by Steve Hely
And there he was indeed, my first sight of him, up at the altar. He looked, in a word, innocent. Like Macaulay Culkin, but with perkier eyes. The manliest things about him were his shoulders, which jutted out wide under his tuxedo. I watched him wave to his kid brother as he took his place.
The wedding started to come into focus for me, like a Polaroid developing. My illusions slipped away. I saw Polly’s dad, a lawyer with an unfortunate patchy baldness, smiling and shaking hands as he worked his way around the aisle. Polly’s mom, dyed black bun of hair on top, a woman who’d told me in a private moment that I seemed like a “great guy,” smiled behind him in a royal-blue dress. Once the two of them had taken Polly and me out to Legal Seafood, and Polly had told me afterward that they’d found me “disarming.”
I saw Polly’s kid brother, a twenty-two-year-old fuckup who lived in his parents’ basement and smoked pot all day. But even he had scrubbed up, and he led in his grandmother, a woman who’d once pinched my cheeks and told me I looked like “a healthy young Irishman.”
Derek whispered hello as he slid in next to me, and he brushed off the pew before letting his Mount Holyoke girl sit down.
Then the organ blasted everyone alert, and we turned our heads around as Polly came in.
I’ll spare the reader a bullshit description of how beautiful she looked coming down the aisle. Beautiful wasn’t the key aspect. She did look beautiful, so beautiful that seeing her it occurred to me in a flash that somewhere in my past I’d ruined my entire life.
But worse than that was that she looked really, purely, happy.
In our time together, I’d seen Polly fake a lot of things. After our friend Alaina had paced around on a poorly lit stage for two full hours in a stupendously disastrous one-woman show about Dolley Madison, I’d watched Polly deliver fulsome and false compliments about how “captivating” it had been. To a distinguished professor of American history I’d seen her brilliantly allude to a false pregnancy, just to get out of sitting through a screening of Birth of a Nation. To my own mother I’d seen her deliver lengthy and baseless testimony on my remarkable diligence as a student. No one could fake someone out like she could. She was amazing. I’d loved her for it.
But walking down that aisle, beaming, she was not faking. I could tell. And it broke my heart all over again.
The Reverend—a woman—read the ceremony. There were readings from The Prophet and First Corinthians. The Buddhist monks chanted out a blessing in Tibetan.
The Reverend invited James and Polly “to share their vows with their friends and loved ones and with each other.”
They stared into each other’s eyes.
“I, James,” he said in an Australian accent, more rounded and genteel than I’d expected, “vow not to spend every Sunday morning watching rugger and cricket on SkyTV.” Happy laughs from the assembled. “I vow to remember to drive on the right side of the road.” Happy laughs. “I vow not to complain too much when you play Britney Spears.”
Again laughter, and then it got serious.
“I vow to support you, Polly, in everything that you do. I vow to protect you, Polly, and everything that you cherish. I vow to listen to you, to look after you, to be with you, when you wake, when you sleep, as a comfort, and a strength. I vow to love you, Polly, in everything that you are, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. I vow to give my life over to you, Polly, so we can make a new life, together.”
Lucy dabbed her eyes. They were as red as beets.
“I, Polly, vow to at least try to like Vegemite,” she said. Cathartic, happy laughs from choked-up throats. “I vow to appreciate the cultural achievements of Australia, such as Kylie Minogue, Kath and Kim, and INXS.” Relaxed laughs. “I vow not to always point out that Budweiser is vastly superior to Victoria Bitter.” Laughs and scattered cheers and friendly boos, hovering just within a reasonable volume limit.
“I vow to support you, James, in your every endeavor. I vow to comfort you, James, in every care and worry. I vow to listen to you, to look after you, to be with you, when you wake, when you sleep, as a comfort—”
Here Polly’s throat snagged and she wiped her eye. She took a breath, and let out a soft laugh. You could feel the crowd pulling for her. With a tremble she pushed on. “I vow to love you, James, in everything that you are, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” She took another breath, and then her voice was calm and strong. “I vow to give my life over to you, James, so we can make a new life, together.”
