CHAPTER SIX #3
“Ooh, is that what I think it is?” Sana said, lifting onto her tiptoes to try to peer over the table into his lap. She and Letty were both only about 5’3.
“It is, but I keep fucking it up,” Scott said, squinting at the paper he was twiddling.
Letty went to the light switch and turned the sconces up a little. “Scotty, they make cones for this now.”
“I like to do it old-school.”
“But consider the fact that we’re getting old and losing our eyesight.”
“I won’t consider that,” Scott muttered. “My eyesight is perfect. Hold on, almost got it.”
Sana sat down beside him, and Letty sat down beside her. They made eye contact and started to giggle like they had a secret; Scott glanced up at them as he finished rolling the joint and seared it.
“Nothing,” Letty said. “We’re just excited.”
“About tomorrow? Hell yeah.”
“It’s funny how it doesn’t feel like we’re already married,” Sana said. “Maybe since we’ve been planning this for so long.”
“Yeah, it’s weird, we eloped ‘cause we wanted to do a part of it that was just us,” Letty said. “But then keeping that a secret from most people is just making it feel like it’s not even true.”
“But I love our elopement photos,” Sana said. “And we couldn’t have gotten married at the sunken forest any other way. We weren’t going to stuff a hundred people on a ferry.”
Scott handed Sana the joint and lighter, and she started it, then exhaled smoke in Letty’s face. Letty stuck her tongue out like a dog and put up two fingers to accept the joint’s passage. Scott pushed a ramekin into the center of the table so they could all ash into it.
“Carver is joining us, by the way,” Letty said, blowing out her own smoke. “Or he said he was going to.”
Scott wanted to not care so pretended he didn’t, nodding nonchalantly.
“When I left he was talking to his wife about work stuff.”
“Okay,” Sana said, putting both hands up and letting out a nervous giggle it seemed like she’d been holding in. “I have a lot to say.”
“God, I know.” Letty leaned across the table to pass the joint to Scott. “I have a lot to say and yet I also have no idea what to say.”
“Carver reminds me of — okay, this might be too fucked up, since he’s your cousin,” Sana said to Letty.
Letty laid a hand on her knee. “Speak your truth, sweetheart.”
Scott exhaled smoke and passed the dwindling joint to Sana, who hit it before glancing behind them at the patio door and saying in a lowered voice, “He reminds me of — so, Scott, I went to T.J., which is this crazy competitive magnet school —”
Scott and Letty both automatically responded to this with polite applause.
“Shut up,” Sana said, laughing and ashing the joint with a lazily elegant finger tap. “I’m only saying that to get across, like, it’s a high-pressure environment. And Carver reminds me of the kids there who we used to joke were suicide risks.”
“Woof,” Letty said.
“To be clear, none of those kids ever killed themselves,” Sana added. “It was the ones you didn’t expect who did. But they did have nervous breakdowns sometimes.”
“I could see Carver having a nervous breakdown,” Letty said quietly, hitting the joint. “I think he’s been having a nervous breakdown.”
“Since when?” Scott said.
She shrugged. “Since he was born.”
“What’s the issue?” Sana said.
“His parents!” Letty exclaimed, hitting the joint again, then glancing back at the door with a paranoid expression.
“Letty, I’ll warn you guys if anyone’s on their way out,” Scott said, laughing. “I have a visual.”
“Thank you. It’s his parents. Like, Chip and Connie, God bless them, they’re kind of hard-headed.
They need someone kicking them in the ass.
Carver kicks his own ass, that’s just who he is, but his parents are even harder on him than the other two.
It’s like because he tried harder, they felt like they could push him more, or something?
I think it’s just slowly paralyzed him. I mean, he’s different, right?
” She nodded to Scott. “When’s the last time you saw him? ”
Scott cleared his throat, then shrugged. “I, uh — in person? I saw him, like, across the room at our fifteen-year high school reunion. And he texted me after Bull Fight charted. But until this weekend, I hadn’t spoken to him since I left for California.”
“Eighteen years,” Letty said to Sana, who made her mouth an O and said, “Whoa. After being high school sweethearts?”
“I wouldn’t — I don’t know, man,” Scott protested, as spiky adrenaline disturbed the nice crossfaded state he’d been enjoying. “I don’t know if that’s how he — if that’s the phrase I’d use.”
