The Privileges (3 page)

He finds his phone on the dresser and calls her again. “I talked to your dad at breakfast,” he says. “You should give him a call.”

“I’m going to.”

“Where are you?” he says.

“At the airport. Don’t try to have me followed.”

“No, seriously.” He strains to make out the background noise,
then realizes it’s the same as the background noise in his own room. “Are you at the Pirates game?”

She laughs. “I’m in a bar with Marietta. We’ve had our hair done, but we’re not ready to go back to the House of Pain just yet.”

“What bar?”

“In your dreams,” she says.

“Well, okay, but just don’t show up drunk at the altar, because my last wife did that and, let me tell you, it really lowered the tone.”

She smiles. The TV plays on a shelf above the scarred oaken bar, in the wonderful, midday, reptile-house gloom. With her fingers she ruins the circle of condensation that her vodka-and-soda glass keeps leaving on the wood. She knows why he’s calling. “So,” she says, “you’re doing okay?”

When she says it she swears she can hear his breathing slow down. “Sure,” he says. “I’m fine. I just don’t like all the waiting.”

They go over the schedule again and hang up, and Cynthia notices her maid of honor staring at her. “He’s nervous, huh,” Marietta says. She drinks. “So, are you nervous?”

Cynthia’s first reaction, she has to admit, is to deny it without thinking about it, because she knows this is how she and Adam figure in the lives of their friends: as the fearless ones, dismissive of warnings and permissions, the ones who go first. But when she does think about it she realizes that the answer is still no. They are perfect together.

“He makes me laugh, and he makes me come,” she says. “And he needs me much too badly to ever fuck things up.”

“Well, I’ll drink to that,” Marietta says, but then she doesn’t drink. Her own date is spending the morning in the hotel gym; nothing about this whole weekend will please him as much as the discovery that his daily workout routine doesn’t have to be altered. She stares into the cloudy mirror behind the bar, where their elaborately coiffed heads float as if in an aquarium. In this splendid dump they look like extras who have wandered off a movie set. “Hey,” she says. “Your head smell like fucking ashtray.”

As the heat peaks the city takes on a dirty sheen. Behind the haze the sun can only be approximately located, like the source of a
headache; on the sidewalks each citizen moves forward in a kind of cocoon of dampness. The wedding guests have abandoned any halfhearted plans to see some more of the city—the church is just a three-minute walk across the park from the Athletic Club and they will wait until the last minute even for that. Unhurriedly they take the tuxedo shirts out of their boxes, recount the studs and the cuff links, hang the dresses on the bathroom door and turn on the shower to steam the travel wrinkles out of them. With nothing else to do they prop open their doors and turn the place into a dormitory. Someone puts on some music and the first complaint from the front desk arrives. They have begun drinking. Special occasions are marked by feats of excess.

One-forty and no one knows where the bride is. Deborah hasn’t said a word; she lies on the couch in her bridesmaid’s dress, reading Walter Benjamin and drinking a Diet Coke. Ruth feels as if her brain is going to blow out of her head like a champagne cork. At the same time she feels justified in some way by the threatened emergence into reality of her vision that this whole day would end in disaster. Her daughter left the hairdresser’s more than an hour ago. Fine. It upheld Ruth’s view of life, her own life at least, to think that the things that mattered to her were, in everyone else’s estimation, a joke. Thirty-eight thousand dollars her husband has sunk into this day—more than the old days gave them any right to dream of—and Cynthia has barely acknowledged him; as for Warren, he has been putting on his tuxedo in the bedroom for an hour now, which, since he is a man who knows how to wear a tuxedo, suggests to Ruth that he is avoiding her. What’s worst, though, is her full awareness, even at a moment like this, of her daughter’s supreme, blithe competence. In another few minutes, with no word from her, they will have no choice but to proceed to the Athletic Club for the photo session as planned, and Ruth knows, in her heart of hearts, that Cynthia will be there. Of course there will be no real disaster: instead there will be the vindication of that refusal to take any of it seriously, to treat respectfully the day that marked the end of motherhood. Till death do us part. Big joke.

