“Guess what?” Danny asked at the start of an unexpected telephone call last week. “It’s my 20th wedding anniversary!”
We both laughed heartily. The wedding of two decades ago commenced a marriage that lasted less than a year, and which Danny wrote off as the single biggest mistake of his life.
“She wasn’t very nice,” he has often said. This time he added: “But then neither am I, maybe.”
He was 43 years old to her 24, an age gap which should not have constituted a warning sign in and of itself but which fed some chatter in the gossip mill. It was the constituency’s steadfast sticking to their ways that seems to have made the union impossible right from the git-go.
I would not have remembered the anniversary date but his call gave me an opportunity to share a story I’d never told him before, and which I felt comfortable telling as the passage of time had softened whatever emotional blow it might have inflicted.
Some years after the wedding I was at an event where, it turned out, I was wearing the same jacket as at that the wedding. I discovered this when reaching into the coat pocket and finding a pin with a photo of Danny and Sally, his temporary wife. This pin, with a dapper photo of the bride and groom, was worn by everyone at the wedding.
Danny busted out laughing when I told him this. “That jacket is cursed, get rid of it!” I described how, when I discovered the pin in my pocket, I handled it like a hot potato, involuntarily emitting an earnest “Gaaaaah!” sound. A long minute of laughter followed.
He cheerily added something I never knew. For whatever regrets he had at ever being married in the first place he saved at least one of each party favor from the wedding, including (he assumed) the pin that I surprisingly found in my coat pocket. I offered him mine if he found that his was missing, which drew another belly laugh.
I found it telling that he retained enough respect for the importance of the failed marriage to keep those wedding tchotchkes. I also find it poignant that he even remembered the anniversary date. Keeping things in perspective he readily admitted that the wedding itself was a beautifully done event.
Well before the wedding I experienced another moment of unexpected connectedness to the affair. Danny had been with Emily (a woman around his age) for a few years when he suddenly and abruptly ended it, dumping her for the much younger Sally in spectacular manner and feeding the ever hungry gossip markets of their mutual acquaintances.
I only knew Emily as an acquaintance. She was perfectly nice, and I never got much detail of what went wrong between her and Danny.
Within a week or so of him dumping Emily I got a call from Danny, but he did not leave a callback number. So I called him at the last number I had written down for him. A woman answered. I asked “Is Danny there?” Her voice curled up into a ball of crud as she whimpered “Nooooo…” Not realizing who I was talking to I asked “Oh so this must be Sally…” “Nooooo… this is Emily.” I had called Danny at his ex-girlfriend’s number, which was the last place from which he had called me. Emily sounded none too happy about it but she stayed mentally adroit enough to not blame me for the mistake. She kept me on the phone. We talked. And talked. For well over an hour we carried on far-reaching conversation about all things, as if we’d been friends for years and just needed to catch up.
At the end of the call she invited me over to her place, an offer I accepted, fully aware of the potential for weirdness.
I don’t think she had room in her heart for true vengeance but if Emily and I became an item I think she would have gleefully wielded the serendipity of the encounter as a bitter retort for being dumped so dramatically.
She called me the next day to say it was great hanging out, “let’s make it a regular thing”, but I never called back and never heard from her again.
I told Danny this story just a few months after his wedding had ended. His reaction was similar to last week’s anxious belly laugh, but at the time I think it was a little too close to the aftermath of the quick divorce for anything even tangentially related to be genuinely amusing.
Maybe I will remind him of it on his 25th silver wedding anniversary.
