The Wedding Beat (25 page)

“Isn’t it nice that Leslie came?” my mother whispered as the rabbi began chanting a Hebrew prayer.

“What’s so nice about it?” my father asked in his attempt at a whisper, which was pretty much his normal voice, except louder.

“It’s nice Gary has someone to go places with,” my mother persisted.

Yes,
I thought,
having a date to bring to a cemetery is a top reason for settling down.
“The ceremony’s starting,” I said, hoping that would shush them.

“Did you talk with Bernie’s niece?” my mother asked. “She’s twenty-six and just graduated from law school.”

“She graduated a year ago,” my father rebutted.

“Either way, she’s a lawyer.”

“Mom!” I admonished under my breath.

“What’s the matter? You’re not related by blood.”

“It’s a funeral.”

“It’s a
mitzvah
.”

I had no energy to disagree. The combination of heat and ancient incantations was making me woozy. Jewish custom dictates burial within twenty-four hours of death, so I’d been going practically nonstop since I received my grandmother’s call as I was leaving the Cornelia Street Café.

It had been a long day. A long year. Well, four months anyway.

It seemed like it was going to be five before the eulogy was over. The rabbi was droning on. He had switched to English, but I found it even harder to focus on his platitudes about sunsets and burning candles. Looking around, I wasn’t the only one who seemed to be wilting. My father’s eyelids were at half-mast.

Finally, we were reciting the kaddish, the prayer for the dead, and the casket slowly descended into the grave. The rabbi lifted a shovel for the ritual task of throwing dirt onto the coffin. When no one fetched the spade from him, he loudly cleared his throat, cueing us into action.

“Saul!” my mother brayed.

“What?” My father’s eyelids flew open and his head jerked like that of a bus driver about to collide with the back of a semi.

“Take the shovel.”

“You take the shovel,” he said, embracing his inner toddler.

My grandmother flinched but didn’t say anything.

“Will one of you please take it?” I begged.

“He’s not my father,” was
my
father’s response.

“He’s not my father either,” my mother volleyed, eliciting another convulsion from my grandmother.

“Then why’s there five pounds of smoked salmon in our refrigerator?”

My mother grabbed the shovel. I’m guessing her intention was to force it into my father’s hands. I’m guessing, because I can only assume she had a lucid goal in mind when she thrust
it toward him. Unfortunately, he chose that precise moment to sneeze. As he bent over, she whacked his forehead, drawing blood.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelped.

The rabbi’s eyes bugged out.

Laurel was right. I lived in mortal fear of becoming my parents. All my protestations about wanting to get married were lies. Marriage terrified me. When I thought of marriage, I thought of two people bickering for eternity and walloping each other with oversized garden tools. Marriage was just legal permission to torture someone with impunity.

I seized the shovel. “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

“I need a Band-Aid,” my father muttered, and a dozen purses zipped open in unison, as if bandages could solve his problems.

Why hadn’t someone stopped my parents from mating? Someone should have pointed out that liking the same radio station and brand of ginger ale made them compatible bowling teammates, not life partners. They should never have fallen in love. The fact that they did proved that love was not only blind but heartless. Not to be trusted. Of course I was afraid of marriage. I’d been imprinted from infancy to seek out a long-term dysfunctional relationship with someone who would make me miserable. It was like being a genetic carrier of a disfiguring disease—one that I could potentially pass on to another generation.

I attacked the fresh mound of dirt with ferocity, flicking a shovelful into the open grave. I heard the soft thud of impassive soil hitting wood and skidding scattershot across the coffin. It made me horribly conscious of what I was doing.

I was burying a man beneath the earth, dispatching him to the jurisdiction of invertebrates. Polonius had it wrong; we are all both borrowers
and
lenders. I was returning Bernie for final
payment. Or was I hiding him? We bury what we want to forget, and I desperately wanted to forget seeing him in his casket. I pictured him lying there now. Worse, I pictured myself in his place. A body in a box in a hole. Alone. It all became too much. The heat and the dirt. The shovel and the blood. Laurel and Melinda. I dropped to my knees, sobbing.

My grandmother leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “Bernie loved you too.”

