The Wishbones (9 page)

Artie eased up a bit, letting Ian impress the crowd with one of the Bryan Adams power ballads that were his specialty, then began to pick up the pace again with crowd-pleasers like “Love Shack” and “Surfin’ USA.” After a couple of swing tunes tossed like bones to the oldster contingent, it was time for the disco portion of the show.

This began, as usual, with a tried-and-true piece of Wishbone theater. Apparently unable to decide what to play next, Artie, Ian, Dave, and Buzzy huddled together in the middle of the bandstand and pretended to have a heated discussion. No one actually spoke; they just stood there, making faces and waving their arms around like idiots. When they had done this long enough to attract attention, Dave and Ian traded a couple of shoves, as if in preparation for a fistfight, but were quickly restrained by Buzzy and Artie. Then everyone returned to their places.

“Maybe you can help us out,” Ian told the crowd. He glanced distastefully at Dave. “Our guitar player doesn't think there are ten people here who know how to do the Electric Slide. I say there have to be at least twenty.”

Dave stepped up to his mike. “No way,” he scoffed. “Not in this bunch.”

Ian waved his arms, as if summoning the audience onstage.

“Come on,” he said. “Get up and show us how it's done.”

This invitation sparked a complex round of negotiations throughout the room. A handful of women, including the bride and her three sisters, jumped up and began coaxing others to join them. Some flatly refused, but a fair number allowed themselves to be persuaded, including a few who had to be forcibly escorted to the dance floor, as though they'd been taken into custody. Pretty soon a respectable group of the usual suspects—young women, couples who'd taken dance lessons, fun-loving aunts and grandmothers, plus several smirking men of various ages, some of them obviously drunk—had been herded into three more or less straight lines. Dave was pleased to see Gretchen in the front row, trapped between the Lambrusco twins, a reluctant conscript in the good-time army.

“All right!” Ian raised his fist in solidarity with the dancers, then turned to Dave, shaking his head in a haughty, what-did-I tell-you sort of way. “Oh ye of little faith. I think you owe these people an apology.”

Dave approached the mike, a study in contrition. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I must have been thinking about the losers at our last wedding.”

Artie counted to four and the bodies began to move. From the stage, the Electric Slide looked like an easy line dance—a couple steps up, a couple steps back, slide, spin, clap—but Dave knew better. Julie had made him try it at her office Christmas party, and he'd found himself hopelessly lost within seconds, clapping and spinning when everyone else was still stepping up and stepping back. It was almost as bad as the time he got kicked out of a low-impact aerobics class during Bring-a-Guest-Free Week at Julie's health club.

Tonight's dancers were better than average, almost as if they'd gotten together earlier in the day and practiced. All three rows did a half-decent imitation of unison—even the drunks managed to turn on the beat, usually in the right direction—and a few of the women looked like ringers smuggled in from an MTV dance party. For someone who hadn't wanted to get up at all, Gretchen seemed suspiciously competent, improvising her own private dance around the basic steps of the Electric Slide, her easy grace heightened by the presence of the no-frills Lambrusco twins on either side of her, stomping around like bodyguards. She seemed to sense him watching and looked up quizzically near the end of the song, doing a startled double take at the moment of eye contact. Before he could react she spun away, leaving him to smile at the yellow bow pinned above her butt like an award.

Seamlessly, the band segued into a ten-minute medley that included “I Will Survive,” “Boogie-Oogie-Oogie,” “Get Down Tonight,” and “On the Radio,” capped by a full-length version of “Y.M.C.A.,” a song that had returned with a vengeance from the land of musical oblivion. The Disco Revival had not been a happy development for the Wishbones, highlighting as it did a number of their weaknesses, the most prominent being the lack of a female vocalist (as hard as Ian tried, “I Will Survive” was not something a man could pull off with any credibility, let alone panache), as well as the band's stylistic discomfort with the entire genre. Dave had to fake the choppy strumming, and Buzzy couldn't quite coax the fat, funky bottom notes out of his usually eloquent bass; Ian had recently begun programming his keyboard drum machine to supplement Stan's none-too-subtle attack. In the end, though, none of this seemed to matter. The dancers waved their arms and sang along as though the Wishbones were just the Village People in black tie.

