Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (23 page)

The ceremony was fast and full of love, with touching, funny speeches delivered by family and friends, including one about a girl dinosaur and a boy dinosaur who despite the odds manage to find each other. Annabel wore a long, slim ivory dress with one architecturally jutting sleeve that passed both of our fashion muster but which she did not purchase at Fred Segal in Los Angeles. She had on a delicate veil made of French netting that covered just a smidge of her face, coquettishly. When the ceremony ended we headed upstairs to another spacious, windowed room. There we snacked on bacon-wrapped shrimp speared by toothpicks and sipped colorful cocktails. We admired the wonder that is the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset and waited to admire the bride and groom, who joined us shortly. I ran into our former editor in chief, who was there with his boyfriend. “She looks gorgeous, doesn’t she?” he said. “This wedding is just so
Annabel
.” I knew what he meant.

•   •   •

A
s the bride had told me ahead of time, I would share a table with the only single guy at the wedding, who in the world of the orchestrated wedding ecosystem might as well have been
the only single guy in New York City. He was seated right next to me. Tom was bald, or had shaved his head to be bald, but either way, the effect was the same, and maybe, just maybe, he reminded me of my old boyfriend, Jason, though with a stockier, athletic build. He had on a crisp suit, paired with an expensive-looking tie. Though he was the only single guy at the wedding, there were more than a handful of single women present—next to me was Ingrid, a novelist and friend I’d met through Annabel, and down at the next table there was Amy, to name just a few. Amy would not be interested in Tom, though. She was already captivated by the bartenders, not to mention her Swedish love, and Tom had no visible tattoos. Worse, he appeared to work in
business
.

I was already at the table when he sat down and offered his hand and his name. “I’m Tom,” he said. “And you are?”

I took his hand and shook it. “I’m . . . well, let’s see. Who am I?” I picked up the place card inscribed with my name that sat in front of my plate and studied it. “Today I am Jen Doll.”

“You need a card to tell you that?”

I leaned toward him and dropped my voice. “I’m a wedding crasher. I do this nearly professionally, or at the very least, competitively amateurly.”

“Fascinating,” he said. “How did you get in?”

I pointed toward the windows behind us. One of them happened to be a glass door, which I’d noticed earlier. “Fire exit. The alarm is disabled. It’s so easy, it’s almost embarrassing. No one ever suspects. You’d think they’d have better security at these things.”

“But what if the
real
Jen Doll shows up?” he asked.

I looked at him sadly. “I’ve taken care of that. Sometimes unfortunates get in the way. Wrong place at the wrong time, you know. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve got to eat.”

“That’s right, food. What are you going to order?”

I’d already decided. “I’m having the chicken. It comes with mac and cheese.”

“And I’ll have the steak,” he said. “We can share, Jen Doll.”

•   •   •

T
here is something that occurs at weddings when you are single and you happen upon another who’s single and you find each other moderately attractive and tolerably pleasant. Two such people might decide they are better together than alone at this fair, if temporary, juncture, and they might abandon all pretense and just be together, as if they’re a real couple, for that night. There’s love in the air, who can resist? We’ve all heard the great wedding legend, the tale of Someone who knows Someone who totally met his or her Someone at just such an event. If it happened to Someone, it could happen to you, too.

Let us call this pairing the Wedding Insta-Couple. The force is powerful. Always in the moment it feels like the right thing to do. We are vulnerable at weddings. They’re not comfortable like old shoes or our own couches in our own homes, or even like the grimy barstools at our favorite bars. They are big, important events at which we need to be on our best behavior, or at least, we’ll do our best to try. But the bride and groom, who may be our closest friends there, are busy. Many of the other wedding guests may already be coupled. If there is only one single guy, or
one single girl, at a wedding, chances are they’ll have the opportunity to go home with someone else who’s single, too, if they play their cards even remotely right. That’s not to say that weddings make us easy, or anything else you might pick up from a shallow reading of the movie
Wedding Crashers
. It is to say that almost every human on the planet wants love and companionship in some form or another, and inserted into an environment in which such things are the stock in trade, we may be inspired to take a chance and try to find them for ourselves, too, even if only temporarily.

Being alone at a wedding can be terrifying, but the promise of love found at a wedding is the opposite. Think of how many movies depict a female character who hires or bribes or convinces some guy to be her date to a wedding, because she can’t stand to go alone, for fear of humiliation, or perhaps because her ex will be there. These plots are silly and sometimes belittling, too, but there’s a kernel of truth there: Sometimes we
don’t
feel like being by ourselves, and a wedding is likely to be one of those times. In the movies, the couple that connects at a wedding frequently falls in love and goes on to get married themselves. This is a real kind of American fantasy, even if the majority of its examples live in Hollywood, not reality.

