Chapter 8 -- Wedding
The year between our engagement and the wedding went fast. Life picked up the pace considerably, and I began to regret not just eloping. Wedding planning, my flights, her flights, my kids, her parents, more wedding planning, looking for a new condo. Everything was a blur, and I immediately felt my age. Jane dove into it head first, and within four months she had everything fairly well planned. She was a hell of a planner. The one thing she refused to allow me to know about was her dress. "Jane's we're in our forties, I think we can dispense with the tradition" was my contribution.
"No way in hell, I'm going to shock the shit out of you" said Jane, huge grin on her face. Man, I love her.
It was a Monday in February when I got the call to go in for a meeting at work. Jane was on a west coast trip, and I had just gotten back from mine. I trudged over to the crew base office, and realized that the senior pilot, head of the office, and two members of HR were present for the meeting. Uh oh.
"We'd like to talk to you about your relationship to Janine Majewski" said the head of the office. "Sure" a million thoughts were going through my mind "uh, is there an issue?"
From the speaker phone, I heard on the other line, in a cheery voice "Hi Tom." It was Jane. Holy hell I wished she was here right now. She sounded happier than I would have expected.
HR chimed in "We believe there may be some improprieties with the situation, and want to clear the air."
Fuck.
"Should I have my union rep here?" was my next question, and Paul chimed in from the phone as well.
"I'm here Tom, I've actually been asked to represent both you and Jane." Damn, Paul was good, no wonder the flight attendants had asked for him as well. HR asked Jane a series of standard questions, Paul intercepting a few of them. The basic question was whether or not this relationship was involving favors for Jane, and whether or not it was over legal immigration statuses. We both answered truthfully.
Eventually, the head of the office put it out there "The end result is that we can't allow the both of you to be on the same flights anymore, because of the rules about fraternization. We'll allow you to keep your relationship status" I felt my face flush red "and your jobs, but these are the conditions."
Paul, praise be to him, vocalized in a professional manner that this was a completely unacceptable response to the situation. After two hours of arguing, the meeting broke up, to be resolved the next day. On the drive back home, I realized that I hadn't heard Jane talk the entire last couple hours. I rolled around the phrase 'allow you to keep your relationship status' in my brain. Fuck Pan Am. I was still angry when I pulled into the condo complex.
I was woken by the phone at 9am the next morning, just as my alarm would have gone off. It was the office. "I was just calling to inform you that the issue has been resolved" was all HR would offer to me. Well, at least that's over.
20 minutes later, I heard the jingle of keys, and the front door open. It was Jane. "Tom" said Jane, a sheepish grin on her face "You're looking at a retired woman."
My mouth dropped open. "I was always under the impression that I was going to be the kept boy, not you the kept girl." Jane just laughed. I carried the newly retired woman to the bedroom, where she shed her flight attendant's uniform, and we made love until noon. As we lay there, me tracing lines around her chest, her laughing and tickling me, we talked about what this meant for us. I was going to keep flying, provided Pan Am still approved of our relationship status. Jane gave me a 'calm down, dear' look when I mentioned it, and I calmed down. I flicked one of her nipples. When she recovered, she tackled me and we fell off the bed. Part of me didn't want to keep flying, but we I figured we needed the money.
Jane would shortly after get a part-time job working at a clothing store in our town. Jane, as I had said, was great at fashion. Jane was great at everything she did. She loved the job, and it gave her something to do when I was out of town.
Between February and October, the wedding planning took over Jane's life. We had a caterer, band, church, reception hall, cake...I lost track eventually. At one point, I just started to get a glazed-over look in my eyes when the topic of wedding planning came up. The next time Jane mentioned doing wedding planning together, I came down from the office to where she was doing the planning in the dining room, and Jane was completely naked. "I figured that this would be the only way to get you to pay attention to wedding planning" she was grinning. It was one of Jane's few poor decisions, because no matter how much she said no to sex until we had made progress, I couldn't pay attention to anything except her body. Jane finally, laughing, got up and sat in my lap. "Okay, this didn't work, but please, please try to concentrate on the planning." We went up to bed, and ended up finding out that we did great at wedding planning in the bedroom, post sex.
Finally, the weekend of the wedding, and everyone was in town. I had chosen my son Josh to be my best man, and he had taken some time from school to be there. Rory and Ray made up the rest of the groom's side. Sarah would be in the bridal party, but Jane's matron of honor was Shawna, her best friend from college who I only met that weekend. She let me in on a lot of great 'Jane in college' stories, but the most shocking of them were that she held a 4.0 GPA at graduation (I was a mediocre student myself), and that she had been what passed for an all-Canadian selection for women's' rugby her final year at McGill. Jane just blushed at the entire proceedings. As we left the rehearsal dinner, Jane heading to the bridal suite at a hotel, Shawna clued me in on something. "She hasn't looked this happy in years, Tom" Shawna said, continuing "I wish she had met you instead of Robert all those years ago." I found out that Jane had met him shortly after graduation, and he had steered her into doing something that was more appropriate for the wife of a high-powered lawyer, instead of doctor. Jane had been pre-med, and was planning on becoming an orthopedic surgeon...before Robert. My heart sank.
The rehearsal dinner flew by. My parents came in for the event, having only met Jane a few weeks before the wedding when they came up from Florida. They were happy for the both of us, even if my mom seemed worried about me. Her parents, who I had grown to know fairly well, beamed with happiness. I could sense that her dad wanted to thank me. Jane was mostly a spitting image of her mother, and if it was any indication, aging would be kind to Jane. Jane's brother Peter had arrived as well, and he was a bit of a shock; intelligence ran in the family, himself being an engineer at a design firm in Toronto. He arrived with his husband, something that Jane hadn't given me a heads up about, who just so happened to be a Colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I hit it off with both of them, and his husband, Jerome, had even spent an exchange tour recently flying the Growler with an Australian squadron.