“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?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess it just depends on whether we can find a girl somewhere who might be capable of doing that job. Can you think of anyone?”
“I suppose I could do it,” she replied slowly, looking away with a terrific show of false indifference. “I mean, if you can’t find anyone else…”