Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (16 page)

The tragedy, of course, is that I lost her.

As with romance, sometimes it’s just too late to try to salvage what remains of a friendship. Sometimes you can’t find your way to agreeing to a compromise that works for both people. And sometimes there is no compromise. It is heartbreaking, and no less heartbreaking than a breakup with a romantic partner. The loss of a friend is one of the saddest things there is. Sometimes weddings mean beginnings, and sometimes they mean endings.

•   •   •

I
saw Heather recently while I was on a trip to LA. She and Rex had been married for six years, and she was pregnant with their second child. I asked if she had any tips for making a marriage work. “Of course: The old cliché is true—communication is key,” she said. “Talking things out and not letting things fester. It’s important to regularly take a step back and remember what drew you to the person in the first place. Also, accepting that people change. No one is going to be the same person you met at nineteen, or twenty-five, or thirty-five, or whatever. People grow and evolve, and accepting and allowing those changes is very important in coexisting happily.”

Those felt like the very same rules for friendships.

Rock-Bottom Wedding

I
am standing in the middle of the dark, rain-dampened Main Street of a small Connecticut town. In front of me is a bar, which I have just been dragged from, kicking and screaming, by friends, possible former friends, and the mother of the bride. I am wearing a purple dress with a ruffle down the front that I bought in Paris. It has held up surprisingly well given the circumstances. Despite the fact that muddy rivulets trace the road, which is littered with debris from the day’s near-hurricane conditions, I am wearing only one shoe. The other, a black leather faux-crocodile platform pump that cost $450 as a pair, is in my recently manicured, now grimy hand. I throw it down the road with all of the strength I can muster. And then that second shoe is gone, too, discarded right along with my dignity. Those items—left pump, right pump, any remaining semblance of grace, elegance, or decorum—are now so far down the street that I couldn’t see them even if it weren’t pitch-black and I weren’t seven sheets to the
wind. The good news is, I’m so drunk I have no idea what a complete and total ass I’m being. That part comes later.

I am barefoot when I am finally coerced into the car with my friend Josh, who has been given the thankless duty of returning me to the hotel where we are staying, in separate rooms, post-wedding. I drum my feet against the dashboard like a child mid-tantrum, alternating between yelling at him—“
How dare you?”
—and begging him to return me to the bar where I’d found a man—not a wedding guest, but a man who was, rumor had it, at his own bachelor party, though that wasn’t in my bleary eyes a problem, not at the time. If anything, it meant we had something in common; we had both been clasped in the omnipotent embrace of so many interminable weddings. This man might be the love of my life, I reason unreasonably to Josh, a moment of false calm, a moment to breathe, before I start kicking again:
“Please-please-please-take-me-back-I-am-a-grown-woman-don’t-tell-me-what-to-do!”

I am a grown woman. Someone has seen fit to return my shoes to me for the ride, and when Josh drops me off in front of the hotel, I discard them again, aiming this time for him, or at least for his rented Lincoln Town Car, which makes him look like one of the many limo drivers waiting out their next fares in the hotel parking lot. These other drivers cluster around him and cluck over what a bitch I must be, having assumed I am a drunken passenger on the way home from a wedding. They’re not far off.

I don’t know this, this story about the limo drivers, or even who drove me home that night, until Josh himself tells me about it over spaghetti at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s East
Village several years later. “I dropped you off at the front of the hotel,” he said, not mad, just matter-of-fact, “because trying to wrangle you in the parking garage would have been a nightmare.
You
were a nightmare. You dented that car with your shoes. Thank God it was a rental.”

I can’t remember that, nor do I have any remnant flickerings of what must have been a slow, stumbling, barefoot course to my room, though I
do
remember what happened afterward, in bits and pieces, weirdly razor-sharp images bursting through the hazy insulating layers of white wine to sting anew each time. Much later, after the apologies had been doled out and the self-inflicted drama had lost its hardest edge, I tried not to think about it at all. But after he told me this tale, I started to have dreams of the two of us maneuvering our way through a parking garage, dreams in which I got lost or forgot my purse or somehow, inevitably, everything just went wrong. I still have those dreams every now and again.

Was this my worst wedding? Let’s backtrack.

•   •   •

N
ora and I raced to Natalie and Luke’s Connecticut wedding in a rented red Mini Cooper. We’d not been invited to the rehearsal dinner the night before, but in this middle age of our wedding-going life, that came as a relief rather than a slight. We’d booked a room with two double beds at a Marriott not far from the location where the wedding would be held, on the pristine beach of an even more pristine Connecticut country club. We could stay the night and be back home at a decent time the next
day, what a gift! After quiet Friday evenings in our respective East and West Villages, we met up early that Saturday, stopping for bagels and coffee, and were on our way, making great time.

