The Privileges

1

A WEDDING! THE FIRST OF a generation; the bride and groom are just twenty-two, young to be married these days. Most of their friends flew in yesterday, and though they are in Pittsburgh, a city of half a million, they affect a good-natured snobbish disorientation, because they come from New York and Chicago but also because it suits their sense of the whole event, the magical disquieting novelty of it, to imagine that they are now in the middle of nowhere. They have all, of course, as children or teenagers, sat through the wedding of some uncle or cousin or in quite a few cases their own mother or father, so they know in that sense what to expect. But this is their first time as actual friends and contemporaries of the betrothed; and the strange, anarchic exuberance they feel is tied to a fear that they are being pulled by surrogates into the world of responsible adulthood, a world whose exit will disappear behind them and for which they feel proudly unready. They are adults pretending to be children pretending to be adults. Last night’s rehearsal dinner ended with the overmatched restaurant manager threatening to call the police. The day to come shapes up as an unstable compound of camp and import. Nine hours before they’re due at the church, many of them are still sleeping, but already the thick old walls of the Pittsburgh Athletic Club seem to hum with a lordly over-enthusiasm.

Mid-September. Since Labor Day, the western half of Pennsylvania has been caught in a late and dispiriting heat wave. Cynthia wakes up in her mother’s house, in a bed she’s awakened in only five or six times in her life, and her first thought is for the temperature. She pulls on a t-shirt in case anyone else is awake, passes her burdensome stepsister Deborah (never Debbie) sleeping in flannel pajamas half on and half off the living room couch, and slides open the door to the deck, from which she can see in the distance a few limp flags on the golf course at Fox Chapel. Cool, tolerably cool anyway, though it’s still too early to tell anything for sure. It can’t even be seven yet, she thinks. Not that she’s worried. The specter of her bridesmaids holding beer bottles to their foreheads to cool off, or of Adam wiping the sweat out of his eyes as he promises himself to her, only makes her smile. She’s not the type to fold if things don’t go perfectly; what matters most to her is that the day be one that nobody who knows her will ever forget, a day her friends will tell stories about. She turns and heads back indoors, past her own fading footprints in the heavy dew on the cedar planks of the deck.

She never imagined a wedding in Pittsburgh, because she never had any reason to imagine it until her mother remarried and moved out here two years ago. To the extent she’d pictured it at all, Cynthia had always assumed she’d be married back in Joliet Park: but in the middle of her last semester at Colgate she learned that her father had sold their old house there, in which he had not lived for a long time; and when she announced her engagement two months later her mother Ruth went off on one of her unpacifiable jags about Cynthia’s stepfather Warren being “a part of this family” and would not stand for any implication that this was less than entirely true. To force-march these outsize personalities back to the scene of the family’s dissolution in Joliet Park, to listen to them bitch over the seating chart and over old friends whose post-divorce allegiances were sometimes painfully ambiguous, was out of the question. It would have been a gruesome sort of nostalgia, and pointless at that. A wedding is rightfully about the future if it is about anything at all.

They could have married in New York -where Cynthia and Adam already shared an apartment-and in fact that was the arrangement Adam gently pushed for, on the grounds, typically male, of maximum simplicity. But the truth was that that wouldn’t have seemed unusual enough to Cynthia, too little distinct from a typical Saturday night out drinking and dancing with their friends, just with fancier clothes and a worse band. She wasn’t completely sure why the idea should appeal to her at all-the big schmaltzy wedding, the sort of wedding for which everyone would have to make travel plans-but she didn’t make a habit of questioning her wants. So Pittsburgh it was. Adam shrugged and said he only cared about making her happy; her father sent her a lovely note from wherever he was living now, implying that the whole idea had been his to begin with; and Warren expressed himself by opening up his checkbook, a consequence, to tell the truth, of which Cynthia had not been unmindful.

She tiptoes past the couch to avoid waking Deborah, because waking her might cause her to speak, and on one’s wedding day there are some trials one ought to be spared. They don’t know each other that well, but little things about Deborah excite Cynthia’s derision as though they have lived together for years. The flannel pajamas, for instance: she is two years older than Cynthia but so congenitally chilly that she and Ruth might as well be roommates at the old folks’ home. The house was bought with a second life in mind, a life in which the children were grown and gone, which explains why there is only one spare bedroom. Though the couch looks gratifyingly uncomfortable, Cynthia considered a campaign to pack Deborah off to the Athletic Club with all the other guests, so that her maid of honor and best friend, Marietta, could stay at the house instead. But family obligations are perverse. It makes no sense at all that this palpably hostile sexless geek should be one of her bridesmaids, and one of Cynthia’s many close friends’ feelings hurt as a result; yet here she is.

In the kitchen Ruth, Cynthia’s mother, whose last name is now Harris, is drinking a cup of tea standing up, in a green ankle-length bathrobe she holds closed at the neck. Cynthia passes her and opens the refrigerator without a word. “ Warren ’s out,” Ruth says, in answer to a question it would not occur to Cynthia to ask. “He went to get you some coffee. We only keep decaf in the house, so he went out specially for you.”

Cynthia scowls at the effrontery of decaf coffee, a fetish of the old and joyless. Tossing a loaf of bread on the counter, she stands on tiptoe to search the cupboard where she remembers the ancient jams are kept; then, feeling her mother’s gaze, she turns her head to look back over her shoulder and says, “What?”

It’s the underwear: the fact that she is parading around in it, but also the underwear itself, the unhomeliness of it, the fact that her daughter has grown into a woman whom it pleases to spend a lot of money on underwear. Shameless is the word for it. All Ruth wants is a little gravitas for today of all days, a proper sense of nervousness or even fear, which she might then think of some way to allay. One last moment of reliance. But no: it became clear weeks ago that all this was no rite of passage into womanhood for her daughter-it’s a party, a big party for her and all her friends, and she and Warren are just there to pick up the tab. For the last six or eight years, nearly every sight of her daughter has caused a certain look to cross Ruth’s face, a look of just-you-wait, though the question “wait for what?” is not one she could answer and thus she keeps her mouth shut. The flatness of Cynthia’s stomach, the strength and narrowness of her hips, more than anything the way she carries herself with such immodesty in a body whose nearness to the modern ideal is bound to provoke an unpredictable range of response: self-satisfied women are often brought low in this world, and for years now, mostly by frowning, Ruth has tried to sneak her insights onto the record.

