CHAPTER SIX #2
With all the bridesmaids absent, Scott’s view of Chip was now unobstructed. Despite the fact that he’d been icing his face for over an hour, blood had pooled underneath his eyes to create two thumb-sized purple bruises. He was also visibly drunk.
Nora shot a pissed-off look at Carver, but said, “It’s not a very debilitating injury, Preston.”
“My face hurts, Mommy.”
“No, put the bridesmaids to work, it’s what they’re for,” Sana said. “Ladies-in-waiting. I’ve been a bridesmaid five times, I want my pound of flesh now.”
Letty laughed at this, but Maryam looked askance at her daughter. “This generation!” she said to Carver and Letty’s parents.
“I know, right?” Josie said. “‘Eff you, pay me,’ huh?”
She said this in an undertone, but somehow the kids’ table overheard her, and two or more of them began chanting: “Eff you, pay me, eff you, pay me!”
“Whoops,” Josie said, making a face.
Nora went over to the patio dimmer switch and brought it up, increasing the glow of the sconces that surrounded them and the little walkway lanterns that illuminated the pool and the paths through the backyard.
A memory suddenly came to Scott: Carver inviting him over the summer before their junior year and telling him to bring a few girls.
His parents were out of town visiting Chip, he said, and he wanted to try skinny-dipping.
Scott had brought the girls — three of them — and kissed one while bobbing with her in the water, but what really stuck with him was the sight of Carver fully nude and lounging on a chaise.
Scott, stupid drunk on wine coolers, let his eyes linger.
In that moment he’d realized he must like some boys the same way he liked girls.
He’d been experiencing surges of attraction to Carver which he kept sublimating with horseplay or wrestling, and which he’d dismissed as accidental friendly fire in the fog of puberty.
But there Carver lay bathed in lamplight with his junk out, his armpits hairy, lithe and pretty but decisively male, and Scott’s attraction to him only worsened.
And then Carver had met his eyes, and Scott looked back at him in terror but forced himself to produce an easy smile.
An eternity passed before Carver smiled back. It was more of a smirk.
“Carver,” Maryam said out of nowhere, making a tingle of alarm shoot up Scott’s spine. “You’re in private equity, aren’t you?”
Carver looked up at her. “Yeah,” he said, then cleared his throat. “My wife and I both are.”
“Could you explain it to me?” Maryam said. “Every time I think I have a handle on it, I read another article and then I realize I don’t understand.” She looked around. “Do you all relate? Does anyone understand what private equity is?”
There were dull murmurings to the negative. The bridesmaids began coming back out of the house with plates. Scott swatted a mosquito that landed on his bare forearm.
“They… buy companies?” Conway said, glancing at Carver.
“Yeah,” Carver said, with all the energy of a dead person. “We buy companies with a mix of debt and equity, then we try to make them more profitable.”
He looked around. Everyone looked back at him blankly, except for one of Sana’s bridesmaids, who said, “It’s actually not that complicated,” as she walked by.
“It’s actually not that complicated?” Sana repeated in a mocking tone.
The bridesmaid, who Scott guessed was Sana’s oft-mentioned best friend Ava, mocked her back before leaning over to hug her. “Bitch.”
“Little miss MBA,” Sana said, squeezing her.
Maryam flapped her hand at them and said to Carver, “But what I don’t understand is the debt aspect.”
Carver began explaining this to her while the bridesmaids finished serving the food.
Scott spent three seconds paying attention before his mind began to wander.
It was a beautiful spring night in the lower Hudson Valley, and a full complement of crickets was singing in the bushes.
He ate some of his food, and found that it was actually very good.
Scott’s phone buzzed in his pocket occasionally with texts from his bandmates, or friends who didn’t know he was out of town this weekend.
He’d been terrible about answering since he arrived; 143 unread texts had piled up, though a lot of this was from group chats.
He just didn’t really feel like looking at or dealing with anything from the people who made up his normal life.
He felt like he’d traveled back in time and shouldn’t be reachable there.
He tuned back in when he heard Maryam say, “So what do you enjoy most about it?”
Scott glanced at Carver, who took a moment to respond, then another moment, and another. Now everyone was looking at him, while he looked at the table. The kids filled the silence by starting back up with “Eff you, pay me! Eff you, pay me!” until Nora shushed them.
“Uh,” Carver finally said.
“It can be very exciting,” Lillian answered for him. “Right now, it’s been a little stressful for us with the deals we have underway, but it’ll work out. It always works out.”
