The Wedding Beat

by Devan Sipher

  The whistle blew, and I stopped, as I’d been instructed. Seconds later I saw Melinda soaring across the tent. Like a lithe angel. Graceful and strong. She lifted her legs up over the trapeze bar, released her hands and swung upside down. Back and forth and back and forth, her hair a halo of feathery curls. Then she slid from the bar, effortlessly doing a double-somersault dive into the trampolinelike net.

  Another whistle, and it was my turn. I would have preferred to be teleported back to my desk as I stood at the top of the ladder, where there was just a narrow platform and open air. An aerialist instructor stood beside me in a space the size of a bathtub, with the net spread thirty far feet below.

  The instructor handed me the bar. It was heavier than I expected. I lurched forward, but he held firmly on to my harness. “I’ve got you,” he said. So much for being Superman.

  “Jump!” he said. I looked down. Bad idea. I couldn’t move. It was like I was back on Melinda’s fire escape but jumping away from the building.

  “Look up,” he said. Like that was going to help. But on the far wall was a huge window with a view of water and sky and burgeoning sunlight. “Jump!”

  And I did.

  I was flying. Not as gracefully as Melinda, but I was swinging on a bar. I pumped my legs, gathering speed and height. And damned if I didn’t feel like the happiest five-year-old alive.

  I dropped into the net, bouncing a few times before flipping myself off of the edge. It was weird being back on the ground. I was wobbly and disoriented. I toppled onto a mat where Melinda was waiting for me. She gave me a small smile, so all was not lost.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “and I’m not sure I believe fear always comes from desire.”

  I was counting on her forgetting about my detour into pseudopsychology. “I don’t know where that came from. I think I had altitude sickness.”

  “I owe you a better answer to your question about Alexander.” The last thing I wanted to talk about was Alexander. “When I was ten, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer,” she said, hugging her knees to her body. “I was twelve when she died.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry” seemed trite. “What was that like for you?” I asked, immediately thinking “I’m sorry” would have been exponentially better.

  “It was hideous,” she said. “Thanks for asking. I mean that. People usually don’t. They want to be polite, but there was nothing polite about the experience.”

  “I can imagine,” I responded for lack of anything useful to say.

  “No, you can’t.” She looked down at the mat. “She baked kick-ass snickerdoodles and sewed funky, homemade Halloween costumes. What I hate is, I have memories of her bald and screaming for morphine that occupy space in my brain. I didn’t think anything could be worse. Until my dad was diagnosed with colon cancer four years later. The day he told me, I insisted it wasn’t possible. We already had our turn. It was double jeopardy, and I had learned in my eleventh-grade government class that was unconstitutional.”

  I wanted to have been there for her. It wasn’t logical, but it was what I felt. I wanted to take care of her. I wanted to make things better for her. “I’m so sorry.”

  “See, that’s what people usually say,” she said with a rueful smile. “I should be the one apologizing. This is not what you signed on for. I think all the wedding stuff is—” Her voice caught in her throat. “It’s just bringing things up to the surface.”

  “How could it not?” I asked.

  She looked up and scrutinized my face. There were tears in her eyes. So much for making things better. I always felt helpless when a woman cried, but this was worse. I couldn’t begin to fathom what Melinda had been through, but if it was possible for me to fall even more for her, I had just done so.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said after wiping her eyes with her sleeve. There was a seriousness of purpose in her voice.

  “Sure,” I said with a slight waver in my own. There was something happening between us. Something significant. This was the moment I had been waiting for since New Year’s.

  “Would you be interested in coming to our engagement party?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Male Pattern Boldness

  My first thought when Melinda invited me to her engagement party was that I’d sooner staple my eyelids to a telephone pole. Then I thought again, and the next day I was in Tucker’s office, pitching him a new blog premise.

  “What if the blog was about following individual brides on their path to marriage?” I was talking fast to keep his attention. It was part eagerness. Part survival instinct. The worst-kept secret in the building was that there was already a list circulating of layoff candidates. The best way for me to stay off that list was by convincing Tucker I was indispensable. “We could call it ‘Destination: Wedding.’ Get it? It wouldn’t be about the location of the wedding, but the journey getting there. It gives us an opportunity to really delve into all the issues a wedding forces upon people. Not just the obvious stuff like choosing a dress and a caterer. But deciding if they want to change their name. Dealing with in-laws. Bachelor parties. Engagement parties. And all the feuds and fits along the way. It could almost be like an online reality show.” I was appealing to Tucker’s desire for glory on the “Interweb.”

  “What happened to the idea of covering breakups?” he asked, unmoved.

  I was way ahead of him. “That’s one of the things that can happen along the way. Not every couple is going to make it down the aisle.” I paused for effect. “You get to have your wedding cake and eat it too, so to speak.”

  He groaned.

  “It’s a broad enough topic to generate the amount of material we’ll need to maintain a daily blog,” I said, bringing it back to meat-and-potato issues. “And it will allow us to serve readers looking for romantic stories as well as those looking for more cynical ones.”

