The underpaid, merciful deejay, who has no doubt witnessed a million embarrassments, plays an infectious dance song, summoning everyone back to jubilance. Everyone is satisfied the brawl is over. Everyone wants to eat dessert.
There is a tearing sound like someone is unzippering the world. The deejay removes her headphones. Simone and I, my mother, and the groom’s family consult one another to find the source.
“What is that?” Nigel says.
“Stay still,” his wife says.
We don’t have time to investigate. The ground beneath my ivory heels lurches. Simone’s knees wobble inelegantly over the churning floor as a crack appears beneath our heels. She and I wonder at it, a slow-moving but determined snake through the linoleum and concrete. It perforates the floor into segments that tremble and pitch. We watch the rupture fracture into other fractures, and others. If it’s an earthquake, it’s a remarkably specific one as it only disrupts where the bridal party stands. The lights over our section burn out with loud pops. On the other side of the room the deejay stares blankly toward us, some of the guests stare wide-eyed over paused forkfuls of cake as we lurch and pitch in the sudden dark. Steady and reliable is the turntable, but even it skips, and the Go-Go’s, as insecure as anyone else, repeat their weak manifesto.
Simone and I cling to each other on the remaining panel. The groom, my mother, and my stepfather struggle on a shuddering piece. The yelping groomsmen yank their wives to safety.
We got the beat, the Go-Go’s sing.
“Hold on,” Simone says. The quaking produces a cavity I tumble into, vaguely aware of other bodies falling around me. Dust presses into my eyes and nostrils. My throat sputters. I choke and cough. The veil catches on jagged concrete and rips in half.
I mean to say I knew it out loud, but sound is deleted. I don’t know whether I’m speaking or thinking as I fall. We land one floor below in an ungraceful heap of natural materials. Simone, my mother, the groom, my stepfather, two bridesmaids, and, like a dream, James, who rushed to help when he heard the yelps and swearing.
“Are you okay?” the concierge calls from above.
Simone pulls me to my feet to assess injury. “We’re fine,” she says, baffled. The groom helps the bridesmaids stand. Hip deep in insulation and debris, we look to the shocked faces of wedding guests peering down at us through the hole. My mother moans, rubs her ankle, and leans against my stepfather. We are disoriented but intact, having fallen into a storage area for what appears to be gigantic bales of cotton. Cirrus and cumulus.
“We landed,” Simone says, “on clouds?”
“Next week’s conference,” James explains, pulling himself out of the wreckage. “How we can learn more about technology by studying clouds. Or vice versa.”
My stepfather frowns at Simone and me. “What are they doing?”
Suspicion narrows our mother’s eyes. “They’re laughing.”
Everyone wants to help. One of the groomsmen hooks his hands under Simone’s armpits and lifts her out of the debris. She smooths her dress, still laughing. The groom attempts the same with me but loses his footing. He tries again, I aid him by jumping, but he can’t get a grip. I half climb, am half lifted out, and sit in a heap of toile at Simone’s feet.
“We will be speaking to the Paradigms about this,” my mother assures the concierge.
“Better it happened at the end of the reception,” Nigel says.
We return to the ballroom where the guests gather their bags, finish glasses of wine, divvy up centerpieces. The destruction is precise, as if performed with a scalpel, so succinct it is easily avoidable, many of the guests not even aware of the chaos.
“I don’t think Granny likes your husband,” Simone says. She steadies herself with one hand pressed against my side. We laugh until tears form.
It is almost time to pull the pashmina over the shoulders of the night and go home. My stepfather attempts to lead my mother away, but her gaze is fixed on Simone. Already concerned over the late addition, she’s become a detective. Our laughter has hit her in the mother place where no one can hide. “We haven’t been introduced,” she says. “Who are you?”
“Simone,” Simone says.
“He’s so brave, isn’t he?” Aunt Henshaw says. “I’m saying he because she’s not a woman. It’s very big these days.”
