The Best Man
By Simon Barget
- 118 reads
Ladies and gentleman, I am the best man. Now everybody comes and wants me to write their speech, to do their speaking. Now you look at me as something different, inhuman, as if my only purpose is to deliver my words. Once a best man, always a best man. But you see what you actually expect is that I’ll read from a script; you all think I’ve cleverly constructed my words, you think that the thing hangs or falls on what I have in my pocket.
But I don’t have anything in my pocket. I never did. I mean, I understand your preference, your expectations. I don’t so much understand why you’re so enthusiastic, so precious, why different people kept coming up to me alluding to the speech, what I was going to say, and when it has to be made, and having that glint in their eye or even winking like I’m certainly going to be dropping a few clangers, I don’t really understand that because what I have to say is not groundbreaking, yes it might well be good, but it’s not going to be groundbreaking. But I do understand that I’m expected to prepare. That I do get. That’s just the way that it’s done. And even as I stood there [points] just before on the porch, close to the French doors, I sort of inwardly laughed at my act of rebellion, I laughed because it was so much not that act of rebellion but just my natural way to do it, the way I now realised was the best way, the only way, I laughed at the coincidental concurrence of the two phenomena, that people would think I was exploding a bomb.
I have been very much looking forward to this speech, though there is some trepidation. But I have never felt like this before, I have never felt such confidence, it feels like a rock or something very very strong, it feels like a forcefield around me, it feels like the moment I open my mouth, I’ll blow you away. What it feels like now, as I stand in this still air, is that whatever I say, I will be the best man. I am the best man. Whatever comes out of my mouth will be said with aplomb and that I don’t have to worry. You will just be rapt and silent, but above all respectful. Not like those other best men with their handheld papers and the crowd in raptures but ever so slightly beholden to the script. The crowd not hanging on the words, not hanging on the best man himself, but an adjunct to the paper, and it is as if you could remove the best man and the crowd wouldn’t know. You would still be caterwauling or guffawing. From here on in all my best man speeches will be off the cuff, they will be what I feel, and who knows what might come out of my mouth, and how, but who cares really, least of all me, because I don’t have to concern myself with saying the right thing in the right way, because I am the right thing.
As I stand on this stage, it is the first time that I will have gone up spontaneously, and yet I feel so at ease, I feel this is the only proper way to be the best man, that is if you want me to be the best man, and you do, the very best man I can be, you have made no indication to me that you want someone else, and by all accounts, you couldn’t conceive of any one else in my place, and not that I am using this knowledge to abuse my position, but I feel that if you have made their choice, then it behoves me (and you) to do it in the best way I can. And if that is the case, then why shouldn’t I do it like that, why should I be beholden to some words, words that yes I will have written, but words nonetheless, cast on the page, unchanging, words I will have to read out like a parrot, like some stooge, words I can’t change, that I can see coming, that I will know and have an attitude towards, why should I be stuck, backed into a corner, I am not a clown or a performing monkey.
Then I wonder why I haven’t always done it like this, how it could ever have felt right to put pen to paper, how I couldn’t have been conscious of the artifice of it all, how I could have gone through with it in the face of all the pretence, but then I shouldn’t be hard on myself, and I suppose I wasn’t even aware that I could just say what I feel, that as the best man, you can really choose how to do it, I took the rest of them at their word, I did what everyone else did and wrote the thing down. I am so far from that person now, that old best man is unrecognisable.
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