by Jen Doll
In preparation for the trip, I bought a tropical-print cotton halter dress in sunbaked reds and purples, an emerald-green frock with a skirt full of ruffles, a bright gold silk minidress, and, for more casual outings, a pair of baggy jeans with numerous rips and tears—you know, the kind the quirky-cool retailer names “boyfriend jeans,” the kind my mom would question my paying actual money for had she been there. I bought my ticket to Jamaica, reserved a hotel room for a full five nights and six days, and laid down my credit card for an array of trip-related goods and services—including the wedding present. And then one morning, approximately three weeks before I was scheduled for departure, I went to work and came home unemployed. I would go on to wear those ripped-up, baggy jeans for most of the summer, in the absence of a boyfriend or a job, dubbing them my “unemployment jeans.”
My parents seemed perplexed that I’d take this rather dire career moment to jet off to Jamaica.
“Are you sure this is wise?” asked my dad.
“I’ve bought the tickets already,” I explained, further rationalizing as only a city dweller can that I’d probably spend less money off the island of Manhattan and on another. “Either you have a lot of money and no time,” I said sagely, “or time and no money.”
My dad grunted, clearly unimpressed by my logic, and later that week a copy of Suze Orman’s The Courage to Be Rich arrived in the mail. But, I thought, this trip could be exactly what I needed. It would give me a moment to reevaluate this weird professional time (in the sun) and figure out what I really wanted to do. There was something else, too, which I didn’t tell my dad—something I’d discovered a few months before buying my ticket. This would be a wedding with a revenge subplot, if the nerdiest revenge subplot that had ever existed. Which meant I had to go. It was a story.
As a senior in high school, I had been the captain of my debate team in Decatur, Alabama. I did Lincoln-Douglas debate, which is a talky, moralistic kind of enterprise, values debate as opposed to the “policy” version, in which competitors appeared to just read things out as quickly as they could regardless of intelligibility. For L-D, each person wrote and argued an affirmative and a negative side, alternating through the course of the competition, on specific topics like “Is Assisted Suicide Ever Justified?” or “Should Prostitution Be Legalized?” I was pretty good, hence the captainship and the handful of silver platters, the L-D award of choice, stashed away in my closet at my parents’ house. Senior year in the state finals I was up against a boy from Montgomery, Alabama, a prep-school kid with a fancy tie and too-large teeth who seemed all bluster and bravado. He was also two years younger than me. This was my win.
Yet I lost. I was shocked. How could this have happened? Clearly I was better. Clearly this had been fixed, to champion the younger boy from the private school in the state capital over the girl from the public school, the Yankee transplant residing in one of the northern-most of Deep South towns. This was sexism! Paternalism! This was unfair.
After my loss I shook hands with the boy, as we were forced to do, and I noted the smug, self-righteous smile on his face. He, too, thought he’d been better. The indignity of it all too much to bear, I turned away and didn’t look back, went to college, got a job, led my life, got another job, went to weddings. But then I found out he’d be at this one. And then I got fired.
He was a friend of the groom. They’d gone to college together. He was single, like me. I’d long forgotten the topic of our debate, and my coming in second had lost any import or meaning in my actual life, but if I was going to face my onetime competitor while dateless at a wedding, you could be certain I’d find a way to win. I was jobless, spending my days writing blog posts for free on a site I had created about being unemployed. I needed a win.
In the dinners we had preceding the wedding, Lucy, who found it hilarious that two of her wedding guests had known each other in a way previous life, confessed all she knew about Boyd. That was his name, my high school debate nemesis: Boyd. He was, I inferred, still rather full of himself. He was a lawyer. A litigator, of course. He’d dated one girl for a while, but they’d broken up when she moved away. He had recently run a marathon. He was terribly conservative, Republican, at times a self-professed chauvinist. “Oh, you’ll hate him,” Lucy enthused. “You might even make out with him.” I smiled and feigned indifference to what might happen. Then I went home and found that Boyd had friended me on Facebook. Hahahahahahahaaaaa, I thought, with imagined diabolical hand-wringing. I would be his wedding kryptonite.
I flew to Montego Bay one early Tuesday morning in June, and at the airport located a driver with an unmarked white van, as the bride and groom had advised, to take me to our spot on the island. Upon arrival I was greeted by the hotel staff and ushered to my small room, one of the cheapest available. It offered just one window, shadowed by an overhanging roof, and my bed was topped with a large mosquito net. Contrary to the photos, my outdoor shower seemed dark and bug-enticing rather than serene and brightly tropical. On the plus side, the refrigerator in the room was stocked with Red Stripe. I popped one open, plugged in my laptop—I’d blog once daily, I had vowed—and unpacked my island attire, changing into my swimsuit and a dress and sandals for my walk to the pool, where I’d been told the happy couple was waiting.
I was one of the first guests to arrive. Boyd was not expected until later in the week. Time to stake out the place and make arrangements as needed, I thought, marveling at how well Mission: Debate Tournament Revenge was working out already. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d do when I finally confronted Boyd—pummel him with coconuts until he admitted his win was unfair? Stage a winner-take-all Round Two debate? Employ the age-old technique of revenge by seduction?—but it seemed like being tan and relaxed, with supple arms from morning yoga, would help.
