her metabolism could manage it. All the cute boys came in during Margaret’s shifts, and even singing the stupid jingles became fun with Gavin, a confident if off-key baritone. Margaret was pleased by how well he hit it off with her roommates, as he was the only friend from home whom she’d invited to the wedding, the only real friend from home she had.

  The buzz about the country star was quickly eclipsed by the fisticuffs that nearly broke out when Mac saw the way he was dancing with Claire, Ashley’s twin.

  “I don’t care who you are!” Mac swelled, seemed double the star’s size. Margaret found herself wanting to hold her new husband back from hurting the star, but also wanting to watch Mac punch him in the face. “That’s my little sister! She’s sixteen!”

  “Seventeen!” Claire squealed, but only her twin seemed to hear.

  The star actually tipped his hat, dressy as far as baseball caps went, with its black-on-black metallic embroidery, and Margaret gasped as he put his other hand over his mouth, catching what she feared would be vomit, but was instead a burp so tremendous that she felt swallowed by the smell from where she stood.

  “Let’s not, now hold up here, hold up, fella, congratulations, hey!” He looked from Mac to Margaret, and back to Mac, just realizing he’d wound up at a wedding.

  Mac’s younger brother, Sammy, had also joined the fray, along with their uncle, who was holding them both back, everyone else rapt.

  “Let me tell you, let me tell you what, and another thing, I’m an American! Hey, what do y’all know, let me—Congratulations.” He uttered these phrases on a loop, staggered in his boots, and teetered so close to falling down that everyone stepped back, made a wide circle for his show. Mac and his brother stood down, ready to let him collapse into his own mess on the floor. But then the star leaned low, and rose up, a kind of bow in reverse, arms outstretched, smile set to mega-bright, and said, crisp as a two-dollar bill, “I do sincerely regret my dishevelment and disruption. If you’ll allow it, I’d like to bless the newlyweds with a song?”

  The twins and their friends cheered and whooped, as did all of the young people, and most of the Kentuckians, and the lingering sounds of confusion and resistance seemed to buoy him as he leaped onstage and launched into a song that even some of the French guests recognized, about warm beer, tight jeans, and an explosively broken heart. His voice was low and bourbon worn and the hackneyed nature of the song was elevated by the soaring chorus, the way his lust sounded like lament, his wails of woe like ecstasy. He even tried to sing the rap interlude that had helped make him a crossover success, and in this he was not so elegant, but his dedication and charisma, along with the enthusiasm of the backing band, got more people on the dance floor than could strictly fit.

  “Is this a love song, like about a lover, or about his daughter?” Lainey shouted into Adam’s ear, his hand in hers. They had snuck off before the scuffle to make out a little in an alcove behind the stage. Adam’s willingness to break for kissing at any time was a quality of his that Lainey treasured. She felt a tepid moral opposition to marriage, especially if it meant you would kiss only one person for the rest of your life, but if she was going to enter into such a ludicrous contract, it would be with Adam, whose kisses still made her feel like she was tumbling headlong into some promising darkness.

  “I think it’s trying to be . . . both?” Adam said. “This is not a great song. But it is such a fucking earworm. Dance with me, daughter-lover!” he shouted over the music as he skipped with her closer to the center of the storm.

  After the first song, the country star sang another, and another, and three more requests before he finished with a soppy ballad off his first album that was custom made for father-daughter dances at weddings, and that Mac requested, not knowing this, only that it was the star’s biggest hit that he hadn’t yet played.

  As they danced, Mac whispered into Margaret’s ear that he was sorry.

  “For what?” Margaret asked. “Everything about this night is a miracle.” She didn’t care to know his answer: for requesting a song that called for the presence of the father Margaret didn’t have, for nearly coming to blows with the country star, for letting the wedding veer off script at all, even in a way that made it more memorable to most of the guests than their own weddings.

  When the country star left—seeming to vanish into a trapdoor under the stage—the band segued back into the bluegrass they’d been given the okay to play after midnight, and everyone danced until they were shepherded, still gleaming with sweat, to the stairs outside the estate. They were given the longest sparklers they had ever seen, along with instructions to hold them aloft for Margaret and Mac’s grand exit.

  Lainey, Alice, and Ji Sun found the fur capelets they’d been expected to wear when outdoors placed on their shoulders by the attendants who seemed to appear from behind the ceiling-height velvet curtains, a style Ji Sun had heard one of Mac’s French relatives describe as “hillbilly Versailles” in the most pleasingly accented way. Hillbilly in her mouth sounded like a couture designer and Versailles sliced back lengthwise into French spoken too fast for Ji Sun to understand over the din.

