The New World: A Novel (15 page)

 

Jim couldn’t remember the chaplain’s name, but he liked to think it had been Dick, way back in his intern years. Dick said it couldn’t have been him because it was never his style to let someone tell him to fuck off every day. “You don’t understand,” Jim said. “We had an understanding!” And he imagined sometimes, a little wistfully, the conversation he and Dick might have had during those weeks in rehab when Jim was getting ready for his wedding—though it would be another whole year before he was well enough, and then another year after that before it was all arranged—learning to walk down the aisle, and button a tuxedo shirt, and speak his vows in a clear, strong voice. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had to wait five years to figure out I wanted to be a chaplain. And I think if I had been a chaplain sooner it would have made me a better husband.”

“You always get everything backwards,” said Dick. “It’s being a better husband that makes you a better chaplain.” They were in the pastoral care office, alone since it was a Saturday afternoon and they were the only two chaplains on duty. Jim was looking for a car service to go fetch Jane from the airport that night and bring her to the restaurant.

Jim was about to argue with Dick some more, but then his pager went off. Dick held out his hand. “I’ll take that. Go get your wife some flowers. And not from the gift shop, either.” They left the office together, then split off, Dick heading left toward the main hospital and the
icu
s, and Jim walking down the long hall toward the Broadway exit. He thought he should go home, since he suddenly felt too full of his own story, too eager to tell some stranger about his fragile and unbreakable marriage, to minister properly to anybody.

By the time he reached the end of the hall, he had regained some of his confidence. He said to himself,
I am going to bring my love for my wife into every room I visit today.
He waved to the guard at the door and passed through, into the foyer. He stopped at the second set of double doors, almost into the afternoon sunshine. A lady was walking through the doors in the opposite direction, but she paused when she saw his face.

“Whoa,” Jim said, putting a hand to his chest, feeling a strange poke at the heart. “What’s
that
?”

 

“Come here much?” Jim whispered to Millicent, while they were waiting at the altar for Jane and her mother. He was trying not to look at all the people in the church. He couldn’t tell his side from Jane’s side all of a sudden, or remember if they had decided to segregate the guests like that.

“Stop talking,” Millicent said through her smile. “People will think you’re having second thoughts.” When he had asked Jane’s mother a week before if it might not be bad luck to have a second wedding, she had replied that it was
perfectly normal
to want to cancel the wedding. It was
perfectly normal
to want to run away. Ponderously, she gave him permission to have those feelings, and after that Millicent started telling him, whenever she could lean in discreetly at his ear, how all sorts of things were
perfectly normal
to feel in the run up to the ceremony. It was
perfectly normal
, she said, to want to make a murder plan for each guest, or to wish the cake could be full of beetles, and it was
perfectly normal
to wish you could be married by a big red dildo instead of a priest.

He started to giggle as they waited, and Millicent pinched him. “Nobody’s even looking at us,” he whispered, which was true. Everyone had turned to watch the bride coming down the aisle. Jane looked very tall next to her mother. A trick of the light made the veil opaque, and for a moment it looked to Jim like Jane had a fancy silk bag over her head, or like someone had wrapped up her face for the morgue.

Millicent pinched him again, much more gently. She was the only person in the church looking at him instead of at Jane, but already all the heads were swiveling around. “Everything will be fine as soon as you see her face,” Millicent said, and kissed Jim’s cheek. Then she took a step back with her sister and stood behind him. He and Jane couldn’t decide who to ask to be in the bridal party—they were both only children and had no close friends but each other—so they didn’t ask anyone. Millicent and Marilynne were their best people.

He hadn’t been anxious at all about the wedding—they were already married, so wasn’t this one just for show? But now he was terrified. All of a sudden he wanted a little more time, just enough for somebody—Jane if she could make herself available right now, or Millicent, or even a random stranger—to tell him a few dozen times that everything was going to be okay.

