Wedding Season (17 page)

“I didn’t do this on purpose, Vern.”

“Well, look, she’s not mad at you.” Charles reads the e-mail over my shoulder. “You haven’t been disinvited to the wedding or anything catastrophic. It’s the best possible scenario. Or did you want to be disinvited?”

“You’re not listening. I feel bad about this.”

“Honey, I
am
listening, I just don’t understand. I know you’ve been going crazy with this wedding marathon, and just a couple of weeks ago you were chafing at the girdle to me over how many of them you had to be in.” He sits on the edge of my desk and gives me a stern look. “Now you’re out of one, and there’s no irreparable harm done between you and Maud, as far as I can tell from the e-mail. Just get her an extra nice present, and go to the wedding wearing something besides another horrible orange bridesmaid’s dress. It’s not like you don’t have any others to wear this summer. So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know.” I sigh and put my head back down on the desk. “I feel left out, I guess.”

“But out of something you don’t want to be included in anyway.”

“Right, okay. But I’m being punished for my position, which seems unfair.”

“I don’t know about that, Vern. It doesn’t sound like
Maud’s punishing you. You have the courage of your convictions, and she has hers. You can’t expect to believe something counter to the norm—or anything at all, really—and not have to deal with the consequences. You know what Saki says, don’t you? ’Never be a pioneer. It’s the early Christian who gets the fattest lion.’”

The phone rings, and I pick up to hear my father’s voice singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

“Hi, Daddy.” I raise my eyebrows at Charles.

“Hello, sweetheart,” my father says. “How’s my little capitalist?”

“Exploiting the proles, as usual. How’s life on the mesa?”

“Ah, the mesa.” He chuckles. “A dry heat. Kiddo, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

Last year my father took a sabbatical from Columbia and moved to New Mexico to live amid the New Age prayer beads and southwestern kitsch of Santa Fe with his fiancée, Desiree, an interior decorator who applies a concoction of feng shui and ostensibly Native American design principles to the homes of wealthy urban expats living in the Southwest. How a man like Daddy could fall for a woman like her is perplexing, but there it is: love, the eternal mystery—or the perennial hoax. And, frankly, my father no longer seems to me the cool and clever hero he once appeared to be. I have begun to suspect, in fact, that he is a perfectly ordinary, average, predictable man.

“Sweetheart, listen,” my father says. “We’ve had a little change in plans for the wedding.”

“What’s up?” I allow myself the brief, bright hope that Dad is calling off the ceremony and ditching Desiree.

“Well, we’ve had to change the date. Do you have a calendar nearby?”

“Yes.” I eye the calendar over my desk, oracle of my season’s agony.

“We’re switching the ceremony from that first Saturday in July to the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-second.”

“Daddy. You can’t. That’s the same weekend as—” I stop to draw breath. “That’s one day after Mom’s wedding.”

“It is?”

“Daddy. You knew that. Josh told me you guys coordinated it. Him, then you, then Mom. Why you all had to do it in a month and a half I’ll never understand.”

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do,” my father quotes.

“Yeah, well. Mom’s ceremony is on the evening of the twenty-first. The evening. As in probably up until midnight.”

“Honey, I guess it just slipped my mind. I didn’t exactly have your mother’s wedding in my date book. But we’ve already switched everything. It’s too late to change back.”

“Oh, Dad. Why did you change it in the first place?”

“Joy, I know this won’t make sense to you. Nor does it, particularly, to me. But—the things we do for love. Desiree’s… well, her astrologer advised against it. The date. Extremely inauspicious, apparently. Star-crossed.” He chuckles.

“Ha, ha,” I tell him. “Ho, ho. How about if your loving children just astrally project themselves to your wedding, then?”

“I’d recommend the red-eye.”

“Better,” I tell him. “I’ve sold my soul to Extreme Romance and the Transgression Enterprise anyway. There’s nothing to project with.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Never mind, Dad. Never mind. We’ll figure it out.”

“What was that all about?” Charles asks, as I set the phone down.

“That was the fattest lion,” I tell him.

“Joy Naomi Silverman!” I hear Henry howl from the front room. “I know you’re in there! The mountain has come to Muhammad!”

“That
would be the fattest lion, actually,” Charles stage-whispers.

“Henry.” I get up from my chair as she flings herself through the door and onto our leatherette recliner. “Come on in. Have a seat.”

