CHAPTER TEN #3
Chip let him go, but it was too late, the waiter was gone. “You need to slow down,” he said to Carver in a pointed undertone. “It’s not even five o’clock yet.”
“Please, you get plastered at every wedding you go to, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Not anymore,” Chip said through his teeth, lifting the glass in his other hand. “This is water.”
“Since when?”
“Since my wife sat me down and told me if I didn’t get my shit together, she would be more than happy to ruin my life.”
“Damn right,” Maggie said drily.
Carver glanced between them in surprise. “When was this?”
“Last year,” Chip said, sipping his water.
“Okay, so you can’t get drunk at weddings anymore, what does that have to do with me?”
Conway leaned over and broke in: “Carv, why don’t you have a canape instead? The ones with salmon are really good.”
Carver’s claustrophobia was returning. He was haunted by the sound of Scott somewhere behind him playing an instrumental version of I Got You Babe while he looked out at his wife, a person to whom this song was so unrelatable as to be rendered incomprehensible.
“My tolerance is stronger than you guys think,” he said. As soon as this was out he realized it was the wrong thing to say, and Chip gave him one of those annoying ‘I’m-convinced-you-have-a-problem-because-I-have-a-problem’ looks. “Okay, I don’t need to be handled,” he spluttered.
“We’re not handling you,” Conway said with an amused eyeroll. A waiter came by with canapes, and she halted him with a Nora-like hand gesture so she could pile several onto a napkin and offer them to Carver.
Carver accepted the napkin and put one in his mouth. He wasn’t hungry at all, and chewing was laborious, but it did taste good.
Conway correctly read his face and said, “Right?”
He swallowed. “You are handling me.”
“Stop fucking needing to be handled, then,” Chip muttered. “Jesus.”
“Weddings can be stressful,” Conway said. “For a… multitude of reasons.”
Carver wondered what she was implying. She worked for a marketing firm in White Plains, and like their parents she was a whiz with weaselly language.
“Still not a good enough reason to make someone else’s wedding about you,” Chip said.
“I’m not making anything about me,” Carver snapped. “And I’m not stressed, why would I be?”
Chip peered over his sunglasses to give him a look of disbelief, then leaned behind him and mouthed something to Conway. Carver tried to karate chop him in the nuts, but he dodged this.
“It’s getting a little warm out here,” Maggie said, taking off her gauzy royal blue shawl and laying it across her freckled forearm. Her impressive breasts were on grand display in the gown she was wearing. “What time is it, hon?”
“Time to get a watch,” Chip said, and she elbowed him. “It’s like, 4:40.”
“Ugh,” Maggie said.
Lillian came over to them, her hair bouncing. Chip greeted her warmly, and Carver had the strong urge to tell him that Lillian thought he was a yokel and laughed when he got hit in the face.
She sidled up next to Carver and squeezed his bicep. “Marcus just texted me, you’re going to have to hop on a quick call in a bit.”
“When’s a bit?” Carver said.
“He said in the next two hours, but they opened a bottle of scotch, so probably longer.”
He nodded and tried to force himself to care, but his mind slid right back off the issue like it was coated in Teflon. “Right. Okay.”
Lillian squeezed his bicep again. “Flex?” Carver flexed. “Nice.”
“You never ask me to flex anymore,” Chip said to Maggie.
She cut her eyes at him, looking amused. “You never ask me.”
“Do it,” Chip said. She did, and he caressed her bicep. “Damn, that’s pretty good, the Giants could use you. Your lacrosse muscles are back.”
“It’s those heavy-ass children.”
“Where are your kids?” Lillian said.
“Uh, they’re… there’s a, like…” Chip looked at Maggie, who supplied, “Wedding nanny. Kid wrangler upstairs.”
Lillian finished her French 75 and said to Carver, “The drinks are fucking weak, aren’t they?”
Carver threw his hands up and turned to each of his siblings in vindication.
“Okay, but five of them?” Conway said.
“I once saw Chip drink nineteen beers in two hours,” Carver said.
“I had a drinking problem,” Chip said, slowly and with emphasis like he was stupid.
“Weren’t you drinking last night?” Lillian said.
“Yeah, I had a problem, I’m not a fucking alcoholic.”
“Me neither,” Carver said. “So there you go.”
Chip shot him a look. “Maybe we’ll let you drink more if you eat some food.”
