The next morning, we stood beneath one of the screens at Penn Station, straddling our bags. My eyes were glued to the track assignments. Boots was less competitive in these situations. He reasoned that we had tickets, which meant we had seats, and that was as much thought as boarding a train required. I informed him that this was the approach of a tall white man with no hindrances in his history and no oppression in his genes.
“Does Penn Station have to be about the patriarchy?”
“It was torn down by men and put back up by men,” I said. “You tell me.”
I primed my muscles to lean in one direction or the other, willing my synapses to transfer the numbers to my brain faster. On cue, I grabbed his hand and made him bolt with me.
“Peconic, first two cars,” instructed a conductor. “Only the first two cars will open for Peconic.”
He sounded exasperated that we were not born knowing this.
Boots and I sat in a center row, our fingers interlaced in a jigsaw puzzle of bones. I watched as the landscape shifted from apartment complexes to shallow bodies of water, birds bobbing in concert with the telephone wires. Maybe, after we got married, we could live somewhere out here. Find a town the real estate boom hadn’t touched. Somewhere safe from memory or coincidence. A place so tiny, none of the train cars open, there’s just a little chute that spits you out onto the town cushion. I thought of Clive’s mother’s story, of the lottery and the towns filled with ghosts who would do anything to go back in time. Anything.
I shook the thought out of my head.
“Are you okay?” asked Boots, squeezing my hand.
Adam’s brother picked us up at the train station, where we were trailed by a woman who’d been on the train with us, only in a different car. She swallowed her name when introduced so I didn’t catch it. She also kept a close watch on her garment bag as it was being loaded into the trunk, showing no compunction about treating the brother like a butler. Boots, in the front seat, turned and widened his eyes at me.
“Everybody in?” asked the brother, even though we had our seatbelts on already.
I always forgot how life outside the city had a completely different texture. The days were easier here, warmer or cooler upon command. Being picked up in a car with no screen or meter affixed to the dashboard reminded me of childhood. But for all the surface comforts, the materials that made up this world were much harsher. Everything was coins in the console, gravel in the shoe, ticks in the grass, ice in the pipes, splinters on the wood. We passed Jess’s high school, a stucco palace in beige. It looked like a prison. An electronic sign was having a conniption fit about an impending baseball game.
The woman and I made small talk in the backseat, which smelled of wet dog. She was in the midst of subletting her apartment, which meant she kept asking me questions but getting pulled into an ongoing text exchange about keys. Eventually, we fell into a silence. It was only in the lobby of the hotel, hours later, where guests had congregated in anticipation of a van, that I heard her introduce herself as Georgette. I wondered how I managed not to have heard a name like that. She had the same reaction upon hearing my name, launching into the Kinks song:
“It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Loooow-la!”
“Yup, that’s it.”
“La-la-la-la Loooow-la!”
“It’s a good one.”
“Now that song’s gonna be stuck in my head the whole night,” Georgette said, accusatorily.
She sat with us in the van, Boots on one side of me and Georgette on the other. She wore orange lipstick and a silk jumpsuit with a deep V that she could get away with because she had no breasts to speak of. Her hair was up, revealing the parallel lines tattooed on her neck. Sobriety chic. She shook a sandaled foot in my direction. Her toenails were jagged, as if she’d been trimming them with her teeth.
“Do you remember the first wedding you ever went to?” she asked us, tucking a chunk of hair behind her ear that fell right back out. “I was like sixteen, which is disturbing because I remember going to plenty of funerals. I guess my family is better at dying than getting married. Anyway, I think it was in a roadside hotel in Reno, though that can’t be right, it was probably just like a hotel with bad carpeting but when you’re young you think all weddings should be in magical forests so a Radisson meeting room is a bummer. Have you ever been to Reno? The bad parts of town are also the sad parts of town, and how many places can you say that for?”
She looked at us like we were actually supposed to name some places. Then she changed the subject, talking about Jess and Adam in a gossipy way, deciding this was a safe space to let loose her theories about what the bride and groom saw in each other. She didn’t know either of us so this was a risky proposition. She’d dated Adam before he met Jess. Did we know that? We did not. Well, she did. Like right before and kind of during. She never really “got” Jess and, furthermore, did not enjoy how righteous Jess probably felt, agreeing to invite a woman Adam used to sleep with.
“Maybe she just likes you,” Boots offered.
Georgette snorted and went on, undeterred.