“Who’s not a woman?” my mother says.
My mother-in-law realizes first. “Your sister,” she says.
“What sister?” my mother says. “She doesn’t have a…”
Simone does not flinch or cower. “Me, Mother.”
My mother’s cheeks purple as she mentally passes through several understandings, none of them gracious. “I should have guessed.” She bats away my stepfather’s grip. “Are you here to ruin the day?”
“I can’t be held responsible for an old inn’s flimsy infrastructure, Mother.”
“I can ruin things myself,” I say. “I don’t need anyone’s help.”
“It can’t be Tom,” my mother says to no one.
“It’s not,” I say. “It’s Simone.”
“A woman,” my mother says. My stepfather attempts to collect her in his arms. My mother-in-law leers nearby, aunts and uncles hinging behind her. My mother’s gaze flicks from us to them, aware that her reaction will be public. This could signal illness or collapse. She’s going to fart, I worry. What she does is more putrid. She stretches out her arms, to lift onto the crucifix, but no, she signals to us, Simone and me, to enter into the area she has created, which seems to be (it cannot be) an embrace. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.” Simone and I watch as she performs magnanimity. We can handle honest revulsion but not showy liberalism. “My daughters,” she says. The crowd looks to us for reaction. Mother has become a bird with one consistent call: Yes. As if she’s been reading dollar-store self-help. She has found radical acceptance under the awning of others’ points of view. “Yes!” the bird cries, advancing. “I say yes.” Because we will not meet it she brings the hug to us, she will suffocate us with her open-mindedness to make this public point.
“No,” Simone says, for both of us.
The deejay’s amplified voice informs everyone that the evening’s embers are growing faint, that they might feel immortal, numb with food, and dim with wine, but time is finite and it’s best to gather one’s things and tell those you hate that you hate them before we die. What she actually says is, “Last chance for romance,” and plays a final song.
“Water damage,” the concierge proclaims, emerging from a side door. “Someone must have been smoking and set off a sprinkler. Water leaked into the floor.” Who would do that and not tell anyone, everyone wonders.
Simone and I are alone with our mother whose tone shifts to reflect granite’s compassion. “You haven’t changed into anything new,” my mother says to Simone. “You still ruin everything.”
“There you are, Mother. I thought we lost you.” Strength ignites in Simone’s eyes. “You’re still a cold bag.”
My mother is so confused she’s grinning. “You’re calling me a bag but you’re a degenerate.” The word falls amid the remnants of spangles and batting and gum and lemon basil and punctured flooring.
In the end, the deejay is the most important person at the wedding because she has the honor of declaring it kaput. Guests not staying at the Inn want to make good time getting home. Carrying wrapped cake slices, overcoats, returned Tupperware from other parties, damaging shoes, shouldering centerpieces, each other’s purses, tired Rodrigo, ditzy with icing, stressed by the thought of driving, doing their best, the guests we’ve received and abandoned, received and abandoned, recto verso, stream by like river fish as we dismiss them one last time (goodbye, goodbye, goodbye) from the broken dance floor.
SIMONE LOOKS AT THE LAKE
The wedding party and Simone follow the crowd to the lobby. Panic slips through me as we reach the front door that on any other night I’d assume would lead outside. I worry this wedding will not let me pass
, though every moment a guest pushes through and is enveloped by whatever’s out there. Things like dream logic don’t happen to the groom. He glides through the doorway and we are outside. I inhale the salve of night. Cars shine darkly in the parking lot. Party shoes make pleasant taps on the asphalt. You see only parts of people on nights like this. The crescent moon of a calf retracting into a sedan. A pale arm, reaching out to steady a lover. The star of a cheek held out for a farewell kiss. The cover-ups each person has chosen in a color that corresponds to their clothing make my heart feel scraped. Faces of those starting their cars, lit by the consoles, scattered bulbs in the darkness.
