With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (22 page)

Over the course of several dress-shopping trips, I gained insight into all my helpers and what their personal preferences and biases were. With Annie, you couldn’t have enough bling. Emily thought every dress was
the
dress and the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and every time I came out in a new dress, she wept. Debbie, who was essentially Kim’s emissary, was like the adult in the room. She’d say I ran the whole thing like a meeting, asking one person for her opinion and then the next. But Debbie really ran the show. For each dress, she’d start by asking if it was within our budget. Then she’d say, “Let’s turn around. Let’s look at that.” She’d put her eyeglasses on and then take them off and say “Let’s think about this” or “Let’s think about that.” Thank God for Debbie.

After eight or so shopping trips, the choice finally came down to two Carolina Herrera dresses, and I just liked one better than the other.

But that wasn’t the end of it—then came the fittings. Seamstresses stick pins into the dress so they know where to adjust this or adjust that so it will fit perfectly. Since it was a fitted dress, I wanted it to fit perfectly. I’d tell them to make it tighter, since I planned to lose weight before the wedding, but they’d say, “It’s going to be too tight!” and I’d say, “No, tighter!” My friend Wayne didn’t come for any of the shopping trips, but he came for one of the fittings, and when I stepped out of the dressing room, he wept. He thought I looked beautiful. I thought I looked nice. Not beautiful, but nice.

Now that the dress was taken care of, I decided I had to do some work on my arms. I’d had no intention of buying a sleeveless or strapless dress, because I do
not
like my arms, but I wound up buying a sleeveless dress, and so I was in a panic. To get my arms in shape, I began doing arm exercises with two-pound hand weights—even in the middle of meetings. It was crazy, but I’m not rational about my arms. Then it got even crazier. I began using dumbbells while I was being driven around during my workday. I wound up throwing out my shoulder. I learned my lesson: it’s not a good idea to lift hand weights while being driven in an SUV on the streets of New York—while on a conference call!

I gave up on doing exercises in the car, but in the end the weights worked. My arms weren’t perfect, but over the course of a couple of months, they were better. My one disappointment was that I hadn’t been able to lose weight. I’d hoped that in the final six weeks I’d lose a ton of weight and that at the final fitting we’d have to take in everything. That didn’t happen at all—I didn’t even lose a pound. So at the final fitting there was nothing to do.

When you wear a fitted wedding gown, you also need to wear “undergarments” to hold everything up and together. As fun as it was to shop for the wedding dress, shopping for the undergarments was definitely
not
fun, especially since I waited until the last minute. At the first place we went—a French boutique on the Upper East Side—all the salespeople were the size of my pinky. I should have known better. The killer came when the salesperson said, “We just don’t make it
that
big.” The last thing I needed to hear the week before my wedding was that I was too big. I was finished shopping for undergarments and walked out of the store, with Kim right behind me. I wanted to call it a day, but she persuaded me to go to a second place on the Upper East Side called Wolford, and the people were lovely. Not only did they have everything I needed, but they told me I needed a size “small”! I could have hugged them all! Kim remembers me saying, “I will love all of you forever!” to the salesclerks. I’m not sure I said that, but that’s certainly how I felt.

Shopping for Kim wasn’t easy either, but it was nothing compared with shopping for my undergarments. It had to be a pantsuit because she doesn’t wear dresses, and it had to be understated because she hates calling attention to herself. She made clear that she wanted me to be the focus of attention that day, at least from a fashion perspective.

So we set out to find a cream-colored pantsuit that would work with my dress. But we couldn’t find anything that worked because it was late February and early March, and almost no white pantsuits were in the stores yet. So without telling Kim, I called one of my friends in the fashion industry to ask her advice. She suggested using a New York designer like Ralph Lauren. So we went to his store on Madison Avenue. This is not the kind of place where Kim and I normally shop, and we made assumptions that the salespeople would be “perfect” and standoffish. But they were lovely! Mary, Cecilia, and Victoria were Kim’s Ralph Lauren posse. They were totally normal and nice, so sweet, and enormously helpful.

