The Wedding Pine
Robert Wexelblatt
It’s easy to say what happened to my own parents though impossible to say much about them. Other people don’t have trouble talking about theirs: Dad’s a tax lawyer and Mom makes a terrific lentil soup. They toss in a few vague adjectives--handsome, alcoholic, fat, sweet, abusive—and instantly I picture a lawyer with graying sideburns, a matron in an apron, a bottle of single malt, a diet scale. I even allow for the deceptions of nostalgia and caricature. Nostalgia and caricature are at least something, but whenever I want to recall my parents’ faces, I have to pull out the big brown photo album. Those slick black-and-white portraits, the Kodachrome snapshots, and washed-out Polaroids are surrogates for memories I lack; the pictures aren’t even convincing. Perhaps they do contain some truth, but it’s a truth too partial not to be misleading. A static snapshot doesn’t invite you in, even if you stick your nose right up to it, which is what I used to do when I was a kid. I do have a memory more compelling than the photos, a recollection of a locked bedroom door. The sense of being barred runs deep in me; it’s just the sort of feeling that can turn into a pattern and wreck a life. My parents’ world was the big adult one around me now in which, to tell the truth, I participate only provisionally. I seem unable to move into it with a whole heart, and I’m careful not to let it draw me in. I’ve denied the world a fulcrum on which to set its enormous lever.
The chief reason why it’s hard for me to fix my parents may be that they were utterly normal, the sort of people nailed by the derisory word nondescript. When I see reruns of 50s sit-coms, they seem to me realistic, even portentous. My father did office work in the city; my mother kept house in the suburbs. He commuted; she stayed home. We visited aunts and uncles at regular intervals, ate dinner at six-thirty sharp, had a Christmas tree and presents in December, turkey for Thanksgiving, a cookout on the Fourth of July. Father liked football, told corny jokes, played a little golf. Mother sewed things, enjoyed her canasta with the girls on Wednesday afternoons, and went shopping. My memory is that she talked on the phone with her two closest friends, Mina Farrell and Viola Malkin, every morning. I remember bopping around her feet on the gray bedroom carpet while she chatted away. I was jealous; I wanted her attention. I hated the telephone. As you can see, the little I recall really is as banal as old TV.
Then my mother got galloping leukemia which used to be the non-clinical name for that variety. You think of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ichabod Crane, the Kentucky Derby. Dad quietly arranged a trust for me and made a will saying whom I was to live with should it become necessary and then one night they both took too many sleeping pills and poof. I was six at the time, not old enough to count for much. I’d only just started first grade. There was only one of me; maybe if I’d had a baby sister or brother it would have been different. Pathetic, isn’t it? I woke up. It was February, always the longest month of the year for me. The house was silent and cold. I rubbed my eyes and went to their bedroom and the door was locked. I expect I pounded my little fist against it and called out and cried; it’s hard to remember. Then the phone rang. It was Viola Malkin.
~ ~ ~
Freshman year it felt like Danielle and I stayed up talking half of every night.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made that noise you make.”
“What noise?”
“You know. Hnnh. That noise.”
“I did not. Silly.”
“Did so. You want me to turn the light back on?”
“No. And I don’t make any huh noises.”
“It’s hnnh. I can always tell something’s eating you when you say hnnh.”
“Hnnh?”
“See? Out with it or I’ll be up all night worrying.”
“I was only just thinking—”
“Oh, sweetie, don’t do that. Cogitation’s dysoporific. That means it inhibits sleep. And we need our beauty sleep.”
“You’re always teasing. Nobody likes it. It’s not a bit attractive, you know.”
“Attractive? You think I want to attract you? What do you mean attractive?”
“You know what I mean. Anyway, what do you think it’d be like being married?”
“Married? I think it’s probably more or less like this, like being suitemates. At least if you go in for twin beds. You insult each other in the middle of the night then eat a silent breakfast in the morning. Can’t be a grand passion all the time, as if you were playing Antony and Cleopatra six nights a week with a pair of matinees on weekends. Marriage isn’t romance but the end of it.”
“God, don’t have a cow. Come on, you must’ve thought about it at least a little. I mean, face it. We’re just about the right age, the right age in lots of cultures, the right age before antibiotics made life expectancy shoot up.”
“Oh, the right age, are we? Ladies, synchronize your watches and register your patterns. The right age? Due to what—peer pressure or the hormonal kind? Jesus. Married life. And death. Only two possibilities: either you stay together or you don’t. Neither’s particularly fetching.”
“But that’s just outcomes.”
“Well, call me a relativist. I’m interested in outcomes. For me, the proof’s in the butterscotch pudding. I judge by consequences. I mean you can’t really tell if a play’s a tragedy or a comedy until it’s over, can you? Nope, intentions don’t impress me very much, especially the romantic ones. You know, road to hell—paving materials?”
