10. Jun, 2019

Wedding Guest

When I walked back in from upstairs, they looked as cosy together as a Mother’s Day convention, all fitting neatly into each other’s family pockets but although a lot of people seem to live that way, anyone with half an eye can see it isn’t so and I have two good eyes. Pale sand lay in the dunes beyond the windows, leading to a distant shore and an even more distant sea.  I knew because once we’d arrived at the hotel for the reception, Emilia and I had walked out there.  Nobody else had, what with their fine shoes, fancy clothes and such like.   Presently, the dunes were empty of all but their wild grasses and sea thistles, looking grim under bad tempered showers rolling in from the sea after a sunnily humid afternoon.

I didn’t ask for much in life, which is just as well since, like most people, I rarely got it.  As the new part of a still youngish couple (by today’s standards), I knew I was being assessed.

“Any port in a storm,” I heard once, as the other guests took me in.

My fiance, Emilia, was a big, soft woman with brown eyes who liked a drink but then again, who didn’t?  After all, we lived lonely in the city and you had to pass the time somehow.  I was more on the deadbeat side of life, where you knew what it was to go hungry.  Hopefully marrying Emilia would put paid to that.  We found each other in a food bank.  Me because I needed the food and Emilia because she was giving it out as a volunteer, hoping to meet people.  That was how come she’d met me.

We were at a wedding, not ours, so that I could meet some of Emilia’s family, in a sideways move, so to speak, since she’d shied away from direct introductions.  I couldn’t blame her for that.  No-one, not even Emilia, probably, would ever describe me as a catch.  She wasn’t ashamed of me as such, more of herself, I think, because I could tell these were the kind of people who would always have been telling her she could do better one way or another.   It’s hard to break the habit of accepting subtle put downs because you don’t know how to deal with them.  I did and I was trying to teach the trick to Emilia but these things take time.

I went down the indoor steps into the room where they were all sitting having drinks before the celebratory meal kicked in later.  Emilia was with some cousins of sorts, all a lot more highly polished than she was, with fascinators in their hair and dresses that fitted.  Emilia’s dresses never fitted.  It was one of the things I liked about her.  She never expected them to and just went with it anyway if she liked something.  (Emilia liked bright somethings, so she kind of stood out).  Like me, Emilia realised that life seldom lived up your vague expectations of it amounting to more than it did.  This was partly because, while we didn’t have expensive homes or cars or holidays, or jobs managing this or that, we also didn’t hold them to be the things that mattered to us in life.  We hadn’t quite figured out what those things might actually be yet, either, though but we felt that, although they eluded us, they were still out there somewhere.  That was the spark we recognised in one another that drew us together but then, regular drunks are always prone to being sentimental romantics, aren’t they, or maybe that’s why we like a drink in the first place?   When sober, we might think we’re just fooling ourselves but still we keep on looking, aimlessly nostalgic for that extra something.  As a result, neither of us had ever pursued more than a faltering career path, punctuated by sporadic attempts at creativity and relationships.  It meant that, underneath it all, any indecisive lack of confidence, in an odd way we felt kind of superior.  We didn’t need the things all those people had to be happy, we told ourselves, which was just as well, since neither of us, clearly, had made much of an effort to attain them.  I sat down and they gave me a drink too off the tray going round, sparkly bubbly something given out free to start with.  The bar would come later.

“So, what do you do?” one of the women asked me.

“I haven’t worked out what I want to be yet when I grow up,” I answered drily, which given my age and worn looks, got the expected response.

The cousins laughed dutifully but their champagne flutes reflected the glint in their eye.

“Another dud,” their exchanged glances concluded, satisfied that, as you might expect, Emilia had found one that didn’t come up to scratch.

“Oh, well, as long as you’re happy,” said one, tapping Emilia’s plump arm with a handful of variegated false nails with little jewel things stuck on them.

Even Emilia had had one of these manicures for the occasion and I could see she was having a struggle with the painted acrylics glued on to her fingers, clutching her glass as if using chopsticks for the first time and nervous it might slip from her grasp at any moment.  I couldn’t help smiling and she pulled a face back, knowing why I was amused.

“Emilia says you both went for a walk on the beach earlier.  What was it like?” was another cousin’s next question.

I thought back to paddling in gritty shallows and seeing the sad remains of a long ago stranded porpoise pod, reduced, alien like, to tooth filled beak bones and bare rib cages, large eye orbits empty.  Until we got close, we couldn’t tell what they were.  There were no people to have discovered them and helped them back from their beaching, only the gulls who still paced about them now, stretching their necks out giving ululating calls.  There was something about it, the isolation and nature still living alone just around the corner from humanity.  We had both taken lots of photographs of different angles and empty horizons.

“Pretty wild,” I said.

Emilia smiled and we exchanged one of our own looks, one that meant we saw things and found odd riches where other people didn’t look.  I could see we were rubbing the other guests up the wrong way without even trying.  It’s a vibe that comes off you when you don’t play the game.  Those that do sense it, even when you’re making light conversation with them, that underneath, you don’t respect what they value.  Of course, that didn’t make Emilia and me any more interesting to them, if anything quite the reverse, because that’s the way it always works.  They weren’t rich people, really,  just the usual tribes of regular attainers of things.  Emilia wasn’t really one of those.  Even so, Emilia didn’t look upset right now, although I’m sure she often had been, in their company.  Rather, she was enjoying having me with her as a joint force, even if we were perceived as failing the invisible tests arraigned against a person in public.  The fact that I didn’t care one way or the other was validating me with Emilia, I could see, which surprised me a bit, as I’d thought we were past all that already but maybe you never are, not when one of you is thrown back into the judgement of old company.

