Cece unbuttoned her shirt. It was like she was letting something out of it, a bird or a snake, she did it so carefully. Garrett could see the trompe l’oeil of a bikini where her skin wasn’t tan, could smell the fermented-juice smell of the lake, but it was as if he was experiencing these things indirectly, through the derangement of his happiness. He did not know he could be happy like this. They were on a beach of polished stones. He stepped toward Cece and his heart sloshed, spilling its sides. Until this moment, it had been an empty thing. He’d been window-shopping at the store of life. She smiled at him, in that lopsided way, and kissed Garrett on the mouth.
He woke up in his bed, feeling a loss that made him gasp. Dark outside, or almost dark: the edges of his windows, where the blinds let in light, were blue. Garrett touched himself, an act of despair. Any brief pleasure he felt was immediately negated by the mess he made of his boxers. Was there anything in the world as wretched as a man coming on himself? It was the opposite of praying. Garrett wormed out of his boxers and walked them to his laundry basket.
He glanced at the clock on his dresser. Eight sixteen p.m. He was late to Charlie’s bachelor party. Charlie, his best friend. Only friend, at this point, besides his father. Garrett had been so exhausted after work—he’d been up till three a.m. the night before, his head filled with visions of Charlie’s fiancée—that he’d lain down to rest and must have fallen asleep.
Garrett opened the blinds. Despite the complex’s name—Elm Creek Apartments—there were no creeks nearby or anything resembling an elm. Instead there was a view of some abandoned train cars, going slowly to rust. Droughty weeds grew in the stretches of track and around the rusted couplers of the train cars. It was the sort of view that would make for a quaintly evocative photo in a San Francisco art gallery but that in real life was depressing as shit. Someone had had the bright idea of paving a bike path in front of the abandoned railroad tracks, so that occasionally Garrett would look up from his dinner and see someone zipping by his window on Rollerblades, peering in at him as if at an animal in the zoo.
He retreated to the bathroom, remembering how giddy he’d felt after that day at Glacier: tasting wines with Cece, watching her face light up when she’d seen him sitting in his truck. How she’d put the binoculars to her face and jumped back in surprise. He’d driven home with the windows down, his heart filling like a sail, singing along to some atrocious song on the radio. “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” The memory of her hand gripping his, refusing to let go even after he’d released it, squeezing for so long it became almost verbal, a silent confession, like a note being passed under the desk—seconds? years? it was impossible to tell—more intimate, somehow, than a kiss. Had he lost his fucking mind? Had he thought, somehow, the wedding wouldn’t happen? That Cece would…what? Run away with him? Charlie’s best friend? It wasn’t like he’d forgotten about the wedding. Just that it no longer seemed real to him—or if it seemed real, it was mysteriously irrelevant.
He splashed his face with cold water and watched it drip from his chin. Of course, he’d invented it all: Cece’s desire for his company, her reluctance to see him go that night. She hadn’t held on to his hand after he’d escorted her from the cliff. He’d imagined this too. He might as well have been a guide dog. In fact, she’d called him a fuckface. How idiotic could he be? She was furious at him for dragging her up there. When he’d come back to fix the Margolises’ fence, she’d made a point of not being home—or pretending not to be, since her car was sitting in the driveway.
She’d felt sorry for him—who wouldn’t?—but could barely stomach talking to him.
Garrett studied his hair in the mirror, the way you could see through to the scalp when he bowed his head. In a few years there’d be little left. The mole on the side of his chin, too, was getting molier. Not to mention the frostbite scar on his cheek, which she couldn’t help pointing out. It turned white in winter, like a ptarmigan.
No doubt he disgusted her. He was like that goat they’d seen on the trail. Why else would she have sniffed her fingers?
Driving to the Margolises’ house, Garrett kept his eyes on a logging truck stacked with cedar trunks, which stuck out the back like unsharpened pencils. He had no desire to go to a bachelor party, Charlie’s or anybody else’s, but he knew from past experience that reneging on the basic requirements of friendship was a slippery slope. It’s why he had only one friend left to begin with. Now that Garrett had survived his own misery, he felt a clammy airsick foreboding that he recognized as guilt. Not just for falling in happiness with Charlie’s fiancée—he refused to call it “love”; it couldn’t be love; he wasn’t a monster—but for being such a shit friend. Charlie had called him how many times since flying in? Six? Garrett hadn’t even managed to listen to the voicemails, perhaps because he’d worried Charlie might become real again. He’d forgotten, for a brief period, that Charles Isaac Margolis existed. But he did exist; he did; Garrett was driving to his house, suddenly petrified of seeing him in person.
And it wasn’t just Charlie he feared. The whole gang would be there, everyone he’d lived with at Middlebury. Garrett had avoided them, more or less successfully, since college. He couldn’t bear to talk about Elias—or worse, watch them dance around the subject, pretending their friend had never existed.
