Wedding Season Read Online Free
Author: Darcy Cosper
and infirm and incontinent, and I believe this hope is mutual. But I don’t want to marry him.
It seems silly that I should have to explain or justify my resistance to marriage at this late date in history, but I usuallydo. Part of it can be explained by the fact that I, like everyone else, fancy myself an independent thinker. Social conventions, the weight of those expectations and assumptions, give me a kind of metaphysical claustrophobia. They make me feel squashed and breathless, flattened out like a paper doll. Why do that to a relationship? Everything else in my life is institutionalized anyway; why should I voluntarily offer up to the preconceptions of church, state, and society one element that isn’t?
Also, and more to the point, I have no empirical evidence that marriage is really all useful or effective these days, that it does anything good for relationships and the people in them. To the contrary, from the moment divorce became relatively legally simple a few decades back, all over the country it’s been sayonara, sayonara, sayonara. Who even needs statistics to make the point? How many happily married people do
you
know, honestly? I know of almost none—neither in my generation nor in our parents’. They’re either newlyweds, grumpy and/or discontented and/or unfaithful, or divorced. Which makes a pretty strong statement about the efficacy of modern wedlock.
The reasons people get married in this era—in the last fifty to seventy-five years, say—are fundamentally different from the reasons for which marriage was conceived and which it served for the last twenty-odd centuries. So why bother? Getting married these days is like, I don’t know—using leeches or bloodletting to correct an imbalance of the humors, instead of taking a rational twenty-first-century antibiotic.
To forgo marriage seems so clearly the sensible, the intuitive, the obvious option that I really don’t understand why people react with such disbelief to my position. But they do, and since being treated like a reactionary crank wheneverthe subject comes up is irritating, I prefer to avoid the issue.
That, apparently, is not possible.
I ARRIVE AT PANTHEON before Henry. The restaurant is quiet, just a few customers at the tables for an early Sunday dinner. Waiters cluster and lean against the banquettes, murmuring to one another at the back of the dim, dozing, lofty room. Luke, my favorite bartender, is on duty.
“Hey, little gal. You’re a sight for sore eyes.” He comes from behind the bar to hug me. His flat, soft Oklahoma accent, flaxen hair, and ever so slightly hayseed manner always make me picture him as one of those wholesome, broad-shouldered, lightly freckled soda fountain attendants featured in Norman Rockwell posters. He’s also extremely tall, and as always, his embrace lifts me half a foot off the floor. “What’s shaking, Joy?”
“The foundations of contemporary society,” I tell him, my legs dangling.
“Bad day?” He returns me to earth and slips back behind the bar. “Tell the bartender your troubles.”
“My troubles.” I watch him uncork a bottle of wine, the tips of his long fingers permanently stained by oil paints. “Well, I have seventeen weddings to attend between now and September.”
“Aw, you’re making that up. April fool, right?”
“I wish.” I accept the glass of wine he offers, and toast him.
“Well, that’s just a hell of a thing. You of all people. How’d that happen? Hello, Blondie.”
“Hello, barkeep.” Henry slides onto the stool next to me, flicks her fingers dismissively at Luke, and kisses me on the cheek. “Why so glum, chum?” She takes off her coat andthrows it over the stool beside her. She’s wearing a yellow T-shirt that reads
Slippery When Wet.
“She has to go to seventeen weddings between now and the end of September.” Luke sets up Henry’s usual, a dirty gin martini with four olives.
“Including mine,” Henry chortles.
“Including hers.
It seems silly that I should have to explain or justify my resistance to marriage at this late date in history, but I usuallydo. Part of it can be explained by the fact that I, like everyone else, fancy myself an independent thinker. Social conventions, the weight of those expectations and assumptions, give me a kind of metaphysical claustrophobia. They make me feel squashed and breathless, flattened out like a paper doll. Why do that to a relationship? Everything else in my life is institutionalized anyway; why should I voluntarily offer up to the preconceptions of church, state, and society one element that isn’t?
Also, and more to the point, I have no empirical evidence that marriage is really all useful or effective these days, that it does anything good for relationships and the people in them. To the contrary, from the moment divorce became relatively legally simple a few decades back, all over the country it’s been sayonara, sayonara, sayonara. Who even needs statistics to make the point? How many happily married people do
you
know, honestly? I know of almost none—neither in my generation nor in our parents’. They’re either newlyweds, grumpy and/or discontented and/or unfaithful, or divorced. Which makes a pretty strong statement about the efficacy of modern wedlock.
The reasons people get married in this era—in the last fifty to seventy-five years, say—are fundamentally different from the reasons for which marriage was conceived and which it served for the last twenty-odd centuries. So why bother? Getting married these days is like, I don’t know—using leeches or bloodletting to correct an imbalance of the humors, instead of taking a rational twenty-first-century antibiotic.
To forgo marriage seems so clearly the sensible, the intuitive, the obvious option that I really don’t understand why people react with such disbelief to my position. But they do, and since being treated like a reactionary crank wheneverthe subject comes up is irritating, I prefer to avoid the issue.
That, apparently, is not possible.
I ARRIVE AT PANTHEON before Henry. The restaurant is quiet, just a few customers at the tables for an early Sunday dinner. Waiters cluster and lean against the banquettes, murmuring to one another at the back of the dim, dozing, lofty room. Luke, my favorite bartender, is on duty.
“Hey, little gal. You’re a sight for sore eyes.” He comes from behind the bar to hug me. His flat, soft Oklahoma accent, flaxen hair, and ever so slightly hayseed manner always make me picture him as one of those wholesome, broad-shouldered, lightly freckled soda fountain attendants featured in Norman Rockwell posters. He’s also extremely tall, and as always, his embrace lifts me half a foot off the floor. “What’s shaking, Joy?”
“The foundations of contemporary society,” I tell him, my legs dangling.
“Bad day?” He returns me to earth and slips back behind the bar. “Tell the bartender your troubles.”
“My troubles.” I watch him uncork a bottle of wine, the tips of his long fingers permanently stained by oil paints. “Well, I have seventeen weddings to attend between now and September.”
“Aw, you’re making that up. April fool, right?”
“I wish.” I accept the glass of wine he offers, and toast him.
“Well, that’s just a hell of a thing. You of all people. How’d that happen? Hello, Blondie.”
“Hello, barkeep.” Henry slides onto the stool next to me, flicks her fingers dismissively at Luke, and kisses me on the cheek. “Why so glum, chum?” She takes off her coat andthrows it over the stool beside her. She’s wearing a yellow T-shirt that reads
Slippery When Wet.
“She has to go to seventeen weddings between now and the end of September.” Luke sets up Henry’s usual, a dirty gin martini with four olives.
“Including mine,” Henry chortles.
“Including hers.
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