The Wedding Beat (7 page)

“Bold food or bold design?” she asked. I didn’t really have an opinion, but that didn’t seem like a very bold thing to admit. “How about a bold location?” she said.

“Like a foreign country?” I asked.

“I was thinking more like the Bronx.”

“New parameters,” I said. “Bold without crossing a major body of water.”

“How about
in
the water?”

There is something to be said for being bland,
I thought as I climbed the narrow vertical ladder on the port side of
The Lightship
, an eighty-year-old boat that had been salvaged from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and was now docked at a pier on the Hudson River.

When Hope recommended the place, I imagined myself following in the footsteps of Mimi and Mylo’s marina-kindled romance. But that was summer in the Hamptons, and this was winter along the West Side Highway.

A frigid wind blew off the Hudson, and the dark waves sloshing against
The Lightship
seemed more threatening than buoyant. As I hoisted myself aboard, I reminded myself that Melinda enjoyed adventures.

A metal stairway led into the belly of the boat, where R&B emanated from the barnacle-clad engine room that housed an intimate lounge. With candlelit catwalks cutting through the rusting hull, it was a cross between a swanky bar and Davy Jones’s locker.

There was no sign of Melinda among the twenty- and thirtysomething fashionistas in their all-black ensembles. I was wearing a dark gray jacket and jeans, my standard uniform, but I had tucked in my shirt.

I positioned myself on a bar stool. After a couple minutes I realized I was slouching, so I stood instead. I checked my watch. It was five after nine. I had an eight a.m. interview I hadn’t finished preparing for. I promised myself I wouldn’t think about it.

My cell phone vibrated, and I worried Melinda was canceling. But it was my parents calling. They’d been updating me regularly about my grandmother’s health. There was nothing to update, since I’d been calling her every morning on my way to work; however, that had negligible impact on the frequency of my parents’ bulletins.

“Just wanted to let you know that there’s no change in your grandmother’s condition,” my father said.

“She doesn’t have a condition,” I said. “She has stitches.”

“Well, she didn’t get any more stitches today,” my mother clarified.

“She’s not going to get any more stitches,” I said.

“Suddenly you’re a doctor,” my father commented.

“It’s not too late for you to go back to medical school,” my mother said. “My Zumba instructor’s nephew didn’t go until he was thirty-eight, and by the time he graduated he was married.”

“I’m not going back to medical school,” I assured her.

“Have you reconsidered looking into mail-order brides?”

Before I could reply, my father said, “Bernie was moved out of the ICU.”

As usual, my parents had buried the lede.

“That’s great news,” I said.

“Make sure to say that to your grandmother.”

“I will,” I said before asking the obvious question. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Bernie’s still unconscious,” my mother said. “The doctor said he wasn’t optimistic.”

“That’s not what the doctor said,” my father objected.

“He said that Bernie may never gain consciousness.”

“But he didn’t use the word ‘optimistic’!”

“Because he wasn’t!”

I looked around the dark room. A shellacked lobster seemed to be eyeing me. Melinda was late. Bernie was dying. My parents were dysfunctional. And I was alone. Figuratively. There were about twenty people sprawled on the sofas and shimmying in the shadows as Mary J. Blige insisted things were “Just Fine.”

My phone beeped. It was Melinda.

“I need to put you on hold,” I told my parents, interrupting them midsquabble. I clicked through to Melinda, fearing bad news and hoping she was merely delayed by the subway or Somalian pirates.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Where are
you
?” I replied.

“I’m sitting at a lovely table for two, minus my plus-one,” she said, before I realized I was hearing Mary J. Blige in stereo through my handset.

“I am so there,” I said, bounding up the steps. I could have sworn I had suggested meeting in the bar, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but seeing her.

The dining room was deck side. Rows of red-and-white-checker-clothed tables were arranged under a tent amid torchlike heater lamps wrapped in strings of colored Christmas lights.

“I’m on the deck,” I said, still holding my phone to my ear.

“I’m
toward the stern on the starboard side,” she said.

“Is this a test?” I tried to remember if stern was front or back.