The guests, mercifully, dispersed quickly. My parents, having regained higher brain function, escorted my grandmother to their car, where condolences could be offered with air-conditioning. I lingered beside Gary, while Leslie waited in their rental car, also air-conditioned.

“That was intense,” Gary said. “I didn’t know you felt so deeply about Bernie.”

I filled him in about Laurel’s accusation. “Standing at the graveside, I realized there’s something worse than ending up like Mom and Dad, and that’s ending up alone.” It seemed so obvious, yet I had chosen precisely that. To be alone, and, worse, I hadn’t even admitted to myself that I was making the choice.

“I know,” Gary said, placing his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“You have?” I wasn’t alone. I had Gary. I would always have Gary. I almost welled up again.

“I proposed to Leslie last night.”

I knew how my father felt getting ambushed by a family member.

“We were waiting until after the funeral to tell everyone.” Gary hugged me. “Congratulate me. I’m getting married.”

Chapter Twenty-six

“I
know I shouldn’t be calling you,” I said while standing in the floor-to-ceiling lavender guest bathroom of my parents’ home. I took a deep breath, hoping I didn’t sound like an obscene caller. There was so much I wanted to say to Melinda. None of it appropriate for the particular time and place, as bladder-challenged guests jiggled the locked door.

I had snuck away from my assigned duty of greeting the parade of bereaved friends bearing brisket. I could hear my mother’s muffled voice calling my name. It was only a matter of minutes before she’d be knocking on the door, demanding I come out or confess to intestinal distress from eating too much smoked salmon.

I was in distress, but it had nothing to do with kippered seafood.

I’d been thinking about calling Melinda ever since the funeral ended. Strike that. I’d been thinking about it since the
moment she ran away from me. It had been nonstop since the funeral.

I’d been afraid of her reaction. I didn’t want to cause her more pain. And I didn’t want to be rejected again. But if Laurel was right, that was all just an excuse.

The phone felt heavy in my hand as I weighed my words. I wanted to apologize. To let her know that I never meant to hurt her. But mostly to tell her I was hopelessly and helplessly in love with her and to find out if there was any chance my feelings could be reciprocated. Of course, I didn’t think that was the kind of thing to say on voice mail. So I just asked her to please return my call.

Then I tried to remember why I thought calling would make me feel better.

“Why are you still single?” Matt Lauer asked me with the discretion of a demolition wrecking ball.

It wasn’t an interview. It was an interrogation. I thought I’d be sharing amusing anecdotes about bridezillas, not defending my extended bachelorhood on national television.

“Doesn’t it bother you going to weddings week after week and not being married?”

For the past several days I’d harbored a secret fantasy of being offered a job as a cohost of the
Today Show
. I imagined Matt and me bonding instantly, one Jewish reporter to another (yes, he’s only half-Jewish, but it’s a genetic thing). I pictured him telling me (and America) that I’d missed my calling, and asking me to join the
Today
team. Then, for good measure, he’d invite me to the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party.

Okay, I knew Matt Lauer wasn’t really Santa Claus and Graydon Carter rolled into one, but if Elisabeth Hasselbeck could be a morning-show host, why not me?

“Do you
want
to get married?” Matt asked with no hint of Semitic kinship.

Of course I wanted to get married. Did being thirty-seven and single make me some kind of freak? “Yes,” I answered, sweating under the hot studio lights and regretting, well, everything about my life.

“Why?” he asked.

I smiled blankly.

“Why do you want to get married?”

No one had ever asked me that before. My eyelids swung up and down. My jaw dropped open. It shouldn’t have been such a hard question to answer.

I wanted to get married so I’d have someone to watch
The Daily Show
with. I wanted someone to ride with me on an overnight train through the Canadian Rockies and on a hot-air balloon in the Hudson Valley. I wanted to hold someone in my arms and make her feel protected. I wanted to put someone’s happiness before my own.

“I want to get married so I don’t have to shave my back.”

The audience standing outside the
Today
show erupted with laughter. I had no idea why the words of Mike Russo’s best man were still occupying cranial real estate, let alone how they had tumbled out of my mouth.

“Well, Gavin,’ Matt said, “different
strokes
for different folks.”

