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The Wedding Beat

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by Devan Sipher




  Praise for

  The Wedding Beat

  “Filled with sharp observations, hilarious truths and poignant moments. Reading The Wedding Beat is like sitting next to the wittiest guest at a wedding—a rare find!”

  —Beth Harbison, New York Times

  bestselling author of Shoe Addicts Anonymous

  “For any woman who devours the wedding section every Sunday, wondering when her own Mr. Right will come along, The Wedding Beat is a romantic, hilarious and inspiring story of the angst behind the announcements.”

  —Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin,

  New York Times bestselling authors of The Nanny Diaries

  “Devan Sipher uses his journalist’s sharp eye for detail to take a delightful and fresh look at the romantic comedy genre. Go for a wild, hilarious ride-along with Sipher as he works The Wedding Beat.”

  —Jillian Lauren, New York Times

  bestselling author of Some Girls and Pretty

  “Romantic and charming, Devan Sipher’s debut novel is a fresh and fun take on finding (and committing to) love.”

  —Laura Dave, author of The First Husband

  “Smart, laugh-out-loud funny and unabashedly romantic. Get thee to a beach and read.” —Sarah Dunn, author of The Big Love

  “Nothing feels more right than love gone wrong from a man’s point of view. Sipher gives us the male Bridget Jones—winning, elegant and terribly lost. No cold feet here. I do, I do, I do!”

  —Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance and The Seven Year Bitch

  “Fast-paced, unfailingly funny and fresh, The Wedding Beat is like the best wedding cakes: delightfully frothy on the outside, but surprisingly substantial within.”

  —Anne Newgarden, author of Becoming Jane:

  The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen

  “Hilarious, hip and deeply heartfelt all at the same time, as if Woody Allen was younger, cuter and wrote a wedding column.”

  —Susan Shapiro, author of Overexposed and Five Men Who Broke My Heart

  the wedding beat

  devan sipher

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, April 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Devan Sipher, 2012

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012

  Cover photo by Paul Simcock/Getty Images;

  wedding dress © 300dpi/Shutterstock Images

  Author photo by Stacey Luftig

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Sipher, Devan.

  The wedding beat/Devan Sipher.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58024-0

  1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.I5763W43 2012

  813.6—dc23 2011045426

  Set in Bauer Bodoni

  Designed by Ginger Legato

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To all the brides and grooms

  who shared their stories—and inspired mine

  the wedding beat

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One: A Dead Fish at the Head Table and Other Celebration Snafus

  Chapter Two: Never Have Parents

  Chapter Three: Let Dead Fish Lie

  Chapter Four: What a Fool Believes

  Chapter Five: If Cinderella Were on Facebook, Would Jiminy Cricket Tweet?

  Chapter Six: The News Zoo Revue

  Chapter Seven: Dream Date

  Chapter Eight: Arrested Development

  Chapter Nine: Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten: Dating for Dummies

  Chapter Eleven: Be the Bee

  Chapter Twelve: Buzzkill

  Chapter Thirteen: The Better Man

  Chapter Fourteen: In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

  Chapter Fifteen: Turbulence

  Chapter Sixteen: Ripe for the Picking

  Chapter Seventeen: Flying Solo

  Chapter Eighteen: Dork Is a Four-Letter Word

  Chapter Nineteen: Facts and Figures

  Chapter Twenty: Up, Up and Away

  Chapter Twenty-one: Male Pattern Boldness

  Chapter Twenty-two: There Will Be Blood

  Chapter Twenty-three: No News Is Good News

  Chapter Twenty-four: The New Me

  Chapter Twenty-five: Always a Bridesmaid

  Chapter Twenty-six: No Day but Today

  Chapter Twenty-seven: The Wedding Beat

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Mayday

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Sanity Is in the Eye of the Beholder

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Reporter’s Notepad: December 31, 2007

  Help! I’m being held hostage at a black-tie wedding on New Year’s Eve. Well, not so much a hostage as an indentured servant for a Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper that cannot be named.

  Fifty-seven minutes and counting, and the ceremony hasn’t even started. The chamber quartet is playing “Endless Love” for the third time. Shoot me now.

  I’m scribbling in my pad and trying to forget I’m a thirty-seven-year-old single guy alone on New Year’s. No, not alone. Surrounded by married couples. The only single woman is the bride’s grandmother, who is eighty-five and a humpback. And even she has a date.

  I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be writing about a wedding at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts, a nineteenth-century former synagogue on the Lower East Side, where uptown brides look for downtown panache. I want to be with Jill. I want to be kissing the back of her neck and wrapping my arms around her as we sway to the gentle beat of samba music at the Blue Ig
uana.

