My Best Man (19 page)

I know what he’s trying to say. This is really something that not only have I brought home a girl, but one who looks like that.

“I’m totally in love with her, Brad. Can you believe it?”

He pauses. Decides to tell the truth. “Not really.”

We look at each other, start laughing, splashing our pee onto the sides of the urinals. “I know, I know,” I tell him. “Everyone thought I’d end up with my high school drama teacher, Mr. Sweeney.”

“Something like that,” Brad says. “This is a better choice, man. Why’d you do it?”

“She makes me laugh,” I say. I can tell he still doubts me.

“And she gives good head.” Now he doesn’t.

“She can even bake a pie,” he adds.

Man, this is so sexist. I can’t believe I’m standing at a urinal, taking a piss, talking about how my fiancee can give head and bake a pie. My lesbian friend from college, Debbie, would punch me in the mouth if she heard me talk like this. It’s such a guy thing-, to talk about chicks while you shake the pee off the head of your dick,

then skip the hand washing and head out. I don’t even check my hair in the mirror.

I can’t believe I just peed like a straight guy.

Everyone is feasting on their prime rib or pork loin or duck or whatever they ordered. The black waiters, in their white waiter’s jackets, keep the water glasses and the wineglasses filled. A trio plays in the background. And Winston compliments my grandmother for the third time this evening only this time he adds a little fire. “Grammie, that’s such a lovely silk blouse. Alacrity has been eyeing it all night. You’ll have to leave it to her in your will.” My mother slams her knife on her plate.

Grammie smiles and tells Winston, “Maybe I will.”

Amity jumps right in. “I do love silk, Mrs. Ford,” she says to my grandmother, “but I’m not interested in taking the clothes off anybody’s back unless it’s coming directly from the silkworm itself!”

Everybody laughs, including Winston with a forced sotto prof undo

“Actually, silkworms aren’t worms at all,” Amity explains, buoyantly still afloat after Winston’s shot across the bow. “They’re caterpillars. We just refer to them as silkworms.”

“I never knew that,” my grandmother says. “And I’ve been all the way to Japan to buy a kimono robe.” “I remember that robe,” Aunt Shirley chimes in. ‘

blue with yellow swans on a river. Pagodas in the background.”

“How lovely,” Amity says. “Did you know it takes about thousand silkworms to make a kimono?”

Everyone is charmed. They’re all looking to Amity now, enjoying her trivia. Winston is rolling his eyes and cutting his meat. “Go on, Calamity. Tell us more,” he snivels.

“They’re little eating machines, y’all. They have to their body weight ten thousand times during their lives and only live about twenty-eight days!”

“So do some girlfriends,” Winston digs.

“Like Patty?” I ask, poking him back.

My mother steers the conversation back to Amity. “What do silkworms eat?”

“Ham hocks and grits?” Winston spouts with a bad Southern accent.

“They just love mulberry leaves,” Amity chirps, ignoring Winston

“Don’t we all,” Winston chirps back.

“A little known fact is that they’re very fragile,” Amity states, no longer ignoring Winston but looking pointedly at him. “Anything can upset a freshly hatched worm: the bark of a dog, the crow of a cock, a foul smell.” She’s labeling Winston as she goes.

“What about a female dog?” Winston asks, striking right back.

“Oh, I’m sure she could upset a worm,” Amity replies, “if she put her mind to it.”

Aunt Shirley takes an off ramp from the Competition Highway. “What about a horrible singer?”

Everyone laughs as the small trio with a female vocalist labors on the far side of the room. Aunt Shirley, with her wickedly caustic wit, nearly collapses with laughter as the off-key vocalist hits a dreadfully wrong note while butchering “Fly Me to the Moon.” Her slack tempo and dull ear betray an obvious overdose of Valium.

“She’s got to be deaf,” my aunt wheezes with laughter. “She ought to just sign the words.”

“Mother,” Ellie, her oldest daughter, scolds. Ellie is home for summer break from law school at Tulane.

“For God’s sake, it sounds like she’s singing “Drive Me to the Moon,” ” Aunt Shirley counters.

Mary, her other daughter, who was studying English literature at Sarah Lawrence, but scandalously dropped out to open her own bookstore in Boston, comes to her mother’s defense. “She is pretty awful.”