“Then where’s my thank-you for training him out of jackhammering her pussy? He used to jam all his fingers up there like it’s ‘To Build a Fire’ and he’s using me for warmth, like he wanted to use my fallopian tubes for mittens. Like there’s a fucking game show buzzer up there. Like you know what I want to know? Who are the bitches before me who just let it happen?”
Boots stared out the window, trying to distance himself from the conversation. It was like someone had skimmed off the most offensive parts of Vadis and dropped them into a whole new person. Vadis liked to shock him for sport, not because she couldn’t help it. But I stayed with Georgette, sensing that if I broke off as well, it would make things worse. Only once was there a natural pause, when the driver announced that we were approaching the goat farm. We looked out to see clouds rolling over a muted sun. Trees entered the window frame and left just as quickly. On a hill was an oxblood barn and, behind it, the very tip of a tent.
Georgette was seated at our table for the reception. We discovered that we shared a birthday, though she was two years behind me. She was enchanted by the coincidence, but I had just been told to expect them and thus had no reaction. The DJ probably had our birthday too. She confessed that meeting people with her birthday was jarring if they were younger, because she imagined them coming out of their mothers’ vaginas at the same moment she was eating her cake. She tried to will herself to stop imagining it but all she saw was icing and blood.
“Cake, placenta, cake, placenta, cake, placenta.”
I was exempt from this imagery because I was older.
“Though,” she mused, “if you want to imagine me coming out of my mother’s vagina, I can’t stop you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to ruin cake for myself.”
“I wouldn’t want to ruin vaginas for myself.”
Her collarbone was a speed bump that moved back and forth when she laughed. I couldn’t stop looking at her, unsure if I was attracted or repelled.
Then she kissed me. Sudden and efficient. An errand. I scanned the crowd for Boots, who had his back turned. I said nothing, mostly because I knew she did it to get a reaction out of me. Clive used to do this with zits or papercuts, less because he cared to show me, more because he was daring me to be scandalized. I wasn’t. Georgette had a similar expression—flirty but smug, like she knew what I was thinking. But what I was thinking was: What if I left Boots for you, Georgette? But then what if it ended and we were stuck in some twisted time loop manned by my former boss? Would I want to be haunted by you then? Would we be with anyone if we knew we could never get rid of each other?
“Go like this,” Georgette said, gesturing for me to wipe lipstick from my face.
I put my fingers to my lips but found myself rubbing instead of wiping.
For the first hour of the reception, Boots talked to everyone but Georgette. He was in his element and this conversational bully was encroaching on his turf. Though he had to touch down at our table eventually and, a few drinks in, he began to find her amusing. He had the tenor of the wedding on his side. It was from this place of confidence that he asked her questions about her life, taking her side against the landlords and collection agencies that oppressed her, nodding at her tales of friends who’d overdosed as if he’d ever known a single person who’d ever overdosed. In return, we let her in on a few prized private jokes. Like how, when we were first dating, we used to play this game called “How Much Would Someone Have to Pay Me to Kill You?” It was more money with each date.
And so the three of us became one. We danced together, moving our bodies far away from one another and meeting in the middle like we were folding a flag. We became keenly aware when one of us was in a porta-potty or trapped with someone dull. We followed one another on social media. Jess’s maid of honor gave a speech about how deserving Jess was of Adam’s love. I stifled my giggles as Georgette mimed Adam’s fingers, scooping the air. I could sense the night’s events unfold before us: Normally, Boots would barely look at another woman—he was puritanical about it, his loyalty wound so tightly around his identity that it choked out every other impulse—but Georgette would be our first threesome. I crossed my legs toward her under the table, bumping my bare calf against the warm silk of her jumpsuit and keeping it there. My abdomen tightened in anticipation of the experience.
“And when is this happening?” Georgette asked with a frozen smile.
She was gesturing at my ring. I could tell she hated it.
“Next fall,” Boots said, looking at me to confirm.
“Long time from now,” Georgette said.
“Georgette can be our witness!” Boots blurted out. “Or our officiant. Is that the same thing? A celebrant?”
“A priestess,” she decided.
“Yes, a priestess!”
I’d known men who became different people, barbarous people, when they drank, and so I knew I was lucky in that Boots became generous. If we owned a house, he would have given away the deed to a stranger in a bar by now. Once inebriated, he became like my parents in this way. All someone would have to do was ask nicely. This was why he was not allowed into a casino unsupervised. And why I sometimes woke at 2 a.m. to the sound of glass blowers or potters in my living room, bragging about the size of their kilns. Of course they could stay over, no problem.
