The Best Man

The Best Man

a novel by

Paul Reidinger

Published by Paul Reidinger at Smashwords

copyright © 1986, revision copyright © 2010 by Paul Reidinger

for Steve

Author's note: When the young writer wrote this book, in 1985, he was 26, in love, in law school and very much under the spell of Evelyn Waugh. The great masters can't be emulated, but it's a rite of literary passage to try, and the young writer did try here, usually by chosing the $10 word when the 25¢ one would have been better. The result was the occasional small stylistic mess. A young writer can't write like a master and, perhaps more important, an American can't write like an Englishman. The young (American) writer learned this the hard way, which is maybe the only way. In any case, those miscues have been easy to clean up, mostly by removing them and, in a far smaller number of cases, doing some rewording.

Two words in particular drew my attention. The first was wholly, an unholy adverb that adds nothing to whatever sentence it joins. I removed all of these I could find. The second was Stanford. Evelyn Waugh made considerable use of his alma mater, Oxford, in his fiction, from Decline and Fall to Brideshead Revisited, and I naïvely thought to do something similar with my own alma mater, failing to recognize that the American attitude toward class and privilege is quite different from that of our English cousins. I haven't cut out all references to the school, but I've reduced them to, I hope, a low murmur. In a small but rich irony, I note that I was not remotely a child of privilege, having grown up in a middle-class family and gone to public schools in a small river town in the Great Lakes. Certainly I felt out of place, from my first day to my last, at a palm-swathed California school filled with the children of the high and mighty, or at least the rich and powerful.

My guiding light as revisor, stepping in a quarter-century after the fact and having not so much as glanced at these pages in more than 20 years, has been to leave the shape and feel of the original text as little disturbed as possible while smoothing out the wrinkles and tuning the atonalities. The novel, for all its imperfections, limitations and shortcomings, does seem to me to have the energy and passion of youth; in this important sense it strikes me as quite genuine. Yes, our young narrator can be lugubrious, self-pitying and absurdly nostalgic, and sometimes I did feel like slapping him, but even at his worst he is self-aware and self-critical, and these are the essential elements of growth and adaption. Sometimes he is even funny. And there is no doubting the emotional and erotic intensity of the narrative, nor of its psychological and social acuteness, which is no less real for being intermittent.

Does this sound like bragging? The word that occurs to me is relief. It is unsettling to revisit the work of one's youth. The young writer himself is only half-familiar to me. Who was I then, what was I like, could I be trusted as a guide on a literary journey? I began reading the work of this long-ago self with apprehension, fearing that what I would find would be bad, and occasionally I did hear the gears grinding; I did see the needlessly big word bursting into shreds like a popped balloon. But mostly what I found was a real book and a sound one, small but authentic, in need of just a little polish and TLC. These I hope I have provided.

--Paul Reidinger, San Francisco, August 2010

1.

Oddly enough, they invited me to their wedding. I shouldn't say oddly because I was close to both of them—if in quite different ways. Even so, I didn't altogether expect to be invited; weddings, after all, are supposed to be harmonious affairs where the future, not the past, is celebrated. I am the past, though it is doubtful whether I would be celebrated in any case. For days after I'd received the invitation I hesitated about accepting. I wondered whether my presence would unnerve either of the principals; and, if not, whether I could bear their equanimity. There were also more general considerations of propriety, and the ominous recommendation of the bridegroom's teetotal mother that only nonalcoholic beverages be served at the reception. This last I could not help but take personally, in my paranoiac way, and it nearly decided me. I was prepared to endure the crushings sentimentality of the two families united, the minister's saccharine remarks, the sight of Katherine and Ross embracing, actually becoming married; but I could not bear the prospect of soldiering through this beflowered nightmare without the assurance of a little something to refresh me at the end. Fortunately there was strong feeling in most quarters that a dry wedding reception would not only be dull but would encourage, in a minor but noticeable way, bootlegging. Ross's mother was therefore overruled, and I went.

I must confess that I don't care much for weddings. I'm not quite sure why, other than that every aspect of them strikes me as faintly distasteful. Perhaps that's because I've known for a long time that I'll never be the star of one, never give my parents that particular pleasure and memory. I suppose it's true, but it makes me sound unduly enslaved to their wishes and expectations, even those that are seldom or never mentioned, and prone to guilt when I do not, cannot, deliver. I hope that is not entirely so.

My reasons for disliking weddings, in any case, run more broadly. It's not just that they're usually held in churches. It's not just the fanfare, the earnest declarations of undying love and loyalty, the wet eyes of elderly relatives—in short, the fact that a typical wedding is a glorious example of the American habit of making a production out of everything, even those things, such as weddings, that deserve more intimate, less public treatment. Beyond that, I dislike what weddings stand for, what they inaugurate. It's true, and I won't bother to deny, that I'm not an ardent proponent of marriage. Admittedly married couples enjoy tax and other financial advantages to which only a fool or a rich man would be insensible in these shrinking times. But I don't mean to sound too venal. Money, as they say, isn't everything. There's also social acceptance, and pleasing the people around you, or above you: our society smiles on married people.

