Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest

by Jen Doll

  It was clear immediately that Luke was free from the manipulative qualities we’d seen in other men. He wasn’t hiding anything, and he didn’t have a hidden agenda. He loved Natalie and wanted for them to be together, and they had that wondrous synergy that made it feel they were even better together than they were individually. The parts of her that were a little bit brittle softened, and the parts of him that were shy and retiring found a rock of stability and confidence. That’s some marital magic there, and when it’s real, it’s real. The invite came, and I was again grateful that Natalie and I had found our way into friendship and glad I could be there to celebrate this moment in her life. What I regret most about this wedding is that my behavior didn’t represent how happy I was for the bride and groom, and how proud of them, too.

  • • •

  Despite the rain, the lateness, and the shift in venue, all was running smoothly. In our party dresses on our folding chairs we watched and waited, and soon enough the music was playing, Luke was walking down the aisle, serious and nervous, and there was Natalie, with her father. She wore a stunning long white dress, form-fitting and elegant with a cutout back, a sweetheart neckline, and delicate lace sleeves. Her chestnut hair was tied back from her face in a chignon covered with a sheer veil. She held a bouquet of white flowers; Luke had a matching blossom in the lapel of his dark suit. Her father walked her to the front of the room, kissed her, and stepped back. The bridesmaids looked on with rapt expressions, as did the crowd. It was all about the couple now. “She looks so Jackie O!” someone whispered. She did, beautiful and completely poised. In front of us all, lightning crashed through the sky again, but the bride and groom didn’t flinch.

  They were married.

  • • •

  Things happened afterward that are painful to write about. We’ll start with the easiest. I drank too much. It’s so easy to drink too much at a wedding. Booze is accessible. You’re talking to people you don’t know that well, sometimes to people you used to know better, and a drink can take the edge off that pressure. You’re expected to feel things; you’re expected to be on your best behavior; you’re expected to act a certain way, regardless of whether those expectations have ever been directly discussed or explained, and a drink can take the edge off that pressure, too. Surely there exist people who do not have drinking problems while at weddings, but at nearly every wedding I’ve been to since I have been of legal age to consume, I have overimbibed to some extent or another. The repercussions are not always more than a headache the next morning, but on the occasion they have been far worse. The added insult to injury? When things go truly bad, they don’t absolve you of the headache.

  Usually my poison of choice is white wine, but it’s also been Jack Daniel’s, Champagne, prosecco, vodka soda, tequila shots, bourbon on the rocks, and ever so many signature cocktails. (A coconut filled with rum? Check.) As I was writing this book, I noted sardonically to a friend that a section of it could be titled “Jen Might Have Had Sort of a Drinking Problem for a While,” and a few of my friends, and those who are no longer my friends, may well agree. At a wedding, like elsewhere in life, though, boozing can certainly add to the incipient drama, but it doesn’t usually create it from nothing. The wedding and the drinking only bring these things to the surface.

  Parts of this wedding—big chunks, in fact—are foggy. Some of what happened, to my great discomfort, will exist forever in photographs; more can be found in other people’s memories, where I can’t explain them away or offer any “I’m sorrys,” and that’s mortifying, too. There’s what I know, what I think I know, and what knowledge I’ve been confronted with since.

  At the reception I was seated at a table with a group of college friends, including Nora, Mattie, Rob and his date, and a guy named Gustav I’d once “accidentally” made out with back in my early years in New York—“accidentally” because I wished I hadn’t. He was married now, and next to him was his much younger, pretty wife, sitting silently and looking at her plate as he made wisecracks across the table. Nora and Gustav sparred not exactly companionably as the rest of us looked on, with Mattie interjecting occasionally to try to smooth things over.

  “I don’t know whose idea it was to put these two together,” said Rob, and everyone laughed awkwardly.

  “You’re just wrong, completely and totally wrong,” said Gustav, who was, I think, baiting Nora for his amusement. “A woman’s place is in the home. Barefoot and pregnant, the best way to be.” He couldn’t possibly be serious. His wife said nothing. Taking a cue from her, we all looked down at our own plates.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Nora. “You’re being a chauvinist, and I don’t care to talk to you anymore.” She was still on edge from our drive, and Gustav wasn’t helping. But also, Nora was a lawyer, and she was stressed about the deal she was in the midst of. A wedding didn’t mean much to the partners or the clients at her firm—nor did her personal life—and she was constantly being pulled between the demands on her life from her job and the demands on her life from her life. She might have to leave early and work, she’d warned me. She poked at the food on her plate and studied her BlackBerry.

  Rob, meanwhile, was walking a precarious wedding tightrope, balancing between taking care of his date and enjoying a comfortable just-like-the-old-days reunion with his longtime friends. “This is Molly, we hit it off instantly,” he’d told us of the woman on his arm, offering us his five-hundred-watt smile, but they hadn’t been together long, and I wasn’t sure they were together in any serious way at all. A few years ago he’d moved from New York to Arizona, but I’d seen him more recently while on a press trip to a Scottsdale-area resort right before I was laid off from my job at OK! magazine. Molly hadn’t been in the picture then, and he and I had had drinks at the bar, where people had assumed we were a couple. We’d play-acted that we were, imagining it for ourselves. We drank too much and tried to break into the pool for late-night swimming; when that failed, we went back to my room and had a water fight on the deck. Rob and I had one of those male-female friendships in which we, single, moderately attracted to each other, and maybe a little lonely, would return again and again to the question of whether there was another sort of chemistry there. I think we both knew our relationship was at heart a friendship, but we tested the boundaries of that—what were we to each other, and what did we want to be?