  A bridesmaid is finally walking down the aisle. Slowly. I’ve never heard Pachelbel’s Canon played so slowly. A flower girl floats by on a cloud of white taffeta. All big eyes and brown ringlets.

  I see the bride stand in the amber glow of candlelight, and something inside me surrenders. I can’t help thinking of all the brides that came before her, linked together by a white dress, a band of gold and a first kiss. It’s a moment of transcendent hope.

  And it makes me feel unbearably alone.

  Chapter One

  A Dead Fish at the Head Table and Other Celebration Snafus

  “Did you know that Sarah Jessica Parker was married here?” Barbara babbled.

  The party planner was trying to distract me. And with good reason. Sarah Jessica Parker never killed a koi. I glanced toward a golden-hued, imported fish floating listlessly in the bridal table’s centerpiece.

  “You know, Mimi and Sarah Jessica go to the same massage therapist,” Barbara informed me, speaking reverently of both the bride and the trendsetting actress. “They have a very similar aesthetic.”

  The only aesthetic I could detect was unmitigated extravagance. Tuxedoed waiters were serving Dom Pérignon and beluga blini appetizers beneath hanging gardens of white hydrangeas, suspended from the vaulted ceiling of the Angel Orensanz. The sanctuary-turned–art and event space was decked out for the holiday nuptials with seven-foot silver candelabra and curtains of crystal beads surrounding twenty-five tables draped in shimmering white silk and French lace that matched the bride’s gown. From the center of each table rose a cylindrical glass aquarium of iridescent koi swimming among submerged orchids.

  Except for the bridal table, where the drowned flowers were not the only casualty.

  “Get me the fish wrangler,” Barbara barked into her headset. Her shapeless black suit was all shoulders and elbows as she shooed away Eddie Wong, the Annie Leibovitz of wedding photographers, who was snapping pictures of the kamikaze koi.

  “Promise me you won’t write about this in The Paper,” Barbara implored, grasping hold of my arm as if it were a personal flotation device. “It would destroy the bride. She’s a vegetarian.”

  I smiled as if I understood the connection. Bad choice. Smiling just encourages people to keep talking.

  “Mimi wanted this day to be perfect. Just like her love for Mylo. You know, she would love him even if he was a ditchdigger.”

  But Mylo was not a ditchdigger. He was a partner in a real estate hedge fund that didn’t like having its name in a newspaper. Or so I was told a half dozen times by their communications director.

  “Mimi knew she was destined to be with Mylo from the night they met,” Barbara continued. “They’re like Romeo and Juliet. Without the suicide.”

  The couple’s apothecary-free saga began last summer at a surprise birthday party on a 210-foot yacht anchored in Sag Harbor. The yacht was his. The surprise was hers. And the attraction was immediate. The party ended at about four in the morning, and she stayed on board—for the next six weeks. Then she moved into his Park Avenue duplex penthouse. That was the end of act one. Act two began when she found out there already was a Mrs. Mylo, who was giving up the honorific very reluctantly. There were tears. There was packing. And there were canceled reservations in St. Barts.

  “Gavin.” Barbara purred my name. “No one but you could capture the magic of their story. Are you staying for the midnight balloon drop?” She had already asked me six times. “There’s going to be a virtual fireworks display designed by Stephano Spanetto.”

  I didn’t care if it was designed by Steven Spielberg. The only fireworks I was interested in were the kind I experienced when I was with Jill, and my goal was to be by her side when the clock struck midnight. I had snagged a reservation at the Blue Iguana for eleven thirty in the hope I’d be done in time, and Jill had been a trouper about playing things by ear. The problem was that it was already after ten.

  “I’ll see,” I answered evasively.

  “But, Gavin, it’s New Year’s Eve.”

  Precisely. I didn’t want to spend it watching real estate developers party like it was 2006. I was not going to let work be my only priority. Not this year. I was no longer the thirty-two-year-old who had landed a job at the number-one newspaper in the country. Five years had gone by in the blink of an eye, or, more accurately, in a state of sleep deprivation, since I was working more than eighty hours a week. Gray hairs were sneaking in among my sandy brown ones, and I had made a resolution that things were going to change. This was the year I was going to find someone smart and savvy. Someone with a quick wit, a kind heart and a great smile. Someone like Jill.

  An advertising account executive with an unlikely predilection for Fellini films, she caught my attention the previous month during a 5k race in Central Park. I ran beside her for the last lap and made a point of letting her beat me. She was charmed. I was stoked. We’d squeezed in only a few dates since then, so spending New Year’s together was a leap. Not for mankind. But the reporter in me prefers to look before I leap—and line up corroborating sources.

