Wedding Season

by Darcy Cosper

  And, of course, everyone I met—at the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, the reception, the postwedding breakfast on Sunday morning—asked when Gabe and I planned to be married. That is, everyone except his immediate family. They were very polite, of course. They always are. But at the rehearsal dinner, apropos of nothing, Teeny gave me a long discourse on the value of family traditions, and how important it was to the Winslows that she and Mo had both married a certain kind of man—by which she meant blue-blooded Yankees with an exhaustive knowledge of silverware for all occasions. And at the reception, Gabe’s mother introduced him, in my presence, to a suitable young lady—Serena Horseface or something like that, a Wellesley graduate recently relocated to New York to take her master’s degree in education. I stood by with mounting blood pressure as Mrs. Winslow encouraged Gabe to look her up. After she had departed, Gabe’s mother said: “Such a lovely, accomplished girl. I simply adore her family. And so pretty, don’t you think, Gabriel? So feminine.”

  IN THE WAKE of all that, we left the city yesterday in Gabe’s old convertible with the top down, singing loudly to radio stations that would flicker in and fade as we drove north. It was late afternoon by the time we arrived in the small, bucolic town where the parents of the groom du jour, my high school friend Ben Rushfield, have a sprawling old summer house on a dozen wild, green, and wooded acres nestled into the famous local hills. I misplaced my virginity here, once upon a long-ago summer when the Rushfields invited a half-dozen of Ben’s classmates up for a lazy, impossibly happy week of country living—which, for my part, included a long-planned and quite romantic sexual initiation courtesy of Christopher Adams, Ben’s best friend and the love of my high school life.

  By the time Gabriel and I checked into our aggressively charming and rustic little inn, located just off the hamlet’s aggressively charming and rustic little Main Street, both of us were irritable from a long drive made longer by my navigation errors. Even Gabe’s inexhaustible good humor had reached its limit. We dressed for dinner, moving around one another at elaborately wide, cold distances in the ruffled, pine-furniture-stuffed room, and drove to the Rushfields’ house in silence.

  As we rolled to a stop at the end of the long driveway, several people tumbled out of the door of the old house and down the steps toward us. Ben pounced on me as I climbed from the car and bear-hugged me as best he could, being several inches shorter than I am. Behind us, his little sister bounced on her toes as she introduced herself to Gabe and chattered at us as we crossed from the lawn into the cool shade of the house.

  Though I knew that Christopher (who goes by Topher) would be there, acting as Ben’s best man, it still gave me a shock when he came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel and waving to us. We hadn’t seen each other for maybe five years, since he abandoned a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century poetry, was hired as a writer by an entertainment company, and moved to Los Angeles.

  “Hello, you.” Topher leaned to kiss my cheek, and I felt myself blushing.

  “Topher, this is Gabe.” This must be what people refer to as regression, I thought: I suddenly felt all of sixteen years old.

  “The famous Topher.” Gabe shook his hand. “At last we meet.”

  “Evelyn, come on out here,” Topher called back into the kitchen. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  I could practically hear an aria swelling up as a seraphically lovely young woman appeared beside him, with a radiant and exquisitely drawn face and tawny hair spilling over her shoulders. The smile that she bore toward me faded and then blossomed again as she saw Gabriel, and she ran to him laughing and threw herself into his open arms. Topher and I looked from them to each other, and then Topher pointed, laughing, at Gabe.

  “You’re that Gabriel!” he said, as I told Topher, “She’s that Evelyn,” and Evelyn, turning between the two men, asked, “This is Joy?”

  “What’s going on here?” asked Marilyn, Ben’s bride-to-be, coming down the stairs.

  “Your wedding has just turned into a French farce, I think.” I gave Marilyn a kiss. “It looks like my high school sweetheart is now the boyfriend of my boyfriend’s high school sweetheart.”

  “What?” Marilyn squinted at me. “Oh, right. Topher and Evelyn. They’re engaged, actually.” She patted my shoulder. Evelyn laughed a tinkling laugh and came to take my hand between both of hers.

  “I’m so glad to meet you.” She gave me the apple-blossom smile, and then put one hand on Topher’s shoulder and the other on Gabe’s chest. “It feels like fate, doesn’t it?”

