The Office of Historical Corrections(6)
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 himself 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 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. The bridal party sits around a wobbly wooden table playing bachelorette bingo, a hot-pink mutant hybrid of bingo and truth or dare—or, the bridal party minus the bridesmaid in blue sits. The blue bridesmaid is holding the bra she has unclasped and pulled from her tank top, and is striding across the bar to deposit it atop the table of a group of strangers at a booth against the far wall. She 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 oversize purse, and Rena has seen her pouring ginger ale into 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 Dori 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.”