Leslie and Elliot
In my experience, the quality of the wedding bears little relation to the quality of the marriage. My first was all tuxedos, white tulips and elegance but didn’t work out in the end. My second was slapdash but gave me the world.
Elliot Alan Pinsley (changed from Pinsky by a relative after Ellis Island) was my second husband, and to some people—especially my parents—he seemed like Mr. Wrong. They had been much more gung ho about my first husband, Emile Camille Geyelin III, whose affluent upbringing matched my own.
When I first said “I do” I was twenty-eight, unsophisticated about love and sex and what it took to be a real partner. Growing up at Brearley, a prestigious all-girl prep school, I had never experienced boys as real people. I had a big sister but no brothers. Men seemed foreign, something glamorous to catch. My mother’s only romantic advice was simple: “If you talk about him all night, he’ll have a wonderful time.” That worked for getting a second date but proved a great way to end up with a narcissist, too. I had a string of dashing short-term boyfriends (in my twenties I even went on a date with Warren Beatty but didn’t kiss him because he was almost twice my age). My favorite beau was a Portuguese fencer who greeted me after a match by lunging to tap his epee against my cheek. I almost swooned. These guys had looks, charm and accomplishments, but they didn’t care a whit about me.
I met my first husband when we were both reporters in the hopping Tampa bureau of The St. Petersburg Times. He was athletic and wiry with fine-boned features, and I was drawn to his simmering, mysterious intensity. Known by the nickname Milo, he was an intrepid investigative newshound, a fierce mix of intellect and self-reliance. His elite background was impressive too. His father, once the head of The Washington Post’s editorial page, won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays against the Vietnam War. Milo’s mother, descended from the family of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, was a fixture in Washington society, constantly entertaining diplomats, journalists and political luminaries. Once Vogue ran a photo spread chronicling how she whipped up a fancy dinner for twelve on twenty-four hours’ notice.
When Milo got a plum job at The Wall Street Journal in Philadelphia, we dated long-distance for months. Then I grew weary of plane trips back and forth.
“We should settle down or break up,” I announced one day. Milo gave in.
And so I did the thoroughly un-modern thing and quit my great job to get married. It was a puzzling move for someone who had been so determined to get the best grades in school, to get into the Ivy League, to get one hot assignment after another. I was always looking ahead, pushing toward the next step—mostly because deep down I was shy and driven to rack up a resume to prove that I was worth loving.
Back then it was a source of pride that in seven years, I’d had five jobs and eleven apartments in two hemispheres. After Yale I’d flown off to Japan to teach English and ended up at The Associated Press in Tokyo, covering earthquakes, jet crashes and trade disputes. Using my overtime pay to zip around from Bali and Bangkok to Burma, I felt like quite the jet-setter. When I was ready to come home, I got a job at Fortune Magazine in New York, but really wanted to work at Time. I asked an editor there what it would take to get hired.
“Go to a newspaper and show me you can write,” he said.
And so I’d landed in Florida. But my glowing resume papered over the truth that all my moving around had left me lonely. College friends were getting married and I felt left behind, like there was a race to check off that milestone too.
My wedding to Milo was gorgeous. It was in my parents’ elegant townhouse off Park Avenue, a home so stylish it was once featured in Elle Décor magazine. With contemporary art on stark white walls, black wood floors, tall ceilings and minimalist modern furniture, it was as airy and pristine as an art gallery. A burglar broke in once and when the cops came they gasped. They thought the thief wiped the whole place out. Actually, my dad told them, it’s always like this. The intruder found nothing to take.
The townhouse had plenty of space for 150 guests in black tie. The second floor living room where we exchanged vows on a Saturday night in January 1990 was lined with extravagant quince flowers and long tapered candles. It was decorated by an A-list florist, a man mentioned with reverence in the pages of New York Magazine. The pheasant pie came from a caterer whose clients included Jacqueline Onassis. There was a jazz band for dancing on the third floor, a classical string duo during dinner on the fourth and a magician for Milo’s young nieces and nephew on the fifth. All under eight years old, they were dolled up in forest green velvet dresses and shorts, custom-made by my mother’s tailor.
I felt oddly detached as the night flew by in a festive blur of champagne and congratulatory air kisses. My mother, the editor of a niche art publication, was a perfectionist about parties, and she set the whole thing up. I didn’t get too involved. Maybe that was a bad sign. The only thing I chose was my dress, a long white Mary McFadden with narrow crinkly pleats like the gown of a Greek goddess.
Milo and I bought a house high on a hill in Montclair, New Jersey, about twelve miles west of New York City. It was simple but had a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline. (The view from the dining table and my bedroom window has kept me sane for almost two decades. The glorious sunrises, the hypnotic clouds and the pink reflections of sunsets on skyscrapers always make me stop and look. Even on my most hectic days, its sheer beauty brings me back to the broader, lasting world outside my antsy head.)
