The Divorce Party (21 page)

She cracks her knuckles and starts to head toward him, toward both of them. Only someone stops her. Thomas stops her. He is talking to a young couple whom he looks less than happy to be talking to. They could be Maggie’s age, maybe a little older.

“Maggie,” he says, shifting his hand from her arm to the small of her back. “I was just looking for you. This is Belinda and Carl Fisher, who just moved into a house down the road. This is Nate’s fiancée, Maggie Mackenzie.”

Belinda looks her up and down—her face almost not breaking rank, almost not showing what she is certainly thinking about what Maggie is wearing. “It’s nice to meet you. We’ve heard so much about you.”

Like what?
she wants to ask, but instead she tries to cover herself, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “You too,” she says.

She feels Thomas’s hand on her shoulder. “If you’ll excuse us, Belinda, I just need a minute with my daughter-in-law,” Thomas says, and steers her to the side of the barn, away from the terrible Fishers and everyone else.

“You need a minute away?” Maggie whispers to him.

He shoves his hands deep into his suit pockets, looking exactly like Nate—awkward in this setting, awkward in a way that he won’t be able to shed until he is out of his suit, out of tonight’s game.

“Is it that obvious? Sorry about that. I’m not a big one for cocktail parties,” he says. “Never have been. But Gwyn is great at them.”

Maggie smiles. He isn’t saying this rudely, but with something like admiration. Admiration that Gwyn is able to stay comfortable in her own skin, or able to fake it better at least.

“Have you been in the house?” he asks, and hands her some cocktail napkins, and she begins drying herself, begins to pull herself together a little bit.

“I’ve been next door with the caterer, actually, helping a little,” she says. “And hiding a little.”

“How was that?”

“The helping or the hiding?”

He laughs. “Either.”

“Both were okay, I guess.”

And he tries to smile. Only there is something behind the smile that can’t be hidden, something that Maggie recognizes almost as soon as she sees it. A loneliness. A complicated one, one that he feels he isn’t entitled to.

“I’m supposed to make a speech in a couple of minutes about things ending peacefully, lovingly.”

“Do you think that’s possible? Things ending peacefully?”

“Well . . .” he says. “I’m starting to think the nicer you try to make things at the end, the worse you actually make them.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure I would open with that.”

He starts to laugh, and Maggie feels herself warm to him. She likes Thomas. She has this feeling that something is going on, something that she doesn’t want to know about, but she likes him anyway. Because she can see it: the parts of him—and not just the outside parts—but also the sweetness that he passed on to Nate. There aren’t many men who have a real sweetness in them, and there are other things that go with it, but right now, it makes her feel grateful.

“From the little I heard, you and Nate had a tough day around here,” he says. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because I’m the reason that you are here.”

She smiles at him. “Please don’t feel badly about that. It’s not your fault that things have gotten a little out of hand.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he says.

She locks eyes with him and starts to hear something else, something that she has been suspecting—pieces coming together—just as Gwyn walks up to them, looking absolutely stunning in all-white.

“There you are,” Gwyn says, looking at Thomas and then noticing her, but with no judgment about what she is wearing—just a quick, sincere happiness to see her. And, in that moment, with all the rest of it, she can feel it. How lovely this woman really is.

“How are you doing, Miss Maggie? I feel like with all the chaos I haven’t gotten to spend any time with you.”

“Good.” Maggie says. “I’m fine.”

“Definitely?”

She nods. “Definitely.”

“Good. Then can I steal Thomas, for just a minute? I’ll bring him back, sooner than you want. I just need to steal my husband so we can get this toast over with,” she says.

“He is all yours.”

Thomas takes Gwyn’s hand and smiles back at Maggie, as if to say,
we’ll talk more later, okay?
And she smiles back at both of them as they head to a small table by the front door of the barn—the rain behind them, the house behind them—a single bottle of wine on it, two glasses.

Then she feels someone’s hand on the small of her back, Nate’s hand, and she turns to look up at him. Murphy, thankfully, is not with him.

“You stayed,” he says.

“I stayed,” she says.

