The Wedding Beat by Devan Sipher

concern was it could have an impact on objectivity, or, equally damaging, give other people the impression it had an impact. But I wasn’t about to tell Téa that.
    “What place had the best food?” she asked me.
    “Blue Hill at Stone Barns,” I punted, referring to the gourmet Mecca of the sustainable food movement, located on an organic farm an hour north of the city.
    “I’m so jealous,” she said. “Talk about a job with fringe benefits. I’ve been wanting to go there for years, but it’s a hike getting to Tarrytown. I’ve heard they serve hand-picked individual tomatoes on a miniature wooden fence.”
    “They do. Ripe Sun Gold tomatoes with just a touch of sea salt.” I had interviewed the publicist.
    “You have to tell me what you ate. Course by course. And don’t say you don’t remember, because I won’t believe you.”
    So much for punting. “I haven’t actually eaten there,” I had to confess. “But the food
looked
amazing.” Mercifully, the waiter intervened.
    “Do you know what you’d like tonight?” he asked enthusiastically.
    The question was what could I afford. Nobu had been animpulsive choice. I was already out thirty dollars for the sake, and I was hoping the evening would go well enough that I’d be ordering more. I scanned the menu for items in the lower stratosphere.
    Téa was also deliberating: “I can never decide between the lobster salad and the black cod.” The lobster salad was thirty-nine dollars and the cod was twenty-six dollars, so I was voting for the cod. “I’m feeling like something light,” she said. There was an advantage to dating a woman who was a size two. “I’ll go for the lobster salad, an order of ceviche, and three pieces of red snapper sushi.” My eyes felt like rotating cash register digits, adding up the items: thirty-nine for the lobster plus seventeen for the ceviche plus twenty-one for the sushi.
    “Light sounds good,” I squeaked, without looking up, so that my face wouldn’t betray the pinch I felt in my wallet. “I’ll have the shiromi usuzukuri.” I had no idea what it was, but it was only eighteen dollars and sounded more exotic than budgetary.
    The waiter looked at me expectantly, asking, “Would you like something in addition to your sashimi?” Had I ordered sashimi?
    “Saving room for dessert,” I blathered. He looked skeptical.
    Téa leaned toward me as he left, and I tried my best to keep my eyes on her face and not her lacy cleavage. “So, did you always dream of writing about weddings?”
    Hardly. “I dreamed of playing backup guitar for the Rolling Stones.”
    “I’m not seeing it,” she said with a smile and a sip of sake.
    “I also dreamed of writing for
Rolling Stone
and decided that was more likely.”
    “So why don’t you write about music?”
    The question of the decade. “I wrote for
Spin
for a few years.” I’d probably still have been writing for
Spin
if an old journalism professor hadn’t introduced me to Renée. “The up-and-comingindie rockers I enjoy interviewing are too offbeat for The Paper, and more mainstream musicians aren’t willing to open up with me. They just recite their press-release talking points, and there’s no fun for me in being a glorified publicist.”
    “Uh-huh.” She rearranged her chopsticks.
    I was losing her. I tried to explain better. “What I thrive on is getting underneath a person’s skin. I call it skin diving.”
    “Skin diving?”
    I was reeling her back in. “When I sit down to write about a couple, I have up to twenty hours of tapes and sometimes a hundred pages of notes. I don’t just read and listen. I submerge myself. Nothing exists but these two people, their thoughts and feelings.”
    “It sounds intense,” she said. “It sounds sexy,” is what she insinuated.
    “I still get butterflies every time,” I said, milking the thrill factor. “It’s like going out on an early-morning dive. It’s dark and cold. And staying on the boat seems a far