Garrett had to keep himself from veering into the parked cars in the driveway, so accustomed was he to pulling right up to the door. He parked on the side of the road instead, listening to the tangle of drunken voices on the porch. The house blazed with light. What had he been thinking? A party? Garrett felt a twirl of anger, as if the people on the porch had no right to be there—as if, in fact, they’d stolen something precious from him. His time alone with Cece seemed as distant, as improbable, as his dream.
How strange it was to walk up the steps of the porch, where she’d stared at him that night through binoculars. The same ones now resting on the railing.
“You look like hell,” Brig Atherton said fondly after locking Garrett in a hug. He was wearing an enormous cowboy hat, as if he’d ridden in a cattle drive from New York City. Brig did something with rich people’s money, helping them come up with “risk management strategies.” He had an apartment on the Upper West Side. This was a guy who’d occasionally shat his pants from drunkenness in college. “What? Do they keep those airline counters open all night?”
“I’m a ramp agent,” Garrett said.
“I thought you worked behind the counter, taking tickets.”
“Nope.”
Brig took off his hat. “So you’re like one of those guys on the runway? Holding the sticks?”
“Wands. Yeah.”
“Cool,” he said unconvincingly.
Garrett appreciated, at least, that he’d asked. The other old acquaintances he’d run into who knew something about his life had been reluctant to even ask about it, assuming he’d be embarrassed. Brig, however, was too drunk to care. He offered Garrett a cup of beer. Garrett accepted it. Marcus Porter offered him one too, which he was forced to accept as well. Johnny Hyong—navigating the porch in a deliberate way, as if it were the deck of a boat—hugged him vigorously, though with both hands full Garrett could only stand there like a robot. His old friends laughed. Unlike Garrett, they all had wives and families and fully functional stoves that weren’t portable electric burners salvaged from Goodwill. Somehow this had not prevented them from aging poorly. Johnny’s hairline was faring worse than Garrett’s and had shrunk to a landing strip on top, as if it had been bikini-waxed. Brig had a potbelly and the nascent mudslide of a double chin, which he’d failed to disguise under a beard. Marcus, an athlete in college, was as trim as ever—though he currently walked like someone’s grandpa, hobbling to the keg for another beer. A torn meniscus, he explained.
“You seemed fine last night at the Lazy Bear,” Brig said, “talking to those female river guides.”
“Ask Brig about his hat,” Marcus said.
“What’s with the hat?” Garrett asked.
“I won it in a pool game.”
“ ‘Won,’ in this case, means ‘lost,’ ” said Johnny.
“I didn’t say I won the game,” Brig said. “Just the hat. Some rancher dude gave it to me.”
“The term is ‘dude rancher,’ ” Marcus said.
“ ‘Gave,’ in this case, means ‘left it on the table while he went to the bathroom,’ ” Johnny explained.
Garrett couldn’t help relaxing somewhat, remembering how much fun he used to have with his old housemates. They’d played in a band together at the Mill, Beastly Baby, which was mostly an excuse to get drunk and come up with dopey cock-rock riffs to crack each other up. (Their best song, “Katzenjammer Morning,” was only fractionally better than their worst, “Poststructuralist Jockstrap.”) They’d skied together at the ancient resort near campus, shouting at each other from the wooden bouncy chairs of its lift and forcing Brig and Marcus, both beginners, down expert runs. They were smart enough not to have to study very hard and generally regarded life as a thing impossible to fuck up, like some foolproof joke. When it turned out not to be a joke—turned out, in fact, to be unsuitably tragic—Garrett’s friends adjusted to this new unsuitable life and did what they could to suit it. After all, it wasn’t that difficult. You just did what people expected of you, fueled by the fear of what would happen if you didn’t. You graduated from college, then went to med school or found an internship in the right company, and the rest just sort of scripted itself.
What had surprised Garrett was how easy it was not to follow the script. To blue-pencil yourself from it completely. That fear and happiness might have something in common.
Now, double-fisted, Garrett felt a stirring of warmth toward these old friends he barely knew anymore. A comforting pity too. They were like children, children who had children. He asked them where Charlie was.
“Good question,” Marcus said. “I think he smoked too much kush.”
Charlie’s brothers emerged from the house, wearing matching T-shirts with vintage woodie wagons on them.
“Hey, where’s the man of the hour?” Brig asked. Charlie’s brothers shrugged in unison. Garrett barely recognized them. He’d spent a Thanksgiving at the Margolises’ in college when Bradley was still playing with light sabers; now the onetime aspiring Jedi accepted a pipe from Johnny’s hand and took a supersized hit. The smoke, when he eventually exhaled, was ectoplasmic. Garrett tried to give his extra beer to Jake, who declined the offer.
“I’m sticking to Tums right now,” Jake said, touching his stomach.
They all stared at him.
