Later that night, I found myself at that lead table with Wes Howard and his blushing bride-to-be. There had been an onslaught of arrivals and even more last-minute changes, but eventually everything had settled into place. The room was full with ninety-eight guests, the entrees had been lain in front of each by the gloved-handed servers, and each and everyone was carefully splitting their chops into bite-sized chunks for their consumption between sips from glasses of Cabernet the stewards in their starched shirt fronts were attentively keeping full.
At our table, Wes sat in the place of distinguished honor. To his immediate left sat Amy Crawford, followed, working clockwise around the table, by Eleanor Rumford, a colleague of Wes’s named Dennis Duncan, who had agreed to be our keynote speaker for the evening, his wife Nancy, myself, and, rounding out the group and sitting on Wes’s immediate right, Mary Walton. Of the group, not a single one had reacted with anything other than delighted surprise at Wes’s introduction of Amy as his fiancee.
Not even Mary.
I had purposely not warned her in advance. I could’ve easily. I could’ve called the cell phone that had been glued to her head since the airport that morning, but I decided against it. Let her find out the same way that I did. I was sure that Mary’s reaction as she fell over herself at the shock would have been worth it for its pure entertainment value.
But I was wrong. Mary hardly reacted at all. Upon meeting Amy, she simply smiled and gave the younger woman a quick hug, almost as if they were sorority sisters or, more likely, that Mary had already known about Amy’s presence and her new relationship to Wes. And that, of course, made so much more sense. Mary had to have known about Amy’s presence in advance, which meant, obliquely, that in not telling me about it, she may have wanted to observe my reaction, for its entertainment or other kinds of useful value.
I thought about that a lot as we sat there sipping our wine and pushing small pieces of meat into our mouths, listening and laughing as Wes Howard held court and regaled us with stories both ribald and sublime. This was not normal. Not in any sense of that word. To think that the universe in all its infinite and seemingly random oscillations could have produced such a situation truly strained credulity. But everyone except me seemed oblivious to such an understanding of these events. Wes Howard, a forty-two-year-old serial harasser, was marrying his twenty-six-year-old former victim, a woman who had worked and who had been fired from the company that provided professional services to the organization that Wes was now about to chair. And, at an event hosted by that organization and organized by that company, Wes had brought this same young fiancee to witness his coronation, and she now sat in a place of both personal and professional honor, at his very left hand, while sitting at his right was the woman owner of the company, the person who had fired the fiancee only months before. The two women, once mortal enemies, had now, in fact, embraced each other. There had been no screaming, no angry threats, no scratching of faces -- just a calm and civilized understanding that the world worked in strange and wonderful ways and that, evidently, the affairs of the heart erased enmity and reigned supreme over one and all.
It was clearly bullshit, but like everyone else at the table, I knew enough to simply play along, knowing that those with power would always abuse it, and those who were attracted to power were as helpless as the rest of us.
I sat there and I had smiled my way through three courses -- an appetizer of butternut squash ravioli with rosemary browned butter, followed by a salad of baby kale greens with asian pear, grapes, candied walnuts, and gorgonzola topped with a honey vinaigrette, followed now by an entree of balsamic glazed lamb chops with a white bean puree -- doing everything I could to both look interested and to stay out of any direct conversation. It wasn’t hard. In the eyes of everyone else at the table, I was clearly the least interesting thing going. If memory serves, there was only one question put to me the entire time.
“Alan,” Wes said between bites, “when should I go up and introduce Dennis?”
He was referring to his colleague, Dennis Duncan, an overweight bear of a man in a dishwater white shirt and a rumpled suit coat, and the timing for the keynote presentation he had been specifically invited to give.
“Right after the desserts have been served,” I said, knowing full well that this was a time that, like almost every other detail of the event, Wes had already dictated to me several times.
And sure enough, shortly after the servers placed our desserts down -- a honey yogurt panna cotta in a blood orange sauce -- Wes slowly got up from his seat, moved over to Dennis, and practically laid down on his shoulders as if he intended to put the larger man in a wrestling hold.
“Come on, Dennis,” he said, slurring his words after all the glasses of wine he had downed. “It’s time to get you up on that stage.”
Dennis hastily pushed half his panna cotta into his mouth before rising, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and the two men, laughing, stumbled their way toward the steps placed just on the edge of the riser that dominated the front of the ballroom. In a moment, Wes’s voice was booming out across the ballroom as he spoke into the microphone hovering over the podium that had been long placed and ignored there.
“Good evening, everyone,” he murmured, and then, looking dismayed at the lack of appreciable effect his words had had on the ambient noise of table conversations and scraping of dessert plates, he said, louder and more insistent. “I said, ‘good evening, everyone!’”
