The Wedding Beat

by Devan Sipher

  “The wedding pages are the same as any other pages. We don’t candy-coat the news,” she said, her throaty voice curdling with disdain. A flinty reporter-turned-editor with a fondness for rugelach and racy jokes, Renée had little tolerance for anyone who impugned her judgment—or The Paper’s.

  “We deal with facts, Ms. Murphy,” she continued as her head bobbed over tall stacks of wedding submissions. “And the fact is that this is going to be your third marriage. If we are going to publish an article about it, we are obligated to include the facts of the story.”

  Renée had worked at The Paper for almost fifty years, and as far as she was concerned, there was no difference between a wedding announcement and a Page One feature. As many a hapless bride had learned. I was simply relieved that her ire wasn’t directed at me. This time.

  My phone rang. It was Tony Fontana, who was sitting three feet away in the cubicle to my right. “Another bride bites the dust,” he whispered.

  “Did the tirade wake you up?” I asked as I booted up my computer. The question was facetious, since Tony was a workhorse, in the office by six a.m. He wrote for three different sections and coached hockey teams for all four of his kids. Somehow he also found time to be president of the Trekkie club in Great Neck.

  “Oh, you’ll get your wake-up call soon as Brunhilda sets her sights on your column,” he said with a chuckle. Renée was born in Germany, which is why Tony teased her with the Brunhilda moniker when she was in a bad mood. But jokes aside, it was clear she was not in the best frame of mind for editing my piece, which I had filed electronically before I went to bed.

  “Go harass a bridegroom,” I responded while double-clicking on my e-mail program.

  “Keeping the world safe for democracy, one wedding at a time,” he said before hanging up.

  With trepidation, I scanned the multitude of new e-mails I had received, scrolling down through far too many offers for penile enlargement. There were several messages from a nervous bride confirming and then reconfirming our scheduled interview on Friday morning, but there didn’t seem to be anything from the Observer—or from Melinda. I was relieved. And disappointed. I reminded myself I was lucky if I simply managed to avert destroying my career. Yet there was a soft ache in my chest as I envisioned Melinda’s dimples.

  “Brides!” Renée exclaimed as she disengaged from her diatribe and sat back down.

  “Is it really so terrible to want to leave previous marriages out of your wedding announcement?” asked Alison Dolan. Tony and I simultaneously popped our heads up above our cubicles with morbid anticipation. Alison was two years out of Barnard and confused why she wasn’t managing editor of The Paper yet. We were confused how she kept her job.

  “We all want things,” Renée snapped as she shot back upright. “I want to be living in the south of France.” That wasn’t really true. Renée was convinced she would shrivel up and die if she spent more than a week away from The Paper. No one knew her exact age, but she had to be nearing seventy, and retirement was a nonissue.

  “If we quote someone in an election article about who they’re voting for, we don’t say how many times they were married,” Alison persisted in her languid whine.

  “And when we quote someone in a wedding article, we don’t say who they’re voting for,” Renée said a little defensively. “If a story’s about marriage, then a previous marriage is relevant. Everything is about context.” Renée sat back down, then sprung up again. “In 1977, Lana Fogerty and I were the only two female reporters on the Washington desk. Then Lana was fired because she had an affair with a congressman. Not while she was working here, but previously.” Renée hammered home the “previously” before continuing her reminiscence. “I thought it reeked of sexism and I went straight to J. D. Rosenberg. J.D. said, ‘I don’t care if my reporters are sleeping with elephants, as long as they aren’t covering the circus.’”

  The bestiality metaphor was troubling, but it was the reference to a reporter being fired for sexual misconduct that made me blanch. I knew all too well that moral integrity was not an expectation at The Paper so much as a sacrosanct demand.

  My phone rang again, and I flinched. I didn’t recognize the number. Not particularly unusual. But what if it was the Observer? Best choice was to let it go to voice mail. Just in case. But what if they then called the standards editor? I needed to get a grip.

