Committed

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  At the next-to-last minute, though, only a few days before the scheduled interview, we realized we had fumbled. We were missing a copy of Felipe’s police record from Brazil. Or, rather, we were missing a document that would prove that Felipe did not have a police record in Brazil. Somehow this critical piece of the dossier had escaped our attention. What followed was a horrible flurry of panic. Would this delay the whole process? Was it even possible to secure a Brazilian police report without Felipe’s having to fly to Brazil to pick it up in person?

  After a few days of incredibly complicated transglobal phone calls, Felipe managed to convince our Brazilian friend Armenia—a woman of celebrated charisma and resourcefulness—to stand in line all day at a Rio de Janeiro police station and sweet-talk an official there into releasing Felipe’s clean Brazilian police records over to her. (There was a certain poetic symmetry to the fact that she rescued us in the end, given that she was the person who had introduced us to each other three years before at a dinner party in Bali.) Then Armenia overnighted those documents from Brazil to Felipe in Bali—just in time for him to fly to Jakarta during a monsoon in order to find an authorized translator who could render all his Brazilian paperwork into the necessary English in the presence of the only American-government-authorized Portuguese-speaking legal notary in the entire nation of Indonesia.

  “It’s all very straightforward,” Felipe assured me, calling me in the middle of the night from a bicycle rickshaw in the pouring Javanese rain. “We can do this. We can do this. We can do this.”

  On the morning of January 18, 2007, Felipe was the first person in line at the U.S. Consulate in Sydney. He hadn’t slept in days but he was ready, carrying a terrifyingly complex stack of papers: government records, medical exams, birth certificates, and masses of other sundry evidence. He hadn’t gotten a haircut in a long while and he was still wearing his travel sandals. But it was fine. They didn’t care how he looked, only that he was legitimate. And despite a few testy questions from the immigration official about what exactly Felipe had been doing in the Sinai Peninsula in 1975 (the answer? falling in love with a beautiful seventeen-year-old Israeli girl, naturally), the interview went well. At the end of it all, finally—with that satisfying, librarian-like thunk in his passport—they gave him the visa.

  “Good luck on your marriage,” said the American official to my Brazilian fiancé, and Felipe was free.

  He caught a Chinese Airlines flight the next morning from Sydney, which took him through Taipei and then over to Alaska. In Anchorage, he successfully passed through American customs and immigration and boarded a plane for JFK. A few hours later, I drove through an icy-cold winter’s night to meet him.

  And while I would like to think that I had held myself together with a modicum of stoicism during the previous ten months, I must confess that I now absolutely fell apart as soon as I arrived at the airport. All the fears that I had been suppressing since Felipe’s arrest came spilling out in the open now that he was so close to being safely home. I became dizzy and shaky, and I was suddenly afraid of everything. I was afraid that I was in the wrong airport, at the wrong hour, on the wrong day. (I must have looked at the itinerary seventy-five times, but I still worried.) I was afraid that Felipe’s plane had crashed. I was retroactively and quite insanely afraid that he would fail his immigration interview back in Australia—when he had, in fact, just passed his immigration interview back in Australia only a day earlier.

  And even now, even though the Arrivals board clearly announced that his flight had landed, I was perversely afraid that his flight had not landed, and that it would never land. What if he didn’t get off the plane? What if he got off the plane and they arrested him again? Why was it taking him so long to get off the plane? I scanned the faces of every passenger who came down that Arrivals corridor, searching for Felipe in the most preposterous of forms. Irrationally, I had to look twice at every single old Chinese lady with a cane and every single toddling child, just to make doubly sure that it wasn’t him. I was having trouble breathing. Like a lost kid, I almost ran over to a policeman and asked for help—but help with what?

  Then, suddenly, it was him.

