I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

by Jennifer Gilbert

  Panic wasn’t an option, so I got on the phone with someone in my office who was handling another event for me that night. That party was well under way, and I quickly hijacked one of those DJs, leaving his assistant to finish off that event. Then he and I grabbed every CD from our cars so he could start playing “Oh, What a Night” instead of Club Mix Ibiza. When the Four Seasons cranked up, the banker boys started dancing, and the crisis was averted.

  That investment bank became a steady client, and the charge I got from being the fixer made me feel like I’d justified my existence yet again. My clients’ needs were my needs, and their priorities were mine as well. I was proud of my skill at making other people happy. It was the only way I could feel happiness myself—a secondhand kind of pleasure.

  I would do anything to make an event perfect. I was so adept at camouflaging my own flaws that I could also zero in on what wasn’t exactly right in the world around me. Very quickly I acquired a practically supernatural ability to pick out the one tiny flaw in any room, no matter how large—the single wilted rose among dozens of flowers in the one centerpiece among hundreds. I’d walk right up to it, pluck it out, and everyone would look at me like I was Rain Man.

  By the age of twenty-four I was already developing a reputation with the management of many of the city’s largest hotels and catering venues. While most of my clients and colleagues were women, the directors of sales and of catering were still part of the old boys’ club—but I was never intimidated. When I knew my client would be happier with a different price or menu, I got it for them. I remember one particular floor-plan standoff with the manager of an elite private club. He actually pointed his finger at me and said, “You listen here, young lady, I’ve been here for fifteen years, and this is where we put the bar.” I smiled politely and said, “I’m the young lady who booked two million dollars of business at this club last year, and we are putting the bar over there.” He moved the bar.

  When people told me they thought my job sounded glamorous, I had to laugh. I loved it, but glamorous it was not. A half hour before the start of one of my big corporate events I would be down on my knees picking up gum from the carpet and sweeping up the flower stems that I didn’t want the “fancies” to see (that’s what I called my black-tie clients who booked the $1,000-per-person dinners). Once the event got under way, I still couldn’t relax. Often enough I was sweating under my dress filling in behind the bar, pouring champagne so the guests wouldn’t be frustrated by long lines.

  This was around the time of my darling tulle bride’s petticoat fiasco, and I was quickly learning that every event involved pulling some kind of magic trick out of a hat. That was where I excelled. It’s not that I didn’t get nervous or freaked out when something went wrong—especially in the early days, I could get just as panicked as any bride-to-be—it’s just that I kept functioning when other people were busy losing their minds. So when we ran out of beer for a Salomon Brothers party at Tavern on the Green, I hopped in a minivan with the catering director and bought every available six-pack in the nearest supermarket. When everyone else was standing around gasping, I went to my fix-it place.

  Pretty soon, I learned not only how to function in stressful moments, but also how to make those moments less stressful for everyone else involved. Events are magnets for disaster, and even I couldn’t always make the problems magically disappear. So I had to figure out ways to help my clients handle their emotional responses. While the natural tendency in the face of man-made disaster is to escalate it even further by getting upset and pointing fingers, I had to gently, diplomatically help my clients see that while they might be justified in flipping out, it wasn’t going to make the situation any better.

  I handled the annual fund-raising auction for an upper-crust Manhattan private school whose auction committee was made up of parent volunteers (i.e., moms). They all had strong opinions, lists of absolute musts and must-nots, and they all had to agree. It took six months of planning and endless meetings, but I found the perfect party space for them that would meet all their requirements. Then, the day before the event, I received a call from the space, telling me that their liquor license hadn’t come through. Now this was a disaster. Number one, it’s a well-known fact that people bid more in auctions when they drink. No booze meant a lot less money for the school. Number two, all those parents weren’t paying babysitters for a Friday night so they could go out and stand around drinking fruit punch.

  Obviously I had to fix this problem. The women on the auction committee were up in arms. They wanted to sue the owner, they wanted all their money back. They probably would have put him to death by firing squad if they could have. But I knew that none of these responses was going to get them what they really needed: a successful auction. So I called the owner of the space, and instead of threatening him with some kind of nuclear option (which I knew would only result in him hanging up on me), I said, “Dude, you’re killing me. Help me out here.” In the end, he worked out a deal with another space, and he put on the event for half the original price. In addition, I got him to pay for shuttle buses for any of the parents who accidentally showed up at the wrong location.

  Did the new space fit all those nonnegotiable requirements that the auction committee had set in stone for me? Absolutely not. But the space was available, and it had a liquor license, and the school made a whole lot more money than they would have had they gone to court. In less than twenty-four hours we had a solution that made everyone happy, and the school was so delighted that they hired me to do the auction again the next year.

