Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (15 page)

On Valentine’s Day of 2012, after we’d been broken up for six years, I saw him on the subway. It was evening, and the 6 train was nearly empty. He was immersed in a
New Yorker
, and he didn’t look up as he stepped onto the train at Union Square. I recognized him the way you do with people you once knew, and sometimes celebrities, an involuntary resonating vibration in your core:
Oh, yes, you.
He was much the same. He had a beard now, but his head was still closely shaven, his eyes were still very blue, his skin was pale, and he was as thin and tall as I remembered. I was standing down the car from him, and instinctively, I stepped toward him, thinking he might look up and see me, too, but when he didn’t, I thought better of it and stepped back. He was married, I knew that, and had been for a few years. They’d had their wedding at the Bronx Zoo, he’d told me in one of our e-mail exchanges, his long-ago plan of getting married in his hometown backyard forgotten or, more likely, evolved. I surmised that he was on his way home from work, that he was going to see his wife for whatever
Valentine’s Day plans they might have. I was just an old girlfriend, someone from long ago whom he didn’t need to be thinking about ever, but especially not on this day. So I said nothing and got off the train one stop later to go to a bar where I was meeting some friends.

“I just saw my ex-boyfriend on the train,” I announced when I got there. “On Valentine’s Day. How weird is that?”

“That is weird!” they agreed. “Lady, get a drink.”

It sounded more dramatic than it was, a corny plotline in a Lifetime movie:
I saw my ex on Valentine’s Day.
It did mean
something
, but the something that it meant was nothing. We’d been over for years. We’d both moved on, and on again still, and what was most notable about any of this was that but for the time we’d once shared together, we might as well have been strangers. How confounding that is, the course of so many of our romantic relationships: You know each other so well, are indispensable partners to each other, love and are in love. And then a day comes and you don’t know each other at all. The decision to not be together forever means, to each other, you become nothing more than a memory, a series of photographs, some stories, and, of course, whatever you’ve learned and will take with you to the next relationship. Those things are not nothing. Yet there was love there once, and then there’s not. I wonder where it goes.

Please Accept My Regrets

A
s painful as it is when it happens, we’re used to romantic relationships ending. It’s par for the course that most of the affairs of love we’ll have in life will, in fact, be finite. We tend to date far more people than we marry, after all. Those who come before “the one,” or the two or even three, will be, if not forgotten, confined to a certain time and place in the past, and in some cases not remembered at all. And that’s okay, that’s the way these things work. The high school sweethearts who meet and fall in love and stay together forever are a rarity.

But friendships ending, particularly those that end not in a fade-out of geographical distance or changing interests or stages of life that no longer seem compatible, but because the friends decide they do not love each other anymore, and not only that, they don’t
like
each other, either—that happens far less frequently. These friend breakups can be even more painful than uncoupling with the men and women we have loved. I’ve had boyfriends who have stuck around for anywhere between two months and three
years. The women I consider my close friends have been so for two, five, ten, and as many as twenty-five years. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

When Ginny started dating the man who would become her husband, I never suspected that what happened in her relationship, in any of our relationships with men, could so drastically change our friendship. It began so typically, and not inauspiciously: They were introduced by mutual friends; they got to know each other while watching sports at their local bar; they went on dates; they had a good time. All seemed promising, but as they grew more and more serious, there were worrisome stories she would share, the sorts of things friends tell one another, promising not to judge and to keep such things just between them—
he’s my boyfriend, this might sound weird or maybe even bad, but I’m telling you because I know you’ll support me
. This is where things get so complicated. Perhaps your friend is just blowing off steam, or wanting you to say,
Oh, that’s not bad at all
! But you are invested in your friend’s happiness, and the more stories you hear—even if they may not ultimately denote deep, intractable problems—the more you are inclined to worry. So what do you do? Do you step aside and let it be, because their relationship is their relationship? Or do you get involved?

I got involved. Hers was the bouquet I could not bear to acknowledge.

It had been two years since Ginny had married her husband. We were thirty, and we’d hung on to our friendship, but it kept being tested. At various times, her marriage would appear to be foundering and, right along with it, there we were, too, crashing headlong onto the rocks. A piece of information would be
revealed that I hadn’t known, and my resolve against the man she’d chosen would strengthen. At one dark point she called in tears, asking me to come over, and I rushed to her aid. We called her parents, who agreed to help pay for a divorce lawyer, if that’s what she wanted. Enough was enough. They’d help her. I’d help her, too. I felt concerned, but also relieved. My friend would be okay. She could put this past her and move on.