Some Australian let out a genteel “Hurrah!” and joyous cheers erupted. Lucy badly defaced the sleeve of her dress mopping up tear-water and snot.
In months of working on The Tornado Ashes Club, I’d gotten good at manipulating emotions. Now, confronted with something real, I was gutted.
There were several things I could’ve done next. I could’ve repented everything. I could’ve gotten on my knees and prayed to God and Abraham Lincoln to wash away my lies and let me start all over again. I could’ve pulled aside the woman reverend, unburdened myself of everything I’d done since losing Polly, and asked her how to lead a true and righteous life. I could’ve stolen a moment to introduce myself to James, shake his hand, and congratulate him on being the better man. I could’ve found Polly’s parents, thanked them for their kindness to me, and hugged them for raising such a wonderful daughter. I could’ve turned to redcheeked Lucy, told her she was the sweetest and kindest person I’d ever met, and asked her to marry me.
Instead, I dashed out of the chapel, forced myself, on the pretext of a “medical emergency,” into the rented Daewoo of one of Polly’s cousins whom I’d met years before at a clambake, rode silently back to the Radisson, stopped at the front desk and had them sell me a package of cold medicine, consumed all eight pills, made for the ballroom, told the bartender that I was “with the family” and it was okay to start serving me early, and encouraged him to be generous in his pouring.
THINGS I DID, OR AM ALLEGED TO HAVE DONE, AT POLLY’S WEDDING RECEPTION
• Stopped the hors d’oeuvres lady, took ten shrimp, put them in a plastic cup, and told her to “scurry along and reload.”
• Asked one of Polly’s bridesmaids, who was a high school English teacher, which of Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain was “the worst liar.” Suggested that if any of them were alive today, they’d be writing car commercials.
• Confronted the reverend and asked her how long they’ve been ordaining ladies.
• Challenged James’s brother George to a shrimp-throwing contest in the parking lot. Defeated him by hitting five windshields in six throws to his three.
• Gave Polly’s mom a hug, holding said hug for well over a full minute, long after she had grown visibly uncomfortable.
• Told the story of Derek and the Mount Holyoke girl to the Buddhist monks, with added ribald detail of my own invention, at one point inviting the Mount Holyoke girl over and suggesting she provide some illuminative physical demonstrations.
• Told Derek I didn’t want to fight him but would if necessary.
• Summoned a group of Australians and delivered a lecture on the theme “Honest Abe Lincoln: The Bearded Hero.”
• Informed my tablemates at dinner that I probably could’ve slept with Polly’s mom.
• Told Lucy that her attempts to quiet me were “crypto-fascist.”
• Declared myself to be a skilled amateur chef. By way of demonstration, poured vodka all over Lucy’s sea bass. When she protested, proclaimed that her palate was “unrefined.”
• Told the reluctant bartender that he was a “cur” and I would fight him.
• Asked the teacher bridesmaid if she thought I could beat Josh Holt Cready in a fight.
• After unwrapping several false leads, found the Oenophile Select Temperature-Controlled Dual-Zone 28-Bottle Wine Refrigerator. Carried it outside. Smashed it against a Dumpster.
• Returned inside. Threw up discreetly into a napkin. Decided to deliver a
few brief remarks and convinced the DJ to hand me the microphone.
I’m told my speech ended with the DJ turning up “The Chicken Dance” really loud to muffle my protesting screeches as Derek and Lucy led me out to the hallway. There I escaped their grasp and ran out the door. I gained control of a hotel shuttle bus and drove it in jerking loops around the parking lot until bumping into a curb.
The next day I woke up in the hotel bathtub.
Fish sometimes get a condition called pop eye, where gas built up inside them causes their eyes to bulge out and eventually burst. I had that. My arms were as weak and trembling as those of a veiny wheelchair-bound centenarian, and it took the greatest efforts of will and strength to extricate myself from the soilings that covered my clothes. My brain squirmed and writhed as though trying to undo itself from an intricate knot. I felt as though my innards had been reduced to a sickly chum, and my interior muscles at spastic intervals tried to heave them up and out. My best defense was to try and pass out before each new assault of nausea hit its violent apex.
