Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (25 page)

Our Champagne brunch done by ten thirty, it was time for the reception. Outside it was sunny and growing hotter, but within the little dive bar the bride and groom had selected as their celebration location, it was cool and dark, offering that disconcerting but cozy feeling of going to a movie in the middle of the day. It was like a vacation, and it was a vacation, I suppose: We didn’t have to go back to work, there’d been a wedding, and it was whatever time we wanted it to be. The drinking hour was now. We settled in at a round table at the back of the bar, and Ashok asked the bartender to keep the beverages coming. “We just got married!” he announced proudly. The bartender grinned big. “Congratulations, man,” he said, slapping him on the back. “That’s awesome.”

Violet and Ashok and I were the first there; Bob and Phyllis had departed to go back to work like responsible adults. Beers were ordered. I got a white wine, happily noticing the bar also offered sandwiches for lunch, though, as it happened, I never ended up eating one. Ashok’s friends from work started to show up, and the table grew crowded. Pandora had gone to pick up a wedding cake, a small white fondant-covered creation shaped like a wrapped gift, complete with fondant bow. We cut into it
and started to eat, washing it down with pinot grigio and Brooklyn Lager. It had a raspberry filling. It couldn’t have been more perfect, this pairing.

The hours went by, and as it grew later we began to reminisce about the ceremony, putting distance between it and ourselves, turning it into a permanent history in our minds. “Remember when?” we’d say, though it had only been that morning. Ashok would introduce Violet to people she already knew, just to get to say “This is my wife” again. Everyone at this party except Pandora and me seemed to be married, I suddenly noticed, whether their spouses were there or not. Everyone had taken this plunge. I went up to the bar to get another drink and casually flirted with the bartender, who was impressed with not only the wedding but also our longevity and was giving us wildly discounted drinks.

Then the people with families at home began to leave, and the party evolved again. The bar got more crowded with strangers, less crowded with us. The cake was depleted to just a few remaining slices on a plate. It seemed to grow dimmer in the bar, though outside the sun was still shining. I got a text from my boss letting me know that my coworkers were all heading out for work drinks. I’d told him the day before that if the wedding party ended early, I might join them. It was five p.m., headed toward six, and I’d been drinking for hours. There was no way I was joining them.

A friend from high school who was in town visiting came in with her husband and daughter. The little girl was just starting kindergarten, and I watched her interact with her dad, whom she clearly adored. She kept going over to him to try to sip his beer or
get his attention, which reminded me of myself as a child, of my relationship with my own father, and beyond that, of the endless cycle of weddings. She was a little younger than I’d been at that first one I remembered. I wasn’t sure this was any more than a party to her, or maybe just some old people hanging out and being silly. Did she know where she was, what this was? “Are you having fun?” I asked her, and she laughed before running away and burying her face in her mom’s skirt.

It was time to leave. Things were getting fuzzy around the edges, and I didn’t want them to get fuzzier. I hugged Violet and Ashok and steadied myself to get home. As I made my way out of the bar, I ran into one of Ashok’s friends, a guy with whom I’d chatted pleasantly earlier that day about things like work and real estate and the various weddings we’d attended. He was just coming back inside.

“Are you leaving?” he asked. “It was great to meet you.” He reached out to hug me, but deep in my subconscious I felt that if I stopped for even a hug it would be over. I was focused, focused, trying to stay focused while washing ashore on the waves of a bottle or more of pinot grigio.

“I don’t hug,” I said abruptly, and rushed out, or so he told me a few months later when we all gathered again to celebrate Ashok’s birthday, an event at which I made up for my gaffe and gave this man a proper good-bye embrace. But that night, I left him aghast, standing in the doorway of the bar. A girl who didn’t hug. That was like a woman who didn’t get married.