“Anybody’d think you were a cynic with a 4.0 average.”
“3.8. Look, if you stay together it’s tedious and if you don’t it’s desolating. And if you never tie the knot at all then you wind up envying every brood mare with a colt. The whole thing’s a pain in the ass, you ask me.”
“Seriously? So, you think it’s impossible to be happily married?”
“Impossible? To be happy and married at the same time? Being happy’s not what it’s about, kid. Nature wants babies and fools us into making them for a sugar cookie. The whole business works better if you’ve got a man who sticks around to pick up at least part of the tab for at least part of the time. Nothing to do with happy. All those fairy tales are just social propaganda aimed at us little girls.”
“You know, sometimes it’s a teeny bit too obvious that you had an unhappy childhood.”
“Don’t mock my psychic wounds. It’s extremely unattractive and, besides, they’re precious.”
“I guess you’ll never get married, then?”
“Me? You know the famous cartoon about the caterpillars?”
“Caterpillars?”
“Two caterpillars are walking along a big leaf. There’s this butterfly soaring over them. One caterpillar turns to the other and says, ‘You’ll never get me up in one of those things.’”
“Well, I’m certainly going to. I’m going to go to law school and then defend the indigent and oppressed brilliantly for maybe a couple or three years and then get married and live in a big Victorian house and give fabulous dinner parties.”
“Is hubby going to be Victorian too?”
“Not a bit. He’ll do corporate law, so we’ll be good and rich.”
“You mean you’ll be good and he’ll be rich?”
“All right, I’ll be good and he’ll be rich. It’s a division of labor.”
“And he’ll make you pregnant?”
“Naturally. We’ll have three children and they’ll all come out smooth as silk, adore me and be impeccably clean in mind and body.”
“Like your mom and dad, eh?”
“Mom’s not a lawyer.”
“And you aren’t clean.”
“I am too clean! And so are my brothers, mostly. Besides, they’re so cute together, aren’t they? A matched pair of role models.”
“Your brothers?”
“No, jerk. Mommy and Daddy. When they dropped me off did you see the dear way they—”
“I’m an orphan. I can’t be expected to be moved by public displays of affection between other people’s parents.”
Deep down, Danielle is a sentimental optimist who loves old musicals. Now and then she would break into a song from one of them. I remember her doing a quiet “Marian the Librarian” during finals and “I Feel Pretty” when she was getting ready to go to her first frat party. She called me a cynic pretty often and if I said something particularly bleak, she’d her ragged Paddington at me and then break into soundless weeping. She did weep easily, but Danielle was just as liable to giggle hysterically. I soon learned that neither meant much. Her flurries of tears or gusts of giggling were as inconsequential as passing rain showers. She shouldn’t have gone to law school but on the stage. She was pretty, bubbly, and could persuade you she was sincere, even when she wasn’t. She knew how to use her voice. The smallest inflections could communicate volumes. The same was true of her body and its language of gestures. For example, she had this way of rotating one foot inward and bingo, you’d know she was depressed. Her body always spoke louder than her words. She could deliver a lyric as teasingly as Marilyn Monroe, just as comically and proved it at Hallowe’en in a tight dress and long gloves:
A kiss on the hand
may be quite continental
but diamonds are a girl's best friend.
I’ll bet Danielle is terrific in bed, but I wonder if Chris is the man to appreciate her. I mean, he really is a corporate lawyer and, having slept with a couple specimens of the breed, I’m not engaging in mere uninformed speculation, Your Honor.
Anyway, maybe it was because of our freshman bull session that, eight years later, Danielle drafted me to be her maid-of-honor. I did my best to refuse politely but she talked me around. “Aww, come on,” she said. “We both know—” she paused then broke into full Rodgers and Hammerstein: “You’re jist a girl who cain’t say no.”
~ ~ ~
While I’ll confess to being allergic to these rituals, I can’t deny Danielle’s wedding full marks for niceness. Nice is just what it was—nice church, nice minister, nice food, nice music, nice clothes. Everybody in attendance was nice too, except, maybe, me; but I did my best under the pressure of the encompassing amiability. The Good always has some depth and vitality about it—even a little pathos, because virtue is inconsolable. The Nice, on the other hand, is your basic shellac and sugar, smooth surfaces, empty calories, usually covering over something. A nice wedding’s not unlike an old-fashioned colonial war, a meticulously planned, one-sided exercise resulting in a quick victory with minimal casualties for the victors. Danielle’s mother was the perfect field marshal.