“Wait till she scats,” my aunt chokes, practically falling into her plate. “Let’s write a request on a napkin and make her sing really fast.”

We’re all laughing now. Thinking of fast songs.

” “Fascinating Rhythm,” ” I suggest.

” “Anything Goes,” “Amity says, scoring a winning laugh from the gallery.

“The Theme from HR Puffinstuff.t” Mary adds.

I’ll bet no one’s ever requested that before,” my uncle Jack contends.

“Why not request something really hard to sing like an aria from an opera?” Winston suggests, ever the wicked one.

“Good idea,” Aunt Shirley says, laughing harder still, tears pooling in her eyes.

Donald doesn’t really understand our family’s humor, and he tries to defend the poor gal. “I don’t think she’s that bad. Why not let her do what she’s prepared?”

Boos and hisses ensue, and everyone strikes him down. My mother comes to his defense. She never questions him, but we know she secretly enjoys the game because she’s secretly still one of us.

Winston, to impress Amity, snaps his fingers and condescendingly summons a black waiter. We all cringe at his manner, but we know he always addresses the help in this way, and we’re used to it. He requests a cocktail napkin and a pen.

“What’s a good aria?” he asks.

“The one from Madame Butterfly,” Aunt Shirley suggests.

“And make her sing it in G sharp.”

“What does it sound like?” Brad asks.

Silence. Then a couple feeble attempts to hum it.

“We all know what it sounds like,” Winston dismisses.

“I’ll sing a little,” Amity offers, smiling wickedly at Winston.

My mother is overly impressed. “You will?”

“Sing us a little!” Donald cries.

“Yes,” Uncle Jack agrees.

“But sing it quietly, so she can’t hear you,” Aunt Shirley cautions, referring to the legit singer.

Winston looks pissed off. Amity has stolen his thunder.

She sings twenty seconds of the aria. She’s soft and has no vibrato, but she sings it evenly and on-key.

Everyone applauds. Everyone but Winston.

After dinner, Winston quickly volunteers to take my grandmother home I assume to accomplish two things: remove himself from “Amity Night” and ingratiate himself further with Grandmother in order to receive more in her will. The rest of us stay behind and make our way to the piano bar. My family has always been too stuffy to indulge themselves with drunken, off-key singing while sipping cordials, as a few select families do after dinner. But having Amity among us has made the evening a very special occasion, and everyone seems years younger and somehow more childlike around her.

After a few songs like “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” which Brad changed to “I Left My Harp In Sam’s Clam Disco,” and “Guantanamera,” which everyone modified to “One Ton Tomato,” Amity leads everyone in her favorite little song the “Bee I Go, Bee I Go, Bee I Bicky Go, Bee I Go, Bicky By Go Boo.” Or something like that. It’s from a scene in a Three Stooges movie. We’re all drunk, and we butcher it into further nonsense, which only makes it more fun. And by this time Amity has charmed everyone: my family, the waiters, the busboys, the pianist at the bar. My mother is sailing with happiness, waving her wineglass in the air and singing so unbelievably off-key, as she does in Episcopal church, that I fear our glasses may shatter at any moment.

And in the middle of all this boozy dare I say gay frivolity

I suddenly become a little sad. Because I realize how much my mother wants me to be straight. And even though she loves me dearly, and there’s never been such levity in her heart as there is

this evening, here, with Amity, I find it all to be a little false. And I realize that it wouldn’t even matter if my mother did know that in the short time I’ve known Amity, she’s fucked Bart, Troy, Hunt, Miguel, Wade, and me. As long as Amity is willing to provide legitimacy to her son’s life, she’s in the fold.

And poor Winston. He’s been driving me to this moment since the day at the baseball park. He can’t stand my attempt to be legitimate, to be gay, to be myself. He’s resented that I’ve refused to walk the same straight line that he does, making it impossible for all of us to have a comfortable prosperous life. But now that I’m finally doing it he’s trying to derail me. Forget it. I’m marrying Amity. And getting my inheritance. For all the right reasons.

Amity’s five-year-anniversary “Award Ceremony” with the air line is tonight. It’s only June, but it’s the hottest day of the year so far. The stagnant air is dripping with humidity, causing leaves on the trees that line our street to hang heavy and cast shadows of resignation on the baking pavement. Like Wichita, Dallas has no oceans or mountains to temper its weather, or even give its air a salt or pine scent. The heated Texas earth forces the air to rise up high into the atmosphere, where it cools and forms huge cumulonimbus structures that serve as a patchwork blanket fiddled with holes. The sun blazes through the voids in vertical streams that bear down on us as if we’re ants under a magnifying glass.

