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The
Happy Wedding
Ten years ago a middle-aged woman, Lulu, left her city, which she adored, for a man, whom she also adored. Though she regrets nothing about the man she did it for, or with—they both likened their fast connection to a leap off a cliff—she continues to miss her city as the site of several irreplaceable friendships. After years of adjusting and finding her level in her new town, she has come to love it. Her life is good in so many ways, and easier, more pleasant even. Though she knows unmitigated bliss is a fairy tale and appreciates the historical fortuity of email enhancing kinship even more than the phone, she continues to miss her old friends. On her adopted coast, on a Sunday in February, it’s a sunny 68 degrees. Back home, eighteen inches of snow have just fallen. Lulu knows it’s snowing because her sister, who likes to keep her informed about extreme weather, has just called and described the swirling snow as it blankets the tiny terrace outside her living room on the thirty-second floor. In return, Lulu tells her that she is sitting outside, looking at the pink and white buds, which have been bursting for a week now. For a brief astral simultaneity, loss is eclipsed, and they both know it’s gorgeous, perfect, in both places. On her patio, Lulu wears a sun visor and sips a glass of seltzer, enjoying the feel of the mild sunshine on her bare arms and the spring smells of the budding garden. She ruminates about two close friends, Amy and Bill, imagining a conversation about love and loss and friendship taking place in their living room, in Brooklyn.
AMY: That’s not the end of it. Never is. BILL: Dead friends are still friends. They’re just frozen in time. The truth about cryonics, pace Disney, is that you do live on. AMY: But memory’s always changing. We’re all rewriting our scripts feverishly just to sustain them. Recognize them. LULU: All you have to do is look at old photographs. So many dead people. But frozen doesn’t quite get at where they are when they’re gone. BILL: There’s a loss, but there’s also an expansion. You know you’re more because they were in your life. AMY: They’re frozen and they’re not. Because you’re continually reinventing who they were to you—pumping them up, putting them down. BILL: The trick is to avoid nostalgia for what never was. AMY: Exactly. LULU: Do you ever think your life—and everyone’s—is like Henny Penny. Remember that awful story? BILL: You’re going along, and going along, though you don’t know your own personal sky is falling. AMY: And you’re totally invested in the telling. BILL: Imagine. LULU: I hate to admit it, but Aristotle seems to be right yet again. He says you don’t need to see the play, just know the script—the muthos—the story, the plot. BILL: He’s saying the play’s not the thing. There are many routes to knowing. LULU: He was such a stinkin’ cautious moderate. AMY (winking): And a good thing, too. LULU: But he’s trashing the play, too. That’s not OK. BILL: Yes and no. Not from the point of view of the magnificence of theatre, but it’s a plus for those who hate theatre or never get a chance to go. There’s hope for them. LULU: Maybe. I’ve been thinking about alternate routes to knowledge. And best-case construals of our lives…and change, time, and space. AMY: In other words, what’s happening—the milieu of our histories? LULU: The people who started out married, divorce. BILL: And those who start out single, couple up. Admit it. AMY: People who look committed to the City, wimp out and move to the burbs. LULU: Most people we know experience intimacy—and the horror of its slow, twisted transformation into loathing—serially, incommensurably, with different partners. BILL: The parallel universe theory is good as far as it goes, but it lets the present trump the past. AMY: And we know that’s a lie. LULU: I think it might be easier for you than the rest of us in this respect. AMY: Because we’re together so long? LULU: Not just longevity, anyone can do that. Stay locked in. But thriving and passionate too. AMY: There are many kinds of parallel universe. For a long time it was just us, with Bill’s kids on weekends, helping them finish growing up. Then we had Rosie, and three years later we had Max—our kids. I can’t believe it. LULU: I know. There was a long time without kids. Talk about alternate realities. They really are different lives. AMY: And you witnessed all of them. Prince Street. Eighty-eighth Street. Park Slope. Connecticut. LULU: Oh, my god. I remember when you told me you were moving to Connecticut for two years so Nat wouldn’t have to change schools and leave his friends. Worked in that bookstore. You did that for Nat—but you really did it for Bill. BILL: Amy’s amazing. LULU: You’re both amazing. From my point of view, decades of trying and serial failure, you both were extraordinarily flexible, and that meant you could—and did—do extreme difference with the same partner. My guys couldn’t cope with meeting the cousins at Thanksgiving, let alone the substance of partnership. AMY: True. Continuity amidst all the discontinuity has been a big help. I think we both know that. And having good process together. LULU: I watched you live negotiate so much with extraordinary grace and generosity. I kind of learned how central being generous is from you. BILL: Lulu, you’re one of the most generous people I know. LULU: I had good teachers. It took a while to get there. I came from kamikaze/complainer/poor-me mode. Don’t you think feeling sorry for yourself always has had a sympathetic audience—more so than a rare happy story—like yours? I used to think only extremity was good. BILL: Admitting Aristotle might be right about the value of moderation is sobering. LULU (laughing): Humiliating. BILL: People like drama. That’s why my high school kids like the plays I teach. LULU: People also like a good example. These days, a happy story is so rare. AMY: Yeah. So much emotional suffering—on top of everything else. LULU: “So why did they do it?” we were all asking each other at your wedding. It was a great ice-breaker. After twenty years and two kids? You’re as close to happy as people get, and lively, too. Alone among the throngs of fakers and cowards. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Connecticut, and back to Brooklyn. It’s been a long and complicated haul. AMY: Something we couldn’t articulate—even to each other. LULU: My haircutter, a dyke who married on Maui months before, told me two days before I flew to your wedding, “It’s different, and I don’t know why.” I spent twenty years railing against monogamy and state-sanctioned legitimacy, when really, I couldn’t do it. When I finally got it together, and met the right person, I realized I wanted the normalcy of being “married” too. It was also the one thing I hadn’t done. So we did it. I never looked back. AMY: That wasn’t my issue. For me, us, it was about community, how fragile it is. We celebrated. We made a big party, made ourselves the center. We planned and arranged, and so many friends came in—even from Europe and the West Coast. And had fun. BILL: Creating a time-space to publicly celebrate our relationship. What the culture calls wedding. We’d never done that. LULU: Though you could have done “wedding” without “marriage.” AMY: It’s so American—love and marriage. Go together like a horse and carriage. They do and they don’t. LULU: Your wedding was a year and eleven days after September 11th. All you had to do was look out of the window. No one at your wedding could look out the wall of windows in that Brooklyn loft facing the spectacular lower Manhattan skyline and not notice their absence. We danced the day into night in the shadow of those absent Towers. AMY: Every laugh, every touch, every moment of awe or joy or pleasure. I savor it like never before. We’re all on borrowed time now. BILL: It was Amy’s idea. She wanted to say, there’s love, not just loss and contingency. AMY: So where are we on change and Henny Penny? LULU: I don’t know. It’s certainly not a balance sheet—so wonderful and terrible at the same time. Here’s to happiness beyond loss, inside of loss. All we’ve got. AMY: It’s tough. We got married to ratchet it up a notch. Or down. LULU: If that can be imagined. So much for Aristotle. AMY: But it was about closeness. To celebrate our luck holding, amid all the loss. LULU: And pluck. And intensity. Each to each. And trust. AMY: Never too much of that these days. LULU: Or any day. BILL: It may not look it, but we’re all fighting for our lives—now. LULU: You guys are great! AMY:
You too.
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