What He's Been Missing

4

“Pretty in Pink”

#Youneverreallyknowwhosomeoneisuntil . . . you help that someone plan a wedding. As the old cliché goes: there’s something about weddings and funerals—they bring out the worst and sometimes the best in people. Too often, I’ve learned that weddings bring out the worst . . . in women. Maybe it’s because most women start planning for their weddings the moment that first Barbie doll is slid into their soft little hands and they consider, without even being told, that finding a Ken and getting a Barbie Dream House after the perfect sunset wedding is the most desired chain of events in a woman’s life. And by the time they actually get to that perfect sunset wedding—if they get to that wedding—most women are raving lunatics trying to make a day in their real adult life match up with the expectations of their seven-year-old imagination. I wish the outcome was more pleasant. But it never is. As amazing and beautiful and wonderful as the actual day can be, it’ll only come close to being a representation of that imagined day. And the frazzled female walking down the aisle, crying because it all turned out worse than she expected or better than she believed, is just a fragment of the lovely human being she was before her future husband put a ring on her finger. If he’s super lucky, time and epiphany will return that woman he only proposed to because he thought she’d never change. Luckily, most of these men wait it out, though. They give in and give out, sit on the sidelines, and agree to whatever they need to just to get her down the aisle and things back to normal.

I wasn’t having any delusions that this set of events would be different with Scarlet. It didn’t matter what she’d told me about me having total control and her and Ian following my lead. At the end of the day, I was the wedding planner and it was her wedding. She’d transform like all of the other transformers I’d seen. I just wondered what she’d transform into. Would she be the nitpicking, worry-wart, drama queen, or full-on bridezilla? And how would Ian handle it all?

One month before the wedding, and Krista and I came up with the answer to the first question. Scarlet wasn’t in any of those common categories. Oh no. Ms. Scarlet outlived and outshined all who came before her. In the short time we had to plan her destination wedding in a town she knew nothing about and on a quarter of the budget we were used to working with, and while we were planning another celebrity wedding in just weeks, in private e-mails and on Post-It notes around the office Scarlet became known as “Two Face.” The name—which Krista came up with in homage to the Batman comic book character Harvey Dent after a vial of acid thrown on the left side of his face left him horribly disfigured and forced his dormant split personality to the surface—perfectly described Scarlet’s hourly changes of heart. One hour, she’d be in a meeting with me, all granola and Mama Africa, trying to save the world and refusing to have wedding bouquets ordered from shops that wouldn’t guarantee that workers, from picking to delivery, were paid above minimum wage. The next hour, she’d send a text to Krista all hard and harsh in all caps and with no periods and smiley faces at the end, demanding only the best orchids and saying her father would pay top dollar. Krista would forward the text to me with an intro: Two Face strikes again.

After the day King died in Social Circle and Ian held me in his arms tight like he was my father and knew just how to love me at that moment, it was hard for me to watch and witness and work around all of this. I knew in that car on the way back from the vet that I was in love with Ian. I’d known for a long time that I was in love with Ian. I just couldn’t admit it to myself. I was happy, I was comfortable with the way things were—the way they’d been. I didn’t want to break what hadn’t been broken. Thinking about it that way, I wondered if maybe the same way Ian had been enjoying two pies, I was also getting water from two wells. I was single and so sad about it. But I was never really alone when Ian was around. Bad date: he’d always be there. Need a comforter: I didn’t even have to call. He was my boy-best-friend. And having him in that category maybe made him better than any other man in my life. Like Journey said about me, he wasn’t going anywhere. But with Scarlet’s regime picking up the pace, I wondered how long that would be true. I also started to wonder how long I could keep my secret from Ian. If I needed to.

Scarlet’s mother was out of town at a conference the morning of Scarlet’s final dress fitting. Scarlet called me before sunrise crying—literally crying—and begging me to go with her. She didn’t want to take any of her friends, saying she wanted them to see her dress for the first time at the wedding. Ian was out of the question and Scarlet’s father was busy at his practice. Half asleep, I was so eager to get her sobs off my phone that I agreed to meet her at the Buckhead Dress Studio first thing in the morning. When I said yes, she cheered like a crying child who’d just been given a candy bar. I could literally hear the tears dry up through the phone.

“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” she cried. “You’re the best. I know why Ian loves you so much.”

I hung up the phone and told Krista she’d have to have the intern take over the office for the day. There was no way I was sitting through that fitting alone with Two Face.

Scarlet was waiting outside the shop in Ian’s car. My heart skipped a beat when Krista and I pulled up.

“I can’t believe we’re still going through with this wedding,” Krista said, parking in a spot beside Ian’s car. All of my epiphanies about Ian hadn’t

been self generated. Over after-work margaritas a few days after the day in Social Circle, I’d told Krista about sliding my hand over Ian’s in the car. How he didn’t move. How he’d said, “Rachel, I’m where I want to be.”

“What am I supposed to say?” I asked. “Hey Scarlet, I can’t plan your wedding anymore. I fell in love with your fiancé when my dog died?”

“You could start there.”

“Ian would be so confused. He’d probably move to Afghanistan and join a madrasah.”

“Or admit that he loves you and take the ring from Two Face,” Krista said, pointing at Scarlet waving at us excitedly from inside the other car.

“Oh God!” I cried. “What the fuck am I doing?”

“I don’t know,” Krista said. “Look, why don’t you let me take over on this one? I can lead. You’re in the wedding. It doesn’t make sense for you to be the lead planner. What are you going to do on the day of the wedding?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Scarlet had e-mailed me pictures of herself in her wedding dress when she picked it out. I commonly go to fittings with my local clients. I like seeing the dresses and imagining what they’d look like floating down an aisle draped in purple Peruvian lilies or terra-cotta royal roses. It inspires me as I plan. And it also helps me to bond with the bride, who most times never imagines I’d even ask to come.

I didn’t request an invite to Scarlet’s picking, but I did ask for shots. The Hotel St. La Rho, where Ian and Scarlet’s wedding would be, had two reception halls: one with windows all along the back, another with a view of the sky from a window on top of the dance floor. I thought that seeing Scarlet’s dress and picturing how the lights from the pier one block away from the hotel might look crawling over her shoulders or imagining the moon kissing her forehead could help me decide which setting to ink. The picture had been of a contemporary Monique Lhuillier that looked more like it was for the two-month marriage of a Hollywood starlet than for a future graduate student and UN Ambassador. I went with the lights on her back.

The staff at the Buckhead Dress Studio knew me, so they had a full spread of drinks and food awaiting Scarlet. Her dress wasn’t cheap, but I knew that red-carpet treatment wasn’t without reason. They were spoiling her in front of me in hopes that I’d send other clients their way.

Scarlet downed two glasses of Perrier-Jouët before following the studio attendant into the fitting room.

“Two Face,” Krista whispered to me on the couch where we were sitting and not touching any of the food or drinks—after seeing the burnt orange mermaid dress Scarlet had me walking down the aisle in, I’d committed to losing seventy-five pounds by the wedding. “I hate to see what she’s like when she’s drunk.”

“You guys ready?” Scarlet called from inside the dressing room.

“Jesus, please be a fence,” Krista said and I elbowed her.

“Yes! Come on out,” I answered Scarlet.

The attendant, a short Italian woman who hardly spoke English and had pins darting up the front of her right sleeve, walked out of the little room first and held out her hands dramatically toward the door. “The bride,” she announced.

Scarlet walked out, all smiles, and I went from being the least anxious person in the room to the most confused.

The bride, who was supposed to be dressed in white, was dressed in pink.