  I went back to reading my e-mails and found one from my grandmother buried amid the spam:

  I’m out of the hospital. I just needed a few stitches. You’ll have to wait a little longer for your inheritance.

  Love,

  Gramma

  I immediately started dialing.

  “Gavin!” my grandmother exclaimed delightedly upon answering her cell phone. “I’m at the Winn-Dixie. How did you know where to find me?” Her embrace of technology didn’t include entirely understanding it. “Did you go running this morning?”

  “Not this morning, Grandma.”

  “Why not? When I got home from the hospital, first thing I did was go running.”

  “Why didn’t you call me afterward?” I asked. “I left you a dozen messages.”

  “I didn’t want to bother you while you were working.”

  “I’m always working,” I said, “but I’m thinking about taking time off to come visit you.”

  “You shouldn’t take off of work,” she said. “Nine thousand people lost their jobs at Verizon.” My grandmother followed unemployment reports the way baseball fans track batting averages.

  “I’m not going to lose my job,” I assured her before asking for details about her health. She insisted she was just bruised and tired. It was Bernie she was concerned about. He was still in the ICU.

  “Last night was the first time we slept apart since we were married,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice. “I don’t want you visiting now. Save your money for taking a nice girl to dinner.” She abruptly said she had to go, and I was still holding the receiver when Renée rapped on my cubicle.

  “Your column’s at the copy desk,” she told me.

  Renée didn’t send a story to the copy editors until she was finished with her edit, which was usually a grueling ordeal over several hours or even days.

  “You don’t have any questions for me?” I asked, somewhat disbelieving. And rather proud of myself.

  “I’m sure I could come up with some,” she said with a hint of menace. “However, Al said he has a query for you.”

  “Captain Al!” Tony’s voice boomed. “Must be a whale of a tale.”

  Al Macallister led the copy desk with the kind of detailed attention that helped earn The Paper its acclaimed reputation. He was also a monomaniac.

  “It’s about your lede,” Al said when I called him. Oh, God, I thought. Please don’t change my lede after all the hours I spent coming up with it.

  Al read the opening sentence robotically, with no inflection in his nasal voice: “‘When it came to love, Mimi Martin thought she had missed the boat.’” He paused before citing my linguistic crime.

  “Which boat?” he asked. “Which particular boat did Ms. Martin miss?”

  There’s a thin line between editorial accuracy and anal-retentiveness.

  “I wasn’t really referring to one particular boat,” I said, trying not to reveal my inner John McEnroe (“You cannot be serious!”).

  “But you used the word ‘the,’ which, in fact, implies one specific boat,” he countered. “If you don’t have a specific boat in mind, you should change it to ‘a boat.’ Otherwise our readers are going to wonder what boat you’re referring to.”

  The only thing our readers were going to wonder was what planet we were on.

  “It’s supposed to be funny,” I said, feebly attempting to reason with him, but if you have to explain that something’s funny, it’s not. “It’s a colloquialism: ‘I missed the boat.’”

  “You didn’t write that YOU missed a boat. You wrote that Miss Martin missed a boat,” Captain Al
pointed out, always on the alert for a factual error.

  “The point is, it’s a turn of phrase that doesn’t make sense with the word ‘a,’” I insisted.

  “I don’t know,” he said. What doesn’t he know? I wondered. How people talk in real life? “I think it’s best to be accurate.”

  I hung up the phone, grumbling, “Al is killing my lede.”

  Renée’s head popped up again over her cubicle. “In 1968, Archie Donovan was the copy editor when I wrote a story about John Wayne’s Oscar win. My lede was, ‘Better late than never. John Wayne showed True Grit, winning an Academy Award for his one hundred and thirty-ninth film.’ Donovan, who believed there was no such thing as too few words, changed it to ‘John Wayne was the late winner of the Academy Award for his one hundred and thirty-ninth film.’ That’s how you literally kill a lede.” She let loose a raspy guffaw, then plopped back down into her chair. From behind the wall she said, “I’ll talk to Al.”

