The Hazards of Good Breeding (10 page)

They are now in view of First Parish Church, the steps of which are dotted with latecomers. Her father pulls into a parking place on the other side of the street from it. “Well,” he says brusquely, opening his door. “Just a thought.”

Caroline pauses for a moment before opening her own door and watches him making his way around the front of the car to her side. He has a very upright stride, which seems suddenly, as he navigates the narrow space between his front fender and the back of the station wagon ahead of it, fragile in its rigidity. She can count on half a hand the times she has ever seen him offer anything approximating a gesture of contrition. It should make her angry, but as he turns to wait for her, eyebrows raised, she feels instead a swell of compassion. He is a man who knows so little about affection that he can't even invite his children to New York without feeling embarrassed. “Coming,” she says, opening the door and climbing out into the humid air of evening.

R
OCK IS GOING
to Skip Krasdale's w
edding for two reasons: (a) Caroline will be there and (b) staying home while Denise “helps” his father pack for Pea Island will possibly kill him. Until last week, Denise was to accompany her fiancé on the trip and Rock Jr. was to have the “duplex” to himself for a blissful six days. But Denise has decided she has “too much work” and that Rock Sr. needs “alone time” with his old friends before they get married. Rock Jr. suspects there are other factors at work here—namely Stephan Dartman, a.k.a. Denise's boy toy.

Through the closed door to his father's bedroom, Rock has already started to hear things like: “You're bringing your tennis racket? God help us,” and “You don't need that old sweater—Jesus, what would you do without me? Walk around looking like Archie Bunker?” Rock Sr., as portrayed by his fiancée, is a bumbling idiot barely capable of dressing himself, let alone interacting in social situations. “You're hopeless, Coughlin,” is one of Denise's favorite ways to punctuate cocktail party stories. “Can you believe this guy?” Rock Sr. will just stand there, looking tired and slightly distracted, but accepting the pathetic vision of himself Denise proffers as if it were no less fair than a parking ticket or a jury duty summons. Rock is in no mood to play audience to this show.

By the time Rock arrives at the white clapboard church on Thorough Street he has had ample time to remember the two distinct reasons why he was
not
going to go in the first place: (a) he will have to see his mother and (b) he hates the groom. Skip Krasdale is Rock's third cousin. A solemn, self-proclaimed moralist, Skip is comfortable making pronouncements about politics, culture, and members of the Coughlin family with the kind of authority generally reserved for veterans of foreign wars and ancient southern matriarchs—not twenty-eight-year-olds with a Harvard education and six years of institutional investment work under their belts. Rock has never heard the guy laugh at anything other than the kind of joke that can be written up in the minutes of a men's club. Neither, for that matter, has Rock ever seen Skip wear a pair of jeans.

It isn't until the reception that Rock even catches sight of Caroline. He has, as expected, been cornered by his mother, who is attempting to explain the essential nature of a daily yoga routine to him. “You'll have so much more energy, Rock,” she is saying. “You need to care for your body first and the rest will follow. Really. I can see everything so much more clearly now that I'm working with Ravi. He's so
grounded
. He would be really good for you.”

Since her divorce she has become an avid consumer of new dietary strategies, meditational techniques, and homeopathy workshops. Her body has been kickboxed, treadmilled, stepped, and yogaed into a stringy fat-free mass of muscle and sharp jutting bones, wrapped in a mysterious year-round nut-brown tan. Even her eyes have acquired an intense, stripped-down way of looking at things, as if everything they take in has, like her body, been honed to its bare essentials. To Rock, she looks about twenty times older than she did when she was an unhappy, out-of-shape drunk. But she feels good—she feels great, in fact. This is what she is trying to explain to Rock. “Right,” Rock says intermittently. He has heard enough New Age rhetoric at Bensen's Organic to last a lifetime. “Excellent.”

