Authors: Devan Sipher
The Wedding Beat
The Wedding Beat
“Filled with sharp observations, hilarious truths and poignant moments. Reading
The Wedding Beat
is like sitting next to the wittiest guest at a wedding—a rare find!”
—Beth Harbison,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Shoe Addicts Anonymous
“For any woman who devours the wedding section every Sunday, wondering when her own Mr. Right will come along,
The Wedding Beat
is a romantic, hilarious and inspiring story of the angst behind the announcements.”
—Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin,
New York Times
bestselling authors of
The Nanny Diaries
“Devan Sipher uses his journalist’s sharp eye for detail to take a delightful and fresh look at the romantic comedy genre. Go for a wild, hilarious ride-along with Sipher as he works
The Wedding Beat
.”
—Jillian Lauren,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Some Girls
and
Pretty
“Romantic and charming, Devan Sipher’s debut novel is a fresh and fun take on finding (and committing to) love.”
—Laura Dave, author of
The First Husband
“Smart, laugh-out-loud funny and unabashedly romantic. Get thee to a beach and read.” —Sarah Dunn, author of
The Big Love
“Nothing feels more right than love gone wrong from a man’s point of view. Sipher gives us the male Bridget Jones—winning, elegant and terribly lost. No cold feet here. I do, I do, I do!”
—Jennifer Belle, author of
High Maintenance
and
The Seven Year Bitch
“Fast-paced, unfailingly funny and fresh,
The Wedding Beat
is like the best wedding cakes: delightfully frothy on the outside, but surprisingly substantial within.”
—Anne Newgarden, author of
Becoming Jane:
The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen
“Hilarious, hip and deeply heartfelt all at the same time, as if Woody Allen was younger, cuter and wrote a wedding column.”
—Susan Shapiro, author of
Overexposed
and
Five Men Who Broke My Heart
wedding
beat
devan sipher
N
EW
A
MERICAN
L
IBRARY
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, April 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Devan Sipher, 2012
Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012
Cover photo by Paul Simcock/Getty Images;
wedding dress © 300dpi/Shutterstock Images
Author photo by Stacey Luftig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Sipher, Devan.
The wedding beat/Devan Sipher.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58024-0
1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.I5763W43 2012
813.6—dc23 2011045426
Set in Bauer Bodoni
Designed by Ginger Legato
Printed in the United States of America
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
To all the brides and grooms
who shared their stories—and inspired mine
wedding
beat
Chapter One: A Dead Fish at the Head Table and Other Celebration Snafus
Chapter Two: Never Have Parents
Chapter Three: Let Dead Fish Lie
Chapter Four: What a Fool Believes
Chapter Five: If Cinderella Were on Facebook, Would Jiminy Cricket Tweet?
Chapter Six: The News Zoo Revue
Chapter Eight: Arrested Development
Chapter Ten: Dating for Dummies
Chapter Thirteen: The Better Man
Chapter Fourteen: In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning
Chapter Sixteen: Ripe for the Picking
Chapter Seventeen: Flying Solo
Chapter Eighteen: Dork Is a Four-Letter Word
Chapter Nineteen: Facts and Figures
Chapter Twenty: Up, Up and Away
Chapter Twenty-one: Male Pattern Boldness
Chapter Twenty-two: There Will Be Blood
Chapter Twenty-three: No News Is Good News
Chapter Twenty-four: The New Me
Chapter Twenty-five: Always a Bridesmaid
Chapter Twenty-six: No Day but Today
Chapter Twenty-seven: The Wedding Beat
Chapter Twenty-nine: Sanity Is in the Eye of the Beholder
Prologue
Reporter’s Notepad:
December 31, 2007
H
elp! I’m being held hostage at a black-tie wedding on New Year’s Eve. Well, not so much a hostage as an indentured servant for a Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper that cannot be named.
Fifty-seven minutes and counting, and the ceremony hasn’t even started. The chamber quartet is playing “Endless Love” for the third time. Shoot me now.
I’m scribbling in my pad and trying to forget I’m a thirty-seven-year-old single guy alone on New Year’s. No, not alone. Surrounded by married couples. The only single woman is the bride’s grandmother, who is eighty-five and a humpback. And even she has a date.
I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be writing about a wedding at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts, a nineteenth-century former synagogue on the Lower East Side, where uptown brides look for downtown panache. I want to be
with Jill. I want to be kissing the back of her neck and wrapping my arms around her as we sway to the gentle beat of samba music at the Blue Iguana.
A bridesmaid is finally walking down the aisle. Slowly. I’ve never heard Pachelbel’s
Canon
played so slowly. A flower girl floats by on a cloud of white taffeta. All big eyes and brown ringlets.
I see the bride stand in the amber glow of candlelight, and something inside me surrenders. I can’t help thinking of all the brides that came before her, linked together by a white dress, a band of gold and a first kiss. It’s a moment of transcendent hope.
And it makes me feel unbearably alone.
Chapter One
“D
id you know that Sarah Jessica Parker was married here?” Barbara babbled.
The party planner was trying to distract me. And with good reason. Sarah Jessica Parker never killed a koi. I glanced toward a golden-hued, imported fish floating listlessly in the bridal table’s centerpiece.
“You know, Mimi and Sarah Jessica go to the same massage therapist,” Barbara informed me, speaking reverently of both the bride and the trendsetting actress. “They have a very similar aesthetic.”
The only aesthetic I could detect was unmitigated extravagance. Tuxedoed waiters were serving Dom Pérignon and beluga blini appetizers beneath hanging gardens of white hydrangeas, suspended from the vaulted ceiling of the Angel Orensanz. The sanctuary-turned–art and event space was decked out for the holiday nuptials with seven-foot silver candelabra and curtains
of crystal beads surrounding twenty-five tables draped in shimmering white silk and French lace that matched the bride’s gown. From the center of each table rose a cylindrical glass aquarium of iridescent koi swimming among submerged orchids.
Except for the bridal table, where the drowned flowers were not the only casualty.
“Get me the fish wrangler,” Barbara barked into her headset. Her shapeless black suit was all shoulders and elbows as she shooed away Eddie Wong, the Annie Leibovitz of wedding photographers, who was snapping pictures of the kamikaze koi.
“Promise me you won’t write about this in The Paper,” Barbara implored, grasping hold of my arm as if it were a personal flotation device. “It would destroy the bride. She’s a vegetarian.”
I smiled as if I understood the connection. Bad choice. Smiling just encourages people to keep talking.
“Mimi wanted this day to be perfect. Just like her love for Mylo. You know, she would love him even if he was a ditchdigger.”
But Mylo was not a ditchdigger. He was a partner in a real estate hedge fund that didn’t like having its name in a newspaper. Or so I was told a half dozen times by their communications director.
“Mimi knew she was destined to be with Mylo from the night they met,” Barbara continued. “They’re like Romeo and Juliet. Without the suicide.”
The couple’s apothecary-free saga began last summer at a surprise birthday party on a 210-foot yacht anchored in Sag Harbor. The yacht was his. The surprise was hers. And the attraction was immediate. The party ended at about four in the morning, and she stayed on board—for the next six weeks. Then she moved into his Park Avenue duplex penthouse. That was the
end of act one. Act two began when she found out there already was a Mrs. Mylo, who was giving up the honorific very reluctantly. There were tears. There was packing. And there were canceled reservations in St. Barts.
