Thrill-Bent (24 page)

B
elow the parking lot, there is a cul-de-sac, and at the end of the cul-de-sac is a narrow path through the rocky and pine-dense terrain. The handrails along the trail are strung with twinkling white lights and threaded with colored-paper streamers. The cliff is so steep it’s hard to see what’s coming next down the hill, and for the first quarter-mile all Betty and I can see is the vast, vertigo-inducing sweep of toad-green ocean below us. My kitten-heeled leopard mules, the only vaguely dressy shoes I brought with me, are daggers stabbing into the earth; with every step, I turn up a poof of fresh ground, flicking a dirtbomb into Betty’s path. Should they ever want to cultivate a garden along this trail, I am aerating the soil like a high-priced rototiller. As we descend slowly into the lair of the sea, the figure of a little church emerges beneath us. Its slanted roof is made of glass, a huge skylight cut into the middle of the hill like a third eye staring upward, absorbing the light from heaven.

“That must be it.” I pause on a narrow step and shift the ridiculously shiny package from my right hip to my left. Our tinfoil-wrapped wedding gift looks farcical out here in the natural world, where bright rays funnel between deep green trees and glint off its surface. The foil is tearing at one corner and the edge of an ugly gray shoebox protrudes.

Betty nods. “Très picturesque. Wonder how far in advance they had to reserve this spot.” She pulls a lipstick out of the hip pocket of her plaid blazer and reapplies, leaning down to stare at her reflection in the foil giftwrap, then blots on one of the crepe-paper streamers. She looks gorgeous, as usual, in spite of the remarkably awful haliperidol hangover we share today, which no amount of coffee or Advil can put a dent in. When I woke up this morning, Betty was curled a mile away from me on her mother’s enormous bed (as though in flight from the uniform dangling near my head), and as I dragged myself from the master bedroom to the kitchen I passed Jackson, who was merrily swabbing the laundry room floor with an industrial mop. I required a fifteen-minute hot shower to dig the all the irridescent powder out of my various orifices. I notice that Betty still has a bit of glistering lavender sparkle underneath her left nostril, and it glitters in the afternoon sun like a magnificent snail trail.

“Will you help me cover this corner?” I ask, holding the package up and examining the tear.

“Oh, please,” she says, “Like anyone’s going to be judging your gift-wrapping skills. Let’s just get down there to the mimosa bar.”

We hear a human sound coming from twenty yards ahead, a gravelly, throat-clearing sort of sound. We tread down another length of trail, and there, off to the side of the path, standing in a small clearing among the pines, is Chantelle. There’s no mistaking her role here; she’s wearing the most ubiquitous Vera Wang gown imaginable—it looks like every cover of
Modern Bride
—a tight white satin bodice swelling into a poofy lace skirt, yards and yards of fabric swirling around her legs like a death-swarm of white moths. Her hair is tucked up under an explosion of veil, but I recognize her face from that Polaroid I’ve been carrying around: too much black eyeliner on a pair of close-set, marmot-like eyes, lips swollen with Restylane and plastered with pink gloss. What the hell is she doing, standing here in the dirt? Is she greeting the guests?

“Oh ... hello,” she says, and smiles over-politely. It’s clear from her decorous attitude that she doesn’t know who we are.

I begin a greeting, but she turns away abruptly, as though to attend to some last-minute bit of business with the pine tree to her immediate left. I look at Betty, who starts to say something then thinks better of it, and then I again start to stutter a hello but swallow it mid-syllable. Something in Chantelle’s pinched tone has made it clear that we are to keep walking, though it seems absurd to do so—like coming across Sasquatch in the woods and simply shrugging as you pass. But it feels rude to linger, after she has turned her back to us, and Betty pulls me ahead through the trees. When we emerge from the forested glen, we are standing in a fragrant little glade just above the church. I lean against a large white marble cross and empty my left shoe.

“Oh shit,” Betty says, and I follow her gaze downhill. The entire congregation is staring up at us expectantly through the chapel’s gigantic slanted glass roof, which is now directly below us. Rows and rows of white people dressed in pastels stand with their faces upturned. Everyone in the church is waiting for the bride to descend to the unmistakable organ strains of the processional. We run down the last leg of path, trying not to look at the disapproving starers. We are breathing hard, my feet are covered in dirt, and the wedding gift is trailing flakes of silver like phosphorescent dandruff. We slip inside through the flung-open wooden doors, trying to somehow blend.