“It’s not that! I’ve got an acid reflux thing. Acts up when I’m drinking.”
“Thank god,” Marcus said.
“Anyway, I avoided Dad like the plague—Mom was the one in the trenches.” Jake looked at his brother. “Isn’t that what Woody said? It only spreads through direct contact.”
“Fecal-oral route,” Bradley said, nodding. “Though infected particles can end up on doorknobs. Oh, and toilet plumes? He mentioned that too. Those are plumes from the toilet.”
Brig, who’d ended up with the pipe, examined the mouthpiece.
“You guys all lived together at Middlebury?” Jake asked, changing the subject.
“Nauseating, isn’t it?” Marcus said. “Like a college catalog.”
“Just not Middlebury’s,” Johnny said.
“We had to lure Marcus away from the tennis team.”
“They warned me I’d be the only Black person living at the Mill.”
Brig took a hit and smogged the porch with smoke. “Just like you’re currently the only Black person in Montana.”
“That cannot be true.”
“If you spend more than two weeks here you turn white. It’s the water. Even your shit comes out white.”
Johnny took the pipe from Brig. “Actually, I saw a Korean kid at the IGA today.”
“Probably adopted.”
“Definitely adopted. Dad’s name was Tanner.”
“Or they stole it.”
“The mother kept looking at me,” Johnny said, “as if I was the birth father come to claim it.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Brig said. “Did she have a fanny pack?” This was a joke, referring to a famous hookup of Johnny’s who’d apparently come to a party at the Mill wearing a fanny pack. It only occurred to Garrett now, ten years later, that the accessory might have been functional: contained something vital to her well-being, like insulin pens. “The important thing is that everybody’s here.”
“Well, almost everybody,” Marcus said.
The revelers went quiet. Brig flashed Marcus a dirty look, one Garrett wasn’t supposed to see, then stared into his cup. Everyone, in fact, seemed abundantly interested in their beers. Garrett waited for the sickening snowstorm to begin. Had he really believed he could do this? Consort with human beings, old friends? His heart was a haunted doll living in a box. One of the windows of the house popped open, suddenly, of its own accord. The men on the porch stared at it.
Brig lifted his beer to the open window, like a toast, and then the rest of Garrett’s friends did too. Garrett, incredibly, did this as well. He had two beers still and lifted them both. “Speech!” Marcus said to the window. It did not respond.
“Where the fuck is Charlie?” Jake said finally.
Brig shrugged. “Probably ran off into the woods.”
“Are you kidding? Guy’s madly in love.”
“Well, monogamy will cure that soon enough,” Johnny said bitterly. Garrett faintly remembered hearing, probably from Charlie, that the guy had separated from his wife. They had twins: identical boys.
“If he went anywhere,” Marcus said, “it was to go find Cece.”
Garrett’s heart leapt. “She’s here?”
Brig gave him an affronted look. “Have you been to a bachelor party before?”
“No.”
Garrett’s old housemates glanced at one another. He’d declined to attend their weddings.
“Cece’s down at Finley Point,” Marcus said. “The women all went camping and are, you know, womanizing.”
“Poor Charles,” Johnny said. “It’s not too late for an intervention. He hasn’t started talking about sump pumps yet. As soon as he gets a sump pump, it’s all lost.” He took a hit from the pipe in his hand. “You know what H. L. Mencken said about marriage, right?”
“Here we go again.”
“ ‘The longest sentence you can form with two words is I do.’ ”
Garrett smiled vaguely. It was strange to hear his own opinions echoing from someone else’s mouth. Stranger still, they annoyed him. Not for the first time, he wondered whether his opinions were based on anything he truly believed. What if his whole belief system was just, like, an advanced form of Tourette’s? He said one thing without thinking about it, maybe just to fill the silence, which forced him to defend the thing with another, which forced him to defend this with another, and so on, until he had to explain these meaningless noises to himself by pretending he’d made them for a reason.
He went to the second floor in search of Charlie and passed a door with a homemade sign on it that read Biohazard Area—god, was he actually back in college?—then found his way into a bedroom that smelled like mothballs. A lace bra hung from the post of the antique bed, fluttering in the breeze from the casement window. Cece’s, no doubt. Garrett stared at it. Perhaps Charlie had taken it off himself. Garrett unthreaded the bra from the post and stuffed it into the front pocket of his jeans. This was not a conscious perverted choice but a mad spasm, a burst of jealousy. He would have some forbidden piece of her. What an animal he was! Cece was right. He was basically a goat.
He wandered over to the open window, recognizing it as the same one he’d yelled up to from the backyard, that morning when Cece had refused to get out of bed. Garrett squinted out the window. Charlie was perched at the edge of the roof in the moonlight, standing with his back to the house. The guy—a doctor, an anesthesiologist—was smoking a cigarette.
