The Wedding Beat (3 page)

“They should be releasing her from the hospital soon,” my father said.

“Don’t worry,” my mother fluttered. “The car is fine.”

Chapter Three

M
imi Martin is not crying over popped balloons.

Ugh. I backspaced and tried again. I was still on the first line of my column after hours of typing and deleting but mostly worrying about my grandmother, whom I hadn’t been able to reach despite numerous attempts. I sat hunched over my laptop, which was going to do wonders for my posture if I was lucky enough to also make it to eighty-two.

Tears weren’t the only thing falling at Mimi Martin’s wedding on New Year’s Eve.

Worse.

When Mimi Martin met Mylo Nikolaidis on his private yacht, she thought he was a catch. And after their wedding last week, there was one less fish in the sea.

Barbara’s stricken face flashed before me.

My brain refused to function. On a good day, my writing process was more pain than pleasure. This was not a good day.

Thomas Mann once said, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I tried not to think about Thomas Mann. I tried not to think about Jill. I wanted to call her, but I knew that I shouldn’t. Couldn’t. Shouldn’t.

So I called Hope instead. Hope was my in-case-of-emergency person, and this was an emotional emergency. But her voice mail was full. Probably because I had been leaving messages all day. I returned to staring at my computer screen.

Inadequate.

Not just my lede paragraph. My life. Who was I to expound on marriage? I was a fraud. It was only a matter of time before people figured it out. There would be a write-in campaign from outraged readers. My editor would purge my columns from the database. And who was going to want to go out with an unemployed journalist who lived in a studio apartment and had a fourteen-inch neck? My cell phone rang.

“Are you spiraling?” asked my brother, Gary.

“No,” I lied.

“Well, stop,” he said, then laughed. I had e-mailed him after my parents’ news flash and also detailed my New Year’s debacle. Deferring to the three-hour time difference in Los Angeles, I had refrained from calling, but it turned out that my father had no such hesitation. Gary’s girlfriend was less than thrilled.

“I kept asking him, ‘What time is it, Dad?’” Gary said. “‘What time do you think it is in LA?’ He said, ‘Why are you asking me about the time? Do you need a new clock?’”

Gary and I had a habit of indulging each other’s rants about our parents’ infractions, though we’d usually conclude the other was overreacting.

“They called me too,” I pointed out.

Gary didn’t appreciate my lack of sympathy. “Last week I
listened to you carry on for an hour after Mom suggested you get a mail-order bride.”

I changed the topic. “I talked to a nurse on Grandma’s floor at Delray Medical Center. She said she’d have a doctor get back to me.”

“Way ahead of you, Reporter Boy,” Gary said. Only two years younger and five inches taller, he liked to tweak my ego whenever possible. “I e-mailed the ER doctor who admitted her. He said they only kept her overnight for observation.” I was relieved to hear that. “Also found out that Bernie is in the ICU.”
So did I,
I almost responded, momentarily feeling more competitive than compassionate.

“So can you go down to Florida?” he asked, just casually enough to convince me it was the main reason for his call.

“I’m on deadline,” I said. My first instinct had been to go to Florida immediately. I had already checked out airfares, but I wasn’t about to tell Gary that. When it came to family obligations, he was very generous with volunteering my time.

“Grandma shouldn’t be alone,” he said, knowing full well that she wasn’t, since our parents lived less than a half hour away. Close enough to torment her in good times and assist in bad. “You know how much it would mean to her to have one of us there.” Yes, I did, and it was clear which one of us he had in mind. “It seems the least we can do.”

“No, it’s the least
you
can do,” I shot back, feeling guilty I wasn’t already on a plane but knowing there was little I could do there.

“Leslie and I have been up since six. We tracked down this Dr. Stein, who, by the way, is one of more than a dozen Dr. Steins in Delray Beach. And Leslie already sent a basket of brownies and a bouquet of flowers, both of which she signed your name to.”