My father stands at the altar. He looks at me and shakes his head. I can’t tell if it’s a slightly amused head-shake, or a slow-burn headshake.

I don’t really care. I’m fucking
here,
aren’t I? Without so much as a bong hit or a shot of whiskey to bolster my spirits and assuage my hangover, I have arrived at my estranged dad’s nuptials.

The Condor, so familiar and yet so mysterious. As soon as I glance at him, let his eyes hook into mine, as soon as I see his tanned skin and raptorial features, all the old feelings come rushing back. I shudder but I can’t look away. He looks the same, only different. Actually, he looks a little younger than he used to. His hair is still mostly black, but tastefully wavy now, with a romantic Omar Sharif side part instead of the jewfro he used to sport; his face is hardly lined and even more handsome. There is something vaguely actor-playing-a-doctor-on-a-soap-opera about him, some semblance of ironed-out “concern” that has been perfected through affluence. My heartbeat zooms. I think I can smell him, Dial soap and Binaca. I take Betty’s hand to steady myself, and she puts her arm around me and squeezes tight. She is sturdiness itself in her chunk-heeled boots, and I’m thankful I brought her with me. She might be indifferent to her Aspergerian brother’s backyard pain; she may never know what it feels like to be
un perdidor
(no one could be a loser in those boots), but Betty is as solid as a headmistress. “Your dad’s a total fox,” she whispers. I let myself lean into her body with a sigh. I’m sure everyone—well, maybe only the 93 percent of wedding-goers who are still openly staring at us—thinks we’re lesbians.

Chantelle hears her musical cue and starts to descend. All eyes turn upward again as she wafts down the steep grade—miraculously, with no obvious dirt clouds in the wake of her train. She looks beautiful and alone, like an ancient queen. But where is her father? Why is no one giving her away? I’ve only been to a couple of weddings in my life, and one of them was in a yurt on Fire Island, yet I’m pretty sure there’s supposed to be a symbolic handing-over of the bride by someone older and richer. Maybe her father is dead. Maybe that’s why in a few minutes she’s going to say “I do” to a man thirty years her senior, a man whose daughter was studying flash cards before she was born. Seriously, she must have a major-league Electra complex.

Look who’s talking.

As the guests ooh and aah while Chantelle swoops down from on high, I steal another glance at the Condor, whose head is tilted back to the same degree everyone else’s head is tilted back. He is grinning sweetly. I try to perform a psychic manipulation to make him turn toward me while everyone else is gazing at her. I narrow my eyes and think hard about metal. I am the giant stainless steel refrigerator and he is the tiny refrigerator magnet, drawn inexplicably to my powerful force field.

Chantelle glides into the chapel through the wooden doors, and several little girls in pink satin dresses run over to lift her train as she walks down the aisle. I notice she does the clichéd wedding walk: step, feet together and pause; step, feet together and pause. It looks a little silly, considering that her slow-mo, choreographed gait is not in unison with anyone else’s. The girls are scrambling behind her, lurching forward each time she steps, like it’s an Easter egg hunt and they might find some colorful jelly beans under her voluminous skirts. She is smiling and moving her head back and forth in a mechanized way, as though her chin is weighted down to her collarbone. Then I notice all the flashes, and I realize she is stopping to pose for the cameras, pitching to what she considers her most flattering angle.

The ceremony is conventional, conducted by a loquacious, bottle-blond minister who takes the opportunity to mention God at every turn, even when he refers to the wedding night (“... to come together according to the Lord’s ordinance in the holy state of matrimony”), which strikes me as slightly obnoxious, like bringing up the subject of double chins just when someone is biting into an eclair. What denomination is this church, anyway? The plaque outside says “Laguna Beach Church of God’s Holy Light,” but that name seems designed to frustrate anyone trying to figure out if it’s a guitar-strumming, Marx-loving, social-justice-spouting church, or a church that thinks dinosaur bones were put here by God to test our faith and that it is possible to pray away the gay.

We are close to the exit, within darting distance of the streamer-twined path that leads back up toward freedom. I tilt my head back to see the giant white marble cross in the clearing above the chapel; it glows in the center of the skylight roof, probably part of the architectural design. To the right, all I can see is a blue-green slab of ocean. The view of the cross is more seductive, but maybe that’s because I know it’s closer to the parking lot where our rental car resides.

