weddings I have ever been to.
When the day arrived, in the afternoon, all the girls who work at Prune came over and crammed into my apartment for a twenty-minute glass of Billecarte Salmon rosé champagne and to admire me in my dress and hair and makeup. I had to get to City Hall before the last “ceremony” at three-thirty and the girls had to get back to work, so we didn’t have much time to drag anything down. They looked exactly like themselves in their aprons and chef jackets, checked pants and clogs, and it felt so much better than if they had been awkwardly stuffed into matching colored bridesmaid’s dresses with their flabby pale underarms and “we in the restaurant business eat too many cake and steak scraps to be wearing this dress” kind of tummies. I was working a French twist and a stiletto heel a mile high. I really love an urban wedding. Urban weddings are classy.
And so I arrived with my sister and my best friend, Heidi, in her four-button, narrow-leg Helmut Lang suit at City Hall, and we got in line to go through the metal detectors. If you want to feel like the most glamorous woman in the world on your wedding day, just be the only one dressed in a good heel and a vintage couture dress at City Hall at two-thirty in the afternoon, surrounded by people going about their municipal business of renewing their driver’s license or appearing for jury duty or verifying their city marshal bond.
There were a few people ahead of us at the chapel, which was just a tight, ugly room upstairs with a dirty carpet, and cigarette burns on a few of the fiberglass chairs where we sat to await our turn. The small group that we had assembled were all impeccably dressed, with the Italians really understanding how to work a good suit and a good cashmere sweater and an expensive colorful silk tie. Michele was so nervous he had cut himself shaving and so appeared at his own wedding with a Band-Aid on his neck under his ear. In truth, Michele was not marrying ironically. For him this was not a piece of performance art whatsoever. He claimed to love me and to want this marriage. Inasmuch as he was able to know himself at the time and to have insights about his own desires, I trust he was getting married for love. I am sure there are many women who would find it wonderful to hear the man they’ve just started sleeping with start to make suggestions about living together, and who would thrill to receive a Tiffanny box after a few brief months into their affair. But I was annoyed by it and felt erased and unseen by it. “Jesus, slow down,” I warned. “You don’t even fucking know me.” I had flatly refused to even introduce him to people we ran into over the first few years, and I never once entertained his preposterous idea of living together. But he wouldn’t for an instant even entertain the idea of marrying someone in his lab just for a green card. He showed up to City Hall at three o’clock in the afternoon to really marry me. At the ceremony, my lesbian friends wore suits, too, which covered up their tattoos, mostly. I’ve never seen a more disparate group of people in a room for the same occasion before in my life—an Italian Upper East Side doctor eleven years my senior and all of his cohort, and a downtown, pierced and tattooed, recently defrocked lesbian dishwasher and her motly crew—all convened in chapel C on the eighth floor.
And yet our candid black and whites in our wedding album look so genuinely happy and festive and relaxed because we were, in fact, just that—happy and festive and relaxed, unburdened by any sense of a “real” or a “deep and somber purpose.”
When we emerged, married, we exited from the building under the huge vaulted arches of the southside doors and there, on the cobblestone, with pigeons all around us and my sister throwing rice—all of it captured in black-and-white photos—it looked an awful lot like an actual, consummated marriage.
I had arranged for a small fleet of black Lincoln Town Cars to wait for us outside City Hall and take us across town to a tiny and excellent wine bar in the West Village. Heidi held the car doors open and helped guests into the cars, shut