- He was trying to encourage from himself a wedding blessing.
- The bride’s term.
- His son, whom he had liked on and off through the years, being the groom.
- Each wedding blessing needed to be detained within a 150-word language compartment.
- All the parents were required to deliver one, although two of them were no longer married to each other, nor had they been since the embryonic heartbeats of the Clinton administration, and he happened to be a member of this subgroup.
- The event permeated space in an involved humid city rich with odours, none of them especially pleasant.
- People were currently looking at him at the banquet, waiting for him to speak.
- Most wore eyes he’d never seen before.
- He rearranged absence from one lung to the other.
- He recalled the guest basket had been perfect.
- It contained a small cellophane sack of potpourri to calm the agitations that comprised the atmosphere in the faintly ailing boutique hotel at which the guests de-upset through the nights.
- His wife, who couldn’t stop appearing taken aback ever since her facelift, and who read newspapers to the blind every Monday afternoon (often inserting words and phrases of her own making), received a sunburn on a tour of nearby Mayan ruins and began shedding her skin.
- Soy sauce, a tea strainer, earplugs, two chocolate chip cookies, a useful electronic gadget, two little bottles of single malt scotch, two AAA batteries, a deflating blank silver balloon bobbing exhaustedly above the congestion.
- Neither his wife nor he could detect a theme.
- The wedding blessing, he believed, would come to him, and so he sipped margaritas on the plane while peering out the window at what he took to be ships anting whitely across the ocean below.
- He couldn’t shake the fact that his teeth—everybody’s teeth—were always on the move in the mouth: leisurely rotating, gapping, collapsing in on themselves like miniature Easter Island heads.
- The wedding blessing would come to him, he believed, and so he sipped piña coladas beside the pool while concentrating on refusing to recall the work back home he was each minute failing to execute.
- The fine sand on the not-distant beach, which neither his wife nor he visited during their stay, was said to be the colour of day-old toothpaste, mile after mile.
- Rising from his chair at the long table, champagne in hand, he believed the blessing would arrive.
- That morning he found amber bark-like peelings—shreds of his wife—in the sheets, on the bathroom counter, and, as he checked himself one last time in the mirror, clinging to his cotton suit.
- Then his son’s face two feet from his own, waiting to absorb the decades of wisdom he had agglomerated.
- He watched the face plastic from blankness to vague perplexity.
- He raised his champagne glass and opened his mouth to part the air called his son.
- The image of the silver balloon in the wedding basket wobbling in the middle of his mind.
- He lowered his champagne glass, closed his mouth, and civilly retook his seat.
- The applause, the applause.
