Someone somewhere had countermanded orders without letting him know.
As expected, the limousine crush began to form earlier than expected. By 6:00 P.M. many arrived who did not wish to waste an opportunity to be photographed before the thicker crush of people more important began. And many of those coming soonest, the First Lady among them, were eager to be there to ogle everything.; It was a feast for fashion editors.; Women were aided beforehand by a proclamation from Olivia Maxon that "no dress would be too dressy." They were grateful as well for a tip sheet from leading fashion stylists of trends in their forthcoming collections. The result was a glorious extravaganza of up-to-the-minute dress designing recaptured on camera with exceptional brilliance, in which the ladies took part confidently as both spectators and spectacles. While numerous tastes in fashion were displayed by the nearly two thousand women there, none of the women were out of style.
They wore everything from cocktail dresses to ball gowns, arriving in a blissful and iridescent shimmering of unlined linen with gold pinstripes and with fringes of Indian beadwork, in palettes that were pale, ranging in the main from ivory to peach and sea green. Leopard spots were a favorite pattern in chiffon skirts, or in organdy dresses with fringed hems, and on silk jackets. There were women in long evening dresses who were thrilled to see many other women there in long evening dresses, especially in dresses with fragile embroidery on crisp, pale silks. Short skirts were of prismatic chiffon too. Jackets were in pink, orange, and chartreuse satin decorated with rhinestones instead of nailheads, while sweeping black point d'esprit overskirts showed the knees in front and dripped to the floor in back, and those bold enough to have guessed right were especially proud of their sexy matte jersey evening clothes.
After champagne, caviar, and cocktails, and well before the bride and M2 had appeared, the lights in all wings of the bus terminal were lowered sacramentally and everyone took a seat; around one of the five stages closest at hand to listen to a gifted violinist the age of a young Midori and four clones play Paganini caprices in each of the places. It was not possible to tell the original from the clones, and no prizes were awarded for correct guesses, Christopher and Olivia Maxon could be seen in the flesh and also larger than life on the closed-circuit television screens as huge as those in a cinema house. They were in the front row on the far right on the main floor of the North Wing, and all guests there and elsewhere suddenly noticed that a single spotlight seemed to have been positioned to shine directly down upon Olivia, who sat with her hands clasped together and a look of poised rapture on her illustrious face. As those in the Communications Control Center could see on the screens flashing to newsstands, she was already being described in a current future issue of U.S. News amp; World Report as "the queen of nouvelle society." And Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine would write, as they saw displayed at the newsstands inside the terminal kept open just for them, that "Olivia Maxon is a princess in the new social order, and the bus terminal is her palace."
The fantasy quintessence of the wedding joining two billionaire families was accentuated by a candlelight ceremony in stylish white-on-white, with all the dresses of the dozens of women and little girls in the bridal party designed by Arnold Scaasi. The bride herself wore an off-white taffeta dress, delicately embroidered in gold, with a twenty-seven-foot train. Her tulle veil was held in place by a diamond-and-pearl tiara. Her maid of honor was a former Miss Universe she had not met before. She had twenty auburn-haired and forty flaxen-haired attendants taller and more stunning than herself in her entourage of bridesmaids, and all were dressed in off-white moire shot with gold. One hundred and twenty children under twelve recruited from friends and members of both families were done up as flower girls and ring bearers. The bridegroom's mother, Regina Minderbinder, was nervous in designer beige, while Olivia Maxon, in peach satin with overlapping ruffles beaded with tens of thousands of seed pearls, looked simply stunning with her huge, dark eyes and retrousse nose, and in the glistening cabochon emeralds that adorned her white throat.
The bridal congregation assembled in privacy below in the Greyhound Bus Company package express area on the subway level. There, the silent girl and her complete retinue, which consisted of her Miss Universe, sixty gorgeous bridesmaids, and one hundred and twenty flower girls and ring bearers, were bathed, groomed, and otherwise made ready for the grand event by personal couturiers and makeup artists. On time, they took their places in very long lines at the base of the matched escalators and, on musical cue timed to a fraction of a second, stepped aboard the rising staircase to be borne upward into the expectant assembly awaiting them. An exultant, heartwarming fanfare of imperious Wagnerian chords gave notice of their ascent onto the main floor of the South Wing, and the bride, on the arm of her stepuncle, Christopher Maxon, emerged and stepped forward to a ceremonious tribute of respectful applause from those seeing them first from the tables outside the police station near the Sport Spot Lingerie Shop and Jo-Ann's Nut House.
To the prelude to Die Meistersinger and the "Dance of the Apprentices," the bride and Christopher Maxon, to everyone's tremendous relief, led the one hundred and eighty-one others faultlessly down the center of the South Wing to the Walgreen's drugstore and the turn toward the exit to the street outside, on which motor and pedestrian traffic had been detoured-even the buses were rerouted-and then, to a sentimental orchestral rendition of the "Prize Song," into the North Wing and finally to the chapel and the Temple of Dendur.
The rites of ceremony discharged, and the Leverkühn interlude of children's lament and heinous laughter from the Apocalypse over-it was the Apocalypse, Gaffney's absurd insistence to the contrary-the multiple areas transformed into banquet halls filled gently with music. Much sedate dancing of a bygone day ensued while people found their places and prepared for their first dinner -the second dinner was planned as a dumbfounding surprise!! The thirty-five hundred close friends of the Minderbinders and the Maxons twirled and dipped to ballads between courses of poached salmon with champagne aspic, trio of veal, lamb, and chicken, orzo with porcini, and spring vegetables. The wines for this main meal were Cordon Charlemagne La tour 1986 and Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne 1978.
Sets of music were timed to twenty minutes. In the ten-minute breaks between, there was the lively performance of the musicians in each group transferring to a different bandstand in the five different locations to play for a different audience. They moved singly up and down the escalators without missing a beat noticed by anyone but themselves. The waiters riding up and down behind them carrying trays kept time with their hips and their shoulders, and the busboys went flitting about like spirits of the wind to clear the tables noiselessly and rush the remains outside to the mammoth garbage trucks ready on the ramps, which tore away when fully loaded from their reserved parking spaces between the refrigerator vehicles discharging new edible treats at top speed. A number of old-timers in high fettle took to following the musicians up and down the escalators in a dance of their own, singing a tune of their own they called "The Hully-Gully." Soon all the bands were playing "The Hully-Gully" every time they rotated. Satellite video reruns of this part of the affair accelerated the tempos to simulate the effect in silent movies of people moving in jerky haste, and Milo Minderbinder, in tails, with his mustache and pained smile, looked to many who did not know him like Charlie Chaplin.
Immediately following the poached salmon with champagne aspic, trio of veal, lamb, and chicken, orzo with porcini, and spring vegetables, before the coffee and any dessert, there came to eath table three frozen moids of mango-orange sorbet, each in the shape of the big sphinx in Egypt, except that one had the face of Milo Minderbinder and the other wore the face of Christopher Maxon, even to the unlit cigar. The third Egyptian sphinx-everyone jumped erroneously to the guess that it would be the President -wore the unknown face of a man later identified as someone named Mortimer Sackler. Not many knew who Mortimer Sackler was anymore, and this ruse was received as another of the zesty jokes of the evening. With no warning, the voice of a woman on the public-address system announced: "Due to congestion on Route 3, all bus departures and arrivals are subject to delay."