  In college I’d asked him one late night at a party if he thought he’d ever get married, and when he said yes, I made him promise he’d invite me. (I had, as we neared graduation, asked a lot of people that question, fearing we’d all grow apart when there was little to keep us together, save the universal prospect of the wedding that was next.) He’d said okay, if I’d do the same, but now, at Natalie’s wedding, I could see how far we’d drifted. I had the feeling he’d brought a date because he was afraid I wanted more from him, or he was afraid of what he wanted from me, or maybe, just maybe, he really did like this Molly person. It’s entirely possible he simply wanted a date to this wedding for any of the reasons anyone wants a date to a wedding.

  Still, I felt strangely displaced. Time moved so fast. If and when either of us got married, would we honor our old promise, and if we didn’t, would we even care?

  “Oh, guys, look, the first dance!” said Mattie.

  I looked out at the dance floor, where Natalie had her head on Luke’s shoulder, and then back at the tables of guests. My eyes fell on Josh, another guy from the past. We’d still talk sometimes, he’d e-mail “we should get drinks” or text “what are you up to?” in the middle of the night, but rarely could we settle on a date. We were so busy with work, and in and out of other relationships, we never really gave more time to each other than was needed to keep the relationship existing at a subsistence level. All that running around and doing things was a good way to feel productive, but it might be preventing something else, something that could be good and fulfilling, something
that might be the most important thing of all. A person could just busy a life away, without a true human connection, without actual love, without even knowing it, I worried, until it was too late. That would be tragic.

  I drank more. I’m not sure what, exactly, I ate—a roll, a bite of salad greens, a sliver of fish—but it wasn’t enough.

  Dinner completed, we headed for the bar, refilling our glasses and lifting them in honor of the bride and groom, who were making their way through the crowd, doling out a few words to each of us. I hugged them both. “You look gorgeous!” I said. “You’re such a great couple, you really are.” “We’re so glad you came,” they said. When they moved on, I talked to a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She and I had been close in college, but we’d fallen out of touch since, to the extent that she hadn’t invited me to her wedding. Now we had such different lives, me in the city and her in the suburbs, and though we always enjoyed seeing each other, there was just never time to find our way back together in any real fashion. “How are you?” I asked her. “How are the kids?” “They’re great!” she said. “How’s your job? What’s the latest?” Now we were people who made small talk at weddings. Perhaps everyone was destined to make small talk at weddings.

  The photo I’m most embarrassed about at this wedding involves me dancing with an older man. He was a relative of a relative, or a friend of a friend, and when I say “older man,” I do not mean “a cute elderly fellow like Santa Claus.” This was an older man who was fit and trim and bragged about being so. Before we hit the dance floor, he’d told me he did yoga daily and had more energy than his sons, who were my age. He did lunges in front of me to prove it. Then we danced, dirty-dancing-style, in front of everyone. There is at least one snapshot in which I am making strange hand gestures while squatting to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” It’s all so unfortunate, and here is where I wish the shenanigans had stopped.

  They did not.

  So came the other stuff: flirting with and, rumor has it, kissing the bartender. Flirting so intently with the man who ran the country club that one of my friends had to divert me away from him. “He’s really gross,” she whispered in my ear. Flirting with, dancing with, and, rumor has it, kissing a coworker of the groom. Leaving the party and going to the after-party at a quaint little bar on Main Street, which was packed with non-wedding-going revelers as well.

  There was a man at that town bar. He had dirty blond hair, I think, and was thin and pale and attractive, in a button-down shirt and jeans. I started talking to him. There is a flash in my mind of a dark corner, a wooden bench, an image of us sitting closely together, my legs draped over his, my mouth saying God only knows what. Then we were making out, and soon enough my friends were trying to extricate me from the situation. It was time to go. I was behaving in a way I would not want to remember in the morning. I have never enjoyed being told what to do, but when I’ve consumed a certain amount of drink, I become positively rage-filled in response to the perception that I’m being pushed around. That was the case here.

  “You can’t tell me what to do!” I might have yelled. “Go back to your own lives! I can do whatever I want! I’m an adult!” My behavior, of course, sort of stood in opposition to that last fact.

  Nora pulled me aside. “Look, I know you don’t want to listen to me, but I have to tell you: That guy’s getting married,” she said.

  Through a fog, I looked at her blankly.

  “He’s engaged. I heard from other people here that this is his bachelor party. He’s getting married,” she said again.

  I couldn’t believe it. That guy, that guy over there, was engaged? He seemed so interested. So . . . not taken. Possibly even the love of my life. My friends were clearly against me; this was a conspiracy; this was punishment. I was directed away from the guy, who I think stared at me, mouth open, stunned and drunk and as unsure of what was actually going on as I was.