  I conduct my business by the guiding principle that people are people. Everyone wants to be treated with respect—whether they’re responsible for the mistake or they’re the injured party. My auction ladies deserved to be upset, so I let them have their anger—but I made sure it wasn’t indulged on a phone call to the owner of that space. I got them to take their deep breaths, and then I made the call—because I knew that I’d get a lot more by being nice than I ever would have gotten by screaming his ear off or making threats. Sometimes, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

  Even when the stakes were a lot lower than a missing liquor license, I never dismissed a client’s feelings. When a client had a nervous breakdown because the tissue paper in her invitation was the wrong shade of blue, I didn’t try to argue that it really didn’t matter. I didn’t try to make the client feel selfish or unreasonable. I didn’t tell her, “Well, at least the printer spelled your name right.” I certainly didn’t tell her that there were bigger problems in the world than colored tissue paper. I had learned the hard way that everything in life is relative, and that perspective only comes after the crisis. All those times that my own pain had been framed in relation to someone else’s (At least you weren’t raped) had taught me a powerful lesson: Never “at least” someone else’s pain away. Let them have it, feel it, and then try to alleviate it.

  Chapter Five

  Running as Fast as I Can

  Shortly after I moved back to the city, I became obsessed with running. I’d always been athletic, but I’d never been the kind of person who exercised in a disciplined way. That changed after the attack. It became very important to me to be strong, and to be able to run far and fast. I ran on city streets, in the park, in the gym, in the Hamptons. Every day, no matter the weather, I ran, and I always ran alone. Exercise was not social to me; it was my private time, where I built my strength and my resolve. While I was running, I was all eyes and ears—the two senses that had failed me the day of the attack. I constantly scanned my surroundings, my radar always on high alert for any threat. This was the new me.

  While I ran, the naive, giggly, silly girl that I used to be sometimes came back to me, and I allowed myself to remember her. She was a nice girl, and I missed her. But bad things happened to that girl. This girl—the new me—stayed on guard, armored and ready.

  Anyone who has experienced a heartbreak o
r a devastating loss knows the feeling of channeling emotional pain into something physical and tangible. I funneled all of my pain into action. I was always on the move. It was the law of inertia. A body in motion stays in motion.

  I worked constantly, never taking a vacation, and when I wasn’t working then I was working at playing. In the summer I took a weekend share in a Hamptons beach house that was so insanely packed that you had to get there early and guard your bed. After a weekend of socializing, on Sunday night I’d drive back to Manhattan and head straight to Boom, a chic, funky place in SoHo. They reserved a table just for me—not to sit at, but to dance on. I was on every list of every party, every junior committee, and all those events showed up in the New York Times Style section party pictures. Because I booked their spaces every day, I knew everyone at all the clubs, from the bouncers and the coat-check girls to the hostesses and the bartenders. At night, when I had a few girlfriends in tow, I’d smile to the bouncer and he’d wave us in, and then I’d wave to the bartender and he’d have my drink ready. It was like a magic trick, and each time I couldn’t believe I’d pulled it off. I’d wanted a fabulous life, and here it was all around me.

  Marius was my one serious boyfriend for most of college, but now I found myself surrounded by single men. All my friends were at the pairing-up stage and starting to think about husbands and future families. But I was emotionally numb. When my friends talked about their dreams, I was happy for them of course, but on a basic level I couldn’t relate. All of these romantic fairy-tale thoughts that I had once had were gone. The happily-ever-after felt impossible to me.

  Still, every client seemed to have someone they wanted to fix me up with, and I became queen of the blind date. In a weird way, I was more outgoing and vivacious after the attack than I’d been before. I was game to meet anyone, and I could make conversation with anyone. Deanna would joke that I could chat up a fruit fly. On one record-breaking night I actually had three dates in a row—one for drinks, one for dinner, and one for dancing. When a date arrived to pick me up, the doorman would call up, and I would come down to meet him. We’d have to go on at least several dates before I’d even invite a man up to my apartment.

  I wasn’t playing hard to get—I genuinely didn’t want to be gotten. Not only did I feel so emotionally empty that I had nothing to give in return, but I dreaded the moment of truth when I’d have to tell a new man about the attack. I still had scars in so many hidden places that I couldn’t possibly have sex with anyone without revealing my secret. So I didn’t get to that point with many men, at least not for a good long while. When I did become intimate with someone, I insisted on keeping the lights off. But the ironic downside of keeping my scars so well hidden was that it made the inevitable unveiling loom all the more dreadful in my mind. I lived in fear of a man noticing my tic-tac-toe board of scars. They were my scarlet letter, an indelible sign that something horrible had happened to me. They marked me as a subject of pity, and brought up all those feelings of shame that I kept so carefully buried. It was much easier for me to keep men at arm’s length than to have to deal with all of that.

  I sometimes wondered if it would be better—healthier—if my scars were more visible. People had told me so many times how lucky I was that the attacker hadn’t gotten my face, and of course I knew that. But on some level I thought, If only people could see my pain just by looking at me. Instead, my scars were hidden away under my hair, under my clothes, fading to whiteness on my hands and between my fingers. For anyone to know what I had gone through, and what I was feeling inside, they’d have to ask me. But as it was no one ever suspected—or at least they never asked. So this breathtaking disconnect continued between how I appeared and behaved, and what I actually felt like inside. I was a gregarious lonely person, a party planner celebrating other people’s amazing life experiences, and I was running as fast as I could away from my own problems, acting for all the world as if I didn’t have any.

