world could provide. He'd been there—maybe that was the difference between him and other men. He'd already had what most guys spent their lives reaching for. Maybe he knew something most men didn't. Maybe he'd pushed his way through to a kind of genius, a bigger and more fabulous vision that lay beyond the rules of ordinary beauty.
All right, then. If Mary was going to divorce him over Magda, if she was going to take the house he'd built plus a big greedy bite out of his income every month, if she was going to poison the kids' minds toward him . . . All right. He had an answer, and it was simple and it was true. There was a genius in his love for Magda. It wasn't a usual love, some poor shlunk leaving his wife for a little leopard of a blonde who'd leave him as soon as she got herself a better offer. This was something else, this love of his, and if you didn't get it, if you were still so unsure of yourself that you needed to parade around with prom queens, well, too bad for you.
At home, in his rented apartment, Constantine played his old records and thought about Magda. He played Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck. He played them in private because all the kids, even Susan, teased him about his taste in music, and these days he didn't like being teased. Okay, he'd never liked being teased, but these days he got furious over any joke made at his expense, any clever little remark that suggested he was a figure of fun. And getting mad in front of the kids just gave Mary more ammunition for the poison she was spreading against him. So he listened to his records alone, after work. Tom Jones sang, It's not unusual to make love at any time. He kept the records in a drawer, not hidden exactly, but out of sight, so that if one of the kids came over and looked through them they wouldn't start in on him. He'd had enough of that. These days, he just wanted to be loved.
He wanted to be loved. What was wrong with that?
He married Magda at St. Bartholomew's, the biggest Episcopal church in six counties. Fuck Catholicism with its curses and redemptions, its insistence on cheerful misery as the only virtue. Fuck the Greek Orthodox church of his childhood, with its veils and secrets and roadside shrines. Episcopalians understood that Christ came to earth as an advertisement for the flesh, to tell us it's all right to be human. It's all right to want things. It's all right to own, as long as you keep yourself humble by remembering that you'll turn it all in again anyway, when your time comes. So Constantine insisted on an Episcopal wedding, and Magda's old Catholic mother, reduced by arthritis to a life of television and sly, joking complaints, didn't put up anything he couldn't handle. If he could beat county inspectors and a squadron of crooked day laborers, he could overrule a sick, good-humored old Hungarian woman in a housecoat the color of stale bread. Besides, she wasn't a fool. She knew a good deal when she saw one.
Constantine and Magda put on the grandest wedding St. Bartholomew's had ever seen. For the wedding a thousand white gladioli were cut. A cake almost five feet high was baked and covered with white sugar roses, swans, and bells, and topped by a little porcelain bride and groom—porcelain, not plastic—with blurred, rapturous faces and identical tiny red mouths. For Magda's dress, forty yards of white lace was tatted by whoever, Belgian or French nuns, whoever it was that made lace, along with slighdy less than an acre of white silk and chiffon and white sequins and pearls no bigger than a sparrow's eyeball. Mary had told Constantine once about something called the forbidden stitch, some Chinese thing, a kind of embroidery so fine they had to ban women from doing it because they went blind over their needles. As Constantine stood at the altar he glanced at Billy. His best man, his only son and heir, built up now, bulkily petulant in a rented tux. Blood rose, hot, to Constantine's temples. He knew what Billy was but he couldn't say the word, not even, inside his own head. Here he stood in front of everybody with his brawny, girlish son and there in the first pew sat Zoe with the little