  “I thought we were the attendants,” Alice whispered. “This wedding is unfuckingreal.”

  Ji Sun, who had seen her share of ostentatious celebrations, had been jubilant at the thrill of a real surprise stacked up against all the orchestrated ones, a wonderland of diversions—silhouette artists, custom bottles of bourbon with guests’ names etched in the glass, vintage accessories, and a French 1920s crescent-moon bench swing in the photo booth—that, like a fun fair, made you sick to your stomach before you could sample them all. Her date, Evan, was a roommate of Adam’s who had been asking her out for several months, describing her to Adam as his “dream girl.” He’d only met her a few times, and Ji Sun was skeptical of his enthusiasm for her, as well as for the evening. He’d been repeating all night that he’d never seen anything like this, that this was for sure the best wedding ever, of, like, ALL time. After the country star showed up, his effusiveness stopped irking her, and she surrendered to his delight, felt it herself. She was giddy when the crowd parted for the country singer, when it looked like Mac might fight him, and most of all when he hopped on the stage and sang as if possessed. She knew the song, but she’d never heard the song, and no one had heard it sung like this, she was sure. She could have gone on dancing for the rest of her life if he’d kept singing songs like the first, and her adrenaline fueled her through his more saccharine follow-ups, moved her close to Evan during the ballads, where she felt in the heat between their bodies a kind of bright joy that wasn’t love, but was the potential for it.

  She would be thankful to Margaret for the rest of her life for this night, for this feeling, she knew. It could only be Margaret, given name Majestic, for whom this night could transpire. She’d felt sorry for her friend at the rehearsal dinner the previous night, by how outnumbered her guests were by Mac’s family and friends, by the way in which Margaret’s family would have been made invisible if not for how they stuck out, bewildered and belittled, wearing clothes too shiny, makeup too heavy, and perfume too sweet. But no number of people, no amount of money, not even an excess of beauty could guarantee a night like this. There was something else, something Ji Sun didn’t pretend to understand but did recognize as a kind of magic.

  “Magnum sparklers!” Adam said. “They even smell good. Like a fancy cigar.”

  Ji Sun didn’t point out that a dozen men had lit long stogies, the puffs of their smoke mixing with the cloud
s of visible breath in the black sky of the cold Kentucky night. Instead, she grabbed Evan’s swinging free hand and planted a fat kiss on his face, real sparks standing in for romantic ones. Falling in love was maybe a little like deciding to smile when you were in a foul mood; you tried it and then your face gave in and then your heart considered there might be something to it. Your mind stayed out of it for a while.

  The enormous sparklers burned long after Margaret and Mac had clambered into their restored speedster, driven some kind of performative route off into the woods before circling back to the club where they, like their guests, were staying that night.

  In their absence, the crowd had a stolen moment where no one appeared to usher them to the next bit of carefully orchestrated wonder. They all looked down the long row of flickering lights, the arches electric, wondered what might come down from the darkness next.

  Chapter 24

  Margaret was rich for having married Mac, and now she would be famous, too? It would have been too much if it hadn’t felt to Lainey like a foregone conclusion somehow, a day they all knew would come.

  The video was irresistible to tabloids, with its combination of how fall-down drunk the star was, how spectacular and stupid his monologue, and then, how chivalrous and how resplendent a performer, even when tanked. The grainy but glorious video, filmed on Margaret’s friend Gavin’s Flip camcorder, appeared everywhere, with its flashes to Margaret’s face: beaming; wet with tears of joy and laughter; lit by the beads on her gown; the borrowed diamonds on her décolletage; her mighty, majestic smile. The dancing and whooping around her disappeared when she was onscreen and all anyone could see was her radiant, absolute joy. It wasn’t even her beauty that was so magnetic, but how beautiful she found the rest of it, the way she looked at them.

  The first article that focused on Margaret rather than the country star had lit up Lainey’s Facebook feed: Stunner Bride Gets Surprise of a Lifetime at Lavish Wedding. The story was all screencaps of the video with links to things similar to Margaret’s attire, since most of what she wore was custom, vintage, one-of-a-kind, “price upon request”: so many ways of saying Fuck you, plebe. The same website did a follow-up article the next day on how to get Margaret’s makeup look, this time with a clearer photo, gotten from a rogue guest, it would appear, who ignored instructions sent in an email cosigned by both wedding planners to please refrain from sharing any documentation with tabloids, as the family would like to showcase professional photographs, and in trustworthy media outlets. The Southern planner had been disappointed when a feature in Martha Stewart Weddings had fallen through before the wedding, but Margaret mentioned they were “in talks” to do a story now.