The Wedding Beat (26 page)

“You
have a hot date tonight?” asked Liam as he caught me looking at my phone for the umpteenth time.

Bad move. This assignment was my audition. Liam had been amused by what he called my “unpretentious” on-air style and pitched his executive producer the idea of doing a video version of my wedding column. If I aced this trial run, I’d get a staff position at three times my previous salary. If I flubbed, I’d be back on unemployment.

“No date,” I assured him. “I’m all yours.” We were setting up in the balcony while Wanda held court below. Actually, Liam was setting up. I was fidgeting with my phone and trying to look as if I knew what I was doing.

“So, you’re on the wedding beat?” Duane asked me while Liam finished attaching his camera to a tripod.

“That’s what they call it,” I said.

“I dig it,” he said, sounding every bit the jazz musician that he was.

Just my luck. I finally got a musician to interview, and I’d been instructed to stick to questions about why it took him thirty years to marry his college sweetheart.

“Oh, can’t say I know the answer to that,” he drawled. Never a promising start.

Liam grimaced behind the camera. I prodded Duane. “What was Wanda like in the seventies?”

“Same as she is today. We picked up right where we left off. Of course, she sometimes treats me like one of her fifth-grade students, but I sometimes act like one.”

That would make a lovely quote for their twentieth anniversary video, but it was doing
bupkes
for me.

“Duane …”

“You can call me Big Mac.” I could, but I’d feel like I was interviewing the Hamburglar.

“Guys
don’t usually let the woman they love marry someone else.” Or maybe they did. I peeked at my phone while he ruminated.

“After college, she made it very clear she wanted a ring,” he said.

“What about you?”

“I wanted a new horn.” His eyes crinkled as he shot me a sheepish grin. Then he became contemplative again. “You know, it
is
kind of like a beat.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“The wedding beat. It’s like a drumbeat. A bass drum. Steady and slow. Getting louder and heavier as more and more people join. On bongos and tom-toms. But not everyone hears it. No, that’s not true. Everyone hears it, but some ignore it. Some people think they got a different beat inside them. They want to move to their own rhythm. And if they’re lucky, they will. They’ll find a groove that’s theirs and theirs alone, but one day they’ll look up and realize there’s no one else ever gonna dance along to that beat.”

The wedding beat.

It had been booming in my head for the last five years. Amplified week after week in couple after couple. A thunderous sound, pounding and pulsating. Incessantly. Beating me into admission that I was a failure at love. A failure at finding it. A failure at sharing it.

My phone rang. Melinda’s number flashed on the screen. I answered without thinking.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you!”

The angry male voice was jarring.

“Stop calling her,” Alexander commanded. “Stop calling her, or I promise you’ll regret it.” That’s all he said before clicking off.

I was too shocked to be upset. And I couldn’t really blame
Alexander for being angry. He wouldn’t have called me if he hadn’t felt threatened. And he wouldn’t have felt threatened unless …

I was already running toward the stairs before I registered the bewildered look on Liam’s face or the inquisitive one on Duane’s. “I’m sorry,” I proffered midstride. “I have to go. Wedding emergency.”

I raced down 138th Street. I was endangering a job I couldn’t afford to lose. I needed to go back, apologize to Liam, and pull myself together, which was precisely what I was instructing myself to do as I hailed a taxi and recited Melinda’s address to the driver.

The cab zipped through the night streets, yet it seemed to be taking forever to reach Melinda’s block, which gave me more time to think about what I was doing and the wisdom of doing it. And that was my biggest problem: thinking too much. Every choice was a monumental task for me, because I never wanted to make a decision without having all the facts. What was considered an admirable trait in my work had become a debilitating one in the rest of my life.

I needed to let go. I needed to be the bee.

No, that was too simplistic. I was parroting other people’s advice, when I didn’t need any advice to know what I wanted. I wanted Melinda. From the moment I met her. Yet I had hesitated, waiting as always to analyze the facts. But there were no facts. There was only a feeling. And I hadn’t appreciated what an extraordinarily rare feeling it was until it was too late.

But it wasn’t too late. Not yet.