It was me, Kim, our friend Emily, and Kim’s sister, Debbie, at the Ralph Lauren store. Kim was nervous that she wasn’t going to find anything, and that even if she found something, it wouldn’t be special. But we found a cream-colored suit that worked—the jacket had satin lapels—and to make it even more special, Victoria sewed a gorgeous gold appliqué onto the vest. It was beautiful. Kim bought a pair of sparkly-silver Jimmy Choo shoes with heels (which she wore to the ceremony) and a goldish pair with a lower heel (which she wore for the reception).

We gave ourselves time to decide on our rings. We quickly settled on getting fancy and everyday wedding rings. The fancy rings are simple bands with diamonds all around—I wear mine almost every day. The metal ones are platinum, and that’s what Kim wears every day.

I wanted to have a couple of my mother’s favorite pins made into hair combs that I would wear to the wedding. They’re decorated with white enamel pansies with little diamonds in the middle. The inspiration for using them came from my wedding dress, which had crystals on the midsection, which if you looked really closely were flowers. Also, the pansies fit with our flower theme and color scheme. My mother wore the pins a lot when I was growing up, and wearing one of them was a way of having her memory with me in a happy way on my wedding day.

We had a bit of drama around finding someone to make the pins into hair combs. The first jeweler we tried couldn’t get the pins to look like what I had hoped for, but after a last-minute search—and with time running out—we found a jeweler that could. I asked my father to pick them up from the first jeweler and bring them to me. We were having a serious press conference with immigration advocates who were protesting the federal immigration authorities’ use of fingerprint records from the New York Police Department to round up undocumented immigrants. It’s not usually an occasion for levity. But in the middle of the press conference, my father happened to walk by, plowed through the crowd, and handed me the package with the pins, and I couldn’t help but laugh. He knew how important they were to me and was determined to get them to me. So at the press conference I thanked my father and explained to the press that there’d been a problem with the hair combs for the wedding and that we were getting them redone. I noted that my father had picked them up from the jeweler for me, and then added, “So let the record reflect, my father is helping. He wants credit for helping.” How could you not love the guy?

We found the pillow for the ring bearer, our grand-nephew Jase Catullo, superquick. I don’t know what people did before the Internet, because we Googled “ring bearer pillows with a cherry blossom theme,” and four hundred options came up—and then we had to choose one! We didn’t want to put the actual rings on the pillow, just in case something happened along the way with all the hustle and bustle, so we sewed on our original 2001 commitment rings (so they wouldn’t fall off), and our friend Wayne kept the real rings in his pocket. Wayne was very concerned that he wouldn’t remember which was mine and which was Kim’s because we don’t have the same finger size, so I told him to put mine in his right pocket because I’m always right. He didn’t like that idea and suggested instead, “Right pocket, because you always
think
you’re right!”

We had a lot of fun choosing the food for our reception. It was another team effort—we brought Emily and her wife, Annie; our nephew Jeff; and his wife, Chris. Jeff’s a former Auburn University football player, a big guy who loves food, and we specifically picked him because we knew he’d have opinions. It wound up being hilarious, because he had very clear and specific opinions on everything we tasted. He’d say, “This slider, the meat is good, but it’s not the right bun; the bun is too puffy, it’s overwhelming,” or “This would be good if it was half its size,” or “This would be good with more of this, less of that . . .” Not surprisingly, we wound up choosing a lot of Italian things, and we made sure that there was a ton of it because the Catullos love food. A lot of the guests were big food people, too, and you just don’t want people to leave hungry.

As the final week approached, Kim and I were feeling that wonderful mix of emotions: we were happy and excited and nervous. We only had a short list of things that needed to be done, and all of them were totally doable. Given my Irish heritage, I should have been expecting the potato famine to start at any moment, but I have to admit that I’d totally let my guard down. So when the bad news came, it came as a terrible shock.

C
HAPTER
14

Shadows

I
t was a gorgeous morning, the day before our wedding, and if everything had gone according to plan, we would have been headed to the nail salon or to the florist for a final check of the flowers. Instead Kim and I were sitting in a sparsely furnished and depressing doctor’s office at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with her brother—my soon-to-be brother-in-law Anthony Catullo. Anthony was an identical twin and seventeen years my senior, but since I’d first met him ten years prior, he’d always felt like my younger brother—an irresistible, six-foot-four-inch-tall little brother who was my biggest champion, who would do anything for me, and who frequently drove me up the wall.

