When I changed planes in Munich, a border control agent asked what brought me to Poland. A wedding, I said.
Is it your wedding? he asked.
I thought of the groom, my friend, the only guy at whom I hadn’t batted my eyes at a point in my life when I’d tried to collect hearts like spare buttons I would never use but still knew to be mine. We met in London after college; we were on the same scholarship. At the time, I was anemic and had a sort of underweight pallor some men found attractive. I solicited their attention with the ardor of a newly formed black hole hungry for light. But I never went after the groom, and he never went after me. We collaborated sometimes. I wrote lyrics that a friend of ours set to music, and the groom played them on the cello. He was the only straight man with whom I had ever stayed friends.
As the border control agent waited, I imagined for a moment that I had gone after the groom, and that it pained me that this was not my wedding. I could almost feel my chest constrict, as it had on Saturday nights in high school when I’d sat alone in my room, trying on each grief I had come across in a book and pretending that it belonged to me. In the four years since London, my Saturday nights had gaped wide again as I followed my boyfriend around the country. In their emptiness, I envisioned lives that might have unfolded, had I acceded to certain offers or openings. If I had gone upstairs with X that night, if I had taken Y’s call, if I had stayed out with Z instead of catching the last train back to the city in which I lived. Tails of possibility I’d held onto like movie stubs. In the weeks leading up to my friend’s wedding, instead of studying for the GRE, I’d made mental tallies of people I dreaded but could reasonably expect to see in Poland. Now, in Munich, I wondered if perhaps I had misread myself, if I had overlooked the real story of my life, whether, without knowing it, I had loved the groom this whole time.
No, I told the border control agent. It’s not my wedding.
As I boarded the plane, I thought with disgust that I was not even in Poland yet and already twitching the old mental muscle of romantic self-importance whereby I pulled people toward me and then balked when they came. (It’s pretty simple, a friend told me one afternoon, as I snapped stalks of grass from a lawn in Regent’s Park and recounted a mess I had made with Y, a mutual acquaintance. You’re just a cock-tease.) The plane lifted up from the ground, and the drop in my stomach felt like the old pangs of liberties taken, as though with good behavior I had been released into the wilds of my old hunting grounds, where it remained to be seen whether I should be trusted at all.
A flight attendant handed out cheese sandwiches, and I thought of women I had judged for acting as I had. Would-be Daphnes escaping Apollos of their own construction. Emma Bovaries who read too much into the stories they’d contrived. Love me, love me. I’d had a roommate in college who did this, who felled lab partners and tennis players, boys across the hall. Tell me if I am gaining ground, they’d demand when we ran into each other on the steps of the library. Talk to me about how much I love her.
I’d loved her, too, and I missed her now, the way she’d call me from the basement of a frat house and ask me to pick her up, how I’d head over in sweatpants and a hoodie, how at home she’d pull me onto her soft gray comforter to tell me what her tennis player had said. You remind me of myself in high school, she’d tell me. Of me before I started going out. How she’d wake me up at six to go running, how we’d watch our bodies tighten as we found ways to eat less, how she schooled me in accompanying her to parties: Just ask questions and smile, she said, it’s easy. How she let me be her double, her second half, her alternate, until something shifted, we both shifted, and I wasn’t anymore. Without her I did not know how to be, what to do, whom to ask these things. But sometimes, when my face looked good and I held myself well, I knew I’d gotten her right, I’d sounded her echo: there she was.
At the hotel in Poznan, I took a shower and a nap. While I slept, I heard a woman scream, plead. Thumps, and she wept. When I woke up, I couldn’t tell whether I had dreamed the fight or whether I had witnessed from sleep a violent altercation in the room next door.
By the time I had dressed, I was late to the rehearsal dinner. I asked the woman behind the reception desk if it would be possible to call a cab.
It would be thirty minutes, she said, maybe forty. If I was in a hurry, I could see if the people waiting in the lobby would share theirs with me. She’d called them a cab fifteen minutes before.
In armchairs by the window sat a man and a woman, neither of whom I knew, talking with someone I did know, a curly-haired consultant the groom and I had met in London—Justin, whom I remembered primarily for the inordinate pride he had taken in his no-more-than-adequate Spanish accent, his love of unicycling. He had quick darting eyes and a large silver wristwatch. He sat with his ankle on his knee, and from beneath his well-pressed suit pants, his ankle twitched nervously in a crimson sock.
The man I didn’t know saw me approach, and Justin’s eyes followed his. I didn’t like the smile he threw me, like I was the punch line to an inside joke we both knew, and here I was, right on time.
I asked if they were going to the rehearsal dinner, whether I could share their cab.
Sure you can, Justin said, as though I’d asked something inappropriate, but he would humor me.
The man and the woman knew the groom from college, they said. For the next ten minutes, we talked about Poznan and the goats the two of them had passed outside the Old Town Hall. Real goats! they said. They thought Polish currency—zloty—was hilarious. How many zluts did you take out this afternoon? they asked each other. Today’s looking pretty zloty, they said.
In the taxi, I sat in the passenger seat and tried to follow their conversation, but the windows were open, and I couldn’t catch their words. We passed a pizzeria, turned right onto Masztalarska, curved left along a public park, passed a row of bikes for rent. The taxi stopped outside a red-brick building with steel windows behind a chain-link fence. The college friends had used up all their zlotys that afternoon, they remembered, and Justin had only big bills, so I paid.
