7 Halfway There

Each of the large round tables in the reception tent was set up for twelve, but table seventeen had only eight actual “leftovers.” The resulting gaps in the seating were an additional impediment to conversation among these strangers. Well, not complete strangers. Griffin was surprised to recognize the unhappy couple from the Olde Cape Lounge. The woman was dressed more modestly today, and her face immediately lit up when she saw him, as if his unexpected presence was further evidence that the world was a marvelous place, that it offered genuine miracles on a daily basis. Her companion seemed to have forgotten him completely. (“We met where?… Oh, right, that fuckin’ place.”) He’d worn a tie for the ceremony but took it off now in the tent, unbuttoning the top two buttons on his shirt as if to allow his chest hair to breathe. The table’s extreme distance from the bridal party wasn’t lost on him, though he seemed cheered by its proximity to the tent’s back flap, on the other side of which the caterers were scurrying. “Maybe we’ll get fed first, at least,” he grunted in Griffin ’s direction, mistakenly concluding, just as he had the night before, that they were natural allies in an otherwise hostile world.

“We’re Marguerite and Harold,” the woman announced when everyone was seated and Sunny Kim suggested they all say something about themselves, where they lived and their relationship to the bride or groom. Marguerite owned a shop called Rita’s Flower Cart in the San Fernando Valley, not far from where Griffin and Joy had lived. She’d moved to California, she said, after she and her husband decided to call it quits. Only when Harold interrupted to say, again mostly to Griffin, “Don’t ever think a woman will go away just because you divorce her,” did he realize this was the ex-husband she’d alluded to. And only when she said she’d bought a house right around the corner from the bride’s parents and described it a little did he and Joy realize that it was their old house. They’d moved to Connecticut before the closing, so they’d never met the buyer.

At any rate Marguerite and the Apples had become such good friends that Kelsey now referred to her as Aunt Rita. Harold, she told the table, hooking her arm through his, lived in Boston (“Quincy,” he corrected) and worked in law enforcement (“Private security”), so when she heard the wedding was going to be on Cape Cod, where the groom’s parents had a house, she called Harold “out of the blue”-without even thinking about it, really, the phone just suddenly in her hand-and asked if he wanted to go to a wedding in June, to which he’d replied, “As long as it’s not ours.” That sporty riposte had reminded Marguerite that one of the things she’d always liked about Harold was his “dry sense of humor.” So she’d flown out a few days early, and they’d spent the time getting re-acquainted, and it had been, she said, scrunching up her shoulders as she’d done the evening before when she decided on a cosmo, really kind of romantic. She turned to Harold, clearly hoping he wouldn’t correct her here as well. “Yeah, well, sex was never the problem,” he conceded.

“I bet I know what was,” Joy murmured, loud enough for Griffin, on her left, to hear and possibly Sunny, on her right, too, though he gave no sign of it. As Marguerite was talking, a bottle of champagne was brought for toasts, and Sunny uncorked it and poured full flutes (ladies first, to Harold’s clear chagrin), shorting Harold just a bit with the last of the bottle. Intentionally, Griffin hoped, but thought probably not.

A precedent had apparently been set for the women at the table to speak for the men, and Joy went next. As she talked, Griffin found himself thinking how different it would’ve been if he was the one giving the synopsis. He had no intention of correcting her, à la Harold, but he did feel a stirring of guilty sympathy for him. Joy explained that their daughter, Laura, was the maid of honor and had been best friends with Kelsey, the bride, since they were girls, and of course she and Griffin had been friends with the Apples when they lived in L.A. This last bit struck him as more convenient than true. Sure, they’d all been friendly enough but never actually socialized, he and Joy having had little in common with Kelsey’s accountant father and evangelical mother, though Joy had been willing to suffer her religiosity given that the girls were best friends.

But never mind L.A. It was how Joy characterized their present lives, though factually accurate, that really rankled him. Griffin, she told the group, was a college English professor (“We’ll have to watch our grammar, then, won’t we?” said Marguerite, again scrunching up her shoulders), making no mention of his screen-writing career. Okay, granted, he was partly to blame, since normally he preferred not to bring that up. People immediately wanted to know what movie stars you knew and whom you had to know to gain entry into such a glitzy profession. They also were curious about what movies Griffin had written, and then he’d have to admit that only one or two of his and Tommy’s really stood up. Toward the end they’d been reduced to writing low-budget, made-for-TV movies, so better, really, not even to open the door.

Yet in this instance it seemed that Joy wasn’t so much acting in deference to his wishes as simply stating what she considered to be the facts. As part of a past they’d by mutual consent put behind them, screenwriting was no longer germane. Which was now also why Sid’s call had initially slipped her mind. It was even possible she thought Sid’s death meant not just the end of Sid but of Griffin ’s screenwriting career, the last dangling thread neatly snipped. He was now only one thing, a professor of English at a very good liberal arts college, whereas before he’d been two. She herself was the assistant dean of admissions, she informed them, and this, though it was the precise, unembellished truth, annoyed him as well. After all, he was tenured and she wasn’t, but to hear her tell it, anybody would have thought she outranked him. That sort of petty caviling was worthy of his mother, of course, and all the more unworthy of him, because Joy hadn’t meant it that way at all. Still, he was relieved when his wife let her voice fall, and the attention shifted to the two hefty lasses across the table.

They were from Liverpool, and their accents nearly impenetrable. Their spirits were extraordinarily high, even for the present occasion, and so far they’d giggled enthusiastically at everything anybody said, as if prior to taking their seats they’d been informed that the other guests at this table were all professional comedians. Griffin ’s experience of lesbians was largely limited to the academic variety-a grim, angry, humorless lot-so he was unprepared for these girls’ good cheer. They demonstrated that British habit of turning simple, declarative statements into questions and then waiting a beat, as if for a response. They’d known the bride for years and years, hadn’t they? Ever since she’d come to Norwich, to the University of East Anglia, that is, where she hadn’t known a soul, had she? But they’d gotten her sorted quick enough. That first Friday afternoon after class they’d pulled her out of the residence hall by force and hauled her down to their favorite pub for a pint, and then introduced her to all the other good pubs and also their chooms (Their what? Griffin thought. Oh, right, their chums), and when the holidays came round they’d dragged her home to meet their mums and dads, and it had all been ever so much foon, hadn’t it? Still, you could’ve knocked them down with a feather when they got invitations to the wedding, because they hadn’t neither of them ever come over to the States before, had they?

By the time the girls finished, they were holding hands, which Marguerite apparently took for a show of moral support between foreigners, because she asked if either of them was married or engaged. “Booth of us,” one of them replied, giving her partner’s hand a squeeze, “to each oother,” as if to admit that their sexual preference might be a local custom that hadn’t yet made its way across the pond. Apropos of nothing but her own embarrassment at not recognizing them as a couple, Marguerite then remarked she’d always wanted to go to England but never had, the reason being-and here she elbowed Harold-that nobody’d ever been nice enough to take her. “Women,” Harold said, turning again to Griffin. “They just never can give it a rest.”