The Privileges (2 page)

“So shall we go do the hair thing?” Marietta says, but then all of
a sudden Deborah is in the doorway, hair matted, face pebbled from the rough upholstery of the couch, looking at them both with tribal hatred.

“Your phone’s ringing,” she says to her stepsister, and turns and leaves.

The phone is on the bedroom floor, underneath the jacket Cynthia wore to the rehearsal dinner. Marietta follows her through the living room.

“Thanks for bringing it to me, there, Debski,” says Cynthia, though Deborah has disappeared into the bathroom. “So, you didn’t bring your dress? Where is it?”

“In the freezer,” Marietta says.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby. Haven’t you heard? It’s my Special Day.”

“Well, that’s my point. You’re the bride. Still well within your power to change the whole dress code to, like, beach casual.”

“Wear a tank top to your own wedding, slut,” Cynthia says. “That’s not how we roll here in Pittsburgh.”

“I’ve got that not-so-fresh feeling,” Marietta says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

In his chair watching CNN as they pass behind him, Warren hears all this and, though he would still like to be a kind of father to this young woman, knows that for the moment the only dignified course is to pretend that he is not even in the room at all.

Cynthia smiles at Marietta and takes the phone out on the deck. “Isn’t this bad luck?” she says, sliding the door shut behind her.

“I saw your dad in the lobby last night,” Adam says. “I recognized him from his picture. He seemed in pretty good form. Have you called him yet?”

“No,” she says, and her heart races a little bit. “I will in a while. Hey, what time is it?”

“Quarter to four.”

“Very funny. I mean aren’t you supposed to be at breakfast with your parents?”

“Maybe.”

“Well don’t leave Conrad alone with them, for God’s sake. You
know how they get. Plus he’s got the rings so let’s not antagonize him.”

Adam smiles, waiting for the elevator in the empty hotel corridor. “Can you believe we’re doing this?” he says.

The boards on the deck are already burning her feet. “Not too late to back out,” she said, “if that’s why you’re calling.”

“Well, I still have seven hours to think about it, right?”

“Me too. Tell you what, if I’m not there by, let’s say, ten of four, you just go ahead and assume I’m not coming, okay?”

“Fair enough. Seeing how everything’s paid for and all, if you don’t show I’ll just wave one of the bridesmaids up and marry her.”

“Which one you have your eye on?”

There is a pause. “I missed you when I woke up this morning,” he says.

Her view of the golf course from earlier that morning has now been erased by haze. She closes her eyes. “Me too,” she says. “You won’t forget pictures, right?”

“Two-fifteen in the Trophy Room. Conrad’s carrying around a little schedule.”

“Okay,” she says. “See you then. Enjoy your last few hours of freedom.”

“Gotta go,” he says. “The hookers are here.”

She hangs up on him, smiling. In the living room, Marietta stands uncomfortably, while Deborah, back on the couch, watches her like a guard dog, like some emissary from the underworld of the socially damned. Marietta can read her hatred only as jealousy, which softens her own attitude a bit.

“So,” she says, and remembers that Deborah is a graduate student somewhere, in something. “School is good?”

Adam strolls into the hotel dining room and sees that his parents, sitting with a stricken-looking Conrad, have ordered their breakfast but not touched it. They missed their connection in New York yesterday and arrived too late to make it to the rehearsal dinner, which may have been just as well. He kisses his mother on the top of her head. “How’s your room?” he asks. “Everything to your liking?”

Adam’s father makes a sarcastic noise, which his mother recognizes
and preemptively talks over. “Very nice,” she says. “Very comfortable. You have to point out Cynthia’s parents to me so we can say thank you.”