Garrett crawled through the window onto the roof. His armpits were sweaty. Had he forgotten deodorant? Charlie, absorbed in his cigarette, did not seem to notice him. Garrett had a strange thought. He could sneak up goatishly on his hands and knees and butt Charlie off the roof, whereupon he might very well break his neck. How easy it would be! Bump, oopsy-daisy, over the edge. Charlie, drunk, might easily have lost his footing…
Wasn’t this a plot—a movie—he’d seen before? Young widow, devastated by grief, winds up in the arms of the groom’s best friend.
At the very least, Charlie would be seriously hurt. The wedding would have to be postponed.
Garrett’s mouth tasted like chalk. He pictured Cece in the bedroom: her face, fogged with lust, as Charlie unhooked her bra. It played in Garrett’s mind, choking him with jealousy. The roof seemed to have steepened. Mountain goats laughed at gravity; their hooves were like suction cups. Lowering his head, chafing his knees on the uneven shingles, Garrett tried creeping down the roof on all fours before realizing this was humanly impossible and shifting onto his butt and sliding down that way, toddler-style, imagining Cece and Charlie on their wedding night—how ghastly this was, monstrous, as if he were imagining a crime—until at last, practically within reach, Garrett stopped. Dear god, what was he doing? Crickets chirred in the trees. He stood up quickly. Startled, Charlie reeled around drunkenly and stepped into the rain gutter. Garrett grabbed him with both hands, keeping him from tumbling off the roof.
“You almost killed me!” Charlie shouted.
“Don’t you mean ‘saved your life’?”
Charlie peered over the edge, cigarette tweezed between two fingers. In reality, the drop wasn’t far enough to do much damage. “Oh,” he said gratefully. “In that case. Cece would just about kill me if I died.” Charlie looked at Garrett, then down at his feet. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
“For what?”
“The thing, you know, about being killed.”
Garrett frowned, wondering if he should make him say Elias’s name directly. It would be worth it, almost, to see him squirm. But then Charlie would just say the thing he always said, about as convincing a lie as saying your phone’s been acting up. You didn’t kill him. It wasn’t your fault.
Garrett sat down on the shingles. He felt suddenly exhausted. Charlie—very carefully, or drunkenly, or carefully-drunkenly—sat down beside him.
“What the hell are you doing out here anyway?” Garrett asked.
“I didn’t want anyone to see me smoking.” Charlie took a drag, then blew the smoke expertly out his nose. “I hate people who smoke. It’s like the worst thing you can do to your heart. Basically starves it of oxygen.”
“I know the feeling.”
Charlie laughed. He offered him a smoke, holding out a soft pack of Marlboros. Garrett took one. Charlie insisted he take the whole pack—he didn’t want it in his possession.
“You know, it sounds exciting, being a doctor, but mostly what I do is fill out forms. I’m a bureaucrat, basically. Bartleby, the anesthesiologist!” Charlie shouted.
“Shut the hell up over there!” someone yelled.
“I would prefer not to!”
There was a slam from the house next door, followed by the groan of a screen door.
“That’s Mr. Petersdorf,” Charlie explained. “He collects traffic cones.”
“Wow,” Garrett said, failing to make a joke. His jealousy had alchemized into guilt. “Your brother’s not feeling great.”
“Oh god,” Charlie said. “Bradley?” He looked stricken.
“Jake.”
“If he’s got norovirus, I’ll kill him.”
“I’m sure it’s not that,” Garrett said.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Charlie said, in what sounded like genuine relief. “It’s like old times, smoking on the roof of the Mill.”
“Except we’d be smoking Viceroys.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you return my calls?”
“My phone’s been acting up,” Garrett said.
“You’re still going to officiate the wedding, right? Cece’s freaking out.”
Garrett nodded, staring at the smoke from his cigarette.
“I’m counting on you,” Charlie said earnestly. “I told her you always come through in the end. You’re like the Rocky Balboa of friendship.” He dropped his hand from Garrett’s shoulder. “You’ve written it, right? What you’re going to say?”
“Of course.”
“I bet it’s fucking timeless. Is it fucking timeless?”
Garrett opened his mouth to tell him the truth—that in fact it was so timeless it didn’t even exist—but Charlie raised his hand to shush him.
“I don’t want to ruin it. Surprise us.”
Garrett looked above him, at the galactic scar tissue of the Milky Way. It seemed like a figuration of his guilt. He blew some smoke at it. Laughter rose from the front porch, eerily amplified by the lake.
“You’re missing your bachelor party,” Garrett said.
Charlie shrugged. “Do you want the embarrassing truth?”
“Sure.”
“Johnny keeps telling me to enjoy my last gasp of freedom, whatever that means, but I don’t give a rat’s ass about that. Only people with traffic cones care about that stuff.” He flicked his cigarette off the roof. “You know in those old cartoons, where somebody gets shot with a cannonball and it just leaves that big gaping hole in their stomach? That’s what I feel like when I get drunk without Cece. I start to miss her terribly. I’d do anything to hear her voice. Like if someone told me to, I don’t know, cut off my nose and she’d have cell service in her tent right now, I’d probably do it.”
