The Wedding Beat (2 page)

“Gavin.” Barbara purred my name. “No one but you could capture the magic of their story. Are you staying for the midnight balloon drop?” She had already asked me six times. “There’s going to be a virtual fireworks display designed by Stephano Spanetto.”

I didn’t care if it was designed by Steven Spielberg. The only fireworks I was interested in were the kind I experienced when I was with Jill, and my goal was to be by her side when the clock struck midnight. I had snagged a reservation at the Blue Iguana for eleven thirty in the hope I’d be done in time, and Jill had been a trouper about playing things by ear. The problem was that it was already after ten.

“I’ll see,” I answered evasively.

“But, Gavin, it’s New Year’s Eve.”

Precisely. I didn’t want to spend it watching real estate developers party like it was 2006. I was not going to let work be my only priority. Not this year. I was no longer the thirty-two-year-old who had landed a job at the number-one newspaper in the country. Five years had gone by in the blink of an eye, or, more accurately, in a state of sleep deprivation, since I was working more than eighty hours a week. Gray hairs were sneaking in among my sandy brown ones, and I had made a resolution that things were going to change. This was the year I was going to find someone smart and savvy. Someone with a quick wit, a kind heart and a great smile. Someone like Jill.

An advertising account executive with an unlikely predilection for Fellini films, she caught my attention the previous month during a 5k race in Central Park. I ran beside her for the
last lap and made a point of letting her beat me. She was charmed. I was stoked. We’d squeezed in only a few dates since then, so spending New Year’s together was a leap. Not for mankind. But the reporter in me prefers to look before I leap—and line up corroborating sources.

“The balloon drop is a symbolic representation of the bride’s emotional journey on her wedding day,” Barbara persisted without irony. “It’s imperative that you see it.”

Barbara had gone from fawning fan to fascist in training. I’d been at the Angel Orensanz for hours and had interviewed everyone but the restroom attendants. Though the wedding had been called for seven, it was well past eight when the Episcopal priest started the mysteriously delayed ceremony—“an act of God” according to Barbara. Translation: The bride had a wardrobe malfunction (solved by a strategically placed small diamond brooch that the bridegroom acquisitioned on a search-and-rescue mission at Bergdorf).

The cocktail “hour” was approaching the ninety-minute mark. I calculated that if I snuck out after the bridal dance, I’d have just enough time to pick up Jill and make our reservation, assuming the taxi gods were on my side.

But what if there really was something extraordinary about the balloon drop? What if the couple said or did something at midnight that exquisitely expressed the essence of their relationship?

As I checked my watch, I reminded myself of the half dozen prewedding interviews I’d already done with the bride and groom. I had a computer file with more than forty typed pages, or roughly ten thousand words of notes for a thousand-word piece. But there was always more I could do, and I’m someone who perpetually fears I’m going to miss something essential.

“Mimi will be so disappointed if you’re not here,” Barbara
stage-whispered as the couple finally made their grand entrance. They swept into the room, her slender mermaid silhouette preceding his wide-shouldered frame snugly buttoned into a narrow-lapelled tux. The metallic silver color of his tie matched the glittering hairpins in her updo. As they made their way through the crowd, they smiled and waved and clasped and kissed. And, yes, they glowed.

“You would never guess what she’s been through.” Barbara sighed before scurrying away toward an unshaved man in shirtsleeves carrying a fish net. And a bucket.

Mimi was hardly the tragic heroine Barbara intimated, but at fourteen she was diagnosed with scoliosis and spent three years wearing a back brace. During one of our conversations, she showed me a picture of herself as a teenager with a freakish-looking contraption of metal rods covering half her body. Her sister described her as an outgoing, athletic young girl whose world changed overnight. At an unforgivingly status-conscious high school, she was taunted daily by her former tennis teammates about her inevitable weight gain and frumpy, loose-fitting outfits. Relegated to radioactive status at cotillions, she swore one day she would be able to stand tall in a strapless dress. And there she was, less than a decade later, wrapped in ethereal beaded lace.

