I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

by Jennifer Gilbert

  At nine the next morning my doorbell rang. I opened the door, and there was Evan with two dozen roses.

  I never saw Beautiful Boy again.

  After Evan and I had been together only two weeks, I was going to Italy for a wedding. I’d be gone for ten days, and I managed to convince him to join me for the last weekend of my trip. Before I left, Evan wrote me a sonnet that was hand-delivered with a bunch of sunflowers. He drove me to the airport (something that to this day always makes me feel special) and packed me up with seven presents—one for each of the days we’d be apart. Meanwhile, I’d ordered personalized cookies to arrive at his office after I left. We were each competing for who could outromance the other, and it was intoxicating and explosive. Very quickly we spent almost all of our time together. A few nights a week I’d peel myself away to spend the night at my own place, but most often we were at Evan’s.

  Once I planned a lavish and complicated wedding for the daughter of a fashion mogul in the Hamptons. It was a ceremony on the beach with torches set up everywhere and a wedding arch that was handmade from tree branches intertwined with wildflowers. The bride didn’t want any of the guests to see the reception room prior to the wedding, so we had to create a cloth-draped, arched hallway that led guests through the dining room of the club and out to the beach. Not only did we have to construct the hallway, but we had to shove all the furniture aside to accommodate the hall, and we had to curtain all the windows as well so that no one could see inside. Meanwhile, there weren’t enough chairs for the ceremony and the reception, so after the ceremony was over, we had to quickly grab all those chairs and bring them into the dining room. Usually we’d have an entire day to set up a room, but in this case we had exactly an hour and fifteen minutes between the ceremony and the reception. During that time the guests would be escorted to a long deck where cocktails would be served and the father of the bride planned to saber a bottle of champagne (literally—he used a sword to open it).

  While the two hundred and fifty guests were drinking, we not only had to set up the (two hundred and fifty) chairs and tables, but we also had to create the custom-made dance floor that had been painted with the couple’s new monogram. The dance floor had been cut into moveable pieces, and each piece was numbered so that it could be assembled the right way—like a huge forty-by-forty-foot jigsaw puzzle.

  I had an army of people with me that day, and we all worked like maniacs—the drama that the bride wanted to create for her guests meant all kinds of drama for us. The whole day was exhausting and physically intense—it started at 7:00 a.m. and didn’t end until 2:45 the next morning, when we finally finished breaking everything down. By the end of it I had splinters in every finger, twigs in my hair, and my legs were cramping from standing in high heels for nearly twenty-four hours straight. The bride offered to put me up in a room that night, but all I wanted was to get home to Evan. So I called him before I left and told him not to wait up, I’d crawl into bed when I got to his place—I just wanted to wake up next to him in the morning. Driving home, I was practically blind with fatigue. I expected Evan to be asleep in bed when I got there, but instead, when I walked into his apartment I found him still up and waiting for me, with candles lit all over the wildflower-strewn living room. It took my breath away.

  At first it felt like Evan and I had everything in common. He loved my success and that I owned my own company, and he was the first boyfriend I’d ever had with whom I could really talk business. At the same time, he loved my silly, goofy sides that had all but disappeared, and I was able to relax again. We made up our own rap songs and laughed like kids. There was something magical for me in that—it made me feel innocent again. And when he made himself vulnerable to me, and shared his pain and insecurities, I felt a powerful urge to help.

  He was romantic and brilliant, and he made me feel smart and beautiful—no man had made me feel both before. While I’d never been the dreamy type, suddenly a part of me started fantasizing about the future again. I pictured a big wedding for us, the kind of perfect fairy-tale event that I planned for other people. I remember driving with Evan in his car one day—the sun was warm and shining, and my heart felt light. I thought to myself, I’m in love, and life’s good, it’s just that simple. It was a feeling of such optimism.

  I was coming out of my emotional fog at just the moment I met Evan, and there he was, standing in a ray of light. The timing was finally right for me. I didn’t want to hold myself at a distance anymore—I was primed to fall in love. But Evan was in a very different place in his life, that same undeserving place I knew all too well.