We are already married
, Jim kept telling himself, and then,
It
’s perfectly normal for the groom to shit himself
. But after he raised the veil and saw Jane’s apprehensive and exultant face, and as the priest went through the first part of the ceremony, he came to know, without having to hear it from anyone, that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. He didn’t say to Jane,
Oh, that’s right—I love you
, though that seemed, in the moment, like it would be better to say that than the vows they’d written together. Certainly it would have been
easier
to say. He didn’t forget the vows—they’d decided it would be classier to memorize them—but he was so nervous he could barely pay attention to what he was saying. He and Jane spoke simultaneously, looking each other right in the face, and the looking turned out to be very hard. It felt like the first time in his life he’d ever looked somebody in the eye and said something that he meant. He’d been given so many wedding warnings and so much wedding advice, and yet no one had warned him about this. He felt like he should be very quiet when he spoke, and like he should shout, and like he should put a hand to Jane’s cheek, and like he should choke her throat for passion. All these promises they were speaking had sounded sweet and prudent when they hashed them out at the dinner table, but now they were ambitious, exalted, and
scary
. The priest gave them permission to kiss each other.

“I love you,” Jim said, in a daze. He was worried that he had neglected somehow to mention that in the vows. “I love you,” she replied, because she was masterful like that—omitting the “too,” declaring by the omission that nobody ever really went first in love, the “too” was only an accident of time, not a cause and an effect, not two causes in search of an effect. It was a causeless effect.

They had agreed not to use any tongue for the kiss, settling on something passionate and chaste, a
Gone With the Wind
sort of kiss, mouths open as if they might start trading breath, held for five seconds, which they both agreed as long enough to give people a little thrill. When they had stopped to consider it, they had both liked the idea of making the people watching them a little horny. But Jim hadn’t considered they might do that to themselves. And of course it was normal, opening an interior eye during the kiss, to see a future together, to measure the time in apartments or houses or cats or even children. Jim’s daze was lifting, the vows were coming back to him. That’s what the kiss is for, he told himself. To have a little time to think together about all those marvelous and terrifying things you just said. They had sworn to remain
always together
and
never apart
. Not in any way that matters.
Occasionally straying, maybe
, Jim said to himself now,
but always returning, until we die.
He saw that, too: advanced old age spent hand in hand on a sun-dappled park bench and then mindless decay into matched graves.

As they kissed, Jane saw the past, the little accidents of fate (parallel schedules in medical school, coincidentally matching to the same hospital for residency) and the big accident of cheated fate that had brought them here, standing too long in their marriage kiss and using too much tongue in front of a hundred strangers and her mother and Millicent. None of them ought to see this. Not even Millicent, who had taught Jane to kiss, inspecting the motions of Jane’s tongue as she made out with a clear plastic bag and composing mnemonics by which Jane might remember how to be a thoughtful and surprising lover of a boy’s mouth.
Maybe we are holding this kiss too long?
Jane said to herself, exulting at the same time, in a hope like knowledge, that the kiss was never going to end.

“We kissed too long, didn’t we?” Jane asked Jim in the limousine on the way to the reception, which they held at an arts club not very far from where Jim had been run over by the taxi. Jane’s mother had instructed the limo driver to take the long way there, and avoid passing that particular corner.

“We sure did,” he said. “Let’s do it again right now.”

“Not just yet,” she said. At the reception she polled the few people she thought would be honest with her. “Just a little,” her new friend Maureen said. “It was a
little
vulgar, sure. But it made me jealous, you know. I wish somebody had kissed me like that at my wedding. Anybody at all. Even the priest!” “Don’t be stupid,” said Millicent. “If you start regretting sexy kisses, then I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.” And Jane’s mother said, “Of course it was.” They were dancing together—her mother was being her father and Millicent was being her mother with Jim, a few feet away. “And of course I blushed for you. And if I had been the officiant I would have given a prearranged signal to let you know. Because it’s hard to remember when to stop. But do you know what I tell newlyweds when they ask me that question?”

“That they fucked up? That they have to do it all over again? That they’re not actually married?”

“That it’s good luck,” her mother said, kissing her cheek and passing her off to Jim. Jane could tell he was getting worn out already by the way he hung on her shoulders. He was still easy to tire, and when he drank, his coordination started to slip.

“We fucked up with that kiss,” Jane said. “My mother said we have to do it over again.”

“Hooray,” he said, and kissed her. But she drew back, saying she couldn’t dance and kiss at the same time. She said that again, a few minutes later at the end of the dance, and again when they sat down, and again around the cake-cutting. “Come on,” Jim said, pretty drunk by now. “Let’s make out a little. We can slide under the table, if you’re worried about people watching us.”

