The Wedding Beat (9 page)

When guys did this kind of thing in movies, it seemed less lecherous. Usually there was romantic music playing. Maybe my iPod would help. With earphones in place, I continued my search for Melinda as Cee Lo Green crowed about being “Crazy.”

The crowd thickened, and my head was pivoting from side to side when I saw a petite figure with a windblown mop of dark ringlets waving at someone to my right. I hurried in that direction. Then scurried back when I saw my least-favorite redhead waving in response.

The two women embraced. In a nonsexual way, I noted with some relief. Then they hurried inside before I could glimpse anything but curls and coat. I trailed behind them (at a nonthreatening distance). The lights in the lobby flickered on and off, and so did my faith in my quest.

Making a quick change in tactics, I entered the auditorium and strode purposefully to the front row. Then I turned around and scoured the audience as if I was looking for someone—and, of course, I was.

There were close to two hundred people seated or wrestling with their coats. I slowly walked up the aisle, scanning each and every row. Melinda was somewhere in the room, and I was going to find her.

Or so I believed for the first ten rows. By the thirteenth row, I was having a bad feeling. But there in the last row was a familiar flash of scarlet frizz and scowl, and one seat over I could see bounteous brunet tresses. She was bent over, looking for something in her bag. Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew it was Melinda. I knew it ten feet away. I knew it three feet away. I knew it as she looked up at me with a mystical expression on her tawny, African-American face.

I was doomed to keep pursuing the wrong Melindas.

Two hours later, I was sitting on a park bench, facing the brightly lit lobby of the student center as the last of the lecture’s attendees filed out of the auditorium. I watched a rail-thin guy with shaggy dark hair hold the door for a winsome blonde. There was something effortless about the way he put his arm around her. They stood together at the street corner, leaning against each other, her mittened hand stroking his cheek.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said Hope, who magically appeared at my side. Actually, it wasn’t that magical, because I had left her a message telling her exactly where I was, in case her date ended early.

“You didn’t have to come,” I said, very grateful that she had. Her warm green eyes were wet from the cold. Though I’d never
admit it to Gary, there were moments I imagined Hope was the woman I belonged with. She was compassionate and insightful and made kick-ass ravioli from scratch. She was also taller than me without heels. She said dating shorter men made her feel like a circus freak. And it was hard for me to picture being with a woman whose neck was bigger than mine.

“Why are you sitting outside?” she asked as she sat down beside me. It was in the thirties, but there was no wind. I found the cool temperature made it easier to think. Not that thinking was helping.

“The important thing is you did something,” Hope said. I looked at her glumly. “Or you tried to do something. That’s all any of us can do.”

“There’s another lecture here next week,” I said.

“Do you really want to do this again?”

“Mike Russo showed up at a subway station every day for weeks.”

“You’re not Mike Russo,” she pointed out. “You can show up here every single day for the rest of the semester, if that will make you happy. You may eventually find Melinda, and she may remember you. It’s possible.”

The way she said “possible” suggested she firmly believed it wasn’t. I suddenly felt very tired. I could feel my motivation dissipating out of my arteries and into the brisk night air.

“How was your date?” I remembered to ask her.

“Conrad proposed,” she said softly.

I was shocked. He had done everything to convince her (and me) that he was not interested in any form of cohabitation. Then after five years of noncomittal bullshit, presto change-o, he dove into the deep end of the pool. I had underestimated him, and I felt like an idiot. Especially since Hope had let me carry on about
Melinda before telling me her great news. “Congratulations!” I said, embracing her.

She started crying. “He didn’t propose to
me
. He proposed to a girl he met five months ago in the Hamptons.” She pulled a used Kleenex out of her coat pocket and dabbed at her eyes.

“Why would he take you out on a date if he’s engaged to someone else?” I was incensed on her behalf.

“He didn’t take me on a date. He had a glass of wine with me before meeting
her
for dinner. He said he wanted to let me know in person. But what he really wanted was for me to let you know, so that you would write about their wedding. Promise me you will not write about their wedding.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s going to be some over-the-top event at a château in Provence. The scumbag promised to take me to Provence last summer, but then he said he was too busy.”

