by Devan Sipher
“It’s the best job on the planet,” she said, pushing herself up from the table. She stood facing me, and this time there was no wobbling. “I’d go back in a heartbeat.”
“There’s more than one Rolodex in this city,” I said to Hope as she inhaled a Venti-sized Starbucks espresso in preparation for working the night shift. “I respect Renée, but she doesn’t necessarily know what’s best for me. I have to trust my instincts and not second-guess myself.”
This was the new me. Acting on my feelings. Letting go. And not dwelling on the past. My life was a big arrow pointing forward.
“Have you called Melinda?” Hope asked, dragging me back into the primordial muck.
“I was talking about my job.”
“You don’t have a job.” Not a helpful response. We were walking to St. Vincent’s Medical Center. Correction: She was going to St. Vincent’s. I was only going as far as the front door, since I couldn’t handle being inside another hospital.
“You need to call Melinda,” she said, continuing to guzzle her iced Café Americano.
“You were the one who said not to contact her in the first place.”
“That was before I knew you loved her.”
“How can I love her? I barely know her.” The whole situation was preposterous. “I think love is something you imagine,” I hypothesized. “When two people imagine it at the same time, it’s real. But if only one, it’s not.”
Hope was unimpressed by my philosophizing. “Either you have feelings for her or you don’t.”
“It makes no difference what I feel. She doesn’t want to see me. And she definitely doesn’t want me to call.”
“Don’t underestimate the power an apology can have on a woman.” We weren’t necessarily still talking about Melinda. A.J. had been MIA since the missed dinner. There had been no calls and no apologies, but Hope was, well, hopeful. “One fight doesn’t have to be the end of everything. But you can’t expect someone to read your mind. You need to tell her how you feel about her.”
Hope had no idea how many times I’d picked up the phone to do precisely that. “You didn’t see the way she looked at me,” I said, shuddering at the memory. “It would be selfish to call her. She’s getting married in less than two weeks. I need to let her go.”
But Hope was the one going away. We had reached the entrance of the emergency room. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Roxanne again. She wasn’t taking a hint.
“I’m focusing on moving forward,” I said to Hope as we hugged good-bye.
“I wish I believed you.” This was why Hope was still single; she didn’t know when to lie.
My phone continued to buzz. Roxanne was like the Ghost of Stories Past, rattling her chains. The old me would have fretted about what mistake I had made in her article, but the new improved me decided that article was ancient history. I wasn’t on The Paper’s payroll, and Roxanne wasn’t my responsibility.
However, it occurred to me that she was Tucker’s responsibility. I couldn’t think of a better going-away gift than letting him have the pleasure of placating an angry bride. Especially one who worked for the Today Show. I answered the call.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” Roxanne said as salutation. “And don’t think I don’t know why.”
If she knew I quit, why was she bothering me? The sooner I gave her Tucker’s phone number, the sooner I could put her and The Paper behind me.
“Whatever Good Morning America is offering you for an interview, I’ll beat it,” Roxanne said. I wasn’t about to broadcast my unemployment on either show, and I was surprised she thought it was newsworthy. She must have had a lot of airtime to fill. “I can get you better placement, bigger limousine—you name it.”
“I’m not appearing on Good Morning America,” I assured her.
“Are you doing Regis and Kelly? No insult, but they’re total size queens. The bigger the name, the more screen time. I guarantee you they’ll spend the entire segment with James Marsden, and just put you on as an afterthought.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “What does James Marsden have to do with anything?”
“Have you even seen the movie?”
“What movie?”
“Are you playing with me? Or do you really not know there’s a movie out about you?”
She had to be mistaken. Didn’t she? I grabbed my paper and flipped to the film ads. American Zombie, Horton Hears a Who, 10,000 B.C. I was pretty sure any movie about me would not include loincloths.
Then I remembered Tucker had mentioned something about an upcoming movie, but he didn’t say it had anything to do with me. He said it was about a bridesmaid.
“Always a Bridesmaid is the number-one movie in America this week,” Roxanne said. “Where have you been?”
I spared her the details as I spotted the full-page ad. Six color photos of Katherine Heigl wearing six different bridesmaid dresses.
“I hate to break the news to you, Roxanne, but I’ve never been a bridesmaid, and I don’t look anything like Katherine Heigl.”
“Don’t be a dope,” she said. “Heigl’s character is the bridesmaid. She falls for a guy who writes the wedding column at a newspaper that looks a whole lot like The Paper. It’s you. Right down to your skinny tie.”
Roxanne had no reason to make this up. Someone must have really made a movie about me. Who? Why? It was exciting. And disorienting. Not the kind of thing you expect to hear while standing on Seventh Avenue with ambulances going by and panhandlers asking for spare change. I felt like shouting out, “I’m going to be hanging with Matt Lauer on the Today Show.” I couldn’t ask for better proof that my life was heading in a bold new direction and away from the past.
“I’m guessing you must know the screenwriter,” Roxanne said. “Her name’s Lori something. No, I’m wrong. It’s Laurel. Laurel Miller.”
God hated me.
