The Wedding Beat (6 page)

The state-of-the-art, glass-and-steel headquarters towered over the eastern edge of Midtown. Draped in a gray, gridlike sheath, its facade resembled soaring pages of colossal newsprint with The Paper’s name spelled out like a fifty-foot-high banner headline along the top floors. Even in my rush, I experienced a surge of pride. At a time when the Internet was threatening The Paper’s existence, the newly completed, sixty-one-story building thrust itself onto the city’s skyline, defying gravity and globalization in a physical declaration of relevance. Newspapers were not going anywhere, the edifice seemed to attest. Or at least not this iconic newspaper.

It wasn’t a place of work so much as a system of beliefs. When people talk of the press as a fourth estate, the implication is that journalism rivals the three branches of government—and at The Paper, you were expected to act as if democracy itself were at stake with each deadline. You didn’t take a job there to punch a time clock but to devote your life to a larger purpose: the pursuit of truth and excellence. I dodged the remaining construction crews and breezed into the vast lobby. My back instinctively straightened at the security check as I brandished my identification card, my proof of membership in an exclusive fraternity.

My pride diminished somewhat when I hit the crowd of people waiting at the elevator bank. Unlike the neo-Gothic building we’d recently vacated, there was no stairway access from the
lobby, yet there was increased demand for elevators, since employees were now spread over forty floors rather than twenty. It could have been worse. The company had planned to inhabit additional floors of the new building, but as revenue forecasts trended groundward, so did real estate aspirations.

The high-tech, “smart” conveyor system eschewed standard up and down buttons, replacing them with a computerized panel. I punched in my desired floor, 5, and endured the requisite delay for the screen to display my assigned car. Except it didn’t. It said
ERROR
. I quickly tried again and received the same message. Frustrated, I stabbed at the panel a third time, and I was directed to elevator F, where I joined a dozen type-A journalists queued up like passengers on a Disney theme-park ride. Like our tourist counterparts, we relinquished all control upon finally entering one of the transport vehicles. Woe be he who changed his mind about his destination, because there were no floor buttons. Apparently, real reporters don’t have senior moments.

I tapped my foot restlessly. The waiting was making me agitated. I pictured a flashing red light on my desk phone and anticipated a voice mail from the ethics and standards editor, asking me to meet with him. I could hear his gravelly baritone stating, “I have some questions about a call I received this morning from the
Observer
.” I wondered what, precisely, constituted sexual harassment.

The elevator doors opened. “What floor are we on?” asked a woman in the back, since floor numbers were not displayed. (Real reporters trust their instincts.) Someone near the doors said, “Five,” and I darted out.

The terrariumlike two-story newsroom buzzed with countless hushed conversations as I briskly traversed the football-field-sized space. Managers huddled with senior editors in small,
glass-walled offices, while reporters hunkered down at their desktop computers with phone cords dangling from their less-than-cutting-edge headsets. There were poker-faced clerks pecking away at their keyboards and art directors fixated on their oversized monitors. Though the newsroom was the nerve center of The Paper’s output, what went on there didn’t look that different from an advertising agency. Or an accounting firm. Sunlight flooded the cherrywood-paneled cubicles as I turned left at a hallway on the far side and made a beeline for my desk.

There was no red light. I was safe. For the moment.

“This is a newspaper, not the Good Ship Lollipop!” my editor bellowed from over my shoulder. I whipped around, worried what that portended. Renée Brodsky, a five-foot dynamo, was standing in the cubicle behind me with her headset in place over short, spiky, gray hair. Her steel blue eyes had narrowed behind her chunky black frames. She was gazing directly at me, but, thankfully, she was focused on a phone conversation.

“The wedding pages are the same as any other pages. We don’t candy-coat the news,” she said, her throaty voice curdling with disdain. A flinty reporter-turned-editor with a fondness for rugelach and racy jokes, Renée had little tolerance for anyone who impugned her judgment—or The Paper’s.

“We deal with facts, Ms. Murphy,” she continued as her head bobbed over tall stacks of wedding submissions. “And the fact is that this is going to be your
third
marriage. If we are going to publish an article about it, we are obligated to include the facts of the story.”