But she reprimands herself; today, no matter who cares to deny it, is not just any day. She feels the faint echo of her own terror in the hours before her first wedding, a terror that was partly sexual, which counts as a bond between them even though her daughter’s sexuality is a subject she has long since lost the fortitude to go near. “So,” she says, trying for a conciliatory tone. “This is your special day.” And Cynthia turns around, mouth open, and laughs-a laugh Ruth has heard before, the only solace for which is a retreat into memories of when her only child was a baby.

Behind them, the digital clock on the microwave blinks silently to seven-thirty. In the living room, Deborah, having woken herself with her own snoring, makes a little groaning sound that no one hears and pushes her face deeper into the gap between the cushions and the sofa back. At the Athletic Club, the weekend desk clerk consults the computer printout in her hand and dials the extension for Adam’s room. She’s seen the Daily Events schedule and recognizes his name as that of the groom; to the scripted wake-up greeting at the top of the printout she adds best wishes of her own, because she saw him last night and he’s cute.

“Thanks,” Adam says, and hangs up. He too goes straight to the window to check the weather. His window faces the alley, though; he’ll probably get a better sense of the day’s prospects from the TV. He turns it on with the sound down but then lies back on the bed, fingers laced behind his head, and forgets to watch.

He hates sleeping alone and maybe for that reason he spent the minutes before the phone rang in an extravagant dream, a dream about driving a car with no steering wheel in it, a car that responded to his slightest weight shifts, like a skateboard or a sled.

One hour until breakfast in the hotel restaurant with his parents and his younger brother and best man, Conrad. Having thought of this, he tries to forget it again so that he can be genuinely blameless if he shows up late. He’s a little hung over from the rehearsal dinner, though others, he reflects, will have cause to be a whole lot more hung over than he. Too early to call Cynthia, who’s probably still asleep. What would really calm him down is sex with her-as it is he starts most mornings that way; it scatters the vague anxieties with which he wakes-but today that’s not going to happen. With sudden inspiration he arches his back and pounds on the wall above his headboard, the wall his room shares with the room where Conrad is staying.

Conrad doesn’t hear; up for an hour already, he is standing in the shower practicing his toast. It was the only duty that gave him any pause at all when he accepted the best-man role. He blushes and shakes whenever he has to speak in public; and how relatively easy it would be to pull this off in front of a ballroom full of strangers, as opposed to friends and family with their license for pitiless long-term teasing, people before whom there is no question of pretending even for a few minutes that he is anyone other than who he is.

“They are a charmed couple,” he says, because this is a phrase over which he’s stumbled in earlier rehearsals; and it’s too late now for a rewrite. “They are a charmed chouple. Fuck.” And he starts from the beginning.

Waking in the other rooms on the second and third floor of the Athletic Club are friends of the bride and groom-couple friends, friends who have brought especially serious or promising dates-almost all of whom find themselves acting, at that hour, on a sexual impulse that’s unsettlingly strong even for the bloom of youth. Some are laughing, and some stare into their partners’ eyes with an urgency the memory of which will have them avoiding each other’s gaze an hour later. They are not used to the licentiousness of hotel rooms; and the knowledge that on this particular weekend they have not just infiltrated this stuffy club but taken it over gives a subterraneous group sense to each intimate encounter, a sense of orgy that makes them want to offend strangers, to exert themselves until the walls of that place come down.

Indeed there is one couple that knocks the headboard against the wall behind Adam’s parents’ bed so loudly that his mother just prays she doesn’t know them. She even tells her husband to call the front desk and complain, but he’s in the bathroom and hears, as a rule, what he chooses to hear.

At eight-thirty Marietta ’s car rolls into the Harrises’ driveway. Inside the kitchen she and the still undressed Cynthia kiss like sisters; “Jesus, it’s fucking hot out there,” Marietta says. “Oh hi, Mrs. Sikes. I mean Mrs. Harris!” It’s more than Ruth can bear; she smiles premonitorily and withdraws from the kitchen.

“So shall we go do the hair thing?” Marietta says, but then all of a sudden Deborah is in the doorway, hair matted, face pebbled from the rough upholstery of the couch, looking at them both with tribal hatred.

“Your phone’s ringing,” she says to her stepsister, and turns and leaves.

The phone is on the bedroom floor, underneath the jacket Cynthia wore to the rehearsal dinner. Marietta follows her through the living room.

“Thanks for bringing it to me, there, Debski,” says Cynthia, though Deborah has disappeared into the bathroom. “So, you didn’t bring your dress? Where is it?”

“In the freezer,” Marietta says.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby. Haven’t you heard? It’s my Special Day.”

“Well, that’s my point. You’re the bride. Still well within your power to change the whole dress code to, like, beach casual.”

“Wear a tank top to your own wedding, slut,” Cynthia says. “That’s not how we roll here in Pittsburgh.”

“I’ve got that not-so-fresh feeling,” Marietta says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

In his chair watching CNN as they pass behind him, Warren hears all this and, though he would still like to be a kind of father to this young woman, knows that for the moment the only dignified course is to pretend that he is not even in the room at all.

Cynthia smiles at Marietta and takes the phone out on the deck. “Isn’t this bad luck?” she says, sliding the door shut behind her.

“I saw your dad in the lobby last night,” Adam says. “I recognized him from his picture. He seemed in pretty good form. Have you called him yet?”

“No,” she says, and her heart races a little bit. “I will in a while. Hey, what time is it?”

“Quarter to four.”

“Very funny. I mean aren’t you supposed to be at breakfast with your parents?”

“Maybe.”

“Well don’t leave Conrad alone with them, for God’s sake. You know how they get. Plus he’s got the rings so let’s not antagonize him.”

Adam smiles, waiting for the elevator in the empty hotel corridor. “Can you believe we’re doing this?” he says.

The boards on the deck are already burning her feet. “Not too late to back out,” she said, “if that’s why you’re calling.”

“Well, I still have seven hours to think about it, right?”

“Me too. Tell you what, if I’m not there by, let’s say, ten of four, you just go ahead and assume I’m not coming, okay?”

