Once, not too long ago, I ran into an old friend at a party. She was with her new boyfriend, and when I asked the normal stuff — you know: how long they’d been going out, how they’d meet, that sort of thing — she kind of waved her hand in the air and said, to forestall any more discussion, “He’s just somebody for now.”
“He seems like a nice guy,” I said, trying to be a nice guy also. Part of being a nice guy, as I’m sure you know, is thinking that everyone else is a nice guy too.
She gave me a dismissive frown and shrugged. “I just don’t like going to parties and stuff alone. And he’s … ” Her voice trailed off as she searched for the right words. “He is not going to last.”
As the evening went on, I could see her point. The guy wasn’t awful, but he had a braying laugh and was one of those guys who touch you when they talk, a tap on the arm here or there to emphasize a point, which becomes more and more irritating as the conversation goes on.
Also: He was a wine guy, so there was lots of tedious talk about “terroir” and “orange wine” and the “full expression of this grape” and a lot of other things I instantly erased from my memory. One of my most useful talents is the ability to blot things away, even as they’re unfolding.
His worst trait, though, was the way he took all of the polite tics and conventions of cocktail party talk literally — as if they were assertions of fact during a legal proceeding.
“Oh, that must have been interesting,” I said, when he mentioned his recent trip to some vineyard somewhere.
“No, Rob, it wasn’t ‘interesting.’ It was tragic because orange wine production in Sonoma County is currently … ”
Blot, blot, blot.
“How great to find such an unusual winemaker,” I said. “No, Rob,” he replied, “He really isn’t unusual. What makes him so good is how not unusual he is. For instance … ”
Blot, blot, blot.
At the end of the evening, I pulled my friend aside. “Dump this loser,” I said. “He is definitely not the one.”
You know how this ends, right? They’re getting married next spring, according to the invitation I just got.
And it’s going to be a doozy of a wedding. They’ve block-booked a swank hotel in the Bahamas, there’s a “barefoot welcome dinner” on the beach, and the dress code is something called “resort chic.” We’ve been invited to celebrate the “special love” and the “most beautiful moment of our lives.” I’m fine with all of that, except that the last I heard, she hated the guy. He was a jerk — “just someone for now.”
Which will not be my wedding toast, I promise.
On the other hand, there is always some awkwardness at a wedding. There are the complicated Freudian undertones to the father “giving” the bride away. There’s the creepy symbolism of the veil. There’s the best man’s swagger as he sizes up the bridesmaids. There are impromptu jokey toasts at the dinner given by people with tongues loosened by champagne and the “signature cocktail,” which in my friend’s case will be “a fun re-imagining of our Dark & Stormy first date!!!”
I don’t have to worry about that, apparently. The bride-to-be called me a few days after I got the invitation when I sent a short, one-character text: “?”
My phone rang a moment later. She jumped right in. “I know. I know,” she said. “I didn’t like him, and I was always just about to dump him, but then somehow, he knew it. Somehow, he knew that he needed to stop it with the weird laugh and the interrupting … “
“And the annoying tapping thing?”
“The what?”
“He taps when he talks. He taps a person.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t care,” she said. “And you know why? Because he genuinely loves me, and he lets me know it every day. And after almost a year, I can honestly say that I love him too.”
“Is he still one of those awful wine bores?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “and I think it’s charming.”
What could I say? I wished her well, told her congratulations, and promised that whatever her feelings had been, they were safely locked away and would never be brought up again, certainly not in my wedding toast.
“Go ahead!” She said. “It’ll be funny. And he knows I hated him. I told him all about it. We don’t have secrets from each other.”
In other words, she didn’t need to blot anything from her memory. She wasn’t erasing anything from the love story. That’s the surest sign that this is a marriage that will last.
Come to think of it, maybe this will be my wedding toast.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