At the time, I thought nothing of what I’d said, my eyes on the yellow cab that was rounding the corner and heading down the
street, right outside the bar. I waved, and the driver stopped. My ride to the courthouse that morning had been full of eager anticipation, curiosity as to what the day would bring and what a courthouse wedding would involve. My trip home was the counter to that. It was still sunny outside, and my eyes, used to the dim surroundings of the wood-paneled bar for so many hours, had to adjust. I squinted, and my pupils returned to the appropriate size as we crossed the bridge on the way back to Brooklyn. I felt that sleepy satisfaction that comes from going home again after a positive and productive day, though the productivity was not my own to claim. Inside my apartment it was quiet and peaceful. I lay down on my bed for a quick moment, just to rest my eyes.

I woke up several hours later when it truly was dark outside. I was ravenously hungry. I got up and ordered pizza, throwing in an order of chicken fingers, which came with French fries, for good measure. I’d have leftovers, but I could eat them the next day, I reasoned. Of course, I ate nearly everything once it got there, sitting on my couch by myself with my feet on my coffee table, watching old episodes of
Veronica Mars
, so comfortable in my solitary state. Being with people I loved was great, but being by myself could be pretty amazing, too, I thought, just before I nodded off.

Did That Just Happen?

P
eople say you never find love when you’re looking for that special someone, and it’s true, I was not looking. I’d gotten out of a relationship months before—that is, if “getting out” meant the guy you’d dated for a couple of months one day shut down all contact and never spoke to you again. Mere weeks before that, he’d gazed at me with a searching expression and, when asked why, uttered to my discomfort, “I’m trying to imagine the rest of my life with you.” Well, if that was the page he was on, I could give it a try, too, I thought, and opened up enough to leave travel-sized packets of fancy face wash at his apartment. Things had not gone smoothly after that, and then it had been plainly and abundantly clear that it was over. But his silence stung more than the end of the relationship.
Just
tell
me it’s over
, I thought,
don’t simply cut things off and refuse to acknowledge that I continue to exist.
I wasn’t perfect, but wasn’t I, or anyone, due that respect? Also, dammit, that was good face wash.

It had been long enough that I knew this guy was doing me a favor by ending it so definitively. No longer was I fantasy-plotting to have hired goons (i.e., my friends) kidnap him and put a bag over his head and take him to an old abandoned warehouse where they’d not kill him, of course, never
kill
him, but instead scare him until he pooped himself, a part scatological, part Scooby-Doo humiliation I imagined they’d document and disseminate across the Internet, per my bidding. While I was over the guy, over the thing that had happened and how small and inconsequential being ignored had made me feel, I certainly wasn’t looking for anyone new. I was keeping my head down, I was working hard, I was channeling my energy for revenge scenarios into work and, at night, drinks with friends. Living well is the best revenge, or so they say.

One Wednesday night in August I had planned to go to a birthday party but instead went out drinking with a coworker when our day at the office ended. One drink turned to several, as it does with the very best sorts of coworkers. We sat in our favorite booth at our favorite smelly bar—disinfectant with undertones of feet and a hint of old mop—and gossiped and plotted our hoped-for great futures. He looked at his phone and it was ten p.m. A TV writer, he had shows to watch, “And you have that birthday party to go to,” he reminded me. I’d nearly forgotten. “It’s right around the corner,” he said. “You should just stop by. You’ll feel good about doing it.”

I agreed, and headed the few blocks to the bar where the party was being held. Inside, the birthday girl was surrounded by a
group of people who were all getting ready to leave. I’d made it by the skin of my teeth. “Happy birthday!” I yelled, trying to hide my lateness with enthusiasm.

“I’m so glad you came,” she said. “Some of us are going back to my place. Join us!”

There were six of us in all: a single guy I was always running into at parties; a couple I hadn’t met and their friend, who was in from out of town; the birthday girl; and me. We gathered around a small table in her apartment and drank beer and white wine. The couple’s friend was a man with dark hair and glasses. He was seated in a chair next to the fridge, slightly outside the cluster the rest of us had formed, a perch from which he delivered the occasional bon mot. I liked his demeanor—he was acerbic but somehow sweet, too—and we started talking. I don’t remember what was said, exactly, but I know I was several drinks in before this leg of the evening had begun, and that sauciness and pinot grigio are historically directly proportional to each other when they meet in my bloodstream. In addition, I had my guard up, all too aware of what I had so recently been reminded of yet again: Guys might charm you, but they’d just as soon never speak to you again, if the whim struck. While I wasn’t being rude, exactly, I wasn’t being particularly nice, either. The most decent way to say it would be that I was giving this bearded, bespectacled man, whose name was Will, though I didn’t know it until the next day, a hard time, being deliberately challenging and sarcastic while also hoping to keep him intrigued enough to continue talking to me, at least as long as I liked.

