When I got married for the first time I was drunk, wearing black leather pants. When my mother got married for the only time, she was about twenty-four hours the right side of an appendectomy. But you’d never know it from the wedding pictures, where she looks sweet and pretty and poised, her teeth white and lips red, fine clavicles framed in satin by a sweetheart neckline.
My father’s smile, on the other hand, looks more like a grimace, knuckles white as he grips my mother’s elbow. He told the story dozens of times at family gatherings. How he’d been terrified she’d collapse right then and there, in front of the altar, before the “I do’s” and the exchange of rings. That when she came to she’d suddenly realize the grave error she’d been about to commit—this was the part where everyone laughed and refilled glasses of iced-tea, my family didn’t drink—and run as far and fast in the other direction as she could. More laughter. I seriously wondered why she hadn’t. Which wouldn’t have meant I wouldn’t have been born, I’m adopted. Which probably explains more than I could ever imagine about me… have at it, dear reader, have at it.
People said I resembled my father, physically, which was entirely a coincidence, though we were evenly matched in stubbornness and cussedness in addition to our flaming red hair. As a very young child, I adored him, and it was mutual. As I approached adolescence, however, we clashed. And clashed, and clashed some more. Our mutual admiration society devolved into a permanent squaring off of sworn enemies.
And it was, I submit, in an attempt–maybe even a conscious one–to offend him—he came to mind more than once as the inexorable steps were being taken—that I married Husband #1, and that I married him in the way I did.
My mother was gone by then, we all missed her terribly. My family was no longer family, we’d come unglued. The best way to avoid setting the table for another, similar banquet of generational heartbreak a few decades down the line, I reasoned, was to live a life as different from, as diametrically opposed to, my mother’s as humanly possible. And at that, I was, and am, very, very good. And my father, at various junctures along the way (though we became closer and more reconciled, or at least better at keeping quiet on topics guaranteed to produce an explosion, during the final years of his life), was gratifyingly incensed. My first wedding stands out as a shining example.
Enter Husband #1, last seen chasing sublimity and water nymphs in the magical woods in the province of Ávila.
We plotted our troth in Gibraltar–which, officially, belongs to Great Britain–because at that time you couldn’t get married in Spain if you hadn’t lived in the location where you planned to tie the knot for a certain period of time… I think two years, but don’t quote me on that. It’s been a while. At any rate, Husband #1 and I missed the mark by a mile.
Certain circumstances precipitated this momentous step. I was on Fulbright scholarship in Spain, writing about ornament and poetry and its metaphorical encounters in medieval Islamic palaces (yes, they give people money to do that, though with the current government, I think it’s entirely possible the intelligentsia will be rounded up into the biggest library they can find and then gassed, the place torched for good measure, so if some week I don’t show up on the Bad, Bad Love blog, you know where to start looking…). That scholarship was soon to finish and I was to begin yet another one, for dissertation completion, which required residency at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. By this time, Husband #1 had installed himself in my studio in Granada (see how neatly he did that? None of us even realized it was happening…), and when he learned that I was soon headed back to the lands of my birth, he determined to come with me.
I had never lived with anyone before, quasi-conjugally, and it was working out okay thus far, two months in, lots of nights out and drinking and sex (which, let me repeat, was never all that—Husband #1 seemed to be of the opinion that the size of the implement he brought to the party excused him from doing pretty much anything else in the way of preparations: you’re allowed to wonder at my willingness to go along…). So I said okay.
Just like I said okay a couple of days later when Husband #1, mixing paint and sucking at a mate straw (I was still okay with mate at that point, not sick of it yet, though that would come, that would come…), casually broached the subject of marriage.
The reason, I think, looking back, that I put up zero resistance to the Marriage Plot was that getting married figured nowhere on my list of Top Ten Things to Achieve In Life. I truly had not given it any thought. So I took him at his word (silly girl): this was purely a question of paperwork, of papeleos and trámites. A means to an end. No. Big. Deal.
I’d be doing him a huge, huge favor (he liked all the Spanish equivalents of the word “huge”). Marriage was the only way, he said, for him to have a ‘normal’ life en los Estados Unidos. Even have a bank account (though what he planned to put into that account was, at that point, a matter of cloudy surmise). And! He knew, somehow, about Gibraltar. No residence requirement necessary.
How, and why, did he know about Gibraltar?
Good question. Which occurred to me only much, much, much later. But definitely a good question.
The one I asked, at the time, however, was “Bus or train?”
Bus.
Can I just say that Gibraltar is one of the weirdest places on the planet (and if you are remembering that Bad Love Incarnate’s father was born in Gibraltar then you have one hell of a memory… and we have not seen the last of Bad Love Incarnate, not quite yet…)? One of the thickest Andalucian accents I have _ever_ heard, even Husband #1 had some trouble at times. Bleak rocky coastline, you can sort of see Morocco right from the beach from certain spots and on certain clear days, or you can convince yourself you can. Imagine the Arab conquerors disembarking on the shore in 711 A.D. and getting right on about the business of conquest.
