My Best Man (16 page)

“Yes shit,” she answers. “In the cervical cap.” “Your mom and dad called,” I tell her. She looks nervous, fidgety. “When?” “While I was jacking off.”

She tries to laugh, but it’s not much of an effort.

“Do they call you Amy?”

“It’s my nickname. Short for Amity. What did they say?” “Just that they love you. Want you to call them. By the way, I flew with a girl who says you were married,” I blurt out. It’s not nice of me hitting her with this when she’s already weakened by mention of her parents. It’s what Winston would have done.

She’s stiffens, looks me square in the eye. “Would it matter if I was?”

“Not at all. That’s why I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me about it.”

She sighs. Takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “It was ugly.” She looks past the back of the sofa to the light beyond the

lace curtains. “I had a lot of pressure from my family to marry him. It wasn’t good chemistry with Arlen. After leaving that godawful Christian wench he was married to, he just wanted a little trophy to carry around and give him sex on demand. He never really liked me. I fell in love with Jerod right after marrying him. He suspected and had me followed and his goons discovered me and Jerod making love in the bathroom of a Black-Eyed Pea.” “Those little peas have bathrooms inside of them?”

“The restaurant chain, silly! They have the best fried corn.” “How the hell do you fry corn?” I ask.

“The whole ear. Dip that bad boy in batter and throw it in oil.” Ole. “Come on. This is serious,” she says, her face adopting a sad look. “Arlen had me ripped to shreds. He even disregarded the prenup. Of course I couldn’t fight him he was too powerful. So I was left penniless. My daddy threatened to kill him.”

“Sounds like a Country-Western song. How come he was so vicious?”

“Because I was kind of a bad girl. Arlen was wealthy,

He was from a family like yours. He was married when we met, and his wife was this mega religious woman from a similar Their marriage was an arrangement. But poor Arlen well, know those Christian women: They just can’t give head. Or dance. Or laugh. I’m not even sure they like to eat.”

I flash back to my high school friend Doug Samuelson, parents were divorced. Doug had a mother who was this tall st Christian nut ball who plastered JESUS=SAVIIS and I BEqEATH aim bumper stickers on everything. You couldn’t see out the windows of their house because they were all covered bumper stickers. My mother forbid me to go to that hood, but I liked hanging out with Doug because he would smoke:: pot and jerk off with me, and I loved watching his dick go up and down because he was uncircumcised. He wasn’t gay. He just liked to smoke pot and jerk off because he knew it wasn’t condoned by

the Bible, and he loved doing anything that wasn’t condoned by the Bible. His psycho mother served poor Doug and his sister charred fish sticks every night of their lives for six years, until Doug’s junior year of school when he threatened to kill her. The judge let him off with counseling after determining he suffered from frozen fish rage, and he got to go live with his dad.

“I broke up their marriage, and it was an ugly divorce that cost Arlen a lot, emotionally and financially. Right after I married him I started having a little cocaine problem. And I fell in love with

Jerod. And Arlen hung me out to dry. I didn’t get a penny.” “Did you marry him for the money?” I ask. “Yes,” she answers. “Yes, Harry, I did.”

I take a drink of tea. OK, it’s time to tell her everything just as she’s done with me. She spilled her guts, offered me unfettered veracity, and obviously she’s sensitive to my position in life.

“Amity, remember when I said we need to visit my mother?” “Yes, Harry.”

“There’s a reason. See, the deal is, I’m broke. Busted. It doesn’t matter how much money my family has, they won’t give me any.” Amity looks sweetly into my eyes. “G’yaw, Bubba. I’m sorry.” “My father fucked me over in favor of Winston, the straight son. Dad was so mean the last few years, always holding it over my head that I could have everything Winston did if I were willing to play the game, become straight.”

“That’s so unfair, Harry. You can’t just wipe the logo off a Louis Vuitton bag and call it Chanel. A Louis is a Louis.”

“Dallas women and their analogies,” I say, shaking my head, “but you’ve got it fight.”

She hits me on the leg. “I’m from Fort Worth!”

“Anyway,” I proceed, taking a sip of my drink, “my father is messing with me, even from the grave.” Amity looks at me, remains silent. “He stipulated in his will that I would forfeit my share of the estate if I wasn’t legally married by my twenty-fourth birthday.