“You’ve been to Provence,” I said, trying to console her. “Twice.”

“That’s not the point!” she snapped. “He said she’s everything he’s ever wanted. Meaning a Parisian size-two former model with a PhD in art history and an aristocratic title. And don’t ask where he met her.” I wasn’t going to, but I was curious.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could say. I suspected losing Conrad wasn’t the hardest part for Hope. It was having it happen in the same way her mother lost her father. But Hope wasn’t married to Conrad. And they didn’t have a seven-year-old daughter.

“I’m better off,” she said. “I had no business dating a guy who waxes his eyebrows.” She stood up and took a deep breath, gazing sadly across the street at the now-empty lobby. “Are you ready to go?”

“No,” I said, also getting up. I couldn’t tell Hope that the
thought of her ex marrying a French model with a doctorate made me even more queasy than I felt at the start of the evening. Instead, I took her hand in mine.

“It’s going to be a long weekend,” she said, still focused somewhere in the distance.

“At least you don’t have to go to a wedding tomorrow,” I said, realizing how much I was dreading it.

“The love coach?”

“That’s next week. This week I’ve got a Secret Service agent who met his fiancée at a firearms convention.”

Hope’s eyes were watering.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” I said, wanting to believe it. She hugged me tightly, and I thought my life would be so much easier if I were in love with her.

“I’m thinking of trying online dating again,” she said, resting her forehead against my own. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

Chapter Ten

“Y
ou gotta make your own luck,” said Mike Russo. I was in the SoHo office of the buff dating guru and star of the new syndicated series
Don’t Think Twice: Russo’s Rules of Romance
. He looked unnaturally tan for mid-January as he proselytized to his audience of one. “That’s what I tell my clients. When you see someone you’re attracted to, you talk to her. Anytime. Anywhere.”

“In a doctor’s office?” I was skeptical.

“In a freaking ambulance,” he said. It was our last interview before Mike’s wedding, and as we veered off topic, he was loosening up. “I’m also a big fan of anyplace you have to stand in line. People waiting in line are miserable, and misery loves company. I particularly like banks, grocery stores, and the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

“How often are people at the Department of Motor Vehicles?”

“There
are worse ways to spend an afternoon,” he said with the dreamy look of a man remembering a weekend in Ibiza—and not remembering Ibiza.

“So you advise your clients to just go up to women they don’t know?” I was still holding to the pretense that my questions were exclusively related to the wedding article.

“Ask for the time. That’s a standard icebreaker.”

“Women often ask me for the time, but I don’t assume they’re coming on to me.”

“You
should
,” he admonished. “You’re an attractive guy with an impressive job. You shouldn’t have any problem meeting women.”

Then why was he assuming that I did?

“First thing out of your mouth should be where you work. I know a guy at the
Wall Street Journal
who’s dating a Versace model, and he’s a total dog. You’ve got that whole sensitive-wedding-columnist thing going for you. Chicks eat that up.”

It was almost a week since the reading at NYU, and I had stopped looking for Melinda. Well, other than in a random kind of way, when walking to work or riding the subway. I hadn’t met anyone new, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. I had a feeling Mike would disagree.

“Gavin, when’s the last time you approached a woman on the street?” he asked. I was trying to remember if I ever had, but he had already moved on. “I want you to tell me what you do when you see someone on the street you’re attracted to.”

We had gone from interview to intervention.

“I look,” I said. Mike’s silence told me he was waiting for more. “Sometimes I stop and turn around.”

“Good. That’s the first step.”

“The first step toward what?” I asked. “Being a horndog?”

“No,
the first step toward knowing what you want and acting on it.”

My training was more along the line of not jumping to conclusions before having all the facts.

“I knew I wanted Amy the first moment I saw her on Fifty-seventh Street,” Mike said.

“I thought you met on a train.”

