Made in Heaven

Years after, our wedding would still come up at gatherings of family and friends. People would say how wondrous it was, how imaginative; how everything unfolded like a play, how it embodied perfectly who we were as a couple.

Of course, everyone would key on different details when they recalled that early evening in September. Your parents would express their happiness that we had our wedding in the same church garden where they took their vows. My sister Elinor would rave about the strapless cobalt blue number she got to wear as part of the entourage, which she wore to critical acclaim on a number of other occasions (she would lament that she never could find another formal dress that flattered her so well). Your college roommate Alex would remember Noel’s solo guitar and vocal rendition of Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky” as we walked down the aisle (northwards, of course, towards the arch festooned with string lights and gardenias under which the minister waited). “Cool song, dudes,” he would say to us. My cousin Sally would inform us she still had the bottle of Casablanca merlot (sans contents, she would always add with a laugh) with Rumi’s “This Marriage” on the label that she took home as a wedding favor.

What everyone would remember, though, what would set off the reminiscences were the faeries – the diaphanous helium globes with LED lights inside them that you so lovingly crafted – that lit up and floated from the bushes to gasps from the crowd during the recessional (Cole Porter’s “It’s De-Lovely,” played by the Delancey wind quintet). You timed it perfectly so they would lift off and illuminate the night sky with a hundred flickering sparks just as we walked together hand in hand amongst our loved ones for the first time as husbands. Your wedding gift to me.

But while the wedding was great and I got a warm, appreciative glow whenever people complimented us for it, I still always thought to myself: Why should it have been such a surprise? We are both creative, meticulous people who leave no details unturned. The wedding was the product of careful planning and the thoughtful application of our gifts. I’m an event planner; you’re an inventor and an artist. Our talents, like us, were a marriage made in heaven.

And, really, these things always come off as memorable and perfect – even the ones that go all to pieces; even the cheesiest nuptials where the bridesmaids wear gold lamé; even, I imagine, the drive-by weddings presided by Elvis impersonators in Vegas – when the marriage is true. Even the glitches and outright disasters become part of the story, things to look back on with embarrassed mirth. And our union was felicitous from the start and continues to be good, despite the travails and challenges that are part of the bargain in even the best of marriages, despite those moments when I would gladly have strangled you, and you, I’m sure, were sorely tempted to walk out the door. I could not imagine trading this life for ten lifetimes without you and the kids.

Nevertheless, I have to confess that even though you always come up with something sweet whenever our anniversary rolls around, our wedding is not what comes to mind when I think of how we got started on this adventure of a lifetime. What I remember is that day on White Island, long before the big day; months, even, before I got around to proposing.

White Island was what the locals called it, even though it was really just a sandbar that disappeared under the waves at high tide. And when it did emerge, it never rose more than a few inches above the water. The currents sculpted it constantly, the locals said, so it was never the same shape twice. We had rowed out to it in a rented tandem kayak on a glassy sea that Sunday afternoon. At the time, we had been together just long enough to start wondering, fearfully, if this was leading to someplace serious – and the uncertainty and trepidation were starting to rub sparks between us: misunderstandings and squabbles over nothing much. I remember we had been arguing on the drive to the coast, over García Márquez, of all things. Our nerves were slightly frayed as we rowed the two miles out; we barely said two words to each other.

Our silence changed in tenor, though – quiet turning to quietude – when our kayak grated on the sand and gravel of the island, which at that point was perhaps a hundred curving feet long and twenty at its widest. We stepped ashore and, without any forethought, you wandered off in one direction and I went the other – not drifting away from each other because of our tiff, I don’t think, but just because for the moment the other had ceased to exist and we each just headed in the direction we had been facing.

I was on ground almost at level with the sea, with calm water all around me, so that if I didn’t look down it was as if I was walking on the ocean itself. There was no sound but the soft swish of tiny waves lapping the shore. When I stopped and turned to the west, it was to see the lowering sun slowly and silently igniting the sky in plumes of deep burnt orange.

I remember thinking to myself, with sorrow: This is not something you experience alone; this is something you share with someone – and it was with a start that I realized I was with someone: I was with you. I like to think you thought the same thing. At least, you turned to me from the other half of the island just as I turned to you.

We walked slowly towards each other. We met in the middle and smiled shyly at one another, as if we were meeting for the first time. We turned again to the boundless sea and the westering sun and the blazing sky. You put your arm around my waist and I put mine around yours.

After a time, without a word, we turned and walked back to the kayak, still entwined. We hopped in and pushed off. I’m sure we were both thinking we should be heading back before it got dark, but I think the deeper reason was that we did not want to overstay the moment. It had already left its mark on us, and it was best we left before it faded away. Indeed, in all the years since, we have never gone back to the island, even though we have kayaked up and down the coast many times. I think we silently agreed that to have done so would have been an imprudent attempt to recapture something that is given to you but once.

We were married that day. That day was our true wedding. That day I knew I would spend the rest of my life with you. All the rest that followed – the proposal in the glass elevator, the planning, the gnawing over the wonderful and persnickety details leading up to that lovely ceremony – was just confirmation of something that already existed, that had already been consecrated, that day on White Island. We made our nuptials as beautiful as our hands and minds could make it, but we did so in the solemn knowledge that nothing we could ever design or craft would measure up to, or be as much of a surprise or gift, as what had already been created around us, for us, between us – by a planner and artist very much greater than ourselves.

Happy Anniversary, sweetie.

(November 2011)