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The wedding didn't affect him much. He'd been to plenty of weddings, and he had become so cynical about marriage in general that he barely paid attention to it anyway. He supposed the bride was radiant and the groom was handsome, or whatever...It was hot. Italy was hot.
Shiv was probably at a bar somewhere, looking devastating, being chatted up by some Italian lothario or other; some tall, slim stallion of a man. He would seem to lounge against the air, as if the humidity was something he could lean against, his dark, insouciant eyes like liquid ink....or something. Whatever, it wasn't even--look, whatever. So she didn't love him, so what? He wasn't exactly a likeable person. Fuck, he'd known that all of his life, even though sometimes he could kind of forget it.
Tom let his gaze drift disinterestedly over the people in the square. Tuscan nightlife was a devastatingly cool thing; people just hung around, from grandparents to tiny babies, in their best clothes. None of them was in crumpled linen and drinking moodily out of a can.
Wasn't it enough, to have Shiv on his arm? She came home to him at the end of the day, you know, eventually. She was beautiful and smart, sexy as hell, funny and rich. She was a quintuple threat, far more, as cousin Greg had pointed out, far more than he deserved. Way out of his league. So she didn't love him, so what? She was still with him.
But, like a fish hook in his brain, the thought kept tugging at him, why was she with him? Tom may flatter himself on the size and prowess of his doodle, but he was not beautiful, or smart, sexy, rich--well, not as rich as Shiv, and every time he tried to be funny, they all looked at him like he'd just started drooling. It was only, in fact, when he wasn't trying to be funny that everyone laughed. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence, sometimes--
Well, look. There was no point in raking over that ground again, that wasn't going to help anyone, and he was prone to getting melancholy in his cups, which was probably why he felt so shitty.
It was cooler, in the evening, but Tom was in the cream linen he'd been sweating in all day. He perched on the edge of a fountain, letting his fingers drift into the aquamarine water, lit prettily from beneath. He was delighted by it, in a bitter, miserable kind of way.
So Shiv didn't love him, and she stayed with him...why? Because he loved her, Tom supposed, swallowing the rest of his drink in one, burning mouthful. He was supportive and caring, and she needed someone like that in her life. The rest of her family was awful sometimes, just horrible. They all were, to each other, and to him, and to everyone else. He provided something for Shiv that nobody else could, he thought, layering the idea on his aching brain like calomine on sunburn. So it was mutually beneficial, because he got Shiv, her humour, her wit, her sexiness, sometimes he even got to sleep with her, and Shiv, she got someone she could rely on.
That was okay, right? There were marriages based on less. And, over time, maybe Shiv would come to love him, when she came home day after day, and he was the only constant in her life. Maybe one day the scales would fall from her eyes, and she would say, 'oh, Tom, it was you all along!', and they would elope to renew their vows. Maybe one day, Tom would be the one person Shiv wanted to see more than anyone else in the world.
But even if she didn't...it was an open marriage, right? Tom was free to do some of his own wild-oat-sowing. There must be a beautiful, dark-haired Italian girl somewhere, he thought, someone tall and willowy, maybe with blue eyes and a pretty mouth, who would look up at him and blink her long eyelashes slowly, trustingly.
Tom shook his head. Despite everything, he just wasn't a casual sex kind of man, and that wasn't Shiv's fault, it was just the way he was. He'd often been teased about it at school, and in college.
But, yeah. It was what it was. He wished he had another drink. God, it was hot.
Two men sat down beside him at the fountain, already populated with people who looked cool and elegant instead of bleary-eyed and dishevelled. Tom was the only one who looked like he'd recently fallen overboard from a booze cruise and been washed up on the shore. Unfortunately for him, Tuscany was popular as fuck, and instead of the soothing incomprehensible Italian, this pair of clowns were speaking in English.
"Okay," one of them said, "let's get a picture at this fountain."
Tom instinctively shied away. Apart from the mortifying ordeal of being able to understand them, he was fairly certain that these two men did not want an unshaven man in the back of their picturesque Instagram fodder, never mind the PR backlash of 'Tom Wambsgans looks hideous in Italy'.