  “‘Destination: Wedding.’” He mulled it over. “I don’t hate it. Do you have a bride in mind?”

  I pictured Melinda in a silky white gown. “I do.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” asked Hope. I assumed the question was rhetorical.

  “It’s like I’ll be an embedded reporter,” I enthused.

  “Your desire to be ‘embedded’ with her is the problem,” Hope sniped while fussing with a bubbling saucepan on her sleek induction stove.

  “Tucker likes the idea.” I didn’t know why I had to defend myself. I never told Hope how to go about sewing someone’s finger back on.

  “Tucker doesn’t know you have the hots for your interview subject.” Hope was irritable because A.J. was late for dinner. Though she had told me it was just going to be a casual get-together, the fresh-baked pear and goat cheese tarts on puffed pastry suggested otherwise.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve had to write about a woman I find attractive,” I said, dipping a celery stick in homemade salsa.

  “There’s a big difference between thinking someone’s cute and wanting to abduct a bride.”

  I had to confess I had dreamed about grabbing Melinda as she walked down the aisle and carrying her, fireman style, to a waiting taxi, but I could distinguish between dreams and reality. I was taller in my dreams.

  “You have no business writing about Melinda. It’s unprofessional and unhealthy.” Hope had a point, but I had no intention of admitting it. “I’m going to call your brother. Maybe he can talk some sense into you.”

  “Gary would be the first person to encourage me,” I said.

  “To pursue a married woman?”

  “She’s not married.”

  “She’s engaged!”

  “To a creep!”

  “Has it occurred to you that you might be biased?”

  Actually, it hadn’t. I prided myself on my objectivity. “If I thought Alexander was worthy of Melinda, I would step aside and wish them both well.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Hope rarely swore. I was bearing the b
runt of A.J.’s transgression. He was supposed to have been at Hope’s place by eight. It was nearing nine. The goat cheese tarts were congealing, as was her mood.

  “If I’m wrong about him, they’ll be married the first week of May,” I said. I didn’t mention I had requested a background check on Alexander. It was standard procedure—for suspected felons and war criminals.

  The phone rang, and Hope went into her bedroom to answer it. I stirred the pomegranate sauce for the chicken that was still roasting (or, more likely, dehydrating) in the oven. I deliberated whether Hope was right, knowing full well that she was. I weighed the pluses and minuses of my situation, trying to come up with some pluses.

  “A.J.’s on call at his clinic,” Hope said when she returned, minus her heels and sparkly earrings. “Did I mention he used to work for Doctors Without Borders?”

  Thirty-seven times and counting. I dipped a tasting spoon into the pot.

  “He’s a caring and compassionate person,” she said without much conviction, “so why couldn’t he have mentioned he was on call tonight prior to five minutes ago? I don’t understand him. No, I don’t understand men, period. Why do you do the things you do?”

  I have never felt representative of my entire sex, but rarely less so than when slurping a spoonful of simmering fruit sauce. “Hey, I was here early,” I said.

  “There is no logic to male behavior. Just when I think I’ve got the primary motivations down to sex, money and fantasy football, the whole paradigm gets rearranged. What possible reason do you have to write about Melinda’s wedding?”

  I thought we had moved on to lambasting A.J.

  “Do you really believe no one’s going to notice that you’re head over heels for this woman?” Hope was growing more agitated. “You keep saying how everything’s so precarious at work, then you go and purposely put your job at risk.”

  “I’m not putting my job at risk,” I said, suddenly worried that I was.

  “Then what is it that you think you’re doing?”

  It was less a question than an accusation, and I resented it. I was doing the only thing I could to be with Melinda. If I didn’t write the article, I wouldn’t have a reason to see her, and I couldn’t bear that.

  There it was.

  Not such a complicated paradigm at all. I was doing what felt right. Even if it happened to be completely wrong.

  “Maybe A.J. didn’t tell you he was on call because he wanted to be here if he could,” I said with newfound appreciation for complicated choices.

  Hope collapsed onto her creamy leather sofa and picked at a desiccated tart. “You really think so?”

  It was only a theory, but I was sticking to it. “From everything you’ve told me, he seems to really care about you.”

  “It’s just so hard. Finding someone. Trusting someone. I know you like Melinda, but do you really want to be the guy who tries to break up an engagement?”

  “No.” Not when she put it like that. “But I also don’t want to be the guy who wonders ‘What if?’ If Melinda decides she’s making a mistake, I’m not going to feel bad about it. Let the best man win.”

  “What if he’s the best man?” Hope softly inquired, adding, “for her.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. “It makes me happy to be around her,” I said, stating the simple truth. “Really happy.”

  Hope sighed and took a small bite of the tart. “For how long?”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  There Will Be Blood

  Gawker was having a field day with my blog, and I hadn’t even started it yet. The headline of their article christened it DESTINATION: DIVORCE.

  Is there any sadder indication that romance is dead than The Paper expanding its wedding coverage to tales of love gone wrong? Harlequin writer—we mean, columnist—Gavin Greene, bereft of enough nauseating courtships to fill his quota, has decided to devote a new blog to the brokenhearted. Bravo, Gavin. Will you also be reporting on the breakup sex?

