But his father was never swept away. He was too strong. In the nighttime heat of our bedroom in Bali, under our damp and billowing mosquito nets, Felipe showed me what a strong swimmer his dad had been. He imitated his father’s beautiful stroke, lying there on his back in the humid night air, swimming, his arms faint and ghostly. Across all these lost decades, Felipe could still replicate the exact sound that his father’s arms made as they sliced through the fast dark waters: “Shush-a, shush-a, shush-a…”
And now that memory-that sound-swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe’s father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe’s father at all anymore, and only one of them-until the moment Felipe shared this story with me-recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.
This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.
This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father’s swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil-all of this, too, has somehow become me.
A few weeks into our sojourn in Bali, there was finally a breakthrough in the immigration case.
According to our lawyer back in Philadelphia, the FBI had cleared my criminal background report. I’d passed cleanly. I was now considered a safe risk for marrying a foreigner, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could finally begin processing Felipe’s immigration application. If all went well-if they granted him the elusive golden ticket of a fiance visa-he might be allowed to return to America within the space of three months. The end was now in sight. Our marriage had now become imminent. The immigration documents, assuming Felipe secured them, would stipulate quite clearly that this man was allowed to enter America again, but for only and exactly thirty days, during which time he had to marry a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, and only a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, or he would face permanent deportation. The government would not be issuing an actual shotgun along with all the paperwork, but it did sort of have that feeling.
As this news filtered back to all our family members and friends around the world, we started getting questions from people about what kind of wedding ceremony we were planning. When would the wedding be? Where would it be? Who would be invited? I dodged everyone’s questions. Truthfully, I hadn’t planned anything special around a wedding ceremony simply because I found the whole idea of a public wedding entirely agitating.
I had stumbled in my studies on a letter that Anton Chekhov wrote to his fiancee, Olga Knipper, on April 26, 1901, a letter that perfectly expressed the sum of all my fears. Chekhov wrote, “If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it has taken place, I am ready to marry you on the very day of my arrival. For some reason I am horribly afraid of the wedding ceremony and the congratulations and the Champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely. I wish we could go straight from the church to Zvenigorod. Or perhaps we could get married in Zvenigorod. Think, think, darling! You are clever, they say.”
Yes! Think!
I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod-and I’d never even heard of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren’t there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, “You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy.” But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.
Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still…
My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn’t really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, “What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?”
I committed to no such thing.
She tried again: “What if I just happened to throw a big party while you guys were at my house, but you and Felipe wouldn’t even have to come downstairs? You could just lock yourselves upstairs with the lights off. And when I made the wedding toast, I would casually wave my champagne glass in the general direction of the attic door? Is even that too threatening?”
Oddly, indefensibly, perversely: yes.
When I tried to sort out my resistance to a public wedding ceremony, I had to admit that part of the issue was simple embarrassment. How very awkward to stand in front of one’s family and friends (many of whom had been guests at one’s first wedding) and swear solemn vows for life all over again. Hadn’t they all seen this film already? One’s credibility does begin to tarnish after too much of this sort of thing. And Felipe, too, had once before sworn lifetime vows only to leave the marriage after seventeen years. What a pair we made! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One divorce may be regarded as a misfortune, but two begins to smack of carelessness.
Furthermore, I could never forget what the etiquette columnist Miss Manners has to say on this very subject. While expressing her conviction that people should be allowed to marry as many times as they like, she does believe that each of us is entitled to only one big fanfare wedding ceremony per lifetime. (This may seem a bit overly Protestant and repressive, I know-but curiously enough, the Hmong feel the same way. When I’d asked that grandmother back in Vietnam about the traditional Hmong procedure for second marriages, she had replied, “Second weddings are exactly the same as first weddings-except with not as many pigs.”)
Moreover, a second or third big wedding puts family members and friends in the awkward position of wondering if they must shower repeat brides with gifts and abundant attention all over again. The answer, apparently, is no. As Miss Manners once coolly explained to a reader, the proper technique for congratulating a serial bride-to-be is to eschew all the gifts and galas and simply write the lady a note expressing how very delighted you are for her happiness, wishing her all the luck in the world, and being very careful to avoid using the words “this time.”
My God, how those two indicting little words-this time-make me cringe. Yet it was true. The recollections of last time felt all too recent for me, all too painful. Also, I didn’t like the idea that guests at a bride’s second wedding are just as likely to be thinking about her first spouse as they are to be thinking about her new spouse-and that the bride, too, will probably be remembering her ex-husband on that day. First spouses, I have learned, don’t ever really go away-even if you aren’t speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism. “We know you better than you know yourselves” is what the ghosts of our ex-spouses like to remind us, and what they know about us, unfortunately, is often not pretty.