All of this was but one level of my punishment. The endless ride back to Boston was punctuated from time to time as Lucy, in the dispassionate tones of the traumatized, recalled and related some new disgrace I’d committed. I could barely keep my consciousness threaded together for long enough spells to listen.
For my part, I had only two very clear memories, chance snatches of footage that somehow preserved themselves, Zapruder films from the drunken mind.
One was this: slouched in a corner of the ballroom, against the wall, sucking on a lime, I watched Lucy and Polly talking on the dance floor. Polly walked over. Focusing on my lime I pretended not to notice her pulling up her wedding dress so she could kneel beside me and touch my cheek.
“Pete,” she said, “please go to bed.”
“Happy wedding,” I said.
“Please. Let them take you back.”
Then she walked away.
The other memory was this: walking through the hall, Derek holding my arm like a gruff prison guard as I performed a half-remembered version of the sentimental Irish tune “The Foggy Dew,” we passed two middle-aged women sneaking cigarettes.
“Is that the guy who wrote the book?” one of them said to the other, trusting that I was too addled to overhear.
“Yeah,” the other said. “Drunken writers, I guess.”
“Well let me tell you,” said the first. “I read it. And it wasn’t good enough for him to get away with behaving like that.”
18
“Some folks say eighty-five is too old to be a rodeo clown. They say a fella that old ought to hang up his striped-orange jacket and give up the game of entertaining kids and luring bulls off fallen cowboys. Well, some folks haven’t met Earl Teacup, who says that at eighty-five … he’s just getting started.”
“Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne. It used to be that if you wanted to be a painter, you had to have two hands. But when an accident changed Betsy Billinger’s life, she didn’t give up on her dream of expressing herself through art. In fact, she decided to pursue her goal twice as hard. And the results? To say the least, … they’re colorful.”
“They don’t talk much. They eat a thousand pounds of shrimp every day. They live at depths as great as half a mile, and they won’t fit into any swimsuit you’d find at the mall. But when it comes to dating, it turns out they’ve got some good ideas. Blue whales weren’t always known for their love lives. But one group of researchers has been studying the way that whales mate. They’ve discovered that single whales … have a few things to teach single people.”
“Roses, vanilla, and fresh-baked cookies: there are some smells that all of us know. But what about red alder, Mayhaw, or burnt plantains? Those are just a few of the odors that competitors have to identify at the World Smelling Championships. If you’re looking for this year’s event … just follow your nose.”
—introductions to Tinsley Honig pieces on the ABC newsmagazine Dispatch as recorded by the author (ellipses indicate dramatic pauses)
Here begin the events that you, the reader may have followed. I’m sorry it took so long to catch up, as these parts are the real fireworks and doubtless the reason you bought this book in the first place. But after the backstory, I’m hoping I won’t seem like quite as much of a bastard.
When I got the news that Tinsley Honig wanted to interview me, I was sitting in a lukewarm bath, thoroughly pruned, with more pubes and soap chunks floating around than anyone should be comfortable with.
This image—my pruned flesh, numb expression on my face, phone balanced precariously on the rim of the tub—can stand for the whole of the postwedding period.
But then David Borer and Lucy called with the wonderful news.
“You don’t understand how big of a deal this is,” Borer said. “You’re nothing as a writer until you get on TV.”
TV! And with Tinsley Honig no less! I was going to be a profile on Dispatch. With any luck, they’d tuck me in between a segment on old-fashioned pedophiles who lured children over their ham radios and a piece about Afghani land-mine kids who were learning to play soccer again.
“Your book is going to start selling all over again,” said Borer. “They’re already talking about printing a special Dispatch edition, which will include a DVD of the piece. Whatever, they’ve got a lot of bad ideas over here, the point is, this is very, very good news.”
Lucy deserved the credit. Some girl who was in her pottery class was roommates with one of Tinsley’s assistants. The book had thus wormed its way into the hands of that auburn-tressed and porcelain-faced angel of TV newsmagazine journalism. It made sense. I was a natural story: young guy writes a sensitive novel, can maybe save literary culture for the text-message generation. And my publicity photo made me look telegenic.