  I didn’t know if I was more upset about someone leaking false information or the Harlequin crack.

  My phone didn’t stop ringing all day. From the New York Post to Entertainment Tonight, everyone wanted to know if it was true I was starting a divorce column. Then the publicists descended. It seemed that every high-profile divorce lawyer had a publicist and an ax to grind. I was offered salacious stories about wife swapping in Westchester and botched penile implants.

  I spent the day declining and disclaiming, when I should have been finishing my article about two former reality-show contestants who had met while competing on The Amazing Race. At eight thirty, I was still at my desk instead of at the Upper East Side townhouse where Melinda’s engagement party had already started.

  Well, physically I was at my desk. Mentally I was picturing Melinda in a strapless black dress and plotting ways to get her alone at her party. An impossible feat if I didn’t get out of my office.

  I was ready to beg Renée for an extension on my deadline, but she had slipped out without my noticing. Often she worked late into the night. In fact, we had some of our best conversations well past midnight. Bleary-eyed, she’d reminisce about the old days when pneumatic tubes carried stories (and the occasional reptile) to the press room, where printers (the unionized kind) set articles word by word in “hot type” metal plates.

  But Renée was gone. As was everyone in the department, which was unusual. But it had been an unusual week. An unusually tense one, as the deadline for voluntary buyouts came and went. Those who chose to take them were both ridiculed and envied by the rest of us, who chose to stay and play an adult version of musical chairs, in which chairs would soon be eliminated one by one, along with computers, security passes and paychecks.

  People were tiptoeing around, waiting for the music to stop. They were afraid of drawing attention to themselves, so they made their escapes each night as quickly and quietly as possible. I was the only person working late in the entire wing, and the automated overhead lights kept going off. Every fifteen minutes, I had to get up and do jumping jacks to convince the motion and heat sensors that I was, in fact, a human life form in need of illumination.

  Metaphorically, of course, I remained in the dark. I didn’t know when the layoffs would start. Or if they would start. Maybe Renée was right when she said it was all just a scare tactic. If so, it worked. I would never have taken solo responsibility for a blog if I hadn’t been worried about losing my job.

  I grimaced while doing my umpteenth word count. I had only seven hundred words of what needed to be a thousand-word story. I needed to get the piece done and get uptown. The lights went out again, and this time the sensors deemed my in-place calisthenics insufficient proof of my existence. So I ran up and down the hall between the cubicles, waving my arms in the air. I was confused to see Renée’s computer was still on and a coat was on the back of her chair. I stopped when I noticed her purse was also hanging there.

  “What are you doing?” I heard Renée before I could see her approaching in the darkness.

  I was about to tell her that I wasn’t snooping when the fluorescents flickered on, and I was jolted by what they revealed.

  It wasn’t the blood itself that was so shocking, as the amount of it. Renée was holding several saturated pieces of Kleenex to her nose, but viscous red fluid was still oozing down to her chin.

  “What happened?” I asked, sprinting to my desk to get her more Kleenex.

  “I’m bleeding,” she grunted. She was also crying. “I get nosebleeds. It’s nothing.”

  I had never seen Renée cry. It was more disturbing than the blood. As I handed her a box of tissues, I remembered reading somewhere that nosebleeds were a symptom of leukemia. Could Renée have been diagnosed with cancer?

  “They fired me,” she rasped, and collapsed into her chair. “The bastards fired me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know what to think. For weeks we had been warned, but I still wasn’t prepared. Even if I had felt prepa
red, I would never have expected Renée to be let go.

  “Heidi Takahashi called me into her office.” Renée’s body heaved as she spoke. Her words came out in staccato bursts between sniffles and convulsions. “First thing she did was introduce herself as a managing editor. Like I don’t know who she is. Like I haven’t been here since she was in diapers.”

  My mind was racing. If Renée was expendable, I was a goner.

  “When I started working here, there was no such thing as a female editor, let alone a female managing editor.” Her eyes reddened as her tobacco-cured voice rumbled with gritty indignity. “Women weren’t even allowed in the newsroom. We were exiled to Ladies Fashion or the secretary pool. It took me ten years to get my first A-section byline, and now this snub-nosed pipsqueak in open-toe pumps has the gall to tell me ‘The Paper is no longer in need of your services.’ She couldn’t even tell me what those services were, because she hadn’t had time to review my file.” Renée wiped at her eyes with the wad of Kleenex, distributing a bloody smear across her face.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, wanting to say something more useful. I had the urge to embrace her, but I knew better. It was one thing for her to show her vulnerability and quite another for me to acknowledge witnessing it.

  She pulled more tissues out of the box and plugged her nose. Tears trickled down her cheek. “This isn’t how I wanted to go out.”

  I couldn’t imagine The Paper without her. Not only had she worked there for almost half its history, but she also personified its core values. Her exacting standards for accuracy safeguarded what she considered a sacred pact between the newspaper and the public. If The Paper had a soul, it was because of Renée and a handful of others. Take them away, and it was just an office building with unconventional elevators.