Music had started and I watched Emilia agree to go on to the dance floor for one of those women’s anthems all gatherings seem to go in for, so, somewhat inappropriately for a wedding bash, Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I will survive’ belted out, maybe to show all the divorcees present they still had a few things to tell people too.  Everyone dancing, married or not, sang along with gusto.  Emilia dancing is worth a look.  She’s an unselfconscious mover, what she lacks in grace being made up for in spontaneity.  Emilia may have her awkward moments but worrying about what she looks like isn’t one of them, which was another thing I liked about her, not that she didn’t look fine to me.  Besides, she was already a little loaded, which only added to the gay abandon of her splendid bosom in action in that dress.  I could tell I wasn’t the only one enjoying it, although you needed to keep your distance on the dance floor, as she’s pretty hefty in heels.

The cousins’ husbands, left behind while all this girl power was going on, tried a little talk of their own.  They were each doing terrifically well, naturally and laughed a lot all the time they spoke of it, with in jokes about other weddings and stag dos mixed in.  I waited for them to get to me, which of course, they did.  In short order, they found out I wasn’t in any business of any kind and that I didn’t have my own place, no.  I lived at Emilia’s.  She rented.  I was careful not to say 'we'.  I didn’t care much about material things, I enjoyed adding, just to annoy, which it did.  They closed ranks a bit but still included me out of courtesy.  They needn’t have bothered, for me.

It was true that Emilia paid the rent but I didn’t see it as freeloading.  After all, I hadn’t asked her to offer me living space when I mentioned mine was looking shaky, which I was apt to remind her of when she got snarky about things.  Emilia always backed down, anyway,  in case I just left.  My illusory air of freedom always stood me in good stead with Emilia, for whom being loved took precedence over common sense, luckily for me.  The conversation continued with the men still keeping me in the circle.  I’m not a good listener, though.  It’s not that I’m cynical, I just bore easy.  This is what I warn Emilia of and it keeps her on her toes.  I walked away and went outside for a moody cigarette.  The rain had stopped.  It wasn’t long before one of the none dancing ladies joined me, attracted by my aloof and jaded air outside the windows, not so much a pose as a habit by now.  My cigarette was real but hers was one of those electric jobs that wreath you in a fruity steam like having a Turkish bath outside.

“Pity,” I said.  “Takes away the romance of offering to light it for you.”

When she fell for it, I turned away slightly, smiling a little to show it was a tease and then she wasn’t sure what to make of it but I’d already hooked her in, so she continued trying to hold my gaze, since I’d looked straight into hers.  I have good eyes, I’m told, though they mostly have to overlook the rest.  I’ve always found though, that if you play the part, you soon seem to look the part.  She asked me my name.

“Jake,” I said, a good name, a manly but arty sounding name, maybe a musician’s name, a poet’s name, a painter’s name, the name of someone who might have travelled, or a name for someone hiding an interesting past behind a dull today.

“That’s a nice name,” she said warmly, following the lines so easily it made me tired already.

“Is it?” I said, smiling and throwing down my dimp, raising an eyebrow.

“Mine’s Lisa,” she offered.

Could I be bothered?  No, I decided, although she was attractive enough to tinker with for a while during the evening.

“I’m engaged to Emilia,” I said, gesturing towards the dancefloor.  “You know Emilia?”

“Oh,” she said, “No I don’t think so.”

“Come and meet her, then,” I suggested.   “I’m just going back in.”

She trailed behind me, was introduced and trailed off again, only slightly disappointed.  After all, I hadn’t put much effort into it.

Emilia had had another drink or two when we sat down with her crowd again, which made her feel a part of things, even though she wasn’t.  It made her loud and friendly, expansively interested in people, even though, again, she wasn’t, not really, not afterwards.  Not that she didn’t mean it at the time, full of gregarious sociability and invitations to get together, that people really should come to ‘ours’.  Not that there was an ‘ours’, of course.

It was definitely time to sit down and eat before she got past it altogether.  Not that I minded but Emilia would and I was familiar enough with the tides of self recrimination which would roll over Emilia for days later, if she thought she’d been inappropriate, to want to avert it.  She had an uncannily accurate memory afterwards for which people had looked surprised or taken aback, or even shocked by her on such occasions.  I’d always tell her there was no harm in being friendly and who cared about any of them anyway but even though Emilia might agree, she’d still worry about it and avoid people for a while.   Especially if she’d issued random invitations.  There were several places we never called into any more for a drink in the city.  For a grown woman she had a childish side, where all her romancing sat, I suppose.  Again, it’s one of the things that made me take to her, a naivety at the heart of her intelligence which would always be her undoing without someone to look out for her.  Luckily, she now had me.

We might be engaged but we never mentioned proper arrangements, ideas of things on beaches being vaguely talked of in our affectionate cups but just now I could see she was enjoying being at this wedding reception and fancying how that kind of occasion might be.  I didn’t mind.  It could be whatever Emilia wanted, whenever she wanted it to be.  I wouldn’t be the one having to pay for it, so as I always said, “it’s your party, baby.  I’ll just come along.”

Emilia always said that was all she wanted.  Just for me to always be along.

“I’ll remind you of that,” I’d say, “when you get sick of me one day.”

Not that I thought she ever would.  We’d go along together still looking for that interesting future until the two of us were all that was left of it, and we’d have to rely on each other then to keep the dream alive.  I could handle that.  I’d drifted through worse.  I watched Emilia enjoying her dinner and chatting, she thinking of our tomorrows when she smiled across at me and I knew that, right then, they were as bright as a tequila sunrise for her.  When we clinked glasses to toast the bride and groom,  I winked at her, just to remind her that we were different and she had things to live up to with me.  Like I said, I try to keep Emilia on her toes.