Best Man’s Speech

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life.

“Standing here today, I can honestly say: Sean and Alli are meant to be together.”

Amid the warmth and pomp of the tuxedos and gowns, centerpieces, lights, and smiles, there was a solemn note of finality that hung in the air.

My eyes stung as I looked over my shoulder at the proud couple. Sean had that unshakeable grin that weathered every storm. I wondered if it would weather this one. Alli flinched at the sound of my voice. Sean didn’t notice. He never noticed much when it came to us. I couldn’t tell if she was rooting for me to deliver a tearjerker, or to tell it like it was.

“When I brought Alli out to Copper Mountain to join our little Colorado ski family, Sean was already storming down the mountain to greet us by the lodge. He slashed his skis and dusted us with the world’s dirtiest rooster tail. While I was still spitting out wet powder, Sean had already noticed Alli and had her hand in his, as if sizing it up for a ring.”

***

What I did not tell the wedding guests was that I had spent the entire flight from Newark telling Sean about her. How we had been working late together. How we connected over our mutual love for the I Ching and an unhealthy obsession with astrology. How I’d made out with her in a bathroom at a bar after happy hour and we hadn’t even spoken about it since.

Sean listened. But he dismissed the whole thing due to my womanizing ways.

Then we reached the mountain, and he took her hand.

I confronted him that night after Alli went to bed. Sean was barefoot in the kitchen, eating leftover chili directly from the pot after everyone else had gone upstairs.

“You knew I liked her.”

“Nothing happened with the two of you.”

“I told you.”

“You like everything with a pulse.”

“I brought her here.”

“You booked a plane ticket. Congratulations. You are a millionaire – you do that shit constantly.”

He said it without anger, which made it worse. Sean could beat you and then make your objection to losing seem grubby and small. That was his most intolerable quality.

“You were going to wait for a sign,” he said. “That’s what you always do. You wait until there’s no risk—the opposite of the markets—and when somebody else goes first you act butt hurt.”

“You mean until you take what I want.”

“Oh please, like you know what you want. You are a man child.”

By breakfast, he and Alli already spoke in the private language of people who believed something important had happened between them.

My thoughts drifted. After all this time, Sean still hadn’t found me out. But he knew what I was. Didn’t he?

That night in Hong Kong was the first time Sean realized what a degenerate I really was.

“One thing is for sure, Sean’s always been a better man than me…”

***

“This way, Sean.” The Vicodin floated me toward the nondescript black door of the Superintendent’s House at the old Central Police Station. This was the secret entrance to The Dragonfly—a bespoke cocktail lounge where nothing good happened.

Behind the unassuming brick wall was a surreal space that looked like the home of the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland if he were on an absinthe-inspired acid trip.

“Ken! Look at this place,” Sean had said.

Turquoise Tiffany-style lamps lit the ceiling. The bar was framed by a naked woman with two ornate dragon wings. Every inch of the place was green and hypnotic. Fairies floated from the ceiling and it was impossible to tell if they were real or imagined in the reflections of the geometrically positioned mirrors they hung from.

Sean walked in ahead of me, his crisp Twillory button-down stretched across taut muscles and an iron frame. His movements were catlike and precise as he strode over to the bar. I stumbled in wearing a Robert Graham patterned button-down that revealed my angular chest, the buttons undone down to my sternum, showing off my David Yurman black titanium chain. I’d always liked wearing my money. I hadn’t always been so gaunt, though.

Once I had been an even stronger athlete and better downhill skier than Sean—before university, finance, and the blinking ticker of commerce consumed me.

That was not revisionist history either, whatever Sean might tell you. At nineteen, I was three-tenths faster than him through anything technical and a full second faster when the course iced over. Sean was stronger on the straights. I was better where the mountain required imagination.

The week before the Eastern qualifiers, I tore something in my knee during a training run. Not enough to stop me. Enough that the team doctor gave me Vicodin and told me not to ski on it. Sean found the orange bottle in my boot bag after I’d taken two and reported me to Coach Daugherty.

He called it concern.

Coach scratched me from the first run. Sean took my start position and won the qualifier by seventeen hundredths of a second. He came to my hotel room afterward carrying the trophy and a bag of ice for my knee.

“You would’ve smoked me,” he said.

I looked at the trophy sitting between us.

“Then why did you turn me in?”

“Because you were high and injured.”

“You knew they’d scratch me.”

“I knew you were going to destroy your knee.”

“Maybe I would have beat you instead.”

Sean’s jaw tightened. He had that particular look he got whenever someone made him confront the possibility that doing the right thing had worked out nicely for him.

“Winning isn’t worth ending your career for.”

It sounded brotherly. I heard it as a confession.