Days later, though, when I asked, she seemed to be changing her mind, and still later, when we met for dinner, she told me she’d decided not to do anything at all. She still loved him, she said. She wanted to work things out. I couldn’t see why, and several drinks in, I told her so. That’s not all I said. I told her that I didn’t know how I could be friends with someone who not only couldn’t stand up for herself but also was so intent on continuing to pull me into her life dramas. I told her that her decision to stay with this guy made me think she was, well, not very bright. I told her I couldn’t take it anymore, and I think I gave her an ultimatum: It was him or me. I said it all and was hopelessly, unreasonably cruel. I left feeling awful, knowing that I’d likely just delivered a fatal blow to our friendship, but not wanting to believe it, either.

Afterward, I reached out and tried to apologize, but it was too late. Unforgivable things had been said, and we were at an impasse. I didn’t understand how she could keep doing this. She didn’t understand how I could fail to support her decisions, nor how I could be so heartless when she needed my support. If I were a real friend, I’d be there for her and respect her choice. But I didn’t know if I could have a real friend who kept making these sorts of decisions and looping me into them, over and over again.
How can you support someone when you believe what she’s doing is not only wrong but also hurts her and you, and she continues to do it anyway? How can you respect those choices? And, on the other hand, how can you love a friend who refuses to love your choice of a husband, a man you’ve promised to stay with so long as you both shall live? How can you love a friend who doesn’t seem to understand that
this
is the paramount thing—this is your marriage? It was awful, and it was also awkward, especially given our broader social circle, which included people who had far more patience with the relationship than I had (not to mention more inherent diplomacy), along with others who were only now being included in the drama. I felt rejected, replaced by this latter group of friends who were so willing to suddenly step in and give the support Ginny needed. They looked like the good guys, yes, but they hadn’t been there the whole time, I thought bitterly. They didn’t know how it felt—then or now.

For weeks after that fight Ginny and I didn’t talk, but we were bound to see each other again, and as it happened, this would be at a wedding. Our friend Heather and her longtime on-again, off-again boyfriend, Rex, had decided to go on-again for good. They’d met while working as office receptionists the summer before our senior year in college, after we had all returned from our semester in Italy. Now, nine years later, they were sealing the deal with a marriage license. By the time of Heather’s ceremony in Los Angeles, the aftershocks of my fight with Ginny were no longer reverberating through our group, but she and I still weren’t exactly speaking, either. There was a big, raw wound that existed for both of us, hidden underneath the sheerest strip of emotional
Band-Aid. We decided silently if mutually to cope by ignoring it. We’d all stay together in a big suite in West Hollywood for this event, happy, happy. Thankfully, Ginny’s husband would not be joining us.

The wedding was downtown, at the top of an old art deco building in an apartment that had once been the residence of a Hollywood billionaire, a protected old-world hideaway with turrets and secret rooms and sweeping views of the city. It was beautiful. We arrived just as the sun was setting, and in the distance, beyond the imperious modern office buildings, you could see blue skies morph to pink and red and orange, speckled with white clouds. If you squinted you could see the Hollywood Hills in the distance, or at least, that’s what we said we saw. Heather and Rex were married outside on the terrace, and after the ceremony, we danced under the stars, Hollywood-adjacent to the thousands of lights still on in the buildings that surrounded us. Even closer, small palm trees decorating the patio twinkled with white lights. Everything and everyone was sparkling.

I had on a black wool minidress that I’d bought on this very trip to LA, partly because at the hotel, our friend Alice had told me the green-and-blue silk with the Marilyn Monroe–
Seven Year Itch
silhouette I’d planned to wear was “too young” for me. While I didn’t love being called too old for anything, I’d wanted a new dress anyway, and the one I bought was certainly not too young. It had short sleeves and a mod structure, with buttons all the way down the back. There is a photo of me at this wedding, dancing on the terrace with my hands in the air, flapper-style, and a huge smile on my face.

The waitstaff dispensed with any propriety, and so did the guests, in the end. They’d handed us bottles of wine and Champagne and not even bothered with glasses, and in the last moments of the party, people stood in the fountain at the top of the building and drank it all in, as much as we could hold. When the bar closed down, we gathered ourselves and our belongings for the after-party at a hotel just down the street. Somehow, though, between the time we left the penthouse in the sky and our arrival at the hotel, the mood had shifted.

On the way up to the bride and groom’s suite of rooms, somewhere between floors one and nine, that thing Ginny and I tacitly agreed not to discuss trickled out. And then there was a stream, a river, a flood, a tsunami.
How could she have gone back to him? Didn’t she see? She was trying to make her marriage work. Didn’t I see? Didn’t we both see everything we’d lost in the process, and everything that still stood to be lost? Why couldn’t I support her? Why couldn’t she be honest with me, with us, with herself? Why couldn’t I be a good friend? Why couldn’t she be?
By the time we arrived at the floor where the after-party was taking place, brutal damage had been inflicted on both sides. I got out of the elevator and numbly entered the room where the wedding party was still celebrating, sort of. No one followed me.

