“Good. Then can I steal Thomas, for just a minute? I’ll bring him back, sooner than you want. I just need to steal my husband so we can get this toast over with,” she says.
“He is all yours.”
Thomas takes Gwyn’s hand and smiles back at Maggie, as if to say, we’ll talk more later, okay? And she smiles back at both of them as they head to a small table by the front door of the barn—the rain behind them, the house behind them—a single bottle of wine on it, two glasses.
Then she feels someone’s hand on the small of her back, Nate’s hand, and she turns to look up at him. Murphy, thankfully, is not with him.
“You stayed,” he says.
“I stayed,” she says.
And he nods, as if to say, thank you, as if to say, I don’t know what that means but I’m glad you’re here.
She nods back. Me too.
“Where is Georgia?” she asks.
“I’m right here.” Maggie turns as Georgia walks up next to her—looking sweet but a little uncomfortable in her halter dress—a half-eaten prosciutto-wrapped asparagus spear in one of her hands. She drapes her free arm over Maggie’s shoulder, taking another bite. “These things are totally delicious,” she says.
“That is the nicest thing you could have said to me,” she says, and pulls Georgia’s forearm tighter around her shoulder.
“Really?” Georgia looks at the spear, slightly confused, reaching across Maggie to hand Nate the uneaten bite. “Well, the nicest thing you could say to me is nothing.”
Maggie bites on her lower lip, obliging, and turns toward Nate, who is popping the rest into his mouth. “No Denis?” she mouths to him.
He shakes his head, swallowing. “No Denis.”
And before she can ask about the rest of it—or not ask about the rest of it—someone is clinking a spoon against a glass, other people chiming in, until mostly everyone is facing toward the small table where Gwyn and Thomas are standing. Maggie looks around at all of them, all of these people who have comprised her future in-laws’ life together, all of them with a story to tell about who Gwyn and Thomas have been, who they think they are now. At first it makes her think that this is like a wedding—when else do you have everyone who matters to you both in one room?—but then she takes in the nervous smiles and dazed looks, looks not exactly of approval or compassion but of doubt and anxiety. Doubt that they can escape this same end, anxiety that they won’t.
Maggie turns her attention back to Thomas and Gwyn as Thomas starts to open the tall bottle of wine, with a dime-store corkscrew. He is being careful with it, too careful with it—the corkscrew, the bottle—everything starting to move in a rhythmic slow motion as he finally pours Gwyn a glass of the wine and pours himself one too.
As everyone moves closer, Gwyn takes the glass from him, swapping him for a folded piece of paper, which he opens, putting his free palm on her hip. It is like a dance the way they move together, seamless—and totally natural, even now. And so, even in this strange instance,
where, apparently, they are about to toast to the end of their union, Maggie is struck all over again by how they look together. They look right.
And then Thomas starts to speak.
“Thank you all for being here tonight, with us, and with our family.” He looks at Nate, Georgia and Maggie, and then over at Gwyn, who is looking right back at him. “When Gwyn first suggested doing this, I thought it sounded a little . . . off the wall. Especially for us. Except the closer we’ve gotten to tonight, the more I’ve come to understand that tonight is a good thing. It’s a way for us to explain that this relationship has mattered. That nothing has mattered more. Even if it is ending now.”
Gwyn takes out another copy of the poem, putting her own wineglass down. “This poem we’re going to read is called ‘The Empress of Nowhere,’ ” she says, more to Thomas than to anyone else.
“It doesn’t rhyme, so bear with us,” he says.
Everyone laughs. This is funny, apparently. Everyone finds this funny. But as they begin to actually read the poem, trading off each stanza, the laughter stops. The laughter stops even though it is a bizarre and very funny poem about a fisherman eating black licorice on a dock in Florida. About how he doesn’t like it at first, finds it too bitter, but learns to like it. He learns to like it—not just tell himself he likes it, but truly like it—just in time to realize that there is no more to be eaten.
Maybe the laughter stops because no one understands. You’d have to stretch the poem to make it relevant. You’d have to stretch the poem beyond recognition, as far as Maggie can tell, to have it make any sense in terms of Thomas and Gwyn—and they’re offering no explanation about what it means to them, what it might have meant. And she can’t help but wonder if she missed something while she was over at the Buckleys’, something that would explain why Thomas and Gwyn are choosing to read this.
Only when she looks back and forth between Georgia’s and Nate’s blank faces, she realizes that they don’t have a clue either. No one does, apparently. No one but Thomas and Gwyn, that is, who are red faced and happy, looking right at each other and smiling, really smiling, which all of a sudden seems like the saddest part. It makes Maggie sad to see it so plainly before her. You have something between you after a while, this soft little bug of a thing, its own life form, even if you decide you don’t want it anymore, even when you decide you want other things instead.
Georgia crosses her arms over her stomach, clutching the top of her belly. “Wow! They’ve officially lost it,” she says.
Maggie looks back at Gwyn and Thomas still watching each other. It isn’t such a great distance. It isn’t such a great distance to get to the worst place. And she turns toward Nate, even though she doesn’t want to. Even though she wishes that the person she loves most hadn’t put them in a position where the distance to somewhere irreversible feels shorter now, where everything feels so hard. But maybe it just is. For now. And maybe the best thing she can do is just to let it be.
She reaches for Nate’s hand, holds on to it. “Let’s go somewhere,” she whispers.
But he doesn’t hear her. “What?” he says.
“I want to go,” she repeats.