Then he mentioned his eleven-year-old stepsister, and the
words he used and the expression on his face when he talked about this little girl whom he clearly loved melted all my steely resolve. This guy was not like the rest, I just knew it. I started to listen to him, and suddenly, as in the corniest of corny movies, it was just the two of us in the room, in the world, and suddenly we were getting up and leaving because we really did want it just to be the two of us in the room, in the world. We left so abruptly that I forgot my phone, and we gave no explanation for our departure to our friends, because to us, none was needed. When I went back to pick up my phone the next day, my friend told me those who’d remained—including the couple Will had been staying with; he was just in town for one night and lived in Seattle—had looked at one another, perplexed but amused, and said, “Wait. Did that just happen?”

Apparently, it had.

He stayed at my apartment that night. We went to sleep at some so-late-it-was-way-too-early hour after talking and talking and talking, the way people do when they’ve found each other and can’t believe they’ve managed to exist for so long on their own
without
that having happened. There is so much to know, so much to catch up on. Sometimes that feeling lasts, and sometimes it fades over time, but the initial pull of it is one of the most magnetic experiences in human existence. You can’t ignore those moments, and you certainly don’t want to end them by doing something as ridiculous and totally unnecessary as going to sleep. So you stay up as late as you can, damning work the next day, defying reality. You let yourself fall in love a little, and you kiss
and cuddle and maybe you have sex or maybe you don’t, and you hope it will all still be there in the morning.

I woke at the requisite early hour to blog, because the Internet was always up even if I didn’t want to be, and he slept for a while and then got up and read while I worked. It was oddly comfortable getting to know each other in this incredibly irregular way, but soon I had to go into the office and he had to catch his plane back to the West Coast. “Do you want to get lunch?” he asked me, but I couldn’t.

“I don’t really get lunch,” I explained, and he nodded,
She doesn’t get lunch
, a nugget of information about this person he barely knew. “I wish I could,” I said, not wanting him to think this was rejection. At the time my days were so scripted from wake up to blog to blog to blog to blog to home to sleep and repeat that I barely had time to make a doctor’s appointment, to do an errand, to drop off or pick up laundry, to go to the gym. This was my own pressure on myself, but I felt it, and it was real, so even a half hour for a sit-down, talk-about-things kind of midday meal was an impossible dream. I could barely pick up an iced coffee at the bodega below the office without feeling like a slouch. Lunch was a thing that happened at my desk.

Before we left my apartment he’d pulled me to him and kissed me, and we stood that way for a few minutes, as long as I’d let myself. We looked at each other, acknowledging: Something was here. But he didn’t take my phone number or my e-mail, and I figured if he wanted such details about me, he could find them easily enough, so I didn’t offer. There was another matter, or two, of no small concern. He was twenty-six. He lived in Seattle. I was
thirty-six. I lived in New York. Maybe something was here here, but would it be there and here, or here and there?

He found my e-mail, and later that day, I received a message from him. His flight had been canceled due to electrical storms. He would be in town for another night. Did I want—did I have the inclination, or the energy, if I wasn’t too tired—to hang out again? I did, thankful for these magical electrical storms that seemed fated to be, meaning perhaps everything about this new person in my life was fated, too. I wrote back with faux casualness, for some god-awful reason, “Let’s totally hang.” To prove (ironically) that I was really someone worth his time, I included a link to an article that quoted something I’d written about Boo, the so-called World’s Cutest Dog, who, it was being Internet-alleged, might only have achieved his fame because his owner worked for Facebook. In a cuckoo-crazy world, good things were afoot.