Artie closed off the set with a couple of Golden Oldies. Gretchen returned to her table during “Under the Boardwalk,”
but was immediately accosted by the Best Man, who seemed eager to drag her back out for a slow dance. She shook her head and dabbed her brow with a napkin, apparently pleading exhaustion, but the cocky little guy persisted. Finally she relented, allowing herself to be led back onto the floor for “The Great Pretender.” Watching this mini drama from the stage, Dave found himself seized by a sudden and violent dislike for the Best Man, who looked like a puffed-up pigeon in his tightly buttoned vest and shirtsleeves.

They danced at arm's-length like the strangers (he hoped) they were, drifting closer and closer to the stage as the song progressed. Dave tried to concentrate on his playing, but it gradually became clear that Gretchen wanted to reestablish the eye contact that had been broken off during the Electric Slide. Her gaze was frank and curious rather than flirtatious, but he was flattered nonetheless. He even began to feel a bit sorry for the Best Man, the poor guy dancing in a dreamworld, thinking he was making progress with the most intriguing woman in the room while she was busy flirting over his head with someone else. He smiled at her and she smiled back.

This isn't happening
, Dave thought.
This doesn't happen to me.
He'd heard lots of talk about willing bridesmaids and musicians getting lucky at weddings, but he'd quickly learned not to take this sort of thing too seriously, at least as it applied to him. He wasn't the center of attention like an Ian or a Zelack; he was just an anonymous guy in the shadows, Joe Average in a tuxedo. Every now and then he got to sing “shoo-bop” or “la la la.”

Spoiling the moment in an effort to preserve it, Lenny rolled his video camera through the middle of the dance floor, his spotlight burning like the midday sun. Gretchen got lost in the glare, but reemerged a few seconds later, her eyes seeking out Dave's as she steered her partner back toward the stage. When she had positioned herself directly in front of him, maybe ten feet away, she mouthed a silent question he couldn't quite decipher. He shrugged
and grimaced. She tried again, mouthing the words more distinctly.

“Are you saved?”

Shit
, he thought,
is that what this is about?
He felt an urge to laugh, even as he registered the surprisingly sharp sense of disappointment in his gut. She really didn't look like the kind of woman who cared if a man was saved or not. He shook his head no, but the Best Man had already spun her away from him. The little guy's eyes were closed; his face looked lost and happy floating above her shoulder. Gretchen rotated him ninety degrees, looking up and repeating her silent question for the third time.

This time his face lit up with comprehension. She was making a much simpler inquiry than he'd thought, one he'd be happy to answer in the affirmative.

“Are you
Dave?”

She wasn't too Surprised he didn't remember. She'd only been seventeen that summer in Belmar, one of a handful of high school girls who used to sneak into bars to hear Lost Cause, this Beaver Brown-type band he'd played in during his second, and final, year of college.

“Mark Frechetti's my cousin. That's how we knew about you guys.”

“Really? How's Mark doing?”

They were standing near the base of the stage, next to the small rolling cart that held the wedding cake, which turned out not to be a cake at all, but an elaborate cardboard facsimile, complete with three-dimensional bride and groom figurines on top. The rest of the band had slipped off to the conference room, and the Best Man had returned to the head table to confer with the happy couple.

“Okay, I guess. He moved to Seattle about five years ago. He was supposedly friends with Nirvana or something.”

“Wow.”

“I know.” Gretchen's eyes widened behind her glasses; he couldn't decide if she was impressed or amused. “My own cousin.”

Mark Frechetti wasn't the most talented singer Dave had ever worked with—he couldn't touch Ian's range, for example—but he was easily the most charismatic. Handsome, seedy, and weirdly intense, he was an orthodontist's kid who wrote incomprehensible lyrics and mumbled them into the microphone long before it became fashionable on the alternative scene. The last time Dave saw him, at an Alex Chilton show in Hoboken, he'd grown these ratty-looking white guy dreadlocks and lost one of his top front teeth. It was easy to imagine him hanging with Cobain during those last grim months, neither one of them uttering a word for hours at a time.

“We were groupies,” she told him. “Lost Cause was all we ever talked about. We were sure you guys were going to be famous.”

“Groupies? How come I didn't know about this?”

