Always a Bridesmaid (for Hire)

by Jen Glantz

  “This isn’t The Maury Povich Show,” she went on, popping a bubble in my ear. “Do you want to meet this guy or not?”

  I agreed to a phone chat first with my mystery guy. His name was Bouyoung, and after chatting with him for ninety-five seconds, I learned that he was forty years my senior. Which was a shame, because we had a lot in common: a desire to retire in Boca Raton, Florida, and a mutual love for a chilled glass of prune juice.

  I wrote back to Patti after I hung up the phone. This had to be a giant mistake. There had to be plenty of guys with good jobs and even better manners she could set me up with, someone in my age range.

  Dear Patti,

  Me again. Was there a glitch in the system? How about setting me up with a guy who doesn’t have an AARP card sticking out of his wallet?

  Ps. My mom says hi. She’s happy we’re chatting. Let me know when we can swab the inside of your cheek. You know, so we can tell if you and she are the “perfect sibling match.”

  It took another forty-eight hours, but I heard back again for the last time. It seems my membership had been revoked, and my email had been blocked.

  So when another opportunity to tango with a matchmaker and her superhuman love powers presented itself to me, I had no choice but to wipe the crumbs off my face and answer.

  This is how I found myself on a Tuesday, at 10:00 a.m., fresh off the A train at the Hudson Street subway station, about to walk two blocks to have brunch with another perfect match victim, all while having the whole thing filmed and edited down to six minutes so that a couple million people could watch it for entertainment.

  Maybe I should just go home, I mumble to myself as I try to orient myself and figure out which way is south. What if he sees me and runs across the river to New Jersey? What if I have lipstick on my teeth? I feel my teeth with my index finger, and, sure enough, my finger proves me to be correct. What if I forget to speak in complete sentences? What if I forget to speak? Okay, what if I spill something? Oh my god, I always spill something! Can I cancel? Is it too late to call this whole thing off? They’ll understand, right? I’ll ask for his address and I’ll send him an Edible Arrangement.

  By the time I talk myself out of the whole thing, I’m standing in front of the Hugo Hotel, with a trail of confused homeless people squatting behind me and a handful of tourists filming my mental predate breakdown on their iPhones attached to selfie sticks.

  “He’s over there,” one of the producers tells me as she grabs my hand and stuffs me into a waiting area behind the lobby. They want our first hello to be under the bright lights and clear filter of a handful of cameras. So until then, we have to stay sequestered in separate coat closets.

  I dig into my purse. “Here’s five dollars and a nearly full punch card to Birch coffee. Go over there, snap a photo or two of him, and tell me what you think.”

  The coat closet attendant stares at me for a minute, then takes the punch card and walks away, in the opposite direction.

  When the red light flashes twice on the camera, the producer tells me to walk toward my perfect match of a date, who’s already sitting down at a wooden table inside the hotel’s restaurant. I approach him as my body trembles and my nose starts to run. As we’re getting close enough to make out the defining characteristics of our human facial features, the lights go out. It’s pitch black. The whole place—the entire hotel—is having a massive power outage.

  How’s that for love at first sight?

  I go to hug him hello, but a producer grabs me with one hand and places the other one over my eyeballs.

  “Cut,” she yells. “Take Jen away. We need to film this whole thing again.”

  The second time is smoother. I walk toward him, camera all up in my grill, and hug him hello.

  He sits down across from me, smiling, his blue eyes searching mine.

  So this is my perfect match, I think to myself, feeling empty, like a gas tank that’s been drained dry.

  “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” I say, fogging up my water glass with my own petrified breath.

  His eyes wander left and then right. “Huh?” He replies.

  “The cameras everywhere?” I say, wondering if I’ve gone bonkers.

  “Oh, yeah. This is pretty weird,” he admits, before jumping into conversation that feels fluid and a little bit forced. Slowly, I begin to realize that he’s everything I asked the matchmaker for.

  Loves his family. Check.

  Is passionate about a hobby. Check.

  Seeks a good adventure. Check.