Out of the corner of his eye he is watching Caroline talk to some tall European guy with slicked-back hair pulled into a little ponytail—no American would have hair like that. Caroline is talking quite seriously, nodding her head and standing with one hand cradling the other elbow. She has one of those thin, extra-naked-looking bodies, all long bones and bright eyes, no padding to speak of, and a certain condensed quietness about her that attracts attention in a roomful of people, like a gap in a mouthful of teeth. Talking to this guy, she looks so focused and interested, nodding her head and asking questions. When she talks to Rock, there is always something faintly distracted about her, as if some secret but essential part of her is missing—off sitting on a windowsill, staring into the dusk somewhere.

As Rock watches, the European turns and reveals himself to be Stephan—
Ste-fan
, who has shed his ripped T-shirt in favor of a smartly fitted tuxedo. Did Caroline invite him here? Rock stares at the two of them, or at Caroline, more precisely, until he realizes he is waiting—with the muscle-tight tension of someone watching a child learn how to bike-ride—for the slippery S curve of Caroline's hair draped over her shoulder to fall straight. Jesus! As if this would be a fucking tragedy! The whole joyless high church ceremony, with its stark readings from the King James Bible, cautionary homily, and silent, floorboard-creaking, dress-rustling exchanging of rings has really wound him up. His cummerbund feels too tight to draw a good deep breath. And the air in the tent smells musky—twice breathed.

Rock downs the rest of his Manhattan and heads back to the bar. When his glass is replenished (his third drink already), he makes his way toward Caroline, who is still talking to Stephan. “The European” is how Rock prefers to think of him. It would make a good name for a contender of Stone Cold Steve Austin or The Undertaker on late-night wrestling.

When Rock gets to the spot where Caroline and he should be, though, they are nowhere in sight. He has been delayed by a forced exchange of hand slaps with the groom's brothers—a triumvirate of blond fraternity boys with beefy necks and bad hearing, whom Rock hates even more than he did five minutes ago. The band has struck up a tepid re-creation of Sinatra's “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and on the raised platform the bride and groom are making their way, workman-like, around the floor: Skip with his usual stiff, constipated look and his wan little bride dragging slightly, like a deflating blow-up doll. In the far right corner of the tent a bird has gotten in under the billowy canvas and is fluttering frantically against it, gathering a crowd at least as large as that collected around the dance floor. In the middle of all this, Rock spots Caroline—
still
talking to Stephan!—now closer to the seafood bar. They have been joined by a hefty, pouf-haired girl in a dress that makes her look like Nancy Reagan. And Stephan has whipped out his video camera.

“Carol,” Rock calls from a little too far away, and all three turn to look at him as if he is possibly dangerous. Calling Caroline Carol gives Rock a particularly satisfying kind of amusement. “Hey.”

“Hi, Rock,” Caroline says graciously. “You remember Stephan—and you know Mindy, don't you? We all went to dancing school together,” she offers by way of explanation, putting her hand on the girl's purple shoulder in that giggly, expansive way that she gets when she is drinking. There is a faint dart of white skin running up from the top of her strapless dress to the nape of her neck, the ghost of some impossibly thin bathing suit tie.

“Sure,” Rock says, extending his hand. “I think you know my father's fiancée, Denise Meirhoffer, don't you?” He has donned his Bob Hope voice despite his best intentions not to.

“Oh.” Stephan looks genuinely startled. “Of course.”

“I remember you,” Nancy Reagan interrupts, turning to Rock. “You were suspended with Sam Daedalus, weren't you? For smoking or something—or for sending an obscene fax? Or letter? What was it?” She has a rapid, aggressive way of speaking and a slight nostril flare that accompanies her vowel sounds.

“That wasn't me,” Rock lies.

“Of course it was,” Caroline pats his arm. “Rocky the rebel. Do any of you need a drink?”

Rock looks at her in dismay. She is going to use him as her out, leave him to steer this motley conversation crew. Rock gulps at the drink in his hand, but can't really make enough headway to justify tagging along. Anyway, he has already been zeroed in on by Mindy, who is asking, nostrils aflare: Where does he live now? What does he do? How does he know Skip?

Rock keeps his answers to a minimum. Stephan seems to be checking the fit of his tuxedo, looking surreptitiously over his shoulder toward his ass.

“So Denise says you're from Cambridge.” Rock turns to Stephan, cutting Mindy off in midquestion.

“What's that?” Stephan asks.

