B008J4PNHE EBOK (24 page)

. . . We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

An involuntary tension locked Sam’s hand on the lens hood. At the neck of the camera, the plastic coupling mewled.

The poem concluded with the sound of oars pulling through still water.

The old man coughed. “Okay, that’s it. We love you guys. It’s going to be a great fall. Get up here, Reverend. Take us home. Take us home. The fondue’s getting cold.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

As the new husband and wife retraced the aisle, the ovation that followed them seemed too loud to Sam’s ears, as though it were coming from somewhere inside himself instead of out. The figures in his lens started to bob and slide, but he managed to film through the blessing and the vows.

The cocktail hour commenced.

Sam dragged himself up by the railing. His legs wobbled, and he bumped into someone. His chest felt swollen. Gray specks drizzled across his vision. Liquid splashed his shoulder, and something hit his shoe.

“Hey.” A young woman in a purple halter dress was beside him, holding a now empty cocktail glass. She was short and wore her dark hair pulled into a pair of stubby hornlike ponytails. A tiny pink diamond clung to her right nostril; scratches of light bent and smeared from the stone and across her face; he was tipping, about to fall.

Fingers lightly touched his elbow. “You’re forgetting to breathe,” said the woman.

Sam exhaled. He tightened his grip on the railing and focused on the floor. The rain on the surface of his vision faded away. There was a green olive on the toe of his right shoe, resting at the tip of a wave in the stitching.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry about”—he meant to say her drink, he was sorry about her drink, but he was looking at his shoe—“your olive,” Sam finished.

The young woman told him to forget it. “Really, are you sure you’re okay?”

He bent gingerly, picked the olive off his shoe, handed it to her—“Uh, thanks,” she said—he apologized again, and strode across the balcony, descended one set of stairs to the ground floor, another set to the basement, and finally made it to the men’s lavatory.

On the marble sink counter, Sam put down his camera. The violin
strains of the first song of the cocktail hour leaked under the door. One of the faucets was dripping. He leaned against the marble and breathed.
The ruthless furnace of this world.
The words were fluttering in his head, held there in some mental updraft. Sam repeated the line quietly, letting the words slip off his dry lips.

Poetry had never meant much to him. He didn’t read it, hadn’t known anyone since college who did. (At Russell, there had been three or four gloomy, bilious girls who huddled in the Shakespeare garden in their hairy black pea coats, ostentatiously taking turns reading aloud from
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
. He remembered how furiously they had smoked and the stink eye they’d shoot at anyone who came too close.) Nevertheless, the meaning of the line was clear enough: the world caught you, the world caught everyone in the end, and the world was a fire. Sam felt that he knew that as well as anyone.

The bathroom door creaked open. A man entered and went to a urinal. He finished pissing, he zipped his fly, and he left without washing his hands. In the mirror, Sam saw the man shoot him a suspicious glance before he pushed out the door, and that was when the wedding-ographer realized he was visibly shuddering all over, his hands opening and closing at his sides, his legs shivering inside his trousers, his teeth chattering, the clacking in his skull like someone stabbing a single typewriter key over and over again.

After a few minutes Sam was able to gather himself and return to the reception. Over the next hour, he worked the room, recording the guests as unobtrusively as possible while they mingled and chatted and helped themselves to the hors d’oeuvres and the open bar.

Toward the end of the cocktail hour, one attendee, a burly man in a glaring maroon suit, toasted the good fortune of the newlyweds by beginning to bellow “La Marseillaise.” Several others soon joined in. Someone helped the poet up onto a banquet table, where he danced, rigidly, and flapped his skinny elbows like a taunting child. Another part of the room began to sing “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” An old woman removed her flats and clapped the soles together in an aggressive way.
The bride, who was singing with the “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” people, lifted the hem of her gown and flashed some thigh at the people singing “La Marseillaise.” The groom climbed atop the table where the poet was dancing. He fed the poet a shrimp, and the poet pretended to be a seal. A waiter, a bona fide Frenchman, cast down his platter of stuffed mushrooms, tore off his tie, and threw his arm around the bearded man, joining in with “La Marseillaise.” A child had obtained an ice bucket; a miniature flapper of a girl wearing a sequined headband and pink shoes, she began to wander around, swinging the bucket, carefully seeding the floor with ice cubes.

