Wedding for Godot
OF COLD FEET, ANGRY GODS AND THE UNITING OF SOULS FOREVER.

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The first thing I did when I got to the Palace Hotel was call up to M.'s room, because it was already 8:10 and I didn't see her at the bar. Her shiny black brilliantined head and powdered white face with movie-star eyebrows and dark red mouth and outrageous low-cut garment rumbling under the wake of her sexily graveled laughing were all unmistakably invisible.

"(Sob) Isn't Shane already down there? (Sniff)"

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing ... I ... nothing ... (Gasp)"

"What's wrong?!"

"Nothing ... (Sniff) I'm on the other line, I'll be down in 10 minutes." Click.

Wuh-oh, I thought, what in the massive world of yaks is going on? Should I run up to her room and sneak her out the window, providing her with enough cab fare to get to our allies in Spain for concealment? Should I find Shane in the bar and stab him in the eye with my keys? Should I go get M. some real drugs?

Stabbing Shane seemed like the wrongest thing I could do when I saw his shaky form at the bar and realized that M. had already warclubbed his soul into childish fright. Shane's a tough guy, a paratrooper, but he looked like he'd just been forced to push his best pal out of a helicopter and down to a savage enemy waiting in a bog below, who would vandalize him in an un-Christian manner. M. is a glittering typhoon of a woman who can be a downright feral polecat when pushed to extremes of stress, inflicting the worst slashings on her nearest and dearest.

I shuffled nervously over to "the table" where "the meeting" was taking place, meeting Shane's mother and Shane's best man, who was also his sister. This was fitting, because I was Father of the Bride, a position I secured after informing M., an orphan, that I was the only person with the moral authority to give her away. Everybody was visibly jarred by the fact that M. had not yet emerged from the suite for this all-important gathering of wedding forces. They were all smiling tight, stapled-on smiles and clutching big glasses of merlot.

"This is normal! Heh hee heh heh heh. New bride stuff. Happens to everybody," they nattered. "Major life commitment stuff. Heh hehmm." The angst rising off the table was wiggling in the air like gas fumes. Shane looked brave, for a man gored and dribbling black matter. Finally, at about the point we were all ready to start inventing elaborate apologies for ourselves and each other, M. came down.

"I've been crying!" she announced, realizing that the 10 minutes she had allotted herself to pull herself together were worthless against the cramped voice and trembling hands and red, waterlogged eyelids.

"Has she been mean to you?" I whispered to Shane.

"Yes," he whispered back.

"Don't worry," I said, clutching his knee. "She'll go through with it. I've spent way too much money on this thing to let her escape."

The church was enormous: a huge 19th century cathedral with stained glass and huge cavernously hooting organs and choir boys and rows upon rows of wooden pews worn smooth by pious slack bottoms and rustling Sunday finest and thousands of family hands gripping the backs to rise and set in accordance with ceremony.

The ceremony itself, despite its being performed by the most gallopingly homosexual Episcopal clergy imaginable, was filled with depressingly unspiritual material, dealing primarily with the searing qualities of jealousy, the distinct probability that both parties would eventually regret the union but need to abide by it anyway and the importance of raising children in abject Fear of a Mean and Ferociously Judgmental God-Head. I was displeased in my little place of honor before the Moorish-looking, intricately carved gray wall of Christly idolatry, and could not prevent my mouth from curling into a sneer.

I guessed that the priest was trying to be "frank" and avoid the kind of myopic sunniness that often mars religious events. Still, I thought, if there is any reason to bring God into the fiasco of marriage, it is to introduce the unknowable spiritual magic necessary to keep love endlessly redoubling itself between the two partners for life, not to serve as a cosmic threat relating to the imminent calumny of divorce. It struck me as odd that the Episcopalians should be so Catholically concerned with keeping us down. What good, after all, is "inspirational" doctrine that only makes one feel smaller and lamer?

N E X T+P A G E +| "A nude bride"