  “Thank you.” I took the sweating glass of lemonade that Ben offered. “Rushfield, was this a little surprise you were waiting to spring on us?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “I never put two and two together.”

  THERE ARE NO single people here, I thought as we sat down to dinner, and an image floated through my head of the assembled couples marching in neat animal pairs onto an ark. Ben’s parents held court at one end of a long table, Marilyn’s at the other, flanked by complete sets of grandparents (one widowed and remarried). A couple of high school friends, and a handful of people I’d never met, mostly from Ben and Marilyn’s graduate program, all married or engaged. Even Ben’s little sister had a boyfriend, who was seated to my left, a handsome boy who still had about him the sweet, brutish look of a high school jock popular enough to be nice to everyone. He told me he was twenty-three, and the matron of honor, a very pregnant woman in her late thirties seated on my other side, overheard and whispered to me, “No one should be allowed to be twenty-three.”

  Across from me, Evelyn sat laughing and luminous between Topher and Gabe, who both attended to her as if under a spell. I watched as Gabe leaned close and whispered to Evelyn; she drew back to look at him with her large soft eyes, her gaze serious and liquid, and put one slim hand against his cheek. I turned away, and when I turned back, Gabe was looking at me, his cheeks flushed. He gave a crooked smile and raised his half-empty glass to me. Topher stood to pour wine for the people sitting across from him. I noticed the curve of his neck, brown against the white linen of his shirt collar, and suddenly remembered resting my head in that hollow during a slow song at some formal dance, laughing together afterward over the limp orchid of my corsage, which we’d crushed by holding each other so tightly.

  AFTER DINNER a few of us decided to take a swim. In the cool midnight we wandered down a long slope to the pond, our faces pale in the light of an almost-full moon. Watching Gabe’s silhouette advance in front of me, I stumbled, and Topher, beside me, put a steadying hand on the small of my back.

  “Oops.” He slipped an arm around my waist. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay.” I leaned into the warmth of his body as we passed several white tents set up for the wedding dinner.

  “Look at this place. Hasn’t changed, has it? You remember our summer up here?”

  “Of course I do.” I blushed into the dark. “The age of innocence.”

  “Something like that.” His arm tightened around my waist. “I’m glad Evie’s getting to see it. Isn’t she great?”

  I felt myself tense, and I moved away, slipping from the curve of his arm.

  “Gabe seems to think so,” I said.

  “Come on, you’re not jealous? That’s not like you.”

  “How could I be jealous? I’m out in the moonlight, arm in arm with her fiancé.”

  “Gabe seems like a solid citizen,” Topher said. “You’re living together?”

  “Since last fall.”

  “You talking about getting married?”

  “God, no. You know how I feel about marriage.”

  “Still?” he said, and laughed. “I thought you’d grow out of that.”

  “I’ve grown into it. It’s an ingrown idea.”

  “Don’t get uppity with me, Silverman. I knew you when you were in braces,” he said. “I took you to the prom. I know all your secrets.” He peered down at me through the dark. “You’re a romantic.”


  We had reached the water’s edge, where clothes were strewn on the damp grass. In the shallows, Ben’s sister and her boyfriend were splashing at each other and howling with laughter. Beyond them, Gabe’s narrow body flashed through the water as he raced Ben out to the raft where Marilyn and Evelyn sat, naked and shining in the moonlight.

  “’In the sun that is young once only, time let me play and be golden in the mercy of his means,’” Topher recited. “I cried when I read that in freshman English. I was such a sensitive little lad. Is that why you liked me, Joy?” He stripped off his shirt.

  “No. I liked you because you were a babe. And I loved your fade-away shot.”

  Naked except for his boxers, Topher tossed an imaginary basketball into the air, and jumped to land ankle-deep in the pond.

  “Christ in hell, that’s cold.” He stepped back to the bank and stripped off the underwear. “Hurry up. I’ll race you to the raft,” Topher said. I sneaked a glance at his so-familiar naked body—the muscular shoulders and back sloping down to a lower region that I still found embarrassingly attractive. I looked away as he waded back into the water swearing, and plunged headfirst into the shallows. A moment later Ben’s sister shrieked and fell backward, and Topher surfaced beside her, one of her ankles in his hand, water streaming from his dark hair. As I undressed, I looked back up the hill to the house. Lights were on in all the windows, and shadows moved across the porch. I could hear music faintly through the open door, and bursts of laughter floated across the lawn. I dove.

