Hitched

You get on the plane that's leaving the airport.

On Wednesday, Richard and I went to the courthouse in Hudson and got married. A judge sat in his customary seat where he hears cases and read aloud the marriage agreement from a script. Gathered as witnesses were a police officer and two lawyers in coats.

We were all in a good mood. Lots of wide grins. It was an office party, and we were standing under a sprig of mistletoe. After the ceremony, the judge even mentioned it would have been nice to share a glass of bourbon, and I wished I’d thought to bring a bottle of something.

There Richard and I stood, side by side, like a pair of animals waiting to enter the ark. No one mentions the age of the animals collected by Noah. We’re meant to understand their job will be to reproduce. Theoretically, after the Flood, God could have created more animals and more species, but once he’d set the game in motion, he apparently decided to step back and hand over the future to genes and physical birth.

I had remembered that the standard marriage text contained the words husband and wife. Before we were invited into the courtroom, a charming clerk made copies of our photo IDs and prepared us for the ceremony. I mentioned we wanted to be named married people, rather than husband and wife, and she smiled as she changed the words. Once, in the CVS on Warren Street, a clerk we are friends with made the assumption we were married. I told him we were not married. He asked why. I said, “The history of the institution has not been a good thing for women,” and I referred him to Engels’ great book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I said, “Would you want to be a called a wife?” He looked scared and said no.

The day before we got married, Richard and I went to the office of the city clerk to get a license. After we were all signed up, the clerk said, “You can just walk over to the courthouse and book a time.” It turned out a judge was available the next day at 4. We said great. I texted friends. They sent back notes of happiness, and it made me happy to stir happiness in the gray, sad world.

The first time I got married I was nineteen. Bruce and I had found an apartment. My father came to see it. He stood on the empty parquet floor and said, “I’ll go-sign the lease if you get married.” Bruce smiled. I said okay, and then I felt like a suitcase on a conveyor belt at the airport, tottling along in a line with other suitcases until we were pitched down a winding chute to a cold, dark whatever.

I don’t remember the words I was asked to affirm back then. I remember the office of the rabbi my mother had found in the phone book. It was on Park Avenue around the corner from my parents’ place on 34^th Street. The rabbi had mentioned it wasn’t necessary to believe in God, and maybe he’d said he didn’t believe in God, either, or maybe I’ve invented this part of the conversation with the rabbi.

Apart from the words husband and wife, I hadn’t given much thought to the marriage text. Maybe I didn’t want it to stop me. When the judge read the word holy. I said, “Is that with an h?” He said yes. I said, “Can you please omit that word?” What I actually said was, “What! No holy! No metaphysics!” The judge changed it. Near the end, he read out a passage that is more or less a standard part of the marriage ceremony we’d forgotten about: “I promise to love and cherish you, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse, and forsaking all others, keep myself only unto you, for so long as we both shall live.”

I thought no one in the history of promises has ever said yes to one word of this with an untroubled conscience. And I was reminded of a brilliant remark once made by Richard I have often quoted without attribution: “Every promise invites a change of heart.” It was almost over. I got that suitcase at the airport feeling and said, “Okay, well I guess?”

I’m not sure what people are celebrating now. No one knows what anyone else is thinking. But I think most of it is simply that people want to affirm the decisions of people they feel attached to. I think this is what it’s about, attachment, and I can see why people set aside times on calendars to celebrate together. They want cake. Any opportunity for cake. There will be cake.

Photo by Suzy Kunz.

The difference between being 19 and marrying Bruce and being 78 and marrying Richard is the decision to get married is mine, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. I like starting a new episode in life I will be able to write about because my feelings will keep changing without ever settling. So, there’s that.

Already the other day we backed away from a fight, two dogs sniffing at bad water and deciding not to drink. We trotted off down the road, and now it's snowing. Our contractors John and Andrew came over yesterday to cut pieces of trellis for the apron of the deck. Richard said we'd gotten married, and they said they thought we were already married. A thing we are surprised by is how much marriage is a communal activity that is immediately out of your hands, the way it outlines the trees and blankets the ground.

Last night, a friend was over to the house, and we were talking about how it felt to be married. It was day number four. I said something about holding Richard more firmly to life. It surprised me. What does it mean? What’s the image that comes to mind? It’s magical thinking to think a symbolic act gives you a firmer footing as the ground tilts. After Gardner died, I dreamed the floor of my apartment became slanted as steeply as a ski slope. It was not a good feeling. I was 44. Now, do I mean a firmer footing when you’re old? A reaching out from behind a curtain? What is the curtain?

Eighteen years ago at Yaddo, I took one look at Richard, and an electron bounced between us. I could taste it. There was something about that punim, the English accent. I have always followed molecules.

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Beige sad at the abyss.

We watched The Hours (2002) the other night, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. The movie is so three sad ladies who are either secretly gay or openly gay and yet still sadly tethered to some annoying or demanding guy, it’s so three sad ladies going through the stations of Mrs. Dalloway, or writing Mrs. Dalloway, that the Philip Glass score comes across as a pulsing undersweep, a kind of Rachmaninoff 2, for the melodrama.

The sad ladyness defeats the actresses. Who would want to look sad all the time. There is Nicole, with a fake nose and bowed head. Did Virginia really always wear that housedress? I like Nicole, anyway. She gives herself to the parts she plays, and she works hard without showing it.

Jeff Daniels, Clare Danes, and Toni Collette give felt and lively performances in cameos. Ed Harris eats the scenery as a gay man with AIDS, who has absorbed the attention of the modern day woman played by Streep. She can’t do the part of the long suffering lesbian in thrall to an angry man, and good for her. No one should have to play that part.

As always, like Nicole, Julianne is moving and weird as the gay man's mother back in the 1950's, when he was growing up. You never know what she’s thinking as she suffers in a Douglas Sirk snow globe, except maybe she’s thinking, when is this part ever going to end where I look tortured so quietly my pain screams.

Meryl doesn’t get to give the party she’s planning. The food they dump at he end looks really good.

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