The Privileges Read Online Free PDF Page A

the hotel before the ceremony has even begun. But Masha is at home at the intersection of pageantry and crisis; she calls the ushers together to instruct them to seat the eldest guests nearest the doors, regardless of their affiliation to bride or groom, and delivers a quick first-aid course in case of fainting. In the event, though, it’s one of the ushers, a blond-haired boy named Sam, who finally passes out, just at the end of the aisle. Too exhausted to be discreet, his friends lay him awkwardly across the rearmost pew. Masha cradles his head in her lap and pulls out the smelling salts she had the foresight to transfer from the home first-aid kit into her purse just that morning.
    The rest of them proceed to the altar a man down. What seemed like such a lightweight job has proved so brutal that it’s starting to seem a little funny, all the more so when they stare across the altar at the bridesmaids, who look as if they have just come from a five-mile hike in their red dresses. But then the familiar martial introduction rolls down from the organist’s loft, a hundred and twenty people struggle gamely to their feet, and their attention gathers at the point where the light is strongest, at the church door. In the heat and glare the bride and her father shimmer slightly.
    Marietta, who unlike most of them has had a few hours to grow used to the sight of her best friend in a wedding dress, keeps thinking about the ceremony itself, how many of its accepted elements seem wrong on symbolic grounds and should be changed. Why would you walk toward the man with whom you wanted to shareyour life in that halting, infantile gait, slower than you’d walked across any room in your life, as if you were being brought in by the tide? Wouldn’t it be more auspicious to slip off your torture shoes and run up there? Then she realizes that what she’s having, in effect, is a conversation with Cynthia, who would normally share her subversive interest in the day’s many weirdnesses, but who’s on the other side of the glass now. They have promised each other over and over that none of what exists between them will be lost, but neither of them has ever had a married friend and so neither of them really knows. She watches Cynthia’s father, that charming piece of shit, squeeze his daughter’s arm emotively without taking his eyes off their destination; he looks like Washington standing in the boat. Knowing how to behave on grand occasions has never been his problem; it’s the ordinary that could never sustain his interest.
    When they finally arrive and the last note of the processional fades, he kisses her on the cheek, says something private to her, and withdraws. All eyes turn to the priest, who, in his mountainous bell-shaped surplice, resembles one of those eternally trickling monuments.
    “Before we begin,” he rumbles into the microphone, “may I suggest that under the circumstances it is permissible for gentlemen to remove their jackets.”
    For about a year after her husband left her, Ruth took Cynthia to Saint George’s in Joliet Park every Sunday, trying to make the best of his absence by mounting a campaign of moral improvement. Then one Sunday Cynthia announced she would never go again, and that was that. So Ruth was surprised when her daughter said she wanted a church wedding. Surprised and a little offended, because a house of worship is not a stage set; but Warren convinced her to let that particular grievance go. Now, as the guests sit in unison and the sound of their sitting throws an echo over the faint buzz of the fans, she’s glad to be where she is, if no less mystified.
    They have agreed to two short readings. Cynthia’s friend Natalie, whose hands she held when Natalie cried after their art history TA called her a cock tease, reads from Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
. Bill Stearns, Adam’s sophomore-year roommate, who oncehelped him pop his shoulder back in at a touch football game and then broke a date