Leslie was his latest in a long string of live-in girlfriends, and her effort was more predictable than praiseworthy. They had been together about six months, which was usually when his girlfriends began thinking he was interested in a long-term commitment. Unlike me, he never hesitated about opening his heart, his wallet, and his home. He just refused to close off the option of moving on if someone better came along. My parents had given up on him ever marrying. “Maybe he’ll get one of his girlfriends pregnant by mistake,” my mother had said to me. “A mother can only hope.”

“Leslie was sorry to hear about Jill,” Gary said in a way that seemed as much about flattering Leslie as consoling me.

“I’m thinking of calling her,” I said.

“Leslie?”

“Jill!”

“Don’t,” he snapped. There was often a hint of coldness beneath Gary’s concern. Something his girlfriends inevitably learned too late. “You got dumped on New Year’s, and that sucks. But there’s no point in dwelling on it.”

I wasn’t dwelling. I was regretting. Not just the evening but everything I had hoped would happen afterward.

“You romanticize things too much,” Gary said. “You keep looking for the one woman who’s going to rock your world, and she doesn’t exist.”

But she did exist. In my head. She was smart. Extraordinarily smart. I imagined she went to Harvard (where I was only wait-listed). And she was curious about the world. Not just curious. Passionate and adventurous. She had backpacked through South America. Or taught English in Estonia. Or she was the kind of person who would consider doing so. What was so wrong with wanting Jill to be that person?

“You need to stop searching for a soul mate and just find a date,” Gary said. “Is Hope still single?” he asked with the subtlety of a B-1 Bomber.

Gary and Hope had gone out one time, five years back. Ever since, he’d been trying to convince me to date her. I suspected it was to score one for the team.

“We’re friends,” I said for the umpteenth time. “Very good friends.”

“Very good place to start a relationship. You’re like Patrick Dempsey in
Made of Honor
. You’re going to figure out you want her when it’s too late.” Conversations with Gary inevitably included movie references. Sometimes classics like
Casablanca
, but usually something of a more dubious vintage that his PR firm was promoting. “I can feel your sperm dying inside of you, one at a time,” he said, quoting from the cinematic gem about a male bridesmaid.

Fortunately, my call waiting beeped. It was Hope.

“Ask her out,” Gary said.

“I don’t want to ask her out.”

“You have nothing to lose but your bar privileges,” he said. “
Eight Men Out
. Great flick.”

I swapped calls.

“I’m going to end up spending the rest of my life alone,” said Hope.

She was stealing my opening line. But empathy got the better of me.

“What happened to Number Two?” I asked. Hope had stopped referring to the men she dated by name. Instead she assigned them leader-board rankings. It was to help her keep from getting emotionally attached to them. It wasn’t really working. She yearned to date with reckless abandon, but Hope’s
idea of recklessness was eating a chocolate cupcake before dinner. The perennial number one on her list was Conrad Eberhart III, her once and future ex-boyfriend with whom she compared every other man she met. Number two at the moment was a Japanese chef from Seattle.

“Number Two has been eighty-sixed,” she said. His name was Sebastian. They met in October at St. Vincent’s emergency room when she stitched his thumb back together after an unfortunate
Iron Chef
episode that won’t be airing any time soon. As she was suturing the wound, he asked if a patient had ever kissed her. Then he did. She had been to Seattle every other weekend since then, but he had made the cross-country trip for the holiday.

“He broke my bed,” she said. “Which sounds much more fun than it was.”

“Still seems like you had a better night than I did,” I said.

“That was early. Then we went to my chief of staff’s annual bash.” A deadly affair I had been coerced to attend the previous year. Dr. Aldridge lived in a large, overstuffed apartment on Park Avenue with his wife and children (also large and overstuffed). The evening’s entertainment consisted of ER doctors trying to outdrink the surgeons, while the radiologists and anesthesiologists compared malpractice rates, and the psychiatrists smoked compulsively. “I had warned him it would be boring,” Hope said defensively. “He said he would amuse himself. I guess he did, because at midnight I couldn’t find him. Do you know what it’s like to be in a room full of drunk couples and you’re the only one not being kissed?”