Sam rushed around, weaving between tables and chairs, tracking singing faces, focusing on the banging soles, capturing the deliberate, tottering walk of the girl with the bucket as she moved through the tumult, cubes falling in her wake.

The poet started to choke on a shrimp. The groom performed the Heimlich maneuver, and the old man coughed up the bit of shellfish onto a woman’s perm. There was a shriek as someone’s aunt stepped on an ice cube and went down with a kick and a thump on the hardwood. The singing petered out, to scattered applause. Dinner was served.

Sam stowed his camera behind the bar for a fifteen-minute break and hunkered in a corner near the open bar to eat a dinner roll and sip a Maker’s Mark. His phone vibrated—a text message from Mina:

Recently, his relationship with his sister had become fraught. There had been an inappropriate boyfriend situation, Sam had intervened, and the last they’d spoken, about a week ago, she’d told him to die. Mina was the one person who, over the last few years, had maintained the power to sometimes make Sam do things he didn’t want to. In this area, though, her effort to make him feel guilty had failed utterly—she was seventeen, and he was right.

Sam typed back,

“Girlfriend?” The young woman in the purple dress with the ponytails and the nose ring was leaning over Sam, reading his cell screen.

“Kid sister.”

Mina’s reply popped on the screen:

“Oh, I like her,” said the woman.

“Yeah,” said Sam, “she’s great.” He wrote to Mina that he’d be home around eleven or so, set his phone aside.

“So I guess you must go to a lot of weddings,” she said.

“Yeah. Most every weekend.”

“Wow. How miserable are you?”

“I’ve considered climbing a clock tower a few times.” He reached up to shake her hand. “Sam.”

“Tess,” said the young woman. “We met when you were about to pass out.”

He took a bite of his roll. “I think I had a panic attack.”

“Seriously?” Tess’s fists were planted on her hips, and she spoke with a flat, slightly nasal affect. It was easy to imagine her demanding his lunch money, easy to imagine handing it over. Sam found this attractive.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not sure why.” He wasn’t about to get into it with a stranger. The litany of his life’s incinerations was, at the very least, second-date material.

“Well, you seem okay now. Maybe it was that grim fucking poem. ‘Congratulations on your marriage, and no pressure, but if you don’t enjoy it, you’re letting down the rest of the world, which, by the way, is a cesspool.’ Hold on a sec.”

She stepped away to the bar, and he heard her order a vodka tonic. When she returned, he was finished with his roll and put up his hand for a lift. She obliged and he stood. Tess had a small, cold hand, no rings.

Sam brushed a few crumbs from his trousers. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie—dull but all-purpose.

“Are you always so sensitive, Sam? For instance, do you cry often?”

“Would there be something wrong with that? If I cried often?”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t cry often. Outside of, you know, people I know dying, or extreme pain. I’ve always thought of myself as being fairly stoic. I didn’t cry when the Towers fell. I just sat there and watched and ate crackers all day. Froze me.”

“I didn’t cry, either, not that day, anyway. I cried when I saw Dan Rather crying on
Letterman.
That broke my heart.”

“I saw that. I don’t know if it made me cry, but it was definitely disconcerting. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because Dan Rather’s so old and earnest and wacky. You don’t want to see someone like that crying. It made him so real and normal.” She drank from her tumbler, sucked on an ice cube, let it clink back in the glass. “How about movies? Do you cry at movies?”

“Not a lot.
The 400 Blows. Bambi.
” Sam pondered for a few seconds—little else came to mind. “I suspect I teared up when they shot Sal in
Dog Day Afternoon
. And maybe when they killed Fredo in the second
Godfather
. Movies with John Cazale tend to get to me.”

“Cazale . . . He was in
The Deerhunter,
too, wasn’t he? Which brother was Fredo in
The Godfather
?”

Though he appeared in only five films, John Cazale had been the finest character actor of the seventies. His hollowed, haunted face induced all his portrayals with a note of suffering. Each of his five films was nominated for Best Picture.

