THE BRO-MAGNET (3 page)

I turn back to the head table. Alice is still there. Alone. A bride alone on her wedding day.

This isn’t right.

Which is how I finally wind up dancing with Alice Keller nee Knox fourteen years after prom to “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”

Fuck the DJ for thinking show tunes were a good idea.

* * *

“You make a beautiful bride,” I say, one hand lightly on Alice’s waist, the other primly on her shoulder, as many inches as possible while still slow dancing separating our bodies so mine doesn’t even think about getting an erection. Or, if it betrays me and goes ahead anyway, hopefully she’ll never know.

“Thanks,” she says, but she doesn’t look happy with the compliment. “I can’t believe you did a retread at my wedding.”

“A retread?” What’s she talking about? Retreads are tires.

“A retread.” Now she’s exasperated at my stupidity. “You gave that same exact ‘circle of friends’ speech at Drew’s wedding.”

Oh. See? This is what I meant earlier about the guys getting tears in their eyes on account of my speech while the women present did not. It’s because the guys always hit the open bar so early and so hard at these things, they don’t remember that maybe they’ve heard that speech before. But the women? Except for the diehard alcoholics they’re smarter. They drink slower in the beginning and therefore, they tend to remember pesky little details.

“I can’t believe,” Alice continues when I fail to say anything in my own defense, “you gave a wedding toast you’d already given once before.”

Actually, I’ve given that speech not just once but seven times before, this being my eighth stint as Best Man – hey, when you’ve got a crowd-pleasing event-appropriate speech in the can that is loved by at least half your audience, why mess with a good thing? But Alice was out of town all those years and therefore missed the other six times I gave the ‘circle of a man’s life’ speech, and hey, I’m not going to be the one to clue her in.

Anyway, it’s not like I’ve given the
exact
same speech eight times. Used to be, when I’d near the end I’d say, “If a man is extremely lucky, if he’s the luckiest man in the world, he finds the right woman to share his life with,” but then I was Best Man at a gay wedding so I had to swap “woman” out in favor of “person” and ever since then it’s just stuck. Hey, gotta be PC, gotta move with the times.

“I’m sorry, Alice,” I say, contrite. Then I brighten. “But hey, your uncle Paul seemed to like it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grown man cry so hard. And the way he hugged me!”

“Oh,” she shakes her head in disgust, “he’s an alcoholic. He cries when he watches
Wipeout
too. Believe me, Uncle Paul crying is no endorsement.”

Perhaps it’s time to change the subject.

“So,” I say, “now that you and Billy are husband and wife, I guess you and I’ll be seeing more of one another?”

“God, I hope not,” she says. “I don’t know what Billy sees in you.”

What do I even say to something like that?

Thank God I don’t have to say anything, because just then I see a pretty feminine hand tap on Alice’s shoulder –
tap, tap, tap
– and there’s Three Sheets, cutting in on Alice so she can dance with me.

“What’s your cousin’s name again?” I whisper in Alice’s ear as we switch partners and I take Three Sheets in my arms.

 I don’t know why I can’t remember the cousin’s name – you’d think I’d be able to after the engagement party, rehearsal, rehearsal dinner etcetera – but it’s a wedding thing, like this mental block. I know I’ll never see this person after a certain point, that point in time being in just a few hours, so why waste the limited storage capacity of my brain by committing her name to memory?

Another look of disgust from Alice – “You’re kidding me, right?” she says – and then Billy’s whirling her away like he’s a taller, bulkier Fred Astaire. Huh. Those pre-wedding ballroom dancing lessons he took are really paying off.

I look down at Three Sheets wishing I had the balls to ask her name but that would be too embarrassing. For her, I mean. She’d probably get depressed, thinking herself so unremarkable, she’s not even worthy of someone she’s been in a wedding party with remembering her name. Me, I’m used to being embarrassed. Honestly, most of the time I don’t even notice anymore when it happens. I just keep going.

“So,” I say, going for a reliable conversation starter, “some wedding, huh?”

Three Sheets tilts her head up at me and for the first time it registers that she’s pretty. Sure, she’s packing an extra fifteen to twenty pounds – wedding-party dresses can be so unkind, particularly purple – but I’ve never minded a little bulk on a woman. Her hair is dark blond and thick, even if it does look a little too retro in that maid of honor updo, and her baby blues are kind if a little bleary.