“Fair enough. Seeing how everything’s paid for and all, if you don’t show I’ll just wave one of the bridesmaids up and marry her.”

“Which one you have your eye on?”

There is a pause. “I missed you when I woke up this morning,” he says.

Her view of the golf course from earlier that morning has now been erased by haze. She closes her eyes. “Me too,” she says. “You won’t forget pictures, right?”

“Two-fifteen in the Trophy Room. Conrad’s carrying around a little schedule.”

“Okay,” she says. “See you then. Enjoy your last few hours of freedom.”

“Gotta go,” he says. “The hookers are here.”

She hangs up on him, smiling. In the living room, Marietta stands uncomfortably, while Deborah, back on the couch, watches her like a guard dog, like some emissary from the underworld of the socially damned. Marietta can read her hatred only as jealousy, which softens her own attitude a bit.

“So,” she says, and remembers that Deborah is a graduate student somewhere, in something. “School is good?”

Adam strolls into the hotel dining room and sees that his parents, sitting with a stricken-looking Conrad, have ordered their breakfast but not touched it. They missed their connection in New York yesterday and arrived too late to make it to the rehearsal dinner, which may have been just as well. He kisses his mother on the top of her head. “How’s your room?” he asks. “Everything to your liking?”

Adam’s father makes a sarcastic noise, which his mother recognizes and preemptively talks over. “Very nice,” she says. “Very comfortable. You have to point out Cynthia’s parents to me so we can say thank you.”

The two sets of parents have never met. There didn’t seem much point to it. “ Marietta made it home okay last night?” Adam asks Conrad. Conrad nods but does not stop eating, because he would very much like to get this breakfast over with. Adam signals the waitress for coffee. He hasn’t really looked at either of his parents since he sat down. No one is looking at Mr. Morey, though he seems to be mysteriously gathering himself nonetheless, like a clock about to strike. Two heart attacks have hunched his shoulders in the way of a man much older than he actually is. Up in the room are four portable oxygen tanks, in case he needs them, and in the purse at his wife’s feet are various pills and phone numbers. But his short temper and unregulated resentments suggest that his physical failings are a kind of natural outgrowth of his personality, and everyone who knows him, mindful of his angry pride, is unsolicitous toward him. He is tormented by the efflorescence of foolishness and waste of all kinds, everywhere around him. He was a pipe fitter who became a full-time union executive until his disabilities forced him to retire. The Pittsburgh Athletic Club is exactly the kind of place that sets him off. His wife has made him put on a coat and tie for breakfast even though she will now have to hear about it for the next month.

But Adam is not embarrassed by them in this setting, as his brother is, because he doesn’t really associate them all that closely with himself anymore. He is amused by their helpless compulsion to be themselves, and will wind them up like a music box at any opportunity. “Hey, you know what I found in my room?” he says. “In the dresser drawer? A list of room rates. Did you guys see that? Do you have any idea what this place costs?”

“Oh, Adam, please,” his mother whispers, “today of all-”

“As it happens, I did,” his father says, reddening. “I’m just glad I’m not the sap paying for all this.”

“More reason to be glad we never had girls,” his mother says, and laughs as if she were being filmed laughing.

“That wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to me,” Mr. Morey says. “I don’t have to put on a show for anybody. I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not.”

Adam abruptly stands up. “Oh look, there’s Mr. Sikes,” he says. “Excuse me. I’m gonna go practice calling him Dad.” And he crosses the room to where the bride’s dapper father sits at a table by himself, reading the paper. Conrad watches him leave in disbelief. His parents stare accusingly at each other. A moment later the waitress comes by and fills Adam’s coffee cup.

The doors to the hotel ballroom are shut, and behind them, in moments of silence, one can hear the vacuum cleaners run. Teenage girls in stiff black skirts walk from table to table, checking the place settings, counting on their fingers. They work slowly; the air conditioning is turned up all the way, and with the room not yet full of bodies it is exotically cold, the coldest place in the hotel. Only those most desperate for a cigarette pass through the double doors to the infernal kitchen and the steaming alley beyond.

At the hotel bar sits the wedding planner, habitually early, having sent her son and his friend to the florist’s in her van, praying they haven’t stopped to get high along the way. It’s why she doesn’t pay them in advance. The bar isn’t officially open yet but Masha knows everyone at the Athletic Club; this will be her fourth reception there this year. Though it’s before noon, she feels like (as her father used to say) a drink drink, and Omar the bartender would certainly comp her one, but while she’s on the job alcohol is out of the question. Something like that gets out and your reputation is shot. True, the bride-whose superior attitude Masha doesn’t especially care for-isn’t even from Pittsburgh and acts as if she might never set foot here again after today; but the stepfather, whose name is on the checks, is some rainmaker at Reed Smith, and the mother, whose superior attitude she doesn’t much care for either, is one of those chronically unsatisfied types who love nothing better than to nurse along some scandal, substantiated or otherwise.

But that’s the secret to Masha’s success: you get invested not in the people, who can let you down, but in the ceremony, which never does. She doesn’t say it out loud very often but she thinks of herself as a guardian of something, a finger in the dike holding back total indifference toward the few things that have always mattered, ritual and devotion and commitment. When you thought of it that way, the less you happened to care for the families themselves, the more noble your work became. Her own marriage ended after nine years, but that detracted in no way from the beautiful memory of her wedding day itself; in fact, that’s what you were left with, she thinks, that and a beloved if somewhat less than reliable son. Besides, if it were up to her they would all still be together, husband and wife and child, through happy and contentious times alike. But not everything is her decision.

A couple around the bride and groom’s age walks into the bar and Omar tells them that he’s closed. The boy looks ready to argue the evidence, but the girl says, “Forget it. I need to go upstairs and take another shower anyway.” That’s what today’s going to be, Masha thinks: a pageant of sweat. Eighty-eight already, according to the silent TV screen above Omar’s shaved head. That was part of the risk they all assumed when they booked the most beautiful old unmodernized Catholic church in Pittsburgh. That’s why she is waiting until the last moment with the flowers. She couldn’t book them the weather. Not that that would stop the mother from blaming her for it anyway.