  But even after an hour of conversation and checking items off my preconceived “perfect guy” shopping list, I realize my cart is painfully empty. Sure, I said I wanted the organic, home-grown, no-preservative stuff. But what do I know? Maybe I’m better off with Fruit Loops and Cheetos. Maybe I thought I would be okay with Splenda, but I want real cane sugar. I want someone whose voice tickles with excitement when he talks about the things he loves and who listens, with his eyes glued, when I talk about the things I love.

  My match-made date was perfect on paper, but in person, he didn’t have much of a personality and we didn’t have much in common besides our dirty blonde shaggy hair and overactive sweat glands that poured through our shirts. When the date ends, I stick my arms out for a hug, but we end up, somehow, just high-fiving in the street.

  “Maybe pizza next time?” I say hopefully, because if this is who an online certified matchmaker thinks I belong with, I’m willing to give him a second chance.

  “Oh, I’m not a big pizza person,” he says, reaching his arm up high to hail the nearest taxi.

  Everyone has their thing, I thought to myself.

  Even though I wasn’t weak in the knees after our first date, I did hope there would be a second. Why not? Everyone deserves a second chance, even a guy who isn’t on my pizza-loving level. But neither one of us had the courage or the desperate desire to exchange numbers. So we parted ways. He went back to Brooklyn, and I went back to Tinder.

  • • •

  A week after the date, I’m walking home with two sizzling slices of pizza on a paper plate and a stolen library book in the other, when I notice that I’m keeping pace with someone who looks familiar. Someone whose perfume makes my nose tingle and whose eyes I’ve spent quality time gazing into before.

  I’m walking next to the matchmaker.

  “Hey, there!” I say, stopping in my tracks as she keeps on walking farther and farther away.

  She turns her head and catches my eye, and then she walks a step faster. It’s as if matchmakers, like fairy godmothers or therapists or gynecologists, prefer not to be recognized in public, outside the confines of their offices.

  “You’re wrong about this matchmaking thing,” I shout as she approaches the crosswalk and hurries across the street.

  She turns around, fully amused, to look at my face. I’m certain there’s mozzarella cheese in my hair and pizza sauce on my cheeks, and she giggles, looks at me, then laughs.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she shouts back, winking at me as if she had a piece of fairy dust in her eye. As if she knew something I didn’t. As if she had set me up on the most lethargic and boring date of my life for a reason.

  Matchmakers, like weathermen, can only ever be 35.4 percent certain. They’re not genies in a bottle. They don’t know what will work for you and what won’t. They simply force you to say what you think you want out loud and drill you with questions nobody else has the patience or courage to ask. And then they give you what you want. What you asked for. Maybe it’s to show you that your list of qualities are pointless. That your perfect match on paper could be someone who makes you wish you could disappear into a fortress of napkins five minutes into the first date. Maybe the ideal guy, who dances around in your head, would have you rolling your eyes in real life.

  Maybe this whole journey of love can’t be plotted out along specific coordinates. Maybe it’s completely random. Or maybe it’s not. That’s what cheap, stic
ky pizza is for: a rest stop for your brain and heart when nothing in New York City seems to make sense.

  Maybe my Mr. Forever would bump into me but wouldn’t catch a single book. Maybe his glasses would fall on the floor and I’d step on them while trying to pick up my purse. Maybe he’d ask to get coffee and I’d spill milk all over his backpack. Maybe he wouldn’t be medium height, or a dog lover, or a fan of Salinger. But maybe he’d be interesting and interested, and maybe that’s all that matters—at first and forever.

  Maybe we need to take our list of demands and, instead of reading them to the world like a riot act, put them in the shredder and remind ourselves that, yes, we want certain things in theory, but in the end, what do we know? Maybe our perfect match is the most imperfect person, but he’s got one hell of a heart.

  Wherever my Mr. Forever is, right now, I hope he’s reading this, knowing that I don’t always have pizza on my face or lipstick on my teeth.