At the pool, I greeted Lucy and David with hugs and that universal destination-wedding croon of “How lucky are we? This is amazing!” before selecting my lounge chair and beginning the business of relaxing. Outside, everything was as expected: the sun hot, the water cool, the service pleasant, the couple thrilled to spend pre-wedding one-on-one time with someone who had virtually no (ostensible) demands, except to coexist in peace and harmony alongside them in their selected form of paradise. This was a brief lull before the rest of the guests and family arrived, and we all appreciated it for what it was. We stayed at the pool into the late afternoon and ate under the stars that night. In opportune moments, I surreptitiously dug further into the secrets of my wedding nemesis (“So, who at the wedding would you say is the most afraid of snakes?” “Are there any allergies I should know of?”). After dessert the couple went off, hand in hand, to the honeymoon villa, and I trudged back to my slightly damp room by myself and listened to the Kinks on repeat. “Strangers on this road we are/We are not two we are one” kept running through my head even after I shut down for the night. I pulled down the mosquito netting and closed my eyes.
By Thursday evening most of the guests had arrived, and we gathered to eat in the more casual of the restaurants on the premises. That’s where I first saw him, my rival, my scourge. He looked about the same. Taller. Wearing a bigger belt. I would have recognized him anywhere at this resort, not least because I knew he’d be there. We were at opposite ends of a long table and so did not talk, but our eyes met, and when they did I would quickly look away, a theme repeated throughout the meal. After dinner, the crowds quickly dispersed into their separate groups, him with his friends, me with mine, and no commingling between. It was a slight disappointment. The next day, I kept scanning the pool deck, gazing laser-eyed and keen into the waves, thinking of what I might say in case he suddenly appeared. There was no sign of him, though, and I started to doubt my initial interpretation of his look, his Facebook friending of me. Maybe he didn’t actually want to meet again at all. On the other hand, maybe I had to be patient.
The next night, at the rehearsal dinner, he and I were seated at separate tables
. I was across from two friends: Natalie and her fiancé, Luke, who she’d later marry in Connecticut. To the left of me was my newly appointed Best Wedding Friend (BWF), a man named Fred. Fred had gotten to Jamaica early as well, and in the last few days together we’d found the easy harmony of destination-wedding friendship, with all the necessary confidences shared, jokes told, drinks drunk, and our separate lives communally affirmed. We were similar enough at the same time that we were suitably dissimilar: He was gay and stylish and, a matter of key importance, he’d never beaten me in a debate competition. He lived in New York, too, and we’d promised to hang out in the city. We probably meant it.
Fred had known Boyd from college, though they hadn’t run in the same crowd. He’d been brought up to speed, of course, on my hankering for restitution of an ancient wrong. He leaned in and reported, “He’s looking at you. Oh, oh, he’s coming in for the kill . . .”
He was. Not for the kill, per se, but for something. It could be the kill. What was the kill, anyway? I turned to Fred to ask, but Boyd was already in earshot, loping toward us in khaki pants and a baby-blue golf shirt that, I wanted to mutter to Fred, only emphasized the lobster hue of his face. (Destination Wedding Tip: SPF.) He stopped, gave us a sort of leering half smile, and slapped my BWF on the back. Fred, who’d been sipping his drink, held back a cough. Boyd then turned to me. “Hello, Ms. Doll,” he said, wasting no time pretending he didn’t know exactly who I was. “I trust you’ve had a splendid evening?”
I nodded. “Highly splendid. The most splendid.”
“We have something to discuss,” he said. “Can I interest you in a nightcap back at my villa? As an added enticement, I have a bottle of Jamaica’s finest. And cigarettes. And—”
My suave demeanor was toast, because despite all the plotting and planning, I’d never successfully figured out what I might say in this initial interaction. I was terrible at this, really. I would have sucked at espionage. I relied on the oldest trick in the book: postponement. “Oh, hey, there’s Lucy. I have to talk to her,” I mumbled, departing hastily and snagging a fresh glass of wine on my way to the bride, who was gazing dreamily out at the water and moonlit sky.
“Did I just see you talking to Boyd?” she asked, snapping to attention. She had always been an excellent multitasker.
“He invited me back to his villa,” I told her. “For a nightcap. Who says ‘nightcap’?”
“Boyd does. Also, he told David he got that villa on purpose just in case he needed ‘extra room for guests.’” Lucy looked at me pointedly.
“What’s he going to do, house the wedding band? He hasn’t even spoken to me since he got here!” I said.
“Well, he just got here,” was her response. “You should give him a chance.”
“You think?” This was not the first time I’d been given this advice. There were plenty of paired-up couples in my life who seemed to see me as a hard-hearted ballbuster who never opened up, who refused to even consider anyone less than some idealized form of man. In truth, I knew that my heart, though deeply crusted on the outside with a protective layer of sarcasm and revenge schemes, was as welcomingly pliable as any of the hearts of the married twosomes I’d seen into wedlock. I might present a tough barrier, but it was a thin one, and once a man had found his way in, I was as accepting as anyone else, possibly more so, probably to a fault. I was starting to consider another truth: that I gave too many chances to people who didn’t deserve them.