  Outside, things got even worse. Nora suggested I get in the car. “Let’s go,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”

  The bride’s mother and brother agreed. “You should go, Jen. It’s time to go home.”

  All these bosses of me and not a one with my interests at heart. I would have to fight for my rights here, I saw, and so I did. I would show them. This was the moment that I let my shoes fly down the road, because, in some childlike reasoning, I figured that without shoes, I couldn’t be forced to leave. Hah. I win.

  I lose.

  (Wedding Tip: Black shoe polish is a balm to your shoes, if not your soul.)

  When I finally made it back to my hotel room, the door was ajar. Nora was inside, packing. It was two in the morning.

  “Why are you leaving?” I asked, my words stumbling over one another.

  “I need to go back and work,” she replied coolly, but I knew—I knew—she was really leaving because of me. She was leaving because she was furious with me.

  “All you do is work!” I shouted, clearly still in tantrum mode. She might have yelled back, “All you do is drink!” I can’t be sure. We most definitely fought, after which she left. Alone in the hotel room, still drunk, I fell onto one of the beds and began to cry. Then I called Josh, still crying, and begged him to come and keep me company. Everything was awful. He had to come.

  When he showed up moments later, he found me with mascara trails down my face, lipstick smeared, face blotchy and puffy, eyes swollen. I was a wreck, but he listened and stayed. And even when I got in bed with him later, feeling totally alone and like at least he’d be my friend in all of this, he’d be the one I could reach out to for the answer I wanted—even if I didn’t clearly know what question I was asking—he didn’t beat a quick path to the door, and he didn’t take advantage of the situation. Josh was always a good guy.

  The next morning I woke with a headache only surpassed in awfulness by the partial memories of what had happened. I was alone. I texted Lucy, who had a room downstairs with David, the two of them four-month-old newlyweds following their ceremony in Jamaica. “Are you driving back to New York?” I wrote. “I think I need a ride home.”

  “Oh, totally. Come with us,” she answered. “We’re leaving in forty-five minutes.”

  I got ready, putting on baggy jeans and a T-shirt and, for some reason, high-heeled pink suede shoes. I might have still been drunk. I made my wobbly way downstairs with my bag and checked out and waited for them in the lobby, not wanting to stay in that hotel room where so many feelings had been sopped up by pillows.

  “Nice shoes,” Lucy said when she saw me.

  On the way home, we talked about what had happened, what I remembered happening, and what they knew. “You should probably apologize to Natalie’s family,” advised Lucy gently. She was right, I probably should. I was filled with a sense of impending dread and no small frustration at myself for having caused these problems. I didn’t want people to be mad at me. I didn’t want to be a disaster of a wedding guest. And yet I had succeeded on both of those counts quite fully.

  That night I sent notes of apology to the bride, her mom, and her brother. I called Nora and said I was sorry; really, really sorry. No one wants a permanent stain of bad feelings upon a wedding, and the responses I received were generous, one million times more civilized than I’d been the night before. “It must have been really hard for you to write this after yesterday,” read the note from the bride’s mom, “but you’re forgiven, and you’re always welcome at our house.” Nora, at first still angry, softened quickly, because there was amusing gossip to share, and it was about me.

  In a comic-tragic, ripe-for-the–Three Stooges sort of moment in the middle of the reception, Rob had approached her at the bar holding his cheek. “Jen just slapped me!” he’d said in disbelief.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” he answered.

  A few minutes later, Josh approached, holding his cheek, blazing with the same telltale red ha
nd mark, and uttering the same refrain: “Jen just slapped me!” Nora repeated her “Why?” He looked at her, shrugging. “Oh, it’s Jen,” he said. “You know.”

  It would have been more hilarious if the story hadn’t been about me. I didn’t want to be a woman who went around at weddings slapping her own friends for reasons she couldn’t remember. If one was going to slap, one should know why one is slapping!

  After you rage at a wedding, you want to know why. You can parse out the blame among so many people and things: booze, the pressure of the wedding-industrial complex, the baggage we carry through life, the mixed emotions we all have about love and marriage. I could claim that my behavior was the fault of the drunk guy at the bar having his bachelor party who decided to go for one last hurrah with a girl who was equally drunk and there for another wedding. I could say it was because at thirty-three, I’d lost my job back in May and still hadn’t gotten a new one. I could pin it on the end of my last relationship, with yet another guy who at first seemed great but whom I ultimately felt, once again, disappointed by, for reasons that might have been more about me than him. You can blame a rock-bottom wedding on anyone and anything you like, but in the end, you only have yourself to look at in the mirror.

  • • •

  A week or two later I was perusing New York City’s Missed Connections on Craigslist, which was something of a procrastination technique I liked to employ. I wasn’t looking for myself in them, I wasn’t, but instead enjoyed imagining everyone else’s stories (with the exception of the pervy and/or foot fetish–based ones). How people can and do meet, and the idea of an instant connection, is endlessly intriguing. I couldn’t resist reading about the different ways others had felt it happen.