My hands were shaking as I paid the fare. I tried to do deep breathing, counting slowly from one to ten, but I kept losing tally after three. A vivid splash of colored flowers caught my eye at the corner deli, and I quickly bought a bouquet of lilacs along with a roll of mints.

I could see a light in Melinda’s window. The last steps to the front door of her building were the hardest. I was gambling everything on a Hail Mary, and if it didn’t work, there was no fallback position. I reached for her buzzer.

Then I stopped. If she wouldn’t pick up my phone calls, there was no reason to assume she would let me in. It would be easy for her to ignore my buzzing, and she wouldn’t have to risk looking at me or listening to me. I had a much better chance of wearing down her resistance if I was standing outside her actual apartment and pleading my case with only a door separating us.

Or a window.

Moments later I was scrambling up the fire escape, glad I’d had a practice run in daylight. I leaned over the railing nearest her apartment and peered inside. The room was barren. I had to double-check I was on the right floor. There were moving boxes piled along the stripped walls. The photographs were gone. The furniture was gone. And there was no sign of Melinda.

Yet the lights were on, so my guess was that she was in the bedroom. How was I going to get her attention? I hadn’t really thought this through beyond envisioning her charmed by my Romeo-like appearance at her window, lilacs in hand. I was considering my options when I heard rustling inside the apartment. I didn’t have much longer to wait before Melinda appeared from around a corner. Or, more accurately, a large box appeared with well-toned legs beneath it.

I gently tapped on the window. The box descended a few inches, revealing a startled face. But the face belonged to Alexander’s mother. She screamed. I screamed. The box fell. The flowers flew. She screamed again. There was the sound of breaking glass. Probably from the box hitting the floor. I can’t say for sure, because I was already running down the metal steps, hoping she hadn’t recognized me. Knowing full well that she had.

Chapter Twenty-eight

S
pring sunshine spilled in through my drawn blinds. It only felt like the darkest day of my life.

“Did you call the police?” Hope asked.

I eyed her with disbelief. “To turn myself in?”

“To make sure that woman was okay.”

There were many times I admired Hope for being such a conscientious physician. This wasn’t one of them.

“She could have gone into cardiac arrest,” Hope said. “She could be lying unconscious on the floor of that apartment.”

“Well, I’m sure as hell not going back to find out.”

“When did you become such an asshole?” Hope was infuriated, but in my defense, it was less my doing than A.J.’s. “Is every man in this city lacking all moral judgment?”

To A.J.’s credit, he finally did call her. To his eternal damnation, it was to inform her he was getting married. When pressed, he admitted he’d been engaged the entire time they’d been
dating. I thought he would have been better off going with the traditional “It’s not you, it’s me.”

“How hard is it to pick up a phone and dial nine-one-one?” Hope grumbled while gorging herself on my Frosted Flakes, which were surprisingly effective for self-medicating abrasions of the heart. “You didn’t even have to leave your name.”

“Why aren’t you worried that
she
called the police? There could be an APB out on me as we speak.”

“If the police were looking for you, don’t you think they would have found you by now?”

Hope had a point. Which meant I could stop wincing every time I heard a siren. The truth was I shouldn’t have run away from Genevieve. I should have stayed and held my ground, or railing, and demanded she tell me where Melinda was.

Of course, she would have sooner stabbed me with a hat pin.

“What if she’s dead?” Hope badgered.

“What if she’s not?” I lashed out. “What if she’s at Temple Emanu-El, tying her son’s bow tie as we speak? The wedding’s in less than two frigging hours.” I was caught in a vise that was slowly and inexorably closing.

Hope’s expression softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was today.” Then she socked me in the arm. “What are you still doing here?”

“Where am I supposed to be? Crashing the wedding? That would be insane.”

“Didn’t stop you yesterday.”

“I’ve done everything I can do.”

“Except tell Melinda how you feel.”

“She doesn’t care how I feel!”

“Because she doesn’t know!” Hope’s tears came so quickly, I was baffled by what had triggered them. “You owe her the truth.”

I had to stop making women cry.

“What kind of person uses an online-dating site when he’s engaged to be married?” she blubbered.

