Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (24 page)

Now Serving C661

O
ne sunny August morning I rolled out of bed, showered, put on a cream-and-blue-printed silk shift dress and my most comfortable walking-around summer wedges, the ones with rust-colored leather uppers and cork soles, and grabbed my going-out bag—orange vintage Louis Vuitton, purchased at a secondhand store—instead of the large bookstore tote I usually stuffed with gym clothes and an array of books and papers before heading to work. Though a Friday, this was not a workday. I was going to a wedding.

I checked my clock. The plan had been that I’d grab a cab with the bride and groom, who lived so close to my new apartment in Brooklyn that we’d decided to ride-share to the Manhattan courthouse together. We’d heard the wait became longer as morning turned to afternoon, and though the bride was one of those people for whom you always gave a ten- or fifteen-minute time window, at which she’d inevitably arrive at the end, the groom was adamant that they be at the front of the line. I left my apartment
and walked to Flatbush, where I got a text: “We already left! He hailed a cab and didn’t want to wait. Sorry!!!!” Oh, well, that was fine, I could get there on my own, I thought, and motioned for my own taxi, following my friends across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Lower Manhattan. Sans date, I took a photo of myself, or, well, my legs and my purse next to me, on the way.

Violet and Ashok had met at an ad agency where they had both worked. He was a producer and she was an art director. She was one of my oldest friends from Alabama. He had been married before and had a little boy with his ex-wife. In New York, Violet and Ashok hadn’t paid much attention to each other, but after a two-week shoot together in Vancouver, she told me she “could never imagine not talking to him again.” To us, he became known as her boyfriend, though she failed to tell her family in Alabama about him—that he existed, that he was divorced, that he had a son who was in elementary school. She worked slowly with that information, doling it out on a need-to-know basis, and in fairness, he was not incredibly forthcoming about her to his family in India, either. At one point after the two of them had been dating for a while, before a visit from her father, Violet pulled me aside and whispered, “Hey, um, don’t mention that Ashok has a kid, okay?”

“Your dad doesn’t know yet?” I’d asked.

“One bombshell at a time,” she said. “First I need to tell him Ashok’s been married.”

The Christmas came when she finally took him home and introduced him to her entire extended family. Though he was
horribly allergic to her stepmother’s cats, everyone loved him, and soon everyone knew everything, and it was all fine. He was a producer; charming people was his business. “I guess I shouldn’t have worried,” she said.

Technically, on the way to this wedding, they were already married. Early on in their engagement they’d asked if I wanted to be their officiant. I’d eagerly said yes, but the pressure of doing something that would suit the couple’s diverse, geographically spread Alabama and Indian families was too great, and I got an e-mail from her several months later telling me the plans had changed. “We have decided to elope to India with family,” she wrote. “Going to get married in Agra at the Oberoi Amarvilas hotel, by the pool probably. You are more than welcome to marry us there! But it’s a twenty-hour journey.” She added, “Just can’t do the wedding thing!” She felt it wasn’t her, and more important, wasn’t
them
, so they created something that was. One of the benefits to having a wedding in your midthirties or beyond is that a lot of the rules and traditional expectations cease to matter in the slightest. You have the confidence and the financial standing to do it your own way, and that makes it all the better.

After the wedding they’d travel through India, to Delhi and Jaipur and wherever else the whim and time and money took them. As the plans became more concrete, they again urged me to go with them. Violet’s older sister and I were friends, too, and she was going; we could share a room to save on costs. They were one of the few couples for whom I
would
travel to India to see get married. But I’d just bought an apartment and started a new job,
too. I didn’t think I could spare the $10,000 the trip would cost, or the time off work, or the energy to deal with all the planning, even though I also knew it would be the trip of a lifetime. Just not my lifetime, not right now. I said no. I couldn’t do it. In the photos I jealously perused later, it all looked amazing.