Milo was a good man, the kind I thought I was supposed to marry, but what we shared—camaraderie, privileged upbringings and aspirations in journalism—was not enough to sustain us. As the years went by, what I once respected as independence I began to resent as withdrawal, especially when I was struggling to take care of two young children and working part-time at The Record, a suburban New Jersey daily. I craved support and affection, and the gap between us grew deeper. That was my fault too. Always averse to conflict, I didn’t express what I needed. In time it became impossible to keep going in a relationship that lacked warmth, connection and desire. As Lynn Redgrave once said, “Loneliness within a marriage can drive you mad.”
When Milo and I agreed to separate seven years after our beautiful wedding, it was done with great civility. In contrast to our flawed marriage, we had a model divorce. A few times we even found ourselves laughing together over a funny turn of phrase at the mediator’s office. My one gnawing fear was the pain we were causing our children. But it can’t be good, I told myself over and over, to grow up with unhappy parents. Our daughter, Devon, was four when Milo moved out. Our son, Alex, was one. The months surrounding Milo’s departure passed in a wrenching haze of guilt and anxiety and desperate hope that the kids would be okay. We did our best to separate with kindness. Still, it was heartbreaking to watch Alex, so little, sob with hurt confusion when we first started the every other weekend and Wednesday night handoffs, his quilted diaper bag passing back and forth between the grownups, along with our stiff smiles.
The second time around, my groom had none of the pedigree or detachment of my first husband. Elliot was the son of a printer in Queens. He grew up on malted milk shakes offered as bribes to go to Hebrew school and relished his summer job as a fourteen-year-old delivering fabric for a garment dealer. His boss gave him cab fare to keep the goods clean, but Elliot would take the subway and spend the cash he saved on meatball heroes.
Ironically, these two very different men, coming from such disparate origins, ended up on similar paths. Both fled the Northeast to go to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Both found their calling at the college paper, The Daily Cardinal, just a few years apart. And both ended up covering legal news for bastions of New York financial journalism.
While Milo grew up surrounded by power, Elliot was raised on romance. His father printed the posters for Broadway shows and used to take Elliot to musicals like South Pacific and Carousel. Elliot adored all those songs about soul mates and passion and the healing power of true love. He grew up hoping that some enchanted evening, he would see a stranger across a crowded room.
That crowded room turned out to be the messy, grey-carpeted fourth-floor of The Record in Hackensack. It would be years before we acted on our attraction, but once we did, we felt inseparable.
My second wedding was almost nothing like my first, and that was a good thing. This time I took charge. I wasn’t going to ask my mother to organize a ceremony she didn’t support. She was concerned about all this upheaval for her grandchildren, and that I could understand. I was worried too.
To keep the day as relaxed as possible, I booked a Sunday lunch in June for two dozen people at Arthur’s Landing in Weehawken, a restaurant with a spectacular view of Manhattan across the Hudson. My parents and a few city friends could come by ferry. No designated drivers necessary.
The challenge was finding someone who could marry us there. We didn’t want anything religious. After several leads proved fruitless, I picked up the phone book. Lo and behold, in the yellow pages under “weddings” was a guy who promised to deliver whatever ritual you wanted.
There was no time to wait until Elliot could come with me to check him out. On my next weekday off, I drove an hour to the man’s house somewhere in Central Jersey with my little boy in tow. Alex was about to turn four, all blond hair and freckles and mischief. I brought toy trucks and pretzels and a sippy cup of juice to keep him busy.
When we arrived at the wedding guy’s slightly unkempt ranch house, two couples in shorts and t-shirts were perched on his living room couches, thumbing awkwardly through fat binders with the prices for various services. The wedding guy—I don’t remember his name—wore a golf shirt that showed his beer gut spilling over his belt. Maybe he was a truck driver who got licensed to run ceremonies through the Internet. The whole scene was a turnoff, but I didn’t have much time to look further.
“Please just don’t say anything about God,” I told him. “Nothing spiritual or New Age-y either. We want to keep this simple.”
He charged two hundred dollars.
A few days before the big day, my father called.
“I’d like to pay for your wedding,” he said, direct as always. I told him that wasn’t necessary, he had already given me a big one, but he insisted. I was deeply touched. Like my mother, he had reservations about this marriage but his determination to pay for it told me he was doing his best to get on board. Maybe he recognized that it would be almost impossible for me to find a man he thought was good enough and that I was serious in my choice. Perhaps he also saw that I was following a bit in his footsteps. When he married my mother, their parents were appalled. My mother’s family in the South couldn’t believe she picked a Yankee, no less a Jew. Despite such censure, my parents had been together for more than four decades and were still devoted to each other.
