Mergers and Acquisitions: Or, Everything I Know About Love I Learned on the Wedding Pages

Chapter 1Wishing and HopingThe manila folder was slapped down on my desk with a flick of a large, hairy wrist, snapping me out of my daydream. My editor, Ira, stared down at me from above his mustache, standing with crossed arms as I scanned what he’d thrown down. I felt like Deep Throat was waiting for me in a parking deck somewhere.“Think you can handle him?” he said, raising his eyebrows and looking down at the folder. “He’s a pretty well-­known asshole. Not just your average politician jerk.”I was twenty-­four, writing for the New York Times, and convinced of my invincibility. “Of course I can,” I said, and snorted. “He’s just a person.”“Yeah, but he doesn’t believe that,” Ira said. “You let me know if you need backup.”That was Monday. Then came Wednesday.I was about two minutes into the call with the Pretty- ­Well-­Known Asshole when he interrupted me, confirming his reputation. “How dare you ask me that?” he snapped. “My relationship with my future wife is none of your business.”“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, as gently as I could, “but we ask these questions of everyone, even well-­known people like yourself who need no introduction. It’s part of the Times’s fact-­checking process.” I could have added, but I didn’t, that he was making his relationship part of my business. This was a man, who, after all, had called a press conference to trumpet his love for his last girlfriend, whom he also said he’d planned to marry, but she ended it before he had the chance.Suzanne, his publicist, sighed. She was listening in on the conference line, of course—­likely to protect me as much as the apoplectic man on the phone. The retired senior senator from the great state of New York was marrying a woman three decades his junior, a news item that had already been detailed breathlessly by the city’s gossip columnists. His bride-­to-­be was a political operative and had spent a few years at City Hall, so she knew from assholes. I think that must have been her type. She and the senator had met at a Republican fund-­raiser and soon afterward started showing up arm in arm at establishment restaurants, at more fund-­raisers, and on Donald Trump’s private plane. He even attended her intramural soccer matches out on Long Island and started calling himself a soccer dad, although there’s no way he remembered his turn to bring snacks for the team. This went on for a couple of years and all seemed blissful—­or if not blissful, then adequate enough to establish them as the city’s newest political power couple. He finally asked her to marry him at her thirty-­seventh birthday party, slapping a four-­carat diamond ring on top of her cake, thereby making a celebration of her all about him. The affair was set for the first weekend in May. They booked a Catholic church on Long Island, registered at Tiffany’s, and, presumably, wrote up one hell of a prenup. After the nuptials, Ms. Smooth Operative was to be known as Mrs. Senator.“I don’t have to answer these fucking questions from you or anyone fucking else,” the senator railed down the line. “You should already know these things about me. Fuck you.”I heard the click of someone exiting the conference call.His flack sighed again. “Cate,” she said wearily, “could we answer your questions via email?”I felt badly for this poor woman, who probably made three times what I did, but there was no way it could have been worth it. Spending seven days a week working the phones, protecting a craven, attention-­hungry man from his nastiest impulses, drafting nonapology after nonapology and fielding calls from reporters when he succumbed to them—­and that was for political matters. But this, only his second time down the aisle, seemed to be as big of a brouhaha as any infrastructure bill he’d ever brought to the Senate floor.“That’s totally fine, Suzanne,” I said. “Sorry about that.”“Don’t apologize,” she said. “This was her idea. It’s such a mess.”We exchanged niceties and hung up, and I noted silently that she’d done the correct thing: protected her client and thrown someone else—­even though that someone was her client’s betrothed—­under the bus. I turned to Ira, who’d been listening in across the desks. “How’d that go?” he said, grinning.“Well, I think you heard the sum total,” I said, and we both started to laugh. Ira shook his head. “I told you, he’s a jerk. I can deal with it if you want.”