The whole “my life has collapsed on me” thing disappeared. It was hard, in fact, to imagine I’d ever thought that. My performance at Polly’s wedding seemed like boyish hijinks from the distant past.
I looked around the bathroom, with its color-streaked towels from Target and the shave-scummed sink. Tinsley couldn’t tape me here. That wouldn’t work at all. What if Hobart came in, with his crazy hair, and started making potatoes just as Tinsley was about to ask me, on camera, how I’d learned to feel so deeply?
Luckily I had a backup plan. We’d do the interview up at Aunt Evelyn’s. The sugar shack, the maple trees, the house made of local stone—that was an author’s house. That was where I should pretend to live.
Something you may not realize when you watch these segments on TV is how fast they come together. I didn’t have any time to prepare.
I wasted my time on the bus up to Aunt Evelyn’s. That was time I could’ve used to plot out the whole interview, to come up with anecdotes and quips and facial expressions. But I spent the whole ride thinking about how my sales would go up after the interview, if I should buy an apartment in New York or skip right to the house on the ocean.
I got to Aunt Evelyn’s in time for dinner. She made these intense fennel sausages—she was going through this whole serious-meats craze—and those were distracting, too.
The next morning, a Tuesday, the segment producer and the camera guy for Dispatch showed up at seven. They rolled up in a van, apparently having driven through the darkness from New York. It was hard to imagine what they’d talked about.
The camera guy, whose name was Skee or perhaps Skeet, was vampire-y thin. He looked ageless in a way hard-living dudes who’ve past a certain benchmark are ageless, but he also looked like he’d been pissed off about stuff since at least the mid-1970s. His skin was ashen, the kind of skin you’d imagine on a Dickensian undertaker.
The producer, whose name was Michelle, was maybe thirty and wearing—and this sounds hard to believe in retrospect but I double-checked at the time—two different scarves at the same time. But her most distinctive trait was a nervous and terrifying laugh, the sound of which could easily be mistaken for hyst
erical weeping.
Skee and Michelle helped themselves to the cantaloupe and maple-smoked bacon Aunt Evelyn had laid out. Michelle explained the day’s procedure, punctuating her sentences with spurts of weep-laughter. She would “pre-interview me,” she said. Tinsley didn’t like to do the prep work herself, preferring to capture the spontaneity of first meeting me for the camera.
“Don’t ask Tinsley about her hair,” Skee said, his mouth full of cantaloupe and bacon. “She’s a real testy bitch about it.”
Michelle loudly wept-laughed and gripped him on the shoulder.
“And she won’t really look at ya? Not right in the eyes anyway? So don’t worry about that,” he continued. “Just look kinda to just above her left ear. It’ll look the same on camera.” He worked a tricky piece of bacon out of his teeth with his left pinkie.
“Okay!” said Michelle, with a big doped-up grin.
“She’s gonna insist on ringing the doorbell,” Skee said. “So let’s go frame that. By the time she gets here the trees are gonna be soaking up the light. It’s gonna be like shooting inside a freakin’ funhouse.”
We walked around, looking for places to shoot, as Michelle asked me practice questions.
“Was it challenging writing a novel?”
I was baffled as to how to answer.
“I’m sorry, but that’s honestly something she might ask.” Nervous weep-laughter.
Out in the back woods there was a piece of a steel plow, rusting and half buried, left by some farmer a century ago. Maybe I could lean on that, say something profound about the passage of time?
“Nope,” said Skee. “She won’t come out here. She won’t want to get the mud on her boots.”
“But she walked around that pond with Preston Brooks!” I said.
Skee gave me a bent smile. “Well he’s him, and you’re you. And she’s Tinsley. And I’m telling you, she ain’t coming back here, and getting her boots all covered in this shit, and if she did I’d probably be the one hearing about it.”
Michelle looked back and forth between us, then wept-laughed, to show it was all in good fun, but which also conveyed that she was as terrified as I was of this lanky madman.