“Now, don’t you think we should go over it just once more, dear? . . . The flowers, oh I just know those lilies are going to droop. . . Do you think you could just—yes, that’s it. Perfect!” . . . “Be a dear and just move the teeniest bit that way, sweetheart.” It was quite a good mask actually, the mother-of-the bride’s. Not only could no one object to commands framed as helpless supplication; nobody would think to look any deeper. As you’ll see in a moment, I think of weddings as much like plays, comedies in which individuality is subsumed by the role: Bride, Groom, Best Man, Mother-of-the-Bride, Bridesmaids, Maid-of-Honor. Danielle’s mother was so bossily polite that some people wanted to take her sympathetically by the arm and give it a little squeeze while others, such as myself, searched the room for a piece of furniture large enough to hide under or small enough to throw.
The reductionism of weddings is fierce. Christopher looked handsome with his golfer’s blond hair and stockbroker’s pallor. The best man had a lantern jaw that made you think of a nutcracker. Danielle’s younger brother Richard looked stylishly wasted while her older brother, already a resident in neurosurgery, stood erect beside his tanned, doll-like wife, who was from California. The bridesmaids conducted themselves like an automated corps de ballet. But, for me, the interesting people were Danielle’s parents. If you looked carefully, you could see that her father was sleepwalking, and her hyperactive mother teetered on the cusp of hysteria.
~ ~ ~
Where exactly is the honor in being maid-of-honor? I couldn’t bring myself to regard the role as a privilege. In fact, there’s something ridiculous about the job as there is about the title; the bride’s mother is the director, the bride the focus for the audience’s attention, while the maid-of-honor is at best the prop manager. There are plenty of trivial obligations and a few essential ones, such as not being taller than the best man, and smiling admiringly at the leading lady. A touch of jealousy is also welcome, regret that one is oneself the virgin princess being sacrificed. After Danielle sang me into taking the part, I considered how best to submerge my pail of acid in the vast salt sea of her joy. It was only later that she told me I would actually have to say something. She and her Intended wanted one of those innovative weddings in which the couple rewrites the ceremony and assigns their friends speaking parts.
“Of course, you could read something if you wanted. That’s what most people are going to do. Julie’s doing an E. E. Cummings poem and Cecilia’s found something she likes in Tennyson’s The Princess. She says it’s ludicrous that the most feminist thing she could find about weddings should be by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. But I’d really love it if you’d write something original. Something just for us.” She made a face, almost a frown. “Only please keep your wit in bounds. Not too long, of course, and, please, please, nothing too outrageous.”
“Outrageous?”
“Oh, not that I think you’d ever spoil things, sweetie.”
“Thanks very much.”
“I’d like you to be funny and dignified at the same time. That’s how I think of you.”
“How?”
“Oh, you know, as a kind of cross between George Eliot and Bette Midler.”
~ ~ ~
It was a Saturday wedding, of course. I was supposed to fly in on Thursday but was delayed for a day because my flight was postponed by a hurricane bashing its way up the East Coast. Danielle’s brother Richard was detailed to pick me up on Friday at noon. He looked unwell, even for an undergraduate with bad habits. He looked like an addict with the shits. I sensed something was the matter and he was trying to hide it with levity about the storm. According to him the zenith of the previous night’s amusements came when the electricity went on the fritz for four hours. “Just imagine,” he said. “No blow drying!” We crunched our way into the arboreal suburbs. There was fallen timber by the sides of the roads and twigs scattered over the streets like a plague of snakes.
The big three-story Victorian was certainly re-electrified. I felt it at once; the mansion was seething with negative ions.
Danielle was inordinately glad to see me, all giggles and hugs; but, as in the old days, her body conveyed an unintended message. I found myself watching her feet. She took me up to her room and I thought I was likely to hear some dreadful confidences or last-minute doubts about Christopher; but, like her brother, she only talked about the storm, then whined a little about her boring job. After an hour of this it was clear to me that, while I only wanted to get out of the house, Danielle really needed to.
“We were all cooped up yesterday with the storm and all. Let’s take Miranda over to the barren land.”
“What?”
“The barren land? I know, funny name. The one wild parcel left in town, conservation land. Everybody calls it the barren land.”
“Sounds like a fairy tale.”
“And so it used to be. Come on, let’s blow this pop stand.”
We took the Jeep. Miranda, the family pet, a sheepdog, leapt in the back with the enthusiasm of an Austrian hussar heading for the front in 1914.
That June afternoon has stuck with me like an allegorical dream. It was under the spell of that hour in the barren land that I made a few emendations to my speech. Here’s how it went.
This morning marks the end of a comedy. We’re all here
to be in on the happy ending. But what kind of ending is happy
and is happiness truly an ending?
All plays begin with a gap between the way things are and
the way they ought to be. In tragedies the rent gets wider and
wider, while in comedies the wound closes and heals.
What makes a tragedy tragic is that a family comes to an
end. But in comedies life triumphs and families are saved—not
just saved but perpetuated. Tragedies and comedies are about
the two universal biological experiences: entrance and exit,
sex and death. This is why comedies wind up with proposals,
engagements, and weddings. The play closes in the perfect circle
of the wedding band. People get what they want, but maybe it
would be more accurate to say life gets what it wants.