  I was grateful for one fewer thing to worry about. Then an e-mail alert appeared on my screen. I had a new message, and it was from Melinda.

  Chapter Seven

  Dream Date

  I was deliberating between roses and tulips at a Midtown deli before meeting Melinda for a late dinner. Roses made a strong statement. Possibly too strong. I was overthinking it. Or, more likely, I was overdoing it. It was just a first date. I wondered if I had been too eager on my first date with Jill. I had brought her a miniature box of Belgian truffles. Maybe that’s what had turned her off. I wished I could ask her. There should be exit interviews for dating. Just a brief evaluation of the highlights and challenges of the relationship, and maybe a few questions like “So what exactly was it that motivated you to dump me?”

  I decided against the flowers. But picked up a package of breath mints. I wasn’t nervous. Or I wasn’t as nervous as I was when I received Melinda’s e-mail two days prior. I had stared at my computer monitor for about ten minutes before opening the message, half expecting her to tell me to cease and desist. Instead, she enthusiastically accepted my invitation. Not only wasn’t she offended, but she also said she was flattered by my boldness. Only problem was maintaining it. I asked Hope to recommend a bold restaurant.

  “Bold food or bold design?” she asked. I didn’t really have an opinion, but that didn’t seem like a very bold thing to admit. “How about a bold location?” she said.

  “Like a foreign country?” I asked.

  “I was thinking more like the Bronx.”

  “New parameters,” I said. “Bold without crossing a major body of water.”

  “How about in the water?”

  There is something to be said for being bland, I thought as I climbed the narrow vertical ladder on the port side of The Lightship, an eighty-year-old boat that had been salvaged from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and was now docked at a pier on the Hudson River.

  When Hope recommended the place, I imagined myself following in the footsteps of Mimi and Mylo’s marina-kindled romance. But that was summer in the Hamptons, and this was winter along the West Side Highway.

  A frigid wind blew off the Hudson, and the dark waves sloshing against The Lightship seemed more threatening than buoyant. As I hoisted myself aboard, I reminded myself that Melinda enjoyed adventures.

  A metal stairway led into the belly of the boat, where R&B emanated from the barnacle-clad engine room that housed an intimate lounge. With candlelit catwalks cutting through the rusting hull, it was a cross between a swanky bar and Davy Jones’s locker.

  There was no sign of Melinda among the twenty- and thirtysomething fashionistas in their all-black ensembles. I was wearing a dark gray jacket and jeans, my standard uniform, but I had tucked in my shirt.

  I positioned myself on a bar stool. After a couple minutes I realized I was slouching, so I stood instead. I checked my watch. It was five after nine. I had an eight a.m. interview I hadn’t finished preparing for. I promised myself I wouldn’t think about it.

  My cell phone vibrated, and I worried Melinda was canceling. But it was my parents calling. They’d been updating me regularly about my grandmother’s health. There was nothing to update, since I’d been calling her every morning on my way to work; however, that had negligible impact on the frequency of my parents’ bulletins.

  “Just wanted to let you know that there’s no change in your grandmother’s condition,” my father said.

  “She doesn’t have a condition,” I said. “She has stitches.”

  “Well, she didn’t get any more stitches today,” my mother clarified.

  “She’s not going to get any more stitches,” I said.

  “Suddenly you’re a doctor,” my father commented.

  “It’s not too late for you to go back to medical school,” my mother said. “My Zumba instructor’s nephew didn’t go until he was thirty-eight, and by the time he graduated he was married.”

  “I’m not going back to medical school,” I assured her.

  “Have you reconsidered looking into mail-order brides?”

  Before I could reply, my father said, “Bernie was moved out of the ICU.”

  As usual, my parents had buried the lede.

  “That’s great news,” I said.

  “Make sure to say that to your grandmother.”