“Holy toledo, girl, your desk is a disaster. This area should be condemned. Charles.” Henry narrows her eyes at him. “Did this young lady get the several messages I left for her, or did she not?”

“I delivered them personally.” Charles begins to edge out of the room. “I’ll just be leaving the two of you alone, now.”

“Oh, Vern, you can stay. Stay.” He doesn’t. “Well, Hank. What a nice surprise. What brings you here?” I know very well what brings her here: I have not spoken with Henry since Sunday—the night of the Ora debacle—though not through any fault of hers. She’s left multiple messages for me at home, on my voice mail at the office, and with various members of the staff here. I have failed to return her calls.

“’Fess up, Jojo. What’s going on?”

“Oh, you know. The usual. Really busy here. Just working on—”

“Uh-uh. No. The last time you went incommunicado on me was when you got the honorable discharge from law school. I don’t buy it. What’s going on?”

“Hank, nothing. Everything’s fine. Maud asked me to step down as bridesmaid, but whatever.”

“She did? Wow. Bold move. Is she that mad?”

“No, I don’t think so. She says she just feels weird having me in the wedding, seeing how I’m anti-marriage and all.”

“You okay with that?”

“I see her point, if that’s what you mean. I’ll just sulk about if for a couple of days, and then I’ll be okay.”

“That’s my girl.” Henry claps her hands together lightly. “And what about Gabe? Did you talk to him? What did he say?”

“Talk to him about what?” I begin to type an e-mail, addressed to myself, which reads:
help I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory.
“Oh, the thing with what’s-her-name. No. No, I decided not to.”

“You decided not to.” Henry gives me her X-ray-vision look. “Any particular reason?”

“Just seemed like a bad idea.” This is, strictly speaking, the truth. “My dad always says, don’t go looking for trouble…”

“Because you’re certain to find it.” Henry rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. But—”

“I appreciate your concern, Henry. Thank you. And don’t worry, okay? I’ve got it under control.”

“But—”

“No buts. End of discussion.”

“But
out, is what you’re saying?” Henry laughs. “Kiss your
but
?”

“You sound like Gabe. Hey, Hank, are
you
having an affair with my boyfriend?”

“Eeeew. What a totally hideous thought. No offense.”

“Right, okay. None taken. You skanky bitch.”

This sends Henry off into a gale of laughter. When she recovers, panting for breath, she turns to me.

“Listen, I have to run. I still haven’t got a wedding present for Joan. Or Maud. Or Miel. I’m on a mad bridal scavenger hunt. Want to come?”

“Gosh, that sounds like loads of fun, but I think I’ll pass.”

“Call me tonight, okay?” Henry stands and stretches. “Okay.”

“You promise?” She gives me a wink. “Yes, Henrietta. I promise.” I wave and she flounces out, blowing kisses to the Invisible staff in the front room.

A
MONTH GOES BY IN
a white blur of weddings.

Joan and Bix are married in an old prewar building downtown, in a ballroom lined on three sides with arched windows that reach from the polished wood floor to the twenty-foot ceiling, and through which the upper reaches of the Manhattan skyline look close enough to touch. The couple exchanges vows as the sun sets and the city recedes into gray twilight, reemerging slowly from the darkness as a crazy skeleton of itself etched in bright lights. The bridesmaids, including me, wear strange, stiff, architectural dresses made of deep red-orange fabric. Joan is unusually calm throughout the evening; when I comment on it, she opens her clutch and shows me a sleek little pillbox—platinum, engraved with her initials, a gift from her new husband—containing enough Vicodin to tranquilize the population of Lower Manhattan. A semifamous actor, several times a nominee for awards at independent film festivals, gives a wedding toast so long that guests begin departing and the groom’s father has to intercede. As if by divine intervention, Ora Mitelman is called out of town for an appearance on a television talk show, and is thus unable to attend.

