Best Man
Anxiety always leaves me feeling like I've got the flu. It centers in my stomach and spreads its poison in all directions. I've got that feeling today. Bad. My best friend, Dennis, gets married in an hour and I'm the best man—which means wearing a tuxedo, which I haven't done since the senior prom four years ago, MC-ing the reception, which I've never done before, and giving a speech after dinner, which I hope I'll never have to do again. At the rate I'm going, Dennis will be my pallbearer before my best man. It's not that I have no luck with women, my luck is surprisingly good at times, which causes problems when I already have a girlfriend.
"These things should come with instructions," Dennis says, pulling the tuxedo from its plastic covering. We are in his bedroom in his parents' house, empty now except for a single bed and my sleeping bag. Last Saturday Dennis and I moved his stuff to the apartment where he and Mira will live after the wedding.
"Have another look in the bag," I say. "Maybe there's a One-Eight-Hundred tuxedo helpline."
He grunts and drops the garment bag to the floor.
I pull on the tux pants. Dennis stands motionless, his shirt unbuttoned, trouser fly open. Holds a small bag containing brass buttoncovers and cufflinks; seems about to say something, then shakes his head and tosses the small bag onto the unmade bed.
"It's not like putting together Mira's exercise bike," I tell him. "You're not supposed to have any pieces left over."
"I'll wait for you to figure out where they go." He sits on the bed and picks up his speech.
And I get thinking about my own speech.
Knowing Dennis for thirteen years—since I was ten and he was eleven—I figured my speech would be simple to write. But as the months leading up to the wedding narrowed to weeks, and the weeks dwindled to days, I found that I had no speech at all. Two weeks ago I sat down and told myself I would not get up until I had at least the first draft completed. I sat for two hours and wrote as many usable sentences. Everything sounded like the start of a bad greeting card. But nerves and writer's block aside there was a larger reason eclipsing all others: I'm against the marriage.