The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian

  He started to giggle as they waited, and Millicent pinched him. “Nobody’s even looking at us,” he whispered, which was true. Everyone had turned to watch the bride coming down the aisle. Jane looked very tall next to her mother. A trick of the light made the veil opaque, and for a moment it looked to Jim like Jane had a fancy silk bag over her head, or like someone had wrapped up her face for the morgue.

  Millicent pinched him again, much more gently. She was the only person in the church looking at him instead of at Jane, but already all the heads were swiveling around. “Everything will be fine as soon as you see her face,” Millicent said, and kissed Jim’s cheek. Then she took a step back with her sister and stood behind him. He and Jane couldn’t decide who to ask to be in the bridal party—they were both only children and had no close friends but each other—so they didn’t ask anyone. Millicent and Marilynne were their best people.

  He hadn’t been anxious at all about the wedding—they were already married, so wasn’t this one just for show? But now he was terrified. All of a sudden he wanted a little more time, just enough for somebody—Jane if she could make herself available right now, or Millicent, or even a random stranger—to tell him a few dozen times that everything was going to be okay.

  We are already married, Jim kept telling himself, and then, It’s perfectly normal for the groom to shit himself. But after he raised the veil and saw Jane’s apprehensive and exultant face, and as the priest went through the first part of the ceremony, he came to know, without having to hear it from anyone, that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. He didn’t say to Jane, Oh, that’s right—I love you, though that seemed, in the moment, like it would be better to say that than the vows they’d written together. Certainly it would have been easier to say. He didn’t forget the vows—they’d decided it would be classier to memorize them—but he was so nervous he could barely pay attention to what he was saying. He and Jane spoke simultaneously, looking each other right in the face, and the looking turned out to be very hard. It felt like the first time in his life he’d ever looked somebody in the eye and said something that he meant. He’d been given so many wedding warnings and so much wedding advice, and yet no one had warned him about this. He felt like he should be very quiet when he spoke, and like he should shout, and like he should put a hand to Jane’s cheek, and like he should choke her throat for passion. All these promises they were speaking had sounded sweet and prudent when they hashed them out at the dinner table, but now they were ambitious, exalted, and scary. The priest gave them permission to kiss each other.

  “I love you,” Jim said, in a daze. He was worried that he had neglected somehow to mention that in the vows. “I love you,” she replied, because she was masterful like that—omitting the “too,” declaring by the omission that nobody ever really went first in love, the “too” was only an accident of time, not a cause and an effect, not two causes in search of an effect. It was a causeless effect.

  They had agreed not to use any tongue for the kiss, settling on something passionate and chaste, a Gone With the Wind sort of kiss, mouths open as if they might start trading breath, held for five seconds, which they both agreed as long enough to give people a little thrill. When they had stopped to consider it, they had both liked the idea of making the people watching them a little horny. But Jim hadn’t considered they might do that to themselves. And of course it was normal, opening an interior eye during the kiss, to see a future together, to measure the time in apartments or houses or cats or even children. Jim’s daze was lifting, the vows were coming back to him. That’s what the kiss is for, he told himself. To have a little time to think together about all those marvelous and terrifying things you just said. They had sworn to remain always together and never apart. Not in any way that matters. Occasionally straying, maybe, Jim said to himself now, but always returning, until we die. He saw that, too: advanced old age spent hand in hand on a sun-dappled park bench and then mindless decay into matched graves.

  As they kissed, Jane saw the past, the little accidents of fate (parallel schedules in medical school, coincidentally matching to the same hospital for residency) and the big accident of cheated fate that had brought them here, standing too long in their marriage kiss and using too much tongue in front of a hundred strangers and her mother and Millicent. None of them ought to see this. Not even Millicent, who had taught Jane to kiss, inspecting the motions of Jane’s tongue as she made out with a clear plastic bag and composing mnemonics by which Jane might remember how to be a thoughtful and surprising lover of a boy’s mouth. Maybe we are holding this kiss too long? Jane said to herself, exulting at the same time, in a hope like knowledge, that the kiss was never going to end.

  “We kissed too long, didn’t we?” Jane asked Jim in the limousine on the way to the reception, which they held at an arts club not very far from where Jim had been run over by the taxi. Jane’s mother had instructed the limo driver to take the long way there, and avoid passing that particular corner.

  “We sure did,” he said. “Let’s do it again right now.”

  “Not just yet,” she said. At the reception she polled the few people she thought would be honest with her. “Just a little,” her new friend Maureen said. “It was a little vulgar, sure. But it made me jealous, you know. I wish somebody had kissed me like that at my wedding. Anybody at all. Even the priest!” “Don’t be stupid,” said Millicent. “If you start regretting sexy kisses, then I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.” And Jane’s mother said, “Of course it was.” They were dancing together—her mother was being her father and Millicent was being her mother with Jim, a few feet away. “And of course I blushed for you. And if I had been the officiant I would have given a prearranged signal to let you know. Because it’s hard to remember when to stop. But do you know what I tell newlyweds when they ask me that question?”

