Page 30 of Kill Your Darlings

Outside of the Clark County Marriage License Bureau the sun was blinding. Wendy put her sunglasses on, while Thom, having

left his pair back at the hotel, shielded his eyes.

“Where to now?” he said. “Straight to the chapel?”

“Which chapel?”

“Any chapel. There are literally two of them across the street.”

“Sure,” Wendy said. “You pick.”

They crossed the avenue. One of the chapels was sort of a miniaturized church, dwarfed by a neon sign of a large red heart

pierced by an arrow. The alternative was in a strip mall, and was called the Carousel Wedding Chapel. Thom and Wendy approached

it and saw that behind the plate-glass windows there was an actual merry-go-round. It wasn’t spinning, but maybe that was

because a couple were being photographed standing on the carousel’s platform. She was holding up her hand, showing her ring.

He had a hand on her back and the other on the mane of one of the plastic horses.

“It seems like a bad metaphor,” Thom said.

“What does?”

“A carousel. I feel like riding a carousel is kind of a fickle thing. You can get on and off and pick different partners.”

“You mean different horses?”

“Right.”

“I don’t know,” Wendy said, sliding her arm through Thom’s and moving closer to him. “Maybe it’s a perfect metaphor for marriage.

You go around and around, getting nowhere, and you feel vaguely nauseous the whole time.”

“Aw, sweet,” Thom said.

“You know that there’s a chapel in our hotel.”

They were staying at the Flamingo on the Strip for three nights. Neither of them had been to Las Vegas before, and Thom had

been the one to choose where to stay. Apparently, it had been in Ocean’s 11 , the heist movie with Frank Sinatra. “Is there?”

“You didn’t see it? Right near where we checked in. We can go there. It really doesn’t matter to me.”

They took a cab back to the Flamingo from downtown Las Vegas. While they paid the fare the cabbie slid a card into Thom’s

hand with a picture of a woman’s torso in a glitzy bra. The text simply read “Most beautiful girls on the Strip,” and there

was a phone number. In the elevator on the way to their room Thom showed the card to Wendy. “There’s a phone in the room,

isn’t there?”

“There is. You should call. We’re not married yet.”

The room was ice cold, but after the heat of the outdoors neither of them minded. Wendy stripped off the skirt and blouse

she’d been wearing and clambered onto the king-sized bed, cracked open the Fodor’s Las Vegas guidebook that Thom had bought for the trip. “Where should we have dinner tonight?”

Thom lay down on the bed next to her. He was suddenly anxious, and not sure why, a phenomenon that had been happening to him

more and more recently. What he really wanted to do was smoke a cigarette, but he’d booked a nonsmoking room, knowing that

Wendy would prefer it. “We could just go downstairs, stand in line, and get married, then we could wander down the Strip and

look for a restaurant.”

“I’ll do whatever you want to do, darling,” Wendy said. It was a recent pet name she was using for him, and Thom wasn’t quite used to it yet. It always sounded vaguely sarcastic.

“I just think that now that we’ve got the marriage license, I should make you an honest woman.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” she said, still flipping through the pages of the Fodor’s.

It was Thom who had ultimately convinced Wendy that they should get married, and it was Wendy who had proposed that they elope to Vegas.

She told him that she’d already had one wedding ceremony and that it had been one too many.

Thom had readily agreed. For one thing, his minor anxiety attacks were getting worse, and the thought of standing up in front of a hundred friends and family and reciting vows made his spine feel like it was made of rubber.

And he didn’t think his parents would mind, especially after the stress and expense of his sister Janice’s wedding on Cape Cod the year before.

When he told them, it turned out he’d been right, his mother saying, “I don’t care how you get married so long as it’s to Wendy.

You know how much we’ve always loved her.

” His parents, of course, were really the only other people who remembered that once upon a time Thom and Wendy had been childhood sweethearts.

Thom and Wendy didn’t exactly hide it from their new friends in Cambridge, but they didn’t talk about it either.

When Wendy had called her mother to tell her that she was planning on eloping with Thom to Las Vegas, she’d offered to buy her mother a plane ticket so that she could be there.

“Haven’t you always wanted to be the mother of a bride at her second wedding?

” Wendy had said. Her mother had responded by laughing, and saying, “I just want to be the mother of happy children. And I am.” Alan, Wendy’s brother, had just gotten a degree to be a vet tech and had moved two towns away from Rose.

Like her, he was engaged. Wendy was glad that Alan would be living close to their mother, but she wasn’t convinced it was a necessity.

Her mother had made more friends in Lander, Wyoming, than Wendy suspected she’d make in her entire life.

It hadn’t surprised her when her mother turned down the ticket to Vegas, saying that she’d rather travel to see where they actually lived their lives.

“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 movie I Know Where I’m Going! , 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 secured her 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 of the 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?”