As they kissed, Jane saw the past, the little accidents of fate (parallel schedules in medical school, coincidentally matching to the same hospital for residency) and the big accident of cheated fate that had brought them here, standing too long in their marriage kiss and using too much tongue in front of a hundred strangers and her mother and Millicent. None of them ought to see this. Not even Millicent, who had taught Jane to kiss, inspecting the motions of Jane’s tongue as she made out with a clear plastic bag and composing mnemonics by which Jane might remember how to be a thoughtful and surprising lover of a boy’s mouth. Maybe we are holding this kiss too long? Jane said to herself, exulting at the same time, in a hope like knowledge, that the kiss was never going to end.
“We kissed too long, didn’t we?” Jane asked Jim in the limousine on the way to the reception, which they held at an arts club not very far from where Jim had been run over by the taxi. Jane’s mother had instructed the limo driver to take the long way there, and avoid passing that particular corner.
“We sure did,” he said. “Let’s do it again right now.”
“Not just yet,” she said. At the reception she polled the few people she thought would be honest with her. “Just a little,” her new friend Maureen said. “It was a little vulgar, sure. But it made me jealous, you know. I wish somebody had kissed me like that at my wedding. Anybody at all. Even the priest!” “Don’t be stupid,” said Millicent. “If you start regretting sexy kisses, then I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.” And Jane’s mother said, “Of course it was.” They were dancing together — her mother was being her father and Millicent was being her mother with Jim, a few feet away. “And of course I blushed for you. And if I had been the officiant I would have given a prearranged signal to let you know. Because it’s hard to remember when to stop. But do you know what I tell newlyweds when they ask me that question?”
“That they fucked up? That they have to do it all over again? That they’re not actually married?”
“That it’s good luck,” her mother said, kissing her cheek and passing her off to Jim. Jane could tell he was getting worn out already by the way he hung on her shoulders. He was still easy to tire, and when he drank, his coordination started to slip.
“We fucked up with that kiss,” Jane said. “My mother said we have to do it over again.”
“Hooray,” he said, and kissed her. But she drew back, saying she couldn’t dance and kiss at the same time. She said that again, a few minutes later at the end of the dance, and again when they sat down, and again around the cake-cutting. “Come on,” Jim said, pretty drunk by now. “Let’s make out a little. We can slide under the table, if you’re worried about people watching us.”
“You’re too tired,” she said. “But it’s too bad I don’t still have my veil.” It really would have been nice to put it down again. They ought to let you do that at your wedding, just pull down the shade for a few moments of privacy and contemplation, or even just to have a moment in which to appreciate one nice long moment, since she was barely getting to pay proper attention to her own wedding. The strangers — why had she invited all these strangers? — kept coming up to talk at her, so she’d had no time to decide if the salmon was too wet or too dry, or whether the wine was any good, or if she liked the signature wedding cocktail they’d paid five hundred dollars for somebody to think up and then write down on a little card to go into the favor bags. “Are you having a good time?” Jim kept asking her, and she kept saying, “I think so!” or “Probably!” or “I’ll tell you in an hour when I catch up to myself!” At least I paid attention to the kiss, she told herself.
But when they were finally alone again, standing in their stained and rumpled finery at the apartment door, she found herself unready. “Maybe we should go to a hotel after all,” she said. “Maureen was right. We shouldn’t come home again until after the honeymoon.”
“Too late,” Jim said, his hand already on the doorknob. “What’s wrong?”
She knew it was silly to avoid making out with your newly recertified husband just because you were afraid it wasn’t going to be as good as the wedding make-out. It’s perfectly all right if it’s all downhill from here, she said to herself, and started kissing him while he was still fiddling drunkenly with the lock.
Don’t compare! she told herself. She kissed him thoughtfully, tentatively, and found it to be exactly the same. It brought her right back to the wedding kiss, and once she was there, she realized that it was the audience, not she or Jim, that was at risk of humiliation, that she and Jim might be making their guests feel bad about their own inaugural kisses, their own relationships. Happiness in love, she thought, like obscene wealth or an ostomy bag, ought to be tastefully concealed. She and Jim ought to be up there in smartly tailored but very plain love, love that had a pool but no poolhouse, no-logo love. Anything else had to be bad luck. Anything else, the universe would punish one day. She knew all these things, but she didn’t stop.
And just like Jim, she took the time to consider what they had just said to each other, since she’d also been too anxious to really pay attention, a few minutes before, when she was actually speaking the vows. Always together, she had sworn with him, never apart. Maureen had said they ought to surprise each other with their vows, but Jane knew that was a terrible idea. She hated surprises. Every surprise of her life so far had been a bad one. And Jim’s vows weren’t just gifts, after all. Neither were Jane’s own. They were a contract. They were a promise not to fuck things up, which could mean something only if the two of them explicitly acknowledged, in the vows themselves, the ways in which they had already fucked up.
Or at least the way that she had fucked up. Always together, never apart. But what that meant for her was: I won’t run away again. Whatever happens, no matter how scared I am, I’ll wait it out with you. She had time, as the wedding kiss went on and on, to look squarely at their last Indian dinner, at her own behavior. When they sat down, she was already afraid, though not because she was expecting Jim to propose to her. She would have behaved better if she’d been expecting it.
But all she had was a feeling that something terrible was going to happen. Jim had been making her uneasy all day long, encroaching aggressively on her bed space in the morning even though they’d already resigned themselves to the fact that she was a nighttime cuddler and he a morning one, then paging her all day long just to ask her dreamily what she was doing now, and finally wanting to hold her hand on the sidewalk even when they were walking against the stream of commuters going up Broadway. She had walked ahead of him, still holding his hand, so it must have looked for all the world that she was leading him like a child.
“Don’t you like your tikka?” he asked.
“It’s lovely,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Sorry if I’m being horrible.”
“You’re not being horrible. Have some naan. It’s right out of the oven. Take some.”
“But I don’t think I’m even hungry,” she said, shrinking away when he thrust it at her. When he didn’t take it back, she tore off a piece and put it in her mouth. Now all the waiters were looking at them, and some were walking to the table. “Oh,” she said when she bit the ring, “there’s a rock in the bread.” The staff rushed in — to help her, she thought, but they gathered around Jim as he lurched to one knee and then they all began to sing.