  “That they fucked up? That they have to do it all over again? That they’re not actually married?”

  “That it’s good luck,” her mother said, kissing her cheek and passing her off to Jim. Jane could tell he was getting worn out already by the way he hung on her shoulders. He was still easy to tire, and when he drank, his coordination started to slip.

  “We fucked up with that kiss,” Jane said. “My mother said we have to do it over again.”

  “Hooray,” he said, and kissed her. But she drew back, saying she couldn’t dance and kiss at the same time. She said that again, a few minutes later at the end of the dance, and again when they sat down, and again around the cake-cutting. “Come on,” Jim said, pretty drunk by now. “Let’s make out a little. We can slide under the table, if you’re worried about people watching us.”

  “You’re too tired,” she said. “But it’s too bad I don’t still have my veil.” It really would have been nice to put it down again. They ought to let you do that at your wedding, just pull down the shade for a few moments of privacy and contemplation, or even just to have a moment in which to appreciate one nice long moment, since she was barely getting to pay proper attention to her own wedding. The strangers—why had she invited all these strangers?—kept coming up to talk at her, so she’d had no time to decide if the salmon was too wet or too dry, or whether the wine was any good, or if she liked the signature wedding cocktail they’d paid five hundred dollars for somebody to think up and then write down on a little card to go into the favor bags. “Are you having a good time?” Jim kept asking her, and she kept saying, “I think so!” or “Probably!” or “I’ll tell you in an hour when I catch up to myself!” At least I paid attention to the kiss, she told herself.

  But when they were finally alone again, standing in their stained and rumpled finery at the apartment door, she found herself unready. “Maybe we should go to a hotel after all,” she said. “Maureen was right. We shouldn’t come home again until after the honeymoon.”

  “Too late,” Jim said, his hand already on the doorknob. “What’s wrong?”

  She knew it was silly to avoid maki
ng out with your newly recertified husband just because you were afraid it wasn’t going to be as good as the wedding make-out. It’s perfectly all right if it’s all downhill from here, she said to herself, and started kissing him while he was still fiddling drunkenly with the lock.

  Don’t compare! she told herself. She kissed him thoughtfully, tentatively, and found it to be exactly the same. It brought her right back to the wedding kiss, and once she was there, she realized that it was the audience, not she or Jim, that was at risk of humiliation, that she and Jim might be making their guests feel bad about their own inaugural kisses, their own relationships. Happiness in love, she thought, like obscene wealth or an ostomy bag, ought to be tastefully concealed. She and Jim ought to be up there in smartly tailored but very plain love, love that had a pool but no poolhouse, no-logo love. Anything else had to be bad luck. Anything else, the universe would punish one day. She knew all these things, but she didn’t stop.

  And just like Jim, she took the time to consider what they had just said to each other, since she’d also been too anxious to really pay attention, a few minutes before, when she was actually speaking the vows. Always together, she had sworn with him, never apart. Maureen had said they ought to surprise each other with their vows, but Jane knew that was a terrible idea. She hated surprises. Every surprise of her life so far had been a bad one. And Jim’s vows weren’t just gifts, after all. Neither were Jane’s own. They were a contract. They were a promise not to fuck things up, which could mean something only if the two of them explicitly acknowledged, in the vows themselves, the ways in which they had already fucked up.

  Or at least the way that she had fucked up. Always together, never apart. But what that meant for her was: I won’t run away again. Whatever happens, no matter how scared I am, I’ll wait it out with you. She had time, as the wedding kiss went on and on, to look squarely at their last Indian dinner, at her own behavior. When they sat down, she was already afraid, though not because she was expecting Jim to propose to her. She would have behaved better if she’d been expecting it.

  But all she had was a feeling that something terrible was going to happen. Jim had been making her uneasy all day long, encroaching aggressively on her bed space in the morning even though they’d already resigned themselves to the fact that she was a nighttime cuddler and he a morning one, then paging her all day long just to ask her dreamily what she was doing now, and finally wanting to hold her hand on the sidewalk even when they were walking against the stream of commuters going up Broadway. She had walked ahead of him, still holding his hand, so it must have looked for all the world that she was leading him like a child.

  “Don’t you like your tikka?” he asked.

  “It’s lovely,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Sorry if I’m being horrible.”

  “You’re not being horrible. Have some naan. It’s right out of the oven. Take some.”

  “But I don’t think I’m even hungry,” she said, shrinking away when he thrust it at her. When he didn’t take it back, she tore off a piece and put it in her mouth. Now all the waiters were looking at them, and some were walking to the table. “Oh,” she said when she bit the ring, “there’s a rock in the bread.” The staff rushed in—to help her, she thought, but they gathered around Jim as he lurched to one knee and then they all began to sing.

  Heart of my heart, I love you

  Life would be naught without you

  Jim had taken her hand. She held on to his as long as she could, perfectly in control of her clutching fingers even if it felt like the rest of her body, which was already straining to run away, belonged to someone else. She was full of questions for Jim—Why do I feel accused by this proposal? Where do their thick Indian accents go when these gentlemen sing?—but he was too busy, too caught up with his own question, for her to ask him any of her own.