My insta-coupling with Tom had in my mind been a done deal, probably from the time that Annabel had told me he and I would not get along. I love a wedding challenge, as we’ve previously determined. And so that evening, after he gave me bites of his steak and I cut up portions of my chicken and moved them to his plate, we walked around together as if we had
come to this event as each other’s dates, as if we’d been dating for years, as if we, soon, might head down an aisle of our own. He had his arm around me, and we introduced each other to the friends and family members (mine the bride’s side, his the groom’s) that we saw. “How did you meet?” they’d ask, taking us for more than side-by-side assigned dining companions, and we’d say, “At the dinner table!” and everyone would laugh at our adorable couple antics. I thought,
Hey, this is sort of fun. I could get used to this.

When the restaurant closed, we walked down the street to the bar where everyone had agreed to converge for the after-party. In contrast to the white-petal-strewn airy brightness of the previous venue, it was dark there, even a little ominous, with crimson-hued lighting and a pool table surrounded by men in concert tees. By that time I was pretty drunk, as were most of us. But as I’d promised myself, there would be no puking, no crying at this wedding. Instead, I became ever so slightly confused about the status of my fake relationship. Was this guy with me or not with me? Was he now, suddenly, flirting with a waitress? I looked. It appeared that he was. Was he spending time talking to that other woman,
another
single woman at the wedding? I looked again. Yes.
Had this all been just a game to him?

In an instant, my wedding insta-relationship, the one that I had never even cared about, not for real, began to crumble, and I to crumble along with it. The unit of two that had seemed so protective and nice and safe, a fake relationship that felt even better in this moment than one that was genuine, was gone. I was alone again, on my own, having to fend for myself. I didn’t even
want another drink. I wanted to go home, climb into bed with my dress on, and pull up the covers, shut my eyes, and go to sleep, only to wake to the brightness of morning. That was the moment in which I should have gone home. Instead, I confronted him, interrupting the conversation he was having with a girl who did not look familiar.

“I think I want to leave,” I said.

“Well, silly, then you should go,” he told me. “It’s late.” Wrong answer.

The girl yawned, looked at her phone, and she herself left. Smart girl. I persisted. “You should come
with
me.”

He glanced at his watch. “I have to be up for this thing really early in the morning.” (Wedding Tip: This is a death knell that means precisely what you think it means! Do not proceed!) I proceeded. I gave him what I felt was a charming come-hither sort of look. It may have only served to convince him that I needed an escort to get home without injury for which he would later be blamed. “Well, all right, I guess,” he finally said, finishing his drink, and we were in a cab back to the East Village.

What I wanted, I think, was to end the night in a way that felt compatible with how we’d experienced the wedding itself, him cutting me pieces of steak from his plate and taking some of my chicken; us walking around the venue together, arm in arm. That is to say, together. I wasn’t ready for our newly constructed twosome, which had felt surprisingly good, to be over just yet. Maybe our insta-coupling had legs. And, yes, probably I wanted to make out with him a little.

We got back to my studio apartment. There were not many places to sit. I took off my shoes and found a spot on the bed, and he joined me. We kissed for a while, until he again looked at his watch. “I better go,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I have to be up early in the morning,” he reminded me. “I have that thing.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “That thing. What thing is that again?”

“It’s just some stuff I have to do,” he said.

Well, if he was going to be that way. “Fine.” I pouted.

He was going to be that way. “It was great to meet you, Jen Doll,” he told me, getting up. “Or whoever you are.”

“You, too,” I said.

And he left.

It was funny, though. After the door had shut and I was again my onesome in my little apartment, I wasn’t angry he had gone at all. So much can change in the matter of a few minutes, outside of the grasp of the wedding. Now I could go to sleep, happily single, comfortably on my own. The next morning I could wake up alone in my own bed, which I could sprawl across if I felt like it, hogging the blankets and sheets and pillows with abandon. I did not have to be concerned about a stranger next to me and what he wanted and how I might need to care about what he wanted, too. I did not have to worry about brunch. I felt relieved. He hadn’t been the one. He was just one.

Before I fell asleep, I ate my Momofuku Milk Bar wedding cookie, the favor from the bride and groom. It was delicious.

•   •   •

S
everal weeks after that, I sent Tom a Facebook message saying I’d had fun meeting him and thanks for helping me get home. I felt the need to counter any behavior that might have been interpreted the wrong way, and I was curious, too. Had there really been something there after all, or was it only Wedding Insta-Couple Haze? I figured I could be an adult about this and told him, if he ever wanted a drink, I owed him one.

He never wrote back.