The Mini was a convertible, but there was no reason to put the top down because the weather was not on our side. At first it was simply ominous and muggy, but halfway up the FDR, the rain began to come down in torrents. We could barely see the road, and our pace slowed to a crawl. By the time we reached the exit to the tony Connecticut town where we needed to check into our hotel and change for the wedding, we were both exhausted, and we were running late. We got to our room and threw our bags to the floor, ransacking them in an effort to dress as quickly as we could. I put on the sleeveless purple dress I’d bought in Paris, pairing it with black faux-crocodile platform pumps that added a little edge to the sweet silhouette and girly ruffles down the front. I did my makeup while Nora fixed her hair. We cleaned up in record time and looked at each other, doing a final check: “Are we ready?” “We’re ready!” “Let’s go.”

We headed out to the parking lot and into the rental car. If anything, the weather had gotten worse. The trip to the country club should have taken fifteen minutes, but we took a wrong turn among the twisting neighborhood streets, which had not only their own speed bumps but also white picket fences interspersed throughout, halfway across the road, to prevent drivers from compromising the safety of children or the quaint neighborhood feel. We were lost, and the minutes were ticking past wedding go-time.

“We’re late,” I said to Nora.

“I know.” She gripped the steering wheel tighter and tried to peer past the pounding rain.

“Do you think we should ask someone?”

“Who can we possibly ask?” she said, annoyed. “We’re in the middle of a hurricane.”

“That guy?” I pointed at a mailman dressed in full protective Day-Glo rain gear, sliding letters into the idyllic suburban mailboxes lining the street. We drove up, and he jerked a proprietary thumb in the direction of the country club. Nora put her pump-clad foot to the gas, plowing through a series of speed bumps. “Fuck it,” she said as the little car bounced in the air.

“We’re almost there!” I told her. “I can see it.”

We pulled up to the front of the building, into a drop-off area protected by an awning above. A man in a tuxedo carrying an enormous umbrella bent down and looked into the car. I rolled down the window. “I’ll park your car for you,” he said.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” said Nora, flustered.

“It’s no problem.” He gallantly waved his umbrella. “Hop out, and I’ll hop in.”

We let him. Later we found he was the husband of one of the bridesmaids, and he’d been doing parking duty, of his own volition, for the past few hours. “He’s a superstar,” we told his wife. “That’s why I married him,” she said.

The wedding couldn’t be held on the beach as originally planned because the deluge continued. Instead we’d be inside, in a lovely room more lovely because it was enclosed by four walls and a roof. We shook off the rain and replenished our lipstick, filing into seats facing an altar covered in branches and wild
flowers. Beyond that, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the beach and the angry sky beyond. The sun had not yet set, and outside shone a strange and radiant gray. Waves of a darker hue crashed below the horizon, and from above came a crack of bright lightning that plunged straight down, seemingly right into the water. The crowd uttered a collective “Ooh!”

The aisles in front of us were full of people I knew. There was my old college friend Rob, who’d had a crush on Caitlin before she married Cash. He sat next to a willowy blond girl whom I took to be his date. They were holding hands. There was Josh, the guy I’d dated casually right after college, when I first moved to New York City. He was the one who was always falling asleep on my couch, an investment banker who worked interminable, grueling hours. He still worked those hours, and we were still friends, though I didn’t see him often. When I waved at him, he responded with a small salute and a smile. There were all the ladies, too, some whom I’d gone to college with, who’d also gone to high school with the bride. Those women were the reason I’d initially met Natalie, though that was not exactly how we’d become friends.

Natalie and I had worked together, along with Lucy, in our first jobs right out of college. Prior to that, we’d both attended Jesuit schools in the Northeast similar enough that there’s an acknowledged overlap in the characteristics of their student bodies. Beyond any shared values or common facts in our upbringings before, after, or during our secondary educations, though, Natalie and I knew a lot of people who knew one another. Despite that, the first time we’d met had not been auspicious. She thought
I was weird. I thought she was a snooty Connecticut stiff, a spoiled rich girl. I’d been invited to a party at some anonymous apartment in Midtown by a mutual friend, and Natalie had been there, too, and we’d exchanged words, neither of us walking away impressed. Later, when I found out we’d be working at the same ad agency, I groaned.
Not that girl from Connecticut
, I’d thought.

