Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (36 page)

In so doing, I have finally found my own little corner within matrimony's long and curious history. So that is where I will park myself--right there in this place of quiet subversion, in full remembrance of all the other stubbornly loving couples across time who also endured all manner of irritating and invasive bullshit in order to get what they ultimately wanted: a little bit of privacy in which to practice love.

Alone in that corner with my sweetheart at last, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Marriage and Ceremony

NOTHING NEW HERE EXCEPT MY MARRUING,
WHICH TO ME IS A MATTER OF PROFOUND WONDER.

--Abraham Lincoln,
in an 1842 letter to Samuel Marshall

Things moved very quickly after that.

By December 2006, Felipe still hadn't secured his immigration papers, but we sensed that victory was coming. Actually, we
decided
that victory was coming and so we went ahead and did the one specific thing the Department of Homeland Security expressly tells you not to do if you are waiting for a partner's immigration visa to be cleared: We made plans.

The first priority? We needed a place to settle permanently once we were married. Enough renting, enough wandering. We needed a house of our own. So while I was still there in Bali with Felipe, I started seriously and openly searching for homes on the Internet, looking for something rural and quiet located within a comfortable driving distance of my sister in Philadelphia. It's a crazy thing to look at houses when you can't, in fact,
look
at any of the houses, but I had a clear vision of what we needed--a home inspired by a poem my friend Kate Light once wrote about her version of perfect domesticity: "A house in the country to find out what's true / a few linen shirts, some good art / and you."

I knew I would recognize the place when I found it. And then I did find it, hidden in a small mill town in New Jersey. Or rather, it wasn't really a house, but a church--a tiny, square Presbyterian chapel, built in 1802, that somebody had cleverly converted into a living space. Two bedrooms, a compact kitchen, and one big open sanctuary where the congregation used to gather. Fifteen-foot-tall wavy glass windows. A big maple tree in the front yard. This was it. From the other side of the planet, I put down a bid without ever having seen the property in person. A few days later, over there in distant New Jersey, the owners accepted my offer.

"We have a house!" I announced triumphantly to Felipe.

"That's marvelous, darling," he said. "Now all we need is a country."

So I set forth to secure us a country, damn it. I went back to the States alone, right before Christmas, and took care of all our business. I signed the closing papers on our new house, got our belongings out of storage, leased a car, bought a mattress. I found warehouse space in a nearby village where we could relocate Felipe's gemstones and goods. I registered his business as a New Jersey corporation. All this before we even knew for sure if he would be allowed back into the country. I settled us in, in other words, before we were even officially an "us."

Meanwhile, back in Bali, Felipe plunged into the last frantic preparations for his upcoming interview at the American Consulate in Sydney. As the date for his interview approached (it was alleged to be sometime in January), our long-distance conversations became almost entirely administrative. We lost all sense of romance--there was no time for it--as I studied the bureaucratic checklists a dozen times over, making sure he had assembled every single piece of paper that he would eventually need to turn over to the American authorities. Instead of sending him messages of love, I was now sending e-mails that read, "Darling, the lawyer says that I need to drive to Philly and pick up the forms from him in person, since they have a special barcode and cannot be faxed. Once I mail these to you, the first thing you need to do is sign/ date Form DS-230 Part I and send it to the consulate with the addendum. You will need to bring the original DS-156 document and all the other immigration documents to the interview--but remember: Until you are right there in the presence of the American interviewing officer, DO NOT SIGN FORM DS-156!!!!"

At the next-to-last minute, though, only a few days before the scheduled interview, we realized we had fumbled. We were missing a copy of Felipe's police record from Brazil. Or, rather, we were missing a document that would prove that Felipe did not
have
a police record in Brazil. Somehow this critical piece of the dossier had escaped our attention. What followed was a horrible flurry of panic. Would this delay the whole process? Was it even possible to secure a Brazilian police report without Felipe's having to fly to Brazil to pick it up in person?

After a few days of incredibly complicated transglobal phone calls, Felipe managed to convince our Brazilian friend Armenia--a woman of celebrated charisma and resourcefulness--to stand in line all day at a Rio de Janeiro police station and sweet-talk an official there into releasing Felipe's clean Brazilian police records over to her. (There was a certain poetic symmetry to the fact that she rescued us in the end, given that she was the person who had introduced us to each other three years before at a dinner party in Bali.) Then Armenia overnighted those documents from Brazil to Felipe in Bali--just in time for him to fly to Jakarta during a monsoon in order to find an authorized translator who could render all his Brazilian paperwork into the necessary English in the presence of the only American-government-authorized Portuguese-speaking legal notary in the entire nation of Indonesia.

"It's all very straightforward," Felipe assured me, calling me in the middle of the night from a bicycle rickshaw in the pouring Javanese rain. "We can do this. We can do this. We can do this."

On the morning of January 18, 2007, Felipe was the first person in line at the U.S. Consulate in Sydney. He hadn't slept in days but he was ready, carrying a terrifyingly complex stack of papers: government records, medical exams, birth certificates, and masses of other sundry evidence. He hadn't gotten a haircut in a long while and he was still wearing his travel sandals. But it was fine. They didn't care how he looked, only that he was legitimate. And despite a few testy questions from the immigration official about what exactly Felipe had been doing in the Sinai Peninsula in 1975 (the answer? falling in love with a beautiful seventeen-year-old Israeli girl, naturally), the interview went well. At the end of it all, finally--with that satisfying, librarian-like
thunk
in his passport--they gave him the visa.