  Jimmy was the first man after the attack that I allowed myself to love. He was a friend of one of my very good college friends, so he was not a random stranger, and somehow that felt safer to me.

  Everything about Jimmy was welcoming, and miraculously, I relaxed into him as into a warm embrace. He had brown hair, a great smile, and blue eyes with an eternal twinkle. He was the rare “guy’s guy” who actually loved to dance. Dancing always felt so freeing to me, I could get lost in the music, and he found me there. He was funny and outgoing, but also incredibly sweet, and infinitely kind. Whenever he rang my bell, I’d open the door to find him standing there with my favorite malt balls in one hand and gummy candies in the other.

  After we got together, we stayed together—every night, weekend, holiday, vacation. I was twenty-five, Jimmy was twenty-seven, and neither of us was thinking about marriage at that point—least of all me, since I was still focused on getting through each day. But in every other way our lives were completely knit together. Even the nights we didn’t plan to spend together, chances were he’d show up on my doorstep at 2:00 a.m. He held me when I woke up with nightmares, and he knew every one of my scars, inside and out.

  Jimmy saw me through the most difficult years of my life; he was the first new man in my life I told my whole story to, and he signed on for everything. He was the definition of a really good man, the best of the best, and he’d do anything for me. Just one example: my family planned a Cayman Islands vacation, and Jimmy was invited along. My father is a scuba-diving fanatic, so for every single one of his holiday gifts, my relentless father gave Jimmy a flipper, a pair of goggles, a snorkel. Jimmy smiled along with each gift, but the truth was that he had never snorkeled or dived—he didn’t even like to swim. Still, he never let on. Instead he spent two days of his Cayman Islands vacation taking the resort’s scuba-diving course, just to make my father happy—because he knew that would make me happy.

  Jimmy was right beside me on my dad’s sailboat when I first hatched my plan to start my own business. I’d had an entrepreneurial streak since I was eight (the first time I’d charged admission to one of my backyard circuses), so it was never going to be enough for me to take a salary and earn a commission. I wanted to own something. Sure there were other people out there planning events, but I wanted to do it for myself, and do it better.

  I’d been working for the same event-planning company for just over two years, but already I was responsible for half the company’s revenue. I was the one breaking down those corporate doors convincing companies to hire me for their events, creating customer loyalty, getting repeat clients. In addition, I had come up with a whole new way of approaching the business of event planning.

  I’d expanded my boss’s business by pairing up clients with great venues, but I’d also heard the same complaint over and over again. The venues were desperate for corporate business, but my corporate clients complained that they couldn’t afford to pay me a retainer. The corporate event planner didn’t have the time to find the newest, most perfect venue, and they were desperate for advice, but they didn’t want the higher-ups to know that they had hired someone else to do their jobs. So they just kept booking the same spaces for the sake of expediency.

  In a eureka moment, realizing that my industry had been going at this thing all wrong, I flipped the business model. It wasn’t the businesses that should be paying the event planners—it was the venues. So I became a PR and marketing agency for any sort of event location. Of course the companies were thrilled, because this meant that I would provide my planning services for free. And the venues were thrilled because suddenly they had all this new business. Within months I had hundreds of spaces wanting to sign up to be in my database. This idea was revolutionary, but it didn’t occur to me to pat myself on the back. I figured I was just solving a problem.

  Around this time, one of my biggest clients, owner of one of the most popular clubs in the city, offered me a job as his full-time event booker. I told him it was a great offer, but I d
idn’t want to just bring him business—I wanted to do business with everyone. I’d get bored just booking events for one space, when what I really wanted was to build my own company. I was so committed to my plan that I’d already named the company in my head—Save the Date. It never occurred to me to name my own company Jennifer Gilbert Productions, or anything with my name in it. These events I planned were not about me; they were about the clients, and what they wanted their own event style to be. I was just the person who figured out how to make it happen for them.

  But that club owner just wouldn’t take no for an answer, and finally we came to a brilliant compromise—he’d become my partner in my new company. He’d pay my overhead and give me office space. I’d book all of his events, and I’d also book events at other venues throughout the city. It was a win for both of us. He made money no matter where I booked, and I achieved my dream of running my own company, but without the headache of managing an office.

  I left my job, paid my old boss the commissions on all the clients I took with me, and became totally, joyfully consumed with building Save the Date®. I had put away all those old fantasies of a blissful future of having it all—but maybe the universe would let me have this one thing, my bouncing baby company.

  Chapter Six

  Chaos Theory

  I knew the district attorney expected that it would take three years to bring my case to trial, but somehow I managed to put that knowledge on a shelf and pretend it didn’t exist. For three years after the attack, I didn’t have any conscious sense that a monumentally traumatic event was hovering over the horizon right in front of me. Within me, though, there was a timer ticking away. Little did I know that when that timer went off, a world of hurt would explode.

  Whether it was coincidence or not, in the months prior to that big impending milestone, I threw my life into an uproar. Looking back on it now, it’s hard to believe I wasn’t doing it on purpose—the timing was just too perfect, and the results were guaranteed to draw my attention away from my immense fear of facing the attacker.