The Wedding Beat (12 page)

Renée once described talking to him as akin to bathing in motor oil: “It’s not necessarily going to hurt you, but it’s not going to help much either.”

To his credit, under his guidance Lifestyles had become one of the most profitable departments, leading to the resentment of hard-news sections that were less popular with readers and the advertisers who covet them. In retaliation, Tucker was the whipping boy of weekly managerial meetings. He was openly treated with disdain and disinterest. Which was pretty much how he treated Renée.

If Lifestyles was the black sheep of the newspaper, Weddings was the black sheep of Lifestyles. Though everything we did was under Tucker’s aegis, it was rare for him to read our pages.
Tony and I once had a bet over who could go the longest without being acknowledged by Tucker. The rules were we had to say “Good morning” or some other salutation every time we saw him. Tony won after twenty-one days, when Tucker asked me to pass him a hand towel in the bathroom.

True to form, Tucker didn’t stop to chitchat after his meeting with Renée, and Renée was also silent as she plopped herself down at her desk and started reviewing page layouts. Tony and I convened at her cubicle in supplication, modern-day Oliver Twists beseeching her for a morsel of information.

“Take those lost-puppy expressions off your faces,” she said, still focused on the layouts. “I got nothing for you.”

“Did Tucker say there would be cuts in our department?” Tony asked. He was worried about supporting his children. I was worried about ever having any.

“No,” Renée answered.

“Did he say there wouldn’t be cuts?” was my follow-up, which received the same monosyllabic response.

Alison made her midmorning entrance. As she took off her wet parka, she said, “I heard Google is buying The Paper.”

“Gawker predicted Murdoch,” Tony lobbed.

Renée rocketed to her feet. “Gawker is a gossip rag,” she said. “This is a newspaper. We stick to facts.”

“No offense, Renée,” said Tony, “but the fact is we saw you arguing with Tucker. We know something is up.”

Renée scowled before declaring, “Tucker is disappointed in our ‘Interweb’ efforts.” The terminology was Tucker’s. We were never quite sure if he was being ironic or ignorant. “He suggested we start posting wedding breaking-news stories.”

“Is there such a thing?” Alison asked. It was an impudent question, but a good one.

“He wants us generating more traffic to the Web site.” Renée read from her notepad. “He wants more sticky eyeballs.”

“I think my kids made those for Halloween,” Tony said.

He chuckled. Renée didn’t.

“Tucker wants us to start a blog with five-hundred- to eight-hundred-word entries posted a minimum of twice daily.”

“Starting when?” Tony asked, no longer laughing.

“As soon as we figure out what the hell we’re going to fill a blog with. He wants a proposal next week.”

“Will we get paid?” was my primary question. Renée gazed at me over the top of her glasses with a look one would give a brain-damaged child.

More work. No extra money. And diminished job security. So far the day was a career trifecta. My unborn children called out to me, begging not to be raised in a studio apartment.

The snow was coming down harder outside the building’s thin glass walls as Renée planted herself back into her chair, signaling us that class was dismissed. “Is any of this negotiable?” I asked. I had started the day determined to ask for a raise, and I’d be damned if I didn’t at least try.

“That depends,” Renée replied.

“On what?”

“On whether you believe Gawker got their story right.”

Chapter Thirteen

M
anhattan is never quite as majestic as during a snowstorm. Skyscrapers melt into soft focus behind swirling white powder that blankets the empty canyons of the traffic grid with car-high snowdrifts. The pristine accumulation makes the city seem cleaner and gentler.

Unless you’re a bride.

In which case, each flake mocks and scorns. Amy was handling it better than many. No tears. No tirades. Just a complete emotional breakdown.

Her florist, Fabio, flagged me down as I emerged from the elevator on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center, warning me there was more than one kind of turbulence at the Top of the Rock.

“The confetti’s here, but the cake is not,” Fabio informed me sotto voce, immediately slipping me his business card. “Her dress is locked in a warehouse in Queens, and her sister’s been
trapped in the Chicago airport for twenty-four hours. It’s no wonder the poor girl is losing it.”