Renée had worked at The Paper for almost fifty years, and as far as she was concerned, there was no difference between a wedding announcement and a Page One feature. As many a hapless bride had learned. I was simply relieved that her ire wasn’t directed at me. This time.

My phone rang. It was Tony Fontana, who was sitting three feet away in the cubicle to my right. “Another bride bites the dust,” he whispered.

“Did the tirade wake you up?” I asked as I booted up my computer. The question was facetious, since Tony was a workhorse, in the office by six a.m. He wrote for three different sections and coached hockey teams for all four of his kids. Somehow he also found time to be president of the Trekkie club in Great Neck.

“Oh, you’ll get your wake-up call soon as Brunhilda sets her sights on your column,” he said with a chuckle. Renée was born in Germany, which is why Tony teased her with the Brunhilda moniker when she was in a bad mood. But jokes aside, it was clear she was not in the best frame of mind for editing my piece, which I had filed electronically before I went to bed.

“Go harass a bridegroom,” I responded while double-clicking on my e-mail program.

“Keeping the world safe for democracy, one wedding at a time,” he said before hanging up.

With trepidation, I scanned the multitude of new e-mails I had received, scrolling down through far too many offers for penile enlargement. There were several messages from a nervous bride confirming and then reconfirming our scheduled interview on Friday morning, but there didn’t seem to be anything from the
Observer
—or from Melinda. I was relieved. And disappointed. I reminded myself I was lucky if I simply managed to avert destroying my career. Yet there was a soft ache in my chest as I envisioned Melinda’s dimples.

“Brides!” Renée exclaimed as she disengaged from her diatribe and sat back down.

“Is it really so terrible to want to leave previous marriages out of your wedding announcement?” asked Alison Dolan. Tony and
I simultaneously popped our heads up above our cubicles with morbid anticipation. Alison was two years out of Barnard and confused why she wasn’t managing editor of The Paper yet. We were confused how she kept her job.

“We all want things,” Renée snapped as she shot back upright. “I want to be living in the south of France.” That wasn’t really true. Renée was convinced she would shrivel up and die if she spent more than a week away from The Paper. No one knew her exact age, but she had to be nearing seventy, and retirement was a nonissue.

“If we quote someone in an election article about who they’re voting for, we don’t say how many times they were married,” Alison persisted in her languid whine.

“And when we quote someone in a wedding article, we don’t say who they’re voting for,” Renée said a little defensively. “If a story’s about marriage, then a previous marriage is relevant. Everything is about context.” Renée sat back down, then sprung up again. “In 1977, Lana Fogerty and I were the only two female reporters on the Washington desk. Then Lana was fired because she had an affair with a congressman. Not while she was working here, but
previously
.” Renée hammered home the “previously” before continuing her reminiscence. “I thought it reeked of sexism and I went straight to J. D. Rosenberg. J.D. said, ‘I don’t care if my reporters are sleeping with elephants, as long as they aren’t covering the circus.’”

The bestiality metaphor was troubling, but it was the reference to a reporter being fired for sexual misconduct that made me blanch. I knew all too well that moral integrity was not an expectation at The Paper so much as a sacrosanct demand.

My phone rang again, and I flinched. I didn’t recognize the number. Not particularly unusual. But what if it was the
Observer
? Best choice was to let it go to voice mail. Just in case.
But what if they then called the standards editor?
I needed to get a grip.

I went back to reading my e-mails and found one from my grandmother buried amid the spam:

I immediately started dialing.

“Gavin!” my grandmother exclaimed delightedly upon answering her cell phone. “I’m at the Winn-Dixie. How did you know where to find me?” Her embrace of technology didn’t include entirely understanding it. “Did you go running this morning?”

“Not this morning, Grandma.”

“Why not? When I got home from the hospital, first thing I did was go running.”

“Why didn’t you call me afterward?” I asked. “I left you a dozen messages.”

“I didn’t want to bother you while you were working.”

“I’m always working,” I said, “but I’m thinking about taking time off to come visit you.”

“You shouldn’t take off of work,” she said. “Nine thousand people lost their jobs at Verizon.” My grandmother followed unemployment reports the way baseball fans track batting averages.

