05. The Rough Patch of Missing

 

The wedding chapel on the fourth floor of Toronto City Hall is an oasis of flowing white curtains and dark wooden furniture surrounded by twenty-three storeys of concrete, glass, and steel. In this regard, the wedding chapel is like marriage itself: a small, organic core encased in functionality. The chapel, although in a public space, is privately run. Weddings are not open to the public, although anyone can attend: they just have to be invited by the bride and groom. When I find myself sharing the elevator with a wedding party, I take it as a sign, tell the bride and groom that I’m writing an article on city hall weddings for the Globe and Mail. To my surprise, they agree to allow my presence. Is it my cynicism that made me think an act of such inclusiveness would be unlikely? Or is their openness sparked by nothing more than vanity at the prospect of having their wedding covered by the Globe and Mail? The significance of this question increases exponentially as the elevator continues to rise.

There are ten people in this wedding party, and their nervous energy, combined with the sly smiles they pass amongst themselves, make it clear that they’re unable to think of marriage as anything other than the ultimate expression of love and romance. As the elevator rises above the third floor, an unexpected and reverential silence overtakes them. The only sound is the motor pulling the cables. Then, the bell dings. The doors open. The bride, groom, and their various attendants spill out of the elevator, a tipped carton of black suits and new dresses and hopes for a brighter tomorrow.

Their laughter bounces off the high ceiling and concrete walls as they pull open the heavy glass doors of the wedding chapel and sit on the leather benches lining both sides of the foyer, organizing themselves by gender, girls on one side and boys on the other. At the top of the benches, closest to the doors of the chapel, which remain closed, the bride and groom face each other. The groom, Sergei, has a sharp, strong jaw and freshly cut short-cropped black hair. His suit is pressed. His tied is knotted in a full Windsor. Sergei adjusts the single white rose pinned to his lapel, then looks across the aisle, catches his bride’s eye, and smiles.

The bride, Calina, returns Sergei’s smile with an intensity that’s impossible to sustain, causing her to look down at the points of her shiny white shoes. She adjusts her firm grip on the bouquet of white roses that she holds, and will continue to hold, over her belly. Calina’s body is athletic, her tan won through hours on the tennis court or jogging or playing pétanque or whatever sport it is that her youth and confidence allows her to excel at. She watches Sergei bend down and wipe an invisible spot from the toe of his left shoe, then reach into his inside pocket and pull out a pack of chewing gum.

“Kameдь?” he asks in Russian.

“Obrigado,” she replies in Portuguese.

This is the thing. Between them, this couple can communicate in six languages. The problem is that English is the only one they share, and neither is very good with it. So the question I have—and forgive me, but there is no unsentimental way to put it—can two people without a common tongue really fall in love?

It’s a cynical question, but I’m feeling cynical today, primarily because my teeth have begun rotting in my head. I’m not being metaphorical. Last night I was sitting on the couch, feeling lazy and dysfunctional because I’d spent the one hour I had to myself watching a Law & Order repeat instead of throwing my efforts behind another attempt to fix Forgive Us Our Eccentricities as We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others. As I watched the show, already knowing who the murderer was, I replayed in my head the fight I’d just had with Julie, trying to figure out who was to blame for transforming the task of determining what to watch on television into an allegory for our sixteen-year-old relationship. And then I felt something tiny and hard in my mouth. I spit a shiny piece of white onto my palm. Several moments passed before I realized it was a piece of tooth.

My curious tongue ran itself along the bottom of my teeth until it found the absence, the rough patch missing on the left side of my right wisdom tooth. There wasn’t any pain, but my tongue couldn’t stop running itself over the ragged edge, as if some primal part of my unconscious believed that enough rubbing could counteract the damage and eliminate the need for a dentist. I wrapped the bit of tooth in a Kleenex, like you would a bug you’re saving to show the exterminator, as evidehhhhhhnce, and put it in the top drawer of my desk.

