Wedding Season (2 page)

“Gabe, you’re an angel.”

“I love you, too.” He assumes the Olympic victory pose again. “So, will you do that swearing thing some more when you get back from dinner?”

G
ABE AND
I
MET
, as it happens, at a wedding.

It was the first I’d attended for one of my peers, and I went not so much out of affection for the couple as out of a slightly morbid curiosity. The invitation, issued by a semi-friend of mine from college, was printed in an ersatz Art Deco typeface; guests were instructed to dress for the occasion in “croquet formal.” Thus I found myself, along with Henry and our friend Joan, on a brilliant afternoon in mid-September,
in the nether regions of Long Island. We had traveled by rental car, getting lost twice, to an estate landscaped within an inch of its green life and featuring a built-to-order, very loosely Tudor-esque mansion. There we joined the crowds strewn across these rolling acres—several hundred guests attired in white and off-white and ivory, adorned with straw hats and fedoras and cunning chapeaux with little veils, endlessly refilling fluted glasses at the champagne fountains and picking over mile-long buffet tables. To me we looked like nothing so much as a herd of escapees from an insane asylum with a semiformal dress code.

In a show of good sportsmanship, my friends and I had bent to the sartorial dictates and arrayed ourselves in white tea dresses; bonhomie ended when the bride, who had majored in theater, attempted to recruit us for the post-ceremony croquet tournament. We retreated to a small table in the dappled shade of several old trees, where we had an excellent view of an eighteen-piece swing band performing under a white-canopied tent the size of a city block.

“We
are one giant fashion faux pas,” Joan said, sighing. “Three weeks past Labor Day, and nothing but white shoes as far as the eye can see.”

“Sweetheart, you can hardly see the end of your cigarette.” Henry patted Joan’s shoulder. “There are champagne bubbles coming out your ears.”

Joan gave her a wicked grin, peered at the few drops of champagne remaining in her glass, and emptied them onto Henry’s blonde coiffure. I heard a loud crack and watched a croquet ball roll by us.

“What country, friends, is this?” I asked.

“Who cares? Get a load of the natives.” Joan nodded in the direction of the tent. “Hunk of burning love at twenty paces.”

We looked. Walking toward us was a tall, slender man in
a pale linen suit, carrying a pair of empty champagne glasses. His nearly black hair curled in a forelock that fell across long-lashed, dark blue eyes. His mouth looked like an overripe valentine. As he passed near our table, he saw the three of us staring and paused.

“A little more champagne?” The vision gathered up our glasses and headed off without waiting for an answer. We stared after him.

“Good God.” Joan shook her head. “I could impale myself on those cheekbones and die happy.”

“He’s a prop,” I told them. “He came with the floral arrangements.”

“You really think a boy in a three-piece suit is playing for your team?” Henry asked. “That hunk of burning love is pure, one hundred percent USDA fairy. Big fag. Bet you money.”

“He just hasn’t found the right woman yet.” Joan mock-sobbed, dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her dress.

“Nice undies,” Henry said; Joan lifted her skirt higher, swishing it back and forth like a Moulin Rouge dancer.

“Steady, there,” I told her. “The cheekbones are back.”

The vision was nearing our table, managing five full champagne glasses with remarkable grace.

“Well, thanks.” Henry’s bayou accent made a surprise guest appearance. “That was sure nice of you.”

“You’re welcome.” He had a furry, warm, tenor voice, and very white, slightly crooked teeth. I don’t generally have an irrational weakness for male beauty, but the total effect of this young man made me want to wrap my arms around a stack of school books, swing back and forth, and dig the dainty toe of one saddle shoe into the gravel of a high school parking lot.

“And you are?” Joan raised her glass unsteadily.

“Gabe. Gabriel Winslow.”

“Of
course
he is,” Joan murmured to me.

“Charmed.” Henry kicked Joan under the table. “I’m Hank, and this is Joan. And Joy.”

Gabe nodded to them, and turned to me.

“Foxtrot?”

“Gesundheit,” I told him, extending a cocktail napkin.

“Listen,” Gabe said. “I have to deliver a glass of this swill to the mother of the groom. But I’ll lose my mind if I have to hear any more stories about her brilliant son, so I need an alibi. That’s where you come in.”

Joan and Henry were grinning and bobbing like toy ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.

“You’re taking the fate of your feet into your own hands,” I said. Gabe laughed and offered me his arm.

“I promise to have her back before midnight.” He gave the girls a little bow. As we walked toward the tent, I looked back over my shoulder and saw them doing their best Lenny and Squiggy impression: pelvis-thrusting, wrist-biting shimmies around the table.