  I would know him anywhere. The most familiar face in the world to me. He was running down the Arrivals corridor, looking for me with the same anxious expression that I was surely sporting myself. He had on the same clothes he’d been wearing the day he’d been arrested back in Dallas ten months earlier—the same clothes he’d been wearing pretty much every day of this whole year, all over the world. He was a bit tattered around the edges, yes, but somehow he seemed mighty to me nonetheless, his eyes burning with the effort to spot me in the crowd. He was not an old Chinese lady, he was not a toddling child, he was not anybody else. He was Felipe—my Felipe, my human, my cannonball—and then he saw me and he barreled down on me and almost knocked me over with the sheer force of his impact.

  “We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,” wrote Walt Whitman. “We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.”

  And now we could not let go of each other, and for some reason I simply could not stop sobbing.

  Within a handful of days, we were married.

  We got married in our new home—in that odd, old church—on a cold Sunday afternoon in February. It’s very convenient, it turns out, to own a church when one has to get married.

  The marriage license cost us twenty-eight dollars and a photocopy of one utility bill. The guests were: my parents (married forty years); my Uncle Terry and Aunt Deborah (married twenty years); my sister and her husband (married fifteen years); my friend Jim Smith (divorced for twenty-five years); and Toby the family dog (never married, bi-curious). We all wished that Felipe’s children (unmarried) could have joined us, too, but the wedding happened on such short notice that there was no way to get them over in time from Australia. We had to make do with a few excited phone calls, but could not risk a delay. We needed to seal this deal immediately to protect Felipe’s place on American soil with an inviolable legal bond.

  In the end, we had decided that we wanted a few witnesses at our wedding after all. My friend Brian was right: Marriage is not an act of private prayer. Instead, it is both a public and a private concern, with real-world consequences. While the intimate terms of our relationship would always belong solely to Felipe and me, it was important to remember that a small share of our marriage would always belong to our families as well—to all those people who would be most seriously affected by our success or our failure. They needed to be present on that day, then, in order to emphasize this point. I also had to admit that another small share of our vows, like it or not, would always belong to the State. That’s what made this a legal wedding in the first place after all.

  But the smallest and most curiously shaped share of our vows belonged to history—at whose impressively large feet we all must kneel eventually. Wherever you have landed in history determines to a large extent what your marriage vows will look like and sound like. Since Felipe and I happened to have landed right there, in that little Garden State mill town, in the year 2007, we decided not to write our own idiosyncratic personal promises (we had done that back in Knoxville anyhow), but to acknowledge our place in history by repeating the basic, secular vows of the State of New Jersey. It just felt like an appropriate nod to reality.

  Of course, my niece and nephew attended the wedding, too. Nick, the theatrical genius, was on hand to read a commemorative poem. And Mimi? She had cornered me a week earlier and asked, “Is this going to be a real wedding or not?”

  “That all depends,” I’d said. “What do you think constitutes a real wedding?”

  “A real wedding means there will be a flower girl,” Mimi replied. “And the flower girl will be wearing a pink dress. And the flower girl will be carrying flowers. Not a bouquet of flowers, but a basket of rose petals. And not pink rose petals, either, but yellow rose petals. And the flower girl will walk in front of the bride, and s
he will throw the yellow rose petals on the ground. Will you be having anything like that?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess it just depends on whether we can find a girl somewhere who might be capable of doing that job. Can you think of anyone?”

  “I suppose I could do it,” she replied slowly, looking away with a terrific show of false indifference. “I mean, if you can’t find anyone else . . .”

  So it turned out that we did have a real wedding, even by Mimi’s exacting standards. Aside from our extremely decked-out flower girl, though, it was a pretty casual affair. I wore my favorite red sweater. The groom wore his blue shirt (the clean one). Jim Smith played his guitar, and my Aunt Deborah—a trained opera singer—sang “La Vie en Rose” just for Felipe’s benefit. Nobody seemed to mind that the house was still unpacked and largely unfurnished. The only room that was fully usable thus far was the kitchen, and that was only so that Felipe could prepare a wedding lunch for everyone. He’d been cooking for two days, and we had to remind him to take off his apron when it came time to actually get married. (“A very good sign,” my mother noted.)

