The Privileges (4 page)

“Before we begin,” he rumbles into the microphone, “may I suggest that under the circumstances it is permissible for gentlemen to remove their jackets.”

For about a year after her husband left her, Ruth took Cynthia to Saint George’s in Joliet Park every Sunday, trying to make the best of his absence by mounting a campaign of moral improvement. Then one Sunday Cynthia announced she would never go again, and that was that. So Ruth was surprised when her daughter said she wanted a church wedding. Surprised and a little offended, because a house of worship is not a stage set; but Warren convinced her to let that particular grievance go. Now, as the guests sit in unison and the sound of their sitting throws an echo over the faint buzz of the fans, she’s glad to be where she is, if no less mystified.

They have agreed to two short readings. Cynthia’s friend Natalie, whose hands she held when Natalie cried after their art history TA called her a cock tease, reads from Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
. Bill Stearns, Adam’s sophomore-year roommate, who once
helped him pop his shoulder back in at a touch football game and then broke a date to wait with him at the emergency room for three hours afterward, soldiers through his unprecedented recital of a poem by Juvenal. The words carry no specific meaning in this context; the hymns and Bible verses, too, are only appurtenances of meaning, but no less heartfelt for that. The trappings of belief are themselves a kind of belief, just as the priest’s cassock is his office.

For this reason they are all suddenly united in the expectation that the priest, who does not know them, who won’t see them again after today, who has even less experience with intimacy than they do, who has probably said the same thing to thirty other anonymous couples this year, has something crucial to impart to them. With majestic unself-consciousness, he blots the very top of his bald head with what is presumably a handkerchief.

“It is good,” he says, “that your life together has begun in conditions that suggest a test.” He pauses to appreciate the small laugh that ripples through the pews; the faces right in front of him, those of the bride and groom, are locked in sobriety. “There will be great joys in your life together, of course, but there will also be tests, maybe even severe ones, and the joys and the tests will not always appear in such a way as to seem to offset one another. We may lose sight, at such difficult moments, of the path, the promise, the blessedness of our lives, because we grow too close to ourselves; our purpose here is something that surely we too could begin to make out, if it were given to us to see as God sees. But we do not possess the farsightedness of God. Trust that He sees what you cannot, and that will enable you to go on trusting in each other. And if ever you should doubt yourselves, if ever there comes a time when you doubt your ability to endure hardship, remember that God, on this day and for all time, has given you to each other. He hath made all of us. And He will never ask us to shoulder more of a burden than He knows we have the strength to bear.”

The vows they have chosen are the traditional ones. The kiss is more of a relief than anything else; shyly they proceed out the door and down the church steps into the odiferous haze and climb directly into the back of a limo for the one-minute drive around the
park to the reception. The guests can see the limo pulling up at the hotel entrance as they trudge back across the park themselves. The bells are ringing, evening is approaching, and though it’s still ninety-two degrees, the solemn air has lifted; there’s a party at the other end of this walk, and an air-conditioned one at that.

When they reach the end of the receiving line they are at the doorway to the ballroom, where the empty tables glitter and it’s as cold as a skating rink. Three idle bartenders smile helpfully. Within minutes they are working like coal stokers, as the younger guests try to recover the buzz they had going in their hotel rooms before the ceremony sweated it out of them. At the head table, a long dais perpendicular to the bandstand, the groom’s mother finds that she and her husband have been seated in between their new daughter-in-law’s natural parents, perhaps to keep them from killing each other. She tries gamely not to be offended by the idea that the role she has been given to play, on this momentous day in the life of her firstborn son, is that of a human shield. She has an idea who’s behind it, even if now is not the time, even if it will never be the time; besides, Sandy feels, the fault is ultimately hers anyway. She went through a rough patch when the boys were little and had to leave home for a while. Literally doctor’s orders. Maybe not surprising, then, that her son winds up with a girl who makes every decision, who calls all the shots. Who treats him like a child. But this isn’t an appropriate moment for Sandy to start losing herself in the past; for one thing, she needs to remember to count her husband’s drinks. Historically, in terms of his capacity for saying the unsayable, five is the magic number.

