by Jen Doll
At some point, Cody asked if I wanted to dance. We got out on the floor with everyone else and moved around like fools, the best sort of wedding groove there is. As we jumped up and down and shimmied to a totally non-slow-dance sort of song, I saw Elizabeth and Lagan stop for an instant, their arms around each other, holding tight. They looked at each other and smiled. Then, the moment past, they began to jump up and down with the rest of us.
The after-party was down the street at a bar deep in the basement of another hotel. There was a band, and we danced and danced some more, and suddenly my whole body was damp with perspiration. Every part of me was exhausted. There was Cody. “Want to leave?” he said, and so we did, going back to his hotel room and collapsing on his bed. We passed out immediately, both of us still in our clothes. I woke up before it was light outside and looked over at him. He opened his eyes and looked back at me.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to sleep with Cody as it was that I wanted to wipe clean the slate. I didn’t want the memory of that man in Pennsylvania still lurking. I didn’t want the memory of Paul, of what might have been wonderful gone suddenly, incredibly awry. I wanted a new memory, one that I could make, one that would not let me down. A fresh start. And why not?
It was nothing special at all, just a few moments of garden-variety, morning-after-wedding sex, and even though I didn’t think we’d have a relationship, didn’t even think I cared about that, when I left an hour or so later I could barely suppress the grin on my face. All of that past fog had dissipated; the sun was shining. That may be a lot to attribute to a few minutes of unremarkable sex, but I’m not lying. I left that room feeling free, and when I bumped directly into the maid, I couldn’t stop laughing. If there was a case for settling, it wasn’t in a marriage. But sometimes, in the moments of a wedding, there could be a Mr. Good Enough. As long as he wasn’t your groom—or someone else’s—that was just fine.
I had lost my earrings, I realized later, and when Cody sent me a Facebook message some days afterward, I asked if he’d found them in his room. “No,” he wrote. “I didn’t see them. And by now I guess they’re long gone.” I didn’t mind. Once some things are gone, they’re gone forever, and there’s no sense trying to get them back. You don’t need them, anyway. It’s nice to remember you don’t need a lot of things.
14.
Appropriate Attire
He showed up at my door wearing jeans. They were black, but they were definitely denim. Oh, dear. He looked so proud of himself, like, weren’t black jeans pretty much exactly the same thing as a suit? Jeans could be wedding-appropriate, come on! Well, no, not exactly. But if I said they couldn’t be, not for this wedding and probably not for most, I feared he’d only get angry and start railing on the bourgeois perceptions and expectations of my nouveau riche friends. He had on a jacket, at least, and a pressed button-down shirt. He’d shaved. He looked stressed, not angry yet, but on edge and ready to rage at being found fault with over something that he hadn’t cared about doing in the first place. This was my deal, not his.
“You look great!” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked, his eyebrows relaxing slightly. “Jeans are okay? They’re black jeans, so they’re practically black pants. I couldn’t find a decent suit. I tried and I couldn’t. The suits were all shitty. And expensive. I’m not going to buy a suit. Why would I buy a suit I’m not ever going to wear again?” He was very nearly talking himself into being pissed off again, and I hadn’t said a word.
I didn’t ask where he’d looked or what he’d seen, but I didn’t really believe he’d tried all that hard. We’d been arguing about what he’d wear to this wedding since it had been determined he would go with me several weeks before. Despite feeling in my gut that it was borderline impolite, I’d asked the bride, my friend Kate—the Kate who’d once had an allergic reaction following a trip to David’s Bridal—if she could squeeze him in as my date. He and I had only been together a couple of months, and this event, which would take place at a Gothic Revival synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, offered a training-wheels wedding guest experience for us as a couple. It was right in our laps, all of the fun of the party with none of the trouble of coordinating a hotel stay, buying a plane ticket to get to our destination, or even, really, traveling. She said of course, there was plenty of room at the wedding. The rehearsal dinner, though, was at 100 percent capacity. I’d have to weather it on my own. There, I was seated next to the best friend of the groom, a guy the marrying couple may or may not have been trying to set me up with. Things, of course, did not go that way, what with the intervening realities of life. He is now married, and I had a date to Kate’s wedding.
• • •
Kate and the man who would become her husband had met at a bar in the East Village. I had been there, too. She and I had spent the day doing charity work with New York Cares. We’d been bused out to Staten Island, where we’d painted a school, and after returning to the city, still clad in our work gear—bandannas, old running shoes, ripped jeans, and crappy, paint-stained T-shirts—we’d gone out to a bar with a bunch of co-charitable citizens. When things at one bar got a little too wild (I may have broken a glass while interpretive kung fu fight-dancing), the two of us decided to take off on our own. We walked a couple of blocks and found another spot, where we commandeered stools at the bar, all the better for buybacks.