  He thought after he graduated from Harvard Business School he would take over the world. Instead he’d taken over his family’s broken business. He was trapped by his unrealized expectations, and no amount of unconditional love from me could rescue him. I told him that he was brilliant, and wonderful, and I believed in him. But he didn’t want to hear that. He told me that he expected me to be his mirror, and that I should be telling him the unvarnished truth. It was as if he wanted me to kick him when he was down, because that’s what he thought he deserved. I had learned over the years that you can’t heal—or forgive—until you give up the struggle. But Evan couldn’t give it up—he was still too inside of it.

  About two years into our relationship, Evan’s frustration at work had blown up into desperation, and he seemed to be manically flailing around, searching for an escape hatch. Once he asked me to go along with him to a convention he had to attend in New Orleans. While we were there, he seriously raised the idea that he would move there and live on a houseboat. I said, “Are you kidding me? After two years together, you want to give it all up and move onto a boat?” His response was, “You can visit.”

  He gave up on the idea, but my confidence was rocked. I started to feel that desperate ache to prove something, and this time I was going to fight to hold on to love, at the expense of my heart.

  It didn’t occur to me that I shouldn’t have to work so hard to make him happy, or that love wasn’t a fight. Yet still I couldn’t let go. For the first time in my adult life I was wholly and completely in love. All my years of learning from my mistakes and being willing to take new turns had taught me the very big lesson that love was the answer —not money, or appearances, or pride. Now I was finally ready to embrace love with a grateful, open heart. Unfortunately I had chosen the wrong person to throw my arms around.

  Soon after New Orleans, Evan broke up with me. No matter how much I was trying to will this relationship to work, I couldn’t control another person’s actions. I cried so long and so hard that my face swelled up and I couldn’t open my eyes. Every wedding I planned felt like tearing off a bandage. None of my old coping mechanisms were working, and I was a disaster—just a complete and utter disaster. I begged Evan not to call me unless he was ready to make a real commitment, because otherwise simply hearing his voice would destroy me.

  Eventually I had to pull myself together—not just for my own sake, but for everyone else’s. To stay sane, I knew that I needed to keep myself really, really busy. To get me out of my house, Bennett started planning an outing a week to try a new restaurant, each in a different neighborhood. Then I received a call; a friend of Nicolette’s from Norway was coming to the city, and I promised to show her around. Marianne was the perfect distraction for me, and every night we were out. She was tall and gorgeous and game for anything, and I dragged her around to every hot club in the city. It was hard work, though. By the end of at least several nights, my party-girl facade couldn’t hold up any longer. Emotionally spent and not a little drunk, I’d show up at Bennett’s door, ringing his bell at 3:00 a.m., screaming into his intercom, “I need chocolate!”

  Bennett would answer the door and lay out a buffet of sweets—he was one of the few who knew that despite all outward appearances, sugar was my drug of choice. I’d gorge myself to the edge of nausea, and afterward I’d pass out. The next morning I’d
wake up on Bennett’s sofa—hung over, with a dribble of chocolate and caramel down my chin. He’d just shake his head as he strolled through the living room on the way to get his morning coffee.

  I received two letters from Evan during that time. He told me he missed me every day, but he never said the exact words that I needed to hear—that I was “it” for him. He did say that he was trying to be the man I wanted. But even I knew that trying and doing were two different things. It killed me, but I didn’t respond.

  To make matters more complicated, while I was in deep mourning for my relationship with Evan, my sister Rachel was planning her wedding. Rachel had gotten me through my absolutely darkest days. Now she was in love and getting married to Daniel, and I was so happy for her. I was incredibly honored to be her sister, her maid of honor, and her wedding planner rolled into one. I put all of my now highly potent wedding juices into planning her big day.