Scarcely a minute goes by without a knife clinking against a glass somewhere in the ballroom, first one and then a chorus of them: You made us come all the way here to witness your love? Okay, then—let’s witness some love. The waitstaff bursts through the double doors like a football team and serves a hundred dinners. Conrad eats his salmon without tasting it and then waits, smiling robotically whenever others at his table laugh at something, until the meal is over and the champagne is poured and the moment is finally upon him.

“I have always looked up to my brother,” Conrad says, eyes down, watching with dismay his own spit hitting the microphone. He memorized his toast but now he wishes he hadn’t, because holding a piece of paper would at least occupy his right hand, the one not holding the champagne glass, the one floating spastically from his pants pocket to his chin to the back of his head. “When we were kids, everything he set out to achieve he achieved, everything he wanted he worked for until he earned it, everything he did set an example not just for me but for everyone around him. An older brother’s distinction, in his little brother’s eyes, is pretty much automatic for a long time. But even when I got old enough to get over that feeling and decide for myself, he has never lost any of my esteem. Until today.”

The whole ballroom laughs, to intoxicating effect, and when Conrad dares to look up his eye is drawn straight to the bride’s stepsister, Deborah, maybe because her red dress is separated from the cluster of other red dresses by the width of the ballroom; she’s sitting off in the corner, with her grandmother, or somebody’s grandmother anyway.
Just be yourself:
what kind of stupid fucking advice was that? He makes himself look away from her before he loses his train of thought entirely.

“Until today, because here is where his streak as a self-made success ends, and sheer blind dumb luck takes over. Anyone can see that Cynthia is a woman of extraordinary charms”—a whistle from somewhere in the room—“anyone who’s ever closed a bar with her or hiked the White Mountains with her or smoked a cigar on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry with her knows that she has a sense of humor and compassion and adventure that’s not just rare but matchless. Any man in full possession of his faculties would choose her out of a thousand. But how on earth do we account for
her
choice? What are the odds that such a spectacular girl would be willing to spend her life with a guy who wears those stupid madras shorts he wears; who thinks he’s a comedian but lacks the attention span to tell so much as a knock-knock joke from beginning to end; who believes with all his heart that
near
the garbage, ashtray, or hamper is the same thing as
in
the garbage, ashtray … That’s just a
million to one shot, my friends, and frankly my brother deserves about as much credit for marrying this woman as he would for waking up with a winning lottery ticket stuck to his forehead, the lucky bastard.”

It is very hard to hold off drinking from the glass of champagne in his hand. He is amazed at how hard everyone is laughing but he still wishes only for the whole thing to be over. Without meaning to he looks up at Deborah again. She’s not laughing, but she is leaning forward intently with her elbows on her knees.

“Seriously,” he says. “They are a charmed couple. No one who knows them can doubt that they are destined to spend a long, happy, extraordinary life together. And no one who sees that these two wonderful people found their perfect match, and were smart enough to realize it, can help feeling a little more optimistic about our own prospects as we head out into the world. To Cynthia and Adam.”

Roars of approval, tapping of crystal. In the parking lot the drummer hears the applause and takes two more quick hits off his pre-gig joint before crushing it under the heel of his shoe.

The moment before the dancing begins, and the principals become hard to find, is the moment when Masha customarily takes her leave. She moves in a kind of crab walk behind the head table, accepting thanks, offering best wishes, smiling at the hundredth joke about the weather as if it were the first one. The money is already in the bank. You have to give them credit, Masha thinks, taking one last look at the whole spectacle, postponing the opening of the ballroom doors and the blast of heat just beyond. They weren’t the most gracious people in the world, but in the end they were willing to spend what needed to be spent.

