ONE WARM SUMMER EVENING, in a tiny hamlet south of civilization, east of the wild mountains, west of the Black Sea, a beautiful young woman named Isabelle cooked and baked and decorated her house for the wedding of her friend Cici to her brother Roman Lazar. When she was done with the house, Isabelle decorated herself. She put on a red dress and five heavy strings of coral beads. She wove silk ribbons through her hair, pink and orange and yellow, and she made a flower wreath of mallow and magnolia and fitted it over her golden mane, the color of a Karabakh mare.
The large family had labored long, toiled from the first hour, and now the work was done, and soon it would be time for a well-earned banquet. The tables were fully laden for the high festival. The harvest had not been good that summer, but that didn’t matter, for nothing was spared to honor the pair about to enter into holy matrimony.
Roman, a spectacular groom in an ultramarine blue shirt and black velvet trousers, rode in on Boyko, his beloved palomino stallion. And Cici, a beaming bride in embroidered white, adorned with peonies and roses, was swept up into Roman’s saddle to circle the village church three times before they were crowned husband and wife.
The korovai had been baked, and the gorilka brew made with extra honey and peppers. The poppyseed cake, the pamplushki, the kutia, the shishkebobs, and the stuffed cabbage were all laid out like offerings.
Isabelle’s husband was on the fiddle, her younger brother accompanied him on the accordion, and her mother played the balalaika. Isabelle’s youngest brother was wrestling with her sons over in the dirt by the trees where the three of them must have thought Isabelle wouldn’t notice.
They drank to life and rejoiced in their good fortune. They bestowed the newly married with their gifts and their pleasure. They danced the Ukrainian Wedding March, the fastest bridal polka in the world, they danced “the Kolomeyka” and “the Hopak.” The music never stopped, and the homemade brew flowed freely. And Боже Мій, it was strong! It was a wonder they made it till morning. The wedding began at eleven and continued through the night and sunrise was like dusk, incandescent indigo and pink.
Four thousand miles away from the Lazars and their all-night worship of the power outside the physical world, separated from Isabelle by space but not by time, Finn Evans hired Paul Whiteman and his fifteen-man orchestra to play live on stage at the exclusive Somerset Club in Boston. Paul’s band drove up from New York for one night only, to serenade Finn and Vanessa’s seventh wedding anniversary. Everyone else in America listened to Whiteman through the little speaker on their living room radio, but here in this room, the king of jazz himself, in a white tux, stood on stage, the gold of his sax glistening, the gold from his sax floating through the air like tenor confetti, while Finn danced with Vanessa.
White linen and lilies covered the tables, and the handsome crowd wore their Friday night best, their hair immaculate, their silk dresses shimmering. The food was exquisite, from the cold lobster to the freshly made bread, from the clam chowder to the cod and scallops; all of it divine. The music drowned out hundreds of sober voices, sober because there was no wine, no moonshine, nothing but bloodless apple cider and virgin mint juleps coursing through the veins of the revelers.
A regretfully sober yet joyous Finn whirled in a waltz with Vanessa, his hand delicate on the small of her back, their guests looking on approvingly. Finn too was approving. His wife was a regal platinum vision, and the world he had built with her so concrete, it was as if he had hammered a perfect David out of a block of shapeless, unforgiving marble.
Such was life—measured by value, by time, by place, by space. It pressed upon them from all sides, and though Finn and Isabelle did not yet know it—feasting sumptuously in their corners of the vast world and spinning to the sax fandango and the fiddle—they were already at the precipice.