Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

by Dave Bry

  Anyway, also that week, the musical The Producers had opened on Broadway to universal raves. And in my enthusiasm, and the difficulty I was having thinking straight, I congratulated you on the achievement. “Hey, way to go,” I said. “Those were some reviews you got!”

  You looked confused. And a little frightened. But you were as nice as ever in telling me you didn’t know what I was talking about. “I guess I missed that one,” you said, leaving open the possibility that, despite appearances, I was not in fact completely out of my mind. “I don’t usually read the reviews.”

  I thought you were just being modest. “Oh, but these weren’t just any old reviews,” I said. “You’re in the hit of the city!”

  You laughed nervously.

  “Everybody’s talking about it,” I went on. “You must be totally psyched!”

  You smiled politely and pretended that your dog was pulling harder on its leash than it was. Then you moved gingerly away from me.

  I shrugged. “Have a good day,” I said and went inside.

  There, I found trouble because I had not called home earlier to tell Emily that I would be out so late. She had to get up for work in the morning, and I hadn’t wanted to wake her. Also, I didn’t have a cell phone. (I am a late adapter.)

  I eased the door shut behind me, relocked the bolt with the quietest click I could manage, and tiptoed down the hall. But Emily was already awake, standing in the middle of the living room with the phone in her hand, looking differently than I’d ever seen her look before. Creases marked her forehead and the skin on her cheeks looked cracked. Salt. She’d been crying, though she wasn’t anymore. Now her face was clenched rigid and she breathed hard through her nose.

  “Hi,” I said and felt myself smile dumbly at the confession.

  She trembled, suppressing something, and her head twitched.

  “You’re up early,” I said.

  “Is this a test?” she said. Her voice was tight but her eyes were wild. “Is that what this is? A fucking test of my tolerance?” Then she shouted, “Is this what living together is?! Is this marriage?! Is this what it’s going to be like?!”

  “No.” I had the sensation of slipping backward downhill. “Hold on…”

  “Where were you?! I wake up at six o’clock in the fucking morning and you’re not here, and I checked the machine and there’s no message, and you won’t get a fucking cell phone so I can call you! Fucking asshole! I don’t know where you are or what you might be doing. I’m thinking you’re dead or bleeding in a gutter somewhere. I was getting ready to start calling people. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know what to do.” Her posture crumpled. She covered her eyes with her hand and sobbed. “I was scared,” she said. “I was so worried!”

  Her shoulders shook. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I couldn’t talk. I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to tell her where I’d been, which was just at a bar and then my friend’s apartment, and explain why I hadn’t called. But a gulp broke in my throat and I swallowed dry air. I thought I was going to cry, too. I wanted to cry, to let her know how bad I felt for making her feel so bad. But I didn’t cry. My tear ducts were empty. The coke, I suppose.

  Emily had always been generously accepting of my lifestyle choices. I never had to hide anything from her. I’d had friends who had to lie and sneak around and use Binaca and Visine and stuff in order to keep their vices secret from their girlfriends and wives, and I never would have wanted to be in a relationship like that. We gave each other space, she and I. We didn’t have to spend every moment together or insist that we take up each other’s hobbies. It reminded me of that Kahlil Gibran poem people always read at weddings about how each individual string needs to quiver separately in order for a lute to make nice music, and how “the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” That had always made sense to me, and I took pride in how we didn’t lose ourselves—our selves, our individuality—even as we’d decided to spend the rest of our lives together.

  But that morning, how rotten I felt, taught me something about what it really means to spend your life with someone, about committing to that. I had always believed that as long as a person wasn’t acting out of malice, he or she couldn’t really be blamed for the way anyone felt about it. People are responsible for their own feelings. But here I had hurt the person I would have least wanted to hurt in the world. Out of carelessness, not malice—in fact, part of it was out of consideration, the not wanting to wake her up. (Well, consideration combined with addle-brained stupidity.) And I could see why she was hurt. Emily had invested her future in me; she had a right to care more about me, and a right to expect more care in return, and more consideration of her care, than I gave to other people. Benign intentions were not enough. My behavior carried ramifications for her. If my string was out of tune—too tight, too high, or too loose and unfocused—it would fuck up her song.

  I found my voice after a moment and apologized as best as I could. I went to her and put my arms around her and told her over and over again how sorry I was, how much I loved her, that I would try my very best to never scare her like that again. She calmed down and took a shower and went to work. I went to bed angry at myself, thinking about change.

  After I woke up, halfway through the afternoon, I remembered that you were not in The Producers. That was Matthew Broderick.

  ADULTHOOD

  (Or in my thirties, approaching middle age, but more often than I would wish, still doing things that leave me feeling like a goofy twelve-year-old.)

  Dear Cousins from Israel,

  I’m sorry for not talking to you at my wedding.

  I will feel like a schmuck about this forever. You took me on a cross-country van trip when I was seven, still the only time I’ve seen the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore and Joshua Tree. You put me up at your house in Israel over three summers, when I was ten, when I was eleven, when I was twenty-two. And you traveled so far. A twelve-hour flight!

