If it was up to me, I don’t think I would have had a reception, said Lena, it was all so hurried, but Chris insisted he wanted a proper wedding with all the trimmings, as though our vows wouldn’t have meant anything without. That morning we’d been in church, me all in white, him in his dark suit. We even paid for a photographer, who took pictures of us down by the lake. We spent the afternoon on a steamship on the lake, and then a yellow postbus with flowers on the hood took us to the reception. There was roast pork with mashed potatoes and a three-tier wedding cake with a marzipan bride and groom on top. Lots of our friends from the theater were there, there were long, emotional speeches, indiscretions, a director who by afternoon had had too much to drink and was telling off-color jokes, the whole wretchedness of a middle-class wedding. Everything came to an end in a drunken chaos. Chris and I got into an argument, I can’t remember why, and by the time we were finally home, and he was carrying me across the threshold, he was so clumsy about it he hit my head against the doorframe and gave me a bump. So much for the happiest day of my life.
That can’t be, I said, I never married Magdalena. It never occurred to us. There are deviations, Lena said softly, so softly I wasn’t sure if it was sorrow in her voice or merriment.
We were sitting at a small table in the library hall, drinking thin machine coffee. It was madness, Lena was saying, when Chris asked me to be his wife we had barely been together for a month. I was completely unprepared for it. And it probably sounds funny, but I had the sense he wasn’t sure about it either, as if he had the idea from someone else.
I was completely confused and wondered what difference Chris and Lena’s wedding made to anything. He’s on his way here, I finally ended up saying. He decided in favor of writing, proper writing, and he’s run away from the workshop and his secure existence as a hack. Now he’s blundering around the city just as we are now, just as I did then.