In the past week, an old friend and a business acquaintance both wrote mentioning the impending marriages of their children. The former will officiate at his son's ceremony, which reminded me of a passage from The Persuasion, my novel featuring Margaret Fuller. On a warm and beautiful summer day much like the one when the two characters, Mariana and Tonin, marry, I offer this short excerpt:
From The Persuasion, Chapter Nine:
On July 19, a Wednesday, at four in the afternoon, Tonin and I were standing in the sunny field of wild lavender in front of T-ville’s dome. Deep in Pale Brook Park, him in a purple Nehru shirt and black pants, me in my purple Biafra Rising dress, facing Red Bird, in turquoise pajamas she’d bought in Chinatown.
Bird read us hexagrams from the I Ching, “The Creative” and “The Receptive;" we countered with words Tonin and I had written, almost all in French, which no one but us really understood, pledging fealty, constancy, honesty, and, above all, love “until,” as we recited together, “the Universe itself swirled out of existence.” His hands shook as he slipped the wedding ring on my finger, a simple platinum band, the counterpart to the slightly wider one that I glided onto his. On the inside of each was inscribed “M&T – 19 Juillet 1973 - pour toute l'éternité,” which the jeweler, whom we’d rushed to do the job, called “an ungodly number of characters for such small rings.” (He stopped complaining when Tonin pulled out his checkbook and signed over an additional hundred.)
“You may now kiss the groom,” Red Bird said, which I did, and then we cupped each other’s temples, drew our palms across the other's shoulders and down the arms, interlinking our fingers and twisting our wrists together, wrapping ourselves tight and kissing again for a very long time.
We cried and laughed as Tonin’s grandfather snapped pictures with his Hasselblad (“Don’t squint so much, Tonie,” he said), his grandmother swatted at mosquitoes with her straw hat, Janos and Erika kissed passionately, and my aunt sobbed uncontrollably for her sister’s absence. Through the glint of tears, I thought I saw both my missing parents beaming back at us from the clearing beyond the blueberry bushes at the field’s edge — and next to them that same woman who’d applauded us at the Brattleboro juice bar.
At that moment, the veil between them and us was porous; I didn’t know whether they were really there or not—and I didn’t care. Tonin and I were crossing into a new dimension together, and, as much as we claimed to discount the institution of marriage, we were ecstatic to become husband and wife.
My uncle Irving, a very sweet man who bore such a resemblance to the comedian Danny Kaye that people stopped him on the street and asked for his autograph, had brought along a record player and some L.P.s, which he set up in the dining cabin for the reception, such as it was. After stuffing ourselves like turkeys on Red Bird’s delectable feast, we danced past midnight to The Supremes, the Beatles, and my parents’ favorite song, “The Sunny Side of the Street.” Even though I had been so little then, I still could remember them doing the Charleston to this tune with huge crazy smiles on their faces in the living room of our apartment in Brooklyn.
Tonin and I danced and danced past the time everyone else had gone to bed, finally slumping onto the glider on the porch of the dining hall, falling asleep half-sitting up with our arms around each other. We woke when the sun started its climb, grabbed our sleeping bags, and hiked back up to the geodesic dome that Tonin had been building for so long. We could smell the lavender before we could see the field. We went into the dome, spread our sleeping bags on the floor, lit a candle, and made love.
“Mrs. Me,” Tonin said when we were done.
“Mr. Me,” I replied.