“If we ever get married!” he added.
“Ooookay,” I muttered, shifting his drink around the centerpiece.
“Let’s just do it at city hall,” he decided. “We could do it when we get back. The building’s there, we’re there, the celebrants are there.”
“Whatever we do,” I said, “maybe we should plan further out than Monday.”
Georgette circled a spoon inside her coffee cup.
“Hey,” she said, “I get it. I’m never getting married.”
“There’s nothing to get,” I said.
“Yeah, there’s nothing to get. We’re married.”
“Well, no,” I said, “we’re not.”
“Why do you have to say ‘we’re not’ like that?”
“I’m not saying it like anything, I’m saying it like facts get said.”
“Georgette,” he said, turning away from me at a defiant angle, “you just haven’t met the right person.”
I could sense where this was headed and was frustrated by his delay in picking it up. He was trying to buck up his new friend. But she did not need bucking.
“People aren’t for me,” Georgette explained, diplomatically, “not like that.”
“What does that mean?”
“See that spry-looking woman to the right of Adam’s grandma?”
She raised her spoon between her eyes like a hunting dog’s paw. A tall Black woman with a tight ponytail was nursing something with a lime in it. Georgette told us how she’d met the woman when they were forced to participate in one of those dumb college orientation activities during which people are split into pairs and told to ask each other the most important question they can think of. The nebulous purpose of the exercise was to illuminate the priorities of the asker. Georgette sat across from the woman and asked her if she thought there was a God. Yes, the woman said, of course there’s a God. Then, when it was her turn, the woman asked Georgette to marry her. The woman kept asking every time she saw her for the next year. The proposals became a ceremonial greeting, a joke that was never quite a joke. And Georgette would say no as they continued on with their lopsided friendship.
After four years of this nonsense, Georgette decided to surprise the woman by driving up to Cape Cod over spring break, where her parents were renting a house. Listening to a playlist the woman had given her, Georgette began to think that she did want to marry her after all. She saw their lives spread out before them. When she arrived, the driveway was packed with cars so Georgette parked on the street. She checked her face in the visor and walked up to the house. She was about to knock when she heard sounds coming from the back porch. She went around to see the woman, her whole family, and another woman she recognized from her Intro to East Asian Literature seminar and her whole family. Mylar balloons spelled out congratulations.
As it turned out, the woman with the lime in her drink had been asking “every twat on campus,” figuring one of them would say yes eventually. It was an insurance policy for a good story. And all this woman really wanted was a good story. Georgette had gotten wrapped up in someone else’s dream. Standing with her at the side of the house, all she could think about was the long drive home and how terrible it would be. But then, as she left, she asked the woman one more time: Do you still think there’s a God? The woman said yes, of course.
“Then I got into my car and never had another romantic feeling about her again. Never missed her a day in my life. This is the first time I’ve seen her since. She looks good.”
Boots blinked as Georgette punctuated her story with a bite of cold steak, licking sauce from her fork so that the back of her tongue got the first taste.
“I think we might be missing something,” he said.
“There’s nothing to miss,” she said, shrugging. “It takes people years to learn what I learned in two seconds.”
“Which is?”
“Everyone is living separate narratives. Marriage is agreeing to live in someone else’s narrative.”
“And to think Jess and Adam didn’t ask you to officiate,” Boots said.
“Listen, she believes a relationship is a good story in the same way she believes in God. People need these fairy tales to function. Let them have them, but I don’t have to live in any narrative but my own. It’s not that I refuse to participate in this”—she made a gesture that encompassed the stars above the tent—“because I don’t want to get hurt. It’s because there’s no such thing as a partner. I’m sorry, but there’s not. What a batshit word for the person whose genitalia you see the most often. There are glorified assistants, glorified bosses, and glorified safety blankets and that’s all she wrote.”
“That’s only slightly cynical,” Boots said.
He eyed a clump of friends in the corner. They would not hurt his brain.
“Do I sound mad about it?” she asked.
“You sound resigned,” I said.
“And bitter,” Boots added, “like a bitter person.”
I winced. There would be no threesomes tonight. Georgette was talking to the one man in the world who was unsettled by this type of logic, who found a fear of commitment to be a character flaw.