Just because you don’t go to a wedding doesn’t mean that wedding, or that coupling, ceases to exist for you. Sometimes it becomes a bigger deal than if you’d attended in the first place, following through with all the ritualistic processes involved, buying a gift from the registry, wearing a dress, wishing your love and congratulations. These are the “ghost weddings”—the missed ones that haunt you in some form or another for long after the wedding actually occurs. They may be weddings you’re not invited to and which go on without you despite what you would have hoped, jabs that indicate you’re not as close to the bride and groom as you thought you were, or that they no longer want you to be close. When you don’t make the cut, that can change your relationship with the marrying couple forever. Other times, you’re invited but must send your regrets: You live too far away, the associated expenses are too much, you can’t take time off work, you’re busy with your own life, you choose to go to another friend’s wedding, you don’t approve, or you don’t want to bother. This, too, may end your friendship, unless you have a very good reason for saying no. A save the date is not just a piece of paper. It is a piece of paper that means something. It can change relationships in ways the invited, the uninvited, and the bride and groom may never expect.

Luckily, with Violet and Ashok’s wedding, my “no” did not
make for an end to our friendship, nor did they take my refusal the wrong way. But when Violet told me they were having a second wedding, this time at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan, I knew I had to be there. I’d gotten a second chance. I took the day off. This would be an event.

I arrived at the courthouse a few minutes after they had, and they were already in line, a handful of people in front of them. She had on a long white sundress with short sleeves, a deep V-neck, and a nipped-in bodice. He was wearing a black suit with a purple-and-white striped tie. They waved at me from behind the velvet rope separating the guests from the couples. “The line’s moving fast!” said Violet. “Smile, I’ll take a picture,” I told her. Soon Pandora, Violet’s sister, arrived and we both shot rapid-fire candids of the couple like we were their personal paparazzi until they reached the second stage of the process. Getting married at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan is a
process
. There are multiple phases, each with its own bureaucratic hurdles to hop. Prior to this trip to the courthouse there had been other steps necessary to get here, and now there were more: paying the fees, showing the proper forms of identification, signing the papers, and finally, finally, finally—the ceremony.

Ashok’s witnesses, his boss, Bob, and Bob’s wife, Phyllis, arrived, and we sat on the benches lining the room and waited for the process that involved us. As one might at a crowded deli counter, Ashok took a number, the sign that would indicate their ceremony time had arrived. I took a picture of him proudly holding that auspicious paper tag, which read “C661.” Sharing the narrow, airportlike waiting area with us were other couples of all
sorts. Men and women, women and women, men and men. They were young and old and middle-aged, and in all varieties of races, ethnicities, and religions. At this UN of weddings, everyone was united by the societal tradition, regardless of the societies from which they might have descended. I studied the couples there waiting for their turns, standing in clumps, sitting on stools in front of the various service windows, perching on the benches like we were and watching for their own numbers to appear on the light boards positioned throughout the room. “Now serving number ____,” we would hear as that number flashed on the screen, and whichever couple it applied to would look at each other and rise and smile and head to the appointed station, because they were getting married.

A group of four people came running through the room, two women in dresses and two men in suits, and it was hard to tell who was marrying whom as they rushed to the clerk to file their papers. Elsewhere, a young Asian couple stood with flowers purchased at a nearby kiosk and smiled as an older family member took their picture. There were children waiting to see parents marry; there were parents waiting to watch children wed. A twentysomething girl with long blond hair and pillowy lips strode through the room in white pumps, her model-like giraffe legs bare but for a pair of small white cutoffs. She had on a blousy, ivory-colored shirt and held a giant bouquet of white flowers in her arms. Her hair and makeup were impeccable, the only color she was wearing a bright red lip. The man she was marrying was dark and handsome, with black hair and tanned skin, a narrow, tall build, and lips as pillowy as his bride’s. Their friends, all rangy
and slim in carefully planned formally informal outfits—shorts and T-shirts but expensive pumps; ties and diamonds and tuxedo jackets with tank tops and thousand-dollar handbags—clustered around them and giggled and looked as much like a photo shoot for the hippest of wedding magazines as possible.