“Well, regardless, that’s a long time to go,” Sana said. “I mean, people change a lot in their twenties. And Ava was just telling me that private equity is a really ruthless business, you have to tear companies apart and trample your colleagues. Maybe his job has just sucked something out of him.”
Scott somehow hadn’t fully considered this possibility, and was dismayed to.
“But it’s like he has changed and he hasn’t,” Letty said.
“I can tell he’s still the guy I remember from when we were kids, but it’s like his portrait in the attic is disintegrating.
He should have had my parents. I mean, my mom has always doted on him.
And they’re cooler about gay people. I was honestly shocked when his parents offered to help pay for our wedding, but I think they have less of a problem with lesbians, and Aunt Nora thinks my parents are bad with money. ” She paused. “‘Cause they are.”
“So, wait, is he gay gay?” Sana said, glancing between the two of them. “What about the wife?”
Scott blew out air, shrugging.
“The wife is three joints worth of discussion unto herself,” Letty said, laughing. “The uber-WASP. Actually, I think her people are Swedish or something. Hallsten?”
“Not Hallsten-Novack?” Sana said.
“No siree.”
“She left me a little cold,” Scott said.
“Well, yeah, and I think that’s because you actually like women,” Letty said. “Because same. That’s the kind of woman a gay man likes. I mean, she’s a riot, but sexually? You just picture the whip in her hand.”
Scott couldn’t help laughing at this. “Yeah, actually. Exactly.”
“Ice queens have their appeal,” Sana said in a faraway voice.
“Careful,” Letty said with a smile.
“I just think you don’t get it ‘cause you’re a top.”
“Hon,” Letty said, laughing. “In front of Scott?”
Scott put his hands up in innocence.
“Sorry,” Sana said, laughing too. “I haven’t been high in so long.”
“Look, I’m just saying, Carver can’t even bring her to funerals anymore because she doesn’t act right,” Letty said.
“She can’t be somber. Like, can you imagine being married to that person?
Go home to each other at night, take care of each other when you’re sick married?
I can’t. Something’s off if that’s who he chose. ”
Scott nodded. He saw what she saw, though he wished he could just ignore it.
Letty hit the joint one last time and blew out smoke, raising her eyebrows at Scott. “But, I defer to you on Carver’s sexuality. And this is cashed, by the way.”
“It’s cashed ‘cause you’ve been sitting on it,” Scott said, digging his Ziploc bag of weed and rolling papers back out of his pocket.
“It’s literally the night before my wedding?”
“I’m rolling as fast as I can, sir.”
“Hurry up,” Letty said, making a gun with her thumb and forefinger and pointing it at him. “Go, go, go.”
Scott licked the paper to wet it. Sana jokingly pounded the table, and Letty turned her finger gun sideways.
“There’s no need for violence,” he said.
“There is, ‘cause you dodged the question,” Letty said.
“There was a question?”
“How high are you? Carver’s sexuality.”
Scott looked down at the joint as he rolled it.
He instinctively knew the answer — that Carver wasn’t actually attracted to women — but felt queasily traitorous about saying so.
He’d brought this exact point up when they argued about California, and he knew he’d hurt Carver’s feelings with it.
He worried that in his selfish teenage heart, he had meant to.
He’d known how likely it was that Carver would turn him down.
He couldn’t offer Carver a life that would make his parents proud; in fact he could only offer a life that would make Carver’s parents tear their hair out.
He knew Carver was determined to make himself a success at all costs and wanted to make the best start possible, to come sprinting off the blocks.
There wasn’t room for Scott in that picture.
Scott only ever had one thing going for him: he was the object of Carver’s affections, and even if Carver could bring himself to toss him aside, no woman could take his place.
And only a woman would do in the eyes of Doug and Nora and most everyone else.
But it was fucked up of Scott to try to levy this against him, or more accurately, to rub it in.
Carver had responded with a frightening canine smile.
“You fucking dickhead,” he’d said, sounding wounded yet thrilled that Scott had ceded the moral high ground.
Scott, who could be happy with a woman if he chose to, had spoken homophobically.
Scott grew up with hippie parents and had traveled among committed liberals and leftists for most of his adult life, so for him this was verboten — except for those years around the millennium when teenage boys were so steeped in homophobia that to resist was to be immediately marked as gay.
It was within that hateful atmosphere that he lashed out at Carver, and within the pain of rejection that he wondered who the fuck Carver thought he was fooling.