Slowly people realized their attention belonged somewhere else, and they quieted down, some turning in their chairs, some actually turning their chairs to give themselves a better view of the stage and the person at the podium.
Wes was drunk. There’s really no other word for it. He slurred and slobbered his way through an overly long speech aimed at his own self-aggrandizement, the main act standing patiently behind him, idly brushing crumbs off his tie and shirtfront. There’s no way I can remember his exact words, but I clearly remember the impression they left on me. I’m great, he seemed to be saying, over and over again. I’m great, and now I’m in charge.
I looked over at Amy while Wes was speaking, and I remember her sitting there in rapt attention, her hair up and a diamond earring hanging from the ear I could see. When Wes was done, the audience gave him a polite round of applause, but Amy clapped almost violently, crouching forward as if she meant to stand.
“Oh, he’s wonderful,” she said, as she looked back at the rest of her tablemates -- me, Mary, Eleanor, and Dennis’s wife -- looking, I thought, for affirmation, and receiving it from everyone but me. “Isn’t he wonderful?”
In comparison, Wes’s introduction of his chosen speaker was shorter than the time he had spent on himself, and in a few minutes, he was bounding down off the riser to rejoin us at the table. Now Amy did stand, rising to meet him in her tight dress, embracing, and kissing him as if he had just won an Oscar. Mary, Eleanor, and Nancy Duncan also stood, applauding, but not approaching Wes. Sitting directly opposite from his position, I felt I could get away without also standing, but I knew I had to applaud if I didn’t want to bring undo attention onto myself.
Meanwhile, on stage, Dennis Duncan began his speech, focused, evidently, on the topic that was going to consume most of the evening. “Let me tell you a story about Wes Howard,” he said, breathing heavily into the microphone as he spoke. “This is back when we were starving undergraduates, but I think it typifies the character of the man that will be leading us for the next year. At that time, to help make ends meet, Wes and I both worked at the campus movie theater…”
I suddenly felt my cell phone buzzing in my pocket. Happy to have the distraction, I fished the phone out and looked at its glowing screen in the darkened room. There was a phone number there, from my home area code, but one I didn’t recognize.
Keeping my head as low as possible, I stood, held up the phone for the people at my table to see, mouthed the words “Excuse Me,” and began walking out of the room as I flipped the phone open and pressed it against my ear.
“Hello?”
“Alan?”
“Yes?”
“Alan, where are you?”
I was out of the cluster of banquet tables, on the side of the room, and moving towards the closest exit.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Meredith. Where are you?”
Meredith. I only knew one Meredith. Jenny’s mother.
“I’m in Denver. Meredith, why are you calling me?”
“I’m at the hospital. Jenny’s gone into labor and the baby is breech.”
I pushed my way out of the ballroom and found myself in the mostly empty foyer. Two other dinner guests were there, both also on their phones.
“What? Say that again, Meredith.” I was out of the noisy ballroom but plugged a finger in my opposite ear anyway.
“Her water broke about an hour ago,” Meredith said, her voice, now that I could hear it clearly, sounding agitated. “We just got her to the hospital and they did an ultrasound. The baby hasn’t turned and they’ve taken her up to the delivery room.”
A thousand questions were flying through my brain. But none of them were able to settle on my tongue. “Meredith, she’s not due for another five weeks!”
“I know that!” she snapped at me -- something extremely unlike her. My mother-in-law was an attorney who I’ve debated over the holiday dinner table countless times. I’ve never seen her lose her cool. “But her water broke, and her blood pressure is rising, and they decided that they’re going to get the baby out of her.”
“But you said it was breech.”
“Yes, I know. They’re going perform a c-section.”
It was too much. I felt faint, and I looked around for a chair to collapse in. There wasn’t one nearby, so I leaned against the wall, and struggled to keep my legs from buckling under me. Through the phone I could hear Jacob whining and Meredith telling him to be quiet.
“Meredith,” I said, knowing the truth of the next sentence that came out of my mouth, having been dragged along as Jenny had worked with obsessive intensity on her birth plan. “Jenny doesn’t want a c-section.”
“I know that, but she doesn’t have much of a choice. The look in her eyes when they told her. My God, Alan, you should have seen it.”
“Let me talk to her,” I said.
“No, I mean it. You should have seen it. Why the hell are you in Denver? You should be here!” Her voice was laced with unspecified accusations.
“Let me talk to her!”
“I can’t,” Meredith said. “They’re prepping her for surgery right now. I need to get up there. Get home, Alan. Just get home as quick as you can. Your family needs you here.”
And with that the line went dead.
I pulled the phone away from my head, told it to redial the last number that called me, and placed it back against my ear. I heard the circuits connecting and then a distant ring, ring, ring, with no answer.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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