There were two men seated at the bar, guys in their late forties or early fifties, and we noticed them noticing us. Finally, one of them spoke. It was not a predictable opener. “Are you girls lesbians?” he said, a lead-up to the explanation that our outfits were not what he expected to see on women in the East Village on a Saturday night after he’d gone to the trouble of taking a train in from Connecticut. He had a chunky class ring with a garnet stone on his pinky finger (Life Tip: Never trust a man with a pinky ring, especially one that’s garnet) and a piggish face. We’d both known guys like this, in our hometowns, at our colleges, in our offices. He gave off such a strong vibe of generalized distaste for his surroundings that it was startling he’d spoken to us at all, and also ironic, because as it turned out, he was the distasteful one. But that form of irony was precisely his MO. “What kind of a question is that?” one of us responded, and he again looked us up and down. “What are you wearing?”
“We were doing charity work,” I said, though there was no need to talk to this person at all. “These are school-painting clothes.”
His friend piped up. “The bandannas are a little lezzie,” he said with a sneer.
“What is your problem?” asked Kate.
The first guy broke in again with a charming sentiment: “I don’t do charity work. I just donate money. Why do it yourself when you can pay someone else to do it for you? What a waste of time. Charity work.” He gave an awful, derisive laugh.
His friend spoke. “I’m a gynecologist, so that’s basically charity work.”
We glared at him.
“You know, being a doctor,” he continued, unbelievably. “You should see what I have to pay in malpractice insurance.”
Kate and I looked at each other, on the verge of departure. But instead of leaving, because we shouldn’t have to leave, they were the assholes, we stayed. They kept talking, and we tried to finish our drinks. It wasn’t until the gynecologist got up to go to the bathroom and pig-face revealed that his friend was getting a divorce and could really use some female attention to help him through this “rough patch” that the camel’s back was broken.
“You are disgusting,” I said, getting up from my barstool.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” Kate added.
“Lesbians,” muttered the guy, his mouth still on his drink.
“That’s not an insult,” I yelled at his back.
We’d been brought down with a thud from the high of our day, a day in which we’d felt indisputably good. If men like these were our options, we
’d always prefer to be single, but that was a depressing reality to consider. Were good guys really so few and far between?
We made our way out of the bar, weaving through tables and chairs that now felt like massive obstacles in our path, trying to put as much distance between ourselves and those terrible men as possible, when suddenly it was not a chair or a table in our way but another man. We tried to get around him but there was no room, and he stood his ground. “Are you guys runners?” he asked.
Oh, not that again. We looked at our shoes.
“Yes,” said Kate definitively.
“Yep,” I agreed. “We run everywhere we go, actually. We don’t go anywhere without running.”
“We just ran here from another bar,” Kate said, “and now we’re about to run home.”
“It’s the best way to burn off beer calories,” I concluded.
The guy, who had on a pair of rimless glasses, smiled and motioned toward a friend sitting at a table in the corner of the bar. “This is my buddy Mike. He’s a runner, too. We all like running! Why don’t you have one more beer with us before you run home?” He looked at Kate’s T-shirt. “Is that Thai writing on your shirt? Have you been to Thailand?”
She had, she started to tell him. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and it seemed the night couldn’t get worse than it already had, but maybe it could get better. So we sat and we had more than one beer, and the world of men and women in New York City bars was at least one iota less depressing.
The next evening, Kate texted. “OMG MY HEAD,” she wrote. “Just ate a ton of greasy Chinese. Not sure it’s working.”
“Ordered pizza,” I responded. “Considering chicken fingers as backup plan. BTW, wtf, those first dudes . . .”
“I know!” she wrote. “Ugh. Wait! The runner texted me! He wants to get a drink.”
“Oh!” I typed back. “He seemed nice.”
“Was he short and Asian?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I only remember his glasses.”
From that moment on, his name was Glasses. (He was neither short nor Asian.) He, like the pig-faced guy, worked in finance, but in his case it seemed okay, even a nice sort of matchy-not-too-matchy job for the possible boyfriend of a lawyer, which was what Kate was. At some point, she confessed she wasn’t a professional runner, nor was she someone who insisted on wearing running shoes every Saturday to do “bar runs.” They started dating. They went to bars, and they went on runs together. They managed a geographically undesirable Hoboken-to-West-Village relationship commute until he moved into her place in Manhattan. They had their friends over for dinner, serving fancy cheese and charcuterie on her matching plates. When he slipped out of the room to use the bathroom, we looked at her expectantly. “It’s all going really well,” she confessed, almost embarrassed that the news was so good. “And the sex is great, too!” We high-fived.
“What did I miss?” he asked, returning.
There were stylistic differences between his boyish incorrigibility and her wry smarts, and sometimes they’d fight, but they always made up, and they seemed stronger for having gone through that process. That they could argue about serious things without their couplehood being threatened seemed the signifier that this was a real relationship. Now, they were getting married. “Does this mean we have to start calling him his real name?” one of our friends had asked.
“Of course not,” said Kate. Apparently, he liked that spontaneous nickname. They celebrated their engagement at the bar where they’d met, and there was no sight of pig-face or his doctor pal.