Inside, Heather was lying on a bed, one of her bridesmaids untying the red satin bow of her white strapless gown so she could change before she vomited. “Hurry,” she said, the word muffled into
“mmmmphrrr”
by the combination of Champagne imbibed and her pillow. Her husband, Rex, was casually chatting with a friend who was wearing a garter around his head and
chugging a beer. Apropos of nothing, there was a large statue of a foot in the corner of the room.

“I have to go,” I told no one in particular, and headed back downstairs. In the elevator, this one empty, the tears began. I found a plush couch in the lobby, sat myself down on it, and started crying in full force.

“Are you okay?” asked a male voice. I looked up to see a familiar face, a guy who was good friends with Heather. He’d been at the wedding; he had been seated at my table.

“No,” I said. Though he’d been on his way upstairs, he stopped and sat next to me, and I confessed everything that had happened, as I saw it. “I don’t know what to do,” I told him, my words coming out haltingly among sobs. “They hate me. I’m staying with them . . . I don’t . . . I’m just trying to stop Ginny from doing something she will regret. It all went wrong again . . . I hate myself . . . I hate . . .”

“Shhhh,”
he awkwardly soothed, patting my arm. “It will be okay. I’m sure it will all be okay in the morning.”

Usually it is. Usually, after a wedding and after a blowout and even after both, you can say that with some surety. Most things are better in the morning. I knew that this wouldn’t be okay tomorrow, though, and that it hadn’t been okay for a long time, and that, in fact, it might never be okay.

When my tears abated, he got up. “I’m going to head upstairs,” he said. “I think you should get a cab and go back and figure this stuff out. These are your friends. They love you no matter what.” He led me outside, and the doorman of the hotel hailed me a taxi.

By the time I got to our room, the lights were off and it was quiet. Everyone was asleep, or pretending to be. I got in bed and stared at the ceiling, trying not to cry, until I fell asleep. The next morning I had an earlier flight than everyone else, out of Burbank. I was awake before my alarm went off, silently gathering my stuff and exiting the room. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to get out of there, to leave it all behind. I felt like I was escaping the scene of a crime.

At the airport I called our friend Nora, who hadn’t come to the wedding because she’d had to work. She’d also, she admitted on the phone, had a suspicion things might go awry. All the unaddressed issues with Ginny made for land mines in the foundation of our friendships. I told her everything. “Well, that sounds pretty awful,” she said, “but I’m not totally surprised. We knew this was going to blow up sooner or later. We can’t just pretend none of it ever happened.”

“But what about Ginny?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I just don’t know. Maybe you can’t be friends anymore for a while, or maybe not ever. Maybe it’s time to let it go—or to give it a long, long break, at least.”

Weddings don’t always bring people together. Sometimes they tear people apart. When a friend makes a choice you find yourself unable to support, that can slowly but surely ruin that friendship, unless you find a way to deal with it. With Ginny, I felt that if she would not be her own advocate, I would fill the role. I tried to do what I thought was right for her, and then I couldn’t stop, even when she decided she wanted something different. My struggle to set appropriate boundaries at the time, as evidenced
by that fateful bouquet toss and what followed after, seems to the older me partly due to a kind of young-person immaturity. The me of today might have been able to find the distance to let the relationship do what it would while also maintaining our friendship. Then again, it’s possible I would have done much the same thing even now, albeit one would hope with a bit more sensitivity, given the wisdom of years. Most of all, I wanted my friend to be happy, and, particularly as things progressed, I saw her again and again as anything but that, her complaints and concerns not one-off dissatisfactions but clear signifiers that the marriage was not working. In that case, I thought, her best bet was to get out, and my duty was to help her do that.

I also saw what seemed to me a kind of hypocrisy, I think. What was the truth? Was the truth the shiny, happy wedding day? Was it in the stories that came after? Was the truth, in fact, love and a sustainable relationship, or was it something more ominous? I wasn’t privy to know more than what my friend told me and what I had seen with my own eyes. Meanwhile, hanging over both of us in this emotionally grueling time was an expectation that marriage should be seen as the supreme bond, the ins and outs of which are nobody’s business but the couple’s. I wasn’t sure I bought into this. If friends and family are asked to come and celebrate the good times, well, I was invested in the bad times, too, but if the times were really bad, the investment was in my friend, not in her marriage. And, whether it was truly so or not, I interpreted what she was telling me as “the times were bad.” So I worried about her—about how he treated her, about whether she really loved him and he loved her, if this union was indeed right, or if it was in
some subconscious way the rote fulfillment of the assumption that life was about, at its most essential level, finding a partner and settling down and starting a family. And maybe I was selfish. I wanted my friend, my strong, happy, confident friend, back, too.