The truth was, when we really gave each other a chance, we found we had a lot in common. I liked her, I admitted to myself. She was hilarious, no-nonsense, and surprisingly tough, but with a kindhearted soft side. At first glance she might have seemed the sort of stereotypical girl who’s bent on finding a wealthy guy and settling down with him in her hometown, where they’d live in a big house and have babies. But she was far more curious than that. She would not meekly accept things as they were or blindly go down some path because others had done it that way. Nor would she hold her tongue if she noticed something she felt needed mentioning. A credit to her courage was that she would say it to your face. I hated that job at the ad agency and was constantly consoling myself with Jack and Diet Cokes and staying out late, occasionally finding myself in the beds of strange men during the phase in our young twenties during which we were employed there. One morning, as I sat down at my cubicle, late to work again, she sniffed.

“Jen, you really need to start drinking vodka instead of Jack and Coke,” she said. “I can smell you from all the way over here.”

As we got to know each other better, a process that continued even when we moved on to our next jobs, we talked about dating,
but it was less about the guys and dates themselves (“He bought me dinner . . . then thought he could just come upstairs!” “I’m not going to sleep with someone on a first date!” “Oh,
he’s
not anyone I’d get serious with!”) and more about what good relationships might look like, what we wanted, what, even, love was—how we could identify it and make sure not to pass it up if and when it landed at our feet. It might come in a different flavor for the two of us; as different as we were, it was bound to, but I knew she wouldn’t criticize my brand even if it didn’t match her own. “I’m not worried about you,” she told me once. I took that as a high compliment, even if sometimes
I
was worried about me.

Natalie had met Luke at work. At first neither of them had considered the other, given the complications of dating someone at the office, but their boss had a matchmaker gene and smelled possibility between his two staffers. He purposely sent them on multiple trips together, they became friends, and romantic interest grew. At an event one night, “after fourteen drinks,” as she put it, he got up the nerve to kiss her. The relationship began in earnest, though I recall some early wondering on her part about whether he possessed all those marriageable characteristics that needed to be checked off for her to feel ready to commit. Sometimes it takes winning someone to decide if we want more, and sometimes it takes losing them. He wanted more. She reacted by pulling away and dating other people, only to realize there was no one as good as this guy who would dedicate his life to making their life together great. She would do the same for him, she decided. They got engaged.

It was clear immediately that Luke was free from the
manipulative qualities we’d seen in other men. He wasn’t hiding anything, and he didn’t have a hidden agenda. He loved Natalie and wanted for them to be together, and they had that wondrous synergy that made it feel they were even better together than they were individually. The parts of her that were a little bit brittle softened, and the parts of him that were shy and retiring found a rock of stability and confidence. That’s some marital magic there, and when it’s real, it’s real. The invite came, and I was again grateful that Natalie and I had found our way into friendship and glad I could be there to celebrate this moment in her life. What I regret most about this wedding is that my behavior didn’t represent how happy I was for the bride and groom, and how proud of them, too.

•   •   •

D
espite the rain, the lateness, and the shift in venue, all was running smoothly. In our party dresses on our folding chairs we watched and waited, and soon enough the music was playing, Luke was walking down the aisle, serious and nervous, and there was Natalie, with her father. She wore a stunning long white dress, form-fitting and elegant with a cutout back, a sweetheart neckline, and delicate lace sleeves. Her chestnut hair was tied back from her face in a chignon covered with a sheer veil. She held a bouquet of white flowers; Luke had a matching blossom in the lapel of his dark suit. Her father walked her to the front of the room, kissed her, and stepped back. The bridesmaids looked on with rapt expressions, as did the crowd. It was all about the couple now. “She looks so Jackie O!” someone whispered. She did, beautiful and completely poised. In front of us all, lightning
crashed through the sky again, but the bride and groom didn’t flinch.

They were married.

•   •   •

T
hings happened afterward that are painful to write about. We’ll start with the easiest. I drank too much. It’s so easy to drink too much at a wedding. Booze is accessible. You’re talking to people you don’t know that well, sometimes to people you used to know better, and a drink can take the edge off that pressure. You’re expected to feel things; you’re expected to be on your best behavior; you’re expected to act a certain way, regardless of whether those expectations have ever been directly discussed or explained, and a drink can take the edge off that pressure, too. Surely there exist people who do not have drinking problems while at weddings, but at nearly every wedding I’ve been to since I have been of legal age to consume, I have overimbibed to some extent or another. The repercussions are not always more than a headache the next morning, but on the occasion they have been far worse. The added insult to injury? When things go truly bad, they don’t absolve you of the headache.