“So you're from Cambridge?” Rock immediately regrets the
so
, which there was no good reason to repeat. Standing across from him, Mindy looks wounded.

“Not really. I lived there for a few years during high school.”

“Hmm,” Rock says. “And now you live in LA?”

“Actually”—Stephan is unzipping his camera bag now, casting an eye around the room—for good scenes to film, presumably—“I just spent a year in Europe.”

“
Really
. I was just thinking you looked kind of European,” Rock is saying before he can stop himself. “The 'do or something.”

Stephan raises his eyebrows.

“I was thinking it would be a good name for a WWF character—you know, ‘The European,'” he says in a cheesy announcers voice. “And he'd be all tall and blond and wearing assless leather pants and a scarf or something.” His voice, he realizes, is rising inappropriately.

“Riiiii-iiiight,” Mindy says. The girl is a real pill. She probably balances her checkbook on-line and reads the wedding section of the
Globe
and sends theme cards to people on their birthdays and when they're in the hospital. She probably loves the Steve Miller Band.

Stephan smiles benevolently and lifts the camera to his eye. “So how do you know Caroline again?” he asks, panning around the room.

“School, growing up, family.” Stephan's smile strikes him as condescending.

“And you said you're Denise's boyfriend's son?”

“Fiancé's.”

“Right.” Stephan is now focusing his camera on some older couple standing by the wedding cake, but there is something phony about his show of casual distraction. Rock senses a certain real interest in his voice—as if he is trying to determine something. “And where was school again?” Stephan asks in the same tone.

Rock is beginning to feel like he is being interviewed. “Quilton. And how about yourself, you went to . . . ?”

“Rindge and Latin—public school, in Cambridge.” He says it hastily.

There is a sharp intake of breath at the far side of the tent as the poor bird, which has been batted at with a whole retinue of white linen napkins and caterers' serving tongs, is swatted onto the ground and then, apparently (Rock sees its body fly up from the ground in an odd, closed-winged, not exactly aerodynamic trajectory),
kicked
out into the night air by a wiry gray-haired man in a tuxedo. There are a few nervous, halfhearted cheers from the crowd, most of whom seem undecided on this radical final solution to the bird problem. The man presses out from between them, brushing his hands off as if he has done no more than pick up a fallen roll or uncork a bottle of champagne. It is, of course, Jack Dunlap. Rock finds himself grinning. The guy is a true weirdo. People are looking after him with the kind of hostile, awe-filled consternation that always seems to follow Spider-Man in the Sunday morning comics.

“Excuse me,” Rock says, and turns to find Stephan has already moved a few yards away to get a better angle on Mr. D's exit. The guy's intentions are hard to get a read on, but whatever they are, Rock doesn't like him: too smug and a little sneaky somehow. He makes his own rapid zigzagging path around the tables toward the side of the tent Jack Dunlap has retreated to. The vodka tonics have Rock seeing in sharp, abrupt chunks—a slick black helmet of hair, a heave of too much goose-bumpy cleavage, a half-eaten platter of bacon-wrapped scallops. “And they had a jukebox, and spiked punch, and everyone wore saddle shoes! It was a riot,” a woman with a ridiculous UFO-like hat is saying as Rock pushes past.

When he reaches Caroline's father, he is out of breath and he can feel his heart beating in his left middle toe from having been ground under the leg of someone's chair. “Mr. Dunlap,” Rock says when he is within range. He is panting slightly.

Jack turns around with a blank look on his face and then narrows his eyes with recognition. “Ron,” he says warily.

“Rock.” Rock nods encouragingly.

Jack does not correct himself. They are at the side of the tent that looks out onto the rolling swells of the golf course, blanketed in a soft moonlit darkness. Beside them a table of elderly people (five chatty women and three fairly subdued men, one of whom is staring directly at Rock with an incredulous expression and a bit of cheese stuck to the corner of his mouth) is still working on plates of roast beef, potatoes au gratin, string beans, and wilty-looking salad with pomegranate seeds, which must be murder on their dentures. It occurs to Rock, now that he has made a beeline over, that he has nothing to say.

“Quite a play the other day,” he finally says, and coughs.