Something in me melted. No, she didn’t want to find a cure for cancer or make the world a better place for an endangered owl species. She just wanted to be pretty. And have good posture. And she was. And she did. She was so proud of how she looked and how he looked at her. You could see how much he wanted her beside him. How lonely his right arm looked without her encircled by it. In that moment, I truly believed she would have loved him even if he were a ditchdigger. Hell, even if he were a newspaper columnist.

When they reached the dance floor, the twelve-piece swing band launched into a lush arrangement of Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack,” and my eyes misted. Then I pulled out my cell phone to call Jill.

“I’m on my way,” I said, eager to see where the evening could lead us.

“Gavin, I’m not feeling great,” Jill said weakly, sounding farther away than a mile uptown. “I ran a half marathon this morning, and it wiped me out.”

I didn’t ask why she ran a half marathon on New Year’s Eve, because that would have sounded judgmental. But it had crossed my mind more than once that Jill was a little obsessed with the whole marathon thing. I enjoyed the runner’s high, but there’s something a bit too punishing about a twenty-six-mile race. However, I liked that she was passionate and feisty. And who was I kidding? I also liked what great shape she was in.

“I’m sorry. If you prefer, we could stay in tonight.” I was already picturing a quiet evening in her cozy West Village walk-up, with just the two of us and a bottle of champagne. Truth be told, I’ve never been a fan of fancy New Year’s celebrations. Too many people too desperate to be happy.

“I don’t want to ruin your holiday,” she said. Red warning signs flashed in my brain. But I ignored them.

“I can pick up something from that Italian place you like,” I offered.

“You’re at a great party. Why would you want to leave?”

“Because I’d prefer to be with you,” I said, hoping I sounded charming and not needy. “How about sushi?” No response. “I can be at your place in a half hour.”

“That’s not a good idea.” Sirens blared inside my head. “I have company,” she stated, sounding vaguely apologetic.

I swallowed hard. Be cool, I told myself. Be strong. Be confident.

“Does this mean you don’t want to date anymore?” I asked.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
How could I have said that? This is why I’m a writer. This is why I write words down on paper. So I can edit myself. So I don’t say the first idiotic thing that pops into my head.

There was silence. Painful, awkward silence. And there was nothing I could do but wait it out as the Don Diamond Orchestra segued into a disco version of “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

“It’s nothing personal,” Jill finally said before clicking off.

Giddy couples glided by me on their way to the dance floor. A waiter passed out color-coordinated noisemakers and party hats.

Barbara rushed by. “Jonathan Adler designed the hats and signed each one. They’re collectibles. Are you staying for the balloon drop? Tell me you’re staying.”

“Sure,” I said dully as a drunk groomsman honked on a designer party favor, welcoming the new year.

Chapter Two

“W
e’re concerned about your ex-wife,” said my father. It was the first thing he said when he phoned me at eight a.m. the next morning, proving that it was never too early for delusional behavior.

“I don’t have an ex-wife,” I said.

“But you may one day,” he said.

I had bolted out of my sofa bed, thinking it was my editor calling, so I was relieved it was just my father wishing me a happy New Year. Or at least I assumed that was why Saul Greene was calling his firstborn. Good tidings and random assaults were often interchangeable in my family.

“You need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario,” my father declared.

“We went to an estate-planning seminar,” my mother chimed in after picking up another line at their Floridian compound in Boca Raton, on the wrong side of the interstate. Their new
hobby was obsessing about their wills. From what I could tell, the purpose was to find new and unusual ways to torment my younger brother and me.

“Gavin, do you know the divorce rate in New York?” my mother asked before proceeding to tell me it was very high.

“We have to think about the future,” my father said. “We have to think about our grandchildren.” Except they didn’t have any, which was a frequent subject of discussion.

“What if she remarries?” my mother said.

“Who?” I asked groggily.

“Your ex-wife!” she cried out.

“You’re jumping to conclusions, Lorraine,” my father chastised, becoming the voice of reason on the topic of my future ex-spouse. “We don’t know that she’ll remarry. Sometimes couples get back together. Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.”

“That’s different!” my mother protested. “She converted for him.”

“She converted for Eddie Fisher!”

“Didn’t she convert back?”

