Page 75 of How to Say I Do
Then, there were Tessa and Tyler.
The wedding planning was unrelenting. I couriered cake samples to both her loft and Tyler’s apartment, and left them detailed design sketches of how the triple-tier classic cake could be redone into a casual version that they preferred. Couture designers were fighting tooth and nail to be picked to fashion Tessa’s gown, and they pitched intricate sketches and couriered ambitious fabric swatches to my office in Manhattan, and then demanded daily updates on Tessa’s reactions and opinions. I fielded calls from Chanel and Givenchy and Versace, Dior, Zuhair Murad, and Valentino, while, quietly, I researched local Texas gown makers. It was easy to imagine Tessa in handmade lace with wildflowers in her hair and a pair of cowboy boots peeking out from beneath a delicate hem.
I video chatted with Tessa every day, and she was over the moon when she heard I was in Texas with Wyatt. She asked us both a million questions about the ranch and the site and how everything was coming along. Wyatt and I took her on video tours of the new flowerbeds and showed her the shade sails, the picnic tables Wyatt had built, and the barn, the whitewashing now over half finished.
She and I chatted décor. I wanted to keep things simple: clusters of yellow roses, the oak trees surrounding the yard draped with silk bunting, and thousands of tiny lights strung between the house and the barn. I wanted to emphasize the grace of Wyatt’s ranch and the richness of earth and sky and vine. Butter and sunshine accents, ivory silk, and hundreds of candles. When the wedding began, the sky would be—ideally, hopefully—an endless, gorgeous cornflower blue, shifting into lavender and clementine before settling into velvet and nightfall.
Tessa said,Yes, yes yes.
We worked on her guest list. Wyatt was going to need a round-number guesstimate soon about how many people to expect, which would tell him when to stop building picnic tables and how big of a dance floor to lay outside the barn. I needed a number to get the food order going, and to reserve hotels in the area, and to book limos, and to finalize the order on those tastefully elegant portable toilets. I’d thought we’d be looking at six hundred guests at a minimum, but she gave me a list of three hundred and then called me back to whittle that number down, and then whittle it down further. At the last count, we were at just under one hundred and forty, and she sounded like she wanted to make even more cuts.
“I just want the day to be meaningful,” Tessa said on one of our calls. She was at Tyler’s kitchen table, and he was behind her, chopping vegetables and shooting her smiles she couldn’t see. “I want to celebrate with the people he and I love the most. And I don’t want to be ‘Tessa Yarborough, the celebrity,’ on my wedding day. I just want to be me. No acts, no fronts, no fake people. And I don’t want to go down the road of whohasto be there.” She rolled her eyes and knocked back a slug of wine. Wyatt had sent her a case of Baby Boy, and she swore it was all she drank now. “I don’t want to have A-listers showing up because my wedding istheplace to be. How shit is that, my wedding turning into a publicity must-have for other celebrities’ Insta?”
Wyatt stood across from me, his forearms hooked across the back of a dining chair. He played with the brim of his hat and frowned.
“Ugh, enough of that,” she said. “Is Wyatt with you? Wyatt, come talk to me. Tell me about Pickle.” Pickle had been her horse on our ride, and she asked about the big lug on every call. When Wyatt joined me, she badgered us to put Pickle on the line, and, of course, Wyatt gave in. We headed out to the barn, holding hands out of site of the my phone’s camera.
Elitewas getting needy.
We had all-hands calls four times a week, and, on those calls, I spent most of my time trying not to talk about Tessa Yarborough.
From the features editor: “Oh, Noël, I was talking with my friend, the creative director at Dior, you know— And she told me that she hadn’t heard back about Tessa’s gown design choice yet.”
And the arts director: “Laurent”—the globe’s most in-demand photographer—“hasn’t heard from you about Tessa’s wedding. Will you be calling Laurent soon, Noël?”
ToElite, I was nothing but a glorified middleman. Of course, my job was to trade gossip for access, but the haughty assuredness of it all chafed me, rubbed me wrong on Tessa’s behalf.
