Weddings always make me think of the movies. (Everything makes me think of the movies.) Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate hammering on a glass wall in a church in Santa Barbara to steal Katharine Ross away from the altar. Grannies dancing in New Delhi in the rainy season in Monsoon Wedding. The ominous spilling of wine on the wedding gown in The Deer Hunter. The Bride shot in the head on her wedding day in Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Peter Cook performing the mawiage cewemony in The Pwincess Bwide. The unforgettable wedding banquet in Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, at which the guests at a rural Chinese marriage in impoverished Shaanxi province are served wooden fish instead of real food, because there are no actual fish to be had, but at a wedding it is important to have fish on the table. But when Nero Golden married Vasilisa Arsenyeva in the Macdougal-Sullivan Historic Gardens at four o’clock in the afternoon, what inescapably came to mind was the most celebrated of all the wedding scenes ever filmed, except that this time it wasn’t Connie Corleone dancing with her father, this time the patriarch danced with his own young bride, as I imagined the rich Italian-American melody written for the movie scene by the director’s father Carmine Coppola welling up and drowning out the actual music of that moment in the Gardens, which with lamentable banality was a recording of the Beatles singing “In My Life.”
Rewind a few hours: after Nero came home from his tennis game, sweating heavily as he always