We have both of the wall-unit air conditioners blasting in the house (we bought a second one, after cashing the enormous check my mother wrote me the day we left Wichita), so we’re somewhat relieved from the heat as we get ready for the big hoedown. The party is being held in a ballroom of some downtown hotel and requires formal attire. These events are renowned at the airline. It’s a chance for all the employees to put on their TV star clothes and go up on stage and accept awards for things like “Five Years of Perfect Attendance” (you have no life) and “Most Inspirational

Employee” (misguided zealot), but most importantly, stand around and get drunk while gossiping about whoever is out of earshot. It’s that magic night when the stewardesses get their chance to meet the unknowing wives of the pilots they’ve fucked on their layovers. Then all the employees sit at tables of eight and eat gristly prime rib while the president of the airline, Mr. Gherkin, a highly religious man who doesn’t drink or smoke (and has a legendarily tiny penis), tells them he wouldn’t be able to live without his devoted workers. Amity showed me a recap of last year’s ceremony in an old issue of the employee paper. It was a gushy article with lots of splashy pictures that culminated in the coverage and photo of the “Employee of the Year,” a dead ticket agent who had died in a single-car accident and was lauded for her “irrepressible good humor, kindness, and honesty.” Amity told me the inside story was that there were two sets of tire tracks on that fated highway; the ticket agent was a prissy bitch with breast implants who, after she’d threatened to go to his wife, was run off, the road by the executive VP she’d been having an affair with.

I sit on the edge of the tub and watch while Amity patiently separates her hair into clumps and puts those clumps into rollers, winding them up, one by one. She’s dropped the formality of boxer shorts and camisole and stands naked, her freshly showered ass to my face.

“Hey, baby, did you know that Eva Catrell is going to be there tonight with her shit-kicker boyfriend?”

My first trip at the airline I flew with Eva Catrell, who tried to get me to fuck her while we were on a layover in Amarillo. I had dinner with her, and she suggested we go back to her room, where she gave me a Valium and poured me a drink, and we lay down on her bed. She told me she always brought her vibrator on her layovers, but loved when she didn’t have to use it. Get it? This gal was rough around the edges, tougher than most of the guys I’d slept with. “Rode hard and put up wet,” as Amity would say. When I

realized she wasn’t offering me her vibrator as a loan, I got off the bed and headed for the door, but before I got out of the room, she stuck her tongue down my throat. The next day, she drank Bloody Marys on the last flight and insisted on taking me home with her, since it was too late to commute to Kansas. I begged off and let her drop me at what I claimed was a friend’s apartment house where I called a cab to take me to a hotel.

“Oh great,” I say.

“Don’t worry,” Amity answers, finishing up on her hair. “I’m sure she didn’t tell her boyfriend that she French-kissed you, Harry!”

“I bet her pussy tastes like sourdough biscuits and campfire logs.”

Amity screams with laughter. “Ooh, baby, you gotta get some of that!”

“No, I don’t,” I say. “I’m just getting to know little Virginia here.”

Amity turns around, naked, her hair in rollers, barely any makeup on, and somehow looks like the most elegant woman on Earth. “And little Virginia is quite pleased to know you,” she answers with gracious esteem.

We’re heading down Mockingbird, in my dented but paid-off BMW (another benefit from Mom’s generously written check), on our way to Central Expressway, and I ask Amity, “Did you read that the House of Representatives passed legislation that cuts federal money to states who have drinking ages below twenty-one?” Texas’s legal drinking age is nineteen. “So they say Texas is going to probably raise the drinking age.”

“That’s not fair!” Amity whines, toking on a joint. She’s wearing a dark maroon floor-length velvet dress that has a slit up the side. “How are young drivers going to cope with Suicide Express?” “They could drink lots of 3.2 beer.”

“That’s not good enough, Harry. You need a shot of whiskey to get on this bad boy.”

“Amity, that’s a great idea! We should set up a series of HA Roadside Whiskey Stands at every on ramp. Sell little shots of Jack Daniel’s to people about to enter the expressway.”