This Will Only Hurt a Little(62)
“I wish there was a way we could just throw a huge party and get married without any of the other bullshit,” Marc said to me one day as we were lying in his bed. I sat up, excited.
“OH MY GOD! Marc! When I was little, my aunt’s best friend threw this really beautiful croquet party in the summer in Lake Geneva and in the middle of the party, she disappeared and when she came back, she was wearing this wedding dress and she and her longtime boyfriend got married right then, in front of everyone! NO ONE EVEN KNEW THEY WERE ENGAGED. It was just a big surprise. And it was so fun!”
He looked at me. “That’s what we should do. Let’s do that. We won’t tell anyone. Maybe our parents. And we’ll just have a party and get married. A surprise wedding.”
I loved the idea, so of course I told Emily and Michelle immediately, and Marc told Abby, who was pregnant with a baby girl. I met the two of them for lunch one afternoon when I was off of work. Abby had a lot of questions: “So, what about a ring? What about a dress? Where?”
I hadn’t thought about any of it really. Except I probably didn’t want a diamond. Not for me, I thought! After lunch, the three of us wandered down Larchmont, the street we were eating on, and stopped in at an antique jewelry store to browse and maybe get an idea of the kinds of rings I would like, even though we agreed I wouldn’t wear it until the wedding day. We wanted it to be a full surprise, and for our friends to not even know we were engaged. The man working there pulled out a beautiful old diamond ring, a mine-cut diamond from 1910 that they’d just gotten in. Marc took the ring to look at it.
“Oh. It won’t fit me,” I said. “My hands are like weird giant hands. Antique rings never fit.”
No sooner had I gotten the words out than Marc had slipped it perfectly on my finger. I looked at the beautiful ring. Wait. WHO didn’t want a diamond? CERTAINLY NOT ME. Marc laughed and shrugged at the man. “Well, I guess I have to buy it now.”
My dress was similarly easy. Abby explained to me that wedding dresses take six months to order and you have to make an appointment to go try them on. But when I called Barneys the girl on the other end said, “Oh. Well, just come in right now. We’re not going to be carrying Vera Wang anymore and all the dresses are samples and seventy-five percent off.”
Abby went with me to Barneys since Emily couldn’t leave work in the middle of the day and I didn’t want to go alone. She wasn’t exactly who I would have picked for such a momentous occasion, but we’d been getting along much better, and whether I liked it or not, she was going to be in my life. I figured I might as well get used to it. We walked into the bridal salon, which only had a few women browsing, since they hadn’t advertised the sale. I pulled a giant Vera Wang couture dress off the rack that looked exactly like the one picture I had torn from a magazine. The saleswoman looked at me approvingly. “You’re only the second person to try this dress on.”
I put it on and she zipped it up. It fit me perfectly. It needed no alterations.
“I think it’s your dress!” Abby said with a smile.
We decided we could fool our friends by having Marc Evite them to a surprise birthday party that he was throwing for me and then when I arrived, I would be in my wedding gown. I googled “COOL DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES LOFTS PARTY VENUE” and when I saw the Marvimon House, I was certain it was it. It looked perfect. It was a place that was mostly used for parties and art openings and secret restaurants, so it didn’t feel “wedding-ish” at all. I called and spoke to Sherri, who owned the place and strangely, they had one weekend open that summer, June 16. It wasn’t my birthday weekend, but it was believable that he would be throwing me a surprise party the weekend before. I booked it. On Abby’s suggestion, we hired Jo Gartin—who was a wedding planner to the stars but also happened to be a friend of ours—to help us.
Keeping a secret is almost impossible for me, but I liked that we were going to surprise all of our friends with this, so I was committed. But still, I wanted to talk about it and there was only so much talking Emily and Michelle wanted to do. Which is why I would sometimes tell random people that I was getting married in a surprise wedding in the summer. Which is how I found myself telling one of the writers on ER, sitting on set one day. I told her all about our plan and how excited I was and how our friends had no idea. A month later, I got a script in which my character was supposed to THROW A SURPRISE WEDDING FOR LUCA AND ABBY. I was so fucking pissed. Look, this is something writers do all the time, especially TV writers. They have so many stories to fill that when they’re in the writers’ room, they throw out pitches from everywhere, including the actors’ own personal lives (see also: Audrey’s drinking problem, Laurie from Cougar Town’s cake-decorating business). It’s something I’ve gotten used to over the years, but this was outrageous. First off, it was my fucking wedding. Second, the episode would air before my own surprise wedding, so it was weirdly going to look like I stole the idea from the TV show I was currently recurring on! BULLSHIT! It was my idea! I tried saying something to the writer who I had confided in and she shrugged it off. “No. It so didn’t come from you! It’s a coincidence.”
It so did come from me, and it was not a coincidence, but I had no power to get them to change it.
Abby gave birth to a little girl named Phoebe in February, and Marc and I started going over there at night, bringing Abby and Jason food. I would help Abby, who seemed overwhelmed by the baby and was having a terrible time breastfeeding. I loved Phoebe instantly. She would let me hold her and sing to her and rock her. She was colicky and I could get her to burp and calm down and she would fall asleep in my arms while we were all sitting in the living room with takeout. We started calling her PheBones and then Bonesy for short. Even Marc, who had a hard time with babies and had even expressed that he was “on the fence” about having kids of his own, was no match for baby Phoebe. She adored Marc and would coo and smile and blow bubbles when he took her. It was because of Phoebe that I knew Marc would become an amazing father and was no longer on the fence. It was because of Phoebe that every last bit of weirdness I had lingering toward Abby melted away. And it was because of Phoebe that I realized sometimes, family presents itself in ways you aren’t expecting.