“You’re too tired,” she said. “But it’s too bad I don’t still have my veil.” It really would have been nice to put it down again. They ought to let you do that at your wedding, just pull down the shade for a few moments of privacy and contemplation, or even just to have a moment in which to appreciate one nice long moment, since she was barely getting to pay proper attention to her own wedding. The strangers—why had she invited all these strangers?—kept coming up to talk at her, so she’d had no time to decide if the salmon was too wet or too dry, or whether the wine was any good, or if she liked the signature wedding cocktail they’d paid five hundred dollars for somebody to think up and then write down on a little card to go into the favor bags. “Are you having a good time?” Jim kept asking her, and she kept saying, “I think so!” or “Probably!” or “I’ll tell you in an hour when I catch up to myself!”
At least I paid attention to the kiss
, she told herself.

But when they were finally alone again, standing in their stained and rumpled finery at the apartment door, she found herself unready. “Maybe we should go to a hotel after all,” she said. “Maureen was right. We shouldn’t come home again until after the honeymoon.”

“Too late,” Jim said, his hand already on the doorknob. “What’s wrong?”

She knew it was silly to avoid making out with your newly recertified husband just because you were afraid it wasn’t going to be as good as the wedding make-out.
It’s perfectly all right if it’s all downhill from here
, she said to herself, and started kissing him while he was still fiddling drunkenly with the lock.

Don’t compare!
she told herself. She kissed him thoughtfully, tentatively, and found it to be exactly the same. It brought her right back to the wedding kiss, and once she was there, she realized that it was the
audience
, not she or Jim, that was at risk of humiliation, that she and Jim might be making their guests feel bad about their own inaugural kisses, their own relationships. Happiness in love, she thought, like obscene wealth or an ostomy bag, ought to be tastefully concealed. She and Jim ought to be up there in smartly tailored but very plain love, love that had a pool but no poolhouse, no-logo love. Anything else had to be bad luck. Anything else, the universe would punish one day. She knew all these things, but she didn’t stop.

And just like Jim, she took the time to consider what they had just said to each other, since she’d also been too anxious to really pay attention, a few minutes before, when she was actually speaking the vows.
Always together
, she had sworn with him,
never apart
. Maureen had said they ought to surprise each other with their vows, but Jane knew that was a terrible idea. She hated surprises. Every surprise of her life so far had been a bad one. And Jim’s vows weren’t just gifts, after all. Neither were Jane’s own. They were a contract. They were a promise not to fuck things up, which could mean something only if the two of them explicitly acknowledged, in the vows themselves, the ways in which they had already fucked up.

Or at least the way that she had fucked up.
Always together, never apart
. But what that meant for her was:
I won’t run away again. Whatever happens, no matter how scared I am, I’ll wait it out with
you.
She had time, as the wedding kiss went on and on, to look squarely at their last Indian dinner, at her own behavior. When they sat down, she was already afraid, though not because she was expecting Jim to propose to her. She would have behaved better if she’d been expecting it.

But all she had was a feeling that something terrible was going to happen. Jim had been making her uneasy all day long, encroaching aggressively on her bed space in the morning even though they’d already resigned themselves to the fact that she was a nighttime cuddler and he a morning one, then paging her all day long just to ask her dreamily what she was doing now, and finally wanting to hold her hand on the sidewalk even when they were walking against the stream of commuters going up Broadway. She had walked ahead of him, still holding his hand, so it must have looked for all the world that she was leading him like a child.

“Don’t you like your tikka?” he asked.

“It’s lovely,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Sorry if I’m being horrible.”

“You’re not being horrible. Have some naan. It’s right out of the oven. Take some.”

“But I don’t think I’m even hungry,” she said, shrinking away when he thrust it at her. When he didn’t take it back, she tore off a piece and put it in her mouth. Now all the waiters were looking at them, and some were walking to the table. “Oh,” she said when she bit the ring, “there’s a rock in the bread.” The staff rushed in—to help her, she thought, but they gathered around Jim as he lurched to one knee and then they all began to sing.

Heart of my heart, I love you
Life would be naught without you

Jim had taken her hand. She held on to his as long as she could, perfectly in control of her clutching fingers even if it felt like the rest of her body, which was already straining to run away, belonged to someone else. She was full of questions for Jim—
Why do I feel accused by this proposal? Where do their thick Indian accents go when these gentlemen sing
?
—but he was too busy, too caught up with his own question, for her to ask him any of her own.