“I literally just did.”
“Do it more, bitch.”
Carver karate chopped at his nuts again.
This time, Chip reacted too slowly and got hit.
He retaliated by punching Carver in the shoulder.
It was a playful punch, but Chip still hit incredibly hard.
Carver saw a few stars in his vision as he straightened up.
Chip was clearly in pain, too; the two of them stood there gritting their teeth and pretending otherwise while the women around them chatted.
“This is not my first lesbian wedding,” Conway was saying with a chuckle. “I played like five different sports. Even horseback riding was full of lesbians.”
“Huh, I wouldn’t have thought,” Maggie said.
“Which equestrian sport did you do, Connie?” Lillian said, arching an eyebrow. “Because I played polo in college, and almost all of those girls were straight, except for one who tried it on with me in the middle of the night when we were at a hotel for an away match. I had to gouge her in the eye.”
Conway stood there and blinked the way people usually did after Lillian dropped personal lore. “Uh,” she said. “I did hunters, then I got bored and switched to jumpers.”
“Smart,” Lillian said. “Hunters is a tea party for princesses.”
“There were more straight girls involved in it, for sure.”
Carver found it difficult to look at his wife for longer than a moment or two.
Every time he let his gaze linger, his mind slowly filled with the memory of Scott pounding him, like carbon monoxide filling a room.
If he let this go on for too long, saliva started to fill his mouth and blood started to stiffen his dick.
He fantasized briefly about getting his mouth on Scott, which didn’t help, then dragged himself back to reality.
Maybe they could work something out. Lillian did say the thought of him making out with Scott was hot, and he often suspected she was into voyeurism.
Once they were walking along a beach in Fiji and heard another tourist couple having drunken sex in some bushes, and Lillian had insisted on lingering for far too long, her face bright with amused interest while Carver fidgeted in Lutheran discomfort.
Maybe they could have Scott over once a month so he could tie Carver up, ballgag him and fuck him on the living room floor while Lillian smoked a cigar and nodded approvingly.
Yeah, Scott would definitely agree to that.
Sure. The idea did turn him on, though. His family was right: there was something so wrong with him that everyone could see it yet no one had the vocabulary to tell him what it was.
Carver longed for someone to show him some mercy and come stove his head in with a cinderblock. He was tired of it all.
Even if he was fully homosexual, which was most likely true, this never felt like a complete explanation.
He remembered feeling this deep internal agitation — this sense of displacement, this instinct that something was wrong — long before he first looked at a boy with affection.
Much of the reason he liked downers and rough sex was the break they gave him from this feeling, and how would fucking men give him a break from the feeling if it were the source of the feeling?
Despite the agita of his siblings, four of those softcore cocktails weren’t enough to get Carver even credibly tipsy, let alone drunk.
And when they were herded back into the reception hall, which now contained a sea of candlelit tables surrounding a dance floor and DJ booth, they were told they had to wait until after the dinner, toasts and first dance to access the open bar.
Carver was at a table with Lillian, Chip, Maggie, Bailey, Aaron and Conway, so the conversation in here was more of the same. He half-listened to them, scanned the room to see if anyone interesting had been invited, and dutifully ate his salad and salmon.
Up front at the banquet table, Letty and Sana seemed to be having a great time, graciously receiving guests who stopped by to say hello and gazing into each other’s eyes.
Each time Carver looked at them he tried to call up memories of his own wedding, but it had flown by and little had stuck.
He remembered Lillian’s bizarre, stiff parents and the insane advice they tried to give him, which Lillian told him he was free to ignore; he remembered their first dance and how all of his focus had been on nailing each step as rehearsed; he remembered how lush and opulent it was, like they were royalty.
He remembered the write-up they’d gotten in the New York Times.
What he remembered most was the feeling he had afterward — like there should have been something more, like they had failed to do something obvious.
“What was your favorite part of our wedding?” he said to Lillian now. He wasn’t sure he’d ever asked her.
Lillian took a sip of water. “The honeymoon.”
“No, like, the day.”
She squinted as if thinking. “I don’t know, really. I liked how many people came, and all the compliments we got. Does that count?”
There was an innocence in her voice like she was genuinely asking him. Carver didn’t know how to respond. He wasn’t in charge of what counted, was he? Finally he coughed up a “sure.”