Anthony had lived a pretty wild life in New York City as a bartender during the Studio 54 era, and he knew everybody there was to know. After I met Kim’s family, he and I quickly became very close. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way about him; everybody did, including all the nieces and nephews, who were never happier than when they were spending the day in the city with their uncle Anthony seeing a Broadway show. And somehow he got tickets to every musical you could name.

Just one story about Anthony. He was at the theater with one of his very young nephews who was having a hard time seeing over the person seated in front of him. Anthony folded up his coat and put it on the seat under his nephew so he could sit on top of it. Before the curtain went up, the woman behind Anthony’s nephew complained to the usher that he shouldn’t be allowed to sit on his coat, because now he was blocking her view. The usher didn’t seem very happy about having to do it, but he told Anthony that his nephew couldn’t sit on the folded-up coat. So rather than putting up a fight, Anthony traded seats with his nephew and sat in front of the woman who had complained to the usher. Anthony was big—over six feet tall. He didn’t confront the woman; he just quietly sent her a message. That was Anthony in a nutshell.

Earlier in the week before the wedding, Anthony had gotten a preliminary diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and now, following additional tests, we were back for the final verdict. From everything I knew about pancreatic cancer, it was pretty much hopeless, even in the best of circumstances. As the doctor reviewed Anthony’s case with us, my attention kept being drawn to the hospital computer’s screen saver, which alternated between beautiful scenes of the ocean and snow-capped mountains. I remember thinking,
Why in God’s name do you have that running on your computer screen when you’re delivering such horrible news? Do you really think pretty pictures are going to help?

Given that I instinctively expect the worst, I might not have been shocked when we heard the test results. Still, the doctor’s words took my breath away, and the implication was almost more than I could take in. While pancreatic cancer was an aggressive disease, he explained, Anthony was a good candidate for surgery—for the Whipple procedure, which he explained in detail using a diagram. The Whipple, in combination with chemotherapy, wasn’t a cure, but it could buy us time—months, maybe years.

As the doctor took us on a detailed tour of a diagram of the stomach and pancreas, I stopped listening because I thought I was going to faint or throw up or both. I absolutely could not let myself do that, so I silently repeated to myself,
Don’t throw up, you can’t throw up, don’t throw up.
When I finally was able to focus again, I heard the doctor explain that despite how obviously jaundiced Anthony was, he was not in a life-threatening situation, and that his focus right now should be on getting to the wedding. Anthony made it clear to the doctor that more than anything, he needed to go to the wedding on the following day. The doctor said, “I want you to enjoy this wedding. We know it’s really important to you. You’re going to be there, and you should be happy.”

Everyone we dealt with at the hospital seemed to know about the wedding. Anthony had told us that the day before, when he went to the hospital for an MRI, the nurse who signed him in said, “We all know about the wedding. It’s like our wedding here in New York City. We’re going to get you to that wedding.” Anthony was so proud of us and so excited that I’m sure he told that nurse—and every other nurse and doctor at Sloan-Kettering—everything about the wedding, including details we’d asked him to keep private. And if Anthony hadn’t told them about the wedding, it had already been all over the news, so it wasn’t exactly a secret that Kim and I were about to be married.

We were a bit stunned by how much press attention our wedding drew, but it had been less than a year since gay people were allowed to marry in New York, and I was the most prominent elected official in the state to take advantage of the new law. On the way out of our apartment building earlier that morning, the doorman at the front desk was reading
AM New York,
one of New York’s free daily newspapers, and there was a huge picture of me on the front page with the headline
THE
BRIDE
&
THE
PRIDE
. I grabbed it out of his hands to get a better look. The subhead read
CITY
COUNCIL
SPEAKER
QUINN
SET
FOR
HISTORIC
NUPS
SATURDAY
. We’d had no heads-up that
AM
was even doing a story, so it was a total surprise to see my picture on the front—and it was actually a nice picture, which was an even bigger surprise.