Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

He turned the shower off and stepped out, getting his breath back, beginning to feel again, the top layers of his sickness lifting, leaving only the deeper part behind for him to live with. Towel around his waist, he sneaked into the bedroom, only to find that his brothers weren’t there. The bed was made. Their tuxedos were gone from the closet, and there was a note on the dresser saying that they were going to find some breakfast and would meet him on the roof. The note ended with Where’s Jacob?

George grabbed his tuxedo out of the bag and began to assemble everything. He had seven minutes. He slipped on the boxer shorts with hearts on them that he’d bought for the wedding, followed by a pair of thin black socks, and then he got his arms into the starched white shirt. As he did the buttons, he roamed around the hotel room, watching the molted boa feathers dancing. It was as if a whole cast of Sesame Street characters had disintegrated in there. George wafted his arm in the thin space, sending a flurry of colors up into the air again. They fell like confetti.

He slipped on the tuxedo jacket and looked at himself in the mirror. It was perfect. As if nothing had ever happened. He walked to the shade that he’d drawn over the balcony doors, wanting to let some light in before he left. There was an explosion of reds, purples, yellows, greens, and blues as the shade pushed the air away. And there, on the other side of the glass, he saw Jacob, sitting at the patio table, already groomed and fully dressed in his tuxedo. He looked vaguely miserable, tapping the tip of his pen at the corner of a piece of hotel stationery like a crazed woodpecker.

He looked up at George and mouthed, “What time is it?”

George slid the door open. “Five minutes to one.”

“You’re supposed to go up for photos.”

“Yeah, I know,” George said, standing back and turning around for Jacob to admire.

Jacob tapped the pen again. “I was supposed to wake you up an hour ago.”

“It’s okay. I got up.”

“Sorry.”

“What?” George couldn’t remember ever hearing Jacob say that word before.

“Sorry,” Jacob repeated, looking down at the paper. “I got caught up in this.”

There on the paper, he could see a poem — or the rough guts of a poem at least — covered in cross-outs and inserts and arrows shifting things from here to there.

Jacob looked at the page in annoyance. “What’s a word that rhymes with fellatio ?”

George grinned and, before taking off for the elevators, reminded Jacob to be up on the roof in fifteen minutes for the group photos. He had three minutes to spare. Sara would be coming up just behind him. He hadn’t felt this happy all year, knowing he wouldn’t disappoint her.

• • •

Everything came together just as it was supposed to. The rooftop of the Waldorf was wide and clear, and the views of the city in all directions were nothing short of jaw-dropping. It wasn’t too windy or too cold. One of the first warm breezes of the year blew through the assembled Murphys and Shermans that day. Everyone behaved. Brothers and sisters fell in line; mothers hugged each other; everyone smiled. Whatever problems and dramas and concerns had existed before were forgotten.

Later the photos would show George holding a glowing Sara in his arms and she looking up at him with absolute, pure adoration. They kissed with a sea of high rise towers behind them. They danced to invisible music; she spun weightlessly. Hand in hand they walked away, smiling back over their shoulders. Her dress was white all the way down to the hem, where it appeared to float just above the ground, as if by magic. She buried her nose in the bouquet of white roses, the shadow on her eyelids echoing the turquoise in the peony buds.

In the group photographs, all six bow ties were straight, and every heel and hem was the right height, and everyone’s hair stayed where it was meant to stay. The photographer told jokes like “How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh?” (“Ten tickles”), which were so terrible, they actually were funny. And when it was all over, they crowded into the elevators and went down to the front of the lobby, where two white limousines were waiting for them. Every parent, aunt, sister, brother, grandparent, and friend was ferried to the church in under two minutes.

Enormous, majestic flags rippled over the church entrance as everyone piled out of the limousines and moved to their stations. The guests, who had been arriving for the past half hour, were being ushered in smooth rotation, each oohing and aahing over the programs, especially the floral trellis detailing that Sara had created with the designer, based on a 1920s Heiligenstein vase. The lettering on the inside wasn’t, as George had feared, unreadable in the dimmer light inside the church. In fact, it exactly matched the brick face inside the sanctuary — and the Oldenburg font choice was a real winner.

And there was Clarence! Made it with ten minutes to spare. He’d actually climbed out of the cab he’d been stuck in on the southbound lanes of the West Side Highway, crossed the northbound lanes on foot, and scaled the six-foot retaining wall along the park so he could catch another cab going south along Riverside Drive. He arrived with both wedding bands in his pocket, as safe as could be, and when the organ began to play the processional, he walked calmly up the aisle with Adeline on his arm, followed by the rest of the wedding party.

St. Bartholomew’s organ pipes — the oldest in the city — were imperious and soft at the same time. George could feel their vibrations in the air around him. His mother looked lovely, not unlike Audrey Hepburn, with her hair still up in its twist, as she walked him to the altar. There George felt something overhead that he hadn’t felt in some time, hard to describe as anything but a not-aloneness. As if the George beneath the George that everyone could see were in good company. It was like tasting that bottle of wine on Shelter Island, or even like seeing that dead body for the first time. A flicker of something beyond what was known and measurable in the universe. But soon all thought of it was gone, as he saw Sara coming down the aisle with her father.

Warm sunlight washed across her face, the stained glass glinting up above her. Her father was crying a little, just the right amount. She willed herself not to look over again, knowing she would immediately begin crying also. She fixed her gaze on George, who looked magnificent at the end of the aisle, towering over the hunched and sleepy-eyed Minister Thaw.

Minister Thaw had some things to say. Sara could barely hear them. Something about there being this small village in Italy somewhere that had a silver statue of Saint Bartholomew. During his feast they routinely carried the statue around the village. One day it became mysteriously heavy and the villagers were forced to set it down. Just then the rocks ahead of them collapsed into the valley. The very ground they had been about to pass over completely disappeared. Had it not been for the sudden miracle of the statue’s weight, everyone in the village would have died. Then many years later, the village was captured by enemy raiders who sought to pillage anything of value. When they came to the statue, however, they found it was light as a feather. Thinking it was a fake, they let it be. This, according to the minister, was a perfect metaphor for the miracles of marriage. It could sometimes be surprisingly heavy, keeping the couple grounded — and yet at other times it could be as light as air — invisible, unfettering, even uplifting. And just as God had protected the faithful villagers, so would He protect his faithfully wed.

Sara could see George almost wanting to argue with the man right then and there — how could he claim that God, with any great consistency, protected true believers? You couldn’t cherry-pick miracles when they made for a nice homily. That was just bad methodology. But no, he was letting it go — just a cute little eye roll to Sara, as if to say they knew better, and nothing else mattered. She squeezed his hands.