Sort of like with Husband #1, the natives put up very little resistance.
In Gibraltar all of the buildings look English, like they’ve been plucked by a big giant hand from the side of some gently rolling green hill in the Lake District and plunked down between the rocks. There are even picket fences.
And shops and shops and shops of cheap electronics.
And cheap alcohol. Which we purchased in quantity. Amazing quantities, in fact, for such a short stay.
We only had to spend one night—got the license in order within an hour of arrival, set the wedding for the following day at ten. Bus back to Granada at two. We parked our stuff in the cheapest B&B in town—the Andalus-speaking, English-looking landlady (everyone reminded me of Bad Love Incarnate’s parents, which, looking back, was likely a pretty bad sign) kind of squinted at us, maybe in disgust, when we told her what we were there to do—and went out to party.
We met two transvestites at the fourth or the fifth club we hit, and they agreed, amid many cocktails and much hilarity, to be our witnesses. So that no one would miss the 10 a.m. altar-time (actually no altar, we did it por lo civil), we spent the night at the house they shared some way out of town—though they were not a couple, they were very clear about that. The drag queens went right to bed, each to her separate room, and left us in the living room with a bottle of Drambuie and two shot glasses. After having stupidly unprotected sex (that’s the sauce béchamel for this post…), we passed out on the couch listening to waves crash on rocks, which I was pretty sure we were both so drunk we were imagining, together. Upon waking to mimosas, however—the drag queens, in addition to being lovely and very funny and witty and smart and cultured and all the things drag queens are in movies, though this was no movie, were wonderful hostesses: they actually had the ingredients for mimosas just sitting around the house—we saw that the waves were real. The house was perched on a little cliff, hanging right out over the water. I was proud of myself for not feeling seasick.
I don’t have pictures of that wedding, or of the brunch afterward (more mimosas…), so I have to, as the Spanish expression goes, “hacer memoria.” Dig around in my memory.
I know that the drag queens, after whispered consultation in the kitchen, decided to leave the drag at home. Our witnesses were, as far as anyone else could tell, perfectly respectable ones, cool in stylish jeans and impeccably pressed shirts (lavender and pink). I know that I wore black leather pants—the same ones I’d partied in the night before; women under 35 can do that and still look hot—and a black, see-thru-y pirate blouse. I know I wore black platform ankle boots, my waist-length hair over one shoulder in a defiantly messy braid, and absolutely enormous gold hoop earrings. I know that I was drunk on mimosas when I said “I do”, en español, and that I was smoking while I said it. I do not require photographic evidence to assert, in full confidence, that Husband #1 was not gripping my elbow, or any other part of me, as he, in turn, pronounced those words (possibly a sign). I don’t know if he smiled, or, if he did, what that smile looked like, because this was pre-cell-phone, and way pre-iPhone, and people didn’t just walk the streets with cameras at the ready. Taking wedding photos would have required thought and planning and care, three ingredients that definitely did not go into the preparations for our Gibraltar nuptials.
In subsequent months, however, I did occasionally regret the lack of photographic evidence of my anti-wedding, because it would have made my father positively blow a gasket. Which, in my book and at that time, would have been an excellent thing.
This Sunday is Mother’s Day, and like pretty much everyone else, my mother is on my mind right about now. As I have lamented before on this blog of Bad, Bad Love, I much regret the fact that she and I were never able to know one another as adult women. Not that we’d have agreed on everything, but I suspect we’d have agreed on a lot. I don’t think she’d have been horrified by my first wedding. Puzzled, maybe, by all the black, but I believe she’d have done her best to enter into the spirit of things. She’d have abstained—as far as I know, alcohol never passed her lips, she didn’t need it, she was always full of joy and had few regrets—but she wouldn’t have condemned what the rest of us got up to. She’d have been up bright and early the next morning with tomato juice and hot buttered biscuits at the ready—every bit as much the hostess-with-the-mostess as the drag queens—and then some coffee (yes, hers was percolated, but percolated can also be good) for when stomachs were settled enough to take it. Then she’d have settled herself into her chair at the kitchen table and said, “Well, now, tell me all about it.”
And she’d have genuinely wanted to know.
Except for near infinite patience for rescued bunnies, I’m about as umotherly as they come—I must have been outside smoking, quite possibly drunk, when they were handing those genes out. Maybe that’s a reaction, too, to the way I was brought up. My mother was pretty much perfect as mothers go, and I’m kind of a perfectionist: I could never have measured up, so I preferred to excel in other areas. Like Bad, Bad Love, at which—as I hope, dear reader, I have thoroughly convinced you by now—I am a consummate expert.
And pissing my father off. I was really, really good at that, too.
Okay, time to take the bunnies out to the garden for a while. Catch you next week… from the Big Apple!
Literally and figuratively. With Husband #1 in tow… woohoo.