The rehearsal dinner was in the backroom of a restaurant the bride’s uncle owned. Brick rose in two stories to the exposed rafters of the ceiling. French casement windows on the far wall opened onto an outdoor patio and a lawn with round planters housing leafy green vegetables. I fell back as the college friends and Justin went ahead. Briefly, I felt like a boggart without an audience. I did not know who to be, from whom to guard myself. I looked around for the faces I’d dreaded but saw none of them. I realized I was disappointed. That, without them here, I felt diminished. This disgusted me, too. Beautiful blond people in elegant suits and dresses embraced and exclaimed in Polish. By the windows I glimpsed the groom smiling, gesticulating. In the far left corner by a table of cheese stood a group of girls I recognized but with whom I had spoken only rarely when we lived near each other. One did something with water, the other cardiology, the third political theory.
They waved me over, and I registered this as a kindness. For the rest of the night, they included me in their stories and laughter. The political theorist had a brother who worked at a salmon fishery in Alaska, and she and their parents had just visited him. Every detail she reported of their time together prompted more laughs. By my third glass of wine, I felt the old hiccup of joy like champagne in my chest. I marveled at their warmth and my pleasure at being with them, as though in lending me their friendship for the evening they had let me glimpse a phantom life it had not occurred to me to envision in my empty Saturday hours.
More than once, while the girls and I laughed, my eyes caught Justin’s, the way close friends’ eyes will while they are separately working a room. I saw him over the shoulder of the girl who studied water; his back brushed the cardiothoracic research fellow’s, and his eyes met mine when he excused himself. But we were not close friends, or friends at all, and I disliked how his awareness of me heightened mine of him. For the rest of the night, I fixed my eyes only on the girls with whom I stuck through three courses, three rounds of speeches and photos, and a taxi back to the hotel.
*
The ceremony the next day took place in the central courtyard of an archeological museum. Around an obelisk, sandstone columns supported arches and floodlights. Four poles I’d helped the groom carry over rose now into a chuppah covered in pink and white flowers. The ceremony was quick, maybe fifteen minutes; the bride and groom had gone to a courthouse the week before. Afterwards, I walked with the girls to the reception. We had an hour. We stopped at a café and drank tea and watched the goats.
In the reception hall, we toasted the bride and the groom and did our best to track down all the available snacks. We sat together at table 24 and piled our plates high with pierogi. We quieted with the rest of the guests to watch the bride and groom play a wedding game in which they sat back to back, each holding one of the other’s shoes, and fielded questions about which one of them was more likely to do such-and-such a thing, which characterizations were more apt for whom; without seeing each other’s decision, they each raised the shoe corresponding to their answer, and whether they were in accord or disagreement, the hall of guests laughed. We rose for a walking dance. We joined the bride and groom on the dance floor for a playlist of songs the groom’s cousins had compiled.
Around three in the morning, I sat back at the empty table and watched everyone dance. My flat slipped off my right foot, and instead of retrieving it, I slipped off my left and rested my stockinged feet on the empty chair beside me.
When Justin began to take that seat, I moved to free it, but he shook his head. You’re fine, he said. We watched the crowd on the dance floor bob and sway to “Uptown Girl.” Justin swayed, too. Do you hear that? he asked, smiling. It’s your song.
It wasn’t my song, and I resented that he would suggest it was. Spare me the projection of who I am, I wanted to say.
Without lifting his eyes from the dancers, Justin reached over and ran his knuckles along the nylon of my stocking. He kept his eyes ahead as his thumb brushed my ankle, the ball of his hand against the bridge of my foot. There’s been a mistake, I thought: this is not what I wanted. I thought maybe the mistake was mine for failing to be relieved that X, Y, and Z were not here. For unwillingly wanting attention, interest. Gently, I pulled my foot from Justin’s hand and returned it to my ballet flat. Less gently, Justin leaned over, retrieved my foot, discarded the flat, returned my foot to his side, and resumed his perusal of my foot’s topography. His hand was hot against my skin, a little sweaty.
This was not the first weird foot interaction I had had abroad. In London once, I had played wing-woman for a friend only to find myself at four in the morning in a classmate’s bedroom, eating a moldy cheese sandwich while he stuck my toes in his mouth. How interesting, I’d thought at the time; how sad he is; I’d wondered how long my friend would be, when we could go home. But this time I felt myself narrow and continue narrowing, past idle fascination, down to a set of coordinates, a point without space. Around me my earlier pleasure peeled away from the evening like curling linoleum. I was a joke, I realized. I remembered Justin’s smile in the lobby. I have your number, his smile told me: you are a cock-tease, a flirt, a game available to play. Watch me play you; be a good sport for me, too.
I’m going to the bar, I said, and walked instead to the bathroom. Little pink flowers in glass bowls framed the porcelain sink and matched the silk flowers on my dress. My eyeliner had smudged; beneath my concealer, my skin, already dry from the airplane, had cracked into little cream scales. I remembered sitting on the floor of a bathroom stall in Oxford, cradling a toilet, X saying, how disgusting, saying, get up, go home.
You should go home, I told myself now. Don’t be pathetic.
I thought of my college roommate, Morgan. She’d found a new best friend in medical school. I’d seen photos of them hugging in matching gray tank tops and olive jeans. Tell me what happens next, I wanted to ask her. Give me a narrative. Give me a script. Justin had given me one, and I didn’t like his. Yours isn’t working, I wanted to tell Morgan. All I know how to be is you.
Sophia Veltfort’s fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Writer’s Digest online (first place, Annual Writing Competition), the Santa Monica Review, Narrative online (30 Below Contest finalist), Chicago Tribune online (Nelson Algren finalist), Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in Harvard Review and been selected as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays. A PhD candidate in Cornell’s Joint MFA / PhD program in English Language and Literature, she is currently completing her first novel, story collection, and dissertation. She teaches creative writing at UChicago.
Photo by CottonBro