The Wedding Beat (8 page)

She bit her lip and seemed to be deliberating about sharing more. “I just didn’t feel like going out,” she finally said. “I had a bad breakup a month beforehand. The guy I had dated since college dumped me at my sister’s big, fat Chinese wedding. I was
the maid of honor, so I was wearing this cheesy fuchsia bridesmaid dress and my hair was all in ringlets. Which took hours. Before the ceremony we were posing for pictures in a vintage convertible, and he told me he had fallen in love with someone else. So let’s just say that I wasn’t keen on romance when I met Mike. As my Grandma Jade used to say, if you let someone sweep you off your feet, you better be prepared to land on your ass.”

“So what changed things?” It was a standard question in my repertoire, but I really wanted to know. I was no longer a journalist. I was a lonely guy seeking vital knowledge. Something fundamental I was supposed to have learned years ago. I feared that my academic honors at Cornell had come at the expense of an incomplete grade in Relationships 101.

“He kept showing up with coffee and cupcakes, and I kept turning him down.”

“You turned down the cupcakes?”

“No. The dinner invitation. I love cupcakes.” She smiled, and for a moment she looked about twelve. “Then a week later, there was a power outage on the subway. No trains were running. But we didn’t know that. We were just standing there waiting. And waiting. Until we finally gave up and tried to get a taxi. Except there were no taxis to get. Which is when I started freaking, because I had a nine fifteen presentation scheduled at work. So Mike ran into the middle of the street, zigzagging through the traffic and flagging down drivers until he convinced someone to give us a ride uptown. We were smushed together in the back of this Honda Fit, and as I climbed over him to get out, he asked for my number again.”

“That’s when you gave it to him.”

“No.” She laughed, shaking her head. “That’s when I called the cops. Well, actually, I called my roommate’s brother, who works as a PI and had offered to do a background check. He’s
the one who contacted the police. How was I supposed to know Mike had a dozen unpaid parking tickets?”

If incarceration was a form of foreplay, I had more to learn than I thought.

“The background check somehow triggered him getting sent a bench warrant for the tickets,” she said. “He had to appear in court and pay a fine, but the way he carries on, you’d think troopers showed up at his door and handcuffed him.”

I needed to know how these two people ended up together. Because it wasn’t inevitable. When I interviewed couples it was easy to believe that their relationships were predestined, but I knew that wasn’t true. Something happened between dodging motor vehicles and picking confetti colors, and I needed to understand what it was. More to the point, I needed to understand love. I was like a scientist studying the components of a foreign substance, and for the first time I realized that my job offered the ideal laboratory. I’d been so focused on the irony of being a single man writing about weddings that I’d overlooked the serendipity. I’d been going about my articles with blinders on, fixated on deadlines and word counts and not appreciating that each of the couples I met had something crucial to teach me. If I could just figure out what it was.

“Did Mike stop showing up in the morning?” I asked, wondering if he pulled back.

“Are you kidding?” She looked amused. “He insisted that after all the trouble I caused, the least I could do was go out with him.” Seemed logical to me.

“And I considered it,” she said.

He was asking for a measly date, not a bank rescue,
I almost shouted in frustration. What was there to think about?

“I debated the pros and cons in my head. Was I ready to start dating again? Was I not ready? Should I go on a diet first? I have
a crazy brain. I ponder all the possible combinations and permutations. When we go to sleep at night, he says to me, ‘I can hear your thoughts. They’re very loud.’”

Okay, she was a little neurotic. In a Zooey Deschanel kind of way. I got it. So what won her over? That was what I wanted to know. She had skipped over that one crucial detail. “Why did you finally agree to go on a date?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “He showed up at my office at lunchtime one day with white calla lilies, a bottle of Moët, and takeout from Nobu. We had a picnic in the conference room. Who can say no to Nobu?” It all came down to expensive sushi and champagne? He must have spent two hundred dollars. I couldn’t afford that. At least not on a first date, and it wasn’t even a first date. It was a pitch for a first date.