The word was that he’d just gotten out of a relationship and he’d tentatively gotten back in it. I don’t know what happened for sure, and it certainly doesn’t matter now, if it mattered even then. He wasn’t really the only single guy in New York, much less the world. He was merely the only single guy at that wedding. But he did me a favor. I could thank him for helping me realize that the only true relationship shame was in not being real, in not being honest with myself, and honest with those I dated, too. There is a not insignificant amount of fear associated with saying,
Yes, this is what I want: a partnership that looks and feels like this
, because on the other side of that lies the paralyzing possibility of rejection, of failure, of choosing wrong. But it’s not very fulfilling to go through life passively, guarded and not taking chances, trying not to let things hurt you. And if you don’t at least try to say what you want, it’s very unlikely that it will suddenly appear on your doorstep with a shiny red bow on top. Sure, you can fake who you are in an effort to keep your heart safe, but that will never
make your heart feel that other thing most of us truly crave. If I wanted a relationship, really and truly, it was time to admit it.

Before Annabel met Ryan, she’d explained her lack of interest in marriage by saying, “I want to make that choice to be with someone every day, not have it be a foregone conclusion.” Now that she’d done the thing she never thought she’d do, she took a different view. “It feels really good,” she told me almost two years after her wedding day, as we shopped at a tiny Brooklyn boutique, her baby sleeping peacefully in a stroller in the corner. “But to tell the truth, I don’t even think about it, being married versus not being married. I’m just living it.”

At Last

I
n 2011, I was a full-time staffer at the
Village Voice
. Though I wrote a few cover stories for the paper in my time at the alt-weekly, my duties were primarily confined to Runnin’ Scared, the news blog, which had a focus on New York City but incorporated a range of global and viral topics as well, all the better for page views. At first I wrote eight to ten posts a day. They could be short, riffy things, because, for goodness’ sakes, it was eight to ten posts a day. We were told as bloggers that we should always try to make the phone call, always try to get more information. We did try, but I had the feeling a lot of the veteran staffers, those who’d been around as reporters during the heyday of the paper, thought we largely just produced a bunch of garbage as the bottom-feeders of journalism. They weren’t all wrong. I very much looked up to those reporters and did not want it to be that way, but I didn’t know how to do everything I was required to do and leave my desk, too. In some ways, my background in print journalism had prepared me little for creating online content,
and most days I felt like I was flailing. I kept writing and got faster, and I slowly got better, too. Our post quota was downsized to a more reasonable five or six daily, which seems insane to me now but was a relief then, and reporting (the kind you could do without leaving your desk, mostly) was encouraged.

Occasionally there would arise an opportunity for which I might be present someplace real news was happening. I relished those moments to see and report back, to write about an event I’d witnessed myself instead of simply picking it up from another outlet and appropriating it for our site, tapping the story with my own stamp of “personality” or “an angle.” In June, the New York State Legislature had passed the bill making same-sex marriage legal in the state. When the news was announced, I’d been at dinner with a friend. We emerged from the restaurant to an atmosphere of no-holds-barred joy in the streets. We’d tearily hugged, so proud of our state and suddenly filled with optimism for the future. In the weeks that followed, one of my coworkers at the paper suggested I try to get a press pass to the wedding that New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg would be officiating at for two of his staffers—the city’s commissioner of consumer affairs, Jonathan Mintz, and the mayor’s chief policy adviser, John Feinblatt—at Gracie Mansion on July 24, the day the law went into effect. I sent an e-mail with my request to cover the ceremony, and to my surprise and pleasure, it was granted.
This
was something to write about.

I wasn’t sure what to wear, it being the first wedding I’d attended as a reporter, not a guest. It was hot, and the July morning had been thick and humid, but the weather cleared up by the time
I was leaving my apartment in the late afternoon. I settled on clothes I might well wear to a casual summer wedding: a long tank dress with alternating dark and light blue horizontal stripes, the waist cinched with a matching belt. I’d bought it at a boutique on my block, won over by the fact that somehow, despite what you hear about horizontal stripes, it managed to be slimming. I’d worn it on a date earlier that month, and it had gotten a “Great dress.” More than that, it was practical. Sleeveless, it would allow me room to maneuver and stay relatively cool, and it was pretty but not too showy. With the blue and bluer stripes, it even felt vaguely governmental. I had on flat sandals, and I carried a notepad and a pen, as well as my phone, from which I planned to tweet and also take photos. At the last minute I threw a couple of
Village Voice
business cards into my tote. The
Voice
was pretty laid-back about formal procedures, and I had yet to be issued an actual press pass. I hoped these would do the trick if need be.

On the uptown street corner where my cab dropped me off, across from the barricaded Gracie Mansion, a small group of Orthodox Jewish men were protesting. Along with various placards expressing their distaste for gay marriage, they had a grotesque-looking stuffed dog hanging on a pole and a sign declaring that a man marrying a man was akin to a man marrying a mongrel. There were cops stationed about in case anything got out of hand, but no one seemed to be paying the protesters much mind. Wedding guests dressed in festive clothing streamed blithely across the street, heading through the barricades and onto the grounds of Gracie Mansion. I followed them. There was a press line stretching into the distance, and I filed in behind two other
women, reporters with their own notepads and a no-nonsense brusqueness that I lacked. I was feeling those wedding jitters I always got before a ceremony. It was funny that they happened whether I knew the couple or not, I thought.