Life is seldom tongue-tied in its moments of triumph. It may
choose to express its victory fancifully and romantically, as it
does via Mr. Shakespeare:
Now, until the break of day,
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessèd be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
Or it may elect to be brutally realistic, as through the witty
Mr. Shaw:
What we have both done this afternoon is to renounce
happiness, renounce freedom, renounce tranquillity,
above all, renounce the romantic possibilities of an unknown
future for the cares of a household and a family. I beg
that no man may seize the occasion to get half drunk and
utter imbecile speeches at my expense.
No matter. Whether we look at it through romantic gauze or
with hard-headedly void of sentiment, we’re here today for the best
sort of comic ending.
Life simply has nothing more joyous to offer than the
continuation of two families in the founding of a third. And this
church is indeed a theater, a place for showing, for revelation.
Like any play, a wedding ceremony’s purpose is to transform the
private into the public. This is a drama of renewal in which the
audience plays a role of some significance. We’re here not just
because we were lucky enough to be invited, but also because for
the legal consummation of intimacy the State insists on a minimum
of two witnesses.
But, of course, life’s neither tragic nor comic; it’s both. And
while a comic ending is happy indeed, in real life this happiness
isn’t an ending. Even the most fortunate of married couples will
feel pain, endure disappointment, get head colds.
What I mean is that a wedding may be the end of a play, its
joyful dénouement; but marriage isn’t like that, not a drama. As I
imagine it, marriage must be a way of existing in the world. A good
marriage is a durable thing, which, according equally to etymology
and experience, means it is hard. The climax of the wedding drama
is a public choice; but marriage is more than a moment of choice.
It’s a commitment, a choice renewed every morning over the orange
juice.
We guests are not simply an audience; but neither are we just
witnesses. We too have a stake in today’s dramatic transformation.
We represent human society and as such we have to thank Danielle
and Christopher for allowing life its triumph, because even if they
are thinking only of one another that’s what’s going on here, and
that’s why we are happy for ourselves as well as for them.
So, for our own sakes as well as theirs, let’s lift our champagne
flutes.
Let’s join together in wishing the heroine and the hero not only
the bright joy of this climactic moment, but also a sturdy and
abiding happiness in all the difficult moments to come. To Danielle and Christopher.
Gulp.
~ ~ ~
The land was not really barren, just not sealed with macadam or encumbered by a mall. It was about ten acres of forest in the middle of an affluent suburb, crisscrossed with dirt paths through the trees, a pond, green fields of the sort Falstaff died mumbling about. Danielle pulled the Jeep into the parking lot and shut off the Metallica CD.
“This is the one place where you don’t have to keep them on a leash,” said Danielle as she released the dog. Miranda leapt from the SUV and galumphed exuberantly down the path, then dashed back, already drooling. She jumped up on us both, then took off back to the parking area where a middle-aged couple had just gotten out of an Audi and were extracting a German shepherd from the back seat. They looked like an L. L. Bean ad. Danielle ineffectually shouted, “Miranda!” A short bout of ass-sniffing ensued and when the dogs didn’t snarl at each other we all smiled at one another like a foursome of successful matchmakers. The Beans put a leash on the shepherd; Danielle ordered Miranda to her side, and we went our separate ways.
As we walked over a rise and down onto a grassy plain Danielle described the civic war that had resulted in the salvation of the park. Just by the path, but considerately not blocking it, lay a gigantic pine, obviously blown down by the storm. The tree must have been at least fifty feet long, a colossal ruin. The newly torn trunk was fragrant; it made me think of the boys’ woodshop in high school.
“Just look at the size of it,” I said with admiration. I thought for a moment that Danielle was going to cry. As I said, you never knew when she might. Instead, she tore off a piece of the white wood.
“Watch out,” I said. “You’ll get a splinter. Don’t want a splinter on the honeymoon.”
She didn’t look at me. “They’ve been at each other all week.”
I didn’t have to ask who. I just said “Hnnh.”
“Last night they announced they’re going to get a divorce and sell the house. It’s all been decided. He’s moving out right after the wedding.”
Miranda raced up to Danielle, nuzzling, not to comfort, but importuning her to throw the bit of wood. The dog gazed up at Danielle with the whole-hearted, expectant love of a pet, a baby sister or a bridegroom.
Any object at rest is motionless, but the felled pine was more than that; it was ponderously, monumentally inert. Chthonic dead weight. A colossal casualty. And yet, if you looked closely at the ripped trunk, the undulating, brutally exposed heartwood, at the reticulated roots encrusted with broken sod, you couldn’t help but imagine the awful violence of its fall.
