A More Perfect Union

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  Jay, on the other hand, was delighted to rub elbows with the well-to-do. As they entered the elegant Victorian lobby, he looked around at the well-dressed men and women lounging by the large fireplace—with a gas flame that produced little heat—or waiting near the doors with their golf clubs and thought, I could get used to this. Not that he had any interest in golf. But in being rich? Yeah, that might be nice.

  A smartly dressed young woman met them by the front desk. “Miss Denning?” she asked Adrastia, extending her hand, “I’m Tessa Constantine.”

  Adrastia took her hand and then gestured to Jay and Wallace. “Pleased to meet you. These are the two gentlemen who are getting married—Jay Corey and Wallace Leopold.”

  If Ms. Constantine was at all bothered by them being gay, she showed no sign of it. In fact, as she shook their hands she said confidentially, as if the thought delighted her, “I believe you’ll be our first gay wedding!”

  “Cool,” Jay said.

  Wallace didn’t say anything, though he appeared less enthusiastic. They hadn’t actually agreed to have the wedding there, since they had yet to discuss pricing.

  But as Ms. Constantine gave them a tour, including the gardens, where weddings were often held, and the spectacular ballroom, Jay kept picturing himself and Wallace walking arm and arm through the hotel like Christopher Reeve and… well, not Jane Seymour—perhaps Dan Stevens… back in 1912, when Somewhere in Time took place. It was the perfect wedding he’d always pictured.

  After the tour, they went to a small room where Ms. Constantine served them glasses of champagne—one of the champagnes they might opt to include for toasts—and laid out brochures on a table outlining the various wedding packages offered by the hotel.

  “We have a garden wedding package, if that’s what you prefer,” she said. “You seemed to like that idea.”

  “Yes,” Jay admitted, “but we’re talking about… when?”

  “The earliest dates we have available are in mid-November.”

  “Exactly. How warm is it going to be in November?”

  Ms. Constantine laughed. “Well, it could be warm, but you’re right. You might not be able to rely on that. In the event it was too cold to hold the wedding in the garden, or say it was raining, we would have a backup plan to move the ceremony inside—in the Garden Ballroom.”

  “And what about the reception?”

  That could be held in the Wentworth Ballroom or the Grand Ballroom. How many guests are you planning on?”

  “We estimated about a hundred,” Jay said. “At least we’re planning on sending out a hundred invites. Not all of them will come, of course.” Considering they were talking about a wedding in less than three months, close to a major holiday, he expected a number of their friends would already have other plans.

  “In that case, either of the ballrooms would work.”

  “The Grand Ballroom is the one I want,” Jay said firmly. “The one from the original hotel.”

  “All right. Have you given any thought to the catering? We can supply a meal based upon these menus—” She slid the booklet of menus across the table to him. “—or perhaps you’d just like us to serve an afternoon tea….”

  Jay felt his heart flutter a bit. “Afternoon tea? With scones and cucumber sandwiches?”

  “There are several options,” Ms. Constantine said, sliding yet another menu toward him.

  It listed scones and Devonshire cream, along with poached pears, lobster profiterole, smoked duck breast, salmon, cucumber cups, and other things that made him want to swoon. He was seeing himself and Wallace dressed in Victorian tuxes at high tea in a Victorian ballroom, and… yes! A string quartet playing in the background!

  Ms. Constantine had been jotting notes and figures down on a notepad during the conversation, and now she tallied some of them up. “If we have the wedding in the garden—with the Garden Ballroom as a backup, in case of the weather—and put the reception in the Grand Ballroom, that gives us a base figure of just under ten thousand.”

  She seemed to think this figure was reasonable, but Jay felt the bottom drop out of the perfect Victorian wedding he’d been formulating in his head. He was suddenly acutely aware of the difference between playing at being wealthy and actually being wealthy. Ten thousand dollars? That was insane! They had discussed other details, including local businesses the hotel had arrangements with for things such as wedding cakes, catering, and flower arrangements. These would all be additional expenses, not included in the hotel price.