S
OME OF MY FRIENDS
say you can tell everything you need to know about a prospective beau from a kiss. I say dance with him. Gabriel deeply endeared himself to me in this way: After a couple of not too awkward turns around the floor, he stopped and smiled at me. I’m on the tall side, so our eyes were almost level.

“I think I know what our problem is.” He pulled my right hand around to the small of his back. “You should be leading. I’ll follow you.”

Now let me be clear. This was not about gender politics, per se. What I liked about Gabe’s gesture had to do with how it was unconscious, not a showy inversion of roles intended
as comment on my character, or a demonstration of how profoundly comfortable he was with his masculinity. It simply meant nothing to him one way or another who did the leading, so long as the dancing was good. And as it happens, the dancing was good.

A
S THE FESTIVITIES
drew to a close, Gabriel and I sat alone at a table under the big top, picking over the remains of what had been a very large slice of chocolate wedding cake and watching girls gather for the ceremonial toss of the bridal bouquet.

“Aren’t you going to go fight the good fight?” Gabe nodded toward the lacy white mob knotting together on the dance floor.

“I’m allergic.”

“To flowers?”

“To marriage.”

“Ah,” Gabe said. “You don’t want to get married?” A funny half-smile dimpled his face.

“No. And specifically, no.” I eyed him with suspicion, bracing myself for the usual queries, the predictable patient scorn, but they were not forthcoming.

“Never cared much for weddings myself.” Gabe leaned back in his chair and looked intently at me. “Never saw the point of marriage, really.”

Now, this exchange may not strike the average Jane as the quintessence of romance, but it was an aphrodisiac for me. Gabe and I stared at each other for a few long moments, during which I felt as though my chest were filling with helium. It was terribly cinematic. There was a thud behind us, and we turned to see that the bouquet had hit the floor. Several women dove for it. Gabe stood and held his hand out to me.

“Would you like to take a turn around the grounds and discuss the possibility of forming an allergen-free colony with me?”

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” I told him, and put my hand in his.

And it was.

G
ABE AND
I
HAVE
been dating for a year and a half now. It’s my first real relationship; I once had a boyfriend for two years—the first and last time, until Gabe, that I was in love—but that was in high school. I didn’t really date much during college, in part because there was a supreme dearth of straight men at Vassar, and I wasn’t about to jockey with a thousand crazed undergraduate girls for some lousy keg-party—ignited two-week romance. I did have a couple of postmixer flings with well-meaning young men from nearby colleges. And for a brief shining moment I contemplated cultivating a crush on my Victorian Lit professor, but everybody I knew had a crush on a professor, which made the whole enterprise seem unattractively redundant and, as my father is a Nineteenth-century Lit professor, unpardonably Oedipal.

Also, there was the one summer that I spent entangled, albeit platonically, with a junior partner in the law firm where my mother had arranged an internship for me. He was just a few years my senior; he was bright, funny, and a relentless flirt. However, Mr. Junior Partner was engaged to be married, and there was no way I was going to play the concubine or trollop or what-have-you—not with my supervisor, not with an acquaintance of my family, and not with someone named Bryce, for heaven’s sake. Of course he attempted to persuade me a number of times, and at first it took every filament of moral fiber I had to resist. Toward the
end, though, the temptation was mitigated by the fact that transgression for its own sake has never held that much appeal for me, and also by what a cliché it all seemed—illicit workplace liaison, older man/younger woman, and so forth. These misgivings were confirmed by my father, who, when I discussed the situation with him, laughed and told me it was just a crisis of originality, and that I deserved better (though by better I didn’t know if he meant a man who was actually available, or a situation less predictable).

