FICTION BY JENNIFER LEE

I FISH OUT the invitation from my purse and toss it on a passing silver tray and trade it for a gin and tonic. I have done this before. Glassy-eyed boredom and drinking at other people's weddings. The silver tray, minus one gin and tonic, walks away, bobbing a little: a cocktail buoy.

The Chus were upset at not having the family names on the invitations; you know: "Please join the Mr. & Mrs. Sun Chus and the Mr. & Mrs. Eric Sung Kims" and all that. But there was no way my aunt, Andrew's mother, was going to go down on the invite as still being the "Mrs. Eric Sung Kim" or for that matter, the too-modern "Ms. Helene Jin-Hee Kim." To divorce is one thing, to flaunt the fact is another.

The family has flown in from all over. Many parts of California, Texas, and New York; Seoul; Paris; Tokyo; even Buenos Aires. We are not so much immigrants as migratory birds, and some of us – not me – have flown first class to see the wedding of my second cousin, an anxious, aloof, Ivy League-educated, born-again Christian.

A quartet plays nondescript jazz in the background. Andrew and Grace walk from table to table, following some white-starch Emily Post custom. They are thoroughly Americanized, but like Americans from the 1950s. I wonder where they learned all this wedding shit and cream-colored everything, from the invitations to the wedding gown, down to the tablecloths. Everything is so goddamn tasteful, and me only on my third G & T. Half the people here are strangers to one another. They say we're family, and some of us are blood relations but most of us are relations by marriage, a lot of marriages. We're breeders, my kin. I am single – "still single?" as it has been asked repeatedly this weekend in the peculiar, clucking tones of concerned female relations. "You're 28," they keep reminding me.

Seated to my right are my first cousin, Matthew, Andrew's older brother, and Matthew's fiancée, a red-haired, long-legged Texan named Ruby. Matthew is now a cardiologist and flashily drives a Porsche around town, his town being Los Angeles, mine San Francisco. My aunts and grandmother have forewarned me about Ruby: They think she is a gold digger and from the looks of her, I see she has found the right occupation.

Matthew is crazy about her. My first cousin Matthew. I like the sound of that and I play with it in my head while I eavesdrop on his tête-à-tête with Ruby. He is giving her the lowdown on The Aunts, who make a formidable trifecta, and Grandmother, who at 90 is alone a powerhouse among them. Together they scare the hair off of anybody lucky enough to be affianced to one of their own.

My first cousin Matthew and I had what you might call a fling our sophomore year in college. It was only once: We used a condom and that was our reasoning. The taboos against first cousins and even siblings, we argued solipsistically, have to do with bad reproductive consequences. It was all in the genes, too alike was no good, we were to go forth and mingle with DNA not like ours – Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Caucasians, the United Nations of DNA. But Matthew and I didn't want to reproduce. We just wanted to try fucking, once. We hadn't seen each other since we were four and the chemistry was incredible, a familiar stranger. Besides, it was Wesleyan; kids were doing worse, laying goats at orgies and whatnot.

Suddenly I am flooded with nostalgia. I turn to Matthew and interrupt. "Hey Matt, remember our sophomore fling, remember? We weren't even drunk, I can't tell you the last time I did it sober. Maybe you."

"Ruby. This is my cousin Sally. She's not a Kim, she's a Lee," Matthew says, as though this explains everything. He does not look at me. "And," he says, finally addressing me, "I was drunk."

My first cousin Matthew does not whisper any of this. He is not embarrassed, ashamed, or afraid. Unlike Andrew the younger brother, Matthew is a fearless, godless son of a bitch, and he knows it still turns me on. The couple across from us pause mid-blini bite, then fiercely direct their concentration at their cheese plates.

"Yes, that's right," I say. "You were drunk, very drunk, almost incapacitated. I remember because I was sober."

"What is that, your third?" he asks, eyeing the glass in my hand.

"Second," I lie.

Ruby jumps in, all Southern charm and placating. Were we fighting?