That night was a strange kind of second date, our conversations extending further into what-if and how-could territory than any regular second date with two locally based participants would ever demand, yet with the understanding that we had no idea what, exactly, we were going to do about all this, or if we even should. We said that if we lived in the same town, of course we would date. We talked about how there was clearly a connection between us, something that people don’t find every day. If nothing else, we should be “friends forever,” we decided. But I didn’t really want to be his friend, not just his friend, if what I could be was something more. I think—I guess—he felt the same way. When he left the next day to catch his flight to Los Angeles,
and then Seattle, he had both my e-mail
and
my phone number. And unlike the guy who’d never contacted me again, he did call, over and over again, in the beginning texting first, a gesture that endeared him to me still further. “Is this a good time to talk?” he’d ask, and I’d write, “Yes,” or “Sure!” or “Of course,” or even “
.”

Each night we talked, and every morning I’d wake to an e-mail from him that was the closest thing to a love letter I’d ever received. He’d tell me about his life up to that point and things that mattered to him, large and small, explaining who he was and the kind of person he wanted to be. I would write back, attempting to do the same, inspired by his openness and intelligence and heart. Some part of me still conflicted about our age difference, I described him to friends as a “Seattle twenty-six,” as opposed to a “New York twenty-six,” which meant, in my mind, more mature, more commitment-ready, just a better guy than a lot of the New Yorkers I’d dated. I mean, he had a dog. Guys with dogs were inherently better and more grown-up than those without, and I was more of a “Seattle twenty-six” than a “Seattle thirty-six,” anyway, I reasoned—whatever that meant. A close friend who’s known me through many a relationship and had previously categorized me as only dating “Option A: reliable, good on paper, utterly boring” or “Option B: batshit crazy” shouted with glee, “You’ve found Option C!”

The relationship, because that’s what it was, we admitted, that’s what it was going to be, and that’s what we wanted it to be, took root and started to grow. Despite the geographical and age-related odds, it felt natural, even easy, in need of watering by way
of phone calls, texts, and plane tickets, all of which seemed doable and an investment well worth what we got in return. I felt calm instead of panicky, peaceful instead of nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop, or for those shoes to end up, against my rational will, halfway down the street. I had not forgotten that things can be destroyed faster than they can be built. On weekend mornings I’d lie in bed after I’d woken, letting myself luxuriate in how much I liked this person, how it seemed he liked me back, and how it felt like I might finally know enough to do things right this time. I hoped we weren’t fooling ourselves, but I didn’t want to know if we were. It felt too good, this Option C.

The day came that I ran into that other guy, the one I’d dated briefly who had surely thrown out my face wash long ago. I knew I’d see him again. New York can be as provincially small as it is an impenetrable monolith. I was heading to a bar for after-work drinks with my boss, and the two of us were deep in conversation. When Face Wash got so close he had to say something, he did, waving at the both of us: “Hey guys,” I think it was, along with a shrug of acknowledged awkwardness. My boss knew the whole tale and had told me, over previous drinks, that it was for the best that this relationship had ended. There’d be someone far better, he had predicted optimistically. “Oh, hi,” we responded in unison to my erstwhile man-friend, and without pausing, returned to each other. We walked for several blocks as if nothing had happened until my boss finally interrupted: “I feel I should say something. Was that okay? That was okay, right? Because it felt okay.”

“Totally,” I said. And it
was
totally okay, it was better than
okay. Sometimes feeling nothing about someone else is the best feeling of all. The only better feeling is standing on the precipice of infinite possibility with someone new.

•   •   •

R
ight after Will and I had first met, I had drinks with a friend who was visiting from out of town. We were talking about dating and love and marriage, and she said, “You know, I never understood why we’re supposed to wait for the wedding to have the honeymoon. We should have the honeymoon first, get to know each other and relax and have a good time. Later, get married and, whatever, take a trip after that if you want. But have the honeymoon first! We should all get the honeymoon, regardless of the wedding.” I’d told her about Will, and she leaned in and commanded with intensity, “Go on a honeymoon with him.
Take the honeymoon.
”