and a wedding gazebo. Waitresses wore bow ties and pushed the scampi, explaining that it was Italian. Had you spent the 1980s in a coma, you might have been impressed with the fake columns and pastel color schemes, but as it was, there was something sad and mallish about it.
While the ceremony would take place at the Royal Pavilion, guests would be staying next door at the Atlantis, a three-story motel essentially unchanged since the early space age. It's where we'd spent weekends as young adults, when tripsto the beach became tripsat the beach. Mushrooms, cocaine, acid, peyote: I'd never checked in without being, at the very least, profoundly stoned, and on arrival I was surprised to find the furniture actually standing still.
My brother had chosen the Atlantis not for its sentimental value but because it allowed the various family dogs. Paul's friends, a group the rest of us referred to as simply 'the Dudes,' had also brought their pets, which howled and whined and clawed at the sliding glass doors. This was what happened to people who didn't have children, who didn't even know people who had children. The flower girl was in heat. The rehearsal dinner included both canned and dry food, and when my brother proposed a toast to his 'beautiful bitch,' everyone assumed he was talking about the pug.
An hour before the wedding, the men in my family were scheduled to meet in Paul's room, no women or Dudes allowed. I went expecting a once-in-a-lifetime masculine moment, and looking back, that's probably what I got. While my room was immaculate, Paul's was dark and littered with bones, like the cave of an animal. He'd only arrived the previous afternoon, but already it looked as though he'd been living there for years, surviving on beer and the bodies of missing beachcombers. I spread out a newspaper and sat on the bed as my father, the best man, attached my brother's cummerbund. It was five o'clock on one of the most important days of their lives and both of them were watching TV It was a cable news channel, a special report concerning a flood in one of those faraway towns senselessly built on the banks of an untrustworthy river. Citizens stacked sandbags on a retaining wall. A wheelbarrow floated down the suburban street. 'And still,' the announcer said, 'still the rain continues to fall.'
I'd heard once, maybe falsely, that when filming the movieGandhi, the director had hired extras to play the roles of sandbags, that it had actually been cheaper than finding the real thing. It seemed like a worthy conversational icebreaker, but before I could finish the first sentence, my father told me to put a lid on it.
'We're trying to watch some TV here,' he said. 'Jesus, do you mind?' Over in the bridal suite, they were applying makeup and systematically crying it back off. Noteworthy things were being said, and I couldn't help but feel I was in the wrong room. My father turned my brother to face him and, with one eye on the television, began knotting his bow tie.
'Water like that will fuck the shit out of some hardwood floors,' Paul said. 'Those sons of bitches are looking at total replacements, I'll tell you what.'
'Well, you're right about that.' My father helped the groom into his jacket and turned to give the flood victims one last look. 'All right,' he said. 'Let's get married.'
It was a busy day at the Royal Pavilion. The five o'clock wedding had gotten off to a late start, and we watched from the sidelines as a Marine Corps chaplain finished marrying an attractive young couple in their early twenties. Lisa and Amy gave the relationship three years at the most. Gretchen and I put it closer to eighteen months, and Tiffany suggested that if we wanted the real answer, we should ask the psychic, who stood beside a scrub pine entertaining Paul's godmother. She was a tall, conservatively dressed woman with flesh-colored hair and matching fingernails. Sunglasses hung from a chain around her neck, and she wiped their lenses while reciting her credentials. It seemed that aside from her regular Friday-night tarot-card readings, she also cured cancer, diabetes, and heart disease by touching the sufferers in secret, hard-to-reach places. 'I've had the gift since I was seven,' she said. 'And believe me, I amvery good at what I do.'
When it came to weddings, she psychically read the prospective bride and groom, divining their innermost selves and using her findings to tailor unique, personally significant vows.
'Well, I, for one, think that that is really beautiful,' Lisa said.
'I know you do,' the psychic said. 'I know you do.'