In just a few months, my percentage of my family’s holdings will pass to Winston, my older brother.”

“Well, we’ll just have to get married, Harry.” She says it matter of-factly, just as I thought she would.

“Amity, I’m gay.”

“I know your dick tastes like shit!”

I playfully kick her, and we both almost fall off the sofa. After hauling ourselves back into place, I continue. “But everybody knows I’m gay. I’ve been resolute about it since I was seventeen.”

“All the better, Bubba. Listen, any other guy in your shoes would go out, find some naive little country gal, and marry her. And he’d spend his nights leaving her at home while he prowls around some city park, looking for a boo-foo in the bushes. But that’s not you or me. We’re on the level with each other, Harry. We know exactly what’s going on. So marry me and get your money.”

“It’s not that simple. I have to stay married and living with my ii wife for a minimum of ten years. If I get divorced before that, my inherited assets, and any profits from their investment, are. deemed immediately receivable by the family estate.”

“There’s always a way around these things,” she says confidently, as if she practices law.

“There’s never a way around my father,” I caution.

She thinks. For longer than usual. And just when it appears has something serious to say, she changes tack and sounds as as my mother. “So we’ll stay married for ten years.”

“Amity, that’s a huge commitment.”

She sits up, takes my hand. “Why? Why should anything any different than it is right now? You have your lovers, I mine. And, well, considering Padre Island, sometimes we might even have each other.” She finishes the last statement with her eyebrow arcing nearly into her hairline.

She’s right. It would be a prosperous honest arrangement. But I have to ask, “What’s in it for you?”

She cocks her head, gives me the demure Amity. “Why, Harry, have I ever bullshit ted you about my tastes? Bubba, I don’t want your fortune. That’s yours. But I meant it when I said I love you on Padre Island. And if I get to spend the next ten years hanging out with a wonderful guy who makes me laugh and buys me a few pretty dresses and a first-class ticket to Pads along the way, then I consider myself lucky. I don’t want your money.”

“What about having a life, Amity? What about a real husband? Don’t you want to fall in love, marry some great guy, have children?”

Her face sobers, her eyes lock into mine. “No. I don’t. Those aren’t my dreams, Harry.”

“I don’t know. I guess I never planned on having all those things. And I know I could never get married to a man, because that doesn’t happen in America. But I do have my dreams, and I kind of hope that one day I’ll find a nice guy, settle down, get a house.”

“I’m a nice guy. We have a house. So bring your boyfriends over!”

“You are a nice guy, and this is a great house. It would just be a pretty big step to get married even if we do love each other. Shit, my father sure has given me a lot to think about.”

Amity pats my leg and rises from the sofa. “Well, I think we should at least get engaged. You’ve got to get these bill collectors off our porch!”

ur flight is about to land in Wichita. Amity is still in lavatory of the jet. I’ve never seen her like this, so nervous. When she returns to her seat, her hair is larger than ever. Her perfume pungent. Her lips shiny. It’s like opening night, and she’” sweating it out before the curtain goes up.

At the gate, my mom and the general are waiting. When sees us, Mother raises her arms and beams like the Statue of Liberty. Her doctors believe that they got all the cancer and that she’ll have a complete recovery. She looks wonderfully alive in her peach colored linen suit. Donald yells, “Hey!” but with his accent I imagine he’s saying, “Hay?” Then, before we come any closer, my mother has a camera and is snapping photos.

Dressed in her little red-and-black Talbot’s ensemble, her linked in mine, Amity shines it on. As I escort her out into the terminal, the camera’s electronic flash popping over and over, smiles like a movie star, and everyone in the gate area of the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport stares at her as if she’s the most beautiful and glamorous thing they’ve ever seen. And at that moment, I wish Brian Manes, that dumb-ass wrestler in high school who hassled me to no end and called me a faggot every day of school for three years, could see me now. But since he’s

not here, it’s satisfaction enough to know that he’ll never get a blow job like the one I got.

“Harry!” my mother says, grabbing my face in her hands and kissing my cheek. She turns to Amity and reaches out her hand. “Amity dear.” Amity shakes and smiles and nauce to meet yew’s my mom, and my mother turns to me and nods with an impressed look on her face. Of course I could have wheeled Karen Ann Quinlan out on a gurney and my mother would have thought, “What a delightful girl. Nonsense about this coma thing she’s just thinking.”