Who was he kidding, it would be 'did Shiv Roy finally kick out her pathetic husband?'
"Cute," the first man says happily, looking at his phone.
"Mm."
"Don't you think?"
There was a pause. Tom glanced over, half-interested. Maybe he was about to see a break up. But one man was holding a little gift wrapped parcel, and the other man was simply looking at it, in surprise. "What's this?" The looking-man asked finally, in a warily pleased voice. "You already gave me a birthday present."
He tore the wrapping, the neat, adult-looking, black wrapping away from a small box, something you'd probably put jewellery in. And, sure enough, inside was a PEZ dispenser, with Donald Duck's head. The man gave an explosive little laugh. He took it from the box and flicked Donald's beak; a little dusty PEZ pill came forward like a tongue.
"You gift wrapped a PEZ dispenser," he said, in a voice which creaked with the strength of his smile. "For me."
"I wouldn't gift wrap a PEZ dispenser for anyone else," the second man replied.
Obviously this meant something to them. Tom was prepared to roll his eyes, but on the upstroke, he accidentally caught sight of the second man's face. He was watching his partner with an expression of such tenderness that it made something open up in Tom that he really, really hated to have open, because it seemed to take up the whole of his torso, from his collarbone down to his stomach. The couple embraced, a long hug, though as they separated, just before, the second man kissed the first one's temple, once, twice, quite chastely. His big, tanned hand framed the side of the first man's head.
"Thank you," the first man said quietly, holding the PEZ dispenser in both hands. "I really, really love it."
Tom was no longer too hot, so that was a positive, he reasoned with himself. Pretty hard to be hot when the breeze is blowing right through the hole in the middle of your body.
He wished fervently that he had another drink to try and pour in, rather than curling his fists against his solar plexus like he could shove them into the empty place as a stopgap. He wanted that, he realised. Maybe he wanted that more than he wanted Shiv's beauty and money and sexiness and wit. He wanted the joy of giving a gift just to see the expression on someone's face. He wanted someone to know him well enough to wrap up some stupid, plastic piece of shit because it reminded him of his childhood.
He pressed his face into his hands, bringing his shoulders in tightly. He fucking hated when all this shit spilled over, because honestly, he had a lot to be grateful for. He loved Shiv, and maybe she didn't love him, but at least he wasn't starving in a ditch somewhere. What did it matter if he couldn't be silly with her?
Abruptly, he remembered Greg's face, soft and open and innocent, saying, "no quid pro quo? That's inc--that's incredibly kind of you."
What did it matter if she wasn't kind to him? Why did it matter if she wouldn't allow him to be kind to her? He'd felt like shit at that dinner with Greg, he was a heartbeat away from taking a long walk on a short pier; he'd wanted more and more to be heaped on him, more misery and suffering, so that it would make his decision for him, crush him under its weight. It hadn't been kindness to let Greg stack more on his shoulders. He'd wanted to reach the end of his tether. It wasn't kindness, it was self-pity, and perhaps he wasn't even capable of kindness.
Someone touched his shoulder lightly, and he flinched back, full of horror at the thought it might be one of those men. A woman jerked back in surprise. She said something to him in Italian, though from the look on her weathered old face, he gathered she was asking him if he's okay. She was probably someone's grandma, Tom thought, a little round, stooped old lady in black clothes, with a polished black walking stick.
"I want to be liked," he told her, and as soon as he said it, he started to cry, all at once, like the stupid, drunken piece of shit he was. "I don't deserve it," he said, "and it's impossible because I'm a fucking nightmare, but I just wish someone would see me and like me anyway."
She blinked at him, perplexed, and then said, in a very thick accent, "I am sorry, I do not speak much English." She smiled apologetically at him, her eyebrows pinched in a good dumb-show of concern. Tom coughed a bitter laugh, and shook his head, forcing a smile at her, and giving her a thumbs up. She nods, but she watched after him as he got up and walked away. He could feel her eyes on his back until he turned the corner.
He walked back to the hotel, and Shiv was not there when he climbed between the cool sheets.