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In the Marriage Court at City Hall we wait in line, fill out forms, pay a fee. There aren’t many other people here. The other couples are young, some perhaps even teenagers; one couple has a little girl with them, so small that she won’t remember the morning she watched her parents get married. We sit together on a bench, holding hands. Alba has the papers, and I try to read them without her noticing. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“What is the date today?”
Alba shows me the form. May 14, 1981. “Oh,” I say, disappointed.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“May is a terrible month to be married,” I tell her. “And dates with the number four are no good. We should have made sure this was a more auspicious day.”
She can’t hide her smile. “Please don’t worry,” she says. The clerk calls our names. Alba stands. “Unless you want to call it off?”
“No, no,” I assure her. I stand and follow Alba down the ugly corridor and into the judge’s office. The judge is a small woman, and to my delight is Chinese. That feels lucky.
“Where are your families?” the judge wants to know. She addresses me in Mandarin.
“We are far from home,” I tell her. “Unfortunately, none of our parents are able to be here.” Alba waits, uncomprehending, while we talk about distance, and immigration. I do a little mental math: Alba’s mother is nine years old and her father is seventeen. My parents aren’t born yet. In English, the judge instructs us to face each other and to hold hands. We repeat the vows after her. We solemnly swear that we do not know of any lawful impediments to our marriage. (Alba warned me they would ask this, as though she was worried I might say something.) I take Alba to be my lawfully wedded wife; Alba takes me to be her lawfully wedded husband. We exchange rings. The judge pronounces us husband and wife. We kiss, briefly, but enthusiastically. We are married!
Alba: The evening of our wedding, Oliver and I are in bed in the Yellow House, drunk on champagne and overstuffed with food (we went to Chinatown for our wedding feast—Oliver did all the ordering and I wasn’t always sure what I was eating, but the proprietor kept bringing extra dishes and strangers kept toasting us and it was the most delightful meal I’ve ever had), and Oliver asks me if we are criminals now.
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” I reply. “I’m the bad one.”
“But are we really married?” Oliver asks.
“It’s a chicken/egg problem. Our marriage comes first, chronologically, but I was younger when I married Zach, and I am still married to him. Come to think of it, Zach and I had trouble getting a marriage license. They made me prove my age; now I see why.”
“Am I the chicken, or the egg?” Oliver wonders, his voice thick with drowsiness.
“Both,” I say. He doesn’t reply, but kisses me. And so, we are married.
Part Four
Always Again
That is why the sadness passes:
the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added,
has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber
and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream.
And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe
that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a
guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come,
perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that
the future enters us in this way in order
to be transformed in us, long before it happens.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Stephen Mitchell, translation
Parrots Do Love
Saturday, August 31, 2041 (Beck is 65, Isadora is 32)
