The Road to Amazing (27 page)

"Oh! I loved your song!" I said,
remembering. "You wrote it, didn't you? I'm so
flattered."

His face brightened. "You really liked
it?"

"Oh,
yeah
."

He nodded. "Yeah, Lady Gaga liked it a
lot too."

"You played your song
for—?" I started to say, but then I saw the expression on his face.
He was bullshitting me, so I swatted him on the arm. (At least
I
think
he was
bullshitting me. Maybe he'd told the truth, but decided he didn't
want to make me feel bad on my wedding day.)

"Oh, hey, guess what?" he said. "I
already heard back from the guy who wrote to me."

"Really? What did he say?"

"He couldn't believe I wrote him.
Which always seems so strange to me. Are there really people who
wouldn't respond to an email like that?"

"I know, it's crazy."

Neither of us said anything for a
second.

"Otto?" I said.

"Yeah?"

But once again, I couldn't find the
right words, so I hugged him instead, hard and long. Not being a
hugger, I guess I didn't understand that sometimes this was a way
to say things you couldn't quite put into words.

* * *

"Congratulations!" Vernie said to me,
out on the deck. "That was exactly as wonderful as I knew it would
be."

"Thanks," I said. I nodded at Walker,
inside getting food. "And what's the story there?"

"I met him out walking this morning.
And..."

"What?"

"Well, I decided you were right. My
life doesn't have to end just because I'm sixty-eight years
old."

"Vernie, you're
seventy-four."

She laughed. "Yeah, but he doesn't
know that!" She leaned in close. "You also might have been right
about the other thing. We've got a date tonight."

"What—?" Then I realized she was
talking about getting laid, and I blushed. "That's fantastic,
Vernie. I'm so happy for you."

"Oh, please, it's the
oldest story in the book. The mentor thinks she has all the
answers, but it turns out she learns something from her protégé?
How many times have we seen
that
story? What a cliché!"

"Speaking of screenplay ideas," I
said, "I think I know what I'm going to write next."

"Do tell."

"Well, I'm going to write about this
weekend. About two guys getting married, and how they invite all
their closest friends to spend the days before with them, getting
everything ready."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but halfway through the
weekend, aliens invade."

"Are you serious?"

"Totally! I mean, has
there
ever
been a
gay, alien-invasion movie?"

Vernie smiled. "But I thought the
whole point was to write a low-budget script. Aliens mean special
effects, which are expensive."

"Yup! I changed my mind. I decided to
write the movie I wanted to write, to hell with the
cost."

Vernie smiled. "Go big or go
home?"

"Exactly! I'm writing
movies, right? So let's write some
movies
."

"But with subversive gay
undertones."

"Well, I mean, it
is
me," I said. "Anyway,
it sounds like we both figured a few things out these last few
days."

"Oh, please! Life isn't like in the
movies. People don't solve all of their problems over the course of
a single weekend."

"Of course not!" I said, and we both
stood there grinning like the fools we were.

* * *

Later, I found Min. "You were
absolutely terrific," I said.

"Thanks," she said. "It was truly an
honor."

At that, both our eyes fell on Ruby,
over in the kitchen serving cake.

"She's really great," I
said.

"She is, isn't she? For the first time
in a long time, I can actually see myself getting married one day.
Maybe not any time soon, but someday. Can you believe it? Me, the
person who is so terrible at relationships?"

"I
can
believe it. Oh, hey, I didn't
tell you. I figured out what happened to the people of
Amazing."

"Oh?" she said. "This should be
good."

I told her my theory, and she thought
about it.

"So Amazing isn't a place, it's a
state of mind?"

"Exactly."

She thought for a second, then nodded.
"I like it!"

We both stood there, looking out at
the crowd.

"Min?" I said. "Thanks for
everything."

"Anytime."

I turned to her. "No. I
mean
everything
."

"Anytime," she said again, but this
time it meant something altogether different.

I still wasn't a hugger, but in Min's
case, I decided to make another exception.

* * *

Later still, Gunnar came to me and
handed me an envelope.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Open it," he said.

So I did. It was a check for twenty
thousand dollars.

"What in the—?"

"It's my wedding gift to you
guys."

"Gunnar! You already gave us a wedding
gift! Remember? You said you were going to make sure nothing got in
the way of our wedding. And you did! You were absolutely great. I
have no idea how you did the things you did, but you did them
anyway."

"Craig's List."

"What?"

"That's how I got rid of the orca.
Plus, a little basic physics. I hired someone with a big boat.
That's also how I found the boats to bring everybody here for the
wedding. Hey, it's the sharing economy, right? But I figured out
how to operate the generator on my own."

"
Gunnar!
" I said, but at least I was
smiling when I said this.

"What?" he said with his usual
cluelessness.

"The point
is
," I said, "you
already
did
all
those things.
That
was your wedding gift to us, and it was the best gift anyone
could have possibly given. You don't need to give us twenty
thousand dollars!"

He shrugged. "I'm selling my
houseboat. Do you have any idea how insane the Seattle real estate
market has been these last few years? I'm going to make seven
hundred thousand dollars. Oh, hey, I also signed on with the crew
of this research vessel for six months. We're going to be studying
penguins in Tierra del Fuego. Word is we'll be heading to
Antarctica too."