“I know what you mean,” Garrett said.
Charlie looked at him. “You do?”
“I mean, she seems like a real find. One in a million.” He blushed at these platitudes.
“Has she been acting weird to you at all?” Charlie said. “When you helped out with the fence and stuff?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s just so distracted all the time. I talk to her and it’s like talking to the wall. She’s always going out to the orchard, but there’s nothing to pick. Plus she can’t sleep. The other night I woke up at three in the morning and she wasn’t in bed.”
“Where was she?”
“Down at the dock. She was high as a kite, checking out the stars in the middle of the night.”
Garrett could picture her perfectly, curled in an Adirondack chair with a flip-flop dangling from one foot. “Probably it’s the stress of the wedding,” he managed.
“You think so?”
“Everyone acts weird before they get married.”
“She does this thing, where she chews her lip and smiles at the same time. It should be illegal. Even when she’s mad at me, I just want to kiss her. Especially when she’s mad. She says the most amazing things. Like she told me I was ‘a pisspot.’ A pisspot!”
“When did she call you a pisspot?”
“I tried to take her skiing last year,” Charlie said, “and she freaked out on the traverse.”
“Did she sit down and refuse to move?”
“How’d you know?”
“She did the same thing up at Glacier. When we went hiking. She insulted a goat.”
Charlie straightened. “You went hiking together?”
“Yeah,” Garrett said, surprised she hadn’t told him. “Like over a week ago?” Charlie’s eyes, in the moonlight, looked newly alert. “On the Highline Trail? I had to drag her up there.”
“Probably she told me,” Charlie said. “I just forgot.”
“There’s a lot going on.”
Charlie stared at the blizzard of stars. “What a pisspot,” he muttered. “A piss-barrel.” He frowned at Garrett. “What did you do with my cigarettes?”
“You told me to take them away from you.”
“Some bachelor party. Don’t be an asshole.”
Garrett reached into the wrong pocket of his jeans and pulled out a strap of Cece’s bra.
“What’s that?” Charlie asked.
“Nothing.”
“A fanny pack?”
“No.”
“You and Johnny.”
Charlie threw his arm around him affectionately, as if they were still in college. Garrett handed him the Marlboros, and he plucked one out before hunching over to light it. While he was busy with the cigarette, Garrett sneaked Cece’s bra from his pocket and threw it off the roof. He watched it parachute into the dark. Something spread out mystically before him: an alternate future, in which he rejoined the world and stopped neglecting his friends, possibly even did something with his life. All he had to do was leap. There was some laughter from the bedroom. Garrett turned to see Johnny and Marcus grinning at them from the window, Johnny holding up a jewelry bag of coke.
“Hey, they’re out here on the roof!” Johnny called behind him. “Rekindling their friendship!”
Cece followed Paige, her best friend from high school, to the rockiest site in the campground. Cece couldn’t complain—or didn’t feel like she could—since Paige had organized this whole camping trip herself, driving the six hundred miles from Portland on what seemed like the gale of her own enthusiasm. What Paige’s enthusiasm could not do was pitch a proper tent, at least the one she and Cece were sharing. Fitting the fiberglass poles together proved more difficult than she’d imagined. She refused to let Cece help. Eventually, after watching the other bachelorettes easily erect theirs, Paige wrestled the tent into a domeless brown shape that resembled a giant turd. She picked up the nylon bag the tent had come in and shook out a few remaining pebbles.
“Shit,” Paige said. “Where are the spike thingies?”
“The stakes?”
“They were supposed to be in the bag.”
Cece laughed. “You brought an inflatable sofa but no tent stakes?”
Paige found some rocks and began securing the corners of the tent with them. “It’s okay! These will do it!”
Perhaps she was right: there wasn’t much wind, just a light breeze feathering Paige’s hair. She still wore the same scarlet lipstick she’d worn in tenth grade—still had the same unfortunate tattoo, a bracelet of barbed wire, that she’d gotten in 1994, hoping to impress a UCLA student she’d met at a Smashing Pumpkins concert. The only thing missing was the joint hidden in her bra. Cece half-expected her to start talking about Señor Ramirez, the Spanish teacher they used to concoct perverted fantasies about. And yet this girl with a barbed wire tattoo was a successful executive—did market research for Nike—and had a one-year-old at home who’d just learned to walk. (She’d shown Cece a video of his first steps, the kid staggering to his crib like a drunk.)
They sat on a log together, sharing some bourbon from Paige’s thermos. “What do you think the boys are doing right now?” Paige asked, clearly delighted that Charlie’s friends were stuck having their bachelor party at the house while they did the stereotypically manlier thing. She was one of those people, handy to know, who saw life as a competition that could only be won through aggressive remarketing. “I mean, besides talking about pussy.”