And he nods, as if to say,
thank you,
as if to say,
I don’t know what that means but I’m glad you’re here.

She nods back.
Me too.

“Where is Georgia?” she asks.

“I’m right here.” Maggie turns as Georgia walks up next to her—looking sweet but a little uncomfortable in her halter dress—a half-eaten prosciutto-wrapped asparagus spear in one of her hands. She drapes her free arm over Maggie’s shoulder, taking another bite. “These things are totally delicious,” she says.

“That is the nicest thing you could have said to me,” she says, and pulls Georgia’s forearm tighter around her shoulder.

“Really?” Georgia looks at the spear, slightly confused, reaching across Maggie to hand Nate the uneaten bite. “Well, the nicest thing you could say to me is nothing.”

Maggie bites on her lower lip, obliging, and turns toward Nate, who is popping the rest into his mouth. “No Denis?” she mouths to him.

He shakes his head, swallowing. “No Denis.”

And before she can ask about the rest of it—or not ask about the rest of it—someone is clinking a spoon against a glass, other people chiming in, until mostly everyone is facing toward the small table where Gwyn and Thomas are standing. Maggie looks around at all of them, all of these people who have comprised her future in-laws’ life together, all of them with a story to tell about who Gwyn and Thomas have been, who they think they are now. At first it makes her think that this is like a wedding—when else do you have everyone who matters to you both in one room?—but then she takes in the nervous smiles and dazed looks, looks not exactly of approval or compassion but of doubt and anxiety. Doubt that they can escape this same end, anxiety that they won’t.

Maggie turns her attention back to Thomas and Gwyn as Thomas starts to open the tall bottle of wine, with a dime-store corkscrew. He is being careful with it, too careful with it—the corkscrew, the bottle—everything starting to move in a rhythmic slow motion as he finally pours Gwyn a glass of the wine and pours himself one too.

As everyone moves closer, Gwyn takes the glass from him, swapping him for a folded piece of paper, which he opens, putting his free palm on her hip. It is like a dance the way they move together, seamless—and totally natural, even now. And so, even in this strange instance, where, apparently, they are about to toast to the end of their union, Maggie is struck all over again by how they look together. They look right.

And then Thomas starts to speak.

“Thank you all for being here tonight, with us, and with our family.” He looks at Nate, Georgia and Maggie, and then over at Gwyn, who is looking right back at him. “When Gwyn first suggested doing this, I thought it sounded a little . . . off the wall. Especially for us. Except the closer we’ve gotten to tonight, the more I’ve come to understand that tonight is a good thing. It’s a way for us to explain that this relationship has mattered. That nothing has mattered more. Even if it is ending now.”

Gwyn takes out another copy of the poem, putting her own wineglass down. “This poem we’re going to read is called ‘The Empress of Nowhere,’ ” she says, more to Thomas than to anyone else.

“It doesn’t rhyme, so bear with us,” he says.

Everyone laughs. This is funny, apparently. Everyone finds this funny. But as they begin to actually read the poem, trading off each stanza, the laughter stops. The laughter stops even though it is a bizarre and very funny poem about a fisherman eating black licorice on a dock in Florida. About how he doesn’t like it at first, finds it too bitter, but learns to like it. He learns to like it—not just tell himself he likes it, but truly like it—just in time to realize that there is no more to be eaten.

Maybe the laughter stops because no one understands. You’d have to stretch the poem to make it relevant. You’d have to stretch the poem beyond recognition, as far as Maggie can tell, to have it make any sense in terms of Thomas and Gwyn—and they’re offering no explanation about what it means to them, what it might have meant. And she can’t help but wonder if she missed something while she was over at the Buckleys’, something that would explain why Thomas and Gwyn are choosing to read this.

Only when she looks back and forth between Georgia’s and Nate’s blank faces, she realizes that they don’t have a clue either. No one does, apparently. No one but Thomas and Gwyn, that is, who are red faced and happy, looking right at each other and smiling, really smiling, which all of a sudden seems like the saddest part. It makes Maggie sad to see it so plainly before her. You have something between you after a while, this soft little bug of a thing, its own life form, even if you decide you don’t want it anymore, even when you decide you want other things instead.