The audience laughed again. There was an eighth circle of hell reserved for mortals who dared to fly too close to the klieg lights.

“Coming up,” Matt said, looking into the camera, “taking the ‘maid’ out of ‘bridesmaid.’ After the break.”

There was a flurry of activity as the show went to commercial. A production assistant seemed to crawl up from under me
as he removed my microphone. Matt gave me a brisk handshake and a consoling pat on the back. His expression said, “Sorry, dude, but you’re going to be seeing that clip on YouTube for the rest of your life.”

Another assistant with a goatee and headset escorted me back to the green room to gather my belongings and the shreds of my pride. But pride be damned. When I had pictured the woman I wanted to love and protect, it was Melinda, and my top priority was checking my voice mail to see if she had called.

I had left her a half dozen messages and received none in return. Standing in a corner of the waiting room, amid the oversized photos of overexuberant NBC stars, I felt like a junkie getting my fix as I stabbed at my cell phone. If I had refrained from contacting her, the possibility of doing so would have remained an option. Instead, I was left without prerogatives beyond compulsively calling my voice mail.

I had no messages. The morning was a smorgasbord of disappointment.

Roxanne hurtled into the room, looking grim and clearly regretting having booked me on the show. She was accompanied by a tall, wiry guy with a mop of dark hair. They both eyed me like anthropologists examining a specimen from the species
Homo uncommiticus
.

“You really have a way with words,” Roxanne said. Translation: It’s obvious why you’re still single. “This is Liam O’Neill, one of our segment producers.”

“You’re one funny dude,” he said with a distracted glance my direction.

I wasn’t sure if he meant “funny” as in “ha-ha” or as in “scary.”

“We usually don’t comment on a guest’s ‘performance.’” Roxanne displayed air quotes like she was Richard Nixon with
Tourette’s. “However, we try hard to maintain the quality level of the
Today
brand, so we felt obligated to say something to you.”

The last thing I needed was a reprimanding. I picked up my shoulder bag and grabbed a bagel for the road. There was nothing they could say I had any interest in hearing.

Liam cracked a smile. “I have a job proposition for you.”

Except that.

Chapter Twenty-seven

“N
o, no, no, no, no!” squawked the exasperated bride-to-be.

I was back to being a wedding reporter, but this time I had a partner in crime. Liam had a video camera slung over the back of his shoulder and a
Today
Show
ID hanging round his neck as we stood in the rear of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a neo-Gothic landmark in Harlem. A gospel choir was practicing thick, joyful harmonies in the amphitheater-shaped sanctuary, and accompanying, or, rather, overriding them were the yawps of Wanda Robinson, a spitfire of a woman in her fifties with café au lait skin and long, painted fingernails that were a miracle of modern cosmetology.

“Do those choir robes look pink to you?” she challenged her wedding coordinator, whose weary expression suggested it had been a long night.

“Honey,
if they were any pinker, they’d be illegal south of the Mason-Dixon Line.”

“I want pink,” said Wanda, her snug green suit creeping up her ample bosom. “Not hot pink. I’ve got a hundred and fifty people coming next Saturday, and they’re not expecting a Victoria’s Secret runway show.”

“Just because they’re not expecting it don’t mean they wouldn’t enjoy it,” said a bemused man with a gray buzz cut, sitting in the last pew.

Wanda turned to us. “You can take him away any time you like.”

The “him” in question stood up and extended his hand. He was also in his fifties, with a lineman’s build, dark skin and a gentle handshake. “Duane Mackenzie. Everyone calls me Big Mac.”

“They most certainly do not,” was the immediate, high-pitched rejoinder.

“Everyone but Wanda,” he said.

“He’s not a cheeseburger,” she said with an emphatic shake of her head. “He’s a grown man, and occasionally he acts like one.”

“I’d do a whole lot more than acting if you wore one of those hot pink robes.”

Liam chuckled.

My problem was that there was only one wedding I was interested in, and that one was taking place in a little less than twenty-four hours at a synagogue four miles south. I hadn’t heard a word from Melinda, but I kept calling anyway. Listening to her voice on her outgoing message seemed to be as close as I was going to get to her. I knew I should give up, and told myself that every time I checked my voice mail.