“You didn’t at any point encourage him?” I asked, dumbfounded. It was a new concept for me, and I was having trouble fully grasping it.

“Well, I didn’t
dis
courage him,” she said. Was he supposed to comprehend the difference? Was I? “It’s not like I didn’t talk to him. Even the first day he showed up on the subway platform. We got into a stupid conversation about
Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
. I remember calling him a doofus, and he called me a movie snob. Which is completely untrue. My all-time favorite movie is
Shrek
. Which I told him. And he started jumping up and down like he needed Ritalin or something, and shrieking that it was also his favorite. Total BS, right? But then he showed me he was wearing a Shrek watch. Who wears a Shrek watch?” No one I knew. But no one I knew would pursue a woman who continually turned him down.

“He was so sure of himself and so sure of wanting me,” Amy said, growing pensive. “The way I look at it, Mike found me. He found me over and over. Even though I didn’t know that I was lost.”

Chapter Nine

“I
need to find Melinda,” I said to Gary, whom I called while heading downtown from Starbucks.

“You need to have sex,” he told me. “Let me clarify that. You need to have sex with someone you can physically touch.”

I had phoned to get an update on Bernie, but Gary was more interested in critiquing my love life. Or lack thereof.

“You need to meet people,” he said. “Have you thought about taking a class?”

“In dating?”

“No,” he groaned, “in something like wine tasting, where you might meet someone.”

“I did meet someone,” I said as I crossed Waverly Street. “I met Melinda.” I just wasn’t making much headway in locating her. I had contacted Lonely Planet, and, as I suspected, they didn’t give out personal or personnel information.

“You’re
never going to see that girl again.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I noticed I was passing NYU’s school of the arts, and I remembered that Melinda had said she was starting a master’s program there. I had about thirty mintues to kill before my next interview. Possibly forty-five if I took a taxi.

“‘Why do you suppose it is we only feel compelled to chase the ones that run away?’ That’s
Dangerous Liaisons
.” He emphasized the word “dangerous.”

“I’m going to find her,” I said with new resolve.

“As Julia Roberts once said, ‘You’re a restraining order waiting to happen.’”

“Have you talked to Bernie’s doctor?” I changed topics as I turned about-face and dashed toward the school.

“Not yet,” Gary said, “but I noticed that flights from New York to Fort Lauderdale are on sale. Not that I want to pressure you. Just trying to keep you out of trouble.”

It was too late for that.

“You’re asking me to do something in violation of school policy,” said the work-study student manning the desk in the writing department. I had hoped the romantic nature of my mission would convince her to let me peek at the list of first-year master’s students so that I could learn Melinda’s last name, but the grad student’s eyes flared with indignity behind her circular wire-framed glasses.

“How about if you just confirm there is someone named Melinda currently enrolled?” I asked.

“That would also be a violation,” she said, tilting her computer screen toward her in a way that seemed intended to guard both its contents and her maidenhood.

The office was a cramped space with unwieldy furniture,
which I suspected had a psychological impact on those who worked there. I kept looking toward the open doorway in the hope of seeing Melinda appear.

“Could I just get a schedule of classes while I’m here? That’s available online anyway.” I was bluffing.

“That information is absolutely
not
available online,” she said. She was either a darn good poker player or had a potential future career as a medical-claims adjuster.

“I’m sure I could find it if I tried,” I said in a friendly, lighthearted way.

“I doubt it.”

I wanted to point out that I was a reporter for The Paper, but if I mentioned that, I’d be breaching all kinds of ethical lines. As I considered my options, two undergraduate bohemians in training wearing clashing plaid shirts squeezed their way around me.

“Do you have any more drop/add slips?” one asked.

My adversary efficiently distributed Xeroxed forms, and the teenage boys slumped out of the office as a dark-skinned man with dreadlocks darted in. He declared that he had a manuscript for Professor Rubin, which he handed over before promptly leaving.

“Busy day?” I asked. She glared. “Listen,” I said, “you’re absolutely right to not give out private information. I think the best thing for me to do is to just hang out. Here.”