When I graduated from college and moved back to Manhattan, I humored my parents and went on a couple of dates arranged by family friends, of which less than nothing came. After a few years, my friends began to despair of what they considered my premature spinsterhood. For a period of time they threw eligible men into my path at every conceivable opportunity; as often as not the men would ask me out, and I would agree, sometimes simply because it was easier and less embarrassing than declining. We’d go out once or twice and that, usually, would be the end of that. A few times things progressed—or at least continued. One fall I dated this very soft-spoken, eerily well-dressed computer programmer whom my older brother James introduced me to (after making a pass at him and finding out he was straight). For a couple of months I went out with a jocular, deliberately eccentric guy who worked as a deejay for a local public radio station and owned three dogs as large and hirsute as Shetland ponies. I was avidly pursued by and for a brief period succumbed to a sculptor a decade my senior, with a picturesque loft, a mind-boggling libido, and a troublesome pair of ex-wives. And so on. In the end, whoever it was, we always broke up. Because I, in the Gospel According to the Exes, am: edgy, intense, hard, too cynical, too analytical, too defended. Or they found me reserved, secretive, elusive, emotionally unavailable—they couldn’t understand me,
couldn’t get to know me, I wouldn’t let them
in.
Or I didn’t take anything seriously, I made a joke out of everything, I was flip, glib, too clever by half, I didn’t really listen (which is what my mother always said about my father; go figure). All of which I interpret as their sense that I was not sufficiently vulnerable, fragile, pliable, woundable, to meet the standards of the Eternal Feminine Principle. Either that, or I’m some delightful mix of the very worst qualities of both my parents, and woe to all comers.

Gabe was not of this opinion, apparently. He called me the day after the wedding, and we had our first official date a couple of days later. From the very beginning it was easy between us, easy to be together, easy to proceed. We dated for well over a month before we spent the night together; there didn’t seem to be any rush. It felt as if we had all the time in the world. It still feels that way. It’s like everything has been all settled for us via some prearrangement or osmosis, and we’re simply getting on with the matter of spending our lives together.

I don’t think my affection for Gabe takes much explaining. He’s the kind of man almost anyone would like. What he sees in me is something more of a mystery. I know he’s partial to redheads, which I have in my favor. He appreciates my sense of humor, and I put up with his awful puns. Beyond that, I just thank my lucky stars and don’t ask too many questions, for fear of jinxing it. Gabe and I just fit. For example: We’ve never been big talkers about The Relationship, by some apparently mutual, tacit agreement. Which is not to say we don’t talk. We talk constantly about anything else—books and movies, politics and art, the news, our families, our work, quotidian stuff. We banter. We gossip. We chat, as Henry says. She means it as a pejorative, but this is precisely what I want—someone to chat with.

Also, we don’t fight. We’ve had a couple of very mild
squabbles; easygoing as Gabe is, he can also be outrageously stubborn on occasion (he’s an oldest child, the beloved only son, and accustomed to getting his own way). The closest we’ve ever been to an argument was over our plans for Labor Day weekend last year. He wanted me to go sailing with his family and I resisted, because being around his family makes me uncomfortable; their formality and their coolness keep me constantly on guard. Also, I don’t think they’re terribly keen on me. So when this Labor Day plan was proposed, Gabe and I had words over it. He won. We went. I can’t say that I had the time of my life, but it turns out Gabe had planned the whole thing so he could have a suitably atmospheric setting in which to propose cohabitation. Two weeks later, I moved into his apartment.

Apart from that incident, Gabe and I have had only one major disagreement, and it was about manners. It took place on Valentine’s Day (of course—who ever gets through Valentine’s Day unscathed?) at this very fancy restaurant Gabe had selected for a romantic dinner. It was one of those places where the tables are set with napkins folded like prizewinning origami and nineteen different utensils for each course; I guess the whole atmosphere and the ritual aspect of the evening had me a little tense. The fight began when I picked up a fork with which to consume my appetizer, and Gabe told me it was the wrong one, and I snapped at him. Who cares, I argued, whether I eat my salad with the salad fork or the oyster fork or the butter tongs? I chew with my mouth closed and beyond that it’s a pack of classicist bunk. Gabe told me—not gently, and I can hardly blame him, since I had taken a fairly antagonistic tone—that I was quite wrong; at the table, in the drawing room, in the office, in the barracks, manners are gestures of respect. Feh, I said, they’re useless silly conventions intended to enforce social order and social distinctions. Not so, Gabe insisted, hushing
me; by adhering to the behaviors assigned to denote politeness in any given culture or society, one demonstrates regard for one’s fellows. Exactly, I said, you sublimate and efface yourself and become a subservient clone. And on we went. There was no shouting or anything, but it felt like a serious event. We never really resolved it, either. What finally happened was that Gabe pulled a small gift-wrapped box from his pocket and asked whether, as I disliked social rituals so much, he should just return my Valentine’s gift, since he didn’t want to insult my value system. He waved the box at me and we both started laughing in a nervous, embarrassed way, and then with relief, and we went on with dinner as if nothing had happened. My gift, by the way, was a watch that had belonged to Gabe’s grandmother. It’s delicate and elegant and feminine—in short, very nice and nothing I would ever choose for myself. I wear it almost every day, though. What it represents is more important than what it looks like.