For years afterward, Sean told people I left skiing because of my knee. I let him. The truth was more humiliating. My knee was fine. What I could not recover from was watching him accept the life I believed belonged to me while explaining that he had saved me from it.

As long as I kept skiing on the circuit, it was always going to be him or me.

“What will it be?” I asked Sean.

“One of everything,” he said, pulling out the screenshot of his Super-G trophy from the Aspen Pro Open the prior week. “We did it, pal.” There was no pride. Just certainty. A foregone conclusion. Inevitability realized.

“You did it,” I’d said, feeling like that stupid fifty-dollar trophy was worth more than the millions I’d acquired arbitraging the capital markets the last ten years. “You sure did, Sean—you stuck with it.”

“It’s not like you sold your soul to the Rothschilds or anything, Ken,” Sean said, laughing, with those power-white chompers as he leaned in and said, “maybe just a piece of it, though, right?” Then he slapped me on the back and said, “But the good news is, you can take it back. It’s not too late to come join me on the circuit.”

It was at that moment that somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I was going to make a run at Alli—that I was going to try to take a piece of what he had—maybe even all of it—just like I would have if I’d stuck with skiing.

Sean had a way of making you believe you could be more and making you simultaneously hate yourself for not being more. Of wanting to be him and wanting to take him down too. A cocktail of hope, laced with envy, mixed with a heavy pour of hero worship—a bitter green liqueur with the tint of wormwood—a maddening spirit.

I guess if you worship the hero, you are going to want to be him eventually, which means dethroning him, and then it’s only a matter of time before you oppose him and shoot your shot. And that makes you the villain.

“I’ll take a dry martini,” I said. “Drier than a nun.”

The bartender winked and clipped a Hemingway quote on my glass about doing what you say drunk when sober. I wondered if that went for what you told yourself but never said out loud.

Sean ordered some Japanese whiskey that came in a carved wooden box. He pulled a small velvet ring case from his pocket and placed it on the bar between us.

“I’m asking her when we get back,” he said.

My stomach dropped with the soft, unmistakable sensation of an elevator cable snapping.

“You’re kidding.”

“Why would I kid about that?”

“I don’t know. You’ve only been together, what, a year?”

“Three.”

“Three?”

Sean laughed. “You really don’t pay attention to anything that isn’t moving across a Bloomberg terminal, do you?”

He opened the case. The diamond was tasteful, which is to say it wasn’t large enough for me, not by half. Sean had probably sold a pair of racing skis and spent six months ordering chicken instead of steak. He couldn’t simply buy the thing. He had to deserve it.

“She’s going to say yes,” I told him.

“I hope so.”

There it was again. Hope. A tremor in his voice that made me feel powerful because I had money and he had something to lose. Whereas Sean played to win, I played off people’s emotions.

I was the crusher of hope. I called losers. Called when they lost. Made naked calls. Without owning the damn thing ahead of time. And this was the same thing. It seems complex. But it is simple really. Know what people want before they do. The fear of losing. The last clear chance to get in on a winning ticket. The moment buyer’s remorse sets in. Be there when they want it. Foresight. Timing. The devil’s toolkit.

And as far as Sean. Well Sean was easy. All I had to do was convince him it was something he’d suspected all along.

“You know people are talking,” I said.

“About what?”

“Alli.”

Sean turned his glass slowly. “What about Alli?”

“I don’t know. I heard she’s been seeing someone.”

It came out effortlessly. No premeditation. No internal debate. The lie arrived fully formed, wearing a suit and carrying identification.

Sean looked at me for a long moment, then smiled. “You’re full of shit.”

“Probably.”

“Who?”

“I said I heard something. I didn’t say I believed it.”

“From who?”

“Around.”

“Around where? We live in different time zones.”

The bartender set down our drinks. Sean stared at the ring, then snapped the case closed and slipped it back into his pocket.

“Forget I said anything,” I told him.

“That won’t be difficult.”

He lifted his whiskey and toasted me anyway.

That should have ended it. But lies are like bad investments. Once you have enough sunk into one, you throw good money after bad, trying to make the original mistake look intentional.

Over the next month, I mentioned a name to Sean. Then I mentioned to Alli that Sean was having cold feet, might have had an affair. Not directly. Never directly. I was too practiced for that. I said people on the circuit assumed Sean and Lena Hartwell, his equipment rep, were together because of the travel. I told Alli that Sean had looked troubled in Hong Kong, as though there were something he wanted to confess. I told Sean that Alli seemed distant when I spoke to her.

I became the market maker for a security that did not exist.

Then, one snowy night in Denver, Alli called me.

“Is there something I should know?”

It was after midnight. Timing is everything. I was in a hotel suite above Union Station, looking down on the trains and the little amber squares of windows in the buildings beyond. I had been drinking. She had been crying.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is there?”