I was already feeling pressured to deliver a killer piece in the hope of protecting my job. A stressed-out bride made for nervous bridesmaids, and nervous bridesmaids gave lousy quotes. It was going to be a long night. Who was I kidding? It was always a long night.

“She’s just staring out the window,” Fabio reported as he led me down a terrazzo-tiled hallway of glass-and-rosewood columns. “At one point she was counting snowflakes. The bridegroom is beside himself, and the best man, well, don’t get me started on the best man.” Fabio seemed to relish the opportunity to be a news source, but I suspected what he really wanted was to get his name in The Paper. “Did I give you my card yet?”

He pushed open a heavy paneled door, revealing Mike in a shawl-collared tuxedo, pacing a plushly carpeted room with a hangdog mien. Beside him was a largish tuxedoed man with thinning blond hair who had one hand on Mike’s shoulder and a champagne glass in the other.

Mike seemed genuinely happy to see me and unexpectedly hugged me, which was both endearing and discomforting. It’s hard to maintain objective distance while being embraced. As a journalist, I like to think there’s an invisible shield surrounding me. I clearly watch too much Cartoon Network.

“This is Brody,” Mike said, gesturing to the man beside him, “the best man.”

“If I’m the best man, then why are you the one she’s marrying?” Brody said with a loud laugh, then downed his champagne in a single gulp and deposited the empty glass on an ebony credenza before vigorously shaking my hand.

Mike smiled halfheartedly. “I’m worried about Amy,” he
said to me. “I’ve never seen her like this. She just shut down. She won’t even talk to me.”

“Well, better get used to that part,” Brody chortled.

“She wants to talk to
you
,” Mike said, looking my direction.

“Me?” I looked behind me to see if someone was standing there. No one was.

“Do you mind?”

Amy was sitting in a curvy Art Deco suite straight out of a 1930s Hollywood film. I pictured a dozen aproned chorines attending to her and breaking into a Gershwin song as the snowflakes spiraled outside the panoramic windows.

“I’m not getting married,” she announced, wrenching me out of musical-comedy land into melodrama.

“You’re the easiest person to tell,” she continued without looking at me. Bereft of her bridal gown, she was wearing a loose-fitting print dress over black leggings, with her arms folded tightly across her chest. “You’re a reporter, so you can report it to everyone else.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Wrangling runaway brides was not part of my job description.

“Every bride gets nervous,” I said, grasping for something impartial but helpful.

“I’m not nervous. I’m making a rational decision.”

If I tried to change her mind, I’d be violating a journalism commandment: Thou shalt not interfere. It was imperative to only observe and never participate in an event being reported. On the other hand, if I didn’t do something fast, there wouldn’t be anything to observe. Not only would all the hours spent interviewing her and Mike be wasted, but I would be left
empty-handed. Wedding or no wedding, I still had an article due and a job potentially on the line.

I had only one experience with a story falling through. It was three years back, when a bridegroom walked down the aisle and then kept on walking—out the side door of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The priest ran after him and so did half the congregation, including the bride’s Sicilian grandmother, who threw her back out throwing her cane at the bridegroom’s Land Rover. While Nana was rushed to Victory Memorial, I made an emergency visit of my own to the marriage bureau at City Hall, where couples go for quickie weddings of minimal pomp and dubious circumstance. I interviewed a Ukrainian masseuse marrying her octogenarian landlord, and two eighteen-year-old high-school dropouts who were expecting their first child (shortly after their ceremony). Out of desperation, I chose to write about the teenagers, because they at least brought flowers. The Ukrainian brought her boyfriend.

I didn’t think Amy should get married just to help me make my deadline, but a wedding definitely seemed mutually beneficial.

“You have a lot of guests arriving,” I said.

“I have a lot of guests not arriving.” She turned toward me, and there were dark smudges of mascara under her eyes. “My sister slept on a bench in O’Hare last night. My favorite aunt and uncle are stuck in Dallas. My cousins in Philly called a few hours ago to say the interstate was closed and they were turning back. I believe in signs, and this is beyond a sign. This is the universe sending me a direct message to stop what I’m doing.”

“If people called off their weddings every time there was a storm, there would be a lot fewer married couples in the world,” I said.

“This
isn’t just a storm. This is biblical.”