“Here?” she said, her eyebrows furrowing.

“Seems like anyone in the department would come through at some point. So I’ll just stay here between classes and during lunch. I’ve got time right now.” About eight minutes, but she didn’t know that. “I can keep you company for the next week. Or two. Or however long it takes until Melinda shows up. And we don’t have to worry about breaking any rules.”

“Loitering is also against the rules,” she said. “We have a strict policy about nonstudents.”

“But I
am
a student.” I flashed the same NYU identification card I had used at the security desk. It was from a French class I’d taken a couple years back (
Je parle mauvais français
). I doubted it would stand up to much scrutiny, but Bride of Cerberus didn’t know that. “In fact, I was thinking about enrolling in one of your graduate writing workshops,” I added for good measure.

“You’d need to get approval from the director of the department.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, plopping myself down on the vinyl love seat.

“There’s a reading tonight by Joan Didion that all students are expected to attend,” she said with a hint of nervous desperation. “Information about the reading is available online.”

The reading was at the NYU student center on the south side of Washington Square Park. I arrived an hour early and positioned myself just inside the front doors of the building.

This was it. In less than an hour I would see Melinda again. It occurred to me that I had no idea what to say to her. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood” wasn’t going to work. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you” would be the most sincere approach, if it didn’t make me sound borderline psychotic. Then I thought of Mike Russo, and decided I would simply tell Melinda I was there to ask her out to dinner. It was direct, truthful and flattering. I was ready.

I was also nauseous.

I noticed my reflection in the glass doors. The unflattering lighting made my skin look sallow and splotchy, and standing
alone in the lobby was like being in a fishbowl. An overly bright fishbowl with no plastic sea galleon to hide behind. I repositioned myself outside the doors as a woman approached from the park. She had a knit hat pulled down over her ears and was clutching her pea coat tight around her. Melinda’s coat! I took a couple steps instinctively toward her, but as she passed beneath a streetlight I could see red hair springing from beneath her hat, where there should have been brown curls. She looked at me suspiciously, and I quickly turned away. When I turned back, she was standing a few feet away, lighting a cigarette. I smiled nervously, and she shot me another suspicious look.

I called Hope.

“If a guy you met only once showed up out of the blue, would you think he was stalking you?”

“It would depend on how cute he was,” she said.

“I’m serious,” I said.

“It would seriously depend on how cute he was.” I filled her in on my plan, and to her credit, she didn’t question my sanity, only my odds of success. “I’m just saying you’re operating with a suboptimal hazard ratio,” she said, regressing into doctor-speak. I suspected she wasn’t fully focused on me, because, well, she said, “I can’t really focus on you at the moment, since I’m backed up with trauma patients and need to get out of here BECAUSE … tonight’s my date with Conrad!”

She was dismayed that I had forgotten.

“I’m meeting him at the Modern,” she said, referring to the restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art known for sleek design and steep prices.

“He’s dragging you all the way uptown?”

“It’s a great place, and he’s making a statement.” The statement being that money was no object. For all of Hope’s savvy, sometimes she was still the girl from Ohio, easily dazzled by
New York glitterati. Something Conrad was well aware of. “I think everything’s going to be different this time.” That’s what she said the last time, but I wasn’t going to voice that. People standing by glass doors shouldn’t throw stones.

She wished me luck and clicked off as a couple entered the building, hand in hand. What if Melinda came to the reading with another guy? Didn’t matter. I was going to do what I was there to do. I was a man on a mission—the James Bond of dysfunctional dating habits.

I relentlessly scrutinized the faces of all incoming females. A freckled woman approaching from the west. Black-clad poet type with dark bangs from the east. A group of four women passed by too quickly for me to see them clearly, so I followed them inside, circling round until I was sure Melinda was not among them. As I returned to my sentry post outside, I held the door for a porcelain-skinned undergrad with long eyelashes. I suddenly felt like an aging lothario. It didn’t help that the redhead smoker was scowling at me.