The cloche hat with the buckle I bought at the boutique before we left…we called it my wedding hat.
When Jane first saw Paul she said to a friend, he’s my enemy. When she met the young composer she wore her hair short and smoked short Cuban cigars. Sylvia taking a bite out of the apple of Ted’s cheek. Edenic.
Prophets and prophesies. Jane and witchy Cherifa. Madame Sosostris in Eliot’s epic. Sylvia and Ted’s Ouija board.
Zelda to Scott in one of her letters: “I DO want to marry you — even if you do think I ‘dread’ it — I wish you hadn’t said that…”
Vivien Haigh-Wood and Thomas Stearns Eliot were married at Hampstead Register Office in 1915 after knowing each other for three months (by that time, she had shortened her name, she would lengthen it again). It was a heroic mission — Ezra Pound had urged Vivien(ne) to marry the poet to keep him in England, just as he later took up the Bel Esprit.
We echoed the Eliots. Marrying fast out of a sense of noble adventure (they had known each other three months, we had known each other nine). We who were going to live extraordinary lives. We who were going to be extraordinary. (She pinned her hopes on the Great Poet, we pinned ours on each other.)
Later she will be punished, continually reminded, of her impulsivity, it will be used to convict her, when this is why he originally fell for her. (Why is falling the model of love? Like down a rabbit hole.)
The chairs at Chicago’s City Hall were orange, hard, plastic.
Zelda in her grey suit the color of her eyes. Those eyes. For the ceremony a suit of midnight blue, the hat trimmed with leather ribbons and buckles. A corsage of white orchids. “She was the only ornament at her own wedding.”
For Tom’s marriage certificate he wrote “of no occupation.” How would they occupy themselves? There was the question of where to live and where the money would come from. Always a pressing financial crisis. No verse is completely free.
Our name is called. Or did we have a number, like at a deli. (I cannot remember. I cannot recall. Do you know nothing…Do you remember nothing?)
The quickie at St. Patrick’s was perhaps Scott worried Zelda would (again) change her mind. His princess he always threatened to keep locked up in his tower. “There was no music, no flowers, no photographer, and no lunch for the out-of-town visitors.” Some say Zelda never forgave him.
The buried grudges of marriage.
Every year the memory vomits up again, especially after every move. Love of our kind requires so much amnesia. Despite his eternal apologies. Despite how far we’ve come, how we’ve both changed, grown, our bond strengthened, one of now mutual respect, constant communication. For I love him yes I love him but ours is not a romantic tale of origins. Of how we came to be.
(At one of those kitschy downtown Asian theme restaurants with that woman from the British Consulate. Her posh and nasally tones. She left us with the bill, and the assurance that, oh, yes, we’d have to get married, if we wanted to go to London together. Oh and I should try writing a multicultural novel, it is all the thing.)
She does not pronounce us anything. We still have to stay and sign things. We do not even kiss afterwards. We do not mimic this well-rehearsed denouement. Or perhaps, laughing, embarrassed, a quick peck. As if to prove for invisible eyes that this is real. We were real.
(You decided then that I could come with you if I wanted, and perhaps work under the table. You were uncomfortable, you said, with the institution of marriage. Or you would do it, if we promised it didn’t mean anything. You were plotting your escape route, just like Tom, later on.)
Only one family member — Vivien(ne)’s aunt — was present. They were trying to keep their hasty union secret from their tyrannical mothers. The esteemed Eliots’ later announcement in the St. Louis Globe Democrat was “heavy with disapproval.”
If we were waiting for permission she did not grant it.
Afterwards we sat in the back of a cab numbed, nervous. You had a Polaroid camera. Our wedding photo. There are some days we don’t want proof of. We look like we had been booked for a lifetime sentence.
(And when I spit, bit, back, that served as your excuse. My violence you instigated allowed you to distance yourself. The time I threw my chair at you in my tiny loft apartment on Chicago Avenue. No, I don’t know how you can go to London with someone who acts like that. Lucia Joyce, James’ daughter, put away for throwing a chair. I am the artist! she cried. To invalidate, R.D. Laing writes, can stir one to violence.)
That month honeymoon in New York hotels. Scott bought her a new Patou suit. “They were interviewed; they rode on the roof of taxis; they jumped into fountains; there was always a party to go to.” Later, Zelda wrote, “There was a tart smell of gin over everything.” Zelda nostalgic in letters to Scott, now forever separated, she trapped in an institution, in a body, aflame with eczema, a scaled she-monster later immortalized in Tender is the Night, he trapped in Hollywood, in afternoon alcoholism. That was when you…Remember, darling? “Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed?” A lovely Zelda association.
Bored after a year in New York the Fitzgeralds took a short trip to Europe. They sailed on the Aquitania. First Class. Zelda was pregnant and pouty.
Their itinerary: England, France, dull, dull, Venice, Rome, all ruins, back to London, where he invested in tailored suits. Scott wrote: “God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest.”
Thinking back, the most extraordinary aspect of this episode was the cab ride. At that time we never took cabs.
What did we do that afternoon? I think we bought socks at the Nordstrom Rack downtown. We went out for sushi, but I felt sick and couldn’t eat. At night in his bed I announced, I think, dizzily, “We’re married!” John shushed me. He didn’t want his roommates to hear. He didn’t want his parents finding out before we were safely in London.
Ah yes. The reason for the cab. Next stop, British Consulate.
Another wedding photo: Our dazed reproductions gazing from our passport books, our one-year visas. That is when you used to hike up your collar for photographs, like a mean street youth from the 1950s. I am dour, expressionless. I look vaguely Eastern European. One young bride ordered by male.
We fly Air India. We attempt to drown out the army of babies who have set up camp in our inner ear — an infantry.
Our first test. We are married. We smile too brightly at the customs officer at Heathrow. I am his wife. The first time ever spoken. My husband will be attending graduate school for the year. To wife. A word. Like something heavy one carries down the street. A verb? What does a wife do? Oh, me? I’ll find something, I’m sure.
I am supposed to stay in our awful little green room in married student housing and WRITE. For months I cannot find work, until I land temporary holiday employment at a bookstore. Can’t WRITE. My first real solitude, alone in a new country, newly married. A different sort of breakdown than in my early twenties, the one that made me watchful, watched. He would get home and I would be sobbing in the bathtub. And so it all began, our dance, of the needy and the needed.
At home together in Akron we spend most of our time in the unfinished dining room. Sitting at the wooden table that we purchased for $50 at the junk shop, the matching chairs with stained pale-turquoise fabric, soon one of the chairs breaks and then we just have three. Anyway, it is just the two of us, we know no one, no one visits us. In a letter to her mother-in-law, Vivien(ne) complains of their incarceration: “We are just two waifs who live perched up in our little flat — no-one around us knows us, or sees us, or bothers to care how we live or what we do, or whether we live or not.” The hideous fake brass chandelier probably purchased from Home Depot. And then the wallpaper — an ugly, screaming red, blanketed by stripes of sickly-pink roses with green leaves set against a black background. We despise this wallpaper. We comment on it constantly. It consumes us, surrounds us. As soon as we are in the room we are depressed, instantly, because of the wallpaper. We consider painting over it, as we painted the living room, a calming organic gray. A living room still dark and windowless, which is why we don’t ever live in it (it doesn’t feel much like living anyway). But we don’t — because as always in the places we live we are sure we are going to leave soon — so why finish it?