GROOM

May 1991

THE MORNING HE IS to be married, O’Neil Burke-thirty, orphaned, a teacher of ninth- and eleventh-grade English-awakens first at 3:00 A.M. to laughter and the bright crash of glass on pavement, again at 5:00 when the sun is rising, and once more at 8:00, when he lifts his head from the pillow, moist with the sweat of his hangover and uneasy dreams, and looks out the window by his bed in the old hotel. Two floors below he can see the parking lot, his friends’ cars, the sweeping lawn, splendidly green; beyond that the stand of hemlock and white pine ascending the steep hill. By his own car someone has dropped a beer bottle, and he remembers the sound of it breaking, and his friend Connor’s voice, cheerfully drunk, barking, “God-damn!” The air is still and moist, the sun warm for a morning in late May this far north, and the windows of the cars are glazed with Vermont ’s heavy dew. O’Neil hears the slap of a screen door, and while he watches, a woman exits the rear of the hotel and crosses the lot to her car, a new sedan that is probably rented. It is Simone, one of Mary’s friends from high school; O’Neil hadn’t met her until the night before, at the party in the hotel bar. She has already dressed for the wedding, in high sling-back heels, a pale green dress open at the shoulders, and a wide straw hat with a silk flower and red ribbon, forked at the back and trailing in the swing of her rich blond hair. The hat, O’Neil thinks, looks good on her, though it wouldn’t look as good on most women, and because she is wearing high heels, her trip across the uneven pavement of the lot takes some time, as if she knows someone is watching. When she reaches the car she keys the trunk and removes a large white package done up with a bow, the same red as the ribbon of her hat. Holding the package, she lifts her face and sees O’Neil watching her from his second-story window, and waves. Or, perhaps it isn’t O’Neil she has seen, just a shape through the screen. Embarrassed, O’Neil returns the wave.

His mind does not dwell on this, but turns to the weather, on which everything depends. While he has watched Simone cross the lot, the clouds seem to have thickened, congealing overhead in a portentous way. The wedding is scheduled for noon, in the meadow high above his sister’s house, five miles away. The meadow is reachable only by a narrow path; if it rains, even a quick shower, the path may become too muddy for their guests, or worse, it may wash out. In any event, the meadow will be soaked. O’Neil begins to worry, and so he rises, hurriedly washes his face and brushes his teeth, and puts on running clothes to go up the hill behind the hotel to have a look. It was clear, he remembers, when he first woke up, but now he doesn’t know what it’s going to do.

O’Neil is sitting on the bed, pulling up his socks, when there is a sharp knock on the door and Stephen, the best man, pokes his head into the room. His hair is wet, and his cheeks are smooth from shaving; he looks remarkably alert, O’Neil thinks, for someone who drank nearly all night, especially the sour, heavy beer made in the hotel’s microbrewery. It was good beer, O’Neil remembers, but not the sort of thing to drink too much of.

“I can’t believe it,” Stephen says. He sits down heavily on the empty bed next to O’Neil’s. “You’re going running? Go back to bed.”

“Is that what you’re wearing for the wedding?” Stephen is dressed in jeans, old sandals held together with electrician’s tape, and a T-shirt that reads “I Am a Womanmade Product.” O’Neil frowns, remembering Simone, her slow progress across the parking lot, like a model on a runway.

“Relax, will you? This thing is hours away. Have a beer. You want a beer?”

“I’m running up the hill.” O’Neil has begun to lace his shoes, one-hundred-dollar Nikes with molded orthotic inserts to balance his wobbly knees. Climbing a steep hill seems a good way to begin the day of his marriage, a suitable purification, but as he leans over to tie the laces a watery dizziness fills his head and the energy that launched him from bed departs, leaving him exhausted and frightened. He has to take a deep breath, then another. Then the feeling passes; he is fine.

“I don’t know about this weather,” he manages. “What’s it doing out?”

“Little of this, little of that.” Stephen fishes in the pocket of his jeans for a cigarette, which he lights and leaves in the corner of his mouth, his right eye squinting artfully above the trail of smoke. “I hate to tell you, but Mary warned me you might try to bolt”-he gestures broadly at O’Neil, now dressed to run-“and you’re not going anywhere.”

“So come with me. It’s not far. How late were you up, anyway? I heard you for a while out there.”

“Don’t know.” Stephen shrugs. “Two or so. Connor’s still asleep.” He looks at the end of his cigarette and frowns acidly. “You know, this really tastes bad.” He crosses the room to find an ashtray and crushes it out. “All right,” he agrees. “I’ll meet you out front. This should be a lot of laughs for you. I can’t run at all.”

Outside, O’Neil sees he was right about the weather. The breeze has picked up, and heavy clouds have gathered from the west and south, over the hill that stands behind the inn. At his car he kicks aside the broken glass, steps back, and places one foot on the bumper to stretch out the calf. His lower back is tight, but the leg stretches out fine, and he holds the position for ten seconds, feeling the muscle grow warm and pliable before he changes to the other leg. He does his hams, his quads, each exercise bringing him closer to the moment when he will feel that he has moved into his body, and his day can begin. He is sitting on the grass, his knees apart and the soles of his shoes perfectly aligned, when the screen door slaps and Stephen trots into the yard. He has changed to jogging clothes: cutoff shorts and a fresh T-shirt, sleeveless this time, with the emblem of a cruise line printed across the front. On his feet he wears black high-tops with plastic orange basketballs embedded in the tongues. The leather actually looks buttery, O’Neil thinks.

“Don’t you have any other sneakers?” O’Neil nods glumly at Stephen’s feet. “Those will give you shin splints, believe me.”

Stephen has begun, mockingly, to do jumping jacks, slapping his hands in the air over his head and counting numbers at random: “Six, fourteen, a hundred and eight.” Then he drops to the ground and does five snappy push-ups, wheezes hard, and collapses on the moist grass. “You know,” he moans, “the problem is I love to smoke. I mean, I truly love it. It would break my heart to quit.”

It is nine when they set off together down the drive, O’Neil holding back a little to let Stephen set the pace. O’Neil doesn’t quite know where he’s going, but he thinks there must be a way up the hill, something with an obvious name: Top of the World Road or Bella Vista Lane. From there he should be able to get a good look at what’s headed in their direction. The wedding is three hours away, and though a tent has been erected in his sister’s yard as a backup, it is important to both O’Neil and Mary to be married outside. They came up with the idea months ago, when there was still an inch of gray snow in Philadelphia and spring seemed a long way off. On the invitations, they wrote no address, only “The Meadow, Hanford, Vermont,” and shaded the paper with pastels: a stroke of green for the earth, blue and pink and bits of brown to hold the sky above it. It was a fun night, coloring the invitations at the dining room table of their small apartment, and O’Neil and Mary finished a bottle of wine while they worked, as they had done when they were first together and nervous with one another. But this was different. They were making wedding invitations.