Lovesick (26 page)

WHAT I’ve learned over the last week of wedding planning is that I have strong opinions on topics that I couldn’t care less about.

Apparently I think a photographer captures the essence of a wedding, but a videographer distorts the fantasy, meaning we should book the former, not the latter. I think tablecloths and buffet station linens should match, but bridesmaid dresses don’t need to (though they should probably complement one another in color and style). Oh, and it’s criminal that Mindy’s Stationery Shop charges $600 for fifty wedding invitations.

But that’s just me. Paige sees things differently.

It was such a promising sign when we agreed to have the wedding at the Lawrence Hall of Science. But we were so young, naive, and flush with credit then. Plus, it’s easy to spend $3,000 you don’t have so you can get married overlooking one of the most spectacular views in the world. But that was a whole week and a dozen compromises ago. Amid all the fierce wedding negotiations, Paige has never invoked her parents, and still I am haunted by what they cannot give her. No matter what we do, is our wedding destined to come up short because Lydia can’t adjust her veil, or because Gregory can’t give her away? These tragic realities guide me every time we are forced to strike a compromise—calling out to me to
help her realize her fantasy
—and yet with every bargain, I expect the insanity to wind down, and it never does.

Finding consensus on the guest list is the most formidable challenge we’ve faced to date. Paige and I are in agreement that both of our families have their share of fruits, but in deciding who receives an invite and who doesn’t, how do you compare his apples to her oranges?

Because Paige has more friends and extended family than I do, I surrendered up front. I told her that she could invite three
oranges for every two of my apples. I thought that was pretty generous—and it did provide her with a temporary sense of relief until she realized we could only afford to invite half as many guests as we thought, or a total of fifty. Paige’s own list was three times that. That’s when Paige went underground for twenty-four hours. Behind closed doors, she managed to whittle down her list, but to this day, she is consumed with guilt.

Given this agreed-upon ratio, I still needed to figure out exactly how many guests I could invite so my total number of attendees would add up to twenty. According to Wikipedia, approximately three out of four people accept a wedding invitation. From there, it was simple algebra: solve for apples.

I can safely invite 26.67 people, and if I do, 20 will attend. Not only that, but by assigning probabilities to each of my guests, I can figure out
which
6.67 guests will likely decline and which 20 will accept (assuming a margin of error of +/−2 percent).

I tried to explain all this to Paige; I told her that she could use this same basic formula to solve all of her invitation problems, too, but she wouldn’t listen.

“I’m still confused on how you invite 67 percent of a person,” Paige says.

“I’ll show you,” I tell her, sitting at my computer. I pull Paige onto my lap and begin kissing her neck. “I like this body part,” I say, moving down the center of her chest. “And these. These body parts would definitely receive invitations.”

Once we figured out
whom
to invite, there was still the matter of
how
to invite them. Invites needed to contain invitations—that much we agreed upon.
But how did I really feel about inner envelopes?
Paige wondered. “Redundant” and “expensive” was my thinking. In the end, “elegant” and “negligible” prevailed.

Maybe we should get rain cards, Paige suggested as we flipped through the sample book at Mindy’s Stationery Shop. No rain cards, I demanded. Yes, we were risking it all by having this wedding outside, but if it rains, people don’t need a card to tell them to go inside. No rain cards, I repeated. Paige relented. It was only days later—when Cookie told me that nobody gets rain cards—that I realized I’d been hustled.

Next came the response cards. I agreed we needed them, but seeing as the vast majority of our guests would end up delivering the response cards to us in person, did we really have to spring for prepaid postage? I never had a chance.

Lara has spent the last week drilling it into Paige’s head that wedding invitations
need
to be hand-addressed. “Anything less is frowned upon as too impersonal,” Lara told her poor sister.
Frowned upon by whom? By the people we actually invite?

Thankfully, cool heads, cost, and the Lucida Calligraphy typeface won out. I eventually convinced Paige that I could create attractive invitations using our word processor and printer, and that despite her sister’s strenuous objections, most of our virtually blind, computer-illiterate guests would never know the difference. We are now on Emily Post’s shit list.

Paige keyed in all the names and addresses, and I agreed to print all the addresses on the outer envelopes. Nothing could have prepared me for the man-versus-machine tug-of-war that ensued. I thought I was doing myself a favor by using the new inkjet printer at the pharmacy. Words cannot describe the profound frustration that comes with clawing at a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 1310 as it swallows a four-dollar outer envelope, but “god,” “damn,” and “fucking printer” are a good start.

Despite dozens of test print runs, envelopes jammed, addresses printed crooked, corners creased, and ink smudged. That’s how Mindy’s Stationery Shop gets you—they give you three measly extra outer envelopes, and I blew through those in ten minutes flat. It’s probably a good thing Paige insisted we buy those inner envelopes. She has no clue how many “innies” I ended up using as “outies.”

The hall is booked, the invites are out, and this wedding is happening in t-minus five weeks, three days.

Not everything has been a chore. Belinda’s mother, Marylyn, was a pleasant surprise. She used to run her own catering business and offered to prepare all of our wedding appetizers and buffet entrées for free. But no good deed goes unpunished. It was only after we accepted Marylyn’s generous offer that we read the fine print in the Lawrence Hall contract: “Lessees who elect to use anyone other than the preferred caterer (listed below) will be subject to a $500 penalty fee.” We’ve decided to pay the penalty—it will still cost us less to buy our own food wholesale and hire a few of Belinda’s friends as servers than it will to hire one of the hall’s hoity-toity caterers.