  “I will,” I said before asking the obvious question. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Bernie’s still unconscious,” my mother said. “The doctor said he wasn’t optimistic.”

  “That’s not what the doctor said,” my father objected.

  “He said that Bernie may never gain consciousness.”

  “But he didn’t use the word ‘optimistic’!”

  “Because he wasn’t!”

  I looked around the dark room. A shellacked lobster seemed to be eyeing me. Melinda was late. Bernie was dying. My parents were dysfunctional. And I was alone. Figuratively. There were about twenty people sprawled on the sofas and shimmying in the shadows as Mary J. Blige insisted things were “Just Fine.”

  My phone beeped. It was Melinda.

  “I need to put you on hold,” I told my parents, interrupting them midsquabble. I clicked through to Melinda, fearing bad news and hoping she was merely delayed by the subway or Somalian pirates.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Where are you?” I replied.

  “I’m sitting at a lovely table for two, minus my plus-one,” she said, before I realized I was hearing Mary J. Blige in stereo through my handset.

  “I am so there,” I said, bounding up the steps. I could have sworn I had suggested meeting in the bar, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but seeing her.

  The dining room was deck side. Rows of red-and-white-checker-clothed tables were arranged under a tent amid torchlike heater lamps wrapped in strings of colored Christmas lights.

  “I’m on the deck,” I said, still holding my phone to my ear.

  “I’m toward the stern on the starboard side,” she said.

  “Is this a test?” I tried to remember if stern was front or back.

  “Yes,” she said with a laugh. “If you fail we’ll never meet.” I liked her challenging but flirtatious tone.

  “Aren’t you going to help me?” I asked as I strode between the tables, my head swiveling from side to side.

  “What kind of romantic hero seeks navigational assistance?”

  “The kind who might be doomed by a lack of nautical knowledge,” I said, psyched that she thought of me as a romantic hero.

  “Fear not, Braveheart, and veer not from your path, as I will be your beacon.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m waving at you,” she said, and I could detect someone waving an arm. But in the dim light I couldn’t see her. “Do not tarry,” she said before hanging up. Fat chance, I thought, pocketing my phone and hurrying toward her.

  She stood to greet me. All six feet of her. She enveloped me as I hesitantly embraced her. We sat down and she smoothed a few strands of s
alt-and-pepper hair.

  “I have to confess, when I got your e-mail, I wasn’t sure who you were,” she said. “But now of course I remember we met at a party last summer in Southampton.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I’ve never seen you before in my life” seemed inappropriate. But accurate.

  Or better yet: “Who are you and what have you done with Melinda?” Though, as Captain Al would undoubtedly have pointed out, she was in fact “a” Melinda. Just not the one I was looking for.

  Why did she respond to my e-mail if she didn’t know who I was? Why didn’t she realize she wasn’t the intended recipient? On the other hand, I was grateful she assumed I was a legitimate suitor rather than an incompetent stalker.

  Looking at her across the candlelit table, there was no reason she couldn’t be the object of a man’s obsession. Though I was guessing that she was in her mid-fifties, she was curvy in the right places with robust lips and doelike eyes.

  “You picked a great place,” she said, bobbing her head to the music. “I feel ten years younger just being among all these fabulous kids.”

  I instantly felt ten years older. I became uncomfortably aware that I was probably the second-oldest person on board.

  “My ex-husband would hate this place,” she said.

  I must have done something terrible in a previous life, I thought as she chronicled twenty-five years of her former spouse’s foibles. “When I met him, he thought the Himalayas were a sexual position.” She also spoke of her two grandchildren—and shared pictures.

  All I wanted was to extricate myself as quickly as possible.

  My phone buzzed. It was my parents again, and I realized that I had inadvertently hung up on them. I was about to say I needed to take the call and use it as an excuse to escape, but I remembered that I had invited her to dinner. She hadn’t sought out the invitation. She hadn’t been the one prowling the Internet for a date. She simply consented to accompany me for a meal, and the least I could do was provide one.