She was describing my life. I flashed back on the cascade of silver and black balloons the night before. I had focused on the balloons to avert my gaze from the lithe women in low-cut
gowns, welcoming the open mouths of strong-jawed men. Barbara had pecked me on the cheek, which only made me feel worse.

I shook free of the memory to realize Hope was near the end of her story. “I finally found Number Two in the kitchen, with his tongue down the caterer’s throat.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked if we could bring her back to my apartment.” I could hear Hope munching on something. “You have to stop me before I OD on chocolate,” she said.

“Stop eating chocolate,” I commanded.

“Telling me doesn’t do any good. I have to be physically restrained. And it would help if you ply me with nonfat meringue cookies that we can pick up at Trader Joe’s on the way to the open house.” I had completely forgotten she had invited me to a party.

“I can’t go. I’m working.”

“If you’re working, why did you call me seventeen times?” She sounded displeased I had commandeered her voice mail.

“In between calls I was working,” I said unconvincingly.

“If you come to my aid, you will be rewarded with good karma, and your column will get done sooner.” I was usually susceptible to such logic, but it was going to take a lot more than karma to get this piece done in the number of hours remaining.

“It’s a holiday,” Hope reminded me.

“I work on holidays. I work on weekends. Which is why I have no social life and I’m going to spend the rest of my life alone.” There. I had said it. Hope wasn’t the only one suffering. It had been almost three years since I had sustained a relationship for more than a month. Since Laurel. I wasn’t going to think about Laurel. The rule was that I never thought about Laurel.

Hope tried to say something comforting. But I didn’t want to be comforted. I wanted to be in love.

“Forty-eight hours ago you were worried you were making a mistake going out with Jill on New Year’s. You said she was superficial and you had almost nothing in common but running.”

If I didn’t want to be comforted, I sure as hell didn’t want to be logical. “What if she was the best I’m going to find? I’m an almost-forty-year-old guy who lives in a studio apartment and has a—”

“Are you going to start in about your neck size again?”

“I have a small neck,” I said, somewhat wounded.

“Women don’t go around looking at guys’ necks. It’s just not something we do. If we’re going to look at something, we’ll look at their pecs, and you have very nice pecs. Okay?”

I was rather proud of my pecs. And my abs. At an age when my friends were getting love handles, I had developed a six-pack. Sometimes even an eight-pack, as long as I didn’t inhale.

“Gavin, I don’t want to go to this party by myself,” Hope said softly. “I had a really awful night. Please don’t make me go alone.”

I had come to realize that being alone isn’t just a feeling. It’s a scarlet letter. It’s the first thing other people see. No matter what else you’ve accomplished, it brands you as a failure in their eyes—and, worse, in your own.

“I’ll meet you there at five,” I said, “but I can only stay an hour.” I hung up and started typing again.

It was a start. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Chapter Four

I
regretted being at the party before I even arrived.

I barely got past the front door of the Chelsea building. It was one of those new luxury constructions crammed into a narrow lot between two stodgy, prewar edifices. The gleaming glass facade seemed to scream out, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. Hate yourself because you can’t afford me.”

The penthouse apartment wasn’t the largest I’d ever seen, and, topping only a seven-story building, it wasn’t the loftiest. But it might have been the most crowded. I had anticipated a low-key gathering of a dozen or so physicians, jazz music and white wine. Instead, it was rum punch and kamikaze shots with nearly two hundred inebriated people wedged between the transparent walls and teetering amid the retro sixties furniture and shag rugs. Loud talk and louder music predominated. Mostly eighties tunes, for some reason. Lots of Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper and
Spandau Ballet. The fact that I recognized Spandau Ballet songs depressed me immeasurably. I looked for Hope, but couldn’t spot her in the density of revelers.