 

The next morning, this morning, there wasn’t enough pain to prevent me from pretending everything was fine. I walked my kids to school, then I went up to the subway, prepared to go to small claims court. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until, standing on the Bloor/Yonge platform, I lost my belief that everything was going to be all right. My heart began to speed. My lungs couldn’t pull in enough air. Everyone stood too close to me, and I couldn’t look any of them in the eyes. Significant concentration was required to stop myself from screaming, from issuing a pre-semantic growl that would, without words, tell everyone to step the fuck back, to leave me alone, to allow me a few precious seconds to pull myself together. But what scared me even more than the justifiable belief that I was losing my grip on sanity was, that no one noticed. Not even those standing so close to me that I could name the fabric of their clothes became aware of how tightly my hands had turned to fists, how pale my skin was or the beads of sweat dotting my forehead. Dr. Jekyll was turning into Mr. Hyde beside them, as they waited for the northbound train to arrive, and it was just another day.

This is when the idea of going to the wedding chapel at city hall, instead of small claims court, leapt into my mind. I don’t know where it came from. I’m willing to believe it was truly inspired, a correcting nudge from God, the divine fist hitting a 1970s television set in order to improve reception. Wherever the idea came from, it was a life preserver splashing into the Sea of Insecurity that was pulling me under. I pushed through the shoulder-to-shoulder rush-hour crowd, ran up the stairs, over to the south platform, and caught the next train down to the Queen stop.

 

The wedding chapel doors burst open and, without groomsmen, bridesmaids, or family, a freshly minted marriage emerges. Radiating joy and confidence, they cut between Calina and Sergei, making their way out into the hallway, where the only thing holding them back from starting their new life together is the arrival of the elevator. Calina and Sergei stare at this marriage, three minutes old. It is unclear whether their immovable gaze is prompted by envy or gratitude, but they remain so transfixed that when the officiant arrives, she has to gently touch Sergei’s shoulder to gain his attention.

The officiant is an owl-like woman who carries her plumpness with a buoyant grace. She begins to explain the stages of the ceremony, her hands drifting through the air like kites on the winds of matrimony. Calina looks at Sergei. Sergei holds up his hand, open palm.

“Please be slow. English is second to us both,” Sergei says.

“Of course. My apologies.” The officiant is receptive. She marries, on average, twelve couples a day, and the idea of a couple lacking a language in common registers low on the list of impediments. But more than that, the officiant long ago learned not to question anyone’s motives, not to judge, to embrace the statistics; since four out of ten marriages end in divorce, even for Calina and Sergei, the odds are on their side. Using simple sentences, the officiant walks through the stages of the ceremony—the vows, the rings, the document that must be signed. In less than five minutes, only one question remains.

“Would you like to make a grand entrance? Or would you two like to come in together?” the officiant asks. Calina does not understand. She looks at Sergei.

“Me here, then you to enter?” Sergei opens his hand, points to the tips of his fingers and then to the base of his palm. “Or the same?” He uses his pointer and middle finger to walk across his palm.

“The same!” Calina’s face lights up. She takes Sergei’s arm.

The officiant ushers the bridesmaids and groomsmen into the chamber, shows them where to stand. She aims a remote control at a spot in the ceiling and pre-recorded classical music begins to play. I hang back, trying to make myself inconspicuous. My efforts are wasted: they’ve already forgotten about me completely. When the bridesmaids and groomsmen finish arranging themselves at the front of the chapel, the officiant once again aims the remote at the ceiling and a fluttering graceful Mozart begins to play. Two or three seconds later, the bride and groom come in, arm in arm, together.

This is where my anxiety returns. It is as pervasive and crushing as it was on the subway platform. I want to run away, but the chapel doors are closed. A hasty exit would require opening them, a gesture so obvious and interruptive it would be impossible not to interpret it as a statement. Even so, I still consider doing it: the only reason I don’t is that I don’t have the nerve. As the handsome groom and the beautiful bride look lovingly at each other, their perfectly blue eyes sparkling from the middle of their symmetrical faces, I struggle very hard to remain silent, to stop myself from taking a deep breath and yelling, “It will not always be this way!