Across town Cynthia and Marietta sit bemused and intimidated, shirtless, their heads poking through holes cut in old bedsheets, as a tight-lipped Polish woman (recommended by Masha) and her young assistant do their hair. They tease each other with stories from their college days; all the stories involve embarrassment or regret but none of them can’t be laughed at. Only a few of them are about men because Cynthia and Adam started dating sophomore year. The Polish women, in a kind of secondary theme, speak in unsmiling Polish about God knows what, at least until Cynthia says something about how badly this whole ordeal makes her want a cigarette.

“Please no,” the older one says, her scissors in the air. “Big kiss on altar, your husband think hey, my wife’s head smell like fucking ashtray.”

Their eyes meet in the mirror, already retelling it.

The doors to the church stand open, for circulation’s sake, but the dust hangs motionless on the ramps of light that slope down from the tall windows. Masha watches her red-eyed son and his Mexican friend, whom she secretly calls Señor Detention, try to get the white runner straight atop the sun-bleached carpeting between the pews. She pulls a creased checklist out of her jacket pocket and walks past the kneeling boys to the pulpit; turning to face the rows of empty seats, she solemnly taps her finger on the live microphone.

“Stay out of heat,” the Polish woman says hopelessly as Cynthia and Marietta button their shirts back on. “Whole thing fall down.”

With the car’s air conditioner at full blast, Marietta pulls into the Harrises’ driveway again. Standing outside the kitchen door on the tiny landing, flat against the wall in the scant shade of the eaves, Deborah is standing among the rain boots and gardening equipment, smoking a cigarette. She is already wearing her bridesmaid’s dress. Eyes barely open, she glowers hatefully at the tinted windshield of the car.

“What is she doing?” Marietta says. She sounds almost scared.

“I don’t know,” Cynthia says wearily. “There’s always some grievance.”

“But why is she smoking outside in this heat? Is smoking not allowed in your mom’s house or something?”

“ Warren smokes. He smokes in the house all the time.”

“Then why is she-”

“You know what?” Cynthia says. “Pull out. I can’t even deal with going back in there right now. Go on, back out. I know someplace we can go.”

Deborah watches them leave and smiles at the prospect of her stepmother’s panic. Mother and daughter are so alike. No capacity for seeing themselves through others’ eyes, no interest in it. No one ever opens a book in that whole god damned stunted hell-bound house, including her father, whose idea of self-betterment is watching Unsolved Mysteries. The aspect of him she’s always cared least about is his money, but now that he’s letting these two spend it like it’s theirs, she resents them as climbers, her nominal stepsister especially. She knows this pains him. Make an effort, he keeps telling her, but no effort is necessary to understand the likes of Cynthia and her friends. One day it will hit them that high school is over.

Adam sits on the bed in his underwear. He’s watching the Pirates game on TV. He considers masturbating, out of boredom, but there is too great a likelihood that Conrad or someone else will knock on his door. There is a great sense of bustle in the walls around him but nothing seems to require him right now. It’s far too awful outside to go for a run. Why did they schedule the wedding for four in the afternoon, anyway? Solitude and inactivity make him restless. At his bachelor party last weekend-a rafting trip on the Delaware with his six groomsmen-there was never a moment of idleness; gloriously exhausted, they slept in tents, some expensive Scotch but no real drunkenness, the whole thing put together by Conrad, one of the two or three best nights of his life. They’d cheerfully teased him by recounting old hookups, old binges, old mortifications. There was some ritual sarcastic mourning of all the sexual freedom he was waiving, but he could tell-it makes him smile now to remember it-that their hearts weren’t in it, because none of them really thinks he is making a mistake. He’s slept with other women, before he and Cyn met and, truth be told, for a short time after. What’s left to mourn there? Just an adolescent obsession with variety, and he is past that point. They are meant for each other: he feels it so deeply that he’s not quite able to say it, not even to her. She’s like one of those horse whisperers, he thinks, only it’s just him, he’s the only one it works on, she’s the only one he will let speak to him that way. It would seem juvenile to go back to wanting anything other than what he has. He also has a home, and a job, and he is impatient, in possession of these things, to leave his childish self behind and get the future under way in earnest.

He finds his phone on the dresser and calls her again. “I talked to your dad at breakfast,” he says. “You should give him a call.”

“I’m going to.”

“Where are you?” he says.

“At the airport. Don’t try to have me followed.”

“No, seriously.” He strains to make out the background noise, then realizes it’s the same as the background noise in his own room. “Are you at the Pirates game?”

She laughs. “I’m in a bar with Marietta. We’ve had our hair done, but we’re not ready to go back to the House of Pain just yet.”

“What bar?”

“In your dreams,” she says.

“Well, okay, but just don’t show up drunk at the altar, because my last wife did that and, let me tell you, it really lowered the tone.”

She smiles. The TV plays on a shelf above the scarred oaken bar, in the wonderful, midday, reptile-house gloom. With her fingers she ruins the circle of condensation that her vodka-and-soda glass keeps leaving on the wood. She knows why he’s calling. “So,” she says, “you’re doing okay?”

When she says it she swears she can hear his breathing slow down. “Sure,” he says. “I’m fine. I just don’t like all the waiting.”

They go over the schedule again and hang up, and Cynthia notices her maid of honor staring at her. “He’s nervous, huh,” Marietta says. She drinks. “So, are you nervous?”

Cynthia’s first reaction, she has to admit, is to deny it without thinking about it, because she knows this is how she and Adam figure in the lives of their friends: as the fearless ones, dismissive of warnings and permissions, the ones who go first. But when she does think about it she realizes that the answer is still no. They are perfect together.

“He makes me laugh, and he makes me come,” she says. “And he needs me much too badly to ever fuck things up.”

“Well, I’ll drink to that,” Marietta says, but then she doesn’t drink. Her own date is spending the morning in the hotel gym; nothing about this whole weekend will please him as much as the discovery that his daily workout routine doesn’t have to be altered. She stares into the cloudy mirror behind the bar, where their elaborately coiffed heads float as if in an aquarium. In this splendid dump they look like extras who have wandered off a movie set. “Hey,” she says. “Your head smell like fucking ashtray.”

