2.9
Jim couldn’t remember the chaplain’s name, but he liked to think it had been Dick, way back in his intern years. Dick said it couldn’t have been him because it was never his style to let someone tell him to fuck off every day. “You don’t understand,” Jim said. “We had an understanding!” And he imagined sometimes, a little wistfully, the conversation he and Dick might have had during those weeks in rehab when Jim was getting ready for his wedding — though it would be another whole year before he was well enough, and then another year after that before it was all arranged — learning to walk down the aisle, and button a tuxedo shirt, and speak his vows in a clear, strong voice. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had to wait five years to figure out I wanted to be a chaplain. And I think if I had been a chaplain sooner it would have made me a better husband.”
“You always get everything backwards,” said Dick. “It’s being a better husband that makes you a better chaplain.” They were in the pastoral care office, alone since it was a Saturday afternoon and they were the only two chaplains on duty. Jim was looking for a car service to go fetch Jane from the airport that night and bring her to the restaurant.
Jim was about to argue with Dick some more, but then his pager went off. Dick held out his hand. “I’ll take that. Go get your wife some flowers. And not from the gift shop, either.” They left the office together, then split off, Dick heading left toward the main hospital and the icus, and Jim walking down the long hall toward the Broadway exit. He thought he should go home, since he suddenly felt too full of his own story, too eager to tell some stranger about his fragile and unbreakable marriage, to minister properly to anybody.
By the time he reached the end of the hall, he had regained some of his confidence. He said to himself, I am going to bring my love for my wife into every room I visit today. He waved to the guard at the door and passed through, into the foyer. He stopped at the second set of double doors, almost into the afternoon sunshine. A lady was walking through the doors in the opposite direction, but she paused when she saw his face.
“Whoa,” Jim said, putting a hand to his chest, feeling a strange poke at the heart. “What’s that?”
Cycle Three
3.1
“Come here much?” Jim whispered to Millicent, while they were waiting at the altar for Jane and her mother. He was trying not to look at all the people in the church. He couldn’t tell his side from Jane’s side all of a sudden, or remember if they had decided to segregate the guests like that.
“Stop talking,” Millicent said through her smile. “People will think you’re having second thoughts.” When he had asked Jane’s mother a week before if it might not be bad luck to have a second wedding, she had replied that it was perfectly normal to want to cancel the wedding. It was perfectly normal to want to run away. Ponderously, she gave him permission to have those feelings, and after that Millicent started telling him, whenever she could lean in discreetly at his ear, how all sorts of things were perfectly normal to feel in the run up to the ceremony. It was perfectly normal, she said, to want to make a murder plan for each guest, or to wish the cake could be full of beetles, and it was perfectly normal to wish you could be married by a big red dildo instead of a priest.
He started to giggle as they waited, and Millicent pinched him. “Nobody’s even looking at us,” he whispered, which was true. Everyone had turned to watch the bride coming down the aisle. Jane looked very tall next to her mother. A trick of the light made the veil opaque, and for a moment it looked to Jim like Jane had a fancy silk bag over her head, or like someone had wrapped up her face for the morgue.
Millicent pinched him again, much more gently. She was the only person in the church looking at him instead of at Jane, but already all the heads were swiveling around. “Everything will be fine as soon as you see her face,” Millicent said, and kissed Jim’s cheek. Then she took a step back with her sister and stood behind him. He and Jane couldn’t decide who to ask to be in the bridal party — they were both only children and had no close friends but each other — so they didn’t ask anyone. Millicent and Marilynne were their best people.
He hadn’t been anxious at all about the wedding — they were already married, so wasn’t this one just for show? But now he was terrified. All of a sudden he wanted a little more time, just enough for somebody — Jane if she could make herself available right now, or Millicent, or even a random stranger — to tell him a few dozen times that everything was going to be okay.
We are already married, Jim kept telling himself, and then, It’s perfectly normal for the groom to shit himself. But after he raised the veil and saw Jane’s apprehensive and exultant face, and as the priest went through the first part of the ceremony, he came to know, without having to hear it from anyone, that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. He didn’t say to Jane, Oh, that’s right — I love you, though that seemed, in the moment, like it would be better to say that than the vows they’d written together. Certainly it would have been easier to say. He didn’t forget the vows — they’d decided it would be classier to memorize them — but he was so nervous he could barely pay attention to what he was saying. He and Jane spoke simultaneously, looking each other right in the face, and the looking turned out to be very hard. It felt like the first time in his life he’d ever looked somebody in the eye and said something that he meant. He’d been given so many wedding warnings and so much wedding advice, and yet no one had warned him about this. He felt like he should be very quiet when he spoke, and like he should shout, and like he should put a hand to Jane’s cheek, and like he should choke her throat for passion. All these promises they were speaking had sounded sweet and prudent when they hashed them out at the dinner table, but now they were ambitious, exalted, and scary. The priest gave them permission to kiss each other.
“I love you,” Jim said, in a daze. He was worried that he had neglected somehow to mention that in the vows. “I love you,” she replied, because she was masterful like that — omitting the “too,” declaring by the omission that nobody ever really went first in love, the “too” was only an accident of time, not a cause and an effect, not two causes in search of an effect. It was a causeless effect.
They had agreed not to use any tongue for the kiss, settling on something passionate and chaste, a Gone With the Wind sort of kiss, mouths open as if they might start trading breath, held for five seconds, which they both agreed as long enough to give people a little thrill. When they had stopped to consider it, they had both liked the idea of making the people watching them a little horny. But Jim hadn’t considered they might do that to themselves. And of course it was normal, opening an interior eye during the kiss, to see a future together, to measure the time in apartments or houses or cats or even children. Jim’s daze was lifting, the vows were coming back to him. That’s what the kiss is for, he told himself. To have a little time to think together about all those marvelous and terrifying things you just said. They had sworn to remain always together and never apart. Not in any way that matters. Occasionally straying, maybe, Jim said to himself now, but always returning, until we die. He saw that, too: advanced old age spent hand in hand on a sun-dappled park bench and then mindless decay into matched graves.