I was vague and noncommittal about all things Tessa, repeating myself until I was blue in the face that she was still in the process of making her decisions, that nothing was finalized, and that I could not, and would not, speculate out of bounds. Laurent and Dior were just going to have to wait.
Elitedidn’t like that.
I’d never had a client like Tessa. The name of the game was to collect as many internet points as possible, and we succeeded at Harrison Ltd. because we had one foot in front of the social trends. We helped define what was hip and unpretentious and on the rise in pop culture.
Now here was Tessa: a superstar in the stratosphere of Beyoncé and Prince and Taylor Swift, but who wanted a small wedding with just her friends and family, and who said her biggest struggle in life was that so few people could find her beneath all the layers of buzz and clicks and headlines. She was dominating and demanding, but that’s what happened when you stayed on top throughout a twenty-year career. She was also kind, and she volunteered, and she lost her heart to animals easily. She helped Tyler grade homework and sang songs to him when he was tired and grumpy.Tyler? Grumpy? Not perfect? Alert the fucking press.
On Tuesday, Harrison shot me the final walk-through of a feature-article set to blister the pages ofGQ, chronicling the re-emergence of an early 2000s pop star who had crashed and burned on the altar of the early-aughts cynicism and Peeping Tom viciousness. Shredding celebrities—especially female celebrities—had been prime sport back then, and almost no one had been as savaged as London Merrill. She’d done the 2000s celebrity Iron Man—singing, acting, and a short stint on reality TV—while getting ripped apart across the burgeoning social media ecosystem. Now in her forties, married, and raising two young children, London was dropping a searing indictment on the world that had reveled in—and was more than partially responsible for—her collapse.
This is me, she told the interviewer.So many people tried to bury my personhood in scathing headlines and cruel comments before. No one wanted the inconvenience of remembering that I was a real person. No one wastes empathy on a headline.
I read the article four times, and then flipped through the attached photosGQhad commissioned. As her representatives, we had say in the final selection, and Harrison had noted which he thought were best. They were classically feminine celebrity shots, with more than a small nod to the rampant hypersexuality of the aughts. Ignored, seemingly, were the images of London looking fierce and fully inhabiting her own skin, or how she stared down the camera with a lion’s eye and a take-no-shit aura. I swapped the photo choices and forwarded them to the features editor atGQ.
Harrison asked me,Noël, how can we frame this or use this? And I—
I walked away.
Wyatt found me sipping a glass of wine while swaying on the porch swing. I’d left London and Harrison behind, and I was supposed to be looking through a portfolio of Texas-designed wedding gowns for Tessa. Satin and tulle and lace had started to blur. Mock neckline or plunge, mermaid or sheath, sultry or sweet. My thoughts were ricocheting.
He took my wine glass and stole a sip. White paint was spattered on his arm and across the front of his t-shirt. He’d been “supervising Peanut” while she painted the barn. When I’d last checked, Peanut was swishing her tail and heckling Wyatt as he painstakingly scraped the boards above the barn door. Peanut was the real supervisor, clearly.
“Help me with this,” I said, handing him my tablet with all the Texas wedding gowns. “Which do you think Tessa will love?”
We were an unlikely pair to pick out dress options for a superstar. We swiped through ball gowns and trumpet gowns, through sexy numbers and demure charmers with long trains of lace. Wyatt had gone with Savannah to her final fitting, and he told me about getting lost in the racks of fluff and fabric, terrified to touch anything. Savannah was as good as his baby sister, and he said he’d cried when she came out of the fitting room dolled up in the dress she’d picked to marry Liam.
“Never would have guessed we’d be picking out dresses together,” he said.
I tried to smile, but my thoughts were drifting and turning sour.Elite’s expectations and the endless tangles I had to unpick were dragging me deeper into an ugly frustration.
“Penny for your thoughts.” The rumble of his voice was as gentle as a river. I wanted to lean into him and set aside the day and all my bubbling, bothersome questions.