Amity offers a handshake to Donald, who holds her hand a little longer than my mother does, and then a little longer still. Donald then shakes my hand and slaps me so hard on the back that I cough up a piece of lung.

We exit through the sliding glass doors of the terminal into the muggy summer air brimming with the smell of earth and wheat. It’s sunny and hot. The puffy clouds serve only as decoration to the unrelenting Kansas sky. Donald has parked illegally in the holding area for hotel vans. I used to park there, five years before, when I was home from college for the summer, and working a piddly-ass job for pocket change by driving a van for the Sheraton Airport Hotel while Winston apprenticed at a downtown investment firm. I’d wait for the Braniff hostesses in their Halston uniforms to appear from the terminal so that I could whisk them away to their hotel jail cells. Haughty sky goddesses. They never tipped, which is why, now that I’m a flight attendant, no matter how poor I am, I tip double.

Donald wheels the Cadillac out of the airport and points it east, onto the flat infinity of Highway 54. The farmland outskirts of the city are soon replaced with rows of small brick houses and too many architecturally uninspired, single-storied, round churches with big brown crosses on their roofs. I’m never sure what the denomination of each church is, just that they all employ the same architect.

As we approach downtown, my mother narrates the city by explaining the “Keeper of the Plains” sculpture at the foot of the river, the sculpture we’re unable to see from the highway. She points out the huge, low, circular roof of the Century 21 Civic Center. “That’s where they have beauty pageants and ice shows and traveling art exhibits,” my mother says. “And in the Fourth National Bank Building, there’s a Calder sculpture,” she adds, trying to impress. Amity nods and replies at all the right moments.

My family home borders the country club golf course and is a tasteful eight-thousand-square-foot ranch-style house with a wood shingle roof. It sits upon several acres of wooded lawns, and the entire property is encircled with a white wooden fence that is repainted every year. The entry to the property is gated, and my mother reaches up to her visor and clicks the remote control that triggers the gate. “Amity’s here!” she sings to the gate as it swings open.

We drive past a grove of pin oaks and roll up to the house and unload. Entering the house, my mother leads us through the oak floored foyer, over the white carpet, and out to the west wing, while Amity immediately compliments her on her lovely homestead. My mother’s decorating tastes have never changed with trends and fashion she has always been a lover of fine American antic and she’s traveled the country most of her life in search of finest Early American pieces. You can practically hear the stampede and frontier women giving birth as you walk past kerosene lamps, wooden rocking chairs, old school desks, the collection of horse bridles hanging on the wall, and flour and sugar storage bins now filled with spicy potpourri. A varied collection of grandfather wall clocks ticks away the silence in each room, including the room given to Amity and me. It’s different from where I slept with my ex-boyfriend. Matthew and I only visited when my father was away, and we were assigned a room with two twin beds. My mother made no secret that she was only mildly comfortable having my boyfriend

and me in the house, and that no sex was to occur. The rules are changed. Amity and I get our own bed. Queen size. My mother makes it clear that Amity is the queen, not I. No, now I am the king. I can practically hear my mother proclaim, “Long live the royal couple!”

In the late afternoon, after I’ve walked Amity around the house and grounds, and we’re sitting in the living room, playing get-to know-you, the front door swings open unexpectedly.

Winston.

He’s standing in the foyer wearing a double-breasted suit and a condescending smile, the only kind he owns. I had no idea he was coming, and I want to kill my mother the moment I see him. I know she’s arranged this and conveniently not told me. There’s no question he’s here in order to attend the unveiling of his baby brother’s girlfriend. “I finally made it,” he says, as if we’ve all been waiting for him. “Sorry I’m late. I told the airline I understand that coach passengers get what they pay for, but when someone flies first class, they should be guaranteed to arrive on time.” He dumps his Bill Blass blazer on the old wooden school bench in the foyer. He’s stunning, as always. Just over six feet tall. Brown wavy hair, hazel eyes, and tan as a lifeguard. “Hello, Mother,” he sings, kissing her on the cheek. He nods to Donald. “Ronald.” Then he turns, ignores me, and sighs, “And you must be Enmity.”