CARLY BRIEN AND ALEJANDRO DE CASTRO
Assured That It’s Just Meant to Be
When she met a schoolmate, Alejandro de Castro, in 1992, Carly Brien instantly thought, wow, was he handsome — well, as third graders go.
All the girls had crushes on him, Ms. Brien recalled. But she had an in with the lad that none of the other girls could claim. Her mother, recently divorced, had just bought a home in Santa Monica, Calif., that had previously been owned by the boy’s family, and she had the good fortune to live in what had been his bedroom.
She was a creative child, and had the lineage to go with it. Her father, Jeb Brien, was the director and producer of videos and television movies about musicians, and her maternal grandfather is the film writer, director and actor Paul Mazursky, who made “An Unmarried Woman.” Making use of the raw material she had at hand (Mr. de Castro’s red-and-white curtains), she cut them into little strips and took them to school to sell to the other girls.
“They were so jealous of me,” said Ms. Brien, now 29.
After elementary school, Ms. Brien and Mr. de Castro attended different high schools and colleges (Kenyon College for her; the University of California, Santa Barbara for him) and lost contact. Ms. Brien ended up in New York, working in film publicity. Mr. de Castro went to Los Angeles, working on promotional campaigns on the Web for corporations.
Their private lives did not move along easily. In 1998, Mr. de Castro’s father, a lawyer and real estate developer, had a stroke and suffered brain damage. In 2007, Mr. de Castro’s college girlfriend took a fatal fall after a seizure.
The next year, in 2008, when Ms. Brien’s mother, Meg, found out she had brain cancer, Ms. Brien began making frequent weekend trips to Santa Monica from New York to help care for her.
It was on one of those trips in 2009 that she and Mr. de Castro happened upon each other in a stairwell of a Santa Monica parking garage. As she rushed by, “I screamed her name,” said Mr. de Castro, now also 29.
He was unaware that she was sick with grief over the imminent loss of her mother; Ms. Brien was unaware that he was heartbroken that his father was slipping away (he would die in 2011). Each could have used a sympathetic ear. But in that moment, neither mentioned their private travails, Ms. Brien said. “We said: ‘Oh, hi. Nice to see you.’ And walked away.”
Mr. de Castro said: “Whether for love or for support, it was as if fate was trying to put us together in the stairwell that afternoon.”
Fate gave them a second chance in September 2010, by which time her mother had died and the family home had been sold. Ms. Brien decided to move back to Santa Monica permanently. She also opted to leave the film world and open a juice shop, Pressed Juicery, with two partners.
“It wasn’t like we were thinking about each other this whole time since our childhoods while we were in other relationships,” Ms. Brien said. She shared the news of the house sale with Mr. de Castro on Facebook. “I thought, ‘Who else will the loss of this house mean something to?’ He wrote me back right away.” They arranged to meet one evening as she closed the juice shop.
“As I was driving there I was extremely nervous but also really energized, as if something powerful was pulling me forward and something really big was about to happen,” Mr. de Castro said.
He was right. After returning from the store, Ms. Brien said: “I called my best friend and said, ‘I think this is it. You go through life and go on dates and you’re looking for something. I feel this is it.’ ”
His appeal grew when she learned that Mr. de Castro habitually made dinner for his mother and her friends. “He turned out to be the family cook and waiter, and he ate standing up and made the women laugh.” Ms. Brien said. “A lot of people just want to go out and party, and here was this guy who loved his family.” So when he invited her to one of these dinners, she jumped at the chance. “I thought, I want to be a part of this,” she said.
Both agreed that the connection was immediate and went deeper than food and laughs. “I think grief gave them a common bond and brought them together,” said Hayden Slater, a partner in Pressed Juicery, of which there are now 12 stores.
Fate continued to play a big role in the couple’s narrative. Three months after they began dating, Ms. Brien became pregnant, something she said she had an “intuitive sense” was meant to be. Nonetheless, she was afraid to tell her father. “I thought, uh, oh, what will he think?” she said. “But he said: ‘Having kids is the best thing that ever happened to me. Your mom was your age when she had you, and I think you’re probably more mature than she was.’ Al’s mom said, ‘You want to have this baby, so if you own that, no one will say differently.’ ”
They took comfort in their families’ support, and moved in together, but privately “they were really terrified,” said Stephanie Danler, a college friend. “They were thinking: ‘We’re not prepared to be parents.’ But they did it. Fate is the scaffolding of their relationship: the house, finding each other after so many years. All the rest is the actions they took, the choices they made.”
The decision to wed came after an accident. In the summer of 2012 their son, Luca, then 10 months old, swallowed a piece of tile that cut his esophagus; he spent eight days in the intensive-care unit. At one point, Mr. de Castro looked at Ms. Brien and said, “You and I and Luca are a family, and I want it to be official.”
She didn’t expect a wedding any time soon after the accident, but Mr. de Castro secretly arranged to meet with her father. “Alejandro came over,” Mr. Brien said. “He confessed how much he loved Carly. Then he said, ‘But we forgot to connect the most important dot.’ And he asked permission to marry her.” As he granted that permission, he recalled thinking that Mr. de Castro was raised right.
The proposal came while they were making lasagna noodles from scratch and decorating a Christmas tree in their Santa Monica home. “We were covered in flour,” he recalled, but the room was cozy. The windows were frosty. The Nat King Cole Christmas album was playing and their son was asleep. But when he told her he had “a small early Christmas present” and to close her eyes, she reacted with anger. They had promised: no Christmas presents. When she opened her eyes, he was down on his knee with the ring.
“It felt like it was a choice for Al to commit himself to me and to go out and buy a ring,” she said. “It’s much more and much better than, ‘Oh, we’re getting married because we’re having a baby.’ ”
On Oct. 5, Ms. Brien and Mr. de Castro were wed at the Santa Lucia Preserve in Carmel, Calif., in a grove of redwoods, some of which were hundreds of feet tall. Luca, now 2 and dressed in a suit, was the ring bearer. After Elaine Williams, a friend who had been ordained online by the First Nation Ministry, pronounced the couple husband and wife, the 160 wedding guests moved to a lawn to graze on predinner hors d’oeuvres while herds of deer grazed in the field behind them.
Thinking about the strength of the match, Krista Smith, an editor at Vanity Fair who had been a friend of Ms. Brien’s mother, said, “When you’ve experienced a profound tragedy, there’s a certain language that you speak, you’re a member of a certain club and can get to the heart of the matter.”
Mr. Mazursky, who was wearing a fedora and a black T-shirt printed like a tuxedo, added levity and a touch of reality: “As a couple they seem loving. How do I know? I’ve got a wife of 61 years, 30 of which have been fabulous.”
ON THIS DAY
When Oct. 5, 2013
Where Santa Lucia Preserve in Carmel, Calif.
Details As guests entered the redwood grove, a grand piano, dwarfed by the giant trees, was being played. Along with wedding programs, guests could pick up linen handkerchiefs that were placed under a sign that said, For Tears of Joy. At the couple’s wedding dinner, two cakes sat on a table: one tiered with traditional white frosting and the other shaped like a child’s beach pail and shovel, with granulated sugar inside that looked like beach sand.
Share this on your favourite network
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment