“Got it,” Scott said. “A hydra.”
“Yeah.”
Scott had known dozens of cokeheads in his life and done his fair share of coke, and he suspected that both Carver and Lillian were abusing stimulants. Probably not coke, probably Adderall or something like it. With Lillian, the main tell was how bubbly and chatty she was despite the checked-out look in her eyes and the frequent lack of affect in her voice. With Carver, the main tells were his grinding teeth and hollow cheeks. He now reminded Scott of a cokehead agent he’d worked with for five months out in California, a guy who made increasingly grandiose promises to him with nothing to back them up. He’d also been slim with dark hair and a handsome face. “Scott,” he kept saying, “I am going to make… you… arock star.You will be bigger… than…Kurt Cobain.” Then one day he vanished overnight: his office cleared out, his phone disconnected, his other clients also mystified. Scott was smoking a lot of pesticide-laced ditch weed at the time and could not remember this guy’s name for love nor money.
The difference between that guy and Carver was that Scott actually cared about Carver, or at least didn’t want to see him unhappy. He couldn’t even imagine Carver’s current day-to-day. The boy he once knew was so eager to get out of Westchester and live free — they both were. Scott had his own problems, he was always the first to admit it, but he knew he was living the life he was best suited to live. It looked like Carver had traded one prison for another.
Scott kept considering that maybe he truly was just jealous of the hot rich wife and the $250,000 car and the impeccably tailored clothes, but it didn’t add up. He’d never lusted afterflash. Being married to someone like Lillian would drive him crazy, he thought Maybachs were ugly and overpriced, and Carver’s tight little button-ups weren’t his style. And Scott had spent his whole life on the periphery of serious wealth. His mother was family friends with the Cargills and the Paleys, and he’d once partied at Jon Bon Jovi’s house. He definitely hadn’t looked at everything Bon Jovi had and dismissed it as a prison. Jealousy was actually a more comfortable and intelligible feeling than whatever was turning his gut right now.
Nora and Doug came out of the house, then, with armfuls of plated steak and salmon.
“Can you let me help you with that?” Letty said, turning around.
“Are you kidding?” Nora said. “You’re the bride.”
“Let us help, then, Aunt Nora, let the bridesmaids help,” Priscilla said.
Nora hesitated as she set plates in front of Letty and Sana, then said, “Okay, the bridesmaids can help.”
Six women got up from their chairs. Doug, setting a plate in front of Sana’s mom, said, “I think we should have let our children help instead?”
“Um, I’ve done a lot today,” Conway said from the far right end of the table, sipping her wine.
Nora smiled at Conway as she walked by her, and stroked her hair. “You have, honey.”
“I’m on the injured list,” Chip said from the other end of the table.
With all the bridesmaids absent, Scott’s view of Chip was now unobstructed. Despite the fact that he’d been icing his face for over an hour, blood had pooled underneath his eyes to create two thumb-sized purple bruises. He was also visibly drunk.
Nora shot a pissed-off look at Carver, but said, “It’s not a verydebilitatinginjury, Preston.”
“My face hurts, Mommy.”
“No, put the bridesmaids to work, it’s what they’re for,” Sana said. “Ladies-in-waiting. I’ve been a bridesmaid five times, I want my pound of flesh now.”
Letty laughed at this, but Maryam looked askance at her daughter. “This generation!” she said to Carver and Letty’s parents.
“I know, right?” Josie said. “‘Eff you, pay me,’ huh?”
She said this in an undertone, but somehow the kids’ table overheard her, and two or more of them began chanting: “Eff you, pay me, eff you, pay me!”
“Whoops,” Josie said, making a face.
Nora went over to the patio dimmer switch and brought it up, increasing the glow of the sconces that surrounded them and the little walkway lanterns that illuminated the pool and the paths through the backyard.
A memory suddenly came to Scott: Carver inviting him over the summer before their junior year and telling him to bring a few girls. His parents were out of town visiting Chip, he said, and he wanted to try skinny-dipping. Scott had brought the girls — three of them — and kissed one while bobbing with her in the water, but what really stuck with him was the sight of Carver fully nude and lounging on a chaise. Scott, stupid drunk on wine coolers, let his eyes linger. In that moment he’d realized he must like some boys the same way he liked girls. He’d been experiencing surges of attraction to Carver which he kept sublimating with horseplay or wrestling, and which he’d dismissed as accidental friendly fire in the fog of puberty. But there Carver lay bathed in lamplight with his junk out, his armpits hairy, lithe and pretty but decisively male, and Scott’s attraction to him only worsened. And then Carver had met his eyes, and Scott looked back at him in terror but forced himself toproduce an easy smile. An eternity passed before Carver smiled back. It was more of a smirk.
“Carver,” Maryam said out of nowhere, making a tingle of alarm shoot up Scott’s spine. “You’re in private equity, aren’t you?”
Carver looked up at her. “Yeah,” he said, then cleared his throat. “My wife and I both are.”
“Could you explain it to me?” Maryam said. “Every time I think I have a handle on it, I read another article and then I realize I don’t understand.” She looked around. “Do you all relate? Does anyone understand what private equity is?”
There were dull murmurings to the negative. The bridesmaids began coming back out of the house with plates. Scott swatted a mosquito that landed on his bare forearm.
“They… buy companies?” Conway said, glancing at Carver.
“Yeah,” Carver said, with all the energy of a dead person. “We buy companies with a mix of debt and equity, then we try to make them more profitable.”