The two sets of parents have never met. There didn’t seem much point to it. “Marietta made it home okay last night?” Adam asks Conrad. Conrad nods but does not stop eating, because he would very much like to get this breakfast over with. Adam signals the waitress for coffee. He hasn’t really looked at either of his parents since he sat down. No one is looking at Mr. Morey, though he seems to be mysteriously gathering himself nonetheless, like a clock about to strike. Two heart attacks have hunched his shoulders in the way of a man much older than he actually is. Up in the room are four portable oxygen tanks, in case he needs them, and in the purse at his wife’s feet are various pills and phone numbers. But his short temper and unregulated resentments suggest that his physical failings are a kind of natural outgrowth of his personality, and everyone who knows him, mindful of his angry pride, is unsolicitous toward him. He is tormented by the efflorescence of foolishness and waste of all kinds, everywhere around him. He was a pipe fitter who became a full-time union executive until his disabilities forced him to retire. The Pittsburgh Athletic Club is exactly the kind of place that sets him off. His wife has made him put on a coat and tie for breakfast even though she will now have to hear about it for the next month.

But Adam is not embarrassed by them in this setting, as his brother is, because he doesn’t really associate them all that closely with himself anymore. He is amused by their helpless compulsion to be themselves, and will wind them up like a music box at any opportunity. “Hey, you know what I found in my room?” he says. “In the dresser drawer? A list of room rates. Did you guys see that? Do you have any idea what this place
costs?”

“Oh, Adam,
please,”
his mother whispers, “today of all—”

“As it happens, I did,” his father says, reddening. “I’m just glad I’m not the sap paying for all this.”

“More reason to be glad we never had girls,” his mother says, and laughs as if she were being filmed laughing.

“That wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to me,” Mr. Morey says. “I don’t have to put on a show for anybody. I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not.”

Adam abruptly stands up. “Oh look, there’s Mr. Sikes,” he says. “Excuse me. I’m gonna go practice calling him Dad.” And he crosses the room to where the bride’s dapper father sits at a table by himself, reading the paper. Conrad watches him leave in disbelief. His parents stare accusingly at each other. A moment later the waitress comes by and fills Adam’s coffee cup.

The doors to the hotel ballroom are shut, and behind them, in moments of silence, one can hear the vacuum cleaners run. Teenage girls in stiff black skirts walk from table to table, checking the place settings, counting on their fingers. They work slowly; the air conditioning is turned up all the way, and with the room not yet full of bodies it is exotically cold, the coldest place in the hotel. Only those most desperate for a cigarette pass through the double doors to the infernal kitchen and the steaming alley beyond.

At the hotel bar sits the wedding planner, habitually early, having sent her son and his friend to the florist’s in her van, praying they haven’t stopped to get high along the way. It’s why she doesn’t pay them in advance. The bar isn’t officially open yet but Masha knows everyone at the Athletic Club; this will be her fourth reception there this year. Though it’s before noon, she feels like (as her father used to say) a
drink
drink, and Omar the bartender would certainly comp her one, but while she’s on the job alcohol is out of the question. Something like that gets out and your reputation is shot. True, the bride—whose superior attitude Masha doesn’t especially care for—isn’t even from Pittsburgh and acts as if she might never set foot here again after today; but the stepfather, whose name is on the checks, is some rainmaker at Reed Smith, and the mother, whose superior attitude she doesn’t much care for either, is one of those chronically unsatisfied types who love nothing better than to nurse along some scandal, substantiated or otherwise.

But that’s the secret to Masha’s success: you get invested not in the people, who can let you down, but in the ceremony, which never does. She doesn’t say it out loud very often but she thinks of herself
as a guardian of something, a finger in the dike holding back total indifference toward the few things that have always mattered, ritual and devotion and commitment. When you thought of it that way, the less you happened to care for the families themselves, the more noble your work became. Her own marriage ended after nine years, but that detracted in no way from the beautiful memory of her wedding day itself; in fact, that’s what you were left with, she thinks, that and a beloved if somewhat less than reliable son. Besides, if it were up to her they would all still be together, husband and wife and child, through happy and contentious times alike. But not everything is her decision.

A couple around the bride and groom’s age walks into the bar and Omar tells them that he’s closed. The boy looks ready to argue the evidence, but the girl says, “Forget it. I need to go upstairs and take another shower anyway.” That’s what today’s going to be, Masha thinks: a pageant of sweat. Eighty-eight already, according to the silent TV screen above Omar’s shaved head. That was part of the risk they all assumed when they booked the most beautiful old unmodernized Catholic church in Pittsburgh. That’s why she is waiting until the last moment with the flowers. She couldn’t book them the weather. Not that that would stop the mother from blaming her for it anyway.