"Matt has told me so much about you," she lilts. She extends a handshake across Matthew.

I comply, taking care not to get stabbed by the enormous rock on her finger: 1.5 carats, platinum. Ruby's nails are perfectly manicured a deep blood red, almost black, and freckles the color of pink-brown dust are scattered up the entire length of her slender arms, gaining a more vivid color around her shoulders and chest. As she leans over, Matthew looks down her plunging neckline. I suppose he has a right to. Maybe he paid for them.

"Don't believe everything he tells you," I say, giving her my most feminine, demure smile (chin down, eyes up).

"Oh no! He only said good things. You're a writer?"

"I didn't say she's a writer, I said she writes. Like a hobby," says Matthew.

"I'm not published," I explain.

Ruby looks confused, so I add: "My parents are dead. I live on the money, life insurance, their business. Estate money. That's how I write. I'm a ... a trust sponger."

"Oh, okay," she says, turning to face the couple in front of us. They're white, probably coworkers from Andrew's law firm. Ruby is mistaken if she thinks she's going to get rescued by those two preppies. The rosy sentimental feeling has drained away now and I realize that I mistook gin for nostalgia. Andrew and his bride finally arrive at our table.

"Excuse me," I say and head for the blini bar.

"Chopped eggs, sour cream?" the blini man asks.

The thought of sex with the blini man flashes through my mind – rolling in caviar and licking silvery and golden grains off each other's bare bottoms, skin slicked with crushed juice – then I'm back at the table from hell. The groom and bride are gone, a relief, and Matthew is nowhere to be seen, another relief. I sit next to Ruby.

She confides, "Dinner is taking so long to start. I don't want to fill up on cheese but I'm getting tipsy."

"Don't worry, no one will notice," I tell her. "Not if you're next to me." This is when I see her for the first time. Ruby's face. She is breathtakingly beautiful. Stupidly, I ask, "Caviar?" Her brows scrunch. She'd like to scowl and make gagging noises, but doesn't want to appear uncouth. "It's good. It's not fishy. Beluga. Osetra." I point to each variety, trying to reassure her. She takes a blini, bites hesitantly, chews cautiously, then with more confidence. Her face brightens with surprise.

"Wow, that's really good."

"You've got champagne tastes."

"Well I'm learning a lot from Matthew. I'm just a hick from Amarillo, you know?"

"Don't kid yourself." Does she really believe anything she says? "Matthew wouldn't be with you if that's what you were." And it's true. Matthew is an elitist but weirdly democratic; he recognizes genuine brains, beauty, talent, and just plain pure perversity. He collects them like his antiquary medical instruments.

It shocks how achingly beautiful women are. I can even see some of it in my own skinny-legged appearance. But it's men who hold complete erotic power over me. I long for the beauty of women but hunger for the excitement of men – their beastly hairy bodies, big clumsy bones, and aggressive erections, possibly the ugliest sight in the animal kingdom. Why can't I find the beautiful erotic? Or the erotic beautiful? Why can't beauty and the erotic be one? My first cousin Matthew, that lucky bastard. He is absolutely turned on by a woman's beauty; his tastes and predilections have coherency. I wonder if this is what people who love experience: the unity of beauty and eroticism. Does love join them, finally?

Out of the corner of an eye, I see Matthew striding back toward Ruby. He holds a glass of tawny beverage in one hand. He walks like liquid in that suit of his, with just a hint of sheen coming off the extra fine pinstripes. Power pinstripes, I call them. Whatever it is, it will be the genuine article. Depressed and sedated, I stand up, begin to walk, not quite right in my knockoff Chanel stilettos. Ruby calls after me. "Sally? Sally you okay?"

At the 32nd floor, I gin-stumble out of the elevator. I'm about to fall on my face when the sight of my aunt wakes me like an electric jolt and immediately I regain balance.

"Sally. What are you doing up here, ah?"

She looks me up and down, and before I can make up a story, she says, "Come with me. I have to get out of this ridiculous mother-of-the-groom dress. I brought a nice pantsuit to change into. And shoes, comfortable shoes, how can you walk on those stilts. Come!"