“I kind of doubt Charlie’s talking about pussy,” Cece said.
“You’re right. They’re probably just watching porn.”
“Charlie doesn’t watch porn.”
Paige laughed. “All men watch porn.”
“I really don’t think Charlie does,” Cece said. Why did she sound, god, disappointed?
“Well, just wait till you’re married,” Paige said.
“Said watches porn?”
“Dunno. I hope so. I know I would, if I had any time. I only get to do it on business trips.” Said, Paige’s husband, was a stay-at-home dad. She laughed at Cece’s face, whatever involuntary expression it was making. “Oh, it’s not his fault. We’re so exhausted all the time we can hardly kiss each other good night.”
Cece took a swig of bourbon, feeling sick to her stomach. Growing up, Paige had been the girl in the class who always had a boyfriend, sometimes two: the sort of serial romancer who thought little of stealing someone’s lover for good or just hooking up with him behind the gymnasium at a dance while his girlfriend drunkenly bellowed his name. There’d been a joke in eleventh grade: Don’t let your boyfriend get Paiged. Cece had enjoyed watching Paige run rampant. Though she’d worried about her too, in a smugly superior way: what it portended for her future. Certainly Cece had never imagined her getting married. It seemed about as likely as Paige becoming a high-powered executive.
“How did you know you wanted to get married?” Cece asked her now.
Paige looked at her. “Oh dear,” she said seriously. “Shit. Are you getting cold feet?”
“No. I mean, I just never thought, you know, when we were kids—you seemed to like twisting guys around your finger so much and then, well…”
“Dumping them on their ass?”
“Yeah.”
“Promwrecker, they called me,” Paige said nostalgically. She threw an arm around Cece. “I was just joking about the porn. Being a stinkwad. Charlie’s going to be an amazing husband.”
“I know.”
“What’s wrong? You’re worried about his mother?”
Cece nodded, happy to change the subject.
“Look, it’s probably just a coincidence.”
“A coincidence that she’s throwing up, two days after his dad got sick?”
“Well, maybe not. But it doesn’t mean it’s going to turn into a puke-fest. They found a hotel room, did they not?”
“Motel,” Cece said. Charlie’s parents had moved into quarantine yesterday, when they realized it wasn’t food poisoning. Both the Salish Inn and the Serenity Shore Cabins were booked through the weekend, mostly with wedding guests, so they’d had to take a room at a Motel 6.
“The wedding’s not for three days,” Paige said. “Everything will be fine.”
She dipped into the woods behind their tent, presumably to pee. “Come on!” she said to Cece. Paige pulled down her shorts and squatted there half-naked, waiting for Cece, who yanked her jeans down as well and squatted beside her. She held Paige’s hand. They used to do this as kids, peeing together at the beach during a bonfire or else at the golf course after sneaking over the fence to slam vodka shots. (The litter box, Paige used to call the sand pit at the golf course.) The smell of urine and pine needles evoked precisely itself. It was so stupid and gross, but Cece felt like she might start crying. Paige was married. She was about to get married too. Eventually they’d be dead.
Pulling her shorts back on, Paige cursed herself for forgetting to bring her boric acid capsules. She worried she might be getting a yeast infection. Concealing her tears, Cece said that she might have some in her Dopp kit.
“Hey,” Paige said, waggling her eyebrows.
“What?”
“We’re talking about pussy.”
They walked over to join the others: Esther and Ushi and Colleen and Akriti, all friends of Cece’s from Pitzer except for Akriti, whom she’d met in med school. Paige grabbed some portable speakers from the car, eager to get the bachelorette party started. Or maiden party, since Esther objected to the term “bachelorette.” “You don’t call female mail carriers mailmanettes,” she explained.
“But ‘maiden’ is even worse,” Akriti said. “It means you’re a virgin.”
“How about ‘damsel’?” Colleen said.
“Ew.”
“Are there really no unsexist terms for an unmarried woman?”
The six of them thought about this.
“Good thing you’re getting married,” Colleen said.
“Yeah,” Ushi said, “answering to the term ‘wife’ will complete your liberation.”
“Does Said call you his wife?” Cece asked Paige. “Because I’m struggling a bit with that. ‘My fiancée’ is bad enough.”