  Light of my life, my darling

  I love you, I love you

  If she had stayed at the table, those lyrics might have become Jim’s vows, since, sentimental as the words were, they said just what he felt. These waiters might have been his groomsmen in their matching black suits. Even now, their accompaniment was the only thing that kept Jim singing instead of lapsing into barking sobs.

  I can forget you never

  From you I ne’er can sever

  Oh, say you’ll be mine forever

  It was plain, after she had gone, that she had not disappeared in a fit of unbearable happiness. “Everything will be very good still,” the hostess kept telling Jim, though his barbershop companions all looked like they’d just seen a murder, and the other patrons had already turned away to try to look like they weren’t talking about him. Without him asking, the staff packed up their dinner to go, adding gifts of food, enough for a feast. He had ten pounds on each arm when he walked out. They’d even wrapped up the mukhwas he’d asked that he and his fiancée be showered with, like wedding rice, as they left. The boys had been supposed to sing them out.

  Everything is going to be fine, he kept telling himself as he trudged along to Jane’s apartment. “Everything is going to be very good still.” He said it in the Indian hostess’s voice because he was afraid he’d be a fool to say it in his own, but after only a few repetitions he started to almost believe it. There was a version of this story, he knew, where he ran now too, and before they could marry, they divorced over his hurt feelings. And there was another version in which Jane simply never calmed down, in which she kept asking for one more week alone until it was twenty years later and they were both married to other people. But he knew that they wouldn’t choose either of those versions. Jane had only given them something to try hard at, a place to practice at the extraordinary work of being together. Running away wasn’t a No. It was just as close to Yes as she could get right now. Jim was smiling, shocked and pleased at what he had just made himself understand, when the cab ran him over.

  Much later, he liked to tell himself he got a look at their future during the accident, that the absolute certainty of that cab is going to hit me became, while he was up in the air, surrounded by levitating pools of curry and dal, became Wow, you can see everything from up here! and then a glimpse of something else. Of course, the accident had wiped out anything he might have been actually thinking or knowing or seeing right then, but real or not real, that floating moment stayed with him for the rest of his life, a nostalgic presentiment. So later, at their second wedding, the one he was awake for, in the great actual now of the kiss Jim thought he could see his own dumb face, heartbroken and hopeful and amazed, staring slack-jawed at them from the past.

  Hang in there, he told his gaping, tumbling face. Everything will be different, but nothing will change. That’s the part that you already have, get it? The thing that doesn’t change. He could feel the nonimaginary people watching as well. He felt their jealous disdain as his own good fortune. He didn’t mind it at all, or care that he and Jane might be holding the kiss too long. All together now, boys! he called out, and they replied in a chorus, every Jim he’d been and every Jim he’d ever be, Always together, never apart. Everything will be different, but nothing will change.

  He knew it wouldn’t end, this affirming and reaffirming. Twice every year he’d do it, at the anniversary of each of his weddings, staring into a mirror and asking the nearest Jim to pass it back. Tell them all not to worry. Everything is indeed different, but indeed nothing has changed. Then some years he forgot. And some years he wasn’t even sure if it was true anymore, so those sad hopeful fuckers in the mirror got long speeches, accusations and rebuttals instead of recited vows. And then, eventually, at last, he would say: All’s well, more or less. I love her. I don’t still love her. I just love her. Same as always, my dudes.

  “What are you doing in there?” Jane called out.

  “Nothing!” he said. “Brushing my teeth!”

  “Are you coming to bed?”

  “Right now!” He gave his teeth a few swipes, and rinsed his mouth. He f
ixed his hair and smoothed his mustache. Peering closer at his face, he noticed how unevenly the hairs fell across his lip, so he clipped them with scissors. All this, though she had already made it dark in the bedroom.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Yes, coming!” But he did a few quick, quiet push-ups, to plump up his biceps, because she always noticed, even in the dark, when they were a little bigger than usual.

  “There you are,” she said, when he came to bed. “I’m so sleepy.”

  “What time is your flight?”

  “Evening,” she said. “But I’m taking an afternoon case for Maureen, so I’ll have to leave right from the hospital. Are you working?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’ll come up and say goodbye.”

  “Oh, don’t,” she said. “Let’s do it now. Bye bye!” She kissed him and laid her head on his chest. He could hear her softly spitting out mustache fragments. He ought to have washed his face after trimming.

  “Happy almost-anniversary,” he said.

  “Oh, tomorrow is the eighteenth,” she said. “But that one doesn’t count. I was crazy. You were asleep.”

  “Of course it counts,” he said. “What did you think I would have said, if I was awake?”

  “You could have said anything.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t have woken up at all, if you hadn’t done it.”

  “Let’s not even talk about that. Let’s talk about the other wedding.” Jane ran the numbers in her head, afraid suddenly that she’d still be in Paris on the anniversary of the church service, which had followed that of the icu service by ten days and a year.

  “Sure.”

  “What should we do? Do you want me to make a dinner reservation?”

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “You’ll forget. You always do.”