I do as my aunt commands. I always have. She was my mother's best friend. "My closest of best friends. We're like twins, not sisters," my mother used to say.

In her suite, my aunt motions for me to unzip her. I kick my stilettos off and go to her, unzip the back of her dress while she holds up her short bob and the delicate gold chain that holds her childhood communion cross. I pull the zipper down, careful not to let it catch on the many layers of chiffon, somehow starched stiff so that it is not the loose flowing dance of wisps that one expects. Pale brown tiger stripes crisscross her back.

"You enjoying yourself, Sally?" She looks at me by way of the mirror in front of us.

"Sure, Auntie. Of course," I reply, neither looking at her nor the two women reflected in the mirror.

"Thank you, Sally," she says, turning to give my shoulder a pat. "I'll just be a minute. I want to check my makeup and we'll go down together, ah? Get yourself some water darling. You look dehydrated."

The view from the window calls and I walk to it, press my forehead against the glass. Inside the plush upholstered room, the city below is a silent sea of lights. Not silent, but the hushed ambient sigh of a well-padded luxury suite. Behind me, in the glass, I can see someone has already been here to turn down the bed. Invisible people who bring fresh towels and chocolates and promises of comfort and care without so much as a demand for love in return and only a little money, so little money.

My aunt reappears, dabbing her eyes. She is dressed in a gunmetal gray suit with a crisp white blouse underneath. "Help me with these, Sally," she says. I go to her and wordlessly work the French cuffs until they fold over like stiff lily petals. I have played this intimate role for her, her lady-in-waiting, and before her, for my mother. I am 13 again.

"Do you want to know why I'm crying, Sally?"

"No."

"You're drunk. Sally, you drink too much. Why do you drink, Sally?"

"Is that why you're crying?"

"Yes," she says. "No," she says. "I don't want to go back down there, Sally. I don't want to see my children's father. Grace's family. Our family."

"Why?"

"The divorce. They hate me for it. The gossip I've had to listen to this week. It's times like these I wish I could still talk to your mother."

"It wasn't your fault, Auntie. He was an asshole. Sorry. A bad man, is that better?"

"It was my fault, Sally. I asked for the divorce. I hated him. Now Andrew can barely talk to me."

"Oh. Andrew. That self-righteous born-again. Who ever heard of a born-again Catholic? I'm sure it's because of Grace. The cunt of a prig. She is, Auntie! Andrew will get over it and you should get over it too, it's only a divorce, half of all marriages end in divorce, why should yours be different." And thinking of the pale lashings down her back, I blurt out with unexpected vehemence, "It was the best thing that could have happened to you – "

Before I know what has happened, my aunt has struck me across the face and I am holding the squishy part of the cheek she has slapped, tears stinging my eyes. I am not hurt. It is reflex. It is only physical. It is not emotion. But watching her shoulders crumple, I am overcome by the shame my aunt feels, the last living person on earth who is ashamed at love's failing, at failing love, and I am angry.

We are both trembling with fear, with hurt, with confusion, with the thrill of confrontation and destroying the polite facades of lies, as concretely as smashing chairs into windows. "Even a prick like Matthew has someone," I hiss. "And don't lie to yourself, you know he could do much worse than Ruby. It could have been Grace, for Christ's sake." I spy a glimpse of my expression in the mirror behind my aunt: Disgusted. Wasted. Twisted as though a rusted hanger were impaling the flesh of my face. I am afraid of my own face.

She steps toward me and I raise my arms to block her from hitting me again, but somehow she has managed to get her hands on my face and she is holding my face.

"You are so much like your mother." She speaks so softly, I sense it more than hear it. The palms of her hands are cool and dry on my wet, burning cheeks. "You do not know how much."

Jennifer Lee is a writer who lives in Oakland. She is the editor of the anthology Paris in Mind: Three Centuries of Americans Writing about Paris, published by Vintage Books.