Page 56 of Kill Your Darlings

“So here’s the plan,” Thom said, placing a hand on Wendy’s thigh. “You stay here and research restaurants. I’ll go down and make sure the chapel can take us this afternoon. Maybe I can even make a reservation, then we’ll reconvene and start this marriage off with a bang.”

“You promise?” she said.

Wendy had moved his hand from her thigh to between her legs, where she was wearing new lacy underwear he’d suspected she’d bought just for this trip. “We’re not married yet,” Thom said, rolling off the bed.

Late that afternoon they were married in the hotel chapel. The officiant was a man with a handlebar mustache, and the witness was an off-the-clock baccarat dealer named Joan Webster. Thom asked her if she knew she shared a name with the lead character in the movieI Know Where I’mGoing!, played by Wendy Hiller. She’d never heard of the movie or the actor. When they were officially a married couple, Thom and Wendy went to the bar at the Flamingo and each had a Champagne cocktail. Then they spent the early evening walking the Strip, popping into some of the glitzier casinos just to see what they looked like. At the MGM Grand they won $50 on a slot machine, then lost it five minutes later on two bets at a blackjack table. They wound up eating at a ridiculously fancy restaurant at Caesars Palace. They’d lucked out on getting a table, having walked up to the hostess a few minutes after there had been a cancellation. They had escargot to start then each had Steak Diane, splitting a bottle of red that cost $250. “Think of the money we saved by eloping,” Wendy said.

Thom was going to comment that she’d also recently securedher inheritance of Bryce’s money. There had been some minor legal wrangles, but his estate had cleared probate and Wendy had become a multimillionaire. Thom, too, he supposed. The first thing she did with the money was purchase the house in Wyoming that her mom had been renting, overpaying for it because she knew her mother never wanted to move again. The second thing she did was pay off her brother’s student loans. She’d asked Thom if he wanted anything for his own family, and he told her that he didn’t, that he wasn’t even telling them how much money she’d received. “We won’t tell anyone,” she said. “I know we’re rich now, but I don’t want to live like we’re rich.”

After dinner they returned to the bar at the Flamingo and drank several more Champagne cocktails. They started a conversation with the sole other patron, a recently widowed Englishman named Jason, who was visiting Vegas on his own from his home in Florida. When they told him what they’d done that day, he insisted on picking up their bill; he also gave an eloquent toast on the nature of marriage. He told them all the cities he’d lived in with his wife over their forty-year marriage and shared his advice for marital happiness (turned out it was eating a hot breakfast together every morning, plus separate vacations). At one point Wendy got up to go to the bathroom and both Thom and Jason Adamson watched her depart the lounge. She had a great walk, his wife did, Thom thought to himself, and said it out loud to their new friend. “You’re a very lucky man,” Jason said. “Don’t squander it.”

“No, we’re in it for the long haul. To the end of the line.”

It was just before midnight when Thom lifted Wendy into his arms and carried her into the hotel room, bumping her head gently against the doorframe. Wendy said that she was pretty sure she could fall asleep standing up, but Thom insisted she change into her wedding-night lingerie, while he stripped and got onto the center ofthe bed. When she emerged from the bathroom she was naked, as well, telling him that the outfit she’d bought was far too ridiculous for him to ever lay eyes on.

“Our new friend told me not to squander my luck,” Thom said as Wendy clambered on top of him.

“I won’t if you won’t,” Wendy said. She sounded a little drunk, unusual for her.

“You won’t, I won’t either.”

After making love, winding up on the far side of the bed in a tangle of sheets, they lay side by side, both now fully awake.

“My twin,” Thom said.

“My handsome twin.”

“It’s our wedding day today.”

“It is,” Wendy said.

“It’s weird to exist in a moment that you know will become a lifelong memory. Like right now we are experiencing the first day of our lives together.”

“Is that how you see it?”

“First day of our married life,” Thom said. “It means something, doesn’t it?”

“I know you already think I’m cynical,” Wendy said, “but I’m not really. It’s just that today doesn’t seem any more important or significant than any other day we’ve had together. I just think ceremonies and milestones and birthdays are pretty much meaningless. Well, it’s all meaningless, really.”

“Everything is meaningless?”

Wendy paused, then said, “Yeah, it’s all pretty meaningless in the big scope of time and the universe and all that. We just get this little scrap of time, and most humans believe that their scrap of time has more significance than some scrap of time that happened five hundred years ago or five thousand years ago or five hundred years from now. It doesn’t. Obviously, this period of time is meaningful to me, and to you, too, because we’re alive in it. But that’s all there is.”

“Nice of you to drop your nihilistic worldview immediately after we got married.”

“I guess I thought you might already know that I have at least a touch of nihilism in me.”

“No, I was just kidding.”

Wendy propped herself up on an elbow. “You’re meaningful to me. My mother is, too, and my brother. But pieces of paper that say we’re married and birthday parties and political movements and people who talk about living a meaningful life... I don’t know. We live, we die, and in between we need to protect the people we love.”

“What about your poetry?”

“What about it?”

“Does it have meaning?”

“Not really. Sometimes. Some of them have meaning for me, some of them don’t. I have no idea if they’ve ever had meaning for someone else. I write them because I like to write. It’s a challenge, and it passes the time. What does writing mean to you?”

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