"Really? That's fantastic!
But wait, go back. I don't
care
if you sold your houseboat. We still can't take
twenty thousand dollars of your money."

"Sure, you can. Didn't you tell me you
couldn't afford a honeymoon? That you were disappointed about what
a lame start that was for your marriage?"

I had told Gunnar that, weeks ago. But
that was before everything that had happened this
weekend.

"Gunnar—"

"Look, Russ, you can either take it
now, or I'll hack into your checking account and deposit it without
you and Kevin knowing. So which is it gonna be?"

Clearly, I really did have the world's
best friends.

* * *

By early evening, the ferries were
running again. This time, we used Uber, and all our parents and
family and friends left. Min, Gunnar, Otto, Vernie, Ruby, and Nate
stayed behind to help Kevin and me clean up. After that, Min signed
our wedding certificate, and Nate and Gunnar acted as our
witnesses, and we all had another toast of champagne, and Kevin and
I were officially married.

By then, everyone else had to leave,
to get back to their real lives (and Vernie had her date). So after
some tearful goodbyes, and even a few more hugs, everyone went
their separate ways.

Kevin and I had our own plane trip
back to Los Angeles, but not until the following afternoon, so he
and I spent that last night by ourselves at the Amazing
Inn.

When the last person was finally gone,
he turned to me and said, "Well?"

Once again, I was at a loss for words.
What could I say? It was a little like with Otto and fame: the
weekend had been simultaneously far worse than I had ever imagined
(with all the things that had gone wrong), and also far better (the
way everything had worked out in the end).

"Yeah," Kevin said, reading my
expression and nodding, "I know."

I looked around the house, which was
sparkling clean but sterile and empty now, and that made me sad.
When we'd rented this place, we'd been incredibly stressed out
about how expensive it was, worried how we'd pay for the whole
wedding. With Gunnar's check, we didn't need to panic about money
anymore, at least for a little while.

"Do you feel any different?" he asked
me. "Now that we're married?"

I concentrated like I was
trying to feel the bones inside my body. Finally, I said, "I feel
good — really, really good. Well, I'm sad that everyone is gone.
But I'm happy that I'm here with you. About us, no, I don't feel
any different. Not at
all
, in fact. I feel exactly the
same about you that I did before. That I have for a long, long
time. I'm really glad we got married, and it did help clarify a few
things in my mind. But it's funny. I think mostly what it did was
acknowledge the obvious."

He laughed. "That about sums it up,
doesn't it?"

Did everyone feel this way after
getting married? It sort of went against the school of thought that
said that getting married was a Really Big Deal, and everyone needs
to take it Really, Really Seriously.

But that's the thing. I don't think
it's bad acknowledging that commitment is something different from
marriage. Sometimes the two things go together, but not always,
because commitment is what happens on the inside, what you feel,
and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the words you
say, or your signature on a piece of paper.

Anyway, it was nice to know I'd felt a
really strong commitment to Kevin for a while now, because I was
pretty sure it meant I'd married the right guy.

* * *

Later, as Kevin and I were getting
ready to go to sleep, I said to him, "You know, I really like this
bed."

"Yeah, me too," he said. "It's
great."

"I'm getting tired of our futon.
Thanks to Gunnar, we can afford a new bed now."

Kevin thought about it. "I'm not sure
I can handle that. Getting married and buying a grown-up bed, both
in the same year?"

"Is that what it would be? A grown-up
bed? A sign that we've entered the next stage of our
lives?"

"Wouldn't it?"

I thought about it. "No," I said at
last. "I think it just means I'm tired of sleeping on a damn
futon!"

We both laughed.

We flossed, and brushed
our teeth, and washed and moisturized our faces — all the things we
always did before going to bed at night. At one point, I realized
that this was the first time we'd done those things as a married
couple, but a second later, I thought,
So
what?

We had sex that night too
— our first sex as a married couple, but I'm not sure either of us
was even aware that it
was
our first married sex. As for the sex itself, it
wasn't nearly as good as the sex in the woods that morning (not
even
close
), but
it was still pretty fun.

Kevin fell asleep right after, but I
stayed awake for a bit, spooning him from behind. I gazed over at
the big window with no curtains, but it looked different with the
lights off, because now I could see outside: the outline of tree
trunks with the stars beyond.

I remembered what I'd decided about
the people of Amazing — about how they didn't like the way things
were in their town, so they'd up and left. They'd gone off over the
horizon, to find a better place to be. They'd learned you couldn't
live in a place called Amazing, not for long anyway, because it
always had a way of slipping away from you.

But as I lay there in bed, I wondered
if that was true.

I thought about everything that had
happened to me since I first met Kevin Land, back in middle school
or high school, however you calculated it. I thought about all the
people I'd encountered, the things I'd done. Some of it had been
good, some of it bad, and a lot of it had been pretty damn
interesting, at least to me.

I held Kevin tighter in the dark,
feeling his body against mine — the hardness of his muscles, the
smoothness of his skin. He was so warm, like cuddling a summer day,
and he smelled so good — this perfect combination of the cocky,
confident boy he'd seemed to be in high school and the gentle,
sensitive man I now knew he was.