  Our wedding vows were administered by a nice man named Harry Furstenberger, the mayor of this small New Jersey township. When Mayor Harry first walked in the door, my father asked him directly, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” because he knew that this would matter to me.

  “I’m a Republican,” said Mayor Harry.

  There followed a moment of tense silence. Then my sister whispered, “Actually, Liz, for this kind of thing, you sort of want a Republican. Just to make sure the marriage really sticks with Homeland Security, you know?”

  So we proceeded.

  You all know the gist of the standard American wedding vows, so I need not repeat them here. Suffice it to say, we repeated them there. Without irony or hesitation, we exchanged our vows in the presence of my family, in the presence of our friendly Republican mayor, in the presence of an actual flower girl, and in the presence of Toby the dog. In fact, Toby—sensing an important moment here—curled up on the floor right between Felipe and me just as we were sealing these promises. We had to lean over the dog in order to kiss each other. This felt auspicious; in medieval wedding portraits, you will often see the image of a dog painted between the figures of a newly wed couple—the ultimate symbol of fidelity.

  By the end of it all—and it really doesn’t take very much time, considering the magnitude of the event—Felipe and I were finally legally married. Then we all sat down for a long lunch together—the mayor and my friend Jim and my family and the kids and my new husband. I did not have any way of knowing with certainty on that afternoon what peace and contentment were awaiting me in this marriage (reader: I know it now), but I did feel calm and grateful all the same. It was a lovely day. There was much wine and there were many toasts. The balloons that Nick and Mimi had brought with them drifted slowly up to the dusty old church ceiling and bobbed there above us all. People might have lingered even longer, but by dusk it had begun to sleet, so our guests gathered together their coats and belongings, eager to get on the road while the getting was still good.

  Soon enough, everyone was gone.

  And Felipe and I were left alone together at last, to clean up the lunch dishes and begin unpacking our home.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is a work of nonfiction. I have re-created all conversations and incidents to the best of my ability, but sometimes—for the sake of narrative coherence—I have edited down events or discussions that may have taken place over several days into one passage. Moreover, I have changed some—but not all—of the names of the characters in this story in order to protect the privacy of certain people who may not have intended, when their paths accidentally crossed mine, to show up later in a book. I thank Chris Langford for helping me track down appropriate aliases for these good people.

  I am not a professional academic, nor a sociologist, nor a psychologist, nor an expert on marriage. I have done my best in this book to discuss the history of matrimony as accurately as possible, but in order to do so, I had to rely a great deal on the work of scholars and writers who have dedicated their entire professional lives to this topic. I won’t list a full bibliography here, but I must offer special gratitude to a few specific authors:

  The work of the historian Stephanie Coontz has been a shining beacon for me over these last three years of study, and I cannot recommend highly enough her fascinating and extremely readable book Marriage: A History. I also owe an enormous debt to Nancy Cott, Eileen Powers, William Jordan, Erika Uitz, Rudolph M. Bell, Deborah Luepnitz, Zygmunt Bauman, Leonard Shlain, Helen Fisher, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman, Evan Wolfson, Shirley Glass, Andrew J. Cherkin, Ferdinand Mount, Anne Fadiman (for her extraordinary writing on the Hmong), Allan Bloom (for his contemplations on the Greek-Hebrew philosophical divide), the many authors of the Rutgers University study on marriage, and—most delightfully and unexpectedly of all—Honoré de Balzac.

  Aside from these authors, the single most influential person in the shaping of this book has been my friend Anne Connell, who copy-edited, fact-checked, and corrected this manuscript to within an inch of its life, using her bionic eyes, her magical golden pencil, and her unparalleled expertise with “the Web nets.” Nobody—and I mean nobody—rivals the Scrutatrix for such editorial thoroughness. I have Anne to thank for the fact that this book is divided into chapters, that the word “actually” does not appear four times in every paragraph, and that every frog within these pages has been correctly identified as an amphibian and not a reptile.