But with Boyd, we were suspended in the faux reality of the wedding. Whether I gave him a chance or not didn’t really matter, not in terms of any permanent situation, not in terms of having to clean something up afterward. Not in terms of heartbreak. He’d made an offer, the most basic of overtures. I knew I could take it or leave it, and I knew that leaving an offer on the table, while occasionally advisable, is almost always the inferior basis for any sort of experience you might want to tell someone about later.
“So, are you going to go?” she asked. “You’ll go. You always go.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a story,” she said. “You’ll do anything for a story.”
I might have smiled—she knew me after all—but I kept it from getting out of control. I had a cover to protect. “I’m really happy for you,” I said. “You and David are a great couple.” I meant it. They clearly loved each other, and that was far better than any false impression of idealized couplehood, which, I’d come to realize, was a cruel form of deception to both those who wed and their guests. Lucy and David bantered and bickered and laughed and teased, but his expression when he looked at her, which he was doing right now, though she didn’t appear to notice, was one of joy and amazement. I am so lucky, it seemed to say. For some reason, out of me came these words: “Not everyone gets this.”
She smiled, that dreamy look crossing over her features again. “I know.”
• • •
On the way back to our rooms, Fred and I decided we’d take a quick dip, because no matter how often you get to jump into a pool overlooking the ocean under the light of the moon, it’s not enough. We traipsed through the resort, which was quiet but for the chirping of tiny tree frogs and the occasional rustlings of nocturnal creatures or other humans wandering back to their rooms. We emerged from a wooded patch to find ourselves not by the pool but in front of one of the expensive villas, an entity on its own. I’d seen the photos on the website: Underneath that thatched roof was an enormous four-poster bed surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows so as to allow a guest to gaze out at the ocean while horizontal. Adirondack chairs were perched outside on the rocky patio surrounding the hut, which had its own personal climbing ladder for access to the water beyond the cliffs. Outside of this hut there was a man sitting and smoking in his Adirondack chair. We were all in shadows, but there was no doubt in my mind who it was, and soon we found the man knew exactly who we were, too. “Oh, hi,” I heard, a familiar voice emerging through the dark over the crashing of the waves. “I was hoping to see at least one of you.”
Fred gave me a look, squeezed my hand, and was gone. I picked my way along the rocks, trying my best not to trip in my heels, until I arrived at the empty chair next to Boyd. Brave through drinks, I looked at him, not letting my gaze waver when he stared back at me. In the dark his eyes resembled those of a raccoon interrupted while picking through the garbage. I realized he was waiting for my next move before he made his. “I was robbed,” I said. “You do realize that.”
He laughed. “Sit down.” He gestured toward the nearest chair, but I waited a moment, gauging him; even, I thought, making him sweat. Of course, it was hot. He’d be sweating anyway, as evidenced by the splotch of perspiration that was currently working its way down my own back. More important than any sort of suspense or nervousness-making, though, was that from this vantage point, standing above him, I had room to consider. Who was this man? Not just the guy I’d put together from Facebook status updates and photos and Lucy’s stories. Not just the boy I barely remembered from so many years ago, the young man I spent an hour standing next to, trying to convince a judge, who may or may not have been asleep, that my side of a hypothetical argument was best. Nor was he even some clear combination of the two, bound together by the indignation that silly incident had wrought. This person, while someone with whom I shared a strange, brief history, a specific moment in time, was largely a mystery. He was also more real than any of the options I’d considered up to this time. I must be the same for him, I thought. We were characters to each other, but we were not only that.
“Do you think people ever know people?” I asked, but before he had a chance to answer my seemingly random question, I eclipsed it with another. “I heard you dated Naomi Windham.” She was a girl who’d been a sophomore at my high school when I was a senior. I’d also heard that the relationship had ended badly, but I kept that to myself.
“I did,” he said, offer
ing nothing more than a lengthy drag on his cigarette, which he then handed to me. “Want?”
I didn’t smoke, but I took it. It seemed the thing to do, companionably, even if what I really wanted was another glass of wine. He noticed me glancing at the cup near his feet and heaved himself out of his reclined position. “I’ll make you a drink,” he said. “You really are the same, you know that?”
“You never even knew me,” I managed, before breaking into a fit of coughing. He shook his head, went into his villa, turned on lights, poured something into a cup, and emerged again. I sat watching and wondering how I’d gotten into this, at the same time aware that to get out all I had to do was walk away.
I’d figured out by now that there are times in a person’s life when she knows what will happen before it actually does. One might argue that this was such a time, that this had been in some ways predetermined, even before that debate competition fifteen years ago. That we would reunite at a wedding made our romantic interaction inevitable—because it was a wedding, because we were both single, because of our shared history, and because, practically speaking, it’s better to try your hand at a seduction scheme than it is to pummel a wedding guest with coconuts. Just because.