The only one who has already braved the walk from hotel to
church, several times today in fact, is Masha. Wearing a maroon blazer—a little heavy for a day like this, but the item in her closet that came closest to matching the burgundy of the bridesmaid’s dresses—she is losing the battle to maintain a fresh, unruffled appearance throughout the day’s events, that projection of capability that’s normally a key element of her job; but today, she keeps telling herself, is a special case. She’s sent her son to Wal-Mart, even though she knows he’s high, to buy every standing fan they have. She’s glad the groom is a little late for their meeting before the photo session. She doesn’t particularly care anymore how it might look that she’s waiting for him in the hotel bar. She drinks club soda after club soda and watches the guys in the band carry their own drums and keyboards and amplifiers into the ballroom, gasping and swearing, while she tries discreetly to check the size of the sweat stains under her arms.

Then the groom enters, black-tied, a very handsome boy with a highly developed sense of charm. “The wedding planner? Oh, she’s in the bar,” he says as he holds out his hand. It comes back to Masha that he is from New York City and has a way of speaking that’s sometimes difficult to follow.

In the Trophy Room they find Ruth and Warren and Warren’s mother, who at eighty-seven has lost track of time’s more incremental movements and thus is as pleased to wait there indefinitely as her daughter-in-law is perplexed and insulted. They are more or less flattened against the wall by the door in order to avoid inconveniencing the photographer as he testily moves the lights and rearranges the furniture. No one else is there. The photographer, a short man with a neat mustache and a drinking problem whom Masha has worked with many times, is pleased to see her because here at last is someone with whom he may safely lose his temper.

“She has something better to do?” he says, smiling tightly, speaking of the bride. “There’s maybe something good on TV?”

With her back to Adam, Masha lifts her eyebrows at the photographer as if to say what can we do, this is what we’re working with; and she says, “Allow me to introduce the groom, Adam Morey.”

The photographer’s mood is softened by Adam’s charisma only
because he sees that here is a young man obviously not averse to having his picture taken. The groomsmen file in; he can tell, mostly from their adolescent nudging, that a few of them are drunk. Who gives a shit, he reminds himself, and grabs one of them and points to his mark on the floor. He makes a note of the groom’s parents (the father has the same strong chin and small mouth, the same convex hairline) standing with their backs to the wall, gazing at their son as if from a great distance, as if crowds were cheering, as if they were standing on an ice floe.

Then the bride walks in, ahead of her own entourage like a prizefighter, in the dress, the makeup, the veil and gloves, the full regalia. Masha and Ruth together make a gasping sound that’s as unrehearsed as anything they’ll say or feel all day. “No rush,” says the photographer, but already his sarcasm is losing its edge—his work bores and harries him but he is not inured to beauty—and he goes to look at her through the camera. Behind Cynthia come the six bridesmaids, Deborah several steps in front of the rest in her eagerness to get out of that awful suite where the beautiful ninnies chattered. The bridesmaids fan out by the door, sharing one of those gigantic bottles of water, picking at the sleeveless wine-colored dresses that are already darkening in spots.

This is why they are late: on her way to the suite set aside for the bridal party’s preparations, Cynthia had finally stopped and knocked at the door to her father’s room; he had opened the door in his tuxedo, looking like a movie star, though also older and thinner than she remembered him; and then, as she’d known all along she would without quite knowing why, she collapsed in tears. He took her in his arms and shut the door and whispered the little things that only he could get away with and then a few minutes later she reemerged and went to the elevator bank to go get her makeup applied.

He’s last to enter the Trophy Room. Life does not seem versatile enough to account for the fact that this man and Cynthia’s mother once fell in love and got married. Ruth herself has trouble accepting it as true, not because she has forgotten but because she remembers the strong impression he gave, every day for ten years, that he was
late for some amusing engagement somewhere else. Now she watches in horror as Warren crosses the room to shake her ex-husband’s hand. It’s her fate, she thinks, to end up loyal to men who don’t understand loyalty themselves.