The wedding is over. Relief makes me an empathic daughter. I find my mother in the crowd. “Mother,” I say. “Thank you for your help with the wedding. This must be a shock, and I hope that one day you will accept Simone for who she is.”
“It’s such a shame.” Her expression is flat. “We paid so much for that dress.”
She and my stepfather walk into the parking lot until they, too, fade into parts, the cornflower shawl, the wink of her satin heels. Her face momentarily lit by the car’s center console, then extinguished. Like Ewan McGregor, my mother finds herself, when on the precipice of connection, lacking. I no longer fault her. It’s not easy in there.
All the while the lake has been watching, gems marveling on its surface. Idling in its depths. The lake is now famous to me. I will compare every other lake to it, forever.
In the farthest dark, sitting in her car, Simone looks at the lake. Her profile against the water’s light is placid and intimate. By observing we are intruding.
“What’s he doing?” the groom says.
“She’s looking at the lake,” I say. “It’s a perfectly fine thing to do.”
His mouth opens into a grin he assumes is harmless. “So. Your brother is a woman now? The world is a fucked-up place.”
“It is,” I say. “But this is not an example of that.”
He remembers a check he was supposed to give to the deejay and returns inside. Moonlight turns my skin quartz. I watch my sister look at the lake.
I think of the photograph Rose showed me of Santa Cruz. Friendly hedges growing alongside the driveways. The affirmation of hills in the distance. In my life I’ve had two profound realizations of the obvious. Arriving at inconvenient times, they showed me nothing I hadn’t known, but in a new way that forced me to see how foolish or reckless I’d become and would not permit anything other than reversal. I can’t say why in this moment the image of Santa Cruz houses occurs to me and I am overtaken by this simple fact: Every evening in California, the sun sets. The glint careening off ocean snarl, the intense business of acacias, branches blurred gold. A child seated on a driveway tossing a toy to herself. I see it as if projected onto a screen, with the nostalgia possessed only by people who’ve never visited a place. And then I have another realization, this one simpler: I must restart some forgotten engine and perform a grand re-steering, and this decision will hurt many people. A new light settles over me, a reprise of one I’d forgotten. I see every shivering pair of bare shoulders in the lot where I watch my sister stare at a lake and wait for a man who is fine, awakened by a photograph of Santa Cruz ranch-style homes. Another life. A part of me tosses to myself and is caught. I know what I want: to sit at the bar of a restaurant running a straw through an interesting drink waiting for a friend I’m looking forward to talking to and not be married to anyone.
“I knew it,” all the bridesmaids say, sighing on a worn couch in my mind. “She didn’t seem excited.”
In the lobby, a few of our guests amble out of the mercurial elevator. They announce that they will have a drink at the bar and it would be unthinkable for the groom and me not to join them. The groom returns and accepts the offer for both of us.
“I want to speak with you,” I tell him. But he says it’d be rude not to accept.
We file into the Inn’s bar.
“Did you have fun?” one of the women asks. “Was it the best?”
“The best,” I say. To the groom: “We need to talk right now.”
“We have our whole lives to talk,” he says. The wedding has made him so likable he’s trying out comedy bits. Amid their fits of laughter I slip outside. Simone’s car is there but she is gone. Is she swimming? Trudging through the woods? Now that she is back in my life even a short absence is an enemy to me, whereas other people could be missing for years and barely produce an emotional stir. I want to talk to her more than I want peaceful old age. A cousin returns from retrieving a bag from her car.
“There she is.” She gasps, several yards away. “The bride.”
A ROOM AFTER A ROOM
W hen the groom wakes I am standing over him, wearing my shoes and coat. I have already thrown up into the toilet and brushed my teeth. His naked chest and mussed hair makes me feel extra clothed.
“We made a mistake,” I say. “It’s not pretty but it’s true.”
He leaves the room and I follow. In the kitchenette he pours two glasses of dirt-colored liquid. He hands me one then sits on the opposite couch, takes a large sip. “Define mistake,” he says.
