IT WAS CRAZY, BUT I felt as if I was on the way to my own wedding again, instead of Jason’s. Except for the pregnant brides, the circumstances were completely different. Paulie and I were married in a small private room in a neighborhood restaurant in Brooklyn, during the lunch rush; I can still hear the not-so-distant banter of the kitchen workers and the crash of china as we said our vows. Jason and Sara’s morning wedding, in Ann’s elegant living room, would certainly have a lot more class. She and Paulie had hired some fancy local caterers to do the breakfast—crepes and Irish salmon and good champagne. This time I was driving there by myself. Twenty-four years ago I was in a cab, wedged between my father and mother, who tried to talk me out of going through with it all the way there. “What’s your hurry?” my mother kept saying, as if Paulie wasn’t three months gone, as if twenty-eight wasn’t considered overripe for bachelors in those days. She even hinted that the baby might not be mine, a claim no one could ever make once he was born. The taxi got stuck in traffic, and we arrived at the restaurant almost a half hour late. There was no private entrance to the private room, and I remember rushing through the main dining room with my parents right behind me, past all the gaping diners, the waiters with their loaded trays. In the little side room, our friends and relatives were standing around impatiently, as if they were waiting for an overdue train to pull into the station. An accordionist was strolling among them, playing a desperate medley of love songs. I didn’t see Paulie right away, and I felt a rush of relief, tinged with disappointment. She was in the ladies’ room, and when she came out, I was right near the door. We looked at each other in an intense way that almost married us right then and there, without the benefit of a ceremony. Still, we went through with the ceremony, although I was a jittery mess just before it was supposed to begin. The end of freedom! My bass man, Roy, who considered himself a card, mimed putting a noose around his neck and stringing himself up. Paulie’s parents flanked her like bookends, and glared at me, and my own mother pinched my arm hard as I broke away from her. The accordionist began to wheeze “Because,” a number I’ve always hated, and I felt something warm trickle, and then run, down my face as I went toward Paulie. It was a nosebleed, a gusher, the first and only one of my life. Years later, during a quarrel, Paulie would accuse me of bringing it on deliberately, as a symbol of the period I wanted her to get. But that day she was all concern and tenderness, running to the bar herself for ice cubes to put on the back of my neck. A few minutes later the nosebleed was stanched, and pale and splattered, my collar soaked and my neck numb with cold, I was joined to Paulie in holy matrimony. The accordionist broke into the finale of “The Wedding March,” and there was scattered applause, the way there is for a third-rate act in a noisy club. Sara’s sister had agreed to stand up for her today, but her parents had stuck to their boycott. We’d invited several friends, but only a few members of our families, so Sara wouldn’t feel even worse about the poor representation of hers. My mother had declined the invitation, saying that her feet were bad, as if we’d asked her to walk up from Miami. Paulie’s mother was there, though, and her corsage was crushed between us when she hugged me. “This is the day, Howie darling,” she said. “Our chickens are going to come in. Wait and see.”
I was early this time—only a handful of guests were there before me. Jason hadn’t even arrived yet; he was coming directly from Atlantic City, where his group had played a gig the night before, without Sara. She’d stayed overnight at Ann’s, and I imagined the serious, sisterly talk they must have had—Ann bestowing love secrets and expensive lotions and perfumes on Sara. They seemed to be in cahoots now, along with Sara’s sister, Peggy, whispering and giggling together, looking gorgeous in their wedding clothes. I talked to them for a while, and to Spence, who pinned a red carnation to my lapel. There was an earthy, springlike smell from all the flowers heaped in baskets around the living room. Ann and Spence had rented little gilt chairs with red velvet seats, and a guitarist in a long dress was sitting on one of them, plucking out strains of Albéniz. Paulie was nowhere in sight, and I walked casually around, looking for her. I hadn’t seen her since Gil’s funeral, when she’d stood beside me as they lowered him into the ground. Now I found her in the kitchen, giving last-minute instructions to the caterers. She was wearing a blue silk dress and she had a flower in her hair. Blue is my favorite color, which Paulie once remarked was predictable and not very interesting. But she’d always worn a lot of it to please me, and she even favored songs with the word “blue” in the title: “Blue Moon” … “Am I Blue?” … “My Blue Heaven.”
