Rena is not a bridesmaid but has been dragged along for the festivities thanks to the aggressive hospitality of the bridal party. She has worn black to avoid stepping on anyone’s color-assigned toes, and Dori, of course, has worn white, and so all night Rena has been waiting to judge Dori for the look on her face when someone spots the two of them and the rainbow bridal party and takes them for brides-to-be, but so far they have only been to bars where the bartenders greet everyone but Rena and the green bridesmaid, the other out-of-towner, by name.
There is a groom involved in this wedding, though Rena believes his involvement must be loose; she can’t imagine JT is on board with this ark business. Rena has known JT for five years. When they met, most of what they had in common was that they were Americans, but far away from home, that could be enough. JT was on his way back to the States after a Peace Corps tour in Togo; she was on her way back from Burkina Faso. The first leg of their flight home was supposed to take them to Paris, but it had been diverted, and then returned to Ghana, after the airline received a call claiming that an agent of biological warfare had been released on the plane. They landed to chaos; no one charged with telling them what happened next seemed sure what information was credible or who had the authority to release it. The Ghanaian authorities had placed them under a quarantine that was strictly outlined but loosely enforced. Had the threat been legitimate, it would have gifted the planet to whatever came after humans. Instead, they’d been stuck on the grounded plane for the better part of a day, then shuttled off for a stressful week at a small hotel surrounded by armed guards, something, JT pointed out, a lot of tourists pay top dollar for.
As two of the three Americans on the flight, JT and Rena found each other. The third American was a journalist of some renown, and so even after the immediate danger was contained, the story of their detention was covered out of proportion to its relevance. Reuters picked up none of the refugee camp photos Rena spent months arranging into a photo essay but did pick up a photo she’d taken of JT in his hotel room. His face was scruffy from several days without shaving and marked with an expression that was part fatigue, part cockiness, just a hint of his upper lip peeking from atop the loosely secured paper mask he’d been assigned to wear. It ran a few months later on the cover of the Times magazine, with the text overlay reading It’s a Small World After All: America in the Age of Global Threat.
In December’s deluge of instant nostalgia, the photo made more than one best-of-the-year list. Rena had not lacked for freelance jobs since its publication. Aesthetically, it was not her best work, but JT, handsome, tanned, and blond, was what the public wanted as a symbol of the boy-next-door on the other side of the world. Boy-next-door, Rena knew, always meant white boy next door. When there is one natural blond family left in America they will be trotted out to play every single role that calls for someone all-American, to be interviewed in every time of crisis. They will be exhausted.
Rena was present in the photo, right at the edge, a shimmery and distorted sliver of herself in the mirror. Most people didn’t notice her at all. One blogger who did misidentified her as hotel staff. In her line of work, it was sometimes helpful not to be immediately identified as an American, to be, in name and appearance, ethnically ambiguous, although her actual background—black and Polish and Lebanese—was alchemy it had taken the country of her birth to make happen.
It was clear to Rena by the second day of their detention that nobody was dying. Dori phoned daily but stopped worrying about JT’s physical well-being somewhere around day four, at which point she took a sharp interest in Rena. JT as JT had talked at length about life as an expat, mostly his life as an expat, but JT as Dori’s ventriloquist dummy wanted to know about Rena’s childhood, her future travel plans, her dating life. In some ways, Rena has Dori to thank for the fact that she and JT became close enough to sustain a friendship once the crisis was over. Rena guessed where the questions were coming from and wished that she had something to defuse the situation, to reassure Dori, but then and now, she had nothing. She had built the kind of life that belonged to her and her alone, one she could pick up and take with her as needed, and so there she was in JT’s tiny hotel room, unattached and untethered and unbothered. To a girlfriend on a different continent, she might as well have been doing the dance of the seven red flags.
Dori is simple but she is not stupid, and since arriving in town for the wedding, Rena has wanted simply to level with her, but Dori will not give her the chance. Dori greeted her warmly and apologized extravagantly for JT’s failure to ask her to take the wedding photos; Rena can’t tell if Dori is being passive-aggressive or really doesn’t know the difference between wedding photography and photojournalism. Dori has left aggressive-aggressive to the yellow bridesmaid, who materializes to interrupt every time Rena finds herself in private conversation with JT. Dori has negotiated her anxiety with perfect composure, but Dori has not womaned up and simply said to Rena did you ever fuck my fiancé, in which case Rena would have told her no.
What had actually happened was that Rena and JT spent most of the hotel days playing a game called Worst Proverb, though they could never agree on the exact terms, and so neither of them ever won. JT believed the point of the game was to come up with the worst-case scenario for following proverbial advice. Over the course of the week, he offered a dozen different hypotheticals in which you only regret the things you don’t do and if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again came to a spectacularly bad end. Rena thought the point of the game was to identify the proverb that was the worst of all possible proverbs, and make a case for its failure. She’d run through a number of contenders before deciding on in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The land of the blind would be built for the blind; there would be no expectation among its citizens that the world should be other than what it was. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.
