Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (31 page)

What I do know is that the day after my encounter with the begging children I flew back to Bangkok and reunited with a Felipe who was calm and relaxed, and who had clearly enjoyed a restorative break from my company. He had passed the days of my absence happily learning how to make balloon animals in order to keep himself busy. Upon my return, therefore, he presented me with a giraffe, a dachshund, and a rattlesnake. He was extraordinarily proud of himself. I, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little undone, and was not at all proud of my performance in Cambodia. But I was awfully glad to see this guy. And I was awfully grateful to him for encouraging me to attempt things that are not always entirely safe and that are not always fully explainable and that do not always work out quite as perfectly as I may have dreamed. I am more grateful for that than I can ever say--because, truth be told, I am certain to do this kind of thing again.

So I praised Felipe for his marvelous balloon menagerie, and he listened carefully to my sad stories about Cambodia, and when we were both good and tired we climbed into bed with each other and lashed our lifeboat together once more and continued on with our story.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Marriage and Subversion

OF ALL THE ACTIONS OF A MAN'S LIFE, HIS MARRIAGE
DOES LEAST CONCERN OTHER PEOPLE; YET OF ALL THE ACTIONS OF
OUR LIFE, 'TIS THE MOST MEDDLED WITH BY OTHER PEOPLE.

--John Selden, 1689

By late October 2006, we had returned to Bali and settled back into Felipe's old house in the rice fields. There, we planned to wait out the rest of his immigration process quietly, with our heads down, inciting no more stress or conflict. It felt good to be in a more familiar place, good to stop moving. This was the house where, almost three years earlier, we had first fallen in love. This was the house that Felipe had given up only one year earlier in order to move in with me "permanently" in Philadelphia. This house was the closest thing to a real home that we could find right now, and man, were we happy to see it.

I watched Felipe melt with relief as he wandered around the old place, touching and smelling every familiar object with an almost canine pleasure. Everything was the same as he had left it. There was the open terrace upstairs with the rattan couch where Felipe had, as he likes to say,
seduced
me. There was the comfortable bed where we had made love for the first time. There was the dinky kitchen filled with plates and dishes that I had bought for Felipe right after we met because his bachelor accoutrements depressed me. There was the quiet desk in the corner where I had worked on my last book. There was Raja, the neighbor's friendly old orange dog (whom Felipe had always called "Roger"), limping about happily, growling at his own shadow. There were the ducks in the rice field, wandering about and muttering among themselves about some recent poultry scandal.

There was even a coffeepot.

Just like that, Felipe became himself again: kind, attentive, nice. He had his little corner and his routines. I had my books. We both had a familiar bed to share. We relaxed as much as possible into a period of waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to decide Felipe's fate. We fell into an almost narcotic pause during the next two months--something like our friend Keo's meditating frogs. I read, Felipe cooked, sometimes we took a slow walk around the village and visited old friends. But what I remember most about that spell of time in Bali were the nights.

Here's something you wouldn't necessarily expect of Bali: The place is bloody
loud.
I once lived in a Manhattan apartment facing 14th Street, and that place was not nearly as loud as this rural Balinese village. There were nights in Bali when the two of us would be simultaneously awakened by the sound of dogs fighting, or roosters arguing, or an enthusiastic ceremonial procession. Other times, we were pulled out of sleep by the weather, which could behave with startling drama. We always slept with the windows open, and there were nights when the wind blew so hard that we would wake to find ourselves all twisted up in the fabric of our mosquito netting, like seaweed trapped in a sail-boat's rigging. Then we would untangle each other and lie in the hot darkness, talking.

One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino's
Invisible Cities
. In it, Calvino described an imaginary town called Eufemia, where the merchants of all nations gather at every solstice and every equinox to exchange goods. But these merchants do not come together merely to trade spices or jewels or livestock or textiles. Rather, they come to this town to exchange
stories
with each other--to literally trade in personal intimacies. The way it works, Calvino wrote, is that the men gather around the desert bonfires at night, and each man offers up a word, like "sister," or "wolf," or "buried treasure." Then all the other men take turns telling their own personal stories of sisters, of wolves, of buried treasures. And in the months to come, long after the merchants leave Eufemia, when they ride their camels alone across the desert or sail the long route to China, each man combats his boredom by dredging through his old memories. And that's when the men discover that their memories really
have
been traded--that, as Calvino wrote, "their sister had been exchanged for another's sister, their wolf for another's wolf."