I suppose what I'm getting at—what's much on my mind as I contemplate my two friends, now honeymooning in Greece—is that too often people seem to get married for bad, or at least inadequate, reasons. In recent years a great deal has been made of a shift in personal priorities; news magazines tell us that people are waiting longer and longer to get married, and that more and more people aren't getting married at all. Maybe so. But from what I see, the pressure on young people to get married is still heavy and unrelenting, with the result that they treat marriage as they've come to treat everything else in their lives: as a step, a goal, a line on a résumé. And those are the relatively benign reasons. There are even worse—but I mustn't get ahead of myself.

I guess I'm a romantic, much as I hate the word, the idea. I think that two people should be together because they want to be, because they get something from each another that they can't get anywhere else, not because they get the cheaper family rate at the country club. That's what I believe. Maybe that's why I'm alone. Maybe that's why this particular union unsettles me.

The ceremony itself was innocuous enough as such things go. The minister didn't dawdle and kept his homilies to a minimum. Everything looked just as it was supposed to. The nuptial couple radiated splendor: Katherine in her white lace and veil, Ross in his tux and black tie. They looked as though they belonged on top of their own enormous cake.

I am not bitter. That is why I said nothing when the minister said, Speak now or forever hold your peace. How embarrassing it would have been; and what, after all, would I have said? I can imagine Ross stepping down from the altar to cross-examine me, find some flaw in what I said, have my remarks stricken from the record. Poor Katherine: marrying a lawyer.

I said nothing even though I had things to say and, with three beers seeping through my system, was about ready to say them. I'd drunk the beers with Katherine's father an hour before the ceremony. He asked me why I wasn't marrying Katherine. I laughed; so did he. I think he meant it.

After the minister had incanted his lines, and the vows and rings had been exchanged, I slipped out of the church and made for the reception, which occupied most of one floor of a hotel a few blocks away. I had been reassured by Katherine that, despite Ross’s mother, there would be generous provisions of champagne: that lured me away. And, to be honest, I did not want to stand there near the altar, sobering up, failing to mingle, waiting to have my picture taken with the newlyweds. I didn't want to be asked to pose with them; I didn't know how I would refuse, or, worse, if I would refuse. In retrospect, now that they're out of the country, I suppose it would have been harmless enough to accommodate their unripened nostalgia. A photograph of the three of us grinning self-consciously might have provided a bittersweet giggle or two many years from now. But at that moment when those pairs of lips touched and the wedding became a fact, I could not stand more. I felt I had done enough. I wanted my reward.

Ross, in his painfully genteel way, did not agree that I'd done my share. He wanted more from me, though not what I wanted to give. He wanted me to be his best man. We had talked about it months ago.

Please, David, he said. You're the only person I really want to do it. It seems appropriate somehow.

It doesn't to me, I said rather snappishly. In a strange way, it hurt me to refuse him a request that would have cost me nothing to grant. But it hurt him more, and that, I had to admit to myself, was the point. I've told you I'll come to this wedding. But that's as far as I go. I won't stand up with you and I won't be your best man.

He sulked for a few days but never mentioned the subject again. Instead he asked his moot court partner from law school to be his best man. That was the extent of my victory; that was why I looked forward even more than I usually do to drinking champagne.

Later, Katherine interceded. I know he won't mention it to you, she said, but Ross really wants you to be his best man. And so do I.

Katherine, I said, I can't be best man and I've given him my reasons why. He can explain it better than I can. Now please let's not talk about it any more.

I was unhappy to cut her off without an honest, illuminating reply; such replies were the basis of our long friendship. And it was wicked of me to send her to her fiance for an explanation he was no more capable than I of giving. But by this time wedding plans were hurtling along like a train on tracks, and my relationship to the two of them, as individuals and as a couple, had ready become more distant and less flexible.

I do not disapprove of the marriage. As marriages go it could be much worse. True, my first reaction to the announcement of the engagement was a certain amount of anguish and a smug conviction that their coupling could never flourish. But then, I had invidious reasons for being appalled at the prospect their union, reasons distinct but inseparable from what, in a partially objective way, I knew about both of them. It saddened me that Katherine should have committed her emotions, long and jealously guarded, sometimes ill-used, to what seemed to me a mirage of a future; and I felt the blackest contempt for him for choosing this way out, this easy, dishonorable path that led straight away from me.

Since that first moment my view has moderated. Perhaps, after a fashion, they will please each other. They both could have done worse. I can't truthfully say that know a great deal about their relationship; at this point it seems peculiarly not my place to inquire. At least they are not alone. Often I hear people in imperfect marriages, or equivalent arrangements, say with some