  Emily and I were surprised, we didn’t think you’d come. We were surprised by a lot of things about the wedding. For a long time, we didn’t think we would even have one. We were originally opposed to the institution of marriage for the same reasons that so many people develop as young adults: smash the patriarchy, etc. Even after we’d figured out that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, when we started talking about getting married, the legal and tax-code advantages, we thought we might elope, just have a small civil ceremony at city hall, and tell everybody after the fact. Upon further discussion, though, knowing how much it would mean to our families, we opted to make it an event.

  Not that we felt that the patriarchy didn’t still deserve to be smashed. We resolved to avoid any fuddy-duddy formality. We’d both been to weddings that seemed more like a trial than a celebration. Ours, we said, would be a party, first and foremost—short on ceremony, long on lobster and Pimm’s Cups and Frisbee and hip-hop. We promised each other that we would have fun. In retrospect, this is to say that we went into the endeavor under false, or at least contradictory, pretenses. In agreement that the wedding was more for other people than for us, we proceeded to talk ourselves into a mutually reinforced sense of entitlement. (We wanted to have our cake because we knew our moms wanted us to have our cake, but we wanted to eat it, the whole cake, by ourselves, too. To torture a particularly fitting figure of speech.)

  I will give myself a partial break and acknowledge that a wedding is an endeavor that naturally leads to this kind of selfishness. In choosing to get married, in the announcement and the planning and the whirlwind months of preparation, two people are susceptible to falling into a circle-the-wagons, it’s-you-and-me-against-the-world mind-set. Having declared Emily to be my favorite person in the world, having established her as my priority, it was all too easy to push everything and everyone else to the periphery of my attention. Love has tunnel vision.

  So, wrapped up in myself even more than I usually am, I was not noticing a lot at the time. Most dramatica
lly, I didn’t notice my sister Debby’s weight loss in the months leading up to the wedding. She was living in New York then, working for an educational nonprofit on lower Broadway, so I was seeing her regularly. We’d meet for lunch or go jogging together by the river. She’d throw dinner parties that would end with this amazing apple-walnut cake she’d invented. But I guess in the way they say a frog will let itself be boiled alive in a pot of water if the temperature is raised incrementally, I didn’t notice how really much too thin she was getting. I remember telling her she looked great—a memory that hits me in the stomach even as I type it now, and even harder when I look at the pictures of Deb from the wedding. The way her collarbone jutted out from below her neck, the sharpness of her shoulder blades. Parts of my sister’s skeleton we had never seen before.

  She had long impressed everyone who’d met her with her maturity. And it was impressive: she had a gravitas beyond her age. She had her act together in ways that I’d never had. She’d come up to visit me at college once and we went to a party at a house off campus and people asked who was older. (I am seven years older.)

  It was understandable: after our dad died, she grew up fast. She got an older boyfriend—one who unfortunately developed an addiction to heroin. She graduated high school a year early and spent a year living in Colorado before starting college at Connecticut College, where I had gone. Then, during Christmas break her freshman year, soon after she’d broken up with her heroin-addicted boyfriend once and for all, he told her, over the phone, “I hope you sleep well at night,” and shot himself with his father’s gun. I will never forget the sound of her voice when I called home to talk to her. She wailed like a wounded animal.

  Even after that, though, even after enduring that second major, horrible trauma before her eighteenth birthday, she recovered and seemed great—bright and bubbly and extraordinarily capable. She had good friends and graduated college in four years (always a monumental accomplishment, from my perspective) and moved to New York and got this cool job at a cool office and was promoted twice in her first year there. She was running after-school arts programs at forty city schools. Times I would come to pick her up at work, her colleagues raved about her to me when she was out of earshot. She was a world-beater, people said.

  I didn’t realize anything was wrong until the night before the wedding. We were at Emily’s folks’ place in upstate New York, where we’d decided to hold the event. Many of us had crammed into the small house: Emily and I; her parents; her sister Lucy and Lucy’s boyfriend, Matt; and Deb. I woke up around three o’clock in the morning and went to pee and heard typing coming from the living room, where Deb was sleeping on an inflatable mattress. I walked out there to find her hunched over her laptop, computer-blue light on her face in the otherwise dark room.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Ughhh!” she turned to me, surprised—and more stressed out and frantic looking than anyone should be at three o’clock in the morning. “I’m working on my toast.”

  “Oh, man, don’t worry about it. It’ll be fine, whatever you say. Or don’t give one if you don’t want to. You don’t have to.”

  She said that Lucy had written something so she had to, too. She seemed sad, her face so drawn.

  “Get some sleep,” I said.

  “I just want it to be good,” she said, turning back to the screen.

  I myself had not been feeling stressed out in the days before the wedding. After a week of rain that had had Emily’s mom in a tizzy, we’d been blessed with four days of blue skies. Everything had come together nicely—the tent was up, the Porta-Potties in place, our fishmonger, Darryl, on his way from the docks of Boston. (This thanks to my in-laws, as they did the on-site organizing.) It would be a big party, the biggest either of us had ever thrown surely, 125 people, but it was just a party. My feet were a very comfortable temperature. It would be fun.

