Cult Classic(36)

“Everybody in?” asked the brother, even though we had our seatbelts on already.

I always forgot how life outside the city had a completely different texture. The days were easier here, warmer or cooler upon command. Being picked up in a car with no screen or meter affixed to the dashboard reminded me of childhood. But for all the surface comforts, the materials that made up this world were much harsher. Everything was coins in the console, gravel in the shoe, ticks in the grass, ice in the pipes, splinters on the wood. We passed Jess’s high school, a stucco palace in beige. It looked like a prison. An electronic sign was having a conniption fit about an impending baseball game.

The woman and I made small talk in the backseat, which smelled of wet dog. She was in the midst of subletting her apartment, which meant she kept asking me questions but getting pulled into an ongoing text exchange about keys. Eventually, we fell into a silence. It was only in the lobby of the hotel, hours later, where guests had congregated in anticipation of a van, that I heard her introduce herself as Georgette. I wondered how I managed not to have heard a name like that. She had the same reaction upon hearing my name, launching into the Kinks song: “It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Loooow-la!”

“Yup, that’s it.”

“La-la-la-la Loooow-la!”

“It’s a good one.”

“Now that song’s gonna be stuck in my head the whole night,” Georgette said, accusatorily.

She sat with us in the van, Boots on one side of me and Georgette on the other. She wore orange lipstick and a silk jumpsuit with a deep V that she could get away with because she had no breasts to speak of. Her hair was up, revealing the parallel lines tattooed on her neck. Sobriety chic. She shook a sandaled foot in my direction. Her toenails were jagged, as if she’d been trimming them with her teeth.

“Do you remember the first wedding you ever went to?” she asked us, tucking a chunk of hair behind her ear that fell right back out. “I was like sixteen, which is disturbing because I remember going to plenty of funerals. I guess my family is better at dying than getting married. Anyway, I think it was in a roadside hotel in Reno, though that can’t be right, it was probably just like a hotel with bad carpeting but when you’re young you think all weddings should be in magical forests so a Radisson meeting room is a bummer. Have you ever been to Reno? The bad parts of town are also the sad parts of town, and how many places can you say that for?”

She looked at us like we were actually supposed to name some places. Then she changed the subject, talking about Jess and Adam in a gossipy way, deciding this was a safe space to let loose her theories about what the bride and groom saw in each other. She didn’t know either of us so this was a risky proposition. She’d dated Adam before he met Jess. Did we know that? We did not. Well, she did. Like right before and kind of during. She never really “got” Jess and, furthermore, did not enjoy how righteous Jess probably felt, agreeing to invite a woman Adam used to sleep with.

“Maybe she just likes you,” Boots offered.

Georgette snorted and went on, undeterred.

“Then where’s my thank-you for training him out of jackhammering her pussy? He used to jam all his fingers up there like it’s ‘To Build a Fire’ and he’s using me for warmth, like he wanted to use my fallopian tubes for mittens. Like there’s a fucking game show buzzer up there. Like you know what I want to know? Who are the bitches before me who just let it happen?”

Boots stared out the window, trying to distance himself from the conversation. It was like someone had skimmed off the most offensive parts of Vadis and dropped them into a whole new person. Vadis liked to shock him for sport, not because she couldn’t help it. But I stayed with Georgette, sensing that if I broke off as well, it would make things worse. Only once was there a natural pause, when the driver announced that we were approaching the goat farm. We looked out to see clouds rolling over a muted sun. Trees entered the window frame and left just as quickly. On a hill was an oxblood barn and, behind it, the very tip of a tent.

Georgette was seated at our table for the reception. We discovered that we shared a birthday, though she was two years behind me. She was enchanted by the coincidence, but I had just been told to expect them and thus had no reaction. The DJ probably had our birthday too. She confessed that meeting people with her birthday was jarring if they were younger, because she imagined them coming out of their mothers’ vaginas at the same moment she was eating her cake. She tried to will herself to stop imagining it but all she saw was icing and blood.

“Cake, placenta, cake, placenta, cake, placenta.”

I was exempt from this imagery because I was older.

“Though,” she mused, “if you want to imagine me coming out of my mother’s vagina, I can’t stop you.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to ruin cake for myself.”

“I wouldn’t want to ruin vaginas for myself.”

Her collarbone was a speed bump that moved back and forth when she laughed. I couldn’t stop looking at her, unsure if I was attracted or repelled.

Then she kissed me. Sudden and efficient. An errand. I scanned the crowd for Boots, who had his back turned. I said nothing, mostly because I knew she did it to get a reaction out of me. Clive used to do this with zits or papercuts, less because he cared to show me, more because he was daring me to be scandalized. I wasn’t. Georgette had a similar expression—flirty but smug, like she knew what I was thinking. But what I was thinking was: What if I left Boots for you, Georgette? But then what if it ended and we were stuck in some twisted time loop manned by my former boss? Would I want to be haunted by you then? Would we be with anyone if we knew we could never get rid of each other?