Chapter Twenty-five
Always a Bridesmaid
I sat in the near darkness, gazing upward. There were only a half dozen other people in the matinee showing. I could hear them munching popcorn and wondered if they noticed that James Marsden and I were wearing identical blazers.
He was me. Or me with whiter teeth. (I made a note to myself to buy whitening strips.) He was like my personal wardrobe avatar. James/I looked dorky in a fedora, but our jeans-and-jacket look totally rocked. Of course, there were obvious differences between us. I would never wear jeans to a wedding. Laurel knew that.
What was she thinking? Not about the jeans. About the whole thing. I had steeled myself for something unflattering, but the movie was a valentine. I was sensitive and romantic. Or James was. But Laurel didn’t consider me either. Not by the end. I’d never forget the icy look on her face the night she told me she was leaving.
I’d been thinking about proposing. I’d been specifically thinking about it while in jewelry stores examining diamond rings. I’d never contemplated spending so much money on a single item, and I became overwhelmed by doubts. What if she didn’t like it? What if she said no? What if she wasn’t the right woman for me?
My vacillations proved providential when she told me she had met a patent lawyer who played drums for a Springsteen cover band. Turned out I’d been “Dancing in the Dark.”
So why did she write about me? She walked out and never called. No e-mail. No nothing. Then three years later, I’m her idea of a romantic hero. It didn’t make any sense.
Unless she still had feelings for me.
I would never have considered it possible, but there was Katherine Heigl, clinging tearfully to James Marsden as she apologized for running away and telling him how much she loved him. Maybe the movie was Laurel’s way of reaching out to me.
If she could pen a twenty-million-dollar peace offering, I could make a phone call.
Laurel looked good. Her face was fuller, and there were a few small creases in her brow. But her thick auburn hair still fell in lustrous waves past her shoulders.
She
wasn’t the kind of woman one would think of as beautiful at first glance. Her features were a little too soft, her cheeks a little too round. But there was a sparkle in her eyes, an inner fire belied by her placid exterior.
I couldn’t tell whether she was nervous. I never could.
She had responded promptly to my voice mail and seemed happy to have received it. I suggested lunch at Cornelia Street Café, a cozy bistro in the West Village. It wasn’t until I walked in the door that I questioned my sanity.
I couldn’t look at Laurel without remembering a thousand moments I had spent three years trying to forget. Sharing a chocolate fondue at a country inn in Stowe, Vermont. Sulking on separate benches on a Fire Island ferry. It was like opening a booby-trapped footlocker. I apprehensively kissed her on the cheek.
“You’re still wearing Drakkar,” she said. Yes, I’d been wearing the same cologne since college, but I happened to like it. I didn’t think I needed to do a makeover for lunch with a woman who’d dumped me. “You smell great.”
My bad.
“I’m glad you contacted me,” she said, getting right to the point as she always did. It was one of the things I’d admired about her. In addition to her intelligence. Her creativity. Her perceptiveness. “I wasn’t happy with how we had left things.”
“Neither was I,” I said, and we both smiled. Partially from discomfort, but mostly because of sincere fondness. I truly liked Laurel. That hadn’t changed since the day I met her at a friend’s book party. It felt natural to be sitting across from her, and I was grateful to her. Grateful for the movie and the opportunity to set things right.
“It’s not that I hadn’t thought of contacting you before,” I said, and I couldn’t remember why I hadn’t, though it had seemed implicit until moments ago.
I looked at her looking at me. The open expression on her face, like she was listening closely to what I was saying. Laurel had always been a good listener. And a good talker too. No one could milk a joke the way she could. Or get as riled up about the latest political scandal. I had missed her more than I’d realized. It occurred to me that maybe everything I’d experienced with Melinda was for a reason, and the reason was to end up here, back with Laurel.
Melinda was a mirage. Someone I imagined more than someone I truly knew. Maybe the reason I was still single was because I preferred the fantasy of a relationship to the real thing. I wrote about marriage, but my stories ended on the wedding night, before any complications set in. I wasn’t just a hopeless romantic; I was a professional one.
But Laurel was real. I knew she snored in her sleep. I knew she liked to eat Cherry Garcia ice cream out of the container. I knew how it felt to kiss her when her lips were still cold from the ice cream.
I proposed a toast with my water glass. “To new beginnings,” I said. She laughed nervously and clinked her glass against mine.
That’s when I saw her wedding ring.
“You’re married?”
“Almost two years,” she said.
Then what the hell was she doing there? What was I doing there?
“Do you remember Jeffrey?” she asked.
“The drummer from the D Street Band?”
She glared at me. “His band’s name is Born in New Jersey.”
As if that was better. “That’s not a credential I’d necessarily want to advertise,” I said, which I concede was a little hostile.
“We live in Hoboken,” she fumed. Oops. “With our six-month-old son.” Ouch. “Are you going to ask to see pictures?” I would prefer to shoot myself.
“Of course I want to see pictures,” I said, trying not to choke on my water.
She pulled open her purse and took out her iPhone. Several minutes of awkwardness followed as she clicked through a succession of generic baby photos. Though I had to admit, he was a pretty cute little tyke with thick bed-head hair.
