The groom’s side of the family, Ann had learned over the past thirteen months, were second-class citizens when it came to the planning and execution of the wedding ritual in America. Maybe it was different in some far-flung tribe in Papua New Guinea or Zambia, and if so, Ann would gladly move there. She was the mother of three sons. She would have to endure this humbling social position at least twice-with Stuart now, and later with H.W. She had no idea what would happen with Ryan.
She and Jim weren’t even throwing the rehearsal dinner, which it was customary, in the wedding ritual in America, for the groom’s parents to do. Jenna had insisted on holding the rehearsal dinner at the Nantucket Yacht Club-apparently this was a suggestion drawn straight from the blueprints her deceased mother had left behind. The Carmichaels had been members of the yacht club since forever; Ann and Jim couldn’t have paid if they’d wanted to. They had, initially, offered to do just that, however-Doug Carmichael could let the Grahams know the cost of the yacht club party, and Jim would write Doug a check to cover it. Doug had graciously refused the offer, and Ann was glad, not because of the expense-she and Jim could easily have afforded it-but because if Ann was going to host a party, she wanted to put her stamp on it. She wanted to pick the location and the flowers and the menu. If the rehearsal dinner had to be held at the Carmichaels’ club, she agreed that the Carmichaels should pay. After Ann’s insistence that she and Jim do something, Jenna had suggested that the Grahams host the Sunday brunch. This felt like a consolation prize to Ann. The Sunday brunch? Half the guests would skip the damn thing because of early departing flights or boats, and the other half would show up exhausted and hung over. Ann nearly rejected the Sunday brunch idea, but then she realized that doing so would make her seem like a spoiled child who hadn’t gotten her way, rather than the six-term North Carolina state senator, devout Catholic, and mother of three that she was. So she said yes and made up her mind that the Sunday brunch was going to be the best part of the whole weekend. Ann had arranged for the White Elephant to set up a tent on the lawn facing the water, and under this tent would be a little piece of the Tar Heel State. The menu would include barbecue flown in from Bullock’s in Durham, as well as two kinds of grits, hush puppies, collard greens, coleslaw, buttermilk biscuits, and pecan pie. Ann had asked the head bartender at the White Elephant, a guy named Beau who actually hailed from Charleston and had worked at Husk, to make ten gallons of sweet tea and order Kentucky bourbon for juleps and whiskey sours. Ann had hired a Dixieland band, who would wear straw boaters and candy-striped vests. They would show Stuart’s new family some genteel southern hospitality.
Still, Ann felt like the runner-up in this particular beauty pageant, and it brought out the worst in her-much the way a nasty campaign did. During her third term, when the scandal with Jim was breaking at home, Ann had battled against the reprehensible Donald Morganblue. She had been sure she was going to lose. The race was close, Morganblue had gone after Ann about a certain failed development project near Northgate Park that had cost Durham County millions of dollars and nearly five hundred promised jobs, and Ann had spent a string of months convinced that both her personal life and her professional life were going to go up in flames. She had, very nearly, become addicted to Quaaludes. The pills were the only way she had made it through that period in her life-the victory by the narrowest margin in the state history of the Carolinas (requiring two recounts) and her divorce from Jim. Ann remembered how the pills had made her feel like a dragonfly skimming over the surface of these troubles. She remembered more than one occasion when she had held the pill bottle in her sweating palm and visualized an easy descent into sweet eternity.
She told herself now that she had never seriously considered suicide back then. Stuart had been ten years old, the twins barely six, Jim had moved to the loft in Brightleaf Square; the boys needed Ann to pack their lunches and transport them to the Little League fields. At night that year, Ann had read the boys Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Their addiction to that book (at the kids’ behest, Ann had ended up reading it three times in a row) was the only outward reaction they had to their father’s departure. Or possibly they were addicted to the quiet minutes with her, curled up on the sofa, her voice always evenly modulated despite her inner turmoil.
There could be no killing herself. Plus, Ann was Catholic, and suicide was a sin for which there was no repenting.
Every once in a while, however, she still yearned for a Quaalude.
Now, for instance. She could use one right now.
She let Jim kiss the side of her neck, a move that always preceded sex. What if they did just as he suggested? What if they ordered up champagne, and strawberries and cream? What if they slipped on the white waffled robes and tore open the scrumptious bed and laid across the ten-thousand-count sheets and enjoyed each other’s bodies? Even now, fifteen years after their reconciliation, Jim’s sexual attention felt precious, like something that could be, and had been, stolen away from her. What if they drank champagne-the more expensive, the better-then ordered another bottle? What if they found themselves giddily drunk by noon, then fell into a languorous sleep with the balcony doors open, sunlight streaming over them in bed? What if they treated this not like their eldest son’s wedding weekend but like a romantic getaway?
“Let’s do it,” Ann said, pivoting to kiss her husband full on the lips. “Call for the champagne.”
“Really?” he said, his eyebrows lifting. He was fifty-six years old, a senior vice president at GlaxoSmithKline but just under the surface was the boy Ann had first married-president of Beta at Duke, the ultimate bad boy, for whom fun would trump responsibility whenever possible.
She was surprising him. He thought she would be in anal-Ann mode, spinning with the hundred things she thought she had to do, the thousand thoughts whirling through her mind. But instead she unbuttoned her crisp white blouse, bought at Belk’s for her arrival on Nantucket. She slid off her navy-and-white gingham Tory Burch capri pants. In just her bra and panties, Ann threw herself across the bed.
“Wow!” Jim said.
“Call!” Ann said.
She was surprising herself.
It was only later, after they had enjoyed the kind of sex particular to really good hotel rooms-Jim had actually clamped his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries-that Ann let herself admit the real reason for her anxiety. She didn’t care about the wedding hierarchy or her position in it; she was too big and too busy a woman to worry about such things. She was only concerned about how she appeared, about how she and Jim appeared as a couple, because Helen was coming.
Helen Oppenheimer-who had, for a period of twenty-nine months, been Jim’s wife.
Ann’s best friend, Olivia Lewis, had nearly inhaled her cell phone when Ann informed her that Helen was on the invite list.
“But why?” Olivia said. “Why why why? Why did you let Jim talk you into it? You’re a strong woman, Ann. Why didn’t you stand your ground?”
“Jim was dead set against it,” Ann said. “It was my idea.”
“What?” Olivia said.
“Stuart asked Chance to be a groomsman,” Ann said.
“So?” Olivia said. “That does not require you to invite Helen to the wedding.”
Ann didn’t know how to explain it to Olivia, or to Jim or to anyone. When she was sitting on her sunporch the previous summer, composing a list of people to invite to the wedding, she had simply added the name Helen Oppenheimer, and it had felt… right. It had felt Christian-but if she told Olivia or Jim this, they would cry bullshit. Jim had cried bullshit anyway. When he saw Helen’s name, he said, “No way. No fucking way.”