“Yes, you have love! No doubt! And it feels as forever as sunsets and rainbows, but it won’t always be! Either something horrible will happen to one of you, or both of you, or to your kids, or you won’t even be able to have kids, or one of you will and the other won’t, but some tragedy will befall you! And as your feet are kicked out from under you, sending you tumbling into a spiral of despair, blame, and disappointment, the love you feel right now will be taken down, too.

“Or nothing will happen, which is even worse, because then you will have to sit there, watching, powerless, from the other side of an empty room that you are, for invisible reasons, unable to cross as your love evaporates. Your love will leave you one molecule at a time, like water left in a boiling pot, the love that was once stronger than anything you’d ever felt in your entire life turning into steam, floating away until all of it’s gone. The pot will boil dry and all you’ll have left is the pungent calcium stink of overheated metal.”

What gives me the strength not to say any of these things is observing how tightly Sergei keeps his arm around Calina. I stare at his arm. I know that if he moves it, if he lets go, I will begin screaming. And I get lucky—the only time he lets go is to take her hands as they exchange vows.

“I do,” Sergei says in his thick Russian accent.

“I do,” Calina says in her thick Portuguese accent.

They kiss, deeply. Hand in hand, they move to a small table, where Sergei keeps his right hand on the small of Calina’s back as she signs the marriage licence. She keeps her left hand on Sergei’s shoulder as he signs. Their arms encircle each other’s waists as they pose for pictures.

What happened to true love? There was a time when questioning the reality of that concept was unthinkable. The existence of true love was undeniable, and those who couldn’t believe in it were to be pitied, handled gently, like baby birds fallen from nests. Capitalism and science have combined to liquidate romance from our concept of love. Romance was sold off to the highest bidder so that desire could be marketed as genetics, lovers perceived as partners, the bed transformed into a boardroom table. Marriage has become nothing but a mutually beneficial merger, featuring terms negotiated through combined earning potential and the division of labour.

My perspective on love has been so corrupted that I can’t even remember what I thought true love was supposed to be. A soulmate? The idea that the perfect person is out there, waiting to be found? That God made a whole, then split it in two, scattering the parts as some sort of metaphysical scavenger hunt? These ideas are ludicrous, but metaphorically correct. I don’t believe in true love because I no longer believe that a person should need someone else to be whole. I’ve been conditioned to believe that I must function on my own, that if I’m not absolutely independent, I’m broken. The notion of love itself is increasingly difficult to believe in. What economic sense does love make? It doesn’t contribute to a stable emotional environment. Love does the opposite. It makes me vulnerable and frail and submissive to another’s will. I miss being those things, even if culture tells me they’re worthless. The idea that love can be free of self-interest and functionality is such a beautiful, optimistic thought, having so little to do with the real estate market or gross domestic product, that I’m not surprised it’s fallen out of fashion.

Love hasn’t changed. We have.

 

Sergei and Calina are certainly looking at each other like they believe in true love. As they leave the chapel, they don’t look back at the officiant. They don’t even look at the groomsmen and the bridesmaids. They look only at each other. They have not stopped touching since they were still girlfriend and boyfriend. They race down the foyer, cutting between the next bride and groom, and then they’re through the glass doors. The elevator arrives and they step inside. The rest of the wedding party waits for the next one. As the doors close, Sergei and Calina are still holding hands, happy, elated, firm in their understanding that these thirty minutes have changed their lives forever. They are an inspiration to believe in love, to reclaim a belief in true love, and yet my tongue, my restless independent tongue, continues to run over the broken side of my tooth, again and again, as if to say, We’ll see, we’ll fucking well see. Decay is inevitable. Nothing can withstand it: nothing at all.