My friend Chloé—half-Dutch, half-Italian, raised in Belgium, and schooled in France and England before coming to the States for law school, where we met—marries her
Argentine fiancé, Ricardo, in a very formal ceremony at a Catholic church. The wedding is attended by people from no fewer than seventeen countries; the reception is held at Ricardo’s restaurant (wildly popular last year when it opened, but declining in favor since a celebrity diner was stricken with a terrible case of food poisoning on a night when both a noted food critic and a gossip columnist were present). There are a great many clumsy attempts at tango made by the American guests; there are an abundance of loud, laughing, weeping, gesticulating toasts given in broken English; there are a staggering number of relatives; there are orange bridesmaids’ dresses. There is some tension over the attendance of some half-sibling who is the out-of-wedlock child of someone’s father’s mistress, but no one, as far as I know, gets food poisoning.

Maud and Tyler are married at the home of a friend, a parking-lot-size loft in Tribeca. Someone leaks the location to the press, and the street has to be barricaded off to keep out paparazzi and weeping teenage girls, fans of the False Gods, Tyler’s band; police and bodyguards escort Tyler’s band members and celebrity guests through the fray. I bring a framed Nan Goldin print of a transsexual as a peace offering. Maud cuts in on Gabe and asks me to dance with her. I wear a non-orange dress. The space is lit exclusively by hundreds of candles, and the catering staff spends a lot of time replenishing the candelabras and scraping up spilled wax. I had thought myself more than happy to attend as a civilian rather than as a member of the wedding, but seated at the table next to the orange-clad bridesmaids for the wedding dinner, watching them laugh and talk, I find myself curiously lonely. When Maud throws her bouquet, a white globe of gardenias the precise size of a volleyball, it bounces off a bridesmaid’s head before landing in Henry’s outstretched hands. I am briefly disappointed she doesn’t spike it.

Ian and Brad, the former a heartbreaker ex-boyfriend of Charles, have a commitment ceremony in the Hamptons. I attend as moral support. A gay priest officiates. The two grooms wear white. Nobody wears orange. The guests seem to be mostly ex-boyfriends of one groom or the other; this group turns out to include my brother James. He and Charles meet at last, and it’s immediately evident that I’m in for extensive precourtship questioning on both sides. I am rounded up with the other dozen women in attendance for what the wedding planner calls a “fag hag portrait.” I watch as the afternoon light fades and in the twilight a hundred men in summer suits dance cheek-to-cheek on the wide lawn.

Miel and Max are married on a bright morning in a sculpture garden on the roof of an industrial building occupied by art galleries and artists’ studios on the west side of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson. Max’s mother, a judge from Kentucky, conducts the ceremony, which is interrupted throughout by the honking of car horns from a traffic jam on the West Side Highway below. There are perhaps thirty guests. Miel is barefoot. I wear an apricot-colored bridesmaid’s dress. The cake, designed by one of the couple’s artist friends, is nearly seven feet tall and topped by specially made marzipan figurines of the bride and groom. These rather remarkable likenesses are set aside for safekeeping and subsequently consumed by two of Miel’s young nephews.

T
HERE ARE BRIDAL SHOWERS
, bachelorette parties, rehearsal dinners, white tulle, white flowers, mountains of silver and white wrapping paper. There are white ribbons, white rice, white doves, white cake frosting on fingers and lips, white lies. My mind gives in to the white, goes blank. I
lose track of days. I have inadvertently memorized the preamble to the wedding ceremony. I can’t concentrate at work; I find myself staring out the window, thinking about the songs chosen for first dances: Cole Porter, Burt Bacharach, love, yours, you, us, ours, two, one, forever, always. And no matter what the song, it always goes like this. The couple joins hands at the center of the dance floor, at the center of a ring of guests; as everyone looks on they circle slowly, smiling into each other’s eyes, suspended and revolving in the empty space; they part and dance with their parents; members of the wedding party join. And gradually, couple by couple, guests fill the dance floor, until we are all there, all participants, all implicated.

I make Gabe lead every time.

M
Y BROTHER’S WEDDING
is held in Gramercy Park, a private park occupying a single block in downtown Manhattan, laid out in the English style, bounded by a high iron fence. The park is accessible only to those lucky few who reside in the fine old buildings on the surrounding streets and are provided with the keys to this little green kingdom. I think my mother blackmailed someone to get us in here.

It’s a hot, humid day, and the lush green square is swimming in full afternoon sunlight, the trees and flower beds opulent, the shade offering little in the way of shelter or relief. James and I, posted like lawn jockeys beside the vast iron gates at the park’s entrance, direct a parade of perspiring guests to their seats. We pass his handkerchief back and forth until it is uselessly damp with sweat.