A wedding in the sky - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Michael Klein

J. T. and I were standing in the chrome reflective sea of cars in the parking lot at Herring Cove in Provincetown, Massachusetts--another day in the extravagant slew of days at the beach, the air filled with wet salt and beach roses, the sun, drenching but specific. When I was a full-time resident here, it was standing inside that fragrance and under that particular angle of daylight that put me under a spell, ready for a conversation in which I would really have to pay attention. I've never been much of a beach reader. I'm available.

Or, I'm in a play. Sometimes my friend Al and I take copies of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to read out loud, grabbing a couple of beautiful boys who we force to read Nick and Honey. As George and Martha, Al and I always up the stakes of the script a little by flirting with Nick and Honey a lot more than the stage directions call for. And whether the rumor is true or not--that Albee originally intended the play to be performed by four men--we can't imagine, without joking about it, how ridiculous the casting would make the play sound: men kibitzing over an imaginary child holding, from a boarding-school distance, the marriage together.

Who would I marry? I thought about it with a surprising openness for someone who didn't think he could ever marry a man. Again. Officially or not officially. There wasn't a ceremony, per se, to legitimize that first marriage and I was still young enough to feel that any real time away from home was only like running away. I loved a man named Richard, told my parents, and moved away from one house into another house. The family is a cult, and the journey out of Brooklyn felt like leaving it for the first real sign of free life, love life.

I'm not much for cults or rituals, but I've always liked the way seances look and feel--the dead rising in a glamour of nostalgia and goofy knowing--all without technique. The mind of the medium's the whole show. Marriage is the seance's opposite--too sealed, too poised on the future, too much money in the bank. Because it's ornate by design, marriage always blinds you with the idea of being the right thing--the next step in logic, whether the outcome is rapture or dread. I know two people who got married so that they could break up.

I suppose, now that I'm older and have friends who are long-term couples, I've changed my thinking about marriage. I've actually seen it provide a comfort, or backdrop to steady any chaos left in two hearts that started out apart. And when it's two men, children aren't biological, which may be the whole point behind an all-male ... Virginia Woolf? What if?, the play might be asking. The legacy, unless men adopt, is ideas or art or politics--what we all start out with and without children as the love object, the sense of responsibility focuses more towards the relationship, more towards the present of two people together in real time rather than two people thinking ahead into what may turn out to be an abyss instead of a glorious future together.