"Good luck on your marriage," said the American official to my Brazilian fiance, and Felipe was free.

He caught a Chinese Airlines flight the next morning from Sydney, which took him through Taipei and then over to Alaska. In Anchorage, he successfully passed through American customs and immigration and boarded a plane for JFK. A few hours later, I drove through an icy-cold winter's night to meet him.

And while I would like to think that I had held myself together with a modicum of stoicism during the previous ten months, I must confess that I now absolutely fell apart as soon as I arrived at the airport. All the fears that I had been suppressing since Felipe's arrest came spilling out in the open now that he was so close to being safely home. I became dizzy and shaky, and I was suddenly afraid of everything. I was afraid that I was in the wrong airport, at the wrong hour, on the wrong day. (I must have looked at the itinerary seventy-five times, but I still worried.) I was afraid that Felipe's plane had crashed. I was retroactively and quite insanely afraid that he would fail his immigration interview back in Australia--when he had, in fact, just
passed
his immigration interview back in Australia only a day earlier.

And even now, even though the Arrivals board clearly announced that his flight had landed, I was perversely afraid that his flight had
not
landed, and that it would never land.
What if he didn't get off the plane? What if he got off the plane and they arrested him again? Why was it taking him so long to get off the plane?
I scanned the faces of every passenger who came down that Arrivals corridor, searching for Felipe in the most preposterous of forms. Irrationally, I had to look twice at every single old Chinese lady with a cane and every single toddling child, just to make doubly sure that it wasn't him. I was having trouble breathing. Like a lost kid, I almost ran over to a policeman and asked for help--but help with
what
?

Then, suddenly, it was him.

I would know him anywhere. The most familiar face in the world to me. He was running down the Arrivals corridor, looking for me with the same anxious expression that I was surely sporting myself. He had on the same clothes he'd been wearing the day he'd been arrested back in Dallas ten months earlier--the same clothes he'd been wearing pretty much every day of this whole year, all over the world. He was a bit tattered around the edges, yes, but somehow he seemed mighty to me nonetheless, his eyes burning with the effort to spot me in the crowd. He was not an old Chinese lady, he was not a toddling child, he was not anybody else. He was Felipe--my Felipe, my human, my cannonball--and then he saw me and he barreled down on me and almost knocked me over with the sheer force of his impact.

"We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two," wrote Walt Whitman. "We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy."

And now we could not let go of each other, and for some reason I simply could not stop sobbing.

Within a handful of days, we were married.

We got married in our new home--in that odd, old church--on a cold Sunday afternoon in February. It's very convenient, it turns out, to own a church when one has to get married.

The marriage license cost us twenty-eight dollars and a photocopy of one utility bill. The guests were: my parents (married forty years); my Uncle Terry and Aunt Deborah (married twenty years); my sister and her husband (married fifteen years); my friend Jim Smith (divorced for twenty-five years); and Toby the family dog (never married, bi-curious). We all wished that Felipe's children (unmarried) could have joined us, too, but the wedding happened on such short notice that there was no way to get them over in time from Australia. We had to make do with a few excited phone calls, but could not risk a delay. We needed to seal this deal immediately to protect Felipe's place on American soil with an inviolable legal bond.

In the end, we had decided that we wanted a few witnesses at our wedding after all. My friend Brian was right: Marriage is not an act of private prayer. Instead, it is both a public and a private concern, with real-world consequences. While the intimate terms of our relationship would always belong solely to Felipe and me, it was important to remember that a small share of our marriage would always belong to our families as well--to all those people who would be most seriously affected by our success or our failure. They needed to be present on that day, then, in order to emphasize this point. I also had to admit that another small share of our vows, like it or not, would always belong to the State. That's what made this a legal wedding in the first place after all.

But the smallest and most curiously shaped share of our vows belonged to history--at whose impressively large feet we all must kneel eventually. Wherever you have landed in history determines to a large extent what your marriage vows will look like and sound like. Since Felipe and I happened to have landed right there, in that little Garden State mill town, in the year 2007, we decided not to write our own idiosyncratic personal promises (we had done that back in Knoxville anyhow), but to acknowledge our place in history by repeating the basic, secular vows of the State of New Jersey. It just felt like an appropriate nod to reality.

Of course, my niece and nephew attended the wedding, too. Nick, the theatrical genius, was on hand to read a commemorative poem. And Mimi? She had cornered me a week earlier and asked, "Is this going to be a
real
wedding or not?"

"That all depends," I'd said. "What do you think constitutes a real wedding?"

"A real wedding means there will be a flower girl," Mimi replied. "And the flower girl will be wearing a pink dress. And the flower girl will be carrying flowers. Not a
bouquet
of flowers, but a
basket
of rose petals. And not pink rose petals, either, but
yellow
rose petals. And the flower girl will walk in front of the bride, and she will throw the yellow rose petals on the ground. Will you be having anything like that?"