“Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” the pastor asked, his voice thick with Louisiana country. Chris suddenly turned his back on me. I remember it in slow motion, him stepping down from the altar and moving toward his groomsmen.
I was being left at the altar, I thought. This was really happening. I had missed my chance to run, and now he was Julia freaking Roberts, the Runaway Groom riding off on a horse. He knows, I thought. He knows I cheated on him and he won’t marry trash.
Chris leaned in with his groomsmen, taking a huddle. They stamped their feet in unison, all turning back to me with a football chant of “We do!”
It was a joke. Chris had planned this. He wasn’t leaving me. He didn’t know I was trash. I was saved from shame and washed with relief. I could endure a toxic marriage, but the humiliation of being left, of being publicly rejected—that would have been too much.
The pastor began the vows. “Do you, Gabriel, take Christopher to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
Wait, I thought. “Gabriel”? This guy just mispronounced my name at my own wedding? But I was raised to never correct people. Certainly not a pastor. All I needed to do was say my name the right way when I repeated the vows. But because I was a good Catholic girl, I said it wrong.
“I, Gabriel, take . . .”
A groan went up from the bridesmaids. I glanced back at their disbelieving faces, then over at Dulé, ready with the faintest shake of his head. I smiled at Chris, which is something I always do to another actor when I am nervous in a scene and just want to get through it. I had a hard time looking at him, so my eyes settled on his forehead.
The pastor pronounced us man and wife, and our exit song down the aisle was Natalie Cole’s “This Will Be.” It’s a cockeyed ode to bliss that now seems a little too on the nose irony-wise. Our videographer walked backward in front of us, capturing the exact moment one of our groomsmen, a huge guy named Zeus, clapped us on the back.
“Y’alls is married now,” he said, riffing on a Color Purple line with a voice full of forced wonder and excitement.
On the video, which I have watched only once, you see my face fall. It was the beginning of the end.
SO WHAT GOT ME THERE? WELL, MY ROOMMATE IN 1999 HAD A THING FOR linebackers in the AFC Central Division. Her taste was very specific, and I can’t fault her for it because they were actually all great guys. One in particular hosted a three-day party in Jacksonville, Florida, every April. My roommate and I went one year with some friends, and on the first night there was a bowling party. I immediately clocked this guy in the next lane, definitely not my type. He was a running back, short and built, and a Jacksonville Jaguars teammate had given him the nickname “Little Thicky.” That was an accurate description. He had on these baggy jeans, and he’d cut off the hems to shorten them. Later, when I was shopping for him, I learned that 38-28 is in fact a mean size to find.
“What are you, Huck Finn?” I asked, looking down at his frayed cuffs.
“My name’s Chris.”
“Where’s Jim? He out watching the raft?”
He gave it right back, trash-talking my game. He was legit funny, a country boy from Kenner, Louisiana, where they take turtles out of the swamp to cook them. He liked drinking dark liquor and playing cards, and he reminded me of the kind of men who married into my family. The contrast was that he also had tattoos all over his arms, two earrings, and an easy cartoon cat smile. When we were all leaving, he got on a Ducati, and that sealed it. As a child of Grease 2, I was always on the lookout for a Cool Rider.
I found myself thinking about him, and the next night he showed up at the house where most of us were staying. One of my girlfriends was like, “He’s downstairs!” He had come back, so that meant he was interested, too. It’s funny, in retrospect, how excited I was.
We spent the rest of the party weekend joined at the hip, hanging out and trading potshots. A big part of our courtship was ragging on each other. Sure, later we would use it as a weapon, having learned what to say to wound and what would be the kill shot. But in the beginning, it was good fun. It felt like a mutual chase.
We would visit each other in Jacksonville and L.A. for weekends. My career was starting to rise, so the arrangement was good. I could focus on work and auditions while he did his training. We had dreams. “After football, I’m one class away from my kinesiology degree from Michigan,” he told me. “I want to go into sports medicine.”
In July, after three months of dating, Chris bought an engagement ring, but he held on to it until my birthday, at the end of October. I flew to Jacksonville to celebrate. I spent the whole day at the spa, and when I got back to his house, there was a rose petal path from the front door to the bedroom. At the end was Chris, down on one knee. He had a bucket of KFC on the floor, and he was eating KFC potato wedges with one hand while holding a ring in the other. When I tell this story to new girlfriends, they always ask, tentatively, if there was some sentimental thing about KFC. No, I have to tell them; in the first of a list of many ignored red flags, I guess he was eating and I had surprised him.
The ring felt big and special, and so many of my friends were already married. I’d won something under the wire, I thought. I was the girl who called everyone to share my news, but I remember feeling more and more apprehensive with each call. I’m the opposite of impetuous. I am a “measure sixteen times, then cut once” person. And then torture myself in the middle of the night about how I kind of did a half-assed job on that sixteenth measurement. So I got defensive when the general response was “Are you sure?” and “As long as you’re happy . . .” People thought it was a terrible idea, given that I’d only known him a few months and had only seen him on random weekends. People on the other side of marriage know what happens when you’ve never spent any real time together. I had no idea what that reality actually looked like, but I told myself I was just efficient.
The next day I had to fly up to Wilmington to audition for Dawson’s Creek. It was a quick trip, there and back in one day. Back in Jacksonville, I let myself into Chris’s place while he was still at practice and got on his computer to check my e-mail.
Kids, this was medieval times, when olde-timey laptops used to have messages pop up on the screen like they were breaking in with a special report. And there it was:
“Yo, you still got that girl coming in next weekend? Nigga, she’s Greek. Nigga, she’s Greek.”
This was from his best friend. Now, I am not Greek. Nor do I know why his friend was so insistent about this woman’s Greek identity. All I knew was that I was going to be back in L.A. the weekend of Greekfest. And this was literally not even twenty-four hours after he had proposed to me.
I packed my bag and kept my ring on just so he could see me take it off when I threw it at him. When he walked in the door, I nailed it, throwing the diamond right at him. Chris entered the scene in full apology mode, as his boy had tipped him off. I guess my reply—something like “Yes, what was her name again?”—gave away that the person typing wasn’t Chris. He bent to pick up the ring and was crawling on the ground, begging.
“You just proposed,” I yelled.
“I didn’t know if you were going to say yes,” he said.
“So you lined up a backup?” I yelled. “Who do you think you’re kidding?”