“Who’s Said?” Paige said in front of the group. As an “honorary bachelorette,” she insisted on banning all references to her husband and child. She cued up some music on her laptop: pop hits from summers past, transforming the woods into a roller rink. At least she hadn’t brought an actual DJ. Cece hoped they weren’t disturbing the family at the next campsite, where a little girl was skipping rocks in the river. Colleen, a former bartender, made margaritas from supplies she’d brought and everyone drank them in front of the fire, reminiscing about Cece’s old boyfriends. Ushi told a story about Cece’s hooking up with a boy in college and then waking up the next morning and accidentally clogging the toilet so that the whole bathroom flooded with fecal water. She’d been so embarrassed she’d escaped out the window. The story was met with raucous laughter. Cece laughed too, of course, trying to be a good sport, but she also thought about how crazy she’d been about the boy—his favorite movie, she remembered, was Duck Soup—and how, except for a stupid quirk of fate, they might have become an item. Who knows? They might even still be together. Lots of undergrads at Pitzer ended up married to each other.
Cece suddenly felt depressed. It was getting dark, stars beginning to fill the sky like snow. She got up and walked toward the river, pretending she needed to grab something from the tent. Why this unditchable sadness? Would it hound her to the grave? Couldn’t she have a bachelorette party, for fuck’s sake, without it trailing her like a pet? Paige must have left a flashlight on when they were laying out their sleeping bags, because their tent was glowing eerily, lit from the inside out, as if an alien were in there waiting for a snack. The tent seemed to be in a different spot than before. Had it moved? Cece sat on a stump, feeling dizzy. She wondered if the norovirus had infected her, was replicating in her bloodstream.
Cece thought of her father’s wedding to Lillian, her stepmom, how it had seemed like a major betrayal even though it had been three years after her mother’s death. How Cece had despised the bride, watching her walk down the aisle in a beaded flapper dress and headband, an honest-to-god egret feather sticking out of her head. She’d escaped the reception and found her grandmother outside, sitting on the steps of the ballroom, such sadness in her face that Cece didn’t recognize her at first. To her astonishment, her grandmother pulled a bottle of tequila from her purse, explaining she’d nabbed it from the open bar when no one was looking. She took a swig, then offered some to Cece. Don’t tell your father. They passed the tequila back and forth. Inside the ballroom the toasts had begun; the guests rippled with laughter. Cece was supposed to give a toast herself—a tribute to her father, to a bond forged in the crucible of tragedy—but she was outside instead. Getting shitty with her grandma. At some point, she climbed into her grandmother’s lap, imagining it was her mother’s.
She’d expected her father’s marriage to fall apart after a year, or at least had prayed for this to happen, but her dad and Lillian were still together. They were flying into Kalispell tomorrow, too late for Lillian to get sick herself. Of course, they were staying at some fancy lodge in Somers because Lillian couldn’t bear to stay anywhere that wasn’t a five-star hotel.
After Cece headed back to the campfire, where her friends were dancing to OutKast, the glowing tent resumed its escape. It seemed to be sneaking away of its own accord. Had the wind picked up? Hesitantly, without a sound, the tent slipped down to the river. The little girl at the next campsite thought about alerting the women, but she was far more scared of them than the wandering tent, which anyway was the most interesting thing to happen all day. It drifted out to the middle of the river and got picked up by the current, glowing like a water lantern, spinning slowly under the stars.
At some point in the evening, a point both inevitable and impossible to pin down, Charlie’s friends—pallbearers of his bachelorhood—decided to go swimming. Lack of swimwear was not an issue. Had you driven by the house at the perfect moment, you would have seen four men dashing across the road, fully clothed but already beginning to yank off their shirts, tugging them over their heads or unbuttoning them midsprint, like Superman on his way to a phone booth. You might have believed them too old to go skinny-dipping, or at least to behave in such a childish way, and they might on a different night have agreed with you. And yet a strange thing happened when they reached the water and finished stripping out of their clothes, hopping around on one leg while they tugged off their shoes and socks, struggling a bit to get out of their jeans—freshly laundered, these jeans, and in some cases two sizes bigger than the ones they wore in college—a strange thing happened when they stormed the dock, dicks flapping, and whooped into the lake: the beer and the drugs and the attempted sorcery of pretending to be young made them actually young. Water was the missing ingredient. It was what the spell needed. The imperfections of their bodies dissolved into the lake. They lost their beer guts and their spare tires, their shin splints and torn meniscuses, anything that made them look half-comic when they ran. They were twenty again, svelte and handsome and bombed out of their minds. Bill Clinton was in the White House. The internet wasn’t much, a new thing, and people argued about whether it was just a fad. The Twin Towers stood as they always would, till the end of time.
And so the Bachelors hollered. They climbed the ladder and fucked the air for no reason and cannonballed into the lake. They splashed one another and woke up the neighbors and did things that would have made them call the cops themselves had they been awakened by the same racket while at home with their wives. Even Garrett, who’d followed at a distance and was still fully clothed, content to watch, felt the embrace of nostalgia, the mysterious goodwill that alights on people who’ve spent countless hours together in various rooms and cars and ski lodges, laughing like idiots. It hadn’t seemed particularly newsworthy at the time, this laughter, just something you did between one event and the next—but of course it was. It was the event itself.