“Didn’t you say a minute ago that sometimes it doesn’t?” Scott said to her in an undertone, intentionally being a little bit of an asshole.
Lillian turned to him with a wide smile and a dangerous gleam in her eye. “What are you, a court reporter?”
Carver sagged back in his chair. Scott ate some of his salmon and glanced up the table at Letty, who comically widened and then lowered her eyes as if to say, I know.
“Carver’s very young for a managing director,” Doug said. “One of the youngest at his firm.”
Carver looked up at his father, nodded, then got to his feet. “Excuse me, I’m gonna, uh…” He glanced at his mother. “What’s your preferred euphemism, again?”
Nora swallowed a sip of wine and said, “Little boys’ room is fine.”
Carver made a face and said “I’m gonna go piss,” before exiting. There were scattered giggles and a loud laugh from Chip.
“I think Scott has one of the more interesting careers at the table,” Nora declared, suddenly imperious in the wake of this disobedience.
Everyone looked at Scott, who demurred, “No, no, not really… Lillian, doesn’t that also make you one of the youngest managing directors?”
“Ooh, Scott, you feminist,” Lillian purred. “No, I’m not quite as impressive, I’m thirty-eight.”
Several people looked at her in surprise. She pantomimed delivering an injection into her face.
“Do you think you two will have kids at some point?” Maryam said.
“Mom,” Sana said, shutting her eyes. “Please.”
Doug and Nora looked conspicuously away from Lillian, suddenly the picture of nonchalance.
“No, it’s fine,” Lillian said, leaning back in her chair and flapping her hand. “We’re considering it soon, I’ve been looking at surrogates. Maybe Q4, or Q1 next year, we pull the trigger.”
“Surrogates?” Nora said.
“Correct. I outsource my manufacturing.”
“Oh, but it’s really a wonderful experience, honestly.”
“I’m sure,” Lillian said with a grin. “I’ll be generous and give it to someone else.”
Doug was now looking at the table in the same disassociated way that Carver had been earlier. Scott looked at Letty again, and she gave him another significant look and mouthed, We need to debrief. Scott nodded.
“So is your dad alive, or?” Lillian said to Sana.
Sana, who was eating her salmon, started coughing. “Yes,” she choked out.
“We had a contentious divorce,” Maryam said, her mouth a flat line. “He lives in London now. The girls plan to visit him when they go on their honeymoon.”
“You know what…” Doug said, getting to his feet and starting to collect up half-full bottles of wine.
They all waited for the rest of the sentence, but it didn’t come. “Yeah, Dad?” Conway said, sounding amused.
“Yeah,” Doug said under his breath, heading for the house with four bottles in his hands.
When the door shut behind him, Conway quietly said, “Poor Dad… runs away from his hometown full of poor assholes who only drink for fun and ends up somewhere full of rich assholes who only drink for fun.”
“Connie,” Nora said in gentle reprimand.
“To Dad and his terrible luck,” Chip said, raising his wine glass. Nora shot him an unpleasant look.
“Or,” Scott said, “to the brides?”
Everyone made noises of approval and lifted their glasses. As they were toasting, Lillian whispered in Scott’s ear, “I just figured you out.”
“Yeah?” Scott said, feeling a tingle of unpleasant curiosity.
“You like to be the most innocent person in the room.” She squeezed his arm. “I get it, but you know, it’s probably cost you a fair amount of money in your life.”
Scott snapped his head around, his pulse quickening. Lillian looked at him with no trace of hostility in her face.
“Okay, fuck you then,” he whispered back.
She smirked at him and made kitty claws with her fingers. Scott looked away from her, unsettled, and absent-mindedly cracked a few of the knuckles on his right hand.
The rehearsal dinner portion of the evening dragged on into dessert, then after-dinner scotch in the den — where the bookshelves built into the wood-paneled walls were full of sports trophies alongside legal texts that weren’t important enough to be displayed upstairs in the office, and the walls themselves held less art than Scott would have preferred.
He had vague but fond memories of hanging out with Carver in here, pretending to watch a movie while fooling around under a blanket and springing apart when they heard the front door open down the hall.
The golden retriever wandered around sniffing everyone, looking for neck scritches.
Around nine, Letty and Sana started making noises about needing to be up early the following day, and the party began breaking up.
The bridesmaids went to help Nora and Doug clean, Chip and his wife took their sleeping children upstairs, and Scott made eye contact with Letty before slipping back out to the patio.
He was rolling a joint under the table when Letty and Sana came out.