  “The balloon drop is a symbolic representation of the bride’s emotional journey on her wedding day,” Barbara persisted without irony. “It’s imperative that you see it.”

  Barbara had gone from fawning fan to fascist in training. I’d been at the Angel Orensanz for hours and had interviewed everyone but the restroom attendants. Though the wedding had been called for seven, it was well past eight when the Episcopal priest started the mysteriously delayed ceremony—“an act of God” according to Barbara. Translation: The bride had a wardrobe malfunction (solved by a strategically placed small diamond brooch that the bridegroom acquisitioned on a search-and-rescue mission at Bergdorf).

  The cocktail “hour” was approaching the ninety-minute mark. I calculated that if I snuck out after the bridal dance, I’d have just enough time to pick up Jill and make our reservation, assuming the taxi gods were on my side.

  But what if there really was something extraordinary about the balloon drop? What if the couple said or did something at midnight that exquisitely expressed the essence of their relationship?

  As I checked my watch, I reminded myself of the half dozen prewedding interviews I’d already done with the bride and groom. I had a computer file with more than forty typed pages, or roughly ten thousand words of notes for a thousand-word piece. But there was always more I could do, and I’m someone who perpetually fears I’m going to miss something essential.

  “Mimi will be so disappointed if you’re not here,” Barbara stage-whispered as the couple finally made their grand entrance. They swept into the room, her slender mermaid silhouette preceding his wide-shouldered frame snugly buttoned into a narrow-lapelled tux. The metallic silver color of his tie matched the glittering hairpins in her updo. As they made their way through the crowd, they smiled and waved and clasped and kissed. And, yes, they glowed.

  “You would never guess what she’s been through.” Barbara sighed before scurrying away toward an unshaved man in shirtsleeves carrying a fish net. And a bucket.

  Mimi was hardly the tragic heroine Barbara intimated, but at fourteen she was diagnosed with scoliosis and spent three years wearing a back brace. During one of our conversations, she showed me a picture of herself as a teenager with a freakish-looking contraption of metal rods covering half her body. Her sister described her as an outgoing, athletic young girl whose world changed overnight. At an unforgivingly status-conscious high school, she was taunted daily by her former tennis teammates about her inevitable weight gain and frumpy, loose-fitting outfits. Relegated to radioactive status at cotillions, she swore one day she would be able to stand tall in a strapless dress. And there she was, less than a decade later, wrapped in ethereal beaded lace.

  Something in me melted. No, she didn’t want to find a cure for cancer or make the world a better place for an endangered owl species. She just wanted to be pretty. And have good posture. And she was. And she did. She was
so proud of how she looked and how he looked at her. You could see how much he wanted her beside him. How lonely his right arm looked without her encircled by it. In that moment, I truly believed she would have loved him even if he were a ditchdigger. Hell, even if he were a newspaper columnist.

  When they reached the dance floor, the twelve-piece swing band launched into a lush arrangement of Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack,” and my eyes misted. Then I pulled out my cell phone to call Jill.

  “I’m on my way,” I said, eager to see where the evening could lead us.

  “Gavin, I’m not feeling great,” Jill said weakly, sounding farther away than a mile uptown. “I ran a half marathon this morning, and it wiped me out.”

  I didn’t ask why she ran a half marathon on New Year’s Eve, because that would have sounded judgmental. But it had crossed my mind more than once that Jill was a little obsessed with the whole marathon thing. I enjoyed the runner’s high, but there’s something a bit too punishing about a twenty-six-mile race. However, I liked that she was passionate and feisty. And who was I kidding? I also liked what great shape she was in.

  “I’m sorry. If you prefer, we could stay in tonight.” I was already picturing a quiet evening in her cozy West Village walk-up, with just the two of us and a bottle of champagne. Truth be told, I’ve never been a fan of fancy New Year’s celebrations. Too many people too desperate to be happy.

  “I don’t want to ruin your holiday,” she said. Red warning signs flashed in my brain. But I ignored them.

  “I can pick up something from that Italian place you like,” I offered.

  “You’re at a great party. Why would you want to leave?”

  “Because I’d prefer to be with you,” I said, hoping I sounded charming and not needy. “How about sushi?” No response. “I can be at your place in a half hour.”

  “That’s not a good idea.” Sirens blared inside my head. “I have company,” she stated, sounding vaguely apologetic.

  I swallowed hard. Be cool, I told myself. Be strong. Be confident.

 

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