“What was your favorite part of our wedding?” he said to Lillian now. He wasn’t sure he’d ever asked her.
Lillian took a sip of water. “The honeymoon.”
“No, like, the day.”
She squinted as if thinking. “I don’t know, really. I liked how many people came, and all the compliments we got. Does that count?”
There was an innocence in her voice like she was genuinely asking him. Carver didn’t know how to respond. He wasn’t in charge of what counted, was he? Finally he coughed up a “sure.”
A few months after their wedding, gay marriage was made legal, and he remembered not feeling anything but surprise about this. He was at work, he looked up and saw the news on a TV, he was surprised, he looked back at his computer. There was nothing else to it. It had nothing to do with him, and it probably wouldn’t last. Except it did last, or was seeming to.
The toasts were interminable. Priscilla gave one, then one of Sana’s sisters, then a bridesmaid who identified herself as Sana’s best friend, then Maryam. Finally, Hank went last. He wept and struggled his way through, taking so much longer than anticipated that the coordinator appeared at his side and stared at him with a big fake smile until he wrapped up and handed over the microphone. She took it briskly and strode away, informing them all that it was time for the first dance. Letty gave her weepy father a long hard hug and a kiss on the cheek, the sight of which Carver found inexplicably moving, then took Sana’s hand and led her to the dance floor. Scott and his backup guy retook the stage, which Carver was now much closer to. Henoticed the backup guy had abandoned his bass and was on the keyboard again.
“Play Free Bird,” a middle-aged man shouted.
Scott looked up, clearly repressing an eyeroll, then glanced at Letty. She grinned and gave him two thumbs up. Scott expressionlessly and masterfully played Free Bird’s most recognizable lick, and a scattered number around the room cheered like they’d just heard the national anthem. Chip golf clapped.
“Okay, that’s it for requests, thanks,” the coordinator said with another fake smile, staring down the guy who had shouted.
“Uh, I did just want to say one thing before we start,” Scott said into the microphone. “Letty and I go way back, and I’m very happy to be here tonight to celebrate her and Sana. Congratulations, guys.”
Predictably, this got anawwfrom the crowd. Scott and his keyboard friend started playing something upbeat which Carver recognized but couldn’t place until Scott opened his mouth and began to sing: “Friday night I crashed your party, Saturday I said I’m sorry, Sunday came and trashed me out again…”
“Billy Joel,” Conway said, laughing. “I bet this was Mom-approved.”
Carver looked over a few tables to where their mother was, and saw that she was smiling and shimmying her shoulders next to Josie, who was doing the same.
The uptempo song had Letty and Sana dancing a little faster than either of them looked confident about, but they moved well together, their movements smooth like water. A bright sunset blazed over the hills, pouring pale pink light through the windows.
Carver looked back over at Scott, who was watching the brides as he sang, again wearing that look of blank intensity.
“I walked through Bedford Stuy alone, even rode my motorcycle in the rain… and you told me not to drive, but I made it home alive, so you said that only proves that I’m insane…”
Carver noticed that Scott’s voice had improved a lot in eighteen years. It was deeper and more lived-in, and he had more control, could easily stretch into corners which seemed out of his reach before. Like his guitar, it was an instrument he had mastered and could pull beauty from easily. Carver’s gaze went back and forth between Scott’s fingers and his face, and blood flowed to his cheeks, lips and dick.
He was getting a semi. What was his fucking problem? Whatever, he didn’t even care. He was suddenly desperate for Scott to throw him down on a mattress and fuck him right through it. He felt hot all over, and the room shimmered like he was feverish. Was he getting sick, or could hormones still do this to a person at thirty-six? Carver stared up at Scott with a possessive and irrational lust, craving his attention.
And Scott looked. He looked over at Carver as if he actually saw him, was not looking just to look but saw and understood what he was seeing. With their eyes locked, Scott sang to him, “Remember how I found you there, alone in your electric chair, I told you dirty jokes until you smiled?”
Carver mouthed a reckless “yes” to him, and Scott immediately looked away. He looked back out over the crowd, in the direction of Sana and Letty, but Carver thought he saw a small smile on his face and a little flush under his beard. He thought about the bruising bite he’d left on Scott’s shoulder and felt a thrill. His earlier hissy fit in the bathroom felt distant, his view of those emotions momentarily obscured.
All too soon Scott was wrapping the song up, levering a natural endpoint into its middle so the brides didn’t have to dance for four whole minutes. Everyone clapped and cheeredfor Sana and Letty as they kissed on the dance floor after a big finish where Letty spun Sana, who then dipped Letty. As Carver clapped, he watched Scott put his guitar away and shake hands with his keyboardist.