“I just refuse to live my life in response to external pressures and stimuli.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” I asked, leaning forward and looking into her eyes until I could make out the reflection of tent lights in them.
“Yes,” she said, as if she knew what Clive had shown me. “You just have to learn how to fight it.”
“Okay, well,” Boots said, slapping his knees, “I’m going to stimulate myself at the bar. Lola, while I’m gone maybe you can decide if our life is a narrative sham.”
“Don’t go,” I said.
“I’m not going. I’m going to the bar.”
He yanked his jacket down. I wondered if I should join him. Was I supposed to join him? I had no interest in being Georgette’s accomplice. I, too, was skeptical of the notion that our life together was a “narrative sham.” But I was not offended by the questioning. That was the difference. Not only did Boots not want to rock the boat, he refused to acknowledge the boat was on water. Or that we were in it.
Georgette and I were the only ones left at our table. Everyone else was dancing. She fished a weed pen out of a pouch in her jumpsuit and offered it to me. I shook my head. She shrugged and inhaled. Guests ambled around the perimeter of the dance floor, following the scent of butter cream. Bridesmaids adjusted themselves for a photographer, hands on their hips, elbows in the next time zone.
“Actually, yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
The smoke was stripper-sweet. I preferred the earthy burn of joints, but this was potent enough. At the bar, Boots was ensconced in a conversation with the groom, being recharged by one of the evening’s celebrities. I knew how that conversation went, a series of familiar nouns being bandied about, devolving into a language textbook. Jess and I just came back from Napa. Did you rent a car? It is easier if you rent a car. I had to pee but the slog to the porta-potties was prohibitive. I wanted to speed up time. How many hours, I wondered, until the post-wedding brunch, which was being held at a nearby antiques store that doubled as a diner, which did not strike me as a hygienic business model.
“And,” Georgette asked, blowing smoke out the side of her mouth, “where are the motherfucking goats? I mean, have you seen a single goat?”
A caterpillar crawled along the edge of the table, swung once, and fell.
“I have no idea. Asleep.”
“You’ll be okay, you know. Think of this like Pre-Cana counseling.”
“Think of what as Pre-Cana counseling?”
“These kinds of conversations. You can’t base your life on fear and guilt. You gotta do what you gotta do because you can’t do it twice. You can’t go back in time.”
“Maybe you can.”
“I’m just saying you’ll be fine, la-la-la-la Lola. Here, watch this.”
She put the pen on the table and placed one hand on her heart and one on mine, her fingers practically at my neck. She told me to be quiet even though I hadn’t said anything.
“I knew it,” she said, resuming vaping. “Your heart is bigger than mine because it’s been broken so many times.”
Was Georgette the Ghost of Christmas Present?
“Did Clive send you?”
“Who?” She laughed and coughed at the same time.
Boots returned, recharged, with two glasses in his hand and a cigarette rocking in his mouth like a loose tooth.
“You don’t smoke,” I said.
“Ith fur you,” he said, in a better mood now.
“My hero, my murderer.”
Georgette dug into her pouch once more to produce a few pale pills. She inspected one, bit it in half, and chased it with a glass of tonic water. Evidently, the sobriety only applied to liquids.
“Nice,” Boots said, almost meanly.
“Fuck,” Georgette said, vigorously rubbing her arms. “Why is it so cold?”
“Because we’re on a farm,” he said.
Neither of us cared to fight this logic. Boots was still irritable and he and I were no longer an intriguing conversational experiment for Georgette, forget a sexual one. We were pusillanimous and predictable. It was as if we’d all gone to the movies together and Boots and I insisted on staying for the credits and this is how she knew that we were not her people.
“The point is,” she said, as if wrapping up a speech, “you guys seem perfect for each other.”
Whether this was a dig or sincerity did not matter. What mattered was how I’d allowed myself to feel aligned with this stranger. And how I now felt aligned with neither of them. I had the urge to walk down the road, to keep walking until I came to a bus stop, take the bus as far as it went, transfer to another bus, and just circle the globe like that until I died. Instead, the three of us shifted in place, surveying the gaiety, the grass cold against the arches of my feet. Tomorrow’s brunch would bring the dual aroma of bacon grease and mothballs. But, and this I guessed correctly, Georgette would not be there. She’d probably never attended a wedding brunch in her life. Too much of an extension of the day before.
In the moonlight, I could see the glint of a safety pin at the zenith of her jumpsuit, the flimsy mechanism holding it together.