  I hit the water, and the several glasses of wine I’d consumed hit me. I swam dizzily in the general direction of the raft, with Topher a few strokes ahead and the group on the raft yelling and clapping for us. Topher reached it first, took the hand that Ben offered him, then yanked him into the water with a colossal splash. Some other man leaped in after them, followed by Marilyn’s sister, and they chased one another around the raft, churning the water and shouting into the night. I hauled myself up onto the raft and lay panting on my back beside Gabe, who put one cold hand on my wet shoulder as he talked with Evelyn, seated on his other side with her arms wrapped around her knees. I closed my eyes and felt the raft spinning beneath me. I opened them, and the raft stopped spinning, but the thick band of stars above us began a blurring spiral.

  “Gabe, I think I’m drunk,” I told him, as the swimmers struggled back onto the raft in a damp tangle of naked limbs.

  “I think I also am drunk,” Gabe said, and he and Evelyn laughed together.

  “I think I need to go home,” I said. Topher flung himself down beside us.

  “New York? Did you forget something?” Gabe asked. Evelyn laughed again and stroked Christopher’s hair.

  “The hotel. I need to go back to the hotel.”

  “You need to go right now? We’re still swimming.”

  “I need to go now.” I hadn’t needed to leave quite so urgently thirty seconds ago, but the more Gabe resisted, the more annoying I found the situation generally and his proximity to Evelyn specifically.

  “I’m in no shape to drive, Joy. Can you wait? Could you just take a nap on the couch?”

  “The hotel,” I told him.

  “If you really need to go, I can drive you,” Topher said. “I wouldn’t be long,” he told Evelyn, and she nodded.

  “Is that okay, Joy?” Gabe patted my arm. “I’ll be there in an hour or so.”

  I shook my head gravely, not looking at him, and lowered myself into the water. Topher slid in beside me.

  BY THE TIME we had dried off and dressed, I had mostly sobered up, but I didn’t say so to Topher. We climbed into his car, drove slowly down the bumpy road to the highway, and turned toward town. The windows were open and the radio played some song about summer. Topher hummed along, and I turned to watch his profile and faintly remembered having made the same drive with him fifteen years earlier, half my life ago.

  “How did you and Evelyn meet?” I asked. “How do people meet in L.A.?”

  “Some party. Mutual friends. Same way they do in New York.”

  “When was that?”

  “In September it’ll be two years.”

  “Same as me and Gabe. We met at a wedding.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re not a romantic.” Topher laughed.

  “I never said I wasn’t. Just that I don’t want to get married. When did you know you wanted to marry Evelyn?”

  “Honestly? I still don’t know for sure.” Topher glanced into the rearview mirror, then sideways at me. “It seems impossible you could ever really know for certain that you’ll be able to spend the rest of your life with a particular person.”

  “Then why get married?”

  “She wants to, which is reasonable, given cultural pressures and biological clocks and all. And if you can’t ever know for certain, why not try? I like Evelyn, I like spending time with her. I don’t get bored. It’s pretty unlikely that some perfect mate is going to come along and make me more certain.”

  “Fine, but that doesn’t really answer the question.”

  “I’ve never been married before. I’m curious to see how it’ll change things,” Topher said, signaling a turn at an utterly deserted intersection. “Society responds pretty strongly to participation in the institution, and those responses are bound to shift our experience of the relationship.”

  “Pretty fancy talk for a sitcom writer,” I said, as we passed the gas station and town market, both closed. “You’ll forgive me if I say your views on marriage don’t sound particularly romantic in any traditional sense.”

  “Ah, but I never said I was a romantic. I only said that you were.”

  We pulled into the shadows behind the little hotel and parked the car. The engine shuddered and quieted.

  “It’s good to see you, Joy.” Topher turned and drew me into his arms. I rested my cheek against the warm familiar curve of his neck, conscious of a vague sadness. I sighed and Topher pulled back and looked at me; his face was inches away, and without thinking I slipped my hand around the back of his head and tugged a little to bring his mouth onto mine. He kissed me back, lightly, and I pressed closer to him.