“I’m not going to lose my job,” I assured her before asking for details about her health. She insisted she was just bruised
and tired. It was Bernie she was concerned about. He was still in the ICU.

“Last night was the first time we slept apart since we were married,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice. “I don’t want you visiting now. Save your money for taking a nice girl to dinner.” She abruptly said she had to go, and I was still holding the receiver when Renée rapped on my cubicle.

“Your column’s at the copy desk,” she told me.

Renée didn’t send a story to the copy editors until she was finished with her edit, which was usually a grueling ordeal over several hours or even days.

“You don’t have any questions for me?” I asked, somewhat disbelieving. And rather proud of myself.

“I’m sure I could come up with some,” she said with a hint of menace. “However, Al said he has a query for you.”

“Captain Al!” Tony’s voice boomed. “Must be a whale of a tale.”

Al Macallister led the copy desk with the kind of detailed attention that helped earn The Paper its acclaimed reputation. He was also a monomaniac.

“It’s about your lede,” Al said when I called him.
Oh, God,
I thought.
Please don’t change my lede after all the hours I spent coming up with it.

Al read the opening sentence robotically, with no inflection in his nasal voice: “‘When it came to love, Mimi Martin thought she had missed the boat.’” He paused before citing my linguistic crime.

“
Which
boat?” he asked. “Which particular boat did Ms. Martin miss?”

There’s a thin line between editorial accuracy and anal-retentiveness.

“I wasn’t really referring to one particular boat,” I said,
trying not to reveal my inner John McEnroe (“You cannot be serious!”).

“But you used the word ‘the,’ which, in fact, implies one specific boat,” he countered. “If you don’t have a specific boat in mind, you should change it to ‘
a
boat.’ Otherwise our readers are going to wonder what boat you’re referring to.”

The only thing our readers were going to wonder was what planet we were on.

“It’s supposed to be funny,” I said, feebly attempting to reason with him, but if you have to explain that something’s funny, it’s not. “It’s a colloquialism: ‘I missed the boat.’”

“You didn’t write that YOU missed a boat. You wrote that Miss Martin missed a boat,” Captain Al pointed out, always on the alert for a factual error.

“The point is, it’s a turn of phrase that doesn’t make sense with the word ‘a,’” I insisted.

“I don’t know,” he said.
What doesn’t he know?
I wondered.
How people talk in real life?
“I think it’s best to be accurate.”

I hung up the phone, grumbling, “Al is killing my lede.”

Renée’s head popped up again over her cubicle. “In 1968, Archie Donovan was the copy editor when I wrote a story about John Wayne’s Oscar win. My lede was, ‘Better late than never. John Wayne showed
True Grit
, winning an Academy Award for his one hundred and thirty-ninth film.’ Donovan, who believed there was no such thing as too few words, changed it to ‘John Wayne was
the late winner
of the Academy Award for his one hundred and thirty-ninth film.’ That’s how you literally kill a lede.” She let loose a raspy guffaw, then plopped back down into her chair. From behind the wall she said, “I’ll talk to Al.”

I was grateful for one fewer thing to worry about. Then an e-mail alert appeared on my screen. I had a new message, and it was from Melinda.

Chapter Seven

I
was deliberating between roses and tulips at a Midtown deli before meeting Melinda for a late dinner. Roses made a strong statement. Possibly too strong. I was overthinking it. Or, more likely, I was overdoing it. It was just a first date. I wondered if I had been too eager on my first date with Jill. I had brought her a miniature box of Belgian truffles. Maybe that’s what had turned her off. I wished I could ask her. There should be exit interviews for dating. Just a brief evaluation of the highlights and challenges of the relationship, and maybe a few questions like “So what exactly was it that motivated you to dump me?”

I decided against the flowers. But picked up a package of breath mints. I wasn’t nervous. Or I wasn’t as nervous as I was when I received Melinda’s e-mail two days prior. I had stared at my computer monitor for about ten minutes before opening the message, half expecting her to tell me to cease and desist.
Instead, she enthusiastically accepted my invitation. Not only wasn’t she offended, but she also said she was flattered by my boldness. Only problem was maintaining it. I asked Hope to recommend a bold restaurant.