“Yes,” she said with a laugh. “If you fail we’ll never meet.” I liked her challenging but flirtatious tone.

“Aren’t you going to help me?” I asked as I strode between the tables, my head swiveling from side to side.

“What kind of romantic hero seeks navigational assistance?”

“The kind who might be doomed by a lack of nautical knowledge,” I said, psyched that she thought of me as a romantic hero.

“Fear not, Braveheart, and veer not from your path, as I will be your beacon.”

“Huh?”

“I’m waving at you,” she said, and I could detect someone waving an arm. But in the dim light I couldn’t see her. “Do not tarry,” she said before hanging up.
Fat chance,
I thought, pocketing my phone and hurrying toward her.

She stood to greet me. All six feet of her. She enveloped me as I hesitantly embraced her. We sat down and she smoothed a few strands of salt-and-pepper hair.

“I have to confess, when I got your e-mail, I wasn’t sure who you were,” she said. “But now of course I remember we met at a party last summer in Southampton.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I’ve never seen you before in my life” seemed inappropriate. But accurate.

Or better yet: “Who are you and what have you done with Melinda?” Though, as Captain Al would undoubtedly have pointed out, she was in fact “a” Melinda. Just not the one I was looking for.

Why did she respond to my e-mail if she didn’t know who I was?
Why didn’t she realize she wasn’t the intended recipient? On the other hand, I was grateful she assumed I was a legitimate suitor rather than an incompetent stalker.

Looking at her across the candlelit table, there was no reason she couldn’t be the object of a man’s obsession. Though I was guessing that she was in her mid-fifties, she was curvy in the right places with robust lips and doelike eyes.

“You picked a great place,” she said, bobbing her head to the music. “I feel ten years younger just being among all these fabulous kids.”

I instantly felt ten years older. I became uncomfortably aware that I was probably the second-oldest person on board.

“My ex-husband would hate this place,” she said.

I must have done something terrible in a previous life,
I thought as she chronicled twenty-five years of her former spouse’s foibles. “When I met him, he thought the Himalayas were a sexual position.” She also spoke of her two grandchildren—and shared pictures.

All I wanted was to extricate myself as quickly as possible.

My phone buzzed. It was my parents again, and I realized that I had inadvertently hung up on them. I was about to say I needed to take the call and use it as an excuse to escape, but I remembered that I had invited her to dinner. She hadn’t sought out the invitation. She hadn’t been the one prowling the Internet for a date. She simply consented to accompany me for a meal, and the least I could do was provide one.

“Have you looked at the menu?” I asked.

“I was too busy admiring the view,” she said. I stiffened, and not in a good way. But then I humbly noticed she was looking out a plastic window embedded in the tent wall beside us. The lights of Midtown twinkled beneath a clear sky.

“This is a perfect romantic spot,” she said. It was. We both gazed out the window that gently billowed in the night breeze, while the candles flickered and nearby couples caressed. The moment was everything I had imagined. Except I was with the wrong Melinda.

Chapter Eight

“I
f it was up to me, we would elope,” said Amy Wu the next morning, sucking down her second grande latte at a Starbucks in Union Square.

She wasn’t the only one who needed perking up.

I hadn’t slept well, having spent most of the night mourning the loss of a relationship I never had. The last thing I wanted was to hear someone talk about finding her soul mate, and I hoped Amy wouldn’t use the words “soul mate.” I had also hoped she would be an easy interview, but the pixieish brunette was less enthusiastic about our meeting than I had expected. A fashion editor at
Elle
magazine, she was used to staying behind the scenes and was becoming increasingly agitated being the focus of attention.

“I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with a vendor for color-coordinated confetti,” said the twenty-eight-year-old as she tugged at the hem of her body-hugging gray sweater. “Six months ago I didn’t even know there was such a thing. I still don’t
know why I need it. Or why I need an article in The Paper. No offense, but I’m not a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

“If you were, I would have paid for your coffee,” I said, trying to calm the caffeinated bride-to-be.