Across town Cynthia and Marietta sit bemused and intimidated, shirtless, their heads poking through holes cut in old bedsheets, as a tight-lipped Polish woman (recommended by Masha) and her young assistant do their hair. They tease each other with stories from their college days; all the stories involve embarrassment or regret but none of them can’t be laughed at. Only a few of them are about men because Cynthia and Adam started dating sophomore year. The Polish women, in a kind of secondary theme, speak in unsmiling Polish about God knows what, at least until Cynthia says something about how badly this whole ordeal makes her want a cigarette.

“Please no,” the older one says, her scissors in the air. “Big kiss on altar, your husband think hey, my wife’s head smell like fucking ashtray.”

Their eyes meet in the mirror, already retelling it.

The doors to the church stand open, for circulation’s sake, but the dust hangs motionless on the ramps of light that slope down from the tall windows. Masha watches her red-eyed son and his Mexican friend, whom she secretly calls Señor Detention, try to get the white runner straight atop the sun-bleached carpeting between the pews. She pulls a creased checklist out of her jacket pocket and walks past the kneeling boys to the pulpit; turning to face the rows of empty seats, she solemnly taps her finger on the live microphone.

“Stay out of heat,” the Polish woman says hopelessly as Cynthia and Marietta button their shirts back on. “Whole thing fall down.”

With the car’s air conditioner at full blast, Marietta pulls into the Harrises’ driveway again. Standing outside the kitchen door on the tiny landing, flat against the wall in the scant shade of the eaves, Deborah is standing among the rain boots and gardening equipment, smoking a cigarette. She is already wearing her bridesmaid’s dress. Eyes barely open, she glowers hatefully at the tinted windshield of the car.

“What is she doing?” Marietta says. She sounds almost scared.

“I don’t know,” Cynthia says wearily. “There’s always some grievance.”

“But why is she smoking outside in this heat? Is smoking not allowed in your mom’s house or something?”

“Warren smokes. He smokes in the house all the time.”

“Then why is she—”

“You know what?” Cynthia says. “Pull out. I can’t even deal with going back in there right now. Go on, back out. I know someplace we can go.”

Deborah watches them leave and smiles at the prospect of her stepmother’s panic. Mother and daughter are so alike. No capacity for seeing themselves through others’ eyes, no interest in it. No one ever opens a book in that whole god damned stunted hell-bound house, including her father, whose idea of self-betterment is watching
Unsolved Mysteries
. The aspect of him she’s always cared least about is his money, but now that he’s letting these two spend it like it’s theirs, she resents them as climbers, her nominal stepsister especially.
She knows this pains him. Make an effort, he keeps telling her, but no effort is necessary to understand the likes of Cynthia and her friends. One day it will hit them that high school is over.

Adam sits on the bed in his underwear. He’s watching the Pirates game on TV. He considers masturbating, out of boredom, but there is too great a likelihood that Conrad or someone else will knock on his door. There is a great sense of bustle in the walls around him but nothing seems to require him right now. It’s far too awful outside to go for a run. Why did they schedule the wedding for four in the afternoon, anyway? Solitude and inactivity make him restless. At his bachelor party last weekend—a rafting trip on the Delaware with his six groomsmen—there was never a moment of idleness; gloriously exhausted, they slept in tents, some expensive Scotch but no real drunkenness, the whole thing put together by Conrad, one of the two or three best nights of his life. They’d cheerfully teased him by recounting old hookups, old binges, old mortifications. There was some ritual sarcastic mourning of all the sexual freedom he was waiving, but he could tell—it makes him smile now to remember it—that their hearts weren’t in it, because none of them really thinks he is making a mistake. He’s slept with other women, before he and Cyn met and, truth be told, for a short time after. What’s left to mourn there? Just an adolescent obsession with variety, and he is past that point. They are meant for each other: he feels it so deeply that he’s not quite able to say it, not even to her. She’s like one of those horse whisperers, he thinks, only it’s just him, he’s the only one it works on, she’s the only one he will let speak to him that way. It would seem juvenile to go back to wanting anything other than what he has. He also has a home, and a job, and he is impatient, in possession of these things, to leave his childish self behind and get the future under way in earnest.