The marines filed out of the gazebo, and we moved in to take their seats. 'Who does that woman think she is?' Lisa whispered. 'I mean, come on, I was only trying to be polite.'
'I know you were,' I said. 'I know you were.'
J.D. the DJ was stuck in bridge traffic, so the ceremony commenced without the prerecorded wedding march. Lisa predictably started howling the moment the bride rounded the Coke machine and came into view on the arm of her father. The dogs followed suit, and determined not to join them, I looked beyond the psychic's shoulder, to a small patch of ocean visible through the trees. It was the place where, twenty-two years earlier, my brother had come very close to drowning. We'd been horsing around at high tide and looked up to find ourselves on the other side of the waves, drifting farther and farther from the hotel. It wasn't natural to be out that far, and so I swam for shore, thinking he was right behind me.
'Greetings, friends and family,' the psychic said. 'We stand on. .' She looked at the bride, towering over my pint-size brother. 'We stand on tiptoes this afternoon to celebrate the love of. . Paul and Kathy.'
He wasn't supposed to be out at that time of day, especially with me. 'You wind him up,' my mother said. 'For God's sakes, just give it a rest.' When accused of winding up my sisters, I'd always felt a hint of shame, but I liked the fact that I could adequately enthuse a twelve-year-old boy. As an older brother, it was my job, and I liked to think that I was good at it. I swam for what felt like the length of a pool, then stopped and turned around. But Paul wasn't there.
'This love cannot be bought. . in a store,' the psychic said. 'It cannot be found. . under a tree, beneath a. . shell, or even in a. .' You could see her groping for a possible hiding place. 'Even in a. . treasure chest buried centuries ago on the. . historic islands that surround us.'
A swell moved in, and my brother went under, leaving only his right arm, which waved the international sign language for 'I am going to die now and it is all your fault.' I headed back in his direction, trying to recall the water-safety class I'd taken years earlier at the country club.Think, I told myself.Think like a man. I tried to focus, but all that came to me was the instructor, an athletic seventeen-year-old named Chip Pancake. I remembered the spray of freckles on his broad, bronzed shoulders and my small rush of hope as he searched the assembled students for a resuscitation victim.Oh,choose me, I'd whispered.Me! Over here. I recalled the smell of hamburgers drifting from the clubhouse, the sting of the life jacket against my sunburned back, and the crushing disappointment I felt when Chip selected Patsy Pyle, who would later describe the experience as 'life-changing.' These are not the sorts of memories that save lives, so I abandoned the past and relied instead upon instinct.
'We ask that this marriage be blessed with as many graces as there are. .grains of sand in the. . ocean.'
In the end, I just sort of grabbed Paul by the hair and yelled at him to lie flat. He vomited a mouthful of seawater, and together we kicked our way back to the beach, washing ashore a good half mile from the hotel. Lying side by side, catching our breath in the shallow surf, it seemed a moment in which something should be said, some declaration of relief and brotherly love.
'Listen,' I started. 'I just want you to know. .'
'Fuck you,' Paul had said to me.
'I do,' Paul now said to Kathy.
'I just never thought I'd see this day,' Lisa blubbered.
My brother kissed his bride, and the psychic looked out at her audience, nodding her head as if to say, 'I knew that would happen.'
Cameras clicked and a wind kicked up, blowing Kathy's veil and train straight into the air. Her look of surprise, his frantic embrace — in resulting photographs it would appear as if she'd dropped from the sky, caught at the last moment by someone who would now introduce himself as the luckiest man in the world.
At the reception my brother danced the worm, throwing himself on his belly as the Dudes chanted, 'Party, fat man, party.' My father delivered a brief, awkward speech while waving a rubber chicken and again the cameras flashed.
'I cannot believe you,' I said. 'A rubberchicken?'
He claimed he'd been unable to find a rubber rooster, and I explained that that wasn't really the point. 'Not everyone has the ability to improvise,' I said. 'Where were your notes? Why didn't you come to me for help?'