  Yet I couldn’t help despairing a little when I compared her life with mine; I was the older sister by three years, and it was all happening to her first. On one particularly difficult morning after my breakup with Evan, I was scheduled to go dress shopping with Rachel, and it was exquisite torture. I stood in the Vera Wang bridal boutique, watching her try on one dreamy dress after another, and I could not have been more miserable, and more convinced that there was no happiness in this world for me. I even remember what I was wearing: overalls (God help me) and a wife-beater T-shirt.

  Right after Vera Wang I went out to brunch with Bennett. I must have been a real joy to behold that day in my overalls, not a stitch of makeup on my face, my hair in a ragged ponytail. I think I was actually wearing a scrunchie (remember those?). I was in such a lousy mood and feeling so alone that I was generally sick of myself. I said to Bennett, “Let’s hear about you. Who are you dating?”

  He said, “No one special.”

  I said, “Honestly, Bennett, you are the pickiest person I have ever met. I wouldn’t even know who to set you up with.”

  Then he said, “How about you?”

  Whoah. What? I looked at Bennett, and I blinked—once, twice. This was not at all the direction I expected this conversation to take. I was speechless.

  Bennett proceeded to tell me that he’d loved me for six years, and stood by and watched me through one boyfriend after another. He told me that he couldn’t wait another day to declare his love because he knew from experience that I’d have another boyfriend by then. This was his chance, and he wasn’t going to pass it up. He said that he would love me forever, and we were soul mates, and that he was certain that he wanted to marry me.

  It’s a cliché to say that I fell out of my chair, except in this case I really did fall out of my chair.

  After I picked myself up from the linoleum, Bennett just sat there quietly, waiting for my response. I looked back across the table at this man I adored, and I thought: He’s my rock, my confidant, my best friend. I had shared every painful life experience I’d ever had with him. The only answer I could give him was: “I’m unbelievably flattered, but I’m in love with someone else. I don’t feel that way about you, and it’s just never going to happen.” And I also think I said, “And I can’t picture kissing you.”

  He’d spend the next two years trying to change my mind.

  PART IV

  The Best Man

  Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.

  —TOM PETERS

  Chapter Twelve

  Best Friends

  It’s not easy planning weddings when you’re unhappy in love. You can’t help wondering what you’re doing wrong when all these people around you are arriving at a destination that seems wholly out of reach for you. But, oddly enough, it was a wedding that helped me say my final good-bye to Evan.

  While Evan and I were still dating, I’d met Jenny, his best friend from Harvard Business School, and her boyfriend Mark. Everyone knew the two of them were destined to be together, but Mark was having a hard time committing. But after some ups and downs, they decided to move in together prior to getting engaged. Jenny was ecstatic, and Mark was genuinely happy, too. To me, Jenny seemed to have it all, and I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous.

  Jenny’s bliss was tragically short-lived. Just when she should have been focused on her new life with Mark, she learned that her mother had been diagnosed with stage-four cancer and given only a few months to live. Jenny called Mark, crying hysterically, and said, “Mark, I’m so sorry to ask this of you, but we have to get married now, my mother has to see me get married.” Although Mark had been the one to take to their engagement slowly, without a moment’s hesitation he said, “I’ll take it from here, Jenny.” He proposed ten days later, after finding the perfect ring and writing her the most heartfelt poem. I was awed and moved by the entire story.

  I was heartbroken for Jenny, and I wanted to do something. I’d learned over the years that when someone is suffering, you don’t ask what you can do—you just do. So even though I barely knew Jenny, I called her, introduced myself as “Evan’s girlfriend Jen,” and told her that I couldn’t do anything to ease the pain of her mother’s news, but I was a party planner, and I could plan her wedding in three months so that she could have her mother by her side. It was my gift to them, and it meant a great deal to me that my work could bring her and her mother solace, and maybe even a little joy, at a time that seemed bereft of both.

