“What is she doing?” Marietta says. She sounds almost scared.
“I don’t know,” Cynthia says wearily. “There’s always some grievance.”
“But why is she smoking outside in this heat? Is smoking not allowed in your mom’s house or something?”
“ Warren smokes. He smokes in the house all the time.”
“Then why is she-”
“You know what?” Cynthia says. “Pull out. I can’t even deal with going back in there right now. Go on, back out. I know someplace we can go.”
Deborah watches them leave and smiles at the prospect of her stepmother’s panic. Mother and daughter are so alike. No capacity for seeing themselves through others’ eyes, no interest in it. No one ever opens a book in that whole god damned stunted hell-bound house, including her father, whose idea of self-betterment is watching Unsolved Mysteries. The aspect of him she’s always cared least about is his money, but now that he’s letting these two spend it like it’s theirs, she resents them as climbers, her nominal stepsister especially. She knows this pains him. Make an effort, he keeps telling her, but no effort is necessary to understand the likes of Cynthia and her friends. One day it will hit them that high school is over.
Adam sits on the bed in his underwear. He’s watching the Pirates game on TV. He considers masturbating, out of boredom, but there is too great a likelihood that Conrad or someone else will knock on his door. There is a great sense of bustle in the walls around him but nothing seems to require him right now. It’s far too awful outside to go for a run. Why did they schedule the wedding for four in the afternoon, anyway? Solitude and inactivity make him restless. At his bachelor party last weekend-a rafting trip on the Delaware with his six groomsmen-there was never a moment of idleness; gloriously exhausted, they slept in tents, some expensive Scotch but no real drunkenness, the whole thing put together by Conrad, one of the two or three best nights of his life. They’d cheerfully teased him by recounting old hookups, old binges, old mortifications. There was some ritual sarcastic mourning of all the sexual freedom he was waiving, but he could tell-it makes him smile now to remember it-that their hearts weren’t in it, because none of them really thinks he is making a mistake. He’s slept with other women, before he and Cyn met and, truth be told, for a short time after. What’s left to mourn there? Just an adolescent obsession with variety, and he is past that point. They are meant for each other: he feels it so deeply that he’s not quite able to say it, not even to her. She’s like one of those horse whisperers, he thinks, only it’s just him, he’s the only one it works on, she’s the only one he will let speak to him that way. It would seem juvenile to go back to wanting anything other than what he has. He also has a home, and a job, and he is impatient, in possession of these things, to leave his childish self behind and get the future under way in earnest.
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.