Daphne, the maid of honor at that historic wedding, was available after the rehearsal dinner and ready for anything that happened, too, open flies not excluded, but she had less luck that night than Waldo. The boys, it seemed, had other things to do. She had been paired — by wedding protocol, but also, she’d felt, as a kind of so-long-kid gift from John — with the best man, a handsome smoothie from John’s fraternity named Bruce, obviously loaded, an altogether consoling consolation prize, had the prize been hers. But juicy Brucie, polite and attentive though he was, had his eye on another. Daphne was the bride’s best and oldest friend, she knew absolutely everything about her, or supposed she did, but she never was able to figure out where the hell that French penpal came from. Probably the two of them had met on one of those trips Audrey, always full of fancypants improvement schemes for her daughter, had taken her on. Whatever, from wherever, Marie-Claire was a veritable apparition, she had all the guys gaga, Breast Man Brucie-boy among them, it was like they’d never seen a girl before. Ringlets and baby teeth and big dark eyes — hey, she was cute, but not that cute. Maybe it was her goddamned accent. Or maybe she knew some French tricks American girls were not privy to. Later that night, abandoned by the guys and bored with each other, Daphne and Ronnie and some of the girls decided to crash the stag party out at the Country Tavern, or at least to go have a peek and see what lurid depravity the unsociable assholes were up to. It was a pretty depressing scene: a porno flick running on all by itself in a darkened corner, a dozen or so fagged-out yo-yos playing cards or pool or throwing it down sullenly at the bar, one of her ex-steadies out cold, wearing nothing but an ashtray for a codpiece, sad songs on the antique jukebox. Some party. Daphne would have gone in there and livened it up for them, but neither Bruce nor John was there, this lot was dead and gone, beyond reprieve. She figured the rest of the guys were with, damn her eyes, the penpal.
The groomsman officially paired with the French bridesmaid at John’s wedding (though he was not in the Country Tavern that night Daphne and her friends peeked in either, nor was he with Marie-Claire) was Harvard, oldest son of Oxford the druggist and his librarian wife Kate, brother to Yale, Columbia, and Cornell, and known as Harvie in the family, Hard Yard to intimates, of whom John, with whom he’d cocaptained the high school track team their senior year, was one. Harvard, a shy, gentle, and dutiful fellow, a good athlete in spite of what Coach Snuffy called his “handicap” (“Tie a knot in that nasty thing, son, before you catch it on the bar going over and damage the equipment!”) and pride of the showerroom but not quite the scholar his father had hoped for, was a chemistry major at a West Coast surfers’ college at the time of the wedding, showing few signs of graduating soon, if ever, but demonstrating a talent, widely esteemed among scientists, for experimentation, a talent that contributed spectacularly to the revels of the final night of his friend John’s bachelorhood, revels that in turn, maturing into revelation as yard, mind, and soul all came and came together, changed Harvie’s life forever, John’s ass theatrically marked by this sudden transformation. Thus, it might be said that Harvie, unlike most people in this town, created, as though in obedience to the slogan on an old calendar down at his father’s drugstore, “A Better Life Through Chemistry,” his own destiny. Years later, returning here for his mother’s funeral, for whose sake he wore a suit instead of a dress, he told his baby brother Cornell that “out there” it doesn’t matter what you’ve got but how you use it. In a small town like this everybody is always measuring. Out there, there are too many, measuring makes no sense. This generous message was meant to console and uplift little Corny, though it probably missed its mark.
Harvie’s baby brother was at that time a biology student up at State, not a very good one, but by then the only member of the family still in school, their sister Columbia having dropped out to be near her cancer-stricken mother in her final months and seemingly destined, now a doctor’s practical nurse, never to return. Cornell would not last long either. In fact, though he would return to college after his mother’s funeral, he would never, no matter how his father pleaded, scolded, reasoned, wept, attend another class. He became a haggard, unkempt quadrangle hangabout, notorious only for his monosyllabic mewlings, his runny nose and spotted pants, the latter something of a campus legend, likened unto an aerial map of a free-fire zone, a mess of curdled gravy, the abode of the damned, a laminated spunk husks exhibit, the rag used to clean out the cafeteria food trays (itself known as “Grandma’s diaper”), Flocculus Rex, a poison puffball bed, the chitinous scutum of something unspeakably inhuman (an alien resident perhaps of that ghastly fork if not the freaked-out host himself), trampled cowflop, the Milky Way, a spermatazoic Field of Armageddon, and, simply, a zippered scumbag. Poor unwashed unlaundered Corny, who went to Paris to become a man and saw such a thing as to make manhood no place to go and boyhood no place he could return to. “Ondress me,” she said, and then, when, in a magical trance (he was thinking of a certain set of four strange comicbooks, thereafter discontinued, that he owned), he did, she said: “Merci, mon petit! Now ronn down to ze delicatesse be-low and breeng for us a bott-ell of Beaujolais nouveau, and we weell make l’amour nouveau, ze new true love of ze heart and blood!” Oh boy. Sounded great. He left her standing there, eyes wide open, looking startled with wanting, thin legs apart and both hands between them, kneading and wringing what was there as though trying to tear it out and give it to him, and ran down the four dark flights of stairs and out into the spicy street, his heart fluttering in his chest like a trapped moth in a glass jar, explosions already erupting stickily between his own skinny thighs. With his clumsy high school French, it took Corny too long a while, racing from shop to shop and bar to bar, to come to understand that, on Midsummer’s Eve, Beaujolais nouveau was not something he was likely to find. Well. He paused, staring bleakly at a swarthy rat-faced shopkeeper, as the truth sank in. Such cruel teasing was nothing new in Corny’s life. Usually he merely turned away from it. But in this nightmarish place, so far from home, where could he go? The smirking shopkeeper seemed to be recommending, in his threatening foreign tongue, another wine with the word “Love” in its name. This confused Corny and made his face hot, but, hastily, he bought it and, homesick now for his friend Pauline, and for his faithful games and toys which never deceived him, turned his steps back toward Marie-Claire’s studio, fearing further humiliations, but keeping faint hopes alive — why not? as his father would say, it’s perfectly reasonable — for a pleasant surprise.