part 2 of ‘post from a wedding weekend’

(First read post from a wedding weekend, part 1 , if you haven’t yet.)

the ceremony

4 p.m. Saturday 12 July

It’s a Protestant ceremony, and everything goes beautifully. Plan C looks at his watch at the end and says with satisfaction, ‘Twenty-eight minutes. Perfect. No wedding should last more than half an hour.’

He continues in the affectionate mode of the night before, even putting his hand on my knee at one point.

the wedding banquet

We’re seated Noah’s-Ark-style, man, woman, man, woman at a round table for ten. At our end of it, the order is like this, from left to right: Plan C’s son (S), son’s fiancée (SF), Plan C, Mimi.

At one point early in the evening, before the main course is served, S gets up from his chair, squats by Plan C’s left side, and whispers something. S returns to his seat, and Plan C asks me for a kleenex. S has apparently noticed something yucky in Plan C’s nose. The expression on Plan C’s face is one of irritation, embarrassment, and humble obedience, all mixed together.

I look at S, who is eyeing me seriously, as if to say, Something has to be done about him. We can’t have him looking this way at a formal public occasion.

I want to indicate to S that I’m willing to help and do indeed want Plan C to look respectable, but at the same time I don’t want to treat Plan C as a child. I lean across and say, ‘Okay, you cover the left nostril, and I’ll take the right one.’

* * *
Fortunately S doesn’t hear what I say.

Plan C asks me what I said. I tell him, and he laughs.

* * *

It’s hard to position yourself in these family issues.

* * *

And there are more family issues during the evening.

At the rehearsal dinner the night before, the food was divine, but alas the post-wedding meal is a dismal failure. All of the options are inedible, at least judging by the great quantities of it left on everyone’s plate.

Plan C complains about it vociferously and often, his face visibly indicating his feelings even when he isn’t talking.

S (who has also eaten very little of the main course) glowers at his father.

* * *

Then the toasts start. The father of the bride, a good-looking man, stands near the center of the small dancing floor with a microphone and begins to speak, sincerely but somewhat awkwardly.

* * *
Twelve minutes later, he is still speaking, sincerely but somewhat awkwardly.

* * *

Plan C whispers to me, ‘If I talk for more than eight minutes at their [S & SF’s] wedding, shoot me.’

* * *
Oh! I think. He actually thinks we’ll still be together in October 2009. He who a month ago said to me over the phone, ‘I don’t know that I want to spend 40 weekends a year in New York’ and other words to that effect, precipitating the crisis in our relationship that I’ve been posting about since the beginning of June – he’s assuming we’ll still be a couple then.

That’s what comes of not having ‘the conversation,’ a conversation he made it clear in [European country] that he wanted to avoid, and that (taking my cue from him) I’ve avoided also. The policy I determined on was to do all the things with Plan C that I had said I would do, follow through on all our plans, which would take us to the end of July / beginning of August, and then Talk.

But my deliberate silence about this topic and his unthinking evasion of it have led him to believe either that everything is as it was, or that we have surmounted the crisis, or perhaps even that we are now together on some new, as-yet-unarticulated terms. I’m not sure, and maybe I’ll find out, or maybe I won’t, when I introduce the topic in early August, or sooner. I’ve had to suppress comments on the subject a couple of times during this wedding weekend, but I’ve gotten used to the suppression and don’t feel too much strain.

* * *

In fact, for whatever reason, I’m having a wonderful time. I don’t think I’ve been this relaxed in ages. My blood pressure must be down to 60 or something. When a decision about anything needs to be made – where we’ll eat lunch, when we’ll do this or that – I say, ‘I’ll go with the flow.’

Me ‘go with the flow’?? Totally un-Mimi-esque, but I mean it. I’m just here to have fun. I have all the right clothes, I’m feeling thin, the inedible dinner means I won’t even gain anything today, and no one here, to my knowledge, is angry at me. Everyone who meets me seems pleased and easy to converse with. I’m happy.

* * *
Plan C’s expressions of disapproval at the father-of-the-bride’s long disquisition on marriage etc. are too audible and too visible, and once more S is giving me looks that seem to say, He needs to be controlled. Can’t you do anything about him?

I find myself wondering what W (Plan C’s late wife, S’s beloved mother, whom he misses very much, I’m told) would have done. I have no idea, but my guess, given S’s looks, is that she would have acted decisively.

* * *
The problem is, trying to soothe or quiet Plan C when he’s in the heat of these rants often has an adverse affect, making him louder and more irritable.

Someone else at our table, nodding toward the father, still in the middle of his toast, says, ‘It’s hard to be the F. O. B.’

* * *
dancing at last

This is the moment I’d been preparing for since September 2006, when I started swing-dance lessons.

The dance lessons followed the renewal of my dating life by just a few months. One of these days, I told myself, you may meet a man who likes to dance, and you’d better know what you’re doing. Like my new hair (maintained by Sophie), my new clothes (OnlyHearts camisoles and shrugs, short skirts), my new personality (cheerful, good-humored), and much else, my dancing lessons formed part of the new self I constructed to meet the needs of my new life.