The first dance: the bride and groom obviously could have practiced more, but their sheepish expressions only make the moment more affecting. They have never danced this way in public before—no one does anymore—and for them to forgo their usual grace, just for the sake of doing it the way it’s always been done, is an expression of surprising humility. The song is “The Nearness of You,” and before it’s half over the parents cut in. Sandy is overwhelmed by her
son’s mischievous physical power. Mothers generally aren’t held in their sons’ arms after a certain age and it comes as a genuine shock. The bride’s father feels his daughter’s cheek on his shoulder, as guilelessly heavy as when she was a child and he carried her sleeping from the car, as he leads her around the floor. There’s a man who can dance. Even Ruth doesn’t bother trying not to remember. He hands their child off graciously to Warren, and feels the eyes on him as he walks off the floor. This has always been the rhythm of his fatherhood: dazzlement and aftermath. All day long he has endured the look of deep surprise in the eyes of nearly everyone to whom he has been introduced. He knows he has things to be forgiven for, but he considers his daughter’s love full vindication, and for those who can’t let go of the past he has never had any use.

Then the less ritualized dancing starts. It is the province of young people fully at home in their bodies, drunk and obscurely tense and in need of release. Only in exorcising them do they feel the demands of this day. The band is bad but honorable, at peace with the fact that, though their ambitions may have sifted down to this, they are still making music for a living in front of an audience. They rarely get a chance anymore to perform for a crowd this young and unrestrained; they don’t see anything fearful or destructive in all that energy, but they do understand the role of drunkenness in it and are okay with that. They’re even more okay with the attractiveness of the women who join them onstage to arouse the crowd with unskilled go-go routines.

Twenty-two is a zone of privilege, and as the night deepens invisibly behind the heavy drapes, the others are centrifugally driven away, first from the dance floor and then from the ballroom itself. Older couples, couples with children, see where the night is going and finish their cake and politely excuse themselves for the long drive home or just for their beds upstairs. All over the hotel, the urge to transgress is finally breaching its borders. The night bellman goes into the men’s room and sees that three tuxedoed wedding guests have pried the mirror off the wall and are hunched over it; he’s so afraid of what’s expected of him that he decides the prudent course is to go down to the basement and piss in the janitorial sink
instead. People flirt with strangers, or even with old friends, in plain sight of their official dates. The desire to do something they know they’ll regret is overwhelming. The doors to the ballroom stand open and the smoking and drinking and intense conversational intimacies spill into the lobby—against the rules, but the night staff is intimidated and unsure of protocol and badly outnumbered anyway.

In the midst of all this, still powering it in fact, is utter faith in convention: at eleven-thirty the bride and groom disappear upstairs, and at midnight they return in their “traveling outfits,” in which to travel the eight blocks to the gingerbread-style bed and breakfast where they will spend the night. Everyone applauds and then lines up raggedly to say good bye.

Adam’s mother and father are incapable of sharing their sadness with each other. The honeymoon in Mexico is their gift. “You have a safe trip,” Mr. Morey says. And then they’re in the car and waving. Ruth starts to cry. The band starts playing again, and with the guests of honor gone, decorum gives way once and for all.

Sam, the fair-haired usher who passed out inside the church, is now standing by the door to the kitchen tirelessly hitting on one of the waitresses, who is twenty years old and needs the wages from this evening and therefore tries not to dwell on how very handsome this guy would be if he would just shut up, which she could certainly make him do.

Marietta, drunk and stoic, is downstairs in the hotel gym, allowing her boyfriend to act out a particular fantasy. Who’s to say what’s creepy? she thinks. In her head is a line from
The Godfather:
someday, she says silently to him as he labors, and that day may never come, I might ask you to do me a service… .

One of the bartenders leaves his station for a quick trip to the men’s room, and when he returns he discovers that the guests have gone behind the bar and taken the bottles back to their tables; he looks around and sees them all smiling at him, not mockingly but with great camaraderie. In the lobby, Bill, the groomsman who recited Juvenal, is trying to talk a married woman ten years his senior into having one drink in his room upstairs. He’s actually almost
there. He wants to do something he can never tell anyone about. A scared-looking bellhop comes into the ballroom and after one or two inquiries finds Conrad. He tells him there is an urgent message for him, upstairs in his room. The only explanations Conrad can think of are bad ones; he gets off the elevator, opens his door with the key, flips on the light, and standing there two feet in front of him is the antisocial, truth-advocating, tattooed bridesmaid, Deborah.