To the best of my knowledge, there wasn’t a lot of snow in the bible.

“I wanted to elope,” she said. “I told Mike getting married here felt wrong. He should have listened to what I said.”

“You specifically said that?”

“He should have listened to what I
didn’t
say, and I didn’t say I wanted this. I never wanted a big wedding. He couldn’t possibly have thought that I did. Unless he doesn’t know me, and how can I marry a man who doesn’t know me?”

I assumed the question was rhetorical until she looked up at me with a wide-eyed expression beseeching some kind of response.

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that
you don’t go through with the wedding,” I said.

“I’m not.”

“Then what?”

She didn’t say anything. That was good. It meant she hadn’t had a chance to think things through. Of course, neither had I.

“What do you do after everyone leaves tonight?” I asked, stalling for time. “What do you do tomorrow? What are you going to say to Mike?”

“I think it’s really wrong of you to try and pressure me. I thought you were the one person I could talk to who wouldn’t try to bully me into getting married.”

I wasn’t trying to bully her. It was an unfair accusation, and I resented it.

“I
don’t
think you should get married.” The words came out of my mouth before they had been cleared for takeoff. “If you don’t love Mike and want to spend your life with him, then you shouldn’t marry him.”

“You don’t think I should marry him?” she asked in a small voice.

“Not if you don’t love him.” I was flying on autopilot, unsure of my destination.

“I
do
love him,” she said, not sounding very pleased about it.

“Do you feel that he loves you?”

“Of course I do. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Then I don’t know how you can give up on that,” I blurted. It was how I truly felt—and completely inappropriate to say. I had crossed the line from dispassionate observation to something primordial. “Mike can’t take his eyes off of you. Even when he’s working. He sits in his office and stares at your picture with a look of gratitude and awe. Do you know how many people are searching desperately to find someone who will look at them like that?” My voice was shaking. “You don’t throw love away. I’m not saying getting married is an easy decision. I’m saying you’re lucky that you have someone to make the hard decisions with.”

I felt my lungs compress. I had to stop talking, afraid of what sound was going to come out of my throat. I was mortified to realize my eyes were watering. I could only hope that Amy was too immersed in her own feelings to notice my emotional distress.

“I still don’t have a gown,” she said after a couple minutes of looking out the window. “Or a maid of honor.” She seemed to sink deeper into the upholstered wing chair. “If we had eloped, we wouldn’t be having any of these problems.”

“So elope,” I said, my breathing coming easier.

“It’s a little late for that.”

Was it?

“There’s a judge down the hall, already paid for,” I said. “It’s
not like you’re going to get a refund.” She snapped her head my direction. I couldn’t tell if she was insulted or intrigued.

Forty minutes later, I got my answer. Standing alongside the fifty guests who braved the inclement weather, I watched Amy walk down a petal-strewn aisle in her leggings and Ugg boots. Mike strode beside her, having traded his tuxedo for jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.

Judge Louise Flanagan led a short civil ceremony. No frills. No commentary. No different from if they were in her chambers. When she asked Mike if he promised to love and honor his bride, he spoke directly to Amy, as if she were the only other person in the room.

“Amy,” he said, holding her hands in his, “you are the woman I want. Not someone in a fancy white dress. Not someone who pretends things are okay when they’re not. You stole my heart from the moment I first saw you, and I don’t ever want it back.”

There were tears in her eyes as she responded. “I get scared, Mike. I get lost in my thoughts. Your love is the light that guides me out of the forest. You’re the reason every day for me to find my way out of the forest.”

I had heard so many flowery vows about metaphoric trees, soaring birds and sunny skies. But Amy was acknowledging the darkness. The effort it takes every single day to pull yourself out of yourself. Who wouldn’t be grateful to have someone rooting for you and waiting for you? Someone willing to enter the darkness, Orpheus-like, and rescue you from yourself.

I wondered if I could have been that person for Laurel, and I found myself conceding that I hadn’t been. Even in our most intimate moments, a part of me held back, afraid of being pulled under. Into what, I couldn’t even put into words. It was a self-protective reflex. But without it, I could only imagine how much
worse I would have felt when she left me. If it was possible to feel worse.