  The morning of June 9, 2001, we ran electrical cords to a circle Em’s father had cleared among the pine trees in the woods and helped my friends Todd and Mike set up their instruments—two guitars, one acoustic, one pedal steel. I had asked them to play something soft and pretty. (And as a cheesy in-joke for anyone who grew up listening to classic-rock radio, Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.”) And we practiced where we’d walk and where we’d stand for the ceremony.

  Guests began arriving early in the afternoon. Greeting the first of them at tables of food and drink set up on the sloping lawn above the house, I found the nervousness I’d been so happily spared to that point. Introducing a college friend and his wife to a work friend and her date, I forgot the name of my college friend’s wife—a woman I had met numerous times, a woman whose wedding I’d attended. I stammered and waited for my friend to bail me out, and he did, but then I looked over his shoulder, down the hill, and saw a thick stream of people marching up the driveway. They were all coming to see Emily and me; I would have to introduce so many of them to each other. I felt the pair of raw oysters I’d eaten swimming around in the Pimm’s Cup I had drunk. It felt like they were doing unsynchronized somersaults.

  So I didn’t eat or drink anything else, and I survived the next hour and a half by letting people introduce themselves to one another. There were so many people—the yard was like a Sgt. Pepper’s cover full of familiar faces: friends from childhood, high school, college, work; my mom’s family from Rochester and Missouri; Ava and Lewis from Boston; Josh from Michigan; and you guys, all the way from Israel. A collage of my first thirty years on the planet.

  Once everybody had had a chance to arrive and have a few oysters and drinks, Debby and Lucy led a procession into the woods. Emily and I waited for five minutes, and then we took each other’s hands and followed. Everyone was smiling as we walked down the aisle. Todd and Mike sounded perfect—the pedal steel notes pealing in the sunlight that filtered through the tops of the pine trees. People who recognized Wonderful Tonight chuckled. The air smelled good.

  Our friends Dave and Georgia, whom we’d asked to conduct the ceremony, stood up in front of everybody and said things that made me cry a little bit. Then Emily and I read the vows we’d written and exchanged our rings and slipped them on our fingers and kissed, and everybody clapped and cheered. The next twelve hours are a swirling blur in my memory, punctuated by moments of transcendent, euphoric clarity: The crack of the shell, the splatter and steam, as I snapped the tail off my lobster. Gazing out from under the eaves of the tent, seeing the sky turn violet over a Wiffle Ball game as the sun set—the deep contentment, the pride, I guess, that I felt when I saw how many people were playing, twenty or so, and how many of them had never met before that day. Dancing with Emily as Stevie Wonder sang about love lasting until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky and stretched the word always longer than thirty syllables in the explosion of pure joy at the end of “As.” (On the record that our DJ, Chris, was spinning, I mean. Stevie Wonder did not perfrom live at our wedding.)

  Some wise person had advised Emily and me to take half an hour to walk off by ourselves at some point during the festivities—a moment to breathe and enjoy one another’s company amid the craziness of the day. We sat on a bench near the stone wall that bordered the woods and felt happier than either of us had ever thought we would ever feel.

  But we should have also done something that we’d seen other brides and grooms do at other weddings—we should have taken a half an hour to walk around to each table during the meal and say hello to everybody and thank them for coming. We didn’t. By design; the couples we’d seen do this never looked happy while they were doing it, stiff smiles, forced small talk, laden with obligation. It was like a receiving line, which has always seemed like the worst kind of torture to me. Considering it further, it is exactly like that. It is in lieu of standing on a receiving line that couples do the walk around the dinner tables. But I now see the value, the reason for the practice. A few short minutes of thinking about people other than myself. Even if it would have been a slight discomfor
t, less than a hundred percent fun, would it not have been worth a few short minutes to let people—you, in particular—know how much I appreciated their coming to celebrate the day with me? How much it meant to me to have everyone there? Rather than just basking in all the love I was being showered with? Like some kind of rock star onstage? Like Sting, closing his eyes and spreading his arms out in that Jaguar commercial that made me wish I could throw something at him through my television screen. That was me that day, like fucking Sting. Yes, it would have been worth it. It would have been worth anything to not be like Sting.

  Debby struggled with her emotions during her toast. She said lots of nice things, but she had written too much. Feeling the minutes in front of an audience, she flipped past pages she was holding in her hands. She started crying when she mentioned that she knew that my father would have loved Emily and had trouble regaining her composure.

  My mom, always thoughtful, devoted her toast to you and all the other relatives, thanking you for traveling and mentioning you each by name. But it was not enough, I’m afraid, to cover my rudeness. Did I even say hello to you? Give a hug and a kiss? I’d like to think so. I know I saw you. But I worry that I didn’t say more than that. I know I didn’t say very much more.

  The day after the wedding, Emily and I got into a rental car to drive to the airport to fly to Italy for our honeymoon. As we pulled out of the driveway, our remaining friends and family waving to us in the rearview mirror, I turned and said, “I’m worried about my sister. I don’t think she’s doing too good.”