Robert Wexelblatt
It’s easy to say what happened to my own parents though impossible to say much about them. Other people don’t have trouble talking about theirs: Dad’s a tax lawyer and Mom makes a terrific lentil soup. They toss in a few vague adjectives--handsome, alcoholic, fat, sweet, abusive—and instantly I picture a lawyer with graying sideburns, a matron in an apron, a bottle of single malt, a diet scale. I even allow for the deceptions of nostalgia and caricature. Nostalgia and caricature are at least something, but whenever I want to recall my parents’ faces, I have to pull out the big brown photo album. Those slick black-and-white portraits, the Kodachrome snapshots, and washed-out Polaroids are surrogates for memories I lack; the pictures aren’t even convincing. Perhaps they do contain some truth, but it’s a truth too partial not to be misleading. A static snapshot doesn’t invite you in, even if you stick your nose right up to it, which is what I used to do when I was a kid. I do have a memory more compelling than the photos, a recollection of a locked bedroom door. The sense of being barred runs deep in me; it’s just the sort of feeling that can turn into a pattern and wreck a life. My parents’ world was the big adult one around me now in which, to tell the truth, I participate only provisionally. I seem unable to move into it with a whole heart, and I’m careful not to let it draw me in. I’ve denied the world a fulcrum on which to set its enormous lever.
The chief reason why it’s hard for me to fix my parents may be that they were utterly normal, the sort of people nailed by the derisory word nondescript. When I see reruns of 50s sit-coms, they seem to me realistic, even portentous. My father did office work in the city; my mother kept house in the suburbs. He commuted; she stayed home. We visited aunts and uncles at regular intervals, ate dinner at six-thirty sharp, had a Christmas tree and presents in December, turkey for Thanksgiving, a cookout on the Fourth of July. Father liked football, told corny jokes, played a little golf. Mother sewed things, enjoyed her canasta with the girls on Wednesday afternoons, and went shopping. My memory is that she talked on the phone with her two closest friends, Mina Farrell and Viola Malkin, every morning. I remember bopping around her feet on the gray bedroom carpet while she chatted away. I was jealous; I wanted her attention. I hated the telephone. As you can see, the little I recall really is as banal as old TV.
Then my mother got galloping leukemia which used to be the non-clinical name for that variety. You think of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ichabod Crane, the Kentucky Derby. Dad quietly arranged a trust for me and made a will saying whom I was to live with should it become necessary and then one night they both took too many sleeping pills and poof. I was six at the time, not old enough to count for much. I’d only just started first grade. There was only one of me; maybe if I’d had a baby sister or brother it would have been different. Pathetic, isn’t it? I woke up. It was February, always the longest month of the year for me. The house was silent and cold. I rubbed my eyes and went to their bedroom and the door was locked. I expect I pounded my little fist against it and called out and cried; it’s hard to remember. Then the phone rang. It was Viola Malkin.
~ ~ ~
Freshman year it felt like Danielle and I stayed up talking half of every night.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made that noise you make.”
“What noise?”
“You know. Hnnh. That noise.”
“I did not. Silly.”
“Did so. You want me to turn the light back on?”
“No. And I don’t make any huh noises.”
“It’s hnnh. I can always tell something’s eating you when you say hnnh.”
“Hnnh?”
“See? Out with it or I’ll be up all night worrying.”
“I was only just thinking—”
“Oh, sweetie, don’t do that. Cogitation’s dysoporific. That means it inhibits sleep. And we need our beauty sleep.”
“You’re always teasing. Nobody likes it. It’s not a bit attractive, you know.”
“Attractive? You think I want to attract you? What do you mean attractive?”
“You know what I mean. Anyway, what do you think it’d be like being married?”
“Married? I think it’s probably more or less like this, like being suitemates. At least if you go in for twin beds. You insult each other in the middle of the night then eat a silent breakfast in the morning. Can’t be a grand passion all the time, as if you were playing Antony and Cleopatra six nights a week with a pair of matinees on weekends. Marriage isn’t romance but the end of it.”
“God, don’t have a cow. Come on, you must’ve thought about it at least a little. I mean, face it. We’re just about the right age, the right age in lots of cultures, the right age before antibiotics made life expectancy shoot up.”
“Oh, the right age, are we? Ladies, synchronize your watches and register your patterns. The right age? Due to what—peer pressure or the hormonal kind? Jesus. Married life. And death. Only two possibilities: either you stay together or you don’t. Neither’s particularly fetching.”
“But that’s just outcomes.”
“Well, call me a relativist. I’m interested in outcomes. For me, the proof’s in the butterscotch pudding. I judge by consequences. I mean you can’t really tell if a play’s a tragedy or a comedy until it’s over, can you? Nope, intentions don’t impress me very much, especially the romantic ones. You know, road to hell—paving materials?”