I’ve already had the conversation five times in my head and am frustrated in advance of him not understanding. “As in, something we shouldn’t have done.”
“Why should we not have done it?” His words are exaggerated, patient. He speaks to a frustrating but well-intentioned child.
“I think you’d agree we’ve been drifting apart for a long time. We haven’t had sex in over a year.”
“Two nights ago,” he says, and I say, “Before that.”
“You told me you weren’t a sexual person.”
During a previous argument, I lied and said I wasn’t sexual to avoid the truth that would create a one-way gate. But now I must see whether he is a front for something more compelling or if he is plaster that rejects the drill, and underneath is more exterior, and underneath more exterior.
I take a large sip. “I am a sexual person,” I say.
“No.” He is confused. “You’re not. Didn’t therapy help you understand that you are not a sexual person because of your injury?”
“Which injury?” I say.
His voice contains barely managed frustration. “Which? Injury?”
“It’s fair to say I have issues, but it’s also fair to say that you do, too.”
He straightens. “I think we can both agree that I am a sexual person.”
This brag stings, but I must permit micro-cruelties and remain perfect in this lightning field because I dragged the flawed measure of our relationship out on the day after our wedding.
“It’s no one’s fault,” I say. “It’s about the heat we conduct when we’re together. Or lack thereof.”
“Or lack thereof?”
“I think so,” I say. “Yes.”
He switches his crossed leg from left to right. “Scoreboard,” he says. “One, you don’t initiate physical intercourse with me. Two, you don’t wear suggestive clothing. You don’t even like to watch porn.” He notices the effect this accusation has on me and changes tack. “But let’s take your word that you are a sexual person. This is good news. We can add this essential part into our relationship. And there goes your lack thereof.” He smiles, triumph.
“There’s still a lack thereof,” I say.
“Tell me more.” The request sounds so tender I think I will be able to explain in a way he will understand.
“The truth is, I am a sexual person. I’m just not sexually attracted to you.”
He taps his fingers against the glass, which contains either two sips or one strong one, wipes the condensation against his thigh. “Why are you bringing this up the day after we’re married?”
“I’ve been on mute,” I say.
He has tolerated this discussion as long as he plans to. “Is this about your client?” He places a stink on the word.
“This is not about my client,” I say, redeeming the word.
“A walk might be a good idea. Clear my head.”
In the bedroom I chuck my belongings into my suitcase. Eyeglasses, pajamas. I can’t think of anything I would mind never seeing again. Make it appear spur-of-the-moment, I remind myself. Cheer bubbles in me when I think of sleeping alone, which pinks my ears with shame. I return to the room. If he finds a discrepancy between the idea of a walk and the packed suitcase, he doesn’t mention it. Cheer and shame.
“You’re really doing this.” He never had to work hard to be admitted into good schools, teams, groups, associations. I am the only bad thing that’s ever happened to him.
“I love you.” His tone contains the punctured tenderness that could on any other morning strip my resolve. “I married you.” He places his head in his hands, tears filling his eyes. “Please don’t. Stay. I’ve been good to you.”
“You have, kind of.” I leave. Between the hotel room door and the elevator is the longest hallway in the world.
DO NOT SHELVE ITEMS IN AISLE THREE WITHOUT ASKING JOANNA
“Checking out?” the concierge says.
“I am but my husband is staying.” I slide my key over the counter. She does not register anything amiss about the statement or my behavior, a kindness she has maintained throughout my stay. “Thank you for this week,” I say. “I’ll remember it always.”
“I’ll say.” Her eyebrows ascend with amusement. “I’ll remember you, the bride who got stuck in the elevator.”
“And fell through the floor,” I say.
“And the floor.” She nods.
“I will remember this inn…” But my thinking halts. Fondly? As the site of my life’s most baffling week? In the end I can’t decide and leave the remark unfinished, I will remember this Inn … and exit the glass door within this ellipsis.
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