  Jay and Adrastia exchanged looks, and he could tell she knew this was going to be impossible. Wallace’s expression was unreadable, as it often was when he was thinking about unpleasant things.

  Their host seemed to sense Jay needed a minute to digest the figure she’d just dropped like an atom bomb on his dream. “I’ll leave you to discuss it for a few minutes.”

  “Oh my God,” Adrastia said under her breath, the moment the door closed.

  “I… didn’t expect it to be that much, I guess.”

  “And that’s just the beginning! You don’t know how much the tuxes and the wedding cake and all the rest will add up to!”

  Wallace contemplated the figures Ms. Constantine had left behind, his mouth set in a grim line. “I would say we’re looking at something around… fifteen or sixteen thousand.”

  “Yeah,” Jay said wistfully. He finished his champagne in one gulp.

  They had acres of land. It would be infinitely cheaper to put up a pavilion on the front lawn, hire a caterer, and maybe buy a bunch of flowers. With the right decorations, it could be beautiful. Adrastia had already agreed to preside over it. They didn’t need to break the bank to prove to themselves and the rest of the world that they loved each other.

  When Ms. Constantine returned, she found them sitting in somber silence. That was probably a big hint about what their answer would be. But she smiled cheerfully and took her seat.

  “Have you decided? Or would you like more details about anything?”

  Jay couldn’t bring himself to say it. He looked at Wallace, who gazed back at him, the corner of his mouth quirked up in an affectionate smile.

  Then Wallace took a deep breath and turned to Ms. Constantine. “We’ll do it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  WALLACE HAD already anticipated how expensive a wedding might be and had worked out their budget for it. Fifteen to twenty thousand dollars had, admittedly, been on the high side of his estimations, but it simply meant their savings account would be pretty lean for the next several months. They wouldn’t starve or miss their mortgage payments. And the look of surprise and delight that lit up Jay’s face when Wallace gave the go-ahead made it all worth it.

  Wallace himself didn’t need anything as elaborately gaudy as the Wentworth for his marriage, but he did need something more than a simple handfasting ceremony in the front yard. That had been discussed, but unfortunately he’d known too many gay couples who were handfasted before marriage was legal for them—and so did a lot of people. Getting handfasted was one of those things gay couples did because they couldn’t get married. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe a handfasting was legitimate. Now that marriage was legal, a pagan high priest or priestess could certainly perform a handfasting, and it would be recognized as a legal marriage by the state. But he didn’t want to deal with the skepticism of the people he knew—his father, coworkers, and even other gay men and women.

  Oh, you got… handfasted? Then you aren’t actually married yet?

  No. He wanted a wedding, dammit. His high priestess would perform the ceremony, and there would certainly be pagan elements, but there would also be the traditional exchange of rings and I now pronounce you husbands.

  Wallace wanted no doubt about the fact that he and Jay were married.

  None.

  WITH ADRASTIA’S help, Jay didn’t find making the wedding arrangements too difficult. The list Ms. Constantine had supplied him with would do, since he otherwise had no idea where to fin
d wedding cakes and floral arrangements in time. He was pretty open to suggestions, except that he insisted everything look plausibly Victorian.

  He picked out a design for the wedding invitations that felt sophisticated and old-fashioned, though still striking. Wallace glanced at it briefly and gave his approval. Then Jay roped Adrastia into helping him address and mail them all out.

  He tried to get Wallace to do it, since he was one of the two people getting married and all, but Wallace just said, “I don’t know why you’re wasting time on mailing anything. Who does that, these days? I’ll just make up an e-mail list. It’s far more efficient.”

  “Uh… no,” Jay said.

  So Jay and Adrastia handled the invites.