The fourth bar on the bachelorette party tour is dim and smells of ammonia, with a faint aura of gasoline courtesy of the auto shop next door. The bridal party is seated around a wobbly wooden table playing bachelorette bingo, a hot-pink mutant hybrid of bingo and Truth or Dare. The bridesmaid in blue has unclasped her bra and pulled it from under the arm of her tank top. She holds it in the air and strides to deposit it atop the table of a group of strangers at a booth against the far wall. The blue bridesmaid is two squares away from winning this round of bridal bingo, and this is one of the tasks between her and victory. The prize for winning bridal bingo is that the person with the fewest bingo squares x’ed out has to buy the winner’s next drink. The winner never actually needs another drink. Rena has bought four winners drinks already tonight, but everyone is being polite about her lack of effort.
Dori is seated across from Rena and is, in infinitesimal increments, sliding her chair closer to the wall behind her, as if she can get close enough to merge with it and become some lovely, blushing painting looking over the spectacle. Dori claims to have been drinking champagne all night, which has required that she bring her own champagne bottle into several bars that don’t serve anything but beer and well liquor, but for hours the champagne bottle has been stashed in her oversized purse, and she has been drinking ginger ale out of a champagne flute. When Dori last ordered a round of drinks, Rena heard her at the bar, making sure some of the drinks were straight Coke or tonic water, for friends who were past their limits. Because she is the prettiest of all of her friends, Rena assumed she was the group’s ringleader, but now she can see that this is not true. Dori is the caretaker. Dori turns to Rena, keeping one eye on her friend striding across the bar with the dangling lingerie.
“Sorry this is getting a little out of hand. I guess you’ve seen worse though. JT says you used to photograph strippers?”
Rena imagines Dori imagining her taking seedy headshots.
Her photo series had hung for months in an LA museum, and one of the shots had been used as part of a campaign for sex-workers’ rights, but Rena isn’t sure the clarification will be worth it.
“Kelly used to dance, you know,” Dori says. “She was the first adult I ever saw naked.”
“Kelly?”
“In the yellow. My cousin’s best friend. She used to steal our drill team routines for the club. We used to watch her practice, and sometimes on slow nights she would sneak us in to drink for free.”
“I didn’t think you were much of a drinker.”
“You haven’t heard the rumors about pastors’ daughters? Thankfully, I’m not much of anything I was at sixteen. Except with JT. I thought we’d be married practically out of high school.”
“Why weren’t you?”
“He went to college. Then he went to grad school. Then he went to Togo.”
“Where were you?”
“Here,” Dori says. “Always here.”
There is a shrieking and then deep laughter from the other end of the bar. The blue bridesmaid, whose left breast is now dangerously close to escaping her tank top, has been joined by reinforcements, and they are dragging over a man from the table across the bar. He is muscled and burly, too big to be dragged against his will, but plays at putting up a fight before he falls to his knees in mock submission, then stands and walks toward their table, holding the bra above his head like a trophy belt. He tosses the bra on the table in front of Dori and tips his baseball cap.
“Ma’am,” he says to Dori’s wide eyes, “excuse my being forward, but I understand it’s your bachelorette party, and your friends over here have obliged me to provide you with a dance.”
For a moment Rena thinks this might be orchestrated, this man a real entertainer, Dori’s friends better at conspiracy than she would have given them credit for, but then the man wobbles as he crouches over Dori, gyrating clumsily while trying to unbutton his own shirt, breathing too close to her face and seeming at any moment like he might lose balance and fall onto her. Dori looks to the bartender for salvation, some sort of regulatory intervention, but the bartender only grins and switches the music playing over the bar loudspeakers to something raunchy and heavy on bass. The bridesmaids begin laughing and pull dollar bills from their purses. Before they close a circle around the table, Rena sees her chance. She is up and out the door before anyone can force her to stay.
It’s a short dark walk back to the hotel, where the bar is closed and its lights are off, but someone is sitting at it anyway. Rena starts to walk past him on her way to the elevators but realizes it’s one of the groomsmen. Michael from DC. He was on her connecting flight, one of those small regional shuttles sensitive to turbulence. He is tall and sinewy, and before she knew they were heading to the same place, she had watched him with a twinge of pity, folding himself into the too-small place of his plane seat a few rows ahead of hers.
“Early night?” Rena asks as she walks toward him.
“Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to a bachelor party with a pastor present.”
“Cake and punch in a church basement?”
“Scotch and cigars in a hotel penthouse. Still boring as all get out. JT and I were roommates in college and he used to tell me he was from the most boring place in the country, but I didn’t believe him until now.”
“So you thought you’d liven things up by sitting at an empty bar with a flask?”