“Fredo was the pitiful one,” said Sam.

Tess snapped her fingers. “Cazale! Now I can see him. Love that guy. Oh, but what about
E.T.
? Everyone cried at
E.T.
”

Sam quickly shook his head. “Nah,” he lied, and Tess scowled. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “It’s true,” he lied again, casually, instinctively.

It so happened that Sam had recently rewatched the story of the boy Elliott and his magical friend from outer space—sort of rewatched it, anyway. The Brooklyn Academy of Music had run a print of the film for a week a few months earlier. Sam had attended a show with Wesley. The reason Sam had only sort of rewatched the movie was because the screening
that he went to was at midnight, which was because Wesley was a sloth, incapable of rising earlier than one or two in the afternoon.

(After waking, Wesley needed to tend to the Internet for several hours, the effect of which was that he was not often prepared to emerge from the apartment before ten
P.M.
Not for nothing was “Rushing” #1 on his list of “Seventy-four Things That Cause Unnecessary Fatigue.” “Crowded environments,” #39 on the list, also applied in this case, since the film’s run was so short and so popular, and it was even more important because Wesley planned to reassess the film as Swag Hag—someone from BAM had given him free passes—and he claimed that overlarge groups sapped his “critical acumen.” Sam, for his part, thought that the Swag Hag’s critical acumen was in good shape, considering his recent denunciation of the Ulster County Microbrewery’s Rip Van Winkle white ale:
A ratsbane concocted of rubbing alcohol, pus milk squeezed from the blackened udders of dying cows, and a zest of sorrow scraped from the lice-ridden scalps of unloved children. NOT EVEN FOR FREE
.

E.T.,
meanwhile, proved more to the Hag’s taste:
Maybe intergalactic friendship doesn’t mean anything to you, you cynical prick, but it still means something to me! If you don’t want to be friends with a wonderful little space guy, if you don’t dream of flying above the treetops and across the moon on your bicycle with your crazy buddies, what do you dream of? To paraphrase E.T., “I’ll be right here—just waiting to hear what the hell it is that
you
think is more awesome than that.” I make no apologies. YEAH, I’LL TAKE IT.
)

Due to the late hour, Sam had fallen asleep right after the opening credits, coming around only toward the end, at the part where the pasty-skinned E.T. rises, not unlike Our Savior, from the dead. It was true, the scene made him cry when he was younger. The noxious clouds of stuff it brought up, like disturbed silt—thoughts about Allie and Booth, memories about being a kid, his adult awareness of how much he hadn’t seen that was right in front of him—made him nauseated. Sam had shut his eyes and pretended to sleep until the movie was finished.

He didn’t want to get into that with Tess or anyone else.

“You must be a robot then. Everyone cries during that movie. Even Republicans,” said Tess.

Sam immediately selected the off-ramp away from
E.T
. “Maybe I’m a Republican.”

In fact, the few strong political convictions Sam did subscribe to related to sexuality—he was friends with a number of gay people and felt that birth control was the bedrock of civilization—and these were sufficient to make him a solid Democrat. Not that he didn’t tend leftward in other ways: he didn’t go to church, have any children, or invest; none of his friends worked in heavy industry, coal mining, oil drilling, livestock farming, agricultural farming, or served in the armed forces; the extinction of animals bothered him if he thought about it, though he rarely did; the Confederate flag, he’d gladly use to wipe his ass; various brown people, black people, Asian people, and people with extremely difficult-to-pronounce names had inhabited neighboring apartments during the time Sam had lived in New York City, and never once had any of his neighbors possessed worse manners than Wesley. By the opposite token, his only faintly right-leaning instinct was an abiding suspicion of adults who rode skateboards. But it was the sex issues that he most actively cared about, although “actively” might have been putting it a bit too strongly.

Tess told him not to joke about that bullshit. “This is a bad time. These Tea Bagger people freak me out. I’m sick of hearing that, because I don’t believe in God, and I don’t want gay people thrown in dungeons, I’m out of the mainstream. I mean, I’m as eager as anybody to stab a terrorist in the eye. I eat hamburgers. I’m as American as anyone.”