Marry the One Who Gets There First
By Heidi Julavits, first published in Esquire
A couple marry after being unfaithful to each other in a scintillating game of cat and mouse.
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Plot Summary
Louis, while he works at his parent’s photoshop, happens upon a picture of a girl in a red dress and begins a “divine search” for this girl of his dreams. Sometime later, while out in the city, he follows a girl, June, into a bookstore as he believes her to be the girl of his dreams, but she escapes him, leaving him to date another girl, Violet. At a party at Violet’s parent’s summer house, Louis learns that June and Violet are sisters. After Violet presciently interprets some secretive attraction Louis has for her sister, she claims to go to a send off party for a friend, Susan, leaving Louis and June to begin an illicit affair — a liaison June photographs for keepsake. Violet strikes up an affair of her own with a man named Shane that she sees all throughout her engagement to Louis on the pretense that she’d picked up a private tutorial in psychology. Later, and closer to the wedding, Louis, scared straight by his similarity to his unfaithful father, instructs June to destroy all the evidence of their affair. June cuts up all of Louis’ love letters and seduces the pastry chef to put the shredded paper into the wedding cake in retribution for Louis ending the relationship. Before the ceremony, June learns that Susan never had a send-off party, and that she and Louis were set up. She and Louis meet behind a stable where he discovers that she has the picture of their liaison from months earlier, reproaches her, and rips the picture into pieces which she buries in the ground. After the ceremony, while he eats the cake, Louis quizzically chews on paper and plunges his hand into the cake to discover bits of the love letters he wrote to June. June, meanwhile, leaves the wedding frantically through the woods. She hitches a ride into the sunset with a man named Norton, a stable keeper who she had watched have relations with a college girl.