“Anybody’d think you were a cynic with a 4.0 average.”
“3.8. Look, if you stay together it’s tedious and if you don’t it’s desolating. And if you never tie the knot at all then you wind up envying every brood mare with a colt. The whole thing’s a pain in the ass, you ask me.”
“Seriously? So, you think it’s impossible to be happily married?”
“Impossible? To be happy and married at the same time? Being happy’s not what it’s about, kid. Nature wants babies and fools us into making them for a sugar cookie. The whole business works better if you’ve got a man who sticks around to pick up at least part of the tab for at least part of the time. Nothing to do with happy. All those fairy tales are just social propaganda aimed at us little girls.”
“You know, sometimes it’s a teeny bit too obvious that you had an unhappy childhood.”
“Don’t mock my psychic wounds. It’s extremely unattractive and, besides, they’re precious.”
“I guess you’ll never get married, then?”
“Me? You know the famous cartoon about the caterpillars?”
“Caterpillars?”
“Two caterpillars are walking along a big leaf. There’s this butterfly soaring over them. One caterpillar turns to the other and says, ‘You’ll never get me up in one of those things.’”
“Well, I’m certainly going to. I’m going to go to law school and then defend the indigent and oppressed brilliantly for maybe a couple or three years and then get married and live in a big Victorian house and give fabulous dinner parties.”
“Is hubby going to be Victorian too?”
“Not a bit. He’ll do corporate law, so we’ll be good and rich.”
“You mean you’ll be good and he’ll be rich?”
“All right, I’ll be good and he’ll be rich. It’s a division of labor.”
“And he’ll make you pregnant?”
“Naturally. We’ll have three children and they’ll all come out smooth as silk, adore me and be impeccably clean in mind and body.”
“Like your mom and dad, eh?”
“Mom’s not a lawyer.”
“And you aren’t clean.”
“I am too clean! And so are my brothers, mostly. Besides, they’re so cute together, aren’t they? A matched pair of role models.”
“Your brothers?”
“No, jerk. Mommy and Daddy. When they dropped me off did you see the dear way they—”
“I’m an orphan. I can’t be expected to be moved by public displays of affection between other people’s parents.”
Deep down, Danielle is a sentimental optimist who loves old musicals. Now and then she would break into a song from one of them. I remember her doing a quiet “Marian the Librarian” during finals and “I Feel Pretty” when she was getting ready to go to her first frat party. She called me a cynic pretty often and if I said something particularly bleak, she’d her ragged Paddington at me and then break into soundless weeping. She did weep easily, but Danielle was just as liable to giggle hysterically. I soon learned that neither meant much. Her flurries of tears or gusts of giggling were as inconsequential as passing rain showers. She shouldn’t have gone to law school but on the stage. She was pretty, bubbly, and could persuade you she was sincere, even when she wasn’t. She knew how to use her voice. The smallest inflections could communicate volumes. The same was true of her body and its language of gestures. For example, she had this way of rotating one foot inward and bingo, you’d know she was depressed. Her body always spoke louder than her words. She could deliver a lyric as teasingly as Marilyn Monroe, just as comically and proved it at Hallowe’en in a tight dress and long gloves:
A kiss on the hand
may be quite continental
but diamonds are a girl's best friend.
I’ll bet Danielle is terrific in bed, but I wonder if Chris is the man to appreciate her. I mean, he really is a corporate lawyer and, having slept with a couple specimens of the breed, I’m not engaging in mere uninformed speculation, Your Honor.
Anyway, maybe it was because of our freshman bull session that, eight years later, Danielle drafted me to be her maid-of-honor. I did my best to refuse politely but she talked me around. “Aww, come on,” she said. “We both know—” she paused then broke into full Rodgers and Hammerstein: “You’re jist a girl who cain’t say no.”
~ ~ ~
While I’ll confess to being allergic to these rituals, I can’t deny Danielle’s wedding full marks for niceness. Nice is just what it was—nice church, nice minister, nice food, nice music, nice clothes. Everybody in attendance was nice too, except, maybe, me; but I did my best under the pressure of the encompassing amiability. The Good always has some depth and vitality about it—even a little pathos, because virtue is inconsolable. The Nice, on the other hand, is your basic shellac and sugar, smooth surfaces, empty calories, usually covering over something. A nice wedding’s not unlike an old-fashioned colonial war, a meticulously planned, one-sided exercise resulting in a quick victory with minimal casualties for the victors. Danielle’s mother was the perfect field marshal.