I put down the phone and reached for a box of Raisin Bran, then decided it was more of a Frosted Flakes day. There was an open bottle of Absolut vodka on the cluttered kitchen counter. I remembered taking it out when I got home from the wedding, intending to drink myself into oblivion. But I don’t really like the taste of straight vodka. I had looked in the fridge for something to mix with it, but there was only an empty jug of milk, three bottles of Sam Adams, and a couple desiccated chili peppers. The freezer was better stocked, and I had taken out a bag of frozen berries to make myself a vodka slush. But then I concluded that drinking a fruity frozen drink by myself on New Year’s was not the way to improve my self-image.

Looking at the bottle in the morning, I thought again about taking a swig. I would never be the next Ernest Hemingway if my tastes ran to berry coladas. Of course, in Hemingway’s journalist days, he wrote about the Spanish Civil War, not society weddings.

Does the man make the beat or the beat make the man?
I put the vodka back in the freezer alongside the berries and several cartons of Ben & Jerry’s, then sat down in my office/dining nook, box of Frosted reinforcement in hand. Eyeing the stack of reporter’s notebooks by my laptop, I found myself dreading the long hours of writing about Mimi and Mylo that were awaiting me. The story was due in a little more than twenty-four hours, since the holiday had fallen on a Monday rather than on a weekend. If I started immediately, there was a small chance I’d finish without having to stay up all night. I picked up the phone. My mother’s high-pitched voice was unmistakably audible before the handset reached my ear.

“What if your ex-wife has children with her second husband? Do you want them to inherit your money?” My mother missed her calling. She should have been working for the IRS. “Your life will be over before you know it. And all you can do is hope that your children will succeed where you failed. But you don’t have any children. And it just kills me, thinking of you dead and your ex-wife off spending your money on children that aren’t even related to you. Do you see why I worry so?”

I knew better than to respond. Another one of my resolutions was minimizing altercations with my parents. Emotionally drained, I just said, “Happy New Year.” The small nicety threw my mother off balance. She paused, possibly to consider what passes for holiday interaction in less colorful families.

“Were you with Janice last night?” my mother asked.

“Who’s Janice?” I replied before considering whether I wanted to know.

“The girl you’re dating,” my father said. By my father’s definition, a girl was any unmarried woman under eighty.

“Her name is Jill,” I said, choking on her name as a corn flake went down the wrong pipe. I had forgotten that my parents had met her briefly while they were in town for a weekend in December. It was a drive-by introduction. Literally. I was putting them in a taxi to go see a matinee of
Mamma Mia!
when Jill showed up early for a running date.

“She said her name was Janice,” my father insisted.

“Why would she say it was Janice when it’s Jill?” I said through clenched teeth.

“Maybe her sister’s name is Janice,” my mother offered unhelpfully.

“Her name is Jill!”

“Does her family call her Janice?” my dad persisted.

“HER NAME IS JILL! ONLY JILL!”

I do not want to yell at my parents. I do not want to yell at my parents.
I repeated the words in my mind like Bart Simpson scrawling on a chalkboard.

“Bernie’s in the hospital,” my mother announced while I was still stabilizing my heart rate. Bernie Perlstein was my grandmother’s husband. Her fourth, but who was counting? I was dizzy from the abrupt change in topics. A conversation with my parents was like living out a Dada manifesto.

I tried to remember how recently I had spoken with Bernie. A World War II veteran and former airline pilot, he was a proud but generous man and devoted to my grandmother. He’d seemed fine at Thanksgiving, but I recalled that he was being treated for a blood-protein problem.

“He had an accident,” my father said nonchalantly. My father never said anything nonchalantly. My parents don’t do understated. This was not about blood proteins. Something was terribly wrong.

“I told Grandma not to let him drive,” my mother said, hinting at the potential peril I risked whenever I ignored her advice.

“Was Grandma with him?” I asked as a hundred other questions came to mind. My chest constricted, imagining my grandmother amid broken glass and twisted metal. She was eighty-two and still ran three miles every morning. (She wore bikinis until she was eighty.) She was dauntless and irrepressible—and the only person in the world who loved me unconditionally.