“Don’t do that, Ken.”

“Do what?”

“Make me drag it out of you.”

That was the moment I could have cleared the trade and admitted there was nothing there. Instead, I told her Sean loved the circuit more than anything. I told her some men need to be admired by strangers. I told her I understood what it was like to live behind somebody else’s dream. It isn’t fair when they take it too far.

An hour later, she was at my hotel.

Nothing happened. Not in the technical sense. We kissed. She pulled away. I apologized. She slept on the couch while I watched trains come and go, each carrying people who had made a decision to stay on or get off.

In the morning, Alli left without saying goodbye.

Two weeks later, Sean proposed.

She said yes.

But that wasn’t the last time she called.

The next time she called, there was no couch.

Sean was in Park City. Alli was in Vail for a conference. I was in Denver because I had arranged to be in Denver.

She came to the hotel after midnight again. This time neither of us cried, apologized, or discussed Lena Hartwell. There was Scotch. Room-service French fries. Snow pressed against the glass while the two of us performed the ugliest kind of betrayal—the kind that feels, for several hours, like vindication.

Afterward, Alli lay on her back staring at the ceiling.

“Do you know what it’s like being with him?” she asked.

I thought I did.

“He forgives everything,” she said. “Every mistake. Every bad mood. Every time I disappoint him. Like he is perfect.”

“He’s not perfect?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“You know what it is,” I said, “he even win’s arguments by acting like he’s better than you.”

“Ughhh…. It’s nauseating,” she said.

In the morning, she returned to Sean. I returned to New York. We did it twice more over the following year, which was enough to make it an affair but not enough to call it a relationship. Then she stopped calling.

Sean won again, though he never knew there had been another event.

***

The ballroom applauded, bringing me back to the microphone.

Sean raised his glass. Alli’s eyes stayed fixed on mine.

I looked down at the cards in my hand. Three pages of jokes, skiing stories, college disasters, and sanitized memories. The roadmap of a male friendship: insult, nostalgia, alcohol, and one acceptable sentence about love.

“Sean has always been the kind of man who finishes what he starts,” I continued. “A race. A promise. A friendship. Even when the other person makes it very difficult.”

There was laughter. Sean’s father slapped the table.

“And Alli has always known the difference between someone who talks like he knows where he’s going and someone who actually does.”

A smaller laugh. Alli looked away.

“I used to think Sean and I were rivals. On the mountain. In business. With women. In life, in general. The truth is, Sean never saw it that way. That was my contest. My scoreboard. My problem.”

The room settled. Sean stopped smiling.

I felt the speech changing shape in my hands. I imagined saying it all—the rumor, the hotel, the kiss, and the other things—detonating the evening in the name of honesty and calling the wreckage virtue.

But traders never tell their secrets.

“So here’s to Sean,” I said, “who never needed to beat anyone to know who he was. And to Alli, who was wise enough to choose the man who never treated love like a competition.”

I raised my glass.

“To Sean and Alli.”

Everyone clapped and went back to getting ripped.

It was a classy speech.

It hit just the right note.

***

I found Sean outside an hour later on the terrace overlooking the dark lake. Snow had started falling heavily, disappearing into the black water like a train of falling stars shooting past the horizon.

“You always did like the dramatic exit,” he said.

“I needed air.”

“You needed Scotch.”

“I had enough Scotch.”

“No such thing at a wedding.”

He handed me a glass anyway.

We stood without speaking. Inside, the band had started playing “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which should be grounds for annulment.

Then Sean said, “Alli told me.”

The cold entered through my tuxedo all at once.

“Told you what?”

He looked at me.

“Right.”

“She told me about Denver. And the things you said. And the rumor about Lena.”

“Why did you ask me to be your best man?”

Sean took a drink.

“Because you’re still my best friend. Always have been.”

“That’s it?”

“And because I kept thinking you’d tell me how you tried to stab me in the back.”

“Nothing happened, Sean.”

“No, something did happen. You tried to keep me single. For what? So, the two of us could whore it up in Bangkok a year from now, on one of our two obligatory annual boy’s trips? Thanks, but no thanks, man.”

That’s when I realized he didn’t know shit.

“Why didn’t you confront me?”

Sean looked out across the lake. “For what? So you could give an even worse best man’s speech?”

I laughed once, but there was no humor in it.

Inside, someone shouted for the best man.

Sean started toward the doors, then stopped.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “you were always the better skier.”

I could have followed him inside and told him the rest. About Vail. About the second hotel and the third.

I resented him for ending up with her. I resented him for winning races he claimed we were never running. Most of all, I resented him for being so self-righteous, and so goddamn selfish. I guess he never knew that he was the villain in my story.

But I kept his marriage intact.

After all, I am the best man.