A nervous smile played across her angular face as she licked foam from the edge of her cup. She was rather adorable, I noted with a modicum of despair. Somewhere in the city, Melinda might also be enjoying a morning coffee. I banished the thought and concentrated on my near-empty notepad while nursing my Caramel Macchiato.

“Most people who want to elope don’t invite two hundred people to the Rainbow Room,” I said, changing tacks.

“Mike wanted a big wedding,” she said. “Sometimes, I swear—he’s such a girl. Don’t quote that. Mike will cry. I mean, freak. He’ll freak out. In a manly way.”

Mike Russo was a professional dating coach who had appeared on
Oprah
. Possibly in need of his own services, he had taken a month to get a first date with Amy. The question was why. The answer was not forthcoming.

“You must get tired asking people how they met,” she said, deflecting my query. “Doesn’t every bride’s story start to sound the same?”

I was tempted to say yes. However, I needed to salvage the interview. “I don’t write about
every
bride,” I said, “but I do want to write about an Ohio native climbing the ladder at
Elle
who gets her future husband arrested for asking her out.”

“You’re not going to include that, are you?” she asked, her brown eyes widening.

Of course I was including it. It was how I had pitched the piece to Renée. “Is it not true?” I said, hoping I could coax her into revealing more.

“I didn’t get him arrested,” was all she said.

“That’s
not what
he
said.” Sometimes my job was a lot like playing Bob Eubanks on
The
Newlywed Game
.

“I didn’t know I was marrying Chatty Cathy,” she said. “Did he also tell you about harassing me on the subway?” All I recalled was they had met on a crowded R train after work. He stood up to give her his seat, and there was a spark. According to him, it was mutual.

“I thought he was cute,” she admitted, blushing. “Handsome. Say
very
handsome.”

A six-foot former competitive skier, Mike’s attractiveness was not in doubt, but she seemed protective of him. I imagined what it would feel like to have someone be that way about me.

“When I got up at my stop, he asked for my phone number.”
Of course he did,
I thought,
because that’s what normal people do.
If only I had done the same, I could be dating the right Melinda.

“I wouldn’t give it to him,” Amy said flatly. I didn’t think I heard right. “He looked about as confused as you do now,” she said with a laugh.

I prided myself on not being so transparent, but I
was
confused. “You said you thought he was attractive.”

“I don’t give my number to random guys on the subway,” she said.

“But you had a spark,” I sputtered. “He gave you his seat.” If a guy like Mike Russo couldn’t seal the deal, I had no chance whatsoever.

“So he was a polite, random guy. Do you know how many freaks there are in this city? And speaking of freaks, the next morning he was waiting for me on the uptown subway platform. Right here at Union Square.”

“How did he know what time you left for work?”

“How did he even know where I lived?” she said, pushing a
loose strand of straight, dark hair behind her ear. It was the same shoulder length as Melinda’s. “When he saw me get off the train, I could have been going to dinner or visiting a friend. It’s crazy. He’s crazy. He got to the station at six in the morning and waited until I showed up at eight thirty.” I was impressed that he made such an effort. Especially since there was no guarantee he would even see her.

“He came over and said, ‘Good morning,’ like it was the most natural thing in the world, shooting me this big toothy smile. I asked him what he was smiling about, and he said, ‘I can’t help but smile when I see you,’ which is the corniest line ever. Which I told him. He told me he could come up with cornier ones, and after three years together I can tell you he wasn’t lying. So I asked him if he lived in the area, and he said, ‘No. I’m just here to invite you to dinner.’ I couldn’t believe his audacity.” Neither could I, but he was a camera-ready dating professional. Mere mortals couldn’t be expected to be that ballsy.

“I told him I had plans,” she said.

“How did that go over?” I was very curious how a guy like Mike handled being turned down.

“The next morning he was there again.” He had just become my hero. “This time with Starbucks coffee and mini cupcakes from Crumbs Bake Shop. He asked me out again, and I said no again.”

“Why?” I found myself taking the rejection personally. This wasn’t just an interview anymore; it was an education. After my missteps of the past week, this was my chance to penetrate the labyrinth of the female mind. “What did he do wrong?”