Another friend, another funeral to come.
Tom was 31. We just found out today. Esteban called me in tears this morning as I was drying my hair. I almost broke it right then, but I had to stay strong for Esteban, who was sobbing into his shirt while sitting on a bench outside his hotel in the Happiest Place On Earth. He’s coming home tonight at some point, but he’s going directly to where his friends are gathering. He has literally spent 8-10 hours with Tom once a week for the last seven years.
I’m still not sure how it happened. I always have suspected that Tom perhaps had Marfan’s Syndrome, because he was gentle and sweet but with a giant physical presence, but regardless, it may have been something related to that. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m only guessing, trying to make sense of it all. He is 31. I am 31. Esteban is 32. I just don’t know.
There are few things in my life that I’ve done that I’ve been ashamed of, but one of them I did to Tom.
Esteban and I were married on a very warm day in late May. The chapel was a tiny little white clapboard dating back to the mid-1800’s, and, without air conditioning, was extremely warm, even with the lovely floor to ceiling windows opened. The white tulle that my mother had swathed the church was dancing ever so gently in the breeze and each window was a ballerina pirouetting to the Pavanne played on the antique grand piano. Tom sat by himself in the very back row of the ancient pews because the farthest row had more space between it and the one in front of it. I have a picture of the congregation before our mothers took their seats and you can see Tom standing there in the back below the choir loft, arms clasped before him, dressed impeccably in a black coat and long-sleeve white shirt that must have been stifling in the heat, and looking very protective over the entire situation, as though he were just daring anyone to try to wreck our day.
Sweet, sweet Tom.
Flash forward throughout the vows, the recessional, the receiving line, the dinner, the toasts, the eight million photographs. Flash forward to the point when even the cute Keds sneakers with the big grosgrain ribbon laces were making my feet hurt and my train had unbustled for the 34th time and felt like I was carrying around perhaps a small Korean woman on the small of my back. Flash forward to the point where my mother’s boyfriend insisted upon showing up uninvited, wearing a polo shirt and jeans, and my brother didn’t want to go home and my grandmother wanted me to sort out the fight that my mother was having with my brother and when I realized that my mother had just lied to me about how much alcohol she had had. Fast forward beyond all of that, to almost the end of the night, when Tom approached me and said ‘Weetabix, would you like to dance with me?’.
You already know what is going to come next.
I begged off. ‘Tom, do you mind if I sit this one out? My feet are absolutely killing me.’
I would like to believe that only now, looking back, do I recognize so much hopefulness on his face, so much anticipation for getting to dance with the bride at a wedding. I know that Tom probably wasn’t that popular in high school and I don’t think he had a girlfriend. Esteban once said of Tom that he was the classic ‘I like you as a friend’ kind of guy. I would like to believe that all of that didn’t occur to me right then, standing there, sweating my ass off in too much satin and a foundation garment with so much boning that I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself or bend over at the waist. Because I would like to grant myself temporarily blinded by my own discomfort rather than to know that I had knowingly just become every Homecoming Queen, every popular girl, every unobtainable piece of shit bitch who ever shot down his attempts in one cruel sentence or made him feel unworthy.
Aging memories show us in our best light and my head automatically glosses up a script in which I make a promise of dancing the next dance with him, after I had a chance to catch my breath but I have a feeling that I didn’t. I have a feeling that I might have made an excuse about not having even danced with Ward yet, which implied that Ward was far more important than Tom. Because sometimes I am a horrible person without meaning to be. Tom, of course, always the understanding gentleman, said ‘Oh, yes of course! I’ll bet your feet are sore.’ And he probably offered me a chair right then, because that’s the kind of person that Tom was. And it’s not the kind of martyrdom that happens after a person dies. Tom really was just that genuine and kind.
And then before I knew it, the evening was over. And we never did get our dance.
Afterward, I told him that the next time we were at a wedding together, he owed me a dance. And I have always planned to dance with him one of these days. And if the appropriate occasion arose and Tom was feeling too shy or had forgotten or figured that I was just saying that to be nice, I was going to walk up to him and say ‘Sir, I believe your name is listed on my dance card.’ and offer him my biggest, flirtiest smile and hopefully make him feel really good just then.
But even though amongst our friends, Esteban and I have been together the longest and were engaged first, we were the last to actually get married, so there have been no weddings within the group of friends since our own in 1999. No opportunities to dance. Not yet. Not ever.
Last week, I wrote in my paper journal Somewhere there are puppets on strings enacting our next moves. Somewhere, there are people watching them with rapt expressions and sudden bursts of laughter. The strings are strummed by the wind while below the puppets dance and loll their heads in delicious agony, knowing that they are but a heartbeat ahead of us. We are, all of us, destined to relive our casual cruel strokes of history each and every day. I can only hope that it is to teach us to be better people. I can only hope. Because I’ve never really been able to forgive myself for that little flippant decision I made to not withstand numb feet for another two minutes in order to make a lovely person smile. And right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. Because if I had one wish right now, I would dance until there was no music left to play.