As the heat peaks the city takes on a dirty sheen. Behind the haze the sun can only be approximately located, like the source of a headache; on the sidewalks each citizen moves forward in a kind of cocoon of dampness. The wedding guests have abandoned any halfhearted plans to see some more of the city-the church is just a three-minute walk across the park from the Athletic Club and they will wait until the last minute even for that. Unhurriedly they take the tuxedo shirts out of their boxes, recount the studs and the cuff links, hang the dresses on the bathroom door and turn on the shower to steam the travel wrinkles out of them. With nothing else to do they prop open their doors and turn the place into a dormitory. Someone puts on some music and the first complaint from the front desk arrives. They have begun drinking. Special occasions are marked by feats of excess.

One-forty and no one knows where the bride is. Deborah hasn’t said a word; she lies on the couch in her bridesmaid’s dress, reading Walter Benjamin and drinking a Diet Coke. Ruth feels as if her brain is going to blow out of her head like a champagne cork. At the same time she feels justified in some way by the threatened emergence into reality of her vision that this whole day would end in disaster. Her daughter left the hairdresser’s more than an hour ago. Fine. It upheld Ruth’s view of life, her own life at least, to think that the things that mattered to her were, in everyone else’s estimation, a joke. Thirty-eight thousand dollars her husband has sunk into this day-more than the old days gave them any right to dream of-and Cynthia has barely acknowledged him; as for Warren, he has been putting on his tuxedo in the bedroom for an hour now, which, since he is a man who knows how to wear a tuxedo, suggests to Ruth that he is avoiding her. What’s worst, though, is her full awareness, even at a moment like this, of her daughter’s supreme, blithe competence. In another few minutes, with no word from her, they will have no choice but to proceed to the Athletic Club for the photo session as planned, and Ruth knows, in her heart of hearts, that Cynthia will be there. Of course there will be no real disaster: instead there will be the vindication of that refusal to take any of it seriously, to treat respectfully the day that marked the end of motherhood. Till death do us part. Big joke.

The only one who has already braved the walk from hotel to church, several times today in fact, is Masha. Wearing a maroon blazer-a little heavy for a day like this, but the item in her closet that came closest to matching the burgundy of the bridesmaid’s dresses-she is losing the battle to maintain a fresh, unruffled appearance throughout the day’s events, that projection of capability that’s normally a key element of her job; but today, she keeps telling herself, is a special case. She’s sent her son to Wal-Mart, even though she knows he’s high, to buy every standing fan they have. She’s glad the groom is a little late for their meeting before the photo session. She doesn’t particularly care anymore how it might look that she’s waiting for him in the hotel bar. She drinks club soda after club soda and watches the guys in the band carry their own drums and keyboards and amplifiers into the ballroom, gasping and swearing, while she tries discreetly to check the size of the sweat stains under her arms.

Then the groom enters, black-tied, a very handsome boy with a highly developed sense of charm. “The wedding planner? Oh, she’s in the bar,” he says as he holds out his hand. It comes back to Masha that he is from New York City and has a way of speaking that’s sometimes difficult to follow.

In the Trophy Room they find Ruth and Warren and Warren ’s mother, who at eighty-seven has lost track of time’s more incremental movements and thus is as pleased to wait there indefinitely as her daughter-in-law is perplexed and insulted. They are more or less flattened against the wall by the door in order to avoid inconveniencing the photographer as he testily moves the lights and rearranges the furniture. No one else is there. The photographer, a short man with a neat mustache and a drinking problem whom Masha has worked with many times, is pleased to see her because here at last is someone with whom he may safely lose his temper.

“She has something better to do?” he says, smiling tightly, speaking of the bride. “There’s maybe something good on TV?”

With her back to Adam, Masha lifts her eyebrows at the photographer as if to say what can we do, this is what we’re working with; and she says, “Allow me to introduce the groom, Adam Morey.”

The photographer’s mood is softened by Adam’s charisma only because he sees that here is a young man obviously not averse to having his picture taken. The groomsmen file in; he can tell, mostly from their adolescent nudging, that a few of them are drunk. Who gives a shit, he reminds himself, and grabs one of them and points to his mark on the floor. He makes a note of the groom’s parents (the father has the same strong chin and small mouth, the same convex hairline) standing with their backs to the wall, gazing at their son as if from a great distance, as if crowds were cheering, as if they were standing on an ice floe.

Then the bride walks in, ahead of her own entourage like a prizefighter, in the dress, the makeup, the veil and gloves, the full regalia. Masha and Ruth together make a gasping sound that’s as unrehearsed as anything they’ll say or feel all day. “No rush,” says the photographer, but already his sarcasm is losing its edge-his work bores and harries him but he is not inured to beauty-and he goes to look at her through the camera. Behind Cynthia come the six bridesmaids, Deborah several steps in front of the rest in her eagerness to get out of that awful suite where the beautiful ninnies chattered. The bridesmaids fan out by the door, sharing one of those gigantic bottles of water, picking at the sleeveless wine-colored dresses that are already darkening in spots.

This is why they are late: on her way to the suite set aside for the bridal party’s preparations, Cynthia had finally stopped and knocked at the door to her father’s room; he had opened the door in his tuxedo, looking like a movie star, though also older and thinner than she remembered him; and then, as she’d known all along she would without quite knowing why, she collapsed in tears. He took her in his arms and shut the door and whispered the little things that only he could get away with and then a few minutes later she reemerged and went to the elevator bank to go get her makeup applied.

He’s last to enter the Trophy Room. Life does not seem versatile enough to account for the fact that this man and Cynthia’s mother once fell in love and got married. Ruth herself has trouble accepting it as true, not because she has forgotten but because she remembers the strong impression he gave, every day for ten years, that he was late for some amusing engagement somewhere else. Now she watches in horror as Warren crosses the room to shake her ex-husband’s hand. It’s her fate, she thinks, to end up loyal to men who don’t understand loyalty themselves.

There is only one person in the room Conrad’s age whom he hasn’t known for years, and that’s Deborah. It’s her he winds up standing next to after the family photograph; and she doesn’t actively ignore him because there’s something in his face that she doesn’t see in the Barbie faces of everyone else in the room.

“I’m actually a little nervous,” he finds himself saying. “I have to give the toast.”

That’s what it is about him, she thinks, a recognizable human emotion. Unconsciously she pulls at the neckline of her bridesmaid’s dress to try to keep her tattoo covered. He looks about eighteen, though she knows he must be older than that; at some point all these people were in the same college at the same time, or maybe it just seems that way. “You’ll get through it,” she says, not unkindly. “Just be yourself.”