  Wallace did accompany Jay to Jacques Fine European Pastries in Suncook, where they were confronted by a mind-numbing array of flavors for the wedding cake and the fillings between the layers—spice cake, espresso, gingerbread, chocolate truffle, Bailey’s, black Russian, apple preserves, lemon, raspberry…. They were given samples of whatever they thought might suit them, and all were heavenly. Jay had always thought wedding cakes were dry, but not these. They were amazing! When he was told he could have different flavor combinations for each of the three layers of the cake, he nearly had an orgasm right there in the bakery. Ultimately he and Wallace agreed on alternating spice cake and gingerbread with black Russian and Bailey’s buttercream fillings, all wrapped up in a cake design called “Wheat in the Wind,” which had a fondant covering of off-white trimmed with golden shafts of wheat, highlighted with bouquets in fall colors.

  Wallace wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the flowery theme, but he looked at it and smirked. “Well, it certainly looks gaudy enough for the Victorians.”

  “Do you object?”

  “Me?” Wallace laughed. “I have no taste. If it were up to me, we’d be eating off paper plates and drinking out of Styrofoam cups.”

  “Ew.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I’m leaving it up to you to make this wedding spectacular.”

  That was certainly what Jay intended to do. He didn’t want to wipe out their savings, but once he was on his Victorian wedding kick, he kept finding more ways to improve upon it. He ran all his ideas and purchases past Wallace and would have put them aside if Wallace had ever said “No, that’s too expensive.” But he never did.

  Jay ordered Victorian tuxes for the two of them online, then dragged Wallace to a local tailor when they arrived to make sure they fitted perfectly. They were nearly identical, except that he’d ordered a dark green paisley waistcoat for Wallace, while his was burgundy. He was used to seeing Wallace in T-shirts and jeans. The man didn’t own much else. But the moment Wallace stepped out of the dressing room, even with the tux fitting a bit awkwardly in the shoulders, he looked so strikingly handsome Jay found himself wiping tears out of the corners of his eyes.

  When the tuxes were properly tailored, Adrastia took a photo of them in their new library, Wallace sitting in the Victorian chair they’d found at an antique store that summer—not for the wedding, but simply because the library demanded an old stuffed chair—with Jay standing behind him. Then she tweaked it in Photoshop to make it look like an old sepia-toned photo. The result was stunning and nearly indistinguishable from a photograph of the time period.

  That gave Jay the idea of small, ornate picture frames with their picture as wedding favors. It was a bit vain, perhaps, but… cool. And if a guest didn’t want to stare at their picture for all eternity, he or she could always take it out and put something else in the frame. He also got some delicate little teacups with candles in them to balance it out.

  He even arranged for a string quartet through a musician friend who happened to know one of the members. They promised to play “Canon in D” for the walk down the aisle, and—best of all—the theme to Somewhere in Time when he and Wallace entered the room! They were a bit pricier than a DJ, but Wallace gave him the okay.

  When the RSVPs began rolling in, Jay and Wallace were surprised. Most of their invites had been accepted, despite the short notice. Jay had also mentioned the Victorian theme and said, “Feel free to dress accordingly, though it certainly isn’t expected or required.” An overwhelming majority of those who’d RSVP’d had notes to the effect that they’d see what they could come up with for Victorian dress, often with comments about how much fun they thought it would be.

  Wallace looked up at Jay after reading one of these and said with amusement, “We appear to be enabling the steampunk fetishists in our circles.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  WALLACE HAD made certain everyone in his family was on the invitation list. In particular, he wanted his youngest brother to be there—he’d always been closer to Rick than his other two brothers—and he wanted his father to be there. More importantly, he wanted his father to stand up at the altar with him, just as Jay’s parents were going to be standing beside their son.

  He knew his father was conservative. They often disagreed about politics, and there were some topics they simply couldn’t get into without tempers flaring. But they were still family, dammit!