Elliot and I got married on June 24, the day before I turned thirty-nine. It was a scorcher. The air was thick and hazy with humidity. When we woke up at my house—we broke tradition and spent the night together before our nuptials—there was a note slipped under the bedroom door. It was from Devon. She had written it in royal blue crayon on white construction paper in slanted capital letters.
HAVE A HAPPY WEDYN! ELLOT IS A GRAT STEPFOTHR! AND MOM IS A GRAT MOM! AND KATE IS A GRAT STEP SISTR! AND MAX AND AREN ARE GRAT STEP BURUTHRS!
LOVE DEVON
My heart filled with gratitude for such an enthusiastic endorsement. Elliot kissed me and went off to thank the author. I took a deep breath and tried to inhale confidence. It was a moment of calm before the onslaught. The house shook with feet pounding up and down the stairs as Elliot’s kids and mine took hurried turns in the shower. Elliot put on the new brown suit he bought for the occasion and looked quite dapper. I’d found a silvery grey sleeveless top and long teal skirt in matching silk with narrow crinkly pleats. The material, which resembled that of my first wedding dress, was the only reminder of my first time around. Somehow the Greek goddess theme stuck with me. Elliot’s mother, always kind, gave me the pearl necklace that Elliot’s late father had given her long ago.
We made it to the restaurant just before our relatives and friends. The wedding guy came in a dark suit at noon and was clearly in a rush to get going. He had another gig to officiate.
As our guests chatted over flutes of champagne in our private room with floor-to-ceiling views of the Empire State building, I snuck into the ladies room for a moment alone. It was cool from the air conditioner, but that didn’t stop my nervous sweat. Crescent-shaped stains were creeping out under the arms of my silk top. My stomach was in a painful knot. It was hard to smile through a ceremony that my mother disapproved of. I just wanted to get through it so Elliot and I could escape to the beach in Bermuda. I took a deep breath, steeled myself and walked back out into fray.
Elliot’s children, Max, a shy twelve-year-old, and Kate, quiet at sixteen, sat by a window looking subdued. Aaron, nineteen and home from college, was gregarious as always. Devon, in a classic pink dress with a satin bow and white patent leather Mary Janes, was excited about being the flower girl. I gave her a basket of rose petals to toss. When she realized the room had no aisle to parade down, she pouted in disappointment but perked up when my sister’s little girls arrived. I had brought along new boxes of crayons and Lego kits for making bulldozers in case they needed extra entertainment. Alex, wearing a white button down shirt and navy blue shorts with suspenders, ripped open his box before the service even started.
Soft jazz piped in from the main dining room.
“If someone doesn’t turn that down,” the wedding guy barked, “I’m going to get a gun!”
Could he be any tackier?
As soon as Elliot and I brought our children together in the center of the room, the guy started. It was impossible to focus on his words about devotion and trust and tolerance. As Elliot’s fingers entwined with mine, I kept looking at the kids to see if they were okay. Kate touched a knuckle to the corner of one eye. It’s hard not to cry when you see concrete evidence that the family you grew up with is gone for good, or at least dramatically altered. Max pinched the top of his nose with his fingers but would later swear he wasn’t tearing up, really, just tipsy from his first sip of champagne.
“You are, ALL OF YOU, part of this new family that Elliot and Leslie have committed themselves to,” the guy said to the small crowd of guests standing around us. “It is a great and wonderful challenge they have taken on. There will be days it may seem daunting. They will need every one of you.”
I stole a glance at my mother. She was sitting in back, outside the circle, looking the other way, far into the distance. She was trying in vain to choke back tears. So was I. Any marriage is a gamble, and it feels like an even bigger risk when you’re bringing children along who could suffer from any bad bets. I was scared. Maybe this would turn out to be a huge mistake. Maybe I was being selfish. But it had taken me half a lifetime to find a man I loved who loved me so much, just the way I was, and I couldn’t bear to give him up. I didn’t want a life ruled by cowardice.
“Leslie and Elliot, this day not only solemnizes your marriage,” the guy continued, “it also honors and celebrates the family you have formed with Aaron, Kate, Max, Devon and Alex. Young members of the family, please join Leslie and Elliot and all hold hands in a circle.”
Alex, who had wandered off to work on his Lego bulldozer, heard his name called and came over to stand next to me. He looked a bit stunned to be in the spotlight.
“Family is not about a blood relationship. It is a construct of the heart. You are now, and for all time, married and a family.”
Devon’s eyes grew glassy. She sniffled. Aaron squeezed her shoulder and she looked up at him. He gave her a grin and she smiled back.
That was a gift, just what I needed to see. The kids were so sweet, and so sweet to each other. They’re adjusting, I told myself. It’s the grownups who are having trouble. I think we’re all going to be alright. This is going to work. I have to make it work. We have to. We’ll fly off on our honeymoon, wash our worries away in the ocean and come back to start life fresh.
My father came over to shake Elliot’s hand and kiss me on the cheek.
“Just be happy,” my dad whispered in my ear.