The room grows noisy, and at the center of it, Adam and Cynthia stand staring at each other, at the odd three-quarter angle into which the photographer manhandled them when it became too difficult to explain what he wanted. His arm around her waist. Something has been missing all day and this was it. When they are close together no one else can touch them. Their homes, their families, everything that made them is behind them now and will remain so from here on in. Masha pops up with a handful of tissues to wipe the sweat off Adam’s forehead.

“I lost weight while getting married!” Adam says. “Ask me how!”

“Stop talking!” barks the photographer. “Memory time!”

This is where it starts to become a blur. And now, finally, as they take orders to turn their heads or change the position of their fingers-as they stand rooted at the apex of a continually reconfigured V-comes the feeling they didn’t quite credit before now, the feeling that the ceremony itself has taken over and begun to bear them along. Everything is dictated from here. They’ve exchanged themselves for their roles and it is not at all an unpleasant or a violated feeling. In the end not even their memories will have to be relied on; images of the day and night that have been taken out of their hands will arrive in the mail, weeks from now, formally and expensively bound.

The church is a furnace. With the heat wave in its second week, Masha’s son was able to find for sale only five standing fans; the breeze they generate falters at about the third row. One young mother with a baby, a cousin of the groom’s, stands up from her pew and heads back to the hotel before the ceremony has even begun. But Masha is at home at the intersection of pageantry and crisis; she calls the ushers together to instruct them to seat the eldest guests nearest the doors, regardless of their affiliation to bride or groom, and delivers a quick first-aid course in case of fainting. In the event, though, it’s one of the ushers, a blond-haired boy named Sam, who finally passes out, just at the end of the aisle. Too exhausted to be discreet, his friends lay him awkwardly across the rearmost pew. Masha cradles his head in her lap and pulls out the smelling salts she had the foresight to transfer from the home first-aid kit into her purse just that morning.

The rest of them proceed to the altar a man down. What seemed like such a lightweight job has proved so brutal that it’s starting to seem a little funny, all the more so when they stare across the altar at the bridesmaids, who look as if they have just come from a five-mile hike in their red dresses. But then the familiar martial introduction rolls down from the organist’s loft, a hundred and twenty people struggle gamely to their feet, and their attention gathers at the point where the light is strongest, at the church door. In the heat and glare the bride and her father shimmer slightly.

Marietta, who unlike most of them has had a few hours to grow used to the sight of her best friend in a wedding dress, keeps thinking about the ceremony itself, how many of its accepted elements seem wrong on symbolic grounds and should be changed. Why would you walk toward the man with whom you wanted to share your life in that halting, infantile gait, slower than you’d walked across any room in your life, as if you were being brought in by the tide? Wouldn’t it be more auspicious to slip off your torture shoes and run up there? Then she realizes that what she’s having, in effect, is a conversation with Cynthia, who would normally share her subversive interest in the day’s many weirdnesses, but who’s on the other side of the glass now. They have promised each other over and over that none of what exists between them will be lost, but neither of them has ever had a married friend and so neither of them really knows. She watches Cynthia’s father, that charming piece of shit, squeeze his daughter’s arm emotively without taking his eyes off their destination; he looks like Washington standing in the boat. Knowing how to behave on grand occasions has never been his problem; it’s the ordinary that could never sustain his interest.

When they finally arrive and the last note of the processional fades, he kisses her on the cheek, says something private to her, and withdraws. All eyes turn to the priest, who, in his mountainous bell-shaped surplice, resembles one of those eternally trickling monuments.

“Before we begin,” he rumbles into the microphone, “may I suggest that under the circumstances it is permissible for gentlemen to remove their jackets.”

For about a year after her husband left her, Ruth took Cynthia to Saint George’s in Joliet Park every Sunday, trying to make the best of his absence by mounting a campaign of moral improvement. Then one Sunday Cynthia announced she would never go again, and that was that. So Ruth was surprised when her daughter said she wanted a church wedding. Surprised and a little offended, because a house of worship is not a stage set; but Warren convinced her to let that particular grievance go. Now, as the guests sit in unison and the sound of their sitting throws an echo over the faint buzz of the fans, she’s glad to be where she is, if no less mystified.

They have agreed to two short readings. Cynthia’s friend Natalie, whose hands she held when Natalie cried after their art history TA called her a cock tease, reads from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Bill Stearns, Adam’s sophomore-year roommate, who once helped him pop his shoulder back in at a touch football game and then broke a date to wait with him at the emergency room for three hours afterward, soldiers through his unprecedented recital of a poem by Juvenal. The words carry no specific meaning in this context; the hymns and Bible verses, too, are only appurtenances of meaning, but no less heartfelt for that. The trappings of belief are themselves a kind of belief, just as the priest’s cassock is his office.

For this reason they are all suddenly united in the expectation that the priest, who does not know them, who won’t see them again after today, who has even less experience with intimacy than they do, who has probably said the same thing to thirty other anonymous couples this year, has something crucial to impart to them. With majestic unself-consciousness, he blots the very top of his bald head with what is presumably a handkerchief.

“It is good,” he says, “that your life together has begun in conditions that suggest a test.” He pauses to appreciate the small laugh that ripples through the pews; the faces right in front of him, those of the bride and groom, are locked in sobriety. “There will be great joys in your life together, of course, but there will also be tests, maybe even severe ones, and the joys and the tests will not always appear in such a way as to seem to offset one another. We may lose sight, at such difficult moments, of the path, the promise, the blessedness of our lives, because we grow too close to ourselves; our purpose here is something that surely we too could begin to make out, if it were given to us to see as God sees. But we do not possess the farsightedness of God. Trust that He sees what you cannot, and that will enable you to go on trusting in each other. And if ever you should doubt yourselves, if ever there comes a time when you doubt your ability to endure hardship, remember that God, on this day and for all time, has given you to each other. He hath made all of us. And He will never ask us to shoulder more of a burden than He knows we have the strength to bear.”