“It’s great,” she says, giving me an admiring look, “and that ‘circle of friends’ speech – I can’t remember the last time anything moved me so much. How did you ever come up with exactly the perfect thing to say about Alice and Billy?”

Ah, the advantages of out-of-town wedding guests. Three Sheets is probably the only woman in the whole room who thinks that was a custom-made speech – even the wait staff in this place have heard it more than once!

* * *

The cake is cut, dessert is eaten – I love it when the bride eschews tradition and goes for the chocolate – then Billy throws the garter and I catch it (my eighth but I never try; they just always somehow land in my possession) and Alice throws the bouquet and Three Sheets catches it.

So there I am, sliding the garter up Three Sheets’s stockings-clad leg. I don’t have much experience taking garters off women but I’m something of a pro, after seven previous times, putting them on women. The trick is to make it look sexy enough to keep the boozy crowd happy but without defiling the garter recipient’s reputation in any way, which can be a challenge if the recipient is drunk and proves almost impossible in the case of Three Sheets.

She’s got her legs crossed demurely at the knee but as soon as that garter goes past her ankle, she spreads that top leg straight out wide and hikes up her dress to make my job easier. She does such a good job of spreading and hiking, I find myself confronted with the fact that underneath that maid of honor dress, her own stockings are held up by garters and she’s, um, traveling commando.

Holy shit!
I’m hoping that the fact that everyone’s consumed a lot of alcohol, coupled with the fact that my kneeling body is right in front of her, will prevent the crowd from seeing what I just saw, which includes London, France and Three Sheets’s lack of underpants. Maybe they only caught a flash and will think that dark thatch I’m seeing up close is some part of her hiked purple dress?

Quickly, I deposit the garter somewhere below her knee and immediately pull her dress down so everything’s all modest again.

As the guests groan – “Couldn’t you get it up?” (very funny) “Couldn’t you get it any higher?” – and the garter falls back down around her ankle, Three Sheets leans forward in her chair and now I’m getting a big serving of cleavage.

“You’re cute, Mr. Speechmaker,” she says, placing hands on either side of my face for a squeeze and in the process reminding me a little too much of Aunt Alfresca the few times she’s ever felt warmly toward me. “Meet me in my room at the hotel next door? I’m staying in 213.”  

I’m about to say no – you know, the Aunt Alfresca thing, but then I shake that off. Hey, you always hear about guys getting lucky at weddings. Why shouldn’t it be me? It
should
be me. Holy crap, it
is
me! Plus, she called me Mr. Speechmaker. So chances are she doesn’t remember my name either, making it perfectly OK for me to bang a girl whose name I don’t know.

“Sure thing,” I tell Three Sheets. “But let’s wait for a bit. It wouldn’t be right to duck out of the wedding before the bride and groom.”

* * *

Earlier, Alice said she didn’t see what Billy saw in me as a friend. Well, I think, as we all wave them off, maybe Billy will tell her now while they make the short journey from the reception to the hotel right next door. See, as part of my wedding present to the two of them, in addition to a check – people love getting money, right? – I sprang for two nights in the honeymoon suite so they wouldn’t have to get on a plane the very next day.

“But we want to get to Bermuda as quickly as we can!” Billy objected when presented with my idea.

“No, you do not,” I said. “Don’t you remember what happened to Drew and Stacy?”

Drew and Stacy’s flight left first thing in the morning the day after they got married. They were both still pretty much well drunk from the day before, so Stacy barely made it on the plane because she was too busy puking in the airport bathroom, then on top of that she picked up a parasite in the Dominican Republic, which she could have avoided if she hadn’t needed to have a drink as soon as she got there for a little hair of the dog and misjudged and drank something with ice cubes in it. So then she ended up sick the whole time they were there, leaving Drew to spend much of their honeymoon playing pool volleyball with a bunch of Germans, and she wound up having to go to the hospital when they got back.

Frankly, none of us think the marriage will ever recover. Now, if they’d only thought to let an extra day pass before getting on that plane…

 Tell a story that uses the word “puke” enough times and you can persuade almost anyone of anything, which is how I convinced Billy to accept the two nights in the hotel, thereby no doubt saving the future of his marriage.

Me? I know everything about how to do a wedding up right.

“Ready, Mr. Speechmaker?” Three Sheets says, sidling up to me.