I had eighteen months of wonderful lessons with Dru.

Although Plan C’s dancing style is quirky and idiosyncratic, I’ve gotten used to it. ‘Just follow him,’ Dru said, unable to mesh the swing-dance style he’d been teaching me with Plan C’s dancing.

So beginning in March Plan C and I practiced off and on, in my living room or his, to his (the Righteous Brothers, Patsy Cline) and my (the Temptations, the Supremes, Bobby Darin, Fred Astaire) favorite music.

I improved.

This wedding was to be our first time dancing together in public, on display.

* * *
And so it was a crisis indeed when I returned from Europe with a swollen foot, because it might mean that I couldn’t dance, I couldn’t go to this wedding, and the preparations of months would be all for naught.

* * *
But the wonderful podiatrist I went to (who gave me an appointment right away because she is my mother’s doctor, and my mother is her favorite patient) told me that I absolutely had to go to this wedding and had to dance. She’s the podiatrist for the cast of Wicked, so she’s used to people who need to dance on sore feet. After diagnosing a stress fracture in my right foot, she gave me instructions on taking care of it and told me that Saturday night, half an hour before the dancing started, I should take two Motrin and dance my heart out. And if my feet hurt in a few hours, I should take two more Motrin and keep on dancing.

* * *

I forgot to take the Motrin till the middle of the dancing, but I had rested my foot most of Saturday (while Plan C golfed), and it was feeling much better.

* * *

But the dancing offered another site for Plan C’s complaints Saturday evening.

First, the dancing floor was too small for a wedding with two-hundred guests, he said. It should be twice as big.

Then, he attempted to find out the protocol: was everyone supposed to wait for the bride and groom to have their first dance before the dancing was open to all?

The answer appeared to be yes.

* * *
Plan C took this protocol as a personal affront.

It won’t be that way at their wedding, he said, nodding toward S and SF. There will be dance music played the whole evening, before, during, and after the dinner, and people will be told to dance the whole time. And there will be a band, not a DJ.
* * *

So from about 5:30 p.m., when the reception merged into pre-dinner seating under the tent, until 9:30 p.m., when the ceremonial part of the banquet ended and the bride and groom had their first dance, followed by the dances with parents etc., followed finally by general dancing for all the guests, Plan C was in a state of continuing irritation rising at times to anger.

He heard all his favorite music being played, but he couldn’t dance to it. He heard Big Band tunes from the 40s and 50s, he heard classic rock, he heard Astaire and Sinatra and Billy Joel and everything he loved sounding out, and he had to stay seated.

They won’t be playing that later, he predicted. Everything I want to dance to is what they’re playing now, and when it’s time to dance, they’ll play awful stuff.

* * *

Plan C was right.

* * *

Most of the evening, the DJ played what the 20-30 generation appeared to want, which was what Plan C called whitepeoplejumpingupanddown music.

Later I asked SF what precisely that was, who were the artists responsible for the music Plan C detested, and she said, lots of them. When I pressed her on specifics, the only name she could come up with as a possibility was Bon Jovi.

* * *

But sometimes the DJ played music Plan C liked, and on those occasions, we danced.

* * *

I’m proud and happy to announce that I did just fine.

* * *

Yup, all those months of lessons and those weekends of practice payed off. I would have been a dreadful dancer without them. And as recently as six weeks or so ago, I needed half an hour to warm up and become a passable dancer.

But I did well on Saturday night, and the fact that we were in the midst of a crowd in a small space meant that I never felt self-conscious, because it was hard to notice anyone.

* * *
I did notice a few things about Plan C’s dancing, however, that I hadn’t realized when it was just the two of us dancing in my living-room.

He dances to be noticed. Visibility is the key word.

Plan C is not vain about his looks; he hates photographs of himself, and he often makes allusions to his ‘pompous’ photo-face or his increasing stomach or other less-than-perfect body parts.

But he’s quite vain about his dancing. He kept moving us around the floor – to the extent that anyone could ‘move’ in the small, crowded space – to slightly emptier spaces, and, I thought, to spaces where we could be seen by women he considered attractive.

Or so I suspected.

After each dance, or at least after several of them, he made approving noises about my dancing, and once he said, ‘I make you look good.’

* * *

So after a while I began saying the same thing to him. And when the whole evening was over, I said to him, ‘Your dancing was not bad. I made you look good.’

* * *

My little joke.

* * *

But he really was a vain dancer. On two occasions he suddenly wrapped other women into our dancing. People were dancing in informal groups much of the time, not always couples, and Plan C seemed to sort of swoop down on such groups and suddenly sweep one of the women into our dancing.

Plan C did it gracefully and was pretty pleased with himself. He said something to me later like ‘That’s one of my little tricks’, but I asked him please not to do it again. It reminded me too much of infidelity.

* * *
Whenever the music changed from a song he liked to one he detested, Plan C appeared personally affronted. And usually at those times, the average age of the dancers changed from 50s – 60s to 20s- 30s. There was definitely a clear generational difference in the dancing music preferences, though there was always a bit of overlap.