“A despicable person,” I assured her, wanting to staunch her weeping while also envying it.

“What’s wrong with me?” she moaned. “Because there must be something wrong with me. Or am I just doomed?” She was clearly asking the wrong person.

“You’re not doomed,” I said, thinking friends should really coordinate their emotional crises so they don’t overlap.

“Then maybe I’m doing this to myself. Maybe I purposely pick guys who are gong to leave. Or maybe I make them leave. So I can play out some childhood psychodrama over and over.” It was the closest she had come to talking about her father in years.

“Or maybe A.J.’s just an asshole,” I consoled.

“A.J. is such an asshole.” She was still crying. But also smiling.

My buzzer rang.

“Who’s that?” Hope asked between sniffles.

I’d been expecting Liam when she arrived. “My producer,” I said as I buzzed him in the front door of my walk-up.

“He didn’t fire you?” Her confidence in me was underwhelming, but so was Liam’s.

“He recently had a bad breakup, so he’s taking pity on me.” And by “pity” I meant that he had allowed me to beg him for a second chance, which was bestowed on the condition that I agreed to be his personal slave. He was dropping off some video footage. Along with his laundry.

There was a knock at the door, and while Hope continued seeking sugared solace, I wearily went to open it.

“You fucking son of a bitch.”

It wasn’t Liam.

Alexander was wearing his wedding tuxedo and a murderous look. His face resembled a ripe tomato.

“I told you to stay the fuck away from my fiancée.” At least I knew that Genevieve was alive.

“Technically, you told me not to call,” I said, flirting with a death wish.

“I’ll give you technical, you piece of shit.” Spittle flew from his mouth.

I was surprisingly calm for someone about to be pummeled. Until Hope came up behind me. Worse than getting beaten up by the guy marrying the woman I loved was having it happen in front of Hope. She gaped at Alexander.

“A.J.?” she said.

Alexander looked as if he had just been hit by a Mack truck.

“What on earth are you doing here?” Hope asked him.

His eyes darted back and forth between us. “Is this some kind of setup?”

Hope turned to me, accusingly. “How do you know him?” I was no longer sure I did.

“Just stay away from me,” muttered Alexander or A.J. or whoever he was. “Both of you stay the hell away from me.” He took off down the stairs.

Hope and I stood in the doorway, staring after him in shock. I grabbed my jacket and ran.

“Where are you going?” she called out.

“I have a wedding to stop.”

The imposing limestone and stained-glass facade of Temple Emanu-El rose along Fifth Avenue like an ornate fortress wall. A policeman guarded the ten-foot bronze doors. I feared he was
stationed there solely to detain me. Keeping my head down, I joined a handful of people standing in line.

“Name?” the officer asked the couple ahead of me without glancing up from his clipboard.

“We’re here for the wedding,” said a middle-aged woman with “Long Island” stamped on her forehead and in her sinus cavities.

“That’s why I’m asking your name. The mayor’s attending, and only people on the official list will be allowed inside.”

“How exciting.”

“Frustrating” was more the word I had in mind. I slipped out of the line to reassess. Coming up with another tactic, I inconspicuously strolled to the street corner, then zipped down the block to the service entrance. There was an officer posted there as well.

Returning to Fifth Avenue, I was lacking options other than making a dash for the doorway and using the element of surprise to get past the cop. I was calculating my odds of finding Melinda before being read my Miranda rights when I almost collided with Melinda’s grandfather. He was on a cigar break. Or lookout duty.

He was turned the other way, so he didn’t see me do a one-eighty and double back around the corner. Retrieving a newspaper from a sidewalk trash can, I shielded my face before inching my way forward. I glanced above the headlines. Her grandfather was still standing there. He was using a cane, but otherwise seemed to have recovered well. I doubted his doctors would approve of his smoking, but that was probably also true before his attack. Maybe I could appeal to his renegade spirit. Maybe I could kidnap him.

“Does The Paper now pay you to loiter at synagogues?”

There was no mistaking the gravelly voice or the phlegmy cough that followed the query.

“I can explain,” I said.