I scan the sweep of heads around us; no one looks familiar. I’m not sure who I expect to find, since my grandparents died years ago, and I have rarely met any other of my dad’s family. His brother, my uncle, died in the Korean war. My mother’s family, whom I’d grown up among on the West Coast, would of course not be invited to my dad’s second wedding, would they? A woman in the front pew has the high ponytail of my Mormon cousin Margie. But most of the people here look like WASPs of the highest order: several older ladies are wearing Chanel suits and First Lady earrings; I see many chignons and linen blazers. The men are in sport coats and ties, and everyone is tastefully tan. Not the kind of tan you sometimes see in Manhattan in winter, that bronzy, rub-on glow that is meant to make you think that the person just returned from Saint Barts, and certainly not the leathery, ruddy, seared-in tan on the faces of the homeless campers in Central Park. This is country-club tan, waiting-for-our-tee-time tan: Laguna Beach tan. Everyone seems polite and attentive, but I don’t see any tears or notice any excitement galloping through the crowd. The energy in the room is well mannered but tense. Bleached of irony or black humor. I’m starting to rethink my wedding gift: an eBay-purchased copy of the vanity plate my dad had on his blood-red 1970 Fiat Spyder: SMUCKFOG.

Then it hits me: I know what is so different about the Condor, and it’s not the part in his hair or his dalliance with Botox. He is no longer Tourettic. He hasn’t quaked or spewed since we arrived. I’ve never seen him go more than a few minutes without sputtering or shouting something obscene. But there he is, kissing the bride, all suave tuxedo and boutonniere. To look at him now, you’d have to assume that he was a distinguished, gentle widower ten years after his wife’s losing battle with cancer, who, after a few years of grappling with his grief on racquetball courts and in tanning salons, has decided to give love one more chance. What must Betty think? Does she think I was joking about his incessant squawks, his irrepressible refusal to be governed by gravity, about the turbulence and anxiety that wallpapered my childhood? I turn to look at her but her face is inscrutable, although I think I detect a spark of anticipation that hasn’t yet died behind the unsurprised sigh of her expression. The organ player launches into a weepy, irksomely familiar song. I squint at Betty, who whispers, “Shania Twain.” A few people stand to clap for the kiss.

We are seated next to several upscale golfers (or are they tennis players?) at the reception, which takes place a short walk from the chapel on an enormous Italianate patio overlooking the sea. Filigreed wrought iron furniture is plentiful. There are introductions around the table, but I can’t really concentrate because I need a drink. Betty whispers that she noticed some caterer types circulating across the courtyard, but flagging them down like they are hot dog vendors at a ball game doesn’t seem quite appropriate. I gaze at the smattering of spiky greens on the white plate in front of me, some sort of herb salad, and I am immobilized by ennui and can’t raise my fork. Maybe it’s the hangover, maybe it’s the peculiar feeling of finally being in the Condor’s presence—either way, I am numb as a plank. My head hurts, my eyes burn, and I’ve forgotten how to make myself understood in basic English. I feel as though I killed some measure of brain with a teensy unnoticeable stroke, leaving a scalloped edge of gray matter flapping dumb, green, and starved for oxygen, oblivious of recent human history.

I haven’t spoken to my dad yet; immediately after the ceremony, the happy couple stole away into the trees with a photographer and a few hydrangea bouquets the size of beach balls. No one knows who I am in this strange Orange County golf church; my dad has barely glanced at me since I got here—in fact, now I’m not so certain that I actually caught his eye in the first place, he may have been shaking his head to release some pre-ceremony jitters or to chase away a fly. The Condor has become someone whose lifestyle choices are utterly unfamiliar, whose slight headshake is a protean conundrum to me.

Betty’s heavy chair cries out as she backs herself up from the table. “Excuse me,” she mumbles to no one in particular, and heads off in the direction of the champagne-wielding cater-waiters.

“Doesn’t Seth look spiffy today?” the woman across from me—Rhonda, was it?—asks her husband, as she chews demurely on her prickly lettuce.

“Yeah, he cleans up pretty good,” he replies and yelps out a hearty laugh.