Andy murmured good night and tried, for the thousandth time that day, to forget about the note. Somehow, sleep came within moments.
The strips of sunlight beamed through the slats in the sliding wooden balcony doors, indicating it was now morning. The hotel phone had briefly stopped ringing but it started again. Beside her Max let out a small groan and rolled over. It had to be Nina calling to announce that it was warm enough for the brunch to be held outside; it was the last remaining decision to make about the weekend. She darted from the bed, wearing only her underwear from the night before, and sprinted into the living room, eager to answer the phone before it could wake Max. She simply couldn’t fathom facing him yet.
‘Nina?’ she said breathlessly into the phone.
‘Andy? Sorry about that, sounds like I interrupted something … I’ll call back, go have fun now.’ Emily’s smile was apparent through the phone.
‘Emily? What time is it?’ Andy asked, scanning the room for a clock.
‘Sorry, love. It’s seven thirty. I just wanted to be the first one to congratulate you. The Times write-up is fantastic! You’re on the first page of Weddings and the picture is gorge! Was that one from your engagement session? I love that dress you’re wearing. Why haven’t I seen it before?’
The Times write-up. She’d almost forgotten. They had presented all their information so many months earlier, and even once the fact-checker had called to substantiate everything, she’d convinced herself there was no guarantee of inclusion. Ridiculous, of course. With Max’s family background the only question was whether they’d be the featured couple or a regular announcement, but she’d somehow pushed it to the edge of her mind. She had submitted the information at Barbara’s appeal, although she could see now that it was a mandate, not a request: Harrison family weddings were announced in the Times, period. Andy had told herself it would be something fun to show their children one day.
‘They hung a paper outside your door. Get it and call me back,’ Emily said and hung up.
Andy shrugged on the hotel robe, turned on the room’s coffee maker, and grabbed the purple velvet bag hanging off the room’s door, then dumped the huge Sunday Times on the desk. The front page of the Sunday Styles section featured a profile on a pair of young nightclub owners and, below that, a write-up on the emergence of root vegetables in trendy restaurant dishes. Then, just as Emily promised, their little section of glory: the very first wedding listed.
Andrea Jane Sachs and Maxwell William Harrison were married Saturday by the Honorable Vivienne Whitney, a first-circuit court of appeals judge, at the Astor Courts Estate in Rhinebeck, New York.
Ms Sachs, 33, will continue to use her name professionally. She is cofounder and editor in chief of the wedding magazine The Plunge. She graduated with distinction from Brown.
She is a daughter of Roberta Sachs and Dr Richard Sachs, both of Avon, Connecticut. The bride’s mother is a real estate broker in Hartford County. Her father is a psychiatrist with a private practice in Avon.
Mr Harrison, 37, is president and CEO at Harrison Media Holdings, his family-owned media company. He graduated from Duke and received an MBA from Harvard.
He is the son of Barbara and the late Robert Harrison of New York. The bridegroom’s mother is a trustee of the Whitney Museum and sits on the board of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity. Until his passing his father was president and CEO of Harrison Media Holdings. His autobiography, titled Print Man, was a national and international bestseller.
Andy took a sip of coffee and pictured the signed copy of Print Man Max had been keeping in his bedside table since the day they’d met. He’d shown it to her after they’d been dating six, maybe eight months, and although he’d never said as much, she knew it was his most prized possession. On the inside cover Mr Harrison had merely written ‘Dear Max, see attached. Love, Dad,’ and paper-clipped to the jacket itself was a letter, written on a plain yellow legal pad, four pages in total and folded in the classic over-under style. The letter was actually a chapter of the book Max’s dad had written but never included for fear it was too personal, that it might embarrass Max one day or reveal too much of their lives. In it he began with the night Max was born (during a heat wave in the summer of ’75) and detailed how, over the next thirty years, Max had grown into the finest young man he could hope to know. Although Max did not cry when he showed it to her, Andy noticed his jaw clenching and his voice getting husky. And now the family fortune was all but devastated due to a number of terrible business decisions Mr Harrison had made in the final years of his life. And Max felt personally responsible for restoring his father’s good name and making sure his mother and sister were always cared for. It was one of the things she loved most about him, this dedication to his family. And she firmly believed Max’s father’s death had been a turning point for Max. They’d met so soon afterward, and she always felt lucky she’d been the next girl he dated. ‘The last girl I’ll date,’ he liked to say.
She picked up the paper again and continued to read.
The couple met in 2009 through a pair of mutual friends who introduced them without warning. ‘I showed up for what I thought was a business dinner party,’ Mr Harrison said. ‘By the time we got to dessert, all I could think of was when I’d see her again.’
‘I remember Max and I sneaking away from the rest of the group to chat alone. Or actually, maybe I got up and followed him. Stalked him, I guess you could say,’ Ms Sachs said with a laugh.
They began to date immediately in addition to developing a professional relationship: Mr Harrison is the largest financier of Ms Sachs’s magazine. When they became engaged and moved in together in 2012, each pledged to support the other’s career endeavors.
They will divide their time between Manhattan and the groom’s family estate in Washington, Connecticut.
Divide their time? she thought to herself. Not exactly. When the family’s dire financial situation came to light after Max’s father passed away, Max had made a series of tough decisions on behalf of his mother, who was too distraught to function and, in her own words, didn’t ‘have a head for business like the men do.’ Andy hadn’t been privy to most of those conversations since it was in the very early days of their dating, but she remembered his anguish when the Hamptons house sold a mere sixty days after the perfect summer day they’d spent there, and she recalled some sleepless nights when Max realized he had to sell his childhood home, a sprawling Madison Avenue town house. Barbara had resided in a perfectly lovely two-bedroom apartment in an ancient, respectable co-op on Eighty-Fourth and West End for the last two years, still surrounded by a number of beautiful carpets and paintings and the finest linens, but she’d never recovered from losing her two grand homes, and she still harped on about what she referred to as her ‘banishment’ to the West Side. The oceanfront penthouse in Florida had been sold to the DuPont family, friends of the Harrisons who played along with the charade that Barbara no longer ‘had the time or energy’ for Palm Beach; a twenty-three-year-old Internet millionaire scooped up the Jackson Hole ski chalet for pennies on the dollar. The only property that remained was the country house in Connecticut. It was on fourteen acres of splendid rolling farmland, complete with a four-horse stable and a pond big enough for rowboats, but the house itself hadn’t been renovated since the seventies and the animals were long gone due to their expensive upkeep. The family would have to invest too much money to update the property, so instead they rented it out as often as they could, weekly or monthly or sometimes even by the weekend, always through a trusted, discreet broker so no one would know they were renting from the fabled family.
Andy finished her coffee and glanced again at the announcement. How many years had she been reading those pages, devouring the photos of the happy brides and handsome grooms, evaluating their schools and jobs, their future prospects and their backgrounds? How many times had she wondered if she would be included among them one day, what information they would list about her, whether or not they would include a picture? A dozen times? More? And now, how strange to think of other young women, curled on couches in their studio apartments, sporting messy ponytails and torn sweats, reading about Andy’s marriage, thinking to themselves, A perfect couple! They both went to good schools and have good jobs and they’re smiling in that picture like they’re madly in love. Why can’t I meet a guy like that?
There was something else. The note, yes. She couldn’t stop thinking about the note. But there was another memory – of writing up her own New York Times announcement with Alex as the groom – that made her feel squeamish now. She must have devised a dozen different versions when they were dating. Andrea Sachs and Alexander Fineman, both graduates of blah, blah, blah. She’d practiced so many times that it was almost strange to see her name beside Max’s.
