Tayari Jones

C H A P T E R 5 Tayari Jones

I am stupid. My wife is not. This is one of the fundamentals of marriage I should have realized at least twelve years ago. My father tried to warned me, as he, too, had hitched his star to a woman a few rungs ahead of him on the intellectual ladder. He said, “Son, when you marry a woman like that, everything you can think of, she done thought already, and come up with something better.” When I saw Olivia, I smiled remembering my old man, and also that song where the husband and wife go seeking greener pastures and piña coladas and end up with each other. Maybe it was the mushrooms, but I waved at her.

Olivia shook her head sternly. You know the term “buzz kill?” That’s what happened. Literally. My buzz was gone. Remember in Pulp Fiction how they un-overdosed that lady with that magic hypodermic? That is exactly what happened when Olivia turned her eyes on me. I was sober as a judge. Olivia gestured to me and I made my way over to what, I guess, was the groom’s side. She patted the space beside her and I plunked down on the pew. “What are you? Twelve?” she hissed. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Santa Fe?” “I lied,” I said with my hands spread. “I knew you were lying, but I wasn’t sure why.” “Well, you lied, too. You didn’t tell me you were coming to Caitlyn’s wedding.” She shook her head like she was talking to a small child. “No. I didn’t say anything at all.” The reception was rather staid. Maybe they ran out of weird after the wedding. Or maybe they did that thing where the bride gets to decide the theme of the wedding, but her parents get to plan the reception for which they so handsomely paid. Who knows. But by the time we all moved to the banquet hall, Caitlyn had been transformed into your average suburban bride. Rayne still looked like a freak, but there was no helping that. I went through the receiving line with Olivia, glad for once that she was there. Caitlyn would introduce me to her husband and I could one up her with Olivia. At least I had married a regular person.

But as regular as Olivia seemed, these were irregular circumstances. As we stood waiting for our chance to greet the newlyweds, I asked my wife. “Now, why are you here again?” “It’s a long story,” she said. I looked at all the people standing ahead of us. “Good thing it’s a long line.” “Sammy sent me,” she said. “The prison poet, Sammy whatshisname?” “You know this is why he hates you. Nobody wants to be called ‘the prison poet.’ He phones me all the time and tells me how much he hates the way the paper has been covering him all these years, like he’s a trained bear or something. He’s a person. He prefers to be called Samuel. ‘Sammy’ is what his friends call him.” I couldn’t help but notice that Olivia felt perfectly comfortable calling him Sammy. “So, Sammy, I mean Samuel, told you to come to this wedding?” “He told me that there was something happening here that I should see.” I couldn’t believe it. Sammy had set me up. So I said it. I said, “I can’t believe that Sammy set me up!”

Olivia said, “You may ind it hard to believe, but this song may not necessarily be about you.”