Celebration was played once, and Plan C perked up, saying ‘I have this choreographed,’ but it turned out not to be the recording he liked.

* * *
Then Plan C requested the Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody, and the DJ obliged.

The song worked like magic, or medicine.

* * *
At the first strains of Unchained Melody, Plan C was transformed.

He became a different person – emotional, romantic, almost teary-eyed – sort of like the person he was during the first three weeks of our relationship.

These are the lyrics:

Oh, my love, my darling
I’ve hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time
And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love
God speed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow
To the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Lonely rivers sigh
“Wait for me, wait for me”
I’ll be coming home; wait for me

Oh, my love, my darling
I’ve hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love
God speed your love to me .

copyright Frank Music Corp.

As the song began, Plan C held me tightly, in slow-dancing position, and within a minute or two he said, ‘I like you very much,’ followed immediately by ‘I love you.’

I remember the exact words and their sequence, because I was baffled, first by ‘I like you very much,’ given that in February, March, and April, he had said ‘I love you’ fairly often; and then by ‘I love you,’ because he hadn’t said those words in ages. And I also wondered at the difference between ‘I like you very much’ and ‘I love you,’ and the way the first modulated into the second: was he trying to remember what he felt, were his feelings changing as he spoke, or was he correcting himself? And I wondered what the second phrase meant about Plan C’s notion of our relationship at the moment.

And finally, I wondered whether Unchained Melody caused those feelings; or released them; or created them the way some mind-altering drug might create feelings.

(For what it’s worth, Plan C’s email message to me, sent when he arrived home around 3 a.m. Monday, having dropped me off just after 1 a.m., was signed ‘love,’ the first such signature since early June.)

So for one reason or another, Plan C appeared to be getting re-attached to me over the weekend, considering the hand on the knee during the wedding, and the response to Unchained Melody.

* * *
During some of what Plan C called the whitepeoplejumpingupanddown music, we were watching the young dancers. Near us, a slender young woman with a good cleavage, long dark hair, and a short black dress, was pulling a young man onto the dance floor. ‘Come on, Michael,’ she was saying, ‘Let’s dance.’

PLAN C: She’s the sexiest woman here.

MIMI: (gives Plan C a look)

PLAN C: I mean, the sexiest young woman here.

MIMI: I thought you didn’t like skinny.

PLAN C: It’s not the body [hah], it’s her face.

MIMI: (no response, but note taken of her face; Plan C does indeed prefer brunettes with significant hair)

PLAN C (watching the young man acquiesce and begin dancing with the woman): He doesn’t know what he’s got. He’s a jackass.

MIMI: Suppose someone said that about you?

PLAN C: I would. [pause, during which he appears to be remembering the circumstances] I do.

MIMI: (no comment)

* * *

marriage in the ER
6:40 a.m. Sunday 13 July

It’s very early. I hear Plan C sniffling. Then he gets up, goes to the bathroom, turns on the water, does something, and returns. The same procedure is repeated several times. Finally, at a little after 7, he turns on the light and says to me, ‘I have a nosebleed.’

I wake up officially. I advise him to lie with his head back for a few minutes. But he keeps having to blow his nose, and the blood is still coming. He’s worried, because he’s on a blood-thinner.

Soon Plan C believes that, because of the Plavix, he will bleed to death.

He calls his physician, who advises him to go to the closest ER.

* * *

Because this is a skiing and biking area, it’s full of medical facilities, and the nearest emergency clinic is very near the hotel. (And, because it’s in the mountains, it’s also full of tourists’ nosebleeds on a regular basis.)

Plan C is the first patient of the day, and he wants me in the examining room with him.

In a few minutes the doctor arrives, a lanky, skinny man in western-looking (to my east coast eyes, at least) clothes with a friendly manner. He assures Plan C that he is not going to bleed to death and explains the steps to follow: pinch your nostrils closed for five minutes and hold the pinch-position, and if after that you’re still bleeding, stuff cotton or tissue up the bleeding nostril and hold it some more. Then, in about an hour or two, once the bleeding has stopped, add antibiotic ointment.

I’m scrawling the instructions down in a little notebook. That’s the only way I can remember something medical or scientific.

Plan C asks a question, and the doctor says, ‘Your wife’s writing it all down…’

* * *

(We are also married later in the day on the plane, when the man next to me asks, ‘What were you and your husband doing out west?’)

* * *

And so we have another sexless, ‘married’ morning, a total waste once more of the beautiful king-size Marriott bed.

‘I had other plans for this morning,’ Plan C says regretfully, indicating he had wanted to use that nice big bed for sex.

* * *

Back in the hotel, Plan C – ravenously hungry not only from the morning’s adventures but from the absence of an edible dinner the night before – has two helpings of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast.

* * *
mimi’s wide-eyed questions on the flight home

DELTA PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM: Fasten your seatbelts and turn off all electronic devices. As we go through the cabin for a final time, please let us know if you have any questions.

MIMI: Does God exist?

* * *

MIMI (looking out the window as the plane takes off) to Plan C:
Why do they call them the Rockies?

* * *

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