We were called forward so that Violet and Ashok could sign another set of papers, and then we were ushered into a smaller, round waiting room, just outside the chapel, for the final and most important part of the process. We stood around on wedding pins and needles, anticipating the big event. The model-couple emerged from one of the chapels, which was really just a room—there was one on each side, identified as West and East—and Phyllis glanced at them and said, “I’ll give that six months.”

I felt suddenly protective of the pretty young things, though I’d been thinking along the same lines. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they’re in love.”

“Ha!” Phyllis scoffed.

“You never know,” I said.

“C661?” asked a man in a dark suit, peering out of the chapel on the left, and Ashok raised his hand.

“That’s us!” he said.

“Come on in,” said the man. “I’m going to get you two married.”

It could have been a room in any administrative building, with drab, colorless carpet and gray-green walls, but it was a chapel, because inside people were being married, a couple at a time. Marriage record books from the 1800s and 1900s were displayed on a glass-paned shelf, some of them opened to pages that
reflected a specific time in the city’s wedding history. Each entry outlined a story, charting the basics and leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. In October of 1943, on one day in New York City, a navy man from Wisconsin married a waitress from Seattle; a thirty-three-year-old soldier who’d come from Ireland married a twenty-two-year-old domestic, also from Ireland; and a merchant marine from Los Angeles wed a telegraph operator from the Bronx. There were furriers and newsdealers and ball players and students and chauffeurs, from the Upper East and Upper West and Lower East sides, from Alphabet City, from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, from Germany. They were in their thirties and their twenties and sometimes older, too, marrying for the first and second and third times, their ceremonies conducted by Catholic priests and clergymen and rabbis and deputy city clerks, like the one about to marry my friends. This was the history of New York City as much as it was the story of these couples. Someday Violet and Ashok would be in the book, I thought.

“Ready?” asked the clerk. “Ready!” we answered, and he began. A person could pack in a lot of ten-minute ceremonies a day, but regardless of how many he was doing in his shift, this guy was not phoning it in. He delivered his lines with gusto. Violet and Ashok looked at him with serious faces, repeating their lines, cracking smiles occasionally when he made a joke. “Okay, now for the kissing part,” he announced. “Cameras on? Go!” They kissed, we clapped and cheered and hugged, and they were married. On the way out we stopped for a few photos in front of a trompe l’oeil painting of the courthouse, lit by studio lights so
there was no need for a flash, and we briefly perused mementos in the gift shop: coffee mugs, T-shirts, and mouse pads all bearing the phrase “Just married.” But there was no need for a mug when what they had was each other. “Brunch?” said the bride.

We taxied to a restaurant in TriBeCa where, years before, during the height of the
Matrix
frenzy, I’d caught a glimpse of Laurence Fishburne. It was fairly empty this summer Friday, the celebrity diners confined to the couple who’d just gotten married. We drank Champagne and talked about advertising and weddings and the way things had been done in the old days and how they were done now. The conversation was full of non sequiturs, but somehow the themes connected: “I recently went to a wedding down South,” Pandora told us. “The day before the ceremony, the ladies went antiquing, and the men went hunting. I couldn’t bear to antique, so I went out hunting with the boys.” “In the old days of advertising there was so much more care for product, so much more craft to it,” said Bob. “Now everything’s online; everything’s done faster and faster. That doesn’t make it better.” “There’s so little thought to some of it,” added Phyllis.

I thought about my own writing, from print to blogs, and I thought about the old books I’d seen in the chapel. Did progress make things less valuable, less valued? In some ways marriage had become so much
better
, as demonstrated by the range of gender and ethnic mixes I’d seen at the clerk’s office. On the other hand, divorce was immeasurably easier, a common reality for many, including people at this very table. But it was oversimplifying and not entirely correct to say that time had devalued the
institution, or that people who decided not to marry, or who divorced, had made marriage itself as flimsy as a dashed-off banner ad. People were still getting married, and though we did it differently, it still mattered very much to the people who were doing it—maybe it mattered more than ever. It mattered to Violet and Ashok as much as it mattered to Bob and Phyllis. And though I hadn’t done it, it mattered to me, too.