  I thank my sister Catherine Gilbert Murdock, who is not only a gifted writer of young adult fiction (her wonderful book Dairy Queen is a must-read for any thinking girl between the ages of ten and sixteen), but who is also my dearly beloved friend and the greatest intellectual role model of my life. She, too, read this book with time-consuming care, saving me from many errors of thought and sequence. That said, it is not so much Catherine’s comprehensive grasp of Western history that amazes me but her uncanny talent for somehow knowing when her homesick sister needs to be airmailed a new pair of pajamas, even when that sister is all the way over in Bangkok and feeling very lonely. In return for all Catherine’s kindness and generosity, I have offered her one lovingly crafted footnote.

  I thank all the other early readers of this book for their insights and encouragement: Darcey, Cat, Ann (the word “pachyderm” is for her), Cree, Brian (this book will always be known as Weddings and Evictions just between us), Mom, Dad, Sheryl, Iva, Bernadette, Terry, Deborah (who gently suggested that I might want to mention the word “feminism” in a book about marriage), Uncle Nick (my most loyal supporter since forever), Susan, Shea (who listened to hours and hours and hours of my early ideas on this subject), Margaret, Sarah, Jonny, and John.

  I thank Michael Knight for offering me a job and a room in Knoxville in 2005, and for knowing me well enough to realize that I would much prefer living in a crazy old residency hotel than anywhere else in town.

  I thank Peter and Marianne Blythe for sharing their couch and their encouragement with Felipe when he landed in Australia desperate and fresh out of jail. With two new babies, a dog, a bird, and the wonderful young Tayla all living under one roof, the Blythes’ house was already overflowing, but somehow Peter and Marianne made room for one more needy refugee. I also thank Rick and Clare Hinton in Canberra, for guiding the Australian end of Felipe’s immigration process, and for watching diligently over the mail. Even from half a world away, they are perfect neighbors.

  On the subject of great Australians, I thank Erica, Zo, and Tara—my amazing stepkids and daughter-in-law—for welcoming me so warmly into their lives. I must especially credit Erica for giving me the sweetest compliment of my life: “Thank you, Liz, for not being a bimbo.” (My pleasure, sweetheart. And right back at you.)

  I thank Ernie Sesskin and Brian Foster and Eileen Marolla for guiding—purely out of the real estate-loving goodness of their
hearts— the entire complicated transaction of helping Felipe and me buy a house in New Jersey from the other side of the world. There’s nothing like receiving a hand-drawn floor plan at three o’clock in the morning to know that somebody’s got your back.

  I thank Armenia de Oliveira for leaping into action in Rio de Janeiro to save Felipe’s immigration process on that end. Also holding up the Brazilian front, as always, have been the wonderful Claucia and Fernando Chevarria—who were just as relentless in their pursuit of antique military records as they were in their encouragement and love.

  I thank Brian Getson, our immigration lawyer, for his thoroughness and patience, and I thank Andrew Brenner for helping us find Brian in the first place.

  I thank Tanya Hughes (for offering me a room of my own at the beginning of this process) and Rayya Elias (for offering me a room of my own at the end).

  I thank Roger LaPhoque and Dr. Charles Henn for their hospitality and elegance at the budget oasis of the Atlanta Hotel in Bangkok. The Atlanta is a wonder that must be seen to be believed, and even then it cannot really be believed.

  I thank Sarah Chalfant for her endless confidence in me, and for her years of constant encircling protection. I thank Kassie Evashevski, Ernie Marshall, Miriam Feuerle, and Julie Mancini for completing that circle.

  I thank Paul Slovak, Clare Ferraro, Kathryn Court, and everyone else at Viking Penguin for their patience as I wrote this book. There are not many people left in the world of publishing who would have said “Take as much time as you need” to a writer who had just missed a major deadline. Throughout this entire process, nobody (except myself) has put any pressure on me whatsoever, and that has been a rare gift. Their care hearkens back to an earlier and more gracious way of doing business, and I am grateful to have been the recipient of such decency.