ELEVEN

Victor

Good evening, sir,” Felix exhaled.

Victor had been staring at his shoes through the bottom of his glass. Felix’s voice was strangely booming, the harshness of German and the rhythm of Spanish bound and dragged over gravel.

The German came from Felix’s mother, Johanna. She had come rushing up to Victor earlier in her pearl pantsuit, sorry that he couldn’t make the rehearsal dinner, oblivious to the fact that no one had invited him. The Spanish came from Felix’s father, Diego Castillo, a real-estate mogul and political activist in the seventies who had recently died of a heart attack. Diego Castillo had organized several anti-Castro rallies, one of which ended with his foot being so badly trampled, he had to lose a toe. The back page of the wedding program featured a picture of them—a mustached Diego sitting with Johanna on his lap, a stripe of cleavage at the center of her halter top, a dry cleaner’s promotional calendar tacked to the wall behind them. It’s May in the photo and it’s May out here in the world, thought Victor, wondering if this was intentional.

“Solid wedding.” Felix clinked Victor’s glass, pointing his cigarette downward to protect it from fat drops of water.

Felix and Caroline, were raised in families of compartmentalization, of tennis at two and tea at four. They were more summarizers than dwellers. Even in college, Victor could sense this awareness in Caroline, as if she were writing her own story: Now is the time I am going to create wild memories with my friends. Then, in a few hours, I shall stop being wasted, step off this piece of furniture I shouldn’t be standing on anyway, and pass out.

“Congratulations, man,” said Victor, who was starting to feel a kind of cotton-balled frame around things.

“Thank you, thank you. I did good. But you know what?” Felix continued, gulping down half his beverage. “This is crap.”

He said it without an ounce of snobbery. It was more the way Victor might begrudgingly finish a greasy order of Chinese food because he had paid for it.

“What are you doing right now?”

“I’m at your wedding.” Victor checked his naked wrist.

“I have a bottle of Macallan in my room but I can’t leave here. She’ll kill me.”

Caroline was zigzagging her way across the tent on an air-kiss rampage.

“It’s, like, fifty-year-old scotch,” he added.

“Where am I going?”

“Kitchen entrance, stairs, bridge, bang a right, long hall, my room’s the one that looks like I grew up in it.”

Victor nodded and thanked Felix, even though it made no sense to. But he recognized the difference between being shooed away from a crowd and given a reprieve from it. He started on his course, passing a photo booth. Flashes of legs and loafers came through the curtain. Chunks of waterlogged feather boa lay soaked on the ground.

Victor had a feel for the layout of the house. He located the bridge suspended over an indoor pool. The bridge spat him out in front of a floor-to-ceiling 1920s tourism advertisement for Miami, featuring a woman crisping herself on the beach: golden sunshine adds golden years! He strolled along the edges of the hallway runner, touching door handles as he went, letting the static rebuild and shocking himself. Finally, he spied the corner of a bed and pushed.

The walls were painted with gold stripes. The bed was made to military perfection, covered in gold throw pillows. This was not the room Felix grew up in. This was his mom’s room.

Victor pivoted dramatically toward the door in drunken amusement with himself. Then he stopped short, distracted by the thing that did not quite belong.

Johanna’s dresser, old and dark, put the newness of everything else in the house into sharp relief. It had the feel of a treasure chest. He’d been so blinded by general wealth that he hadn’t bothered to categorize the wealth. There was, for instance, a fiberoptic peacock statue in the foyer. This dresser was not in conversation with that peacock. A round mirror framed in wooden roses was attached to the back. The wood was scratched all over and worn at the edges; stiff brown ribbons bled from the bottom of the mirror onto the surface of the dresser.

Victor put his empty glass on the floor. On top of the dresser were framed photographs, some in color with people relaxing on boats, some in black and white with people relaxing in living rooms. One, in sepia, featured Diego Castillo holding an Uzi under one arm and a baby pig under the other.

“Normal,” Victor whispered.

Another photo: Johanna and Diego and a tiny Felix in Hawaii, standing barefoot on a volcanic reef, a cloudless sky behind them, Felix burrowing into his mother’s thighs and crying at the sight of a distressed blowfish. Another photo: Johanna as a little girl, standing with her leg on a woven café chair, pulling up a kneehigh sock and smiling slyly at whoever took the picture. Even then, those were serious legs.

Beneath the photos were so many little drawers, the dresser could have doubled as a card catalog. A pile of silver keys lay in a mother-of-pearl shell. Victor touched the corresponding keyholes, pushed his finger into one of them until it left a mark.

An Abyssinian cat came out of nowhere and jumped up on the dresser.

“Fuck!” Victor screamed.

The cat meowed, a jumping-off point for a conversation.

“Can I help you?”

The cat sniffed around at the objects on the dresser, checking to make sure that nothing had been altered, rubbing the corners from chin to cheek. It sniffed Victor, sending in its whiskers as twitching emissaries before ramming Victor’s hand. Victor sneezed and made a mental note to not touch his eyes. The cat rolled over, rattling the dresser with a big amber thud, knocking the shell of keys to the ground.

“Some guard dog you are.”

Victor picked up the keys. He reasoned his reward for tolerating a hive-inducing, box-shitting animal was to test a lock at random. From the scratch marks around the openings, it was clear he wasn’t the first to try. No luck.

He removed a crystal golf tee from a decanter, sniffed and combined the contents with whatever was already in his glass.

Then voices caught his ear, floating up through the open window. He checked the time on his dying phone. The first bus back to the city, as they had been informed back when everyone’s ties were tied, would depart at 12:00 a.m. sharp. The second wouldn’t go until 2:00 a.m. Victor removed his jacket, leaning on it like an arm muff. Mostly he heard the sound of women complaining about their feet as they waited to board the bus, but the sound of familiar laughter sliced through the banter. He pushed the curtain aside. Kezia. Kezia convulsing into fits of hysterics induced by the subliterate witticisms of a himbo named Judson.

“It’s like, why would you ever?” Her face was scrunched.

“I know!” Judson stopped to double over. “It makes no sense!”

What makes no sense?

“Where is the logic there?”

Good question.

“So funny.”

Yes, so.

“Seriously so funny.”

Was it? Seriously?

“It was,” Judson concurred, “it was seriously so funny.”

Oh, fuck everyone.

He sat on Johanna’s bed, rolling his jacket into a neck pillow and lying back. He emptied his breath. When the cat jumped up, Victor shooed it away. The cat came right back, getting into position more quickly this time. He should go back downstairs, he thought. But by now Felix had surely forgotten the errand. He had a bride, money, a job, a sense of purpose, a mother he didn’t mind, people bringing him drinks. Victor blinked, alternating with the cat.

“So. Many. Lids.” His voice sounded funny, distant.

He put his hands on his chest and removed his glasses. The command center in his brain told his fingers to do a quick round of strumming, checking for paralysis. His eyelids collapsed swiftly, as if someone had kicked them from behind.