“No, no. I want to do this. It’s a test, right?”Ira laughed again. “Well, you let me know.”I swiveled my rickety rolling chair back to my desk and looked again at the submission Ira had given me, which he’d marked through with his signature red ink, noting the alleged facts that needed checking. It wasn’t like I’d never been hung up on before by powerful people. I’d worked in Washington during the Bush years, after all, when getting yelled at and hung up on was as routine as ordering Thai for dinner. But I’d never had a receiver slammed down over a matter as seemingly trivial as this: a wedding announcement, a public trumpeting of a couple’s love and commitment. It wasn’t a policy proposal. It was society news.I stared at the dirty taupe wall for a minute. I went to journalism school for this?And then I laughed. You bet I went to journalism school for this.What’s in a wedding announcement? After all, weddings will (and do) happen without one. In fact, most American nuptials, successful or not, go unnoticed by news organizations and unannounced, except on social media and the occasional church bulletin. But the weddings we wrote about for the Times—­they were different. They were, generally speaking, wildly expensive—­far beyond the average American expenditure of $44,000. But they were more than the sum of their gilded parts. They were mergers of families and bank accounts, of aspirations and hubris. And these announcements were battle plans, and business plans, of class and warfare. They were incredibly difficult to obtain, which meant that they were worth far more than the soy ink they were made of. They were expected by a certain set. And they were, above all, exclusive. If your wedding announcement was in the paper of record, then your marriage counted—­and, by proxy, so did you.But I didn’t know any of that when I pushed my way through the revolving doors at 229 West 43rd Street. Now, mind you, I thought I knew a lot, even though I didn’t know much of anything. What I knew for certain was this: I was in the city I’d longed for since childhood, sleeping with an insanely hot guy who had both tormented and thrilled me for years, wearing the smallest jeans size I’d owned since middle school, and coming to work five days a week at the New York Times. I was relatively flush with cash and eating something interesting at least once a day. I’d made it out of double-­A ball and was playing in The Show.Here’s how it happened. Most people, I think we all can say with confidence, don’t land their dream job right out of college. The thing is, I didn’t really have a dream job. I entered the job market in 2002, when journalism was about to take a major plunge into the abyss of shrinking revenues, layoffs, and outright closures. A dream journalism job in that economy was steady employment on a decent beat with the possibility of health insurance. My plan to avoid this personal realization of adulthood was to get the hell out of the country and as far away as I could, or at least until I ran out of funds. I had enough money in my bank account left over from scholarships—­about two thousand dollars, more or less, plus graduation gifts—­to spend the summer in Africa with an old roommate, Meghan, who’d gone into the Peace Corps in Zambia. My boyfriend’s dad, a Muslim man whom I adored for his adventurous spirit and truly bonkers stories about his childhood in Turkey, got me a deal on a ticket to Dar es Salaam from one of his travel agent friends. “On KLM,” he said, handing me the ticket in their kitchen one spring evening. “They’re good. Get your shots.”At that point, I lived and breathed for his son, Adnan, and everyone knew it. We had started dating on Valentine’s Day my junior year of college and had met because we both worked at the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina, to which I basically devoted my entire college career. I’d wandered in there during freshman orientation and had found a home in the newsroom, like so many self-­described misfits tend to do. Don’t let any journalist fool you with their Brooks Brothers shirts, their devotion to the higher cause of telling the truth no matter the cost, and their world-­weary outlook. Underneath it all, they—­we—­are all weird. Weird precisely because of the personal cost and little glory of the profession, maybe; weird because we live for other people’s stories. Weird because we don’t blink an eye at working when the rest of the world stops to react; weird because we drive into storms instead of away from them. For whatever reason, as soon as I wrote a story for the DTH and spent the hours before deadline being edited, I knew this was exactly where I wanted to be and exactly what I wanted to do. My first story was about revolutionary new HIV drugs—­the cocktail, they’d started to call it—­being developed at the medical school, and it appeared under the byline Catherine Doty. I picked up ten copies the next day and decided that byline was pretentious. Cate I am, and Cate it was.Adnan was a year ahead of me, and the moment I saw him working at a turquoise iMac on an information graphic, I fell hard. Haaarrrrrd. Hard enough to fast with him during Ramadan (I also lost seven pounds) and avoid pork. And hard enough to drive through a foot of snow just to spend the night at his house, leaving my Jetta on the side of the highway when I finally drifted out of the lanes. I’m telling you, hard.He was tall and slender and moved with the grace of someone to which nothing bad ever could stick, and his smile could power the football stadium. I daydreamed about his gentle, deep voice on my answering machine, wondering if I wanted to meet for coffee. We officially hooked up on Valentine’s Day, after a few achingly sweet weeks of being inseparable, and we spent the rest of the semester under our own personal spell of romance, longing, and the imperfect joys of love in the spring, right as the tide of impending adulthood began to rise.