“Jump in!” the Bachelors shouted.
“Ha ha,” Garrett said. “I don’t think so.”
“Come on! Let’s see that ass!”
“I’ll need another line for that. Maybe two.”
“Help yourself! It’s in my jeans!”
“I wouldn’t touch Johnny’s jeans if I were you! If you value your health!”
“Scabies, scabies, burning bright! In the trousers of the night!”
“What’s the matter, Minister? Need a life vest?”
“Afraid we’ll handle your baggage?”
“We’re all naked in the eyes of God!”
“Oh my god. Wow. I can’t believe I was friends with any of you.”
“Holy shit! He’s taking off his shirt!”
“The minister disrobes!”
“Jump in! The water’s freezing!”
Garrett walked to the edge of the dock, fighting the urge to conceal himself. It had been a long time since he’d been naked in front of someone, and he couldn’t help wondering how he looked, if anyone noticed the furry sinkhole of his belly button, which seemed to get furrier every year. Specifically, he wondered how he compared to Charlie. Garrett stretched as if he were performing an Olympic dive, canting his hips back and forth with his arms akimbo. Everyone laughed, thinking he was trying to be funny. Because he was. He was stark naked, cracking people up. No one was more surprised than Garrett himself.
Charlie swam under the dock, frogman style, then sneaked up to Garrett from behind and pushed him in the lake. They came up together, spitting mouthfuls of water at each other. Charlie’s face bobbed in the moonlight. The cartoon funk of “Give It Away” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers drifted over the lake, played by a cover band at the Lazy Bear—the dreadful song had become, yes, classic rock—and Brig got out of the lake and scatted along to the music, playing his dick like a guitar. The remaining Bachelors expressed their disgust. They insulted the size of his guitar. Marcus referred to it as a ukulele. Johnny squinted and wondered if he was playing air guitar. Garrett joined in the insults, feeling transformed back to a former shape. He had friends who weren’t his father.
He and Charlie swam out twenty or thirty yards from the dock, then flipped onto their backs so that they were floating side by side, their ears corked with water. The music disappeared, replaced by the infinite silence of the lake. He couldn’t see Charlie but knew he was listening to the bottomless silence too. It contained Elias, Garrett’s grief, everything they would ever need to say to each other. They floated on top of it, like debris from a wreck. They’d found each other again. The sky bristled with stars. If only this could be his wedding speech. A wedding silence, with their whole lives cradling them.
They stopped floating and peered at the moonlit docks along the shore, which looked like the teeth of a giant comb. Garrett could not believe that he’d been jealous of this man, or lusted after his fiancée, or done anything but call him daily on the phone.
“What’s the name of that church?” Charlie said.
“What church?”
“The online one! Where you got ordained for the wedding?”
“Universal Life,” Garrett said.
Charlie laughed. “How do I join?”
“You’re in it already. We’re all part of its flock.”
The band at the Lazy Bear had launched into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Tragically, this was classic rock now too. Garrett and Charlie swam back to the dock and then, teeth chattering, climbed the ladder to gather their clothes. But they did not find their clothes. The other Bachelors had taken them up to the house. This was their idea of fun. Garrett and Charlie cursed them bitterly. They put on their shoes, which had been graciously left behind. In this peculiar fashion the two of them walked back to the house, crossing the highway not as heroic young nudists but in shivering disgrace, hunched and cowering, glancing back over their shoulders toward the lake. They covered their genitals with two hands. The spell had been broken.
The remaining Bachelors jeered at them from the porch.
“You stole our clothes!” Charlie yelled at them.
“And yet you’re wearing shoes,” Marcus said philosophically.
“Yes, strange things are afoot,” Brig said.
“Earlier it was raining bras,” Bradley said. “In the backyard. One almost landed on me while I was taking a whiz.”
“Also, the Bachelorettes have returned a day early!”
“For real?” Charlie said happily.
“One of their tents floated down the river!”
Sure enough, the Bachelorettes began to emerge from the house, one after the other, like clowns from a car. A succession of Cece’s friends. They made it seem like the real party—the one the Bachelors had all secretly dreamed of having—had finally begun. Cece appeared last of all, wearing a flannel shirt that hung to her knees. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the two naked men on the lawn, sporting sensible footwear. Her eyes widened; she burst into laughter. As soon as Garrett saw her, laughing on the porch in one of Charlie’s shirts, something happened. The nostalgic affection he’d been feeling for his old friend dried up at once. It might as well never have existed. He was lost again, murderous, a naked goat on the roof.
Cece caught Garrett’s eye and then peered at her feet, pretending not to have seen him. Garrett’s heart lurched. He would need to do something drastic. He couldn’t kill Charlie, but he would need to do something. Time was running out.
“Ceeeece!” Charlie called to her, clutching the whereabouts of his heart with two hands, but she’d already covered her eyes.