Jonathan Dee: The Privileges

The only one who has already braved the walk from hotel to church, several times today in fact, is Masha. Wearing a maroon blazer — a little heavy for a day like this, but the item in her closet that came closest to matching the burgundy of the bridesmaid’s dresses — she is losing the battle to maintain a fresh, unruffled appearance throughout the day’s events, that projection of capability that’s normally a key element of her job; but today, she keeps telling herself, is a special case. She’s sent her son to Wal-Mart, even though she knows he’s high, to buy every standing fan they have. She’s glad the groom is a little late for their meeting before the photo session. She doesn’t particularly care anymore how it might look that she’s waiting for him in the hotel bar. She drinks club soda after club soda and watches the guys in the band carry their own drums and keyboards and amplifiers into the ballroom, gasping and swearing, while she tries discreetly to check the size of the sweat stains under her arms.

Then the groom enters, black-tied, a very handsome boy with a highly developed sense of charm. “The wedding planner? Oh, she’s in the bar,” he says as he holds out his hand. It comes back to Masha that he is from New York City and has a way of speaking that’s sometimes difficult to follow.

In the Trophy Room they find Ruth and Warren and Warren’s mother, who at eighty-seven has lost track of time’s more incremental movements and thus is as pleased to wait there indefinitely as her daughter-in-law is perplexed and insulted. They are more or less flattened against the wall by the door in order to avoid inconveniencing the photographer as he testily moves the lights and rearranges the furniture. No one else is there. The photographer, a short man with a neat mustache and a drinking problem whom Masha has worked with many times, is pleased to see her because here at last is someone with whom he may safely lose his temper.

“She has something better to do?” he says, smiling tightly, speaking of the bride. “There’s maybe something good on TV?”

With her back to Adam, Masha lifts her eyebrows at the photographer as if to say what can we do, this is what we’re working with; and she says, “Allow me to introduce the groom, Adam Morey.”

The photographer’s mood is softened by Adam’s charisma only because he sees that here is a young man obviously not averse to having his picture taken. The groomsmen file in; he can tell, mostly from their adolescent nudging, that a few of them are drunk. Who gives a shit, he reminds himself, and grabs one of them and points to his mark on the floor. He makes a note of the groom’s parents (the father has the same strong chin and small mouth, the same convex hairline) standing with their backs to the wall, gazing at their son as if from a great distance, as if crowds were cheering, as if they were standing on an ice floe.

Then the bride walks in, ahead of her own entourage like a prizefighter, in the dress, the makeup, the veil and gloves, the full regalia. Masha and Ruth together make a gasping sound that’s as unrehearsed as anything they’ll say or feel all day. “No rush,” says the photographer, but already his sarcasm is losing its edge — his work bores and harries him but he is not inured to beauty — and he goes to look at her through the camera. Behind Cynthia come the six bridesmaids, Deborah several steps in front of the rest in her eagerness to get out of that awful suite where the beautiful ninnies chattered. The bridesmaids fan out by the door, sharing one of those gigantic bottles of water, picking at the sleeveless wine-colored dresses that are already darkening in spots.

This is why they are late: on her way to the suite set aside for the bridal party’s preparations, Cynthia had finally stopped and knocked at the door to her father’s room; he had opened the door in his tuxedo, looking like a movie star, though also older and thinner than she remembered him; and then, as she’d known all along she would without quite knowing why, she collapsed in tears. He took her in his arms and shut the door and whispered the little things that only he could get away with and then a few minutes later she reemerged and went to the elevator bank to go get her makeup applied.

He’s last to enter the Trophy Room. Life does not seem versatile enough to account for the fact that this man and Cynthia’s mother once fell in love and got married. Ruth herself has trouble accepting it as true, not because she has forgotten but because she remembers the strong impression he gave, every day for ten years, that he was late for some amusing engagement somewhere else. Now she watches in horror as Warren crosses the room to shake her ex-husband’s hand. It’s her fate, she thinks, to end up loyal to men who don’t understand loyalty themselves.

There is only one person in the room Conrad’s age whom he hasn’t known for years, and that’s Deborah. It’s her he winds up standing next to after the family photograph; and she doesn’t actively ignore him because there’s something in his face that she doesn’t see in the Barbie faces of everyone else in the room.

“I’m actually a little nervous,” he finds himself saying. “I have to give the toast.”

That’s what it is about him, she thinks, a recognizable human emotion. Unconsciously she pulls at the neckline of her bridesmaid’s dress to try to keep her tattoo covered. He looks about eighteen, though she knows he must be older than that; at some point all these people were in the same college at the same time, or maybe it just seems that way. “You’ll get through it,” she says, not unkindly. “Just be yourself.”

The room grows noisy, and at the center of it, Adam and Cynthia stand staring at each other, at the odd three-quarter angle into which the photographer manhandled them when it became too difficult to explain what he wanted. His arm around her waist. Something has been missing all day and this was it. When they are close together no one else can touch them. Their homes, their families, everything that made them is behind them now and will remain so from here on in. Masha pops up with a handful of tissues to wipe the sweat off Adam’s forehead.

“I lost weight while getting married!” Adam says. “Ask me how!”

“Stop talking!” barks the photographer. “Memory time!”

This is where it starts to become a blur. And now, finally, as they take orders to turn their heads or change the position of their fingers — as they stand rooted at the apex of a continually reconfigured V — comes the feeling they didn’t quite credit before now, the feeling that the ceremony itself has taken over and begun to bear them along. Everything is dictated from here. They’ve exchanged themselves for their roles and it is not at all an unpleasant or a violated feeling. In the end not even their memories will have to be relied on; images of the day and night that have been taken out of their hands will arrive in the mail, weeks from now, formally and expensively bound.

The church is a furnace. With the heat wave in its second week, Masha’s son was able to find for sale only five standing fans; the breeze they generate falters at about the third row. One young mother with a baby, a cousin of the groom’s, stands up from her pew and heads back to the hotel before the ceremony has even begun. But Masha is at home at the intersection of pageantry and crisis; she calls the ushers together to instruct them to seat the eldest guests nearest the doors, regardless of their affiliation to bride or groom, and delivers a quick first-aid course in case of fainting. In the event, though, it’s one of the ushers, a blond-haired boy named Sam, who finally passes out, just at the end of the aisle. Too exhausted to be discreet, his friends lay him awkwardly across the rearmost pew. Masha cradles his head in her lap and pulls out the smelling salts she had the foresight to transfer from the home first-aid kit into her purse just that morning.