This kid Melville Horton didn’t understand the old-fashioned unspoken agreement that you didn’t march into a man’s office during a train strike demanding a late job if it wasn’t a matter of real cash. He was an idiot. And Melville wasn’t short on money, not with his shop taking a hundred orders a week. On top of that he was operating the whole thing as a kind of hobby anyhow, because his old man’s old man had founded Cap Soaps before it was incorporated. The bastard cashed in when it went public. He had plenty of liquid assets to move around when needed. The kid didn’t have to worry about derailments or bad tooling. The jerkoff could buy the frickin’ railroad if he felt like it.
The DJ was playing mambo music. There was a muffled announcement, another last-ditch toast to pump life into the reception. Standard put the plastic cup to his lip and sucked the last drops out of the ice.
“Honey.” Ellen Standard put her hand over his. She knew and wanted to ease his thirst. His third was gone and already he was starting to get up. Susan was coming, making the rounds, raising the skirt of her wedding dress as she walked to reveal her thick ankles. She’d gained more weight during the engagement than during the last ten years, since her last marriage.
“I’m getting a refill,” he said, trying to sound casual. There was an edge of panic in his voice, as if the bar might close.
“Congrats, Susan,” he said, barely stopping, just brushing her arm with his and then heading off, swaying slightly, into the dark. There were three people dancing to “Flashdance,” doing a feeble, half-remembered disco step. The music was loud against the hard walls. It boomed from the speakers, black boxes that went halfway to the ceiling. The DJ worked his CD player with amazing seriousness, like a judge presiding over a trial. His face was firm, and he spent time between songs making marks on a clipboard. It was a sad, lonely job, providing music for occasions like this. But on this night, watching Frank Standard sway over to the bar for the fourth time — noting the solemn way the man held his eyes fixed on the bartender — the DJ had a premonition: he felt a shift in the evening, and he would later say that he knew this reception was doomed to some traumatic event. If anyone in the world could feel it coming, he could. He was an expert on the tedium of modern rituals; on the watered-down inability most wedding receptions had of rising above their own careful, deliberate cheerlessness. So when Roy walked through the double doors, smelling of the shit that had dripped down his leg as he swaggered quickly through the hotel lobby, past two guards who were talking heatedly about the Pistons game, the DJ wasn’t surprised: he just lowered the volume dial from ten to seven and sat back.
Two years later, when the divorce papers were signed by both parties, it would be the interruption that people would remember if they thought of the reception at all; the way Roy stood beneath the frame of the doorway, legs apart, arms out from his sides slightly, reeking so much that even the Hilton’s ventilation system, roaring air up through five-foot-wide vents, couldn’t compete; shit and urine and sweat and body odors along with the reek of bourbon on his breath and a hint of garlic from a slice of pizza he’d dug out of a dumpster that afternoon for lunch. It was one of those smells that remain indelible, scratched in the stone of dendrites, a smell that says we’re all from shit, nothing more or less, God forgive us. And it’s this smell that Susan Horton, who after two years had taken on certain refinements of class, thought of as she sat on the deck of the house looking out over the Mediterranean. She was thinner. She’d lost twenty-odd pounds since she arrived at the house, which sat on a cliff, fifty miles from Malaga. Around it, desert stretched; it was Africa, really, licking that edge of Spain, she’d been told by Peter, the Brit who took care of the American houses during the off-season. He picked her up at the airport in Almeria. A squat man with a large forehead. He’d been a British paratrooper, he explained, lifting the cuff of his shirt to show an old tattoo, so faded and blotched it was more like a birthmark. The deck was made of smooth flagstones, with small pebbles between, and felt good on the feet when you returned from the beach. She went down to the water every day, after lunch, stayed for two hours, alone on her straw mat, reading the salty paperbacks someone had left behind, and then, returning alone to the deck, she had a gin and tonic and looked from her spot in the shade out over the landscape. This afternoon, the odor returned to mind. She hadn’t seen Roy when he first staggered into the reception. A description of his entrance came to her via Horton’s sister, Edith, who spoke of it later that evening when the celebration was over, when Roy, beaten black and blue, was sleeping soundly in the county holding cell. The room was cleared of guests, except for the bride and groom, Edith, Ronald, her husband, and Ellen Standard, who was trying to patch up her husband’s reputation. The room was bright, revealing the pipes overhead and the beleaguered black walls marred with kick marks and gouges from high school proms. Under the lights it was impossible to miss the wide oval stain where Roy had deposited his vomit first, before anybody really got to him, before the kicking began. Edith told her that part; she spoke of it as one might of a delicious appetizer. It was truly grotesque. That, that man, he just stood there. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Good god the smell was just perfectly awful. By the fruit and salad bar, bowls set tight in chipped ice; that’s what he moved towards, with Standard and the DJ and a few others the first to notice.