The bride and groom are gone. It’s a wedding. I could do worse.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I say and put my arm around her. “Let’s hit it.”

* * *

Perhaps not as nice as the honeymoon suite, still, Room 213 will do.

There’s a big bed, out the window there’s a view of the highway in the distance, in the room there’s a mini-bar – all the comforts of home.

“So, um, what did you say you do for a living?” I ask.

I’m crouched down checking out the mini-bar selection, figuring I’ll just give Three Sheets some cash before I go to cover whatever I take, when – oof! – something crashes into me from behind. I’m not quite sure what Three Sheets was trying to accomplish, whether she was making an amorous move on me or if she simply tripped on her way over to those travel-sized bottles of liquor. But whatever. The results are the same. I’m sprawled on the floor, half on my side, and she’s sprawled on top of me. Before I was thinking maybe we’d have a drink and then maybe kiss for a while first, maybe even finally learn each other’s names, but as she rearranges me so that I’m flat on my back and leans over me with all that purple-encased cleavage, I’m thinking: Yeah, this could work.

And then Three Sheets is kissing me, she’s got her tongue down my throat, I’m a little taken aback by the suddenness yet somehow manage to respond in kind, then she’s sliding my white tux jacket off, ripping off my purple bowtie, undoing the buttons on my shirt. The cummerbund confuses her for a bit, but then, don’t cummerbunds confuse everybody?

And now I’m playing catch-up here, sliding that ridiculous purple dress off Three Sheet’s creamy shoulders and – wow! – she’s got no bra on underneath to go along with the no panties underneath I glimpsed earlier. This is so easy. It’s almost too easy. Now she undoes my belt, tugs my white pants down over my hips so that they’re bunched up around my ankles. Wait! Don’t I have to get this stupid tux back by five? Oh, that’s right, I still have until tomorrow night. My white patent-leather penny loafers still on my feet, I’m tenting my boxers but she relieves me of that restraint too and then takes a quick dive, her breasts are bobbing in rhythm with her head, and I’m thinking this is great, this is really great, this is the best wedding I’ve ever been to, this is so good. And that’s when I gently shift a little away from her mouth, gently push her away from me because I don’t want to just come and make her have to wait for me to get hard again, and I find my pants and I’m reaching in my pants pockets – Do I have a condom? Of course I have a condom. I’m a thirty-three-year-old single man. I’ve always got a condom, and no, it’s not the same one I kept from senior prom thru college – and now I’m sliding it on, and it keeps rolling back from the base like condoms sometimes annoyingly do, and the annoying rolling gives me a moment to look at the woman who’s supposed to be the object of my desire, at least right at this moment, and she’s slouched on the ground, her naked back barely propped up by the side of the bed, her updo’s somehow become a downdo, a thick hank of hair stuck to her cheek by what looks unpleasantly like drool, her eyes are at half-mast and she’s starting to nod, and I’m thinking,
NO! Do not pass out! Please, do not pass out! I want to get laid! I may not be a virgin, but it has been a very long dry spell!
I don’t say this out loud, of course I don’t, but I’m patting her on the cheeks, trying to get my date to be more, um, alert. And now she is alert! And she’s saying, “Don’t worry, I still want to do this. That speech, my God, that speech,” except that she’s really slurring now, even worse than before, so it sounds more like “Don ree, ill wanna da-dis. Thaspee, mygah, thaspee,” which I’m only able to decipher because I flunked Spanish but I do speak Drunk, and I’m going to go for it anyway when it suddenly hits me: No, this really is too easy.

Why is it that it’s just the somehow-impaired ones who ever go for me?

Three Sheets is too drunk, reminding me of another girl in another place and time. She may think she wants to do this but she’s not capable of making a decision right now.

And that’s when I force myself away from her.

“But – ” she says.

“You don’t even know my name,” I say.

“But – ” she says again.

But I will brook no buts. I hike myself back into my boxers and pants, then help her up and onto the bed. Somehow I get the covers down and her underneath them, tuck the blankets up under her chin. By now she’s snoring quietly, so I tiptoe around as I locate an empty champagne bucket to put near the bed in case she needs to puke and I liberate a water bottle from the mini-bar and put it on the night table along with one of the trial packets of aspirin I always keep on me just in case – she’ll need both when she wakes up – and finally money to cover the charge for the water bottle when it appears on her hotel bill.