  They’d endured the loss of Wallace’s mother to heart disease five years before Wallace had met Jay, and they’d lost Wallace’s older brother to pancreatic cancer very suddenly just before Wallace and Jay had moved in together. About the same time, Wallace’s father had had a minor stroke. He’d recovered, thankfully, but perhaps all these things had made him realize just how fleeting his time with his sons might be. He’d made some gestures toward recognizing Wallace’s relationship with Jay. Nothing huge, but Jay had been invited to some family gatherings, and Wallace’s father had been pleasant to him, if not exactly friendly.

  It seemed like progress.

  To people who didn’t know him well, it might seem as if Wallace wasn’t overly concerned about the wedding. He certainly wasn’t enthusing about it all the time, the way Jay was, or obsessing on the details. But it was tremendously important—one of the most important things in his life. He loved Jay, and he wanted that love acknowledged by the world. He didn’t want to pretend they were just two good friends buying a house together. He didn’t want a small ceremony with just a few close friends so the rest of the world could pretend it had never happened. He wanted to exchange rings on the lawn of the goddamned White House with the president conducting the ceremony on national television and every single lawmaker in the entire country who’d ever voted against his right to marry the man he loved forced to attend, dressed in matching gowns of hot pink.

  Jay’s family was delighted by the whole affair. His younger brother, Alan, was going to be Jay’s best man—Jay had even bought a Victorian tux for him—and his mother jabbered excitedly about it whenever her son talked to her on the phone.

  They’d booked rooms in the hotel for Jay’s parents, his brother and his sister-in-law, as well as for themselves, but Wallace’s family had said not to waste the money on them. They’d be there the morning of the wedding. It made Wallace a bit anxious, because he didn’t like leaving things until the last minute, but as long as they made it there before noon, there would be plenty of time.

  However, the Friday morning before the wedding, as Wallace and Jay prepared to go to the hotel and meet up with Jay’s family for the wedding rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner, Jay logged in to check his e-mail, and his face went pale.

  “What is it?” Wallace asked.

  Jay took a long time to respond. He opened his mouth as if to say something but seemed to change his mind. He simply rotated his laptop so Wallace could look at the screen.

  There was an e-mail from Wallace’s father, and as he read it, Wallace felt his chest contract, as if a shard of ice had pierced him through and frozen his insides.

  I tried to e-mail Wallace, the message read, but I must have his address wrong. Please tell him I won’t be attending your event. It’s a matter of principle.

  Wallace left the room, and Jay didn’t chase after him. By now he k
new when Wallace needed to be given some space.

  Principle.

  A matter of principle.

  Not a matter of love for his son. Not a matter of respect for how much Wallace had wanted his family to share this “event” with him.

  No.

  His fucking “principles” were more important than his own son.

  JAY COULD tell by the look on Wallace’s face, when he walked back through the room on his way to his office, he was going to be out of commission for a while. Whenever something really upset him, he shut down. He sort of turned into a zombie and barely responded to anything said to him. And generally he closed himself in his office, so Jay wouldn’t try to talk to him. It was his way of processing things.

  Shit.

  This was not the time for it. Not the day before the wedding.

  He logged on to Facebook and sent a message to Wallace’s brother, Rick. Are you still planning on coming to the wedding?

  Jay waited anxiously for a half hour while he puttered about the house, making sure their tuxes were loaded into the car, along with everything else they’d need for the weekend. Wallace was still brooding in his office, but nearly everything had been done the night before, so that wasn’t immediately a hardship.

  Finally a message came back: Dude! Of course! I wouldn’t miss it.

  Thank God.

  We’ve got a problem, Jay replied. He copied and pasted the e-mail into the message.

  Fortunately Rick didn’t try to take his father’s side. Jay would have lost it if he had. That’s pretty shitty. I’m sorry, man.

  Wallace’s friend, Clark, is best man. They lived together in the house in Derry. But it was really important for Wallace to have your father standing beside him at the altar. Can you take his place? He didn’t suggest Rick argue with Mr. Leopold and change his mind. Even in the short time he’d known the man, Jay had learned that was nearly impossible. If he ever came around, it would be on his own terms, in his own time.