The vows they have chosen are the traditional ones. The kiss is more of a relief than anything else; shyly they proceed out the door and down the church steps into the odiferous haze and climb directly into the back of a limo for the one-minute drive around the park to the reception. The guests can see the limo pulling up at the hotel entrance as they trudge back across the park themselves. The bells are ringing, evening is approaching, and though it’s still ninety-two degrees, the solemn air has lifted; there’s a party at the other end of this walk, and an air-conditioned one at that.

When they reach the end of the receiving line they are at the doorway to the ballroom, where the empty tables glitter and it’s as cold as a skating rink. Three idle bartenders smile helpfully. Within minutes they are working like coal stokers, as the younger guests try to recover the buzz they had going in their hotel rooms before the ceremony sweated it out of them. At the head table, a long dais perpendicular to the bandstand, the groom’s mother finds that she and her husband have been seated in between their new daughter-in-law’s natural parents, perhaps to keep them from killing each other. She tries gamely not to be offended by the idea that the role she has been given to play, on this momentous day in the life of her firstborn son, is that of a human shield. She has an idea who’s behind it, even if now is not the time, even if it will never be the time; besides, Sandy feels, the fault is ultimately hers anyway. She went through a rough patch when the boys were little and had to leave home for a while. Literally doctor’s orders. Maybe not surprising, then, that her son winds up with a girl who makes every decision, who calls all the shots. Who treats him like a child. But this isn’t an appropriate moment for Sandy to start losing herself in the past; for one thing, she needs to remember to count her husband’s drinks. Historically, in terms of his capacity for saying the unsayable, five is the magic number.

Scarcely a minute goes by without a knife clinking against a glass somewhere in the ballroom, first one and then a chorus of them: You made us come all the way here to witness your love? Okay, then-let’s witness some love. The waitstaff bursts through the double doors like a football team and serves a hundred dinners. Conrad eats his salmon without tasting it and then waits, smiling robotically whenever others at his table laugh at something, until the meal is over and the champagne is poured and the moment is finally upon him.

“I have always looked up to my brother,” Conrad says, eyes down, watching with dismay his own spit hitting the microphone. He memorized his toast but now he wishes he hadn’t, because holding a piece of paper would at least occupy his right hand, the one not holding the champagne glass, the one floating spastically from his pants pocket to his chin to the back of his head. “When we were kids, everything he set out to achieve he achieved, everything he wanted he worked for until he earned it, everything he did set an example not just for me but for everyone around him. An older brother’s distinction, in his little brother’s eyes, is pretty much automatic for a long time. But even when I got old enough to get over that feeling and decide for myself, he has never lost any of my esteem. Until today.”

The whole ballroom laughs, to intoxicating effect, and when Conrad dares to look up his eye is drawn straight to the bride’s stepsister, Deborah, maybe because her red dress is separated from the cluster of other red dresses by the width of the ballroom; she’s sitting off in the corner, with her grandmother, or somebody’s grandmother anyway. Just be yourself: what kind of stupid fucking advice was that? He makes himself look away from her before he loses his train of thought entirely.

“Until today, because here is where his streak as a self-made success ends, and sheer blind dumb luck takes over. Anyone can see that Cynthia is a woman of extraordinary charms”-a whistle from somewhere in the room-“anyone who’s ever closed a bar with her or hiked the White Mountains with her or smoked a cigar on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry with her knows that she has a sense of humor and compassion and adventure that’s not just rare but matchless. Any man in full possession of his faculties would choose her out of a thousand. But how on earth do we account for her choice? What are the odds that such a spectacular girl would be willing to spend her life with a guy who wears those stupid madras shorts he wears; who thinks he’s a comedian but lacks the attention span to tell so much as a knock-knock joke from beginning to end; who believes with all his heart that near the garbage, ashtray, or hamper is the same thing as in the garbage, ashtray… That’s just a million to one shot, my friends, and frankly my brother deserves about as much credit for marrying this woman as he would for waking up with a winning lottery ticket stuck to his forehead, the lucky bastard.”

It is very hard to hold off drinking from the glass of champagne in his hand. He is amazed at how hard everyone is laughing but he still wishes only for the whole thing to be over. Without meaning to he looks up at Deborah again. She’s not laughing, but she is leaning forward intently with her elbows on her knees.

“Seriously,” he says. “They are a charmed couple. No one who knows them can doubt that they are destined to spend a long, happy, extraordinary life together. And no one who sees that these two wonderful people found their perfect match, and were smart enough to realize it, can help feeling a little more optimistic about our own prospects as we head out into the world. To Cynthia and Adam.”

Roars of approval, tapping of crystal. In the parking lot the drummer hears the applause and takes two more quick hits off his pre-gig joint before crushing it under the heel of his shoe.

The moment before the dancing begins, and the principals become hard to find, is the moment when Masha customarily takes her leave. She moves in a kind of crab walk behind the head table, accepting thanks, offering best wishes, smiling at the hundredth joke about the weather as if it were the first one. The money is already in the bank. You have to give them credit, Masha thinks, taking one last look at the whole spectacle, postponing the opening of the ballroom doors and the blast of heat just beyond. They weren’t the most gracious people in the world, but in the end they were willing to spend what needed to be spent.

The first dance: the bride and groom obviously could have practiced more, but their sheepish expressions only make the moment more affecting. They have never danced this way in public before-no one does anymore-and for them to forgo their usual grace, just for the sake of doing it the way it’s always been done, is an expression of surprising humility. The song is “The Nearness of You,” and before it’s half over the parents cut in. Sandy is overwhelmed by her son’s mischievous physical power. Mothers generally aren’t held in their sons’ arms after a certain age and it comes as a genuine shock. The bride’s father feels his daughter’s cheek on his shoulder, as guilelessly heavy as when she was a child and he carried her sleeping from the car, as he leads her around the floor. There’s a man who can dance. Even Ruth doesn’t bother trying not to remember. He hands their child off graciously to Warren, and feels the eyes on him as he walks off the floor. This has always been the rhythm of his fatherhood: dazzlement and aftermath. All day long he has endured the look of deep surprise in the eyes of nearly everyone to whom he has been introduced. He knows he has things to be forgiven for, but he considers his daughter’s love full vindication, and for those who can’t let go of the past he has never had any use.