  Who am I kidding. I do. I always do.

  chapter twelve

  A Time and a Square to Say I DO

  To someone who has never been before, Times Square seems like a giant, well-lit playground in an underground nightclub. It’s a plaza of brightly colored chaos, made up of converging avenues and neon signs. If you’re a visitor, it’s where you ask your taxi driver to take you after you drop your bags off in a hotel room that smells like Clorox bleach and meatloaf, ready to hunt for a slice of greasy street pizza.

  People come to 42nd and Broadway from all over the world, passports popping out of their purses, phones clutched tightly in one hand, a well-worn paper map of the city in the other. But it doesn’t take long for them to look away from their maps and up, up, and up without interruption, excused, for just a few minutes, of the view of bald spots and the butts of exaggerated coat jackets. They hope, or maybe they know for sure, that what they’ll find here will be different than what they’ve seen before, printed on glossy cardstock postcards, triple-filtered on Instagram feeds, sitting up straight as the backdrop for a rom-com, where guy meets girl, and girl decides smack down in the middle of buzzing tourists and a burping homeless guy, that she wants to kiss him.

  For people who are from New York City, Times Square is an Alexandrite gemstone that has completely lost its shine. It’s the scent of roasted peanuts meeting the smell of unwashed armpits. It’s the place where tourists fill up their camera rolls with pictures of a 5-foot-3 man dressed in a fur-stained Elmo suit, or a freshly painted Statue of Liberty human perched on a milk crate, collecting tips in her Lady Liberty torch while poking passersby. It’s the place you go when you’re craving a midday anxiety attack, if you want to get jostled in the ribs by careless elbows, giant shopping bags, and overstuffed purses. Most New Yorkers would rather walk fifteen minutes in the wrong direction instead of zig-zagging through the herd of saucer-eyed tourists.

  The longer you live in Manhattan, the lower your tolerance gets for this suffocating and gimmicky circus. Yet Times Square, even for those with a permanent mailing address within the five boroughs, can possess the same allure for those who won’t be staying long. It’s a center stage for people to be and do and say whatever they want. Guys shilling twenty-five-dollar comedy show tickets, hip-hop performers barking about their next street show, passionate lovebirds kissing beside the TKTS sign—this is their proscenium.

  I forget all of that when I find myself standing beneath the protruding awning of the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, body-slamming tourists as I stare down at my phone, waiting for a text message that should have arrived twenty minutes ago. Everyone here is a stranger, but tonight I’m tapping my toes, waiting for two Australian guys who have hired me to stand beside them as they say, “I do.”

  Meet on the corner, underneath the Broadway show’s sign. We’ll be in black tuxedos, purple pocket squares, holding hands; brown hair; over 6 feet.

  I get the shakes, pacing back and forth underneath the meeting spot as the lights illuminating the Aladdin sign flicker on and off, like someone forgot to pay the electric bill.

  What am I doing? Why am I here? A family of three, all blonde and buttoned up and waiting to see the show, begin to stare at me. The teenager with the same constellation-like pattern of acne that I used to have is probably tweeting, New York is strange but the strangers who live here are stranger. #MeccaOfMadness #Pizza

  I check my phone again, but still, there’s nothing. I pull up the last email from the couple and skim the details once more, worried that my gut is unable to intuit imminent danger.

  October 15, 2015—11:24am

  From: Rb40@aol.com

  To: Jen@bridesmaidforhire.com

  Darling! We’ll see you tonight 6pm underneath the Aladdin sign. We are excited to get married in a place we’ve seen only in our dreams ;). It’s going to be a night for all of us to remember, love. See you soon!

  Kisses,

  Rob + Chuck

  I open up a blank text message and decide to confess to Kerri:

  Have a weird feeling about this. Underneath the Aladdin sign. If I don’t text you in 45 minutes, send help?

  I write her again, this time with more specific directions:

  There’s money for rent rolled up in a ball, zipped into my bedbug mattress protector, if anything happens to me

  July 2, 2014—5:15am

  From: Rb40@aol.com

  To: Jen@bridesmaidforhire.com

  Jen Jen,

  I’m Rob, next to me in a very tacky hospital bed right now, is Chuck!!! He’s recovering from having his tonsils out and what else do you do while visiting a loved one in the hospital (especially one who can’t talk) but watch television? We heard them talk about you and Bridesmaid for Hire and thought “This is interesting, we’re getting married, just the two of us, in Times Square in a few months.”