“Now, don’t you think we should go over it just once more, dear? . . . The flowers, oh I just know those lilies are going to droop. . . Do you think you could just—yes, that’s it. Perfect!” . . . “Be a dear and just move the teeniest bit that way, sweetheart.” It was quite a good mask actually, the mother-of-the bride’s. Not only could no one object to commands framed as helpless supplication; nobody would think to look any deeper. As you’ll see in a moment, I think of weddings as much like plays, comedies in which individuality is subsumed by the role: Bride, Groom, Best Man, Mother-of-the-Bride, Bridesmaids, Maid-of-Honor. Danielle’s mother was so bossily polite that some people wanted to take her sympathetically by the arm and give it a little squeeze while others, such as myself, searched the room for a piece of furniture large enough to hide under or small enough to throw.
The reductionism of weddings is fierce. Christopher looked handsome with his golfer’s blond hair and stockbroker’s pallor. The best man had a lantern jaw that made you think of a nutcracker. Danielle’s younger brother Richard looked stylishly wasted while her older brother, already a resident in neurosurgery, stood erect beside his tanned, doll-like wife, who was from California. The bridesmaids conducted themselves like an automated corps de ballet. But, for me, the interesting people were Danielle’s parents. If you looked carefully, you could see that her father was sleepwalking, and her hyperactive mother teetered on the cusp of hysteria.
~ ~ ~
Where exactly is the honor in being maid-of-honor? I couldn’t bring myself to regard the role as a privilege. In fact, there’s something ridiculous about the job as there is about the title; the bride’s mother is the director, the bride the focus for the audience’s attention, while the maid-of-honor is at best the prop manager. There are plenty of trivial obligations and a few essential ones, such as not being taller than the best man, and smiling admiringly at the leading lady. A touch of jealousy is also welcome, regret that one is oneself the virgin princess being sacrificed. After Danielle sang me into taking the part, I considered how best to submerge my pail of acid in the vast salt sea of her joy. It was only later that she told me I would actually have to say something. She and her Intended wanted one of those innovative weddings in which the couple rewrites the ceremony and assigns their friends speaking parts.
“Of course, you could read something if you wanted. That’s what most people are going to do. Julie’s doing an E. E. Cummings poem and Cecilia’s found something she likes in Tennyson’s The Princess. She says it’s ludicrous that the most feminist thing she could find about weddings should be by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. But I’d really love it if you’d write something original. Something just for us.” She made a face, almost a frown. “Only please keep your wit in bounds. Not too long, of course, and, please, please, nothing too outrageous.”
“Outrageous?”
“Oh, not that I think you’d ever spoil things, sweetie.”
“Thanks very much.”
“I’d like you to be funny and dignified at the same time. That’s how I think of you.”
“How?”
“Oh, you know, as a kind of cross between George Eliot and Bette Midler.”
~ ~ ~
It was a Saturday wedding, of course. I was supposed to fly in on Thursday but was delayed for a day because my flight was postponed by a hurricane bashing its way up the East Coast. Danielle’s brother Richard was detailed to pick me up on Friday at noon. He looked unwell, even for an undergraduate with bad habits. He looked like an addict with the shits. I sensed something was the matter and he was trying to hide it with levity about the storm. According to him the zenith of the previous night’s amusements came when the electricity went on the fritz for four hours. “Just imagine,” he said. “No blow drying!” We crunched our way into the arboreal suburbs. There was fallen timber by the sides of the roads and twigs scattered over the streets like a plague of snakes.
The big three-story Victorian was certainly re-electrified. I felt it at once; the mansion was seething with negative ions.
Danielle was inordinately glad to see me, all giggles and hugs; but, as in the old days, her body conveyed an unintended message. I found myself watching her feet. She took me up to her room and I thought I was likely to hear some dreadful confidences or last-minute doubts about Christopher; but, like her brother, she only talked about the storm, then whined a little about her boring job. After an hour of this it was clear to me that, while I only wanted to get out of the house, Danielle really needed to.
“We were all cooped up yesterday with the storm and all. Let’s take Miranda over to the barren land.”
“What?”
“The barren land? I know, funny name. The one wild parcel left in town, conservation land. Everybody calls it the barren land.”
“Sounds like a fairy tale.”
“And so it used to be. Come on, let’s blow this pop stand.”
We took the Jeep. Miranda, the family pet, a sheepdog, leapt in the back with the enthusiasm of an Austrian hussar heading for the front in 1914.
That June afternoon has stuck with me like an allegorical dream. It was under the spell of that hour in the barren land that I made a few emendations to my speech. Here’s how it went.
This morning marks the end of a comedy. We’re all here
to be in on the happy ending. But what kind of ending is happy
and is happiness truly an ending?
All plays begin with a gap between the way things are and
the way they ought to be. In tragedies the rent gets wider and
wider, while in comedies the wound closes and heals.
What makes a tragedy tragic is that a family comes to an
end. But in comedies life triumphs and families are saved—not
just saved but perpetuated. Tragedies and comedies are about
the two universal biological experiences: entrance and exit,
sex and death. This is why comedies wind up with proposals,
engagements, and weddings. The play closes in the perfect circle
of the wedding band. People get what they want, but maybe it
would be more accurate to say life gets what it wants.