There is only one person in the room Conrad’s age whom he hasn’t known for years, and that’s Deborah. It’s her he winds up standing next to after the family photograph; and she doesn’t actively ignore him because there’s something in his face that she doesn’t see in the Barbie faces of everyone else in the room.

“I’m actually a little nervous,” he finds himself saying. “I have to give the toast.”

That’s what it is about him, she thinks, a recognizable human emotion. Unconsciously she pulls at the neckline of her bridesmaid’s dress to try to keep her tattoo covered. He looks about eighteen, though she knows he must be older than that; at some point all these people were in the same college at the same time, or maybe it just seems that way. “You’ll get through it,” she says, not unkindly. “Just be yourself.”

The room grows noisy, and at the center of it, Adam and Cynthia stand staring at each other, at the odd three-quarter angle into which the photographer manhandled them when it became too difficult to explain what he wanted. His arm around her waist. Something has been missing all day and this was it. When they are close together no one else can touch them. Their homes, their families, everything that made them is behind them now and will remain so from here on in. Masha pops up with a handful of tissues to wipe the sweat off Adam’s forehead.

“I lost weight while getting married!” Adam says. “Ask me how!”

“Stop talking!” barks the photographer. “Memory time!”

This is where it starts to become a blur. And now, finally, as they take orders to turn their heads or change the position of their fingers—as they stand rooted at the apex of a continually reconfigured V—comes the feeling they didn’t quite credit before now, the feeling that the ceremony itself has taken over and begun to bear them along. Everything is dictated from here. They’ve exchanged
themselves for their roles and it is not at all an unpleasant or a violated feeling. In the end not even their memories will have to be relied on; images of the day and night that have been taken out of their hands will arrive in the mail, weeks from now, formally and expensively bound.

The church is a furnace. With the heat wave in its second week, Masha’s son was able to find for sale only five standing fans; the breeze they generate falters at about the third row. One young mother with a baby, a cousin of the groom’s, stands up from her pew and heads back to the hotel before the ceremony has even begun. But Masha is at home at the intersection of pageantry and crisis; she calls the ushers together to instruct them to seat the eldest guests nearest the doors, regardless of their affiliation to bride or groom, and delivers a quick first-aid course in case of fainting. In the event, though, it’s one of the ushers, a blond-haired boy named Sam, who finally passes out, just at the end of the aisle. Too exhausted to be discreet, his friends lay him awkwardly across the rearmost pew. Masha cradles his head in her lap and pulls out the smelling salts she had the foresight to transfer from the home first-aid kit into her purse just that morning.

The rest of them proceed to the altar a man down. What seemed like such a lightweight job has proved so brutal that it’s starting to seem a little funny, all the more so when they stare across the altar at the bridesmaids, who look as if they have just come from a five-mile hike in their red dresses. But then the familiar martial introduction rolls down from the organist’s loft, a hundred and twenty people struggle gamely to their feet, and their attention gathers at the point where the light is strongest, at the church door. In the heat and glare the bride and her father shimmer slightly.

Marietta, who unlike most of them has had a few hours to grow used to the sight of her best friend in a wedding dress, keeps thinking about the ceremony itself, how many of its accepted elements seem wrong on symbolic grounds and should be changed. Why would you walk toward the man with whom you wanted to share
your life in that halting, infantile gait, slower than you’d walked across any room in your life, as if you were being brought in by the tide? Wouldn’t it be more auspicious to slip off your torture shoes and run up there? Then she realizes that what she’s having, in effect, is a conversation with Cynthia, who would normally share her subversive interest in the day’s many weirdnesses, but who’s on the other side of the glass now. They have promised each other over and over that none of what exists between them will be lost, but neither of them has ever had a married friend and so neither of them really knows. She watches Cynthia’s father, that charming piece of shit, squeeze his daughter’s arm emotively without taking his eyes off their destination; he looks like Washington standing in the boat. Knowing how to behave on grand occasions has never been his problem; it’s the ordinary that could never sustain his interest.

When they finally arrive and the last note of the processional fades, he kisses her on the cheek, says something private to her, and withdraws. All eyes turn to the priest, who, in his mountainous bell-shaped surplice, resembles one of those eternally trickling monuments.