“You look nice,” I said. “Not at all like your typical mother of the groom.”
“That groom,” she said, ignoring the compliment and elbowing me out into the hallway, “should have been here by now.”
“Traffic,” I said. “You know how it is.”
“You were late on our wedding day, too,” she reminded me.
“Our taxi got stuck in a tie-up. Those things happen.”
“Your mother probably set up a roadblock,” Paulie said.
“Jason’s not really late,” I said, determined to be pleasant. “There’s plenty of time. Do I look nice, too?”
“You’ll do,” she said. I’d hoped she’d make some fussy, wifely gesture—straighten my tie or the boutonniere, or find some lint to pick off my sleeve—but she didn’t.
Guests kept arriving. The door chimes rang and voices rose in greeting. La Rae and Frank were in the living room when we got there, and Katherine and Tony were just coming in. Mike had a stunning strawberry blonde on his arm. I never expected he’d bring Janine, and he swore he was finished with her, anyway, but I was spooked when I first saw the blonde. The room was humming with conversation, the guitarist was into Vivaldi, and there was an air of excitement and celebration. Through the open drapes, I could see the row of sugar-coated junipers at the edge of the snowy garden. It was cold, but very sunny, and everything glittered and shone. “Look at that,” I said to Paulie. How could she fail to be moved by the occasion, by the beauty of the day?
Spence introduced us to the judge who would perform the ceremony. He was a big, hearty man, someone I wouldn’t mind coming up before if I’d committed a murder. “So you’re the groom’s parents!” he said in resounding tones, clamping one hand on each of our shoulders. “Well, well! Congratulations to you both!” After he’d wandered off, I said to Paulie, “I feel as if he just married us.” She laughed and I said, “Can we leave on our honeymoon now?” She stopped laughing and sidled away from me into a group of guests.
I talked to a few people myself, but I wasn’t having a very good time. Jason actually was a little late, and I was getting edgy and worried. “So where’s my handsome nephew?” Paulie’s deaf aunt Mildred shouted, and I saw the judge frown and look at his watch. I went down the hallway again and found Sara by herself, leaning against the wall outside the kitchen. “How are you doing, kid?” I said. “Any last requests?” To my horror, her eyes filled with tears. “Hey, Sara,” I said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, no,” she said, just before she really started bawling. I took her arm and herded her into the powder room. After I’d locked the door behind us, I grabbed a few Kleenex from the dispenser and handed them to her. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she sat on the closed toilet seat and said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.”
“That’s all right, it’s your big day,” I said. “You’re entitled to a little nervous hysteria.”
“It’s not that. It’s that Jason isn’t going to sh-show up,” she said.
“Sure he’s going to show up,” I said, hovering over her, wanting to touch her veiled head but afraid of mussing it. I wished there was a bathtub ledge I could perch on, so we could be at eye level. Instead, I crouched before her, and when that proved uncomfortable, I got down on one knee, as if I was about to propose. “Of course he’s going to show up.”
“He’s not,” she said, with stubborn confidence. “I knew it the minute I woke up this morning. I knew that his heart was never in it, and that he wouldn’t go through with it. Now he’s not here, and I’m g-glad my parents aren’t, either.” And Niagara Falls began gushing again.
“That’s crazy, Sara,” I said. “Why would he have agreed to get married in the first place? It was hardly an impulsive decision.”
“It was, in a way,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “He decided to do it after one of our birth-training sessions. We were lying on the floor with all the other couples that day, everybody breathing together in one long, whooshing sound—like the ocean? It was so beautiful. I closed my eyes and pretended I was at the beach—that’s one of our relaxation techniques—and when I opened them, Jason was staring at me. I knew right away that something was different about him. My heart started pounding, and I was afraid to say anything.”
“Did Jason say anything?” This seemed like the beginning of a very long story, and my knee was starting to ache from the cold, hard tile.
“Not then. We walked home, and it began to snow again. The whole world was quiet, and we were sort of in tune with it. But much later, when we were in bed, he said something about the cool way the group breathing had sounded, and that maybe we could make some music like that. I said that was a good idea, and I was reaching to turn off the light when he grabbed my wrist, real hard, and he said, ‘Sara, I love you.’”
“Hadn’t he ever said it before?” I asked.