“That’s the G-rated version. She walked by while I was bent over buying a newspaper by Carnegie Hall. She was checking out my ass. She won’t admit it, but she was. She turned and looked back over her shoulder with those big brown eyes, and I was a goner. I ran after her into the subway station, but I lost her in the rush-hour crowd. I got on a train and was totally bumming, when I looked up and there she was. Gavin, you can’t imagine how bad I wanted her, and I’m not talking about wanting to have sex with her. That goes without saying. I mean, I wanted her in my life. It was a gut reaction.”

“You didn’t know anything about her,” I said. That was my gut reaction.

“You have to trust what you feel. It’s when you start second-guessing yourself that you get in trouble.”

What some call second-guessing is what others call making rational decisions. “A lot of mental-health professionals would disagree,” I said. “Successful relationships aren’t based solely on instant physical chemistry.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about at all. I get so frustrated when people use their physical connection as an excuse to stay or go. Gavin, I can’t tell you how many times I hear, ‘We had great sex, so why won’t she return my calls?’ Or ‘The sex wasn’t great, so what’s the point of another date?’ That’s all bullshit, Monday-morning quarterbacking. I’m talking about being
present in the moment and knowing what you feel. It may not be what you feel a day or a month later, but you need to respect what you’re feeling when you’re feeling it.”

He spouted therapy talk with the enthusiasm of a car salesman, matching the empathy and lingo with direct eye contact and open body language. Even his furniture was purposefully transparent. Glass desk, glass coffee table and glass shelving. Outside the oversized picture windows, moody gray clouds were gathering.

“No regrets,” he said, pointing an index finger at me.
Was that dating advice or a quote from a Vin Diesel movie?

“This is going to sound Neanderthal,” Mike warned, “but the reality is we’re animals with animal instincts. When I’m hungry, I know it. When I’m scared, I know it. And when I’m attracted to someone, I know it.”

When it’s time to end an interview, I know it.

“When I saw Amy on that train, I ached for her,” he said. “Not just physically. Spiritually. You say I didn’t know her, but corny as it sounds, I felt like I did know her. I sensed kindness, steadfastness, curiosity and intelligence. The same qualities I now admire in her on a daily basis.”

He glanced instinctively toward a framed photo on his desk. I couldn’t help doing the same. It was a snapshot of Amy at the Union Square farmer’s market. She was looking over her shoulder with a deliriously happy expression as her hand reached for the camera. No, not for the camera. For him.

“If I hadn’t trusted my instincts and acted on them, it would have haunted me,” Mike said, still gazing at the photograph. “I could picture myself wandering the city, searching the Internet, hoping to find her again. I could still be doing that today instead of marrying the woman I love.”

I no longer cared that most of what Mike said sounded hokey.
I wanted what he had. I wanted someone looking out of a picture frame with deep longing. Someone to talk with after turning out the lights. Someone to stand beside me beneath a wedding canopy.

“Meeting the right person is luck,” said Mike. “The trick is acting on it. The moment you feel something, you need to act on it. Feel. Act. You need to practice doing that until it’s muscle memory, like making a chip shot out of the rough.”

I wasn’t very good at golf either. “What if you act on your feelings with the wrong person?” I asked.

“There’s no such thing.”

“Trust me,” I said. “There is.”

“If it’s the wrong person, you move on to the next.”

“Doesn’t it make more sense to try to pick the right person to begin with?” I asked. “If I’m going to expend the time and energy, it seems it should be with someone who wants me to.”

“How are you going to know if someone wants you to?”

“That’s what I’m asking
you
,” I said. “At the very least, shouldn’t I wait for a woman to send a signal that she’s interested?”

“A woman doesn’t have to show she’s interested.” He was emphatic. “All a flower has to do is be a flower. It’s up to the bee to go to the flower. If she smiles at you, that’s great. If she checks you out, even better. But she doesn’t have to. You’re the bee. You’re the one who needs to show interest, even if you don’t get any encouragement in return. You’re still the bee, and a bee needs honey to live.”