“You never know when something interesting might happen.”
“At least you got to change out of your rainbow color. Or were you guys not assigned colors?”
“We only have to wear them tomorrow.”
“Men. Always getting off easy.”
“Easy? Do you know how hard it is to find an orange vest?”
“Ooh, you’re orange. Have you spent much time with your bridal counterpart?”
“Only met her briefly.”
“See if you can get out of her what she did.”
“What she did?”
“You have seven color choices, you don’t put a redhead in orange unless you’re angry at her. Girl is being punished for something. Must be some gossip.”
“So far most of the gossip I’ve heard at this wedding has been about you.”
“I only know one person here. Whatever you’ve heard isn’t gossip, it’s speculation.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “You want to finish this upstairs? Less to speculate about.”
So, now there will be something to gossip about. Maybe it will put Dori’s mind at ease if Rena appears to be taken for the weekend. Michael tastes like gin and breath mints, and he is reaching for the button on her jeans before the door is closed. Rena affixes herself to his neck like she is trying to reach a vein; she is too old to be giving anyone a hickey, she knows, but she is determined right now to leave a mark, to become part of the temporary map of his body, to place herself briefly along his trajectory as something that can be physically noted, along with the smooth and likely professionally maintained ovals of his fingernails, the faint appendectomy scar, the very slight paunch of his unclothed belly. She clasps a fist in his hair, which is thick and full, but they are at that age now, a few years older than the bride and groom, youth waving at them from the border to an unknown territory. Rena can tell that if she saw Michael again in two years, he would be starting to look like a middle-aged man, not unattractive or unpleasant looking, but it has snuck up on her, that time of her life when age-appropriate men remind her of her father, when you go a year without seeing a man and suddenly his hair is thinned in the middle, his beard graying, his body softer. So she is saying yes please to right now, to the pressure of his palm along her arm and his teeth on her earlobe, and she is surprised by how much she means it.
Sleeping in someone else’s bed doesn’t stop the nightmares. Rena observes this almost empirically—it has been a while since she has spent the night with anyone and a very long while since she slept soundly. It is her job to go to the places where the nightmares are. It is not a job a person takes if full nights of sleep are her priority. Plus, weddings are not easy. Rena has missed a lot of weddings by being strategically or unavoidably out of the country. The only time she was actually in a wedding, she was the maid of honor. It was her little sister Elizabeth’s wedding, autumn in Ohio, a small ceremony, a marriage to a man both of them had grown up with, Connor from the house around the corner. Connor who used to mow their lawn and rake their leaves and shovel their snow. Rena’s dress was gold. Her mother worried about the amount of cleavage and her grandmother said her baby sister’s getting married before her, let her flash whatever she needs to catch up. For a week before the wedding, her sister had been terrified of rain, and Rena had lied about the weather report to comfort her, and the weather turned out to be beautiful, and her sister turned out to be beautiful, and Connor turned out to be the man who, a year later, suspected Elizabeth of cheating because he’d seen a repairman leave the house and she’d forgotten to tell him anyone was coming that day, and so he put a bullet through her head. She lived. Or someone lived: it was hard to match the person in the rehab facility with the person her sister had been.
Rena has not been to visit Elizabeth in three years. Her mother says Elizabeth is making small progress toward language. She can nod her head yes. She can recognize again the names of colors. Rena’s sister was a middle-school drama teacher, a job she had chosen because pursuing a theater career would have taken her too far away. When Elizabeth was in college, Rena had come to see her in Antigone on opening night, and though the show was not only in English but staged, at the director’s whim, to involve contemporary sets and clothing and a backing soundtrack of Top 40 pop, Elizabeth told her afterward that she had memorized the play both in English and in its original ancient Greek, which she had taken classes in to better get a feel for drama.
There had been signs. Rena had been too far away to see them, her parents maybe too close. Connor had threat
ened her before, but her sister did not say she was afraid of Connor. The whole week of the wedding, her sister said she was afraid of rain. All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.
That Rena wakes up screaming sometimes is something JT knows about her, the way she knows that he is an insomniac and on bad nights can sleep only to Mingus. There was a point at the hotel when they stopped sleeping in their own rooms and then when they stopped sleeping in their own beds, and even now she cannot say whether what they wanted was the comfort of another body in their respective restlessness or the excuse to cross a line, only that they never did cross it, and that tonight, before JT’s wedding, she does not want to wake to a strange man holding her while she cries. It is 4 a.m. according to the hotel clock. She dresses in the bathroom and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her. Her room is one floor down and she is ready to pass the elevator and head for the staircase when she sees JT in the hallway. All week he has been put together—clean-shaven, with his hair gelled and slicked into place—but the JT she sees now looks more like the man she met, like he has just rolled out of bed. He seems as surprised by her as she is by him, and his face relaxes for a moment as he grins at her and raises an eyebrow.