At the front of the line, I showed off my business card to an approving nod from security and was pointed to a set of risers upon which reporters could stand and take notes and photos during the ceremony. I claimed a spot in the back, where I figured I’d be out of the way and also up high enough to see over the heads in front of me. The media was gated off from the rest of the crowd, contained in our little area, but that only added to the experience. Around me, people who looked like bona fide professionals—slightly disheveled attire, pens tucked behind ears, cell phones in hand—were setting up cameras on tripods, taking photos and shooting video and jockeying for positions. A woman who worked for a city tabloid got into a screaming match with another writer, and I watched, overjoyed. News! It was happening everywhere around us. The crowd pushed in tighter. Scribbling details onto my notepad, I tried to make myself small and unnoticeable, fearing I’d be forced to relinquish my space to someone from a bigger venue.

From my riser, I saw Matthew Broderick walk into the wedding tent. He had on khaki pants, and there was a pastel pocket square tucked into his navy jacket. I began to notice other people I knew from writing and reading about New York City, and I felt a little ping of satisfaction as I checked them off, one by one: Christine Quinn. New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. There was Broadway legend
Joel Grey, who would serenade the grooms after the ceremony. And of course Mayor Bloomberg was in attendance. He’d brought along his two yellow Labs. The dogs lolled happily on the lawn. At the very front of the cluster of white folding chairs set up for invited guests, not nosy reporters, there was a group of little girls in party dresses. I guessed they must be friends of the school-aged daughters of the grooms. A quartet in front of them, facing all of us, performed charming renditions of romantic classics like “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” but as with any wedding the crowd began to grow restless, shifting in their seats. Helicopters droned above as the sun slowly set. Everyone was ready to get this thing going, no matter why we were here.

Suddenly, movement appeared in the windows on the second floor of the mansion. A little girl in white peered out, guests and working stiffs alike straightened up and paid attention, and the wedding began.

It was a short ceremony. After a brief introduction and some marital guidance from the mayor—“Never stop listening, and never stop laughing,” he advised—the two men were pronounced married. Each groom broke a glass under his heel, Grey performed, eco-fetti was thrown, and the press began to depart en masse as quickly as they’d set up, while the actual guests headed into the tent for the reception. I saw a woman take her shoes off, digging her bare feet into the green grass and looking out into the horizon. Pink punch was being poured into glasses and passed around to waiting partiers, and there was an ice-cream truck pulling up into the parking lot adjacent to the mansion.

I felt a twinge of sadness that I was missing out on the fun part of the wedding, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I had no role in this event beyond getting the story, telling it as well as I could, and being a part of history in whatever small way a writer can be. It was the most fully adult ceremony I’d ever been to, or at least, the one at which I’d behaved in the way most becoming of an adult. There was no need for drama, there were no friendships or relationships ripped wide open again. I walked away completely sober. As I headed toward the exit, I found myself trapped behind Mayor Bloomberg and Christine Quinn. I have an excellent shot of the back of Bloomberg’s neck from this moment. I showed it proudly to the political reporter at the paper the next day, and though he sweetly tried to match my enthusiasm, I think he mostly thought I was nuts.

Walking west to find a cab, I texted Nora. “Dinner downtown? Just covered my first wedding!” (Wedding Tip: It’s not a wedding without wine.) She met me at our regular East Village Italian spot, and we ordered all of our favorite items, the kale salad and tomato bruschetta and fresh-made pastas, and a bottle of Verdicchio, which we drank leisurely as we caught up. Conversation ranged from meaningful—what this new era of New York history, and, we hoped, beyond, could mean for the world at large—to mundane—had that guy I’d seen the concert with asked me on a second date yet? What was happening with the man she’d recently met? Everywhere we looked it seemed happiness and love were entirely possible, and even present.

That evening, home with my feet up, sated on wine, spaghetti,
the emotional food of the wedding, and the conversation with a good friend that had followed, I opened my computer and began to type. “This blogger has been to a lot of weddings,” I began, which was true then and is only more true now. “This blogger, however, was keenly excited to see (1) Mayor Bloomberg marry someone, someone not his daughter or a former mayor (the two types of people he had once vowed he would only marry), and (2) to partake, even in a small way, in the first same-sex marriage of two people who work for our city and, despite not being able to legally wed, had loved and created and sustained a beautiful family for themselves—all the happier to make it ‘official.’”

It had been everything I’d hoped it would be. It felt sort of like the world was growing up, and maybe I was, too. It had only taken me thirty-five years, but who’s counting?