  “Hey.” He pushed me away gently, then reached to smooth my hair.

  “What?” I leaned in for another kiss.

  “This isn’t the best time to get nostalgic, Joy.” Less gently than before, he put me back into my seat.

  I crossed my arms and stared out the windshield to the dark windows of my empty room. “Why not? When do we get nostalgic, then?” I heard myself say this as if from a great distance. “What are nights like this for? Do you really think Gabe isn’t getting nostalgic out there on the lake with Evelyn?”

  Topher was silent. I opened the car door but didn’t make a move to climb out.

  “That’s a specious argument if I’ve ever heard one,” he finally said, turning from me and twisting the key in the ignition. “Your jealousy doesn’t require that there be anything to substantiate it. Go to bed, Joy. It won’t feel like this tomorrow.”

  HE WAS RIGHT. It feels much worse.

  Gabe comes out of the bathroom and sees me peering from the bed. He is wearing frayed sweatpants, his hair stands on end, a toothbrush sticks out of his mouth, and he is obviously the most fabulous and desirable man in all of creation. Never underestimate the powers of guilt to shed new light on a situation, I tell myself, resisting an urge to fling myself on him and gibber incoherently.

  “Morning,” he tells me, through a mouthful of toothpaste. “I feel like hell. Hey, you were out cold when I got back last night. How are you feeling?”

  How am I feeling? I have no idea, actually. The question is absurd. I never know how I’m feeling. I think of the look on Topher’s face as I climbed out of his car last night, and then of a photograph Gabe showed me shortly after we’d moved in together, a picture that he’d taken of Evelyn years earlier, and then of Gabe’s naked leg resting against hers on the raft, and I think, nothing could be less interesting to me than how I’
m feeling. I feel like screaming at the top of my lungs. I feel like I’m going to pieces. I feel like I do right before a sneeze—that frantic, discombobulated, debilitating tension, overwhelming and unbearable, that precedes an explosion. No wonder I don’t pay attention to my feelings. I can’t imagine why other people are so keen to get in touch with them.

  “Fine,” I tell Gabe. “I feel fine. But I haven’t moved yet.”

  “You have nothing to lose but your balance.” Gabe returns to the bathroom, and I hear him spit into the sink.

  “And your dignity,” he adds.

  I pull the covers back over my head. Peekaboo, I think.

  Where’s Joy? Where did Joy go?

  BY TWO O’CLOCK I am dutifully arrayed and arraigned on the Rushfields’ broad lawn, chatting with distant relatives of the happy couple. I have planted a chaste kiss on Topher’s cheek, returned Evelyn’s embrace, admired half a dozen toddlers in their finery, squeezed Ben’s hand as he passed, complimented the dresses of mothers of both bride and groom, petted three dogs, posed for photographs with a group of high school classmates, nibbled hors d’oeuvres, tucked behind my ear the flower offered to me by Ben’s sister, mounted the creaking stairs to deliver a pitcher of lemonade and murmur niceties into the gabled bedroom where Marilyn was dressing with a flock of women around her. I have been gracious and charmed and charming, penitent and proper, I have been agreeable, sensible, helpful. The afternoon feels as frictionless as the atmosphere of some distant and perfect planet: everyone well groomed, good-natured, the conversations proceeding like easy minuets, the steps pleasantly known, gracefully executed. The sky is a pale, miraculous blue, the roses are in full and righteous bloom, the air is sweet with pollen and lilting voices. Even the weather gives benediction, and who am I to question what seems so fair and flawless, so functional? I give in. I drink iced tea, exchange bright, benign observations with those to whom we are introduced, and shush any critical thoughts that float into my head, as if they were naughty children. After an hour or so, I realize that I’m actually having a fine time. I’m fine. I’m so fine that when Gabriel departs from a little knot of guests in which we have become ensconced and the woman standing beside me asks when the two of us are getting married, I give her a winning smile and say nothing at all. As word goes around that the ceremony is beginning, I take Gabriel’s arm and move toward the white chairs set in the shade of a big green-and-white striped awning, feeling something almost like pleasant anticipation. Look, I want to tell him, look at your virtuous and good, your beautifully behaved, outlandishly normal girlfriend, your altogether suitable beloved. You can take me anywhere. Whither thou goest, I will go.