“Oh, sure, lots of times. But never like that. He looked … angry, almost, or like he was going to cry.”
“Yeah, I know that look,” I said. “And what did you say?”
“You know—that I loved him, too, and all that.”
“Then what happened?” I said, shifting to my other knee.
“Then he said, ‘Let’s get married,’ and I said, ‘Let’s,’ and ‘How wonderful,’ or something, and he said, ‘Let’s call my father up and tell him he’s won.’”
Jesus. “And?” I said, already knowing the rest.
“Well, it was after midnight, so I told him we’d have to wait until the next day, and that’s when we called you.”
“It practically sounds like a religious conversion,” I said. “Why do you think he’d back out now?”
“The last few days he’s been very moody.”
“That’s only natural before your wedding,” I said. “And Jason’s a moody guy to begin with, Sara. You know that.”
“No, I mean dark and moody. I couldn’t say boo to him. He sat at the drum pads all the time, working the same rhythms over and over again.”
Someone knocked on the door then, and rattled the knob. “We’ll be right out!” I called. “See, he’s probably here already,” I told Sara. “They probably want to get started, and they can’t do that without the bride.”
I stood up and tried to rub the circulation back into my knees. Sara stood, too, and we walked out together. All the way to the living room, I silently prayed he’d be there, but I knew that he wouldn’t be. The worst thing was the stupid relief I felt when I saw the other members of Blood Pudding. “What took you guys so long?” I asked Iggy, their keyboard man, who had a string of paper clips hanging from one ear. When he didn’t answer me, and they all looked at one another like guilty kids, I said, “Where’s Jason?”
“He didn’t come with us,” Iggy said, and I heard a little cry from Sara as she disappeared behind me, like a ghost.
“What do you mean, he didn’t come with you?” I demanded. “Where the hell is he?”
“We dropped him off in the Bronx,” Iggy said. “He said he had to take care of some business, that he’d catch a train or a bus in a little while.”
“Did he take his drums out of the van? And his drum box?”
“Well, yeah. Sure,” Iggy said.
“Oh, shit,” I said. Paulie was standing next to me by then, and I could see by her face that she’d taken everything in. “What are we going to do?” I said.
“I guess we’ve done all the wrong things already,” she said.
“He’s a grown man,” I told her. “There comes a time when he has to be accountable for his own life, for his own actions.”
“You say that now,” she said.
“Paulie, what do you want from me? I talked to him, remember? And he came around.”
“You thought he did, anyway.”
Iggy was listening to us, his head swiveling from side to side, as if he was watching a tennis match.
“Oh, shit,” I said again.
“I’m going in to Sara,” Paulie said.
“And I’ll try calling Jason.”
“Hah!” she scoffed, walking away.
I told the guitarist to keep playing until I got back, and she immediately began something jazzy and upbeat. As I climbed the stairs toward Ann and Spence’s bedroom, I thought of the band playing as the Titanic went down. Of course Jason didn’t answer the phone, and when I heard Black Flag screaming on his answer tape, I yelled, “You rotten little bastard, why don’t you get your ass down here!” and I threw the phone across the bed.
I conferred with Spence in his study downstairs. After a while we went into the living room, and he announced that the wedding was being postponed because Jason had been unavoidably detained. There was a stunned silence, followed by an excited buzz of conversation. The guitarist started packing up her guitar, and the bewildered caterer stood at the entrance to the living room, holding a dripping ladle. Paulie’s mother was crying. “Maybe something happened to him,” she said. “Maybe he got sick. Or maybe he was mugged. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.”
It was like an untimely, senseless death, a funeral without a body to mourn. People left quietly, shaking their heads sadly and pressing the hands of the bereaved. I drove Paulie and Sara to the Bronx. As we’d expected, Jason wasn’t in the apartment, and his equipment and most of his clothes were gone, too. Paulie pleaded with Sara to come home with her, and finally she gave in. I took them to Manhattan, and then I drove back to the Island by myself. At first, I walked around the house, kicking things and cursing, madder than hell at Jason for jilting Sara, for screwing everything up like that. As the day wore on, my anger wore off, and by nighttime I was left with only a feeling of flatness and terrible fatigue. When I got into bed, I decided to start looking for Jason the next day, but in the meantime I couldn’t keep my eyes open another minute.