Then the less ritualized dancing starts. It is the province of young people fully at home in their bodies, drunk and obscurely tense and in need of release. Only in exorcising them do they feel the demands of this day. The band is bad but honorable, at peace with the fact that, though their ambitions may have sifted down to this, they are still making music for a living in front of an audience. They rarely get a chance anymore to perform for a crowd this young and unrestrained; they don’t see anything fearful or destructive in all that energy, but they do understand the role of drunkenness in it and are okay with that. They’re even more okay with the attractiveness of the women who join them onstage to arouse the crowd with unskilled go-go routines.

Twenty-two is a zone of privilege, and as the night deepens invisibly behind the heavy drapes, the others are centrifugally driven away, first from the dance floor and then from the ballroom itself. Older couples, couples with children, see where the night is going and finish their cake and politely excuse themselves for the long drive home or just for their beds upstairs. All over the hotel, the urge to transgress is finally breaching its borders. The night bellman goes into the men’s room and sees that three tuxedoed wedding guests have pried the mirror off the wall and are hunched over it; he’s so afraid of what’s expected of him that he decides the prudent course is to go down to the basement and piss in the janitorial sink instead. People flirt with strangers, or even with old friends, in plain sight of their official dates. The desire to do something they know they’ll regret is overwhelming. The doors to the ballroom stand open and the smoking and drinking and intense conversational intimacies spill into the lobby-against the rules, but the night staff is intimidated and unsure of protocol and badly outnumbered anyway.

In the midst of all this, still powering it in fact, is utter faith in convention: at eleven-thirty the bride and groom disappear upstairs, and at midnight they return in their “traveling outfits,” in which to travel the eight blocks to the gingerbread-style bed and breakfast where they will spend the night. Everyone applauds and then lines up raggedly to say good bye.

Adam’s mother and father are incapable of sharing their sadness with each other. The honeymoon in Mexico is their gift. “You have a safe trip,” Mr. Morey says. And then they’re in the car and waving. Ruth starts to cry. The band starts playing again, and with the guests of honor gone, decorum gives way once and for all.

Sam, the fair-haired usher who passed out inside the church, is now standing by the door to the kitchen tirelessly hitting on one of the waitresses, who is twenty years old and needs the wages from this evening and therefore tries not to dwell on how very handsome this guy would be if he would just shut up, which she could certainly make him do.

Marietta, drunk and stoic, is downstairs in the hotel gym, allowing her boyfriend to act out a particular fantasy. Who’s to say what’s creepy? she thinks. In her head is a line from The Godfather: someday, she says silently to him as he labors, and that day may never come, I might ask you to do me a service…

One of the bartenders leaves his station for a quick trip to the men’s room, and when he returns he discovers that the guests have gone behind the bar and taken the bottles back to their tables; he looks around and sees them all smiling at him, not mockingly but with great camaraderie. In the lobby, Bill, the groomsman who recited Juvenal, is trying to talk a married woman ten years his senior into having one drink in his room upstairs. He’s actually almost there. He wants to do something he can never tell anyone about. A scared-looking bellhop comes into the ballroom and after one or two inquiries finds Conrad. He tells him there is an urgent message for him, upstairs in his room. The only explanations Conrad can think of are bad ones; he gets off the elevator, opens his door with the key, flips on the light, and standing there two feet in front of him is the antisocial, truth-advocating, tattooed bridesmaid, Deborah.

“Jesus!” Conrad says.

“Close the door,” she says.

“How did you get in here?”

“You’re not like the rest of them,” Deborah says. She’s still in her bridesmaid’s dress but she’s not wearing any shoes. She’s very drunk. “I can see you, you know,” she says. “You should give up trying to be one of them because you’re not.”

He’s starting to get an inkling of what this is all about. She’s not what he usually considers attractive, but on the other hand sometimes life puts something in your path that may never show up there again.

“You deserve something special,” she says. Something in him chafes at this self-satisfied Mrs. Robinson routine. But he’s in no position to call her bluff; she does know at least that much about me, he thinks. She lifts up her bridesmaid’s dress; if she was wearing something underneath it earlier, she’s not anymore. She has a piercing that actually makes him wince. He is still young enough to immediately amend a mental checklist of sexual phenomena he has or has not seen.

“Close the door,” she says. “Come on. Quickly.”

“Aren’t we related now?” he asks.

“Get on your knees,” she says.

“Jesus Christ!” he says, and he gets on his knees.

In the ballroom an actual fight breaks out. One of the dishwashers has come out of the kitchen and told Sam to leave the young waitress alone; she’s reached the end of her shift but is now so afraid to leave the hotel, because she knows he’ll follow her outside, that she’s in tears. Sam throws the first ridiculous punch, but the real damage is done when he’s backing away in self-defense and falls right across the bar, smashing glasses and bottles alike. The women have long since removed their shoes, and so as a safety measure they climb up on the tables and continue dancing there. The band hasn’t had this kind of contact high in years. They play until the moment they stop getting paid, and then they play three more songs, and then the night manager comes in and threatens to pull the plug. It would be really punk to tell him to go fuck himself, but they have another job here next month.

So the music stops, and the bar is closed, and the lights are all turned on because the night manager has had all the complaints from upstairs he can take; but there are still twenty or thirty people in and around the ballroom, drunk, tired, euphoric, young, beautiful, sweaty, dressed up and on someone else’s nickel, and determined-as who wouldn’t be?-to remain all those things forever. When the ballroom is locked they take over the lobby, and when they’re chased out of the lobby they take it upstairs to their rooms. Dawn seeps around the drapes. They pass out on one another’s floors, across one another’s beds, refusing to part, sealing their legend.

At the bed and breakfast eight blocks away Cynthia, in a t-shirt and shorts, is propped up by pillows on the huge four-poster bed, some librarian’s idea of a honeymoon bower; she strokes her husband’s hair as he sleeps with his head in her lap. He didn’t even make it out of his clothes. She’s not disappointed. Sex is no novelty; being exhausted together, being each other’s safe place-that’s what tells you you’ve found what everybody’s always whining about searching for. The air conditioner hums. Tomorrow they will fly to Mexico, and when they fly back to New York Cynthia will be pregnant. When she figures that out, she will wonder again what she is wondering right now: whether it’s true what the priest said-that God gives each of us only what He knows we can handle-because, all her life, things have come at her very fast.