Page 55 of Kill Your Darlings

When he got back late that afternoon, he just assumed that Wendy would be able to see what he’d done on his face, that she would take one look at him and know everything. But she was in a good mood, watering plants, playing her Lauryn Hill CD. After dinner that night she told him that she was three days late in getting her period. “You’re pregnant?” he said.

“I might be.”

“I’m going out to the CVS to buy a pregnancy test,” Thom said, standing, knocking his knee on the underside of their dining-room table.

“No, not yet. We can do it tomorrow. Tonight it will be a mystery.”

In bed, later, Thom almost told Wendy about what had happened that day with Ariel, and how it was over, but he could already hear her response. “You know, darling, just because we’re married, you don’t have to tell meeverything.” She’d said it enough times. So he kept it to himself, another secret, hopefully the last one he’d ever have to keep.

1995

Outside of the Clark County Marriage License Bureau the sun was blinding. Wendy put her sunglasses on, while Thom, having left his pair back at the hotel, shielded his eyes.

“Where to now?” he said. “Straight to the chapel?”

“Which chapel?”

“Any chapel. There are literally two of them across the street.”

“Sure,” Wendy said. “You pick.”

They crossed the avenue. One of the chapels was sort of a miniaturized church, dwarfed by a neon sign of a large red heart pierced by an arrow. The alternative was in a strip mall, and was called the Carousel Wedding Chapel. Thom and Wendy approached it and saw that behind the plate-glass windows there was an actual merry-go-round. It wasn’t spinning, but maybe that was because a couple were being photographed standing on the carousel’s platform. She was holding up her hand, showing her ring. He had a hand on her back and the other on the mane of one of the plastic horses.

“It seems like a bad metaphor,” Thom said.

“What does?”

“A carousel. I feel like riding a carousel is kind of a fickle thing. You can get on and off and pick different partners.”

“You mean different horses?”

“Right.”

“I don’t know,” Wendy said, sliding her arm through Thom’s and moving closer to him. “Maybe it’s a perfect metaphor for marriage. You go around and around, getting nowhere, and you feel vaguely nauseous the whole time.”

“Aw, sweet,” Thom said.

“You know that there’s a chapel in our hotel.”

They were staying at the Flamingo on the Strip for three nights. Neither of them had been to Las Vegas before, and Thom had been the one to choose where to stay. Apparently, it had been inOcean’s 11, the heist movie with Frank Sinatra. “Is there?”

“You didn’t see it? Right near where we checked in. We can go there. It really doesn’t matter to me.”

They took a cab back to the Flamingo from downtown Las Vegas. While they paid the fare the cabbie slid a card into Thom’s hand with a picture of a woman’s torso in a glitzy bra. The text simply read “Most beautiful girls on the Strip,” and there was a phone number. In the elevator on the way to their room Thom showed the card to Wendy. “There’s a phone in the room, isn’t there?”

“There is. You should call. We’re not married yet.”

The room was ice cold, but after the heat of the outdoors neither of them minded. Wendy stripped off the skirt and blouse she’d been wearing and clambered onto the king-sized bed, cracked open theFodor’s Las Vegasguidebook that Thom had bought for the trip. “Where should we have dinner tonight?”

Thom lay down on the bed next to her. He was suddenly anxious, and not sure why, a phenomenon that had been happening to him more and more recently. What he really wanted to do was smoke a cigarette, but he’d booked a nonsmoking room, knowing that Wendy would prefer it. “We could just go downstairs, stand in line, and get married, then we could wander down the Strip and look for a restaurant.”

“I’ll do whatever you want to do, darling,” Wendy said. It was a recent pet name she was using for him, and Thom wasn’t quite used to it yet. It always sounded vaguely sarcastic.

“I just think that now that we’ve got the marriage license, I should make you an honest woman.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” she said, still flipping through the pages of the Fodor’s.

It was Thom who had ultimately convinced Wendy that they should get married, and it was Wendy who had proposed that they elope to Vegas. She told him that she’d already had one wedding ceremony and that it had been one too many. Thom had readily agreed. For one thing, his minor anxiety attacks were getting worse, and the thought of standing up in front of a hundred friends and family and reciting vows made his spine feel like it was made of rubber. And he didn’t think his parents would mind, especially after the stress and expense of his sister Janice’s wedding on Cape Cod the year before. When he told them, it turned out he’d been right, his mother saying, “I don’t care how you get married so long as it’s to Wendy. You know how much we’ve always loved her.” His parents, of course, were really the only other people who remembered that once upon a time Thom and Wendy had been childhood sweethearts. Thom and Wendy didn’t exactly hide it from their new friends in Cambridge, but they didn’t talk about it either. When Wendy had called her mother to tell her that she was planning on eloping with Thom to Las Vegas, she’d offered to buy her mother a plane ticket so that she could be there. “Haven’t you always wanted to be the mother of a bride at her second wedding?” Wendy had said. Her mother had responded by laughing, and saying, “I just want to be the mother of happy children. And I am.” Alan, Wendy’s brother, had just gotten a degree to be a vet tech and had moved two towns away from Rose. Like her, he was engaged. Wendy was glad that Alan would be living close to their mother, but she wasn’t convinced it was a necessity. Her motherhad made more friends in Lander, Wyoming, than Wendy suspected she’d make in her entire life. It hadn’t surprised her when her mother turned down the ticket to Vegas, saying that she’d rather travel to see where they actually lived their lives.

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