It hit me that he could be mine. Not literally. The math didn’t allow any question about that. But I could be the father of a boy with big brown eyes and fat cheeks in a blue jumper. Well, in my family, maybe not the fat cheeks. I looked longingly at the last shot of him gurgling. If I had a uterus, it would have been aching.
“I don’t understand why you accepted my invitation for a date,” I said.
“A date?” She looked appalled. “I didn’t come for a date. I came for an apology.”
She had to be joking.
“I’ve been waiting for three years,” she said.
“You left me,” I said. “Not the other way around.”
“You can’t leave someone who wasn’t really there.”
I could feel my face getting red. “If I wasn’t there, where was I? Because someone got left behind when you walked off into the Jersey sunset, and I seem to remember it being me.”
“Because you think everything’s about you.”
“And what about your movie? Was that about me or some other guy you dated who writes a wedding column?”
“It’s not like I wrote The Devil Wears Drakkar.”
I felt like I’d been stabbed. “But you obviously thought about it.”
“Of course I thought about it. I was angry and hurt.”
No! She didn’t get to turn our entire relationship inside out and rewrite history. “You’re the one who walked out without any warning.”
“Your unlucky-in-love act is getting old,” she had the audacity to say. “Poor Gavin. Everyone leaves Gavin.”
“Not everyone. You. Specifically you.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” she said. “You always complain how you’ve been so unsuccessful at getting married, when the opposite is true. You’ve been completely successful at avoiding it.”
“That’s bullshit.” Now she was some two-cent psychoanalyst. I wanted to take back every compliment I ever gave her about being perceptive. “It just so happens that when you took off with your Springsteen wannabe, I was looking at rings.”
“Looking!” she erupted. “Not buying!”
She opened her purse and pulled out a Kleenex. “You weren’t even able to be honest with yourself, let alone with me. When Jeffrey and I first got together, he was consoling me.”
“I bet,” I said, more to the tablecloth than to her. When I looked up, I saw her eyes were bloodshot.
“You’re so stupid.”
There are many things that I can be accused of, but being stupid isn’t one of them.
“If I had believed there was any chance of you proposing, I would have stayed. How can you not know that?” She buried her face in her hands. “I can’t believe I’m crying.”
Neither could I. She wasn’t the one who was single, childless and heartbroken. If anyone should have been crying, it should have been me. But all it took was a few tears for her to trump all of that.
“I didn’t think you would get to me,” she said, and a small part of me took pride in the fact that I still could. But mostly I wished I’d never called her. “I came here feeling sorry for myself because of how I let you treat me. But the truth is, I feel worse for you, because you’re going to end up living your life alone.”
I couldn’t tell if she was pitying me or gloating. “Don’t you think I know that!” Three years of pent-up hurt and frustration came gushing out. “What do you think is my biggest fear?”
“Gavin.” She caught my outstretched hand in hers. “Your biggest fear isn’t being alone. It’s ending up like your parents.”
Bernie’s funeral was on a particularly steamy Florida day. As the temperature neared ninety, I didn’t feel like I was wearing my black suit so much as stewing in it.
About sixty people were gathered under a green canopy that seemed more suited for a swim party. My grandmother sat stoically in a folding chair beside the raised casket, and I stood behind her, between my parents. Gary and Leslie stayed farther back, on account of Leslie having an allergic reaction to my father’s new cologne. (It was suspected my father was also allergic, since he had been sneezing all mor
ning.)
“Isn’t it nice that Leslie came?” my mother whispered as the rabbi began chanting a Hebrew prayer.
“What’s so nice about it?” my father asked in his attempt at a whisper, which was pretty much his normal voice, except louder.
“It’s nice Gary has someone to go places with,” my mother persisted.
Yes, I thought, having a date to bring to a cemetery is a top reason for settling down. “The ceremony’s starting,” I said, hoping that would shush them.
“Did you talk with Bernie’s niece?” my mother asked. “She’s twenty-six and just graduated from law school.”
“She graduated a year ago,” my father rebutted.
“Either way, she’s a lawyer.”
“Mom!” I admonished under my breath.
“What’s the matter? You’re not related by blood.”
“It’s a funeral.”
“It’s a mitzvah.”
I had no energy to disagree. The combination of heat and ancient incantations was making me woozy. Jewish custom dictates burial within twenty-four hours of death, so I’d been going practically nonstop since I received my grandmother’s call as I was leaving the Cornelia Street Café.
It had been a long day. A long year. Well, four months anyway.
It seemed like it was going to be five before the eulogy was over. The rabbi was droning on. He had switched to English, but I found it even harder to focus on his platitudes about sunsets and burning candles. Looking around, I wasn’t the only one who seemed to be wilting. My father’s eyelids were at half-mast.
Finally, we were reciting the kaddish, the prayer for the dead, and the casket slowly descended into the grave. The rabbi lifted a shovel for the ritual task of throwing dirt onto the coffin. When no one fetched the spade from him, he loudly cleared his throat, cueing us into action.
“Saul!” my mother brayed.
“What?” My father’s eyelids flew open and his head jerked like that of a bus driver about to collide with the back of a semi.