  Then we realized this chicky is in New York ;)!!! Chuck couldn’t talk but he looked at me and after 17 years, I knew I had to at least send an email. We want you in October when we come to America for the first time and proclaim our love in the Crossroads of the World, Times Square!!!

  How much and how can we get you to say yes?

  Kisses,

  Rob + Chuck

  I’m rubbing morning crud out of my eyes when I read this email, my covers wrapped around me tightly like I’m a well-made Chipotle burrito. A sharp tingle of uncertainty demands my half-awake attention, and something inside me thinks this email is a prank. I have a feeling it’s from a friend who just got home from another late-night bender on the Lower East Side, writing this email as one last hurrah before her noggin hits the pillow. Something about the way it’s written makes me paranoid that it’s from someone trying to reel me in, someone concocting a lie to lure me away from my keyboard just so he can scope me out on the corner of 42nd Street.

  You should see the kind of gobbledygook emails that I’ve bookmarked in a folder called Say What? ever since I posted the Craigslist ad for Bridesmaid for Hire.

  There was a seventy-five-year-old man asking how much it would cost him for a cuddle, a guy from Slovakia asking to purchase the Bridesmaid By Your Side package because he wanted to use it as a way to take me on a first date. I had a couple dozen people read the ad and mistake it for my dating profile, responding with their age, sex, location, and a scanned photo that looked like it was from 1997. I had six marriage proposals in the first week.

  But this email stood out. It had nine exclamation marks, a winky face, and the word chicky. I wasn’t ready to place this one in the Say What? folder yet. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to give these guys a chance to prove me wrong.

  July 2, 2014—7:15am

  From: Jen@bridesmaidforhire.com

  To: Rb40@aol.com

  Rob & Chuck,

  Greetings from New York City. Thank you for writing. Sorry to hear about the tonsil operation, Chuck. I hope they are at least letting you clean out their freezers of ice cream.

  I’d love to learn more about the two of you. How about we Skype ne
xt week?

  Love,

  Jen Glantz

  I’m pacing back and forth, feeling the blended juices in my stomach churning from my upper rib down to my intestines. My eyes shut tight, and I try to formulate a game plan: Do I stay, or do I go? My feet suddenly step on something soft and bony. I open my eyes to see that I’m standing on top of a New York City police officer’s foot.

  “Ma’am?” he says, trying to figure out if I’m lost or just waiting to be found. I wiggle my head as if I’m trying to get rid of lice, finding a way to say sorry and explain myself in the same breath.

  “I’m so sorry,” I start with the obvious one first. “I’m just a bridesmaid for hire, waiting to meet two strangers.”

  In the distance, police sirens wail, throwing off flashes of red and blue light that compete with the LED lights all around us. I realize what I just said must sound wacky. If this were a small town in Arkansas, where neighborhood police officers know last names, birthdays, the first kisses of all the residents, this news would have been enough to take me into the station for questioning. But this is Times Square. I have a lot to compete with.

  “Have you met them before? Seen what they look like?” the officer asks, as if this therapeutic kind of questioning is standard protocol.

  Their email tells me they will be in tuxedos, that they are over six feet. It’s a rare combination anywhere else but in Times Square, where men walking by in tuxedos are just as common as people in fluffy Disney character costumes. They could be anyone. I edge closer to the police officer, hoping, if they see me now, that they’ll know I called in backup. They’ll know the kind of guys I bring with me as my plus-one.

  “No,” I admit. Guiltily. “I haven’t.”

  July 18, 2014—4:15pm

  From: Rb40@aol.com

  To: Jen@bridesmaidforhire.com

  Jen Jen,

  Oh snoot! We don’t have Skype, or a webcam for that matter. But we would like to meet you on the 15 of October. Will you meet us then? Will you be our one and only bridesmaid and wedding guest?