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow. Felipe's private history becomes a piece of my memory; my life gets woven into the material of his. Recalling that imaginary story-trading town of Eufemia, and thinking of the tiny narrative stitches that comprise human intimacy, I would sometimes--at three o'clock in the morning on a sleepless night in Bali--feed Felipe a specific word, just to see what memories I could summon out of him. At my cue, at the word I had offered up to him, Felipe would lie there beside me in the dark telling me his scattered stories of sisters, of buried treasures, of wolves, and also more--of beaches, birds, feet, princes, competitions . . .

I remember one hot, damp night when I woke up after a motorcycle without a muffler had blasted past our window, and I sensed that Felipe was also awake. Once more, I selected a word at random.

"Please tell me a story about fish," I requested.

Felipe thought for a long while.

Then he took his time in the moonlit room to recount a memory of going fishing with his father on overnight trips when he was just a little kid back in Brazil. They would head off to some wild river together, just the child and the man, and they would camp there for days--barefoot and shirtless the whole time, living on what they caught. Felipe wasn't as smart as his older brother Gildo (everyone agreed on this), and he wasn't as charming as his big sister Lily (everyone agreed on that, too), but he was known in the family to be the best helper and so he was the only one who ever got to go on the fishing trips alone with his father, even though he was very small.

Felipe's main job on those expeditions was to help his dad set the nets across the river. It was all about strategy. His dad wouldn't talk to him much during the day (too busy focusing on the fishing), but every night over the open fire, he would lay out his plan--man to man--for the next day about where they would fish. Felipe's father would ask his six-year-old son, "Did you see that tree about a mile up the river that's halfway submerged? What do you think about us going there tomorrow, to investigate?" and Felipe would squat there by the fire, all alert and serious, listening manfully, focusing on the plan, nodding his approval.

Felipe's father was not an ambitious guy, not a great thinker, not a captain of industry. Truthfully, he was not very industrious at all. But he was a fearless swimmer. He would clench his big hunting knife in his teeth and swim across those wide rivers, checking his nets and traps while he left his little boy alone back on the bank. It was both terrifying and thrilling for Felipe to watch his father strip down to his shorts, bite that knife, and fight his way across the swift current--knowing all the while that if his father was swept away, he himself would be abandoned there in the middle of nowhere.

But his father was never swept away. He was too strong. In the nighttime heat of our bedroom in Bali, under our damp and billowing mosquito nets, Felipe showed me what a strong swimmer his dad had been. He imitated his father's beautiful stroke, lying there on his back in the humid night air,
swimming
, his arms faint and ghostly. Across all these lost decades, Felipe could still replicate the exact
sound
that his father's arms made as they sliced through the fast dark waters:
"Shush-a, shush-a, shush-a . . ."

And now that memory--that sound--swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe's father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe's father at all anymore, and only one of them--until the moment Felipe shared this story with me--recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.

This
is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father's swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil--all of this, too, has somehow become me.

A few weeks into our sojourn in Bali, there was finally a breakthrough in the immigration case.

According to our lawyer back in Philadelphia, the FBI had cleared my criminal background report. I'd passed cleanly. I was now considered a safe risk for marrying a foreigner, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could finally begin processing Felipe's immigration application. If all went well--if they granted him the elusive golden ticket of a fiance visa--he might be allowed to return to America within the space of three months. The end was now in sight. Our marriage had now become imminent. The immigration documents, assuming Felipe secured them, would stipulate quite clearly that this man was allowed to enter America again, but for only and exactly thirty days, during which time he had to marry a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, and
only
a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, or he would face permanent deportation. The government would not be issuing an actual shotgun along with all the paperwork, but it did sort of have that feeling.

As this news filtered back to all our family members and friends around the world, we started getting questions from people about what kind of wedding ceremony we were planning. When would the wedding be? Where would it be? Who would be invited? I dodged everyone's questions. Truthfully, I hadn't planned anything special around a wedding ceremony simply because I found the whole idea of a public wedding entirely agitating.

I had stumbled in my studies on a letter that Anton Chekhov wrote to his fiancee, Olga Knipper, on April 26, 1901, a letter that perfectly expressed the sum of all my fears. Chekhov wrote, "If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it has taken place, I am ready to marry you on the very day of my arrival. For some reason I am horribly afraid of the wedding ceremony and the congratulations and the Champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely. I wish we could go straight from the church to Zvenigorod. Or perhaps we could get married in Zvenigorod. Think, think, darling! You are clever, they say."

Yes! Think!

I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod--and I'd never even
heard
of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren't there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, "You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy." But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.

Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn't have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still . . .

My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn't really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, "What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?"