  It was soon thereafter that Evan and I broke up. Since Jenny was Evan’s good friend and not mine, our breakup might have made it awkward for me to continue with the planning. But over the course of working on her wedding, I became extremely attached to Jenny and her family. It was a deeply emotional time, and it brought home to me how important our rituals are—a wedding isn’t just a big party, or an opportunity to buy a new dress. It’s a momentous occasion, and the bond that Jenny and her mother shared during those weeks made it feel all the more significant. Jenny’s wedding would be a beginning and an end—a blessing and a good-bye. Each week Jenny’s mother got thinner, and the time they had left together felt shorter, and they treasured every second together.

  Over the course of the weeks while I was planning Jenny’s wedding, I was in my frantic phase of trying to put Evan out of my mind—while secretly hoping that he’d come to his senses, just as Mark had. But aside from Evan’s two noncommittal letters, nothing had changed, and I hadn’t heard anything else from him. Then I heard from Jenny that Evan had requested that I be seated next to him at the reception. I was horrified—somehow I’d managed to forget that of course I would have to see Evan at the wedding. It was some kind of cosmic joke—me and Evan, at a wedding?

  I told Jenny that, as much as I loved her and was so honored to be her planner as well as an invited guest, I just couldn’t bear to see Evan, and therefore I couldn’t possibly come to the wedding. Then Evan himself called me—for the first time since our breakup—and pleaded with me to reconsider. Finally the guilt of abandoning Jenny on her big day won out over my sense of self-preservation, and I agreed to go to the wedding, on the condition that I would not sit with Evan. I also agreed to meet Evan for a drink. I told myself that it would help to defuse the drama of seeing him at the wedding if at least it wasn’t the first time since our breakup.

  It was three days before the wedding when we saw each other. He told me he loved me and missed me. I was guarded, but not guarded enough.

  Jenny’s wedding was at a loft in Tribeca, and it was elegant, simple, and purposeful. The flowers were all white, and there was a fantastic soul dance band, because the bride and groom both loved music. Jenny and Mark had put a great deal of thought into their vows, and every aspect of the ceremony felt infused with emotion. Of course every wedding should feel that way, but so much of the time we get more focused on the color of the napkins than on the words that we say to the person we’re marrying.

 
During the ceremony, tears rolled down my face and formed dark drops on my dress as I thought about what Mark had done for Jenny. He’d overcome every petty hesitation he had, and he’d thrown himself into making this day everything that Jenny wanted it to be. The most important thing that Jenny wanted was to have her mother there to see the day—and she was, wearing a pretty wig and a lovely dress that we had to keep taking in around her thinning frame in the weeks before the event.

  As I watched the wedding unfold, my eyes still swimming in tears, I knew that Mark was a man in love. Marrying Jenny in three months wasn’t a sacrifice for him. Seeing his fiancée in pain and knowing that he could do something to help—he just did it, and without a second thought.

  I looked over at Evan, who was in the wedding party, and his face was tear-streaked, too. After the ceremony he told me that he loved me, and that I was it for him. It wasn’t a marriage proposal, but I heard what I wanted to, and I think in that moment he genuinely believed what he was saying.

  After the reception I said good night to Evan, and he looked shocked that I was leaving without him. We’d spent the whole night dancing and had a wonderful time together, and he thought that was it—we’d go back to the way things were. I told him that I couldn’t act as if nothing had happened, and that if he wanted to see me, he should call me, and we would talk.

  The next day he called, and we spent the entire day together on his boat. I cried and cried. I told him that he’d devastated me, and that I was terrified he’d do it again. I told him that I didn’t need a ring from him—it had never been about that. I just wanted to know that I was the girl for him. I asked him if we’d be together forever. He cried with me, and he said, “That’s the goal.”

  In the weeks after Bennett had confessed his feelings, I worried it would be awkward for us to be together. But of course, since it was Bennett, it wasn’t. We still spent time together, avoiding the topic of both our love interests, and just enjoyed each other’s company. But now, even though I wanted to protect Bennett and try to spare him the pain that Evan and I were reunited, I knew I had to tell him right away.