Two weeks after the wedding, the night Roy died with Arno attending to his needs, the first hairline fracture appeared in her marriage — at least in hindsight it looked that way. She sipped the gin and tonic, rattled the ice, felt the cool air from the surface of the drink and thought about it: they’d gone to Wal-Mart on a lark, to buy some Christmas lights, to slum it a bit, parking his Ferrari in the hinterlands to avoid runaway carts, getting out under the sodium lights, finding a strange excitement in the bleak span of pavement. It was snowing quite hard, sticking in clumps to her fur stole. Around the front entryway to the store a few vagabonds lingered. (At the time, the word vagabond fit her vision of these hovering shadows edging around the periphery of things. Her father, a hardworking Hungarian immigrant, looked upon bums as unclean, and he couldn’t help instilling in his only daughter the view that such people were simply wandering out of their own accord, stray hunks of humanity who had lost a toehold on the earth. She had memories of the homeless camp on the edge of Elma one particularly bad year; these were, mostly, men who came down from Canada to pick blueberries, living in an array of makeshift canvas tarps, tents, lean-tos. You could smell it for miles, her father claimed. Dirty people. She was seven years old, and a man came to the house for a cup of water or coffee. In Spain, on the mesa, she had a brief vision of him: his beautiful eyes, marbled brown, in a young face. He was a boy, really. He was her age, a young boy. He had his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his dungarees. She kissed him for no reason. She just felt like it and did it and then there was her father shouting in Hungarian [as he did when he got so angry his circuits shorted out and English was superseded by his native tongue]. He chased the boy a half mile and gave him a lashing with a small shank of pine furring strip. This was after the war, after the Depression and during a strange readjustment when the protocol for approaching such people was being transformed; the country, exploding with riches, no longer had even the smallest room for the dirty, not even a brush with them, she thought, now, on the deck, listening to the gardener moaning slightly to himself.) Inside the store that night there was the stunning, opulent glare of neon racked upon neon, the warmth of aisles stuffed with products — and feeling giddy, they went to the section where the Christmas decorations were. Immediately they began to argue. The argument developed into a fight. The fight was over which kind of lights, white or colored, would look best woven around the front banisters — that’s all she could remember, holding the glass back and letting a piece of ice rest against her front teeth until the cold permeated to the soft center. The sun was behind the mountains, and the dusty, rubble-specked landscape became bathed in the orange afterlife of a day; black swifts dove past the whitewashed houses. Somewhere out of sight the gardener was sloshing water into the flower beds. It was the constriction of their words she could recall; the tone of it; the passing of information in clipped phrases — for what should have been a warm, soft choice — a romantic choice; it was her first indication of the resolute stodginess that went all the way through Horton Melville. She smiles and thinks of the British man, Peter, asking her to go for a drink; she remembers his bulk, unstable on large legs, the way he bounced on the balls of his feet like a kid. Was it love she felt for this man, his ruddy face, cut square, his lingering Cockney accent; his British paratrooper tattoos? She was no longer the kind of woman who would avoid feeling intensely about someone after only a few meetings, she told herself; her experiences with Horton had settled into her view of life, and she was now quite sure that one was best guided by first impulses, by spur-of-the-moment movements, not by some obligation to long-winded common sense.