Figure and Ground

Abstract

Figure and Ground John Mattson (bio) Winner of the R.M. Kinder Prize in Realistic Fiction He surrendered his decrepit Volvo to the men in the khaki hats. His sister, whom he didn't like, had roadside apples and didn't want to entrust the car to strangers. She was sure they would help themselves to whatever number they thought no one would miss. She pushed the bag into the footwell as far as it would go. "And who has valet parking at a wedding?" "Probably lots of people," Ben said, though he had never seen it. He had only been to church weddings, so he was surprised to be ushered directly into a gravel courtyard of tables set for a banquet. He had expected rows of chairs, a dais, preschoolers with flowers, friends and family segregated by allegiance. He did not expect servers in white aprons circulating with trays of toast. Wee toast, someone called them, someone not from a country that talks that way. Guests drank and mingled and exchanged cards. It was as though the couple had decided to skip the ceremony and proceed directly to the reception. Not even necessarily a wedding reception; it could have been a corporate retreat. Thirty of the thirty one tables were arranged in the courtyard like a flock of geese. The first assumed its position closest to the vineyard, with the others trailing behind in rows of nested Vs. It was his sister who found their table, lost and out of formation, tacked onto the last row at an odd angle. Any farther from the ceremony it would have been in the parking lot. Because nobody knew his sister, there were two place cards with Ben's name on it. Their assigned seats faced away from the event, but afforded an unimpeded view of the valet operation and its phalanx of tightly packed cars, the nearest of which was Ben's own Volvo. The wedding had parked him close enough to his car that if he squinted he could read the dashboard clock. They took their seats to the sound of a guest describing the ingenious ice bullets of Athnel Jones, killer of Dick Tracy fame. Of such ephemera, Ben considered himself a connoisseur. The speaker, a tailored hipster MBA with hair gel and a watch, continued to hold forth from the seat directly across the table, but Ben had already heard enough to cast him as his nemesis. This had nothing to do with the girl, whom he hadn't seen yet, whose existence was entirely unknown to him, though she was hiding in plain sight at his new rival's elbow. You would think, given what happened after, that the girl came first, but no. Because Ben knew, like he knew the back of his hand, or which villains appeared in which issues of Spiderman #1-113, or who sung on which Beatles records, or which soft drink investigated engraving its logo on the face of the moon, that ice bullets were not from Dick Tracy but Batman. He nearly blurted out "Batman," but stopped himself. He took a sip from a water glass that [End Page 15] turned out not to have any water in it, and filed away his silence as evidence of maturity. There wasn't much in this file. And it would be thirty years before Google would inform him he was wrong about the ice bullets and his nemesis was right. According to the menu, the vows were to be the third course in an eight-course meal. The first course was an amuse bouche. The people found their seats and were amused. A lime and tortilla broth was to be second but was pushed back at the last minute. Ben was hungry and reviewed the menu with prejudice. Its paper matched the place card, a rustic ivory with gold marbling, corners not quite square, edges torn. It looked to him like layers of filo off the top of a baklava. He thought he heard someone say it had been handcrafted by courtesans, but what were courtesans? Something fancy from a book he read once and vowed to remember, then forgot. The couple...