Life is seldom tongue-tied in its moments of triumph. It may
choose to express its victory fancifully and romantically, as it
does via Mr. Shakespeare:
Now, until the break of day,
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessèd be;
And the issue there create
Ever shall be fortunate.
Or it may elect to be brutally realistic, as through the witty
Mr. Shaw:
What we have both done this afternoon is to renounce
happiness, renounce freedom, renounce tranquillity,
above all, renounce the romantic possibilities of an unknown
future for the cares of a household and a family. I beg
that no man may seize the occasion to get half drunk and
utter imbecile speeches at my expense.
No matter. Whether we look at it through romantic gauze or
with hard-headedly void of sentiment, we’re here today for the best
sort of comic ending.
Life simply has nothing more joyous to offer than the
continuation of two families in the founding of a third. And this
church is indeed a theater, a place for showing, for revelation.
Like any play, a wedding ceremony’s purpose is to transform the
private into the public. This is a drama of renewal in which the
audience plays a role of some significance. We’re here not just
because we were lucky enough to be invited, but also because for
the legal consummation of intimacy the State insists on a minimum
of two witnesses.
But, of course, life’s neither tragic nor comic; it’s both. And
while a comic ending is happy indeed, in real life this happiness
isn’t an ending. Even the most fortunate of married couples will
feel pain, endure disappointment, get head colds.
What I mean is that a wedding may be the end of a play, its
joyful dénouement; but marriage isn’t like that, not a drama. As I
imagine it, marriage must be a way of existing in the world. A good
marriage is a durable thing, which, according equally to etymology
and experience, means it is hard. The climax of the wedding drama
is a public choice; but marriage is more than a moment of choice.
It’s a commitment, a choice renewed every morning over the orange
juice.
We guests are not simply an audience; but neither are we just
witnesses. We too have a stake in today’s dramatic transformation.
We represent human society and as such we have to thank Danielle
and Christopher for allowing life its triumph, because even if they
are thinking only of one another that’s what’s going on here, and
that’s why we are happy for ourselves as well as for them.
So, for our own sakes as well as theirs, let’s lift our champagne
flutes.
Let’s join together in wishing the heroine and the hero not only
the bright joy of this climactic moment, but also a sturdy and
abiding happiness in all the difficult moments to come. To Danielle and Christopher.
Gulp.
~ ~ ~
The land was not really barren, just not sealed with macadam or encumbered by a mall. It was about ten acres of forest in the middle of an affluent suburb, crisscrossed with dirt paths through the trees, a pond, green fields of the sort Falstaff died mumbling about. Danielle pulled the Jeep into the parking lot and shut off the Metallica CD.
“This is the one place where you don’t have to keep them on a leash,” said Danielle as she released the dog. Miranda leapt from the SUV and galumphed exuberantly down the path, then dashed back, already drooling. She jumped up on us both, then took off back to the parking area where a middle-aged couple had just gotten out of an Audi and were extracting a German shepherd from the back seat. They looked like an L. L. Bean ad. Danielle ineffectually shouted, “Miranda!” A short bout of ass-sniffing ensued and when the dogs didn’t snarl at each other we all smiled at one another like a foursome of successful matchmakers. The Beans put a leash on the shepherd; Danielle ordered Miranda to her side, and we went our separate ways.
As we walked over a rise and down onto a grassy plain Danielle described the civic war that had resulted in the salvation of the park. Just by the path, but considerately not blocking it, lay a gigantic pine, obviously blown down by the storm. The tree must have been at least fifty feet long, a colossal ruin. The newly torn trunk was fragrant; it made me think of the boys’ woodshop in high school.
“Just look at the size of it,” I said with admiration. I thought for a moment that Danielle was going to cry. As I said, you never knew when she might. Instead, she tore off a piece of the white wood.
“Watch out,” I said. “You’ll get a splinter. Don’t want a splinter on the honeymoon.”
She didn’t look at me. “They’ve been at each other all week.”
I didn’t have to ask who. I just said “Hnnh.”
“Last night they announced they’re going to get a divorce and sell the house. It’s all been decided. He’s moving out right after the wedding.”
Miranda raced up to Danielle, nuzzling, not to comfort, but importuning her to throw the bit of wood. The dog gazed up at Danielle with the whole-hearted, expectant love of a pet, a baby sister or a bridegroom.
Any object at rest is motionless, but the felled pine was more than that; it was ponderously, monumentally inert. Chthonic dead weight. A colossal casualty. And yet, if you looked closely at the ripped trunk, the undulating, brutally exposed heartwood, at the reticulated roots encrusted with broken sod, you couldn’t help but imagine the awful violence of its fall.