Carver couldn’t get a handle on what he was feeling. After all this, was he just going to go back to his life as it had been? Simultaneously his instincts told him both “of course” and “of course not.”
Could he actually leave Lillian, and did he want to? She knew everything about him, except for the aspects which made him want to leave her. He worried about being the bad guy, hurting her, wasting her fertile years — provincial concerns that she would probably laugh at if she heard them. She was up in the stratosphere and always had been, a bored and sinister angel pacing around a heaven she took for granted. He was the one who wanted to get her pregnant after they were married, who wanted to do his duty, and she was the one who put him off eternally. He didn’t seem capable of hurting her, only displeasing or surprising her. He would be adrift if he left her, but he felt adrift beside her.
It would blow up his whole life to leave, though. She was much more wealthy and connected, so she would get all of their mutual friends, because that was what those people cared about. They wouldn’t be able to keep working together. He would probably have to make a lateral move away from Blackbrick, and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. Lillian had been his life raft at work through this long period of burnout and senioritis; she did all the things he no longer had the appetite for. To give up his wife was to give up his career, most of his social life, his home, and for what? So he could go live on their yacht in the harbor and drink and day trade all day, then date Scott at night? If Scott even had any interest in that. If Scott could even be tied down to regular dates.
Carver felt like he was too old to start fresh. There was no mechanism for a thirty-six-year-old to do so, there was no puberty or college to smooth the transition into middle age. When he arrived at Duke, young and heartbroken and confused, he was immediately pulled into a ready-made new life. It was almost like his schoolmates were waiting for him and happy to see him. They didn’t see whatever dark smear his parents did, and he could pretend to be lighter, more easygoing. The boys on his freshman dorm hall accepted him immediately — he looked and smelled and talked like them. His professors found him smart and diligent. Girls liked him. He was invited to rush frats then invited to join Alpha Delta Phi, and quickly realized his talents for hosting parties and fundraising.
Soon he discovered that booze, cocaine and long hours at the gym and the library were all fantastic ways to stave off the thoughts and feelings he didn’t like. He hooked up with girls, was seen around with girls, only going for men when he started to feel like he was losing his grip, only hooking up with other ADPhis because he knew they wouldn’t be loose-lipped, never fucking them more than once and then ignoring them in the dining hall and on the quads. His frat brothers, though a bunch of crude alcoholics who teased him for watching his weight and caring so deeply about his grades, embraced him as one of their own and did him favors like sneaking him into the basketball team’s state-of-the-art hydrotherapy facility so he could rehab his healing rotator cuff there.
College had been the best four years of Carver’s life, in many ways, because he understood exactly what was being asked of him and was finally allowed to just flat-out deliver. Finally he was in a place where striving got you where you wanted to go and had immediate results. He hit all his marks, landed a spot in Goldman’s analyst program, and went home to New York so he could start his career while getting his MBA at Columbia nightsand weekends. He got his second diploma just two weeks after he got an associate offer from Blackbrick’s private equity group. He had momentum, he was going somewhere, it was all clear track ahead of him. And then things started to slide out of his grasp, the fog began to gather. Before long he was twenty-five, he’d just survived yet another round of 2008 crisis layoffs, and his boss brought him into her office and asked, “So what do you want out of your life, Carver?”
What did hewant?That had never been on the table before. He remembered looking back at her with abject horror and manufacturing a response about supporting the company’s continued growth. Since when did anyone care what he wanted? But when he walked out of that meeting, he knew: life had changed up on him again. His days of clearing obvious hurdles were over. If he didn’t know what he wanted, he better pick something and pretend, lest he stumble and be stampeded by all his peers whose eyes were firmly fixed on some personal horizon. A few weeks later he had formalized his relationship with Lillian and worked with her to sketch out five, ten and twenty-year plans for his career.
If Carver asked a well-meaning and emotionally healthy person for advice, they would probably encourage him to take a leap and go find himself. But he had no idea where he was. As foggy as things were now, the place outside his life looked even foggier. What he felt for Scott was like a bright lamp shining somewhere in the fog, leading him toward uncharted territory and possibly disaster. Despite this, he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off it or stop inching toward it. He wanted Scott again, and again and again. On some level he’d meant his dirty talk of asking Scott to ruin his life; on some level he didn’t want to be given a choice. He wanted to be ravished in all ways, physically and otherwise.
