“Five grand,” he said. “For one party.”
“When you get married,” she said, “your father'll be off the hook. Your wife's family will have to pay.”
“When I get married,” he said, “we'll go to a justice of the peace. If somebody wants to fork over five thousand bucks, we'll take the cash and spend, like, a year in Europe.”
“The girl you marry may feel differently.”
“I wouldn't marry somebody who felt that differently.”
The number ended, and Billy walked Mary back to her table. As she walked with her hand on her son's elbow, Mary's pink shoes shed their cool minty light against the indigo carpet of the country-club ballroom. This was her son, on his way to Harvard. She was conscious of his new height, the size of his hands. She loved him so. He was still hers, the most intelligent of her children, full of promise and afflicted with a ravaged complexion that only increased the terrible weight of her love. He was at once ethereal and painfully human. He, alone among her children, suffered hurts and prides she could read.
That night she lay in bed in her nightgown, watching Constantine undress. His body, gone slack and hairy, now inspired in her a tenderness that had almost as much to do with motherhood as it did with passion. Her husband might have been her oldest child, a difficult and obstreperous boy who lived outside the realm of her control. She could love him, more or less, when she thought of him as a wayward boy, one who occasionally did harm to others, who was subject to violent fits of temper, but whose decent heart would outlive his youthful fury. In his middle age Constantine had turned boyish, and she lived with him that way, as a boy with a pudgy body and a petulant streak. Wearing only his Jockey shorts, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, there she goes. She's married.”
“Mm-hm.” Mary still inhabited the outer edge of the yellow pill, its soft declining side. The world retained its feathery aspect.
“Married,” Constantine said.
“I think the wedding went fine, don't you?” Mary said. “I had a few doubts about the band, but really, on the whole I think it was a real success.”
Constantine rose without speaking, put his pajamas on over his shorts. He had had a few during the reception, he was moving with elaborate caution, but Mary didn't think about that. She thought about the wedding she'd produced, a sit-down dinner for over two hundred. She tried not to worry about its coarse aspects: the off-color toast made by Constantine's partner, the foreman who'd argued with a wife in a dress crawling with fuchsia flowers. She tried not to imagine the future weddings of Susan's bridesmaids, girls whose families Mary scarcely knew because she was an Italian woman married to a Greek construction man. None of Todd's people had gotten drunk.
“I could have done without Nick Kazanzakis's toast,” she said. The hard edges were returning. “What's the matter with him? A toast like that, at a wedding.”
“Nick's all right,” Constantine said. “He likes a little joke. Nobody minded.”
“Betty Emory minded. I was sitting right beside her. I saw her go stiff.”
“Fuck Betty Emory. She's got a stick up her ass, just look at her.”
“Oh, lovely. That's a very nice thing to say about a lady. I'll tell you one thing, she is a lady. Which was not true of about half the women there today.”
Constantine got into bed. The smell of liquor was mixed with his old personal smells.
“Let's not fight,” he said. “Not tonight.”
“Fine. I'd be delighted to not fight.”
He pulled the covers up to his chest. She saw how haggard his face looked, how worn. He was getting older.
“This was our daughter's wedding day,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Now her name is Mrs. Emory. Susan Emory.”
“I know.”
She turned off the light. The room went black, and pieces of objects slowly materialized: half of Mary's vanity with its oval mirror, the nearer legs of the chaise on which no one ever sat. Mary lay looking at the room, her mind so tangled with thoughts that she might have been thinking of nothing at all. The bedside clock put out its buzz. There was something else, a strange sound she thought at first was coming from outside but which she realized was the sound of Constantine weeping beside her. He was turned away, and she laid her hand on his back, which was covered with the broad stripes