expensive but stained suit, and beside him, on a rock, a middle-aged man in bare feet and khaki shorts, wearing a mocha-colored velvet tuxedo jacket. Both were smoking cigars. She thought they looked foolish, trying too hard to be hip, and it amused her to watch and judge, since she knew almost no one at the wedding, and those she did, she remembered only distantly, from the seemingly endless hours she’d spent along this very shore as a child.
She and Claudia had played daily when they were younger, until they were twelve; their names for each other had been She and Me. Then their parents stopped seeing one another, some argument she barely remembered concerning the two of them, the obsessive nature of their play, their made-up language. It had been an irrevocable break, and now, years later, her cousin had written to her out of the blue and announced she was marrying and wouldn’t Jean please come? It would mean so much.
And so here she was. They’d barely had time to say hello, though Jean arrived an hour early for the service, and now the reception was halfway over. Checking her watch, she decided it would be another hour before she could leave gracefully, and when she looked up she glimpsed her aunt’s blue dress passing behind the white and coral azaleas, the dress such a beautiful blue, Jean thought, one hardly noticed the gray in Sally’s hair against it. She seemed on her way somewhere, as she had all afternoon; the caterers needed checking up on, perhaps. Weddings weren’t for the bride and groom, of course, but for their parents, and Sally was ignoring Jean completely and Uncle Teddy was dead, and Boyd’s parents seemed merely happy to be there, as if they hadn’t quite believed Boyd would pull this off. Boyd. She drank more of the champagne. Even his name sounded foolish.
The cigar smoke from the men beside Jean was heady, too strong, really, but in the warm sunshine she found herself attracted to it and moving closer to its source. Soon her allergies would kick in: her temples would throb, her eyes fill with water, and every breath would become a struggle, but for now the scent was pleasurable. She listened to the buzz of the quiet conversation and wondered briefly if the two men might be her distant relatives, if she’d seen them years ago at family Christmas parties, perhaps made fun of them with Claudia. One year she and Claudia had carved the initials of all their least favorite relatives into her aunt’s kitchen wall, a task that had taken half an hour.
Music and echoing laughter reached her from over the water, and she turned to watch the approach of the barge with the bride and groom and many of the guests. They had gone out on it earlier, and now they were dancing to the tunes of a jazz trio, women in pastel dresses floating in the arms of tuxedoed men, their bright, indistinct faces uniformly happy. Jean searched for Claudia and Boyd in the crowd. The barge was right in front of her, at the midpoint of its orbit around the lake, so close she could see the rust-red paint peeling on its hull and hear the quiet chug of its engine below the strains of the music, but even so she couldn’t make out the bride and groom. They must have been hidden in the center of the throng, the core of happiness around which the happiness of others gathered, like bees around a honeycomb. Listening to the waltz, an up-tempo number she recalled from dancing lessons long ago, boys’ sweaty palms clasping her gloved one, she regretted her decision to stay ashore.
“It wasn’t a choice, really,” she said, to comfort herself, and when the middle-aged man standing on the rock glanced up and smiled around his cigar, she realized she’d spoken aloud. At work it didn’t matter, there they were used to her ways, but among strangers the habit embarrassed her. She felt the rims of her ears redden and finished the first glass of champagne, then turned to face the lake.
She had since childhood harbored a vague foreboding about deep water. It had not kept her from learning to swim, but when she’d been asked earlier to go on the boat it had held her back as surely as a physical restraint, yet she’d made a choice, she knew that. Everything was a choice. Ashore there was champagne, and a long meal of chilled gazpacho and grilled shrimp and smoked salmon, and the buzz of slightly drunken conversation all around her, and she’d chosen safety and satiety over the press of a stranger’s hand, urging her to come aboard and dance, though she wouldn’t have, younger. She and Claudia had never opted for security as children. They’d squirted trails of lighter fluid on their forearms and lit them; dropped bricks ever nearer to their bare toes from higher and higher, eyes closed, aiming by feel and not by sight; ridden their bicycles down steep, curving hills in utter darkness, their bare, dirty feet propped on the handlebars in order to keep from braking. But all of that seemed long ago.
She worked to dislodge a rock from the shore with the toe of her shoe, continuing at it even after scraping the leather, and toppled it into the water, where the dropped pink blossoms from the fruit trees bobbed in its wake.
Sensing movement nearby, she looked up to see the boy with the headband detach himself from the man, and as he neared, his eyes rose only to her breasts. Her Inappropriate Date Magnet appeared to be on at full force, and she did not bother to stifle her sigh. The magnet had been off, briefly, when she’d been asked to go out on the water, and turning down the stranger’s invitation had been foolish. This proved it.
He took the cigar from his mouth, its end sodden and horribly misshapen, as if it was something dredged from the bottom of the lake, and she felt like asking if he knew he wasn’t supposed to eat it. When he smiled at her, showing nice teeth, sex was clearly on his mind, but judging by his swagger, it would be of the quick and unmemorable kind.
“Someone as lovely as you shouldn’t be lonely,” he said, “today of all days.”
“I’m not lonely,” she said, “just alone. And someone as old as you ought to have a better line.”
He blanched, and she realized how she must have sounded, the scolding, dismissive edge to her anger, and she felt a momentary pang of regret, but then she decided she shouldn’t care. He’d approached her uninvited, after all, and not the other way around, and the proprietary air he exuded was annoying. Still, it was a wedding, people were in a festive mood. She raised the second champagne flute, still full, by way of explanation. “I’m waiting for someone,” she said, hoping to sound diplomatic.
“Obviously not me.” His face had lost its color, and his voice was rising to a whine, which irritated her.
“Obviously,” she said.
When he turned back, he was so angry that she could almost hear him ticking.
The man relighted the boy’s cigar and they leaned together and began to talk. She heard the slight hissing of their words, a snatch of laughter, something guttural like a grunt, and then the man sneered and shook his head. They were discussing her, her skin prickled with the knowledge, and the air in her lungs suddenly thickened, as if she were breathing mud.
She strained to hear the waltz as the barge moved away over the water, but the boy’s voice grew louder, almost boasting, and when the man said something to make the boy tilt his head back and laugh and then stared at her over the boy’s shaking shoulder, she knew what would happen next; men in pairs were so transparent. She had always hated that, the pack mentality. He slapped the boy’s back and came toward her.
It angered her. She hadn’t asked for this, why couldn’t they let her be? Nonetheless she gave him the full radiance of her smile. She knew it worked; years before, one of her doctors had suggested she smile more. It’s free, he said, and inspires people to like you. But I don’t want them to like me, she’d replied. I want them to leave me alone.
“I hope my nephew wasn’t rude,” the man said, holding out a hand. “Austin Harding.”
“How do you do.” She let him hold her hand longer than required, and when he noticed that, he stepped a foot closer. It did not surprise her that his cologne was Brut, or that she could smell it even over the cigar.
“Don’t you think it’s