Georgia crosses her arms over her stomach, clutching the top of her belly. “Wow! They’ve officially lost it,” she says.

Maggie looks back at Gwyn and Thomas still watching each other. It isn’t such a great distance. It isn’t such a great distance to get to the worst place. And she turns toward Nate, even though she doesn’t want to. Even though she wishes that the person she loves most hadn’t put them in a position where the distance to somewhere irreversible feels shorter now, where everything feels so hard. But maybe it just is. For now. And maybe the best thing she can do is just to let it be.

She reaches for Nate’s hand, holds on to it. “Let’s go somewhere,” she whispers.

But he doesn’t hear her. “What?” he says.

“I want to go,” she repeats.

“Let’s go, then,” he says.

And he starts to pull her out of the crowd, away from here. But before they can get out, Gwyn starts to speak again, and Maggie turns back. Maggie turns back, which may be the first mistake because she can hear it, something breaking in Gwyn’s voice. She hears something, impossible, starting to break.

“This is the way we spent our first night together, in a way.

And in celebration of that, and everything that has come since, we hope you will raise your glasses and join us in a toast as we cut the cake.”

But there is no cake yet. Which is when Eve starts to wheel it in.

And Gwyn says: “Please join us for this one last thing.”

Gwyn

This one last thing.
Her words are drowned out by the thunder. Gwyn almost can’t hear herself, her voice sounding bizarrely far away, displaced, like she has just gotten off a plane, her ears popping, creating a remove she didn’t expect but feels relieved to have. It helps her keep going. To the part that is coming next.

In a minute, the cake will be front and center. The red velvet cake. There is only enough cake to serve to ten people, or—maybe the way these women eat frosted carbohydrates— all two hundred guests. There is only one person this cake is really for, though. It is the cake he loves best, and the last time she will ever make it for him. This holy man. Holy and unholy. Right and wrong. Good and evil. Is anything that clear-cut? That able to be separated? If it was, it would be easier. It would be easier to avoid being fooled and confused by the people who hurt us. We could recognize the injuries before they came. We could recognize the places where we will never be safe.

The rain sounds like it is going to break through the barn without any problem at all. Hard, deep raindrops. Breaking only for the claps of thunder. Breaking only for the lightning. Shocks running through her each time.

There are things Gwyn knows. She is holding a poem in her hand. She is looking out at her children, and Maggie—at all of Thomas’s and her friends. The ones she likes, the ones she doesn’t particularly. They will try to be there for her, on the other side of this, all of them. She knows this. But she also thought she knew something else. She thought there wouldn’t be another side of this. She thought she could count on Thomas. She never thought they would actually reach this moment.

But Gwyn turns and sees her wheeling the cake in, in a red chef jacket, matching, almost as though she has planned it, the inside of the beautiful cake. Gwyn is looking at the cake so intensely—the red creeping out beneath the white—that it takes her a minute to meet Eve’s eyes, and she almost misses it—almost misses it taking place, the moment that Thomas notices Eve. But Gwyn remembers. She remembers just as Thomas and Eve lock eyes on each other: Eve picking up the cake, holding it in her hands.

They are still there, in that place new couples are in at the beginning, in that space where they are so happy to see each other. Surprised and in awe. It is you. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you weren’t just a dream. So it takes Thomas a moment to catch the rest of it—what it means that Eve is there. What that means that Gwyn has found out.

Her husband turns toward her, his eyes open wide, and Gwyn braces herself against it—her natural inclination to support him, to offer herself to him. She looks hard right back at him so that he knows—without a doubt—that she knows everything. She knows the lies he has told, about where he has been these last nine months, about where he is hoping to go now. Without her.

“Gwyn . . .” Thomas whispers. “Just, please. Let me explain.”

Let me explain?
This is the best he can say in this moment? This is the best he can offer? What three words could be worse? She can’t think of any. She can’t think of any that are less appealing, more useless, than these, promising an excuse for the inexcusable.