I was a bridesmaid in my friend S's wedding in Philadelphia earlier this year. I flew in Thursday night, and checked into a hotel down the street from Rittenhouse Square. I was a wreck. I had been single for two weeks and was still reeling in sadness. I did not have my bridesmaid face on. S had asked me to give a speech at the reception. I wrote out a disjointed raft of words on the flight over, crying quietly above my laptop hoping the random stranger sitting next to me wouldn't notice. S#2 was going to be at the wedding too. I saw her in S's MySpace friends list a year earlier and hit on her. I met her in person once on a trip to visit S and some other friends but nothing came of it. When I landed in Philly S#2 was already there and we met for a drink.
We went to a dingy bar that allowed smoking and served twenty-five cent hot dogs. The first time I had met S#2 I was clutched with anxiety. Everyone in the group knew I had a crush on her and kept nudging me into making some grandiose play. Anything less than sex in a bar bathroom would have been a disappointment for them. I rebelled against the pressure by ignoring S#2 for most of the night, and when I did speak to her it was about impenetrable topics like the score in Midnight Cowboy and the difference between ketchup and catsup.
S#2 and I were among the first of the long-distance wedding party to arrive in Philly. At the bar she ordered Makers Mark and Budweiser as if it were a single drink. I went round for round with her, smoking and eating hot dogs. By the time the fourth round arrived I wasn't sure I should be drinking whiskey anymore. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth and I could feel the muscles in my neck going slack. I had been drunk under the table. S and her fiancée met us as I started asking the waitress for water, hoping S#2 wouldn't notice that I was now ignoring the full glass of whiskey in front of me and taking sheepishly small sips of beer.
After closing down the bar we walked back to our hotel, picking up some pizza along the way. It was late May. The city was hot and muggy at 2AM. I had just pierced my nipple and felt a craven urge to take my shirt off while we walked. And so I did. A garbage truck drove by and honked at me as I tottered along the street gutter. It felt good to be drunk. I was cheating, I knew, but it was still nice to actually feel good for a while; to not be swept away on the kaleidoscopic dirge of little memories of the woman I had been seeing. Glimpses of her bare feet on my hardwood floor. The taste of her mouth in the morning when I would nudge it open for a first kiss. The angle of her eyes, looking distractedly out the window. The tenuous shake in her voice at karaoke, nervous in a near deserted Chinatown dive bar. I had been living in a silent flood and it felt nice to be numb to it for a few hours.
S#2 and I went back to my hotel room, which I was sharing with my friend B. We ate pizza and watched cable. B announced that she was going to bed and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. S#2 looked at me and started describing some video she had seen on YouTube, trying to convince me of how funny it was. I was skeptical. She asked me to come up to her room to watch the video on her laptop. There are only so many times in a man's life that a woman asks him back to her room at 3AM to watch YouTube. Here was my moment, suddenly. That mythic window of experience had opened up before me, halfway between amateur porn and an awkward freshman pickup line. I accepted.
We got to her room, a narrow closet with a twin bed. I sat on the bed and she fetched her laptop from the desk then sat beside me on the bed. I started kissing her while she opened the web browser. She kept typing with one eye on the screen while we kissed. The video played. It was less charming than advertised. I made fun of her for thinking it was funny. She protested, defending her taste and sense of humor. We started kissing again. After a while we were undressed to our respective underpants. I felt overwhelmed by her body. It was so new and different. I felt the twinge of kaleidoscopic sadness again. I closed my eyes and cupped her face between my hands and kissed her. With my eyes closed, she was someone else. It was jarring to open them again and see her, a shock of blond hair, blue eyes, and pale beige freckles.
We kissed for another hour, trying to jack each other off. I didn't have condoms, and I didn't care whether or not she did. It was close to sunrise. My drunkenness was evaporating into a tired, pulsing distraction. As the numbness wore away I could feel sadness welling up inside my chest, like a ball of dim light, a sunrise over some polluted winter city. I looked at the clock and told her I should probably get to sleep. The wedding rehearsal was in the morning, and there was a lot of work to do.
I got dressed and went back to my room. The next night the entire wedding party went out after the rehearsal dinner. S#2 and I arrived separately. We looked at each other across the bar, intermittently. I felt sheepish and conflicted. I was sober again and didn't want to hook up anymore that weekend. My head was scrambled and my heart was upside down. But I liked S#2 and I didn't want to reject her. There are few things I like less than telling people "no." I didn't even know if she had any lingering interest in me. We avoided each other all night, then as I was leaving with the group I had come with I walked over to her. We made small talk, I asked how she was getting home, treading conversational water, then gave her a kiss and took off.
The next day I had to give a speech at the reception. I was terrified. Giving a speech at a wedding is mortifying. Bridging the gap between joyful pith and meaningful intimacy in front of a huge group of distracted onlookers is terrifying. Everyone that went before me was perfect, alternating personal anecdote with coy jokes about the bride's or groom's personality quirks. After postponing as long as I could B shoved me up to the podium. My veins dilated and my hands were sweating on the microphone. I skimmed the room for half a second, then looked down at my shiny leather boots. I had written a thousand words on my laptop, ambling sentences riddled with semi-colons and inconclusive parentheticals. I tried to pull the form of it from memory.
My point, like most things I try to express, was over complicated and awkwardly phrased. Words hung off the idea like an over-sized suit on a skinny man. It was all vaguery and guesswork. When you love someone you want their partner to be someone who'll take care of them the way you'd take care of them if you could. S still teases me over the speech. Everyone was really funny and short and then I went up there and made a sappy puddle of myself in public for a few minutes. "What the hell was that?" she asked me a few weeks ago over brunch.
That night we all stayed out late. I had moved to a different hotel a mile away from the hotel I had stayed at the first night to be closer to the reception. We closed another bar and I wound up alone again with S#2. I walked her back to her hotel. I stopped at the steps to the front door. She stood a few steps up and lingered, both of us holding on to small talk. I yawned and said I was exhausted. I moved in and gave her a hug and kiss on the cheek. I backed away down the street and she walked up the remaining steps and disappeared into the hotel.
I drunk dialed someone on my way home, talking into the empty vacuum of voicemail as I stumbled through the old streets of downtown Philly. The red and brown bricks melded together into a dull crimson under the street lights. The only thing I had left were words, and I sent them through the phone mic in a soft voice, meandering through all the details of where I was, what I had been doing, and what time of morning it was. It felt nice for a few seconds, almost like touching, the 1's and 0's being translated into sound waves, recorded in some master server, archived for 14 days, played back later, on a Sunday morning, looking out a window at the bright and sunny sidewalk. It felt like I was somewhere else entirely.
Then I hung up, drunk and alone in Philadelphia.
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