“I tried to talk to you a few times, but you always seemed preoccupied.”

More than ten years down the road, Dave could still vividly recall that Lost Cause summer. Seven guys sharing a one-bedroom beach rental, crashing anywhere there was enough floor for a body. Delivering furniture by day, getting stoned and playing music at night. It would have been a great time, except that Julie had just left him for Brendan, and he'd forgotten how to eat or sleep. No wonder he'd seemed preoccupied.

“We thought of you as the Sad One,” she continued. “The brooding loner of the group.”

“Just my luck. The one time in my life I have groupies, and I don't even know it.”

Her hand fell softly on his wrist. “It's so weird seeing you here. It feels like a dream or something.”

He studied her face, trying to rescue it from the messy file cabinet of his memory. Was there a folder up there marked “Frechetti's Little Cousin?” Or “People Named Gretchen?” Or “Girls I Should Have Talked to, but Didn't?” Gretchen didn't mind the scrutiny. She stared right back at him with an odd composure that seemed to say,
Go ahead, look at me all you want.

Dave wasn't fully aware of the intimacy generated by this silence until it was violated by the Best Man. He barged into their moment without a word of apology, grabbing hold of her wrist as though he had some sort of preestablished claim on her body.

“Hey,” he said, “we need you back at the table.”

She didn't answer right away. Her gaze moved away from Dave to the fingers on her arm, then traveled without haste up to the Best Man's face.

“Are you touching me?” she asked.

The little guy pulled his hand away, his cheeks flushing with remarkable speed. His voice was reproachful and defensive at the same time.

“They're taking the table picture. Everybody's there but you.”

“Okay,” she told him. “I'll be there in a minute.”

The Best Man didn't know how to take a hint. He crossed his arms on his chest and let out a long, impatient sigh. Gretchen grabbed hold of Dave's wrist as easily as the little guy had taken hold of hers.

“Come on,” she said, tugging him toward the door. “I need a cigarette.”

He was happy to follow her out the door and down the hall, happy to leave the Best Man fuming on the dance floor and the less-fortunate Wishbones twiddling their thumbs in the conference room while he shared a quiet moment with a woman who somehow
managed to pull off the nearly impossible feat of seeming sexy and intelligent in a bridesmaid's dress.

“I don't even know what I'm doing here,” she said, pausing at the top of the stairs to gather the front of her dress into two big billowy handfuls. “Staci and I haven't really been friends since we were twelve.”

“So how'd it happen?”

“It's complicated.” She began her descent, hugging her raised skirt like a grocery bag to keep from tripping. “My mother and her mother were like sisters. My mom died this year and Staci asked me to do this at the funeral. Neither one of us was thinking straight.”

“I'm sorry.”

“This dress is ridiculous,” she muttered. “I can't even see my feet.”

“About your mother,” he added, in case she hadn't understood him the first time.

Downstairs was a madhouse. Just as they reached level ground, an enormous conga line spilled out of the Birnam Wood Room and began snaking through the lobby. Rockin’ Randy led the charge in a wild Hawaiian shirt, waving his cordless mike and shouting “Hot! Hot! Hot!” The bride and groom were right behind him, followed by the wedding party and what appeared to be a never-ending line of women in dresses and men in suits, each one holding on to the person in front and chanting along with Randy. It was like one of those freight trains that just kept on coming, car after car after car. When the caboose finally arrived, it turned out to be Buzzy, who was holding on to an elderly woman's waist with one hand and brandishing an eclair with the other.

“Yo,” he called out, beckoning to Dave with the pastry. “Get on board!”

Dave turned hopefully to Gretchen, thinking a conga line might not be the worst way to break the ice with her.

“I need some fresh air,” she told him.

“Hot! Hot! Hot!”

Rockin’ Randy's freight train ran amok through the lobby in a series of overlapping loops and spirals, temporarily denying them access to the parking lot, the only source of fresh air he could think of.

“Hot! Hot! Hot!”

But then he remembered another possibility. There was a fire door at the opposite end of the building that opened onto what amounted to a little patio enclosed by Dumpsters. Buzzy had shown it to him when he first joined the band, explaining that this was where the dishwashers hung out during their breaks. At the time there were even a couple of lawn chairs out there. It was at least worth a try.