• • •
Christoph and I hadn’t been dating long. I wasn’t even referring to him as my boyfriend. But the truth was, I wanted a date—a boyfriend—at this wedding, not least because it seemed as though all of my friends were partnered up, married, or on their way to being so. It was exhausting going to weddings with so many solidly formed twosomes, even if the members of those couples were my friends. There are aspects of being a couple that no one else should be included in, and aspects that no one else wants to be included in. Still, that can make a single person feel a touch lonely, a little bit rootless and reckless, particularly at a wedding. When it’s time for everyone to get up and dance, or at the end of the night, to go home, and when everyone but you has someone to do that with, well, it can feel less than fabulous, regardless of how independent-minded and self-actualized a person might be. Sometimes at a wedding you just want a teammate to fall back on, when conversation lulls, when you need a refill, when it’s time for photographs. I wasn’t on any sort of fast marriage track, obviously—I was thirty-three; if I’d wanted a husband more than anything else, I figured, I’d probably have one by now—but I didn’t want to be the third wheel yet again, and I didn’t want to be that single girl longingly waiting for her wedding setup, either. Here was someone I was already seeing, someone who could dress in the right clothes and fulfill the role. A real live date.
That what the “right clothes” were had so quickly become a matter of contention revealed much about the relationship, however. In the couple of months since we’d met, things had, on occasion, gotten weird. All would seem fine, and suddenly, there would be a dramatic turn for the worse, and I couldn’t figure out why. Irritated that he couldn’t open the window in my apartment, he yanked it open with all the force he could muster, and when I chastised him for breaking the lock by doing that, he became even more furious. “How dare you accuse me of breaking your window!” he’d shouted. We’d be out at a bar, having a good time, and inexplicably (to me) he would become sullen and silent and want to go home. Gradually, he revealed information that made me doubt that a relationship was the right thing for us. But there was an undeniable physical connection, which the off-kilter aspects when we were together only emphasized. When you can’t rely on emotions, sometimes you rely on sex, and sometimes sexual intimacy seems like it’s just as good as the emotional kind. For a while, anyway.
I had on a Diane von Furstenberg dress. The lower half of it was a slim navy pencil skirt, which led to a navy waist that tapered in and extended to midtorso. Above that, the top was an ivory bustier dotted with colorful flowers, held up by navy straps. With his jeans, I hoped, we’d look rock ’n’ roll as opposed to mismatched or inappropriate. It was a Lower East Side wedding after all, and we’d be surrounded by friends I’d had for a long, long time. These were people who, fingers crossed, would still love me even if I brought a date who did not meet the dress code to their wedding.
I grabbed my purse and we left my apartment, which was just blocks away from the synagogue. Being able to walk there was a luxury, and on the way, our clothing decisions final, we perked up, a happy couple en route to a wedding. We arrived, checked our coats, and entered the cavernous multilevel room where the ceremony would take place. There we found seats in the rows of folding wooden chairs positioned facing the altar, which was flanked on either side by large vases of cherry blossom branches. The backdrop to the altar was a set of doors decorated with wrought-iron vines. White petals decorated the aisle that the bride and groom would walk down, and white flowers were everywhere, picking up the subtle pink, purple, and red hues of the stained glass throughout the synagogue. It was all eerie and gothic and beautiful, as if we were in an enchanted castle, or a Guillermo del Toro movie.
Marjorie, who’d flown in from Nashville for the event, was a bridesmaid. She was behind the scenes preparing for her walk down the aisle, but a few seats away, there was her husband, Brian, next to our old roommate Violet and her boyfriend, Ashok. I waved. We’d be sitting at a table together for dinner. I noticed Kate’s mom, with the man she was dating, on one side of the aisle. Kate’s dad, with his girlfriend, had been seated on the other. The bride’s parents had been divorced for a while, but they hadn’t met each other’s new significant others yet. The plan was to keep them away from each other as much as possible. We all bring our own backstories to a w
edding. Some are far more significant than black jeans.
The music began, and we fell into a hush. A trio of tiny flower girls traipsed down the aisle, carrying baskets full of more petals to add to those already decorating the floor. “Awwww,” murmured the crowd, and we got ready to stand up for the bride.
Following the ceremony, we went upstairs for Champagne and hors d’oeuvres, passed around by waiters clad in neat bow ties and suits. I felt a wave of embarrassment over my date’s attire. When I introduced Christoph to the bride’s mother, I thought I noticed a barely perceptible double take over his jeans, but I convinced myself this was a figment of my paranoid imagination. It was only clothes. Why was I getting hung up on something so stupid, or, as Christoph might say, so bourgeois? We drank and sat with my friends and their dates in a row of bleacherlike seats overlooking the area below, where shortly thereafter we’d eat tomato soup and filet mignon and dance and party out the rest of the night. Glasses and Kate arrived upstairs after photos, giddy from their vows, flushed from the excitement, and we toasted and congratulated them. Everything was fine, but something was off. I leaned in to Christoph. “Are you having fun?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, but I couldn’t tell if he meant it. I went to get us another round of drinks from the bar, and when I came back, he was quiet, staring off into the distance. Ashok and Violet and Marjorie and Brian were talking and laughing around him.
“You know who you look like?” Marjorie asked him, leaning in and smiling.
“Who?” he responded.