Then there’s Principal Martin. He is a “magnum member” at The Wine Basement on Port Street. With his discount, Harvey Mar tin says he can get us reasonable wine at cheap prices, and not the other way around. There’s something poetic about having your former high school principal purchase your alcohol. With a little notice and cash, Principal Martin thinks personalized wine labels may even be in the cards. Paige and I both love that idea.

As it turns out, my pharmacy school friend Stinky Stanley has far more to offer than his human beatbox rhythms. Known better as “Slick 6” to the Wednesday night crew at a local San Francisco club, I’m told Stinky Stanley’s deejay skills are sublime. Lucky for us, his wedding collection is also extensive, he’s available, and in our price range: free. Slick 6 only has two, nonnegotiable rules: no chicken dance and no polkas. “I don’t play Satan’s music,” he informed me, placing bended fingers over his head like horns.

There are three of us planning this wedding, and living with the Day sisters, the differences between Lara and Paige couldn’t be starker. Lara Day is the type of person who enjoys preparing detailed dossiers on frail, poverty-stricken senior citizens, while Paige Day, much like her father, prefers scribbling down to-do list items on tiny scraps of paper, haphazardly leaving them lying everywhere.

With Paige at the helm, it feels, most days, like we’re arbitrarily completing wedding tasks as she thinks of them. We have a
pharmacy full of office supplies—I bring home a different organizational tool every day—and yet nothing works. Paige is all over the place. Between the wedding vows, marriage license, music choices, guestbook, seating chart, wedding rings, dance lessons, and cake, something important is going to fall through the cracks. I just know it.

That’s why I made her this gift.

It took me twenty minutes to figure out how to print Unicode character 61441, known better by its nickname, “D.” No self-respecting wedding list would neglect to include check boxes. After scouring the house for three hours, I managed to find all of Paige’s cryptic notes; decipher, compile, condense, and categorize them into one master list; and print the whole shebang. For every pending item on the four-page list, I designated a lead person, a target deadline, and an actual completion date.

The things men do for love.

TOMORROW morning Paige and Lara are headed to the wholesale market to price flowers for bridal bouquets and centerpieces. But tonight we register for gifts. If I don’t go with her, it could be a week before Paige and I spend some quality time together. Now that we live together, we see much less of each other. Paige is the only one around here earning a steady income, and with the living expenses adding up, she’s been picking up as many shifts at the television station as possible.

I’d prefer to undergo dental surgery than register for gifts, but the ways things have been going lately—who knows—maybe I have deep-rooted feelings about china patterns.

I haven’t been back to San Francisco since picking up Paige’s engagement ring from Igor Petrov. Less than two months ago, the pharmacy was open; I was blissfully ignorant of the Day Co-Pay program; Lara was happily toiling away in Los Angeles; Paige and I were dating; and Gregory was alive.

Summer nights in San Francisco, the high hits sixty degrees, if you’re lucky. A cable car rattles its bell through Union Square. Misguided tourists stand out like sore thumbs in shorts and T-shirts. Sunday shoppers flood the sidewalks. I take a seat on the park ledge facing Macy’s.

The Day sisters are easy to spot in the crowd. Lara and Paige maneuver down the sidewalk, chatting, laughing, and oblivious to my existence. They’ve never looked livelier, happier, or more alike. Brightly colored shopping bags hang from their fingertips. Worrisome. They were supposed to keep the spending down and find Paige wedding gown material for her dress.

The two of them are absolutely giddy. I wave them over. Paige waves back, but not Lara.
Typical.

“How’d it go?” I ask.

“Good … Fine,” Paige corrects herself as our cool lips touch again.

“Then you found what you were looking for?”

“Wait until you see me. You’re going to be thinking: ‘Va-va-va-voom. I can’t believe that’s my bride!’”

Her face lights up when she speaks. Her eyes sparkle with pure joy.

“I’m excited,” I tell her.

“You ready to do this?” she asks, presenting Macy’s to me with both hands.

“Not so excited.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun, I promise, and if you’re good, I’ll buy you a cookie.”

“More like you’ll buy
you
a cookie,” I say. “Now I know why you decided to register here—the food court.”

“I’ll buy us
both
a cookie,” she admits.

“We don’t need to register. Between my apartment, and your
house, we have everything we’ll ever need. Not to mention that our guest list includes some of the biggest cheapskates north of Oakland.”

“We’re about to exploit the greatest wedding registry loophole ever!” she whispers. “Mildred tells me that if we register for something during the Macy’s Fourth of July Sale, and Macy’s sells out of that item, we get the equal or higher end product at the same price.”

“But we don’t even need the equal or the higher end product,” I say.

“You’ll thank me later,” she says all serious. “You
do not
want the likes of Cookie Brewster buying us a wedding gift all by herself. Register now or regret it later. You decide.”

Lara walks gingerly across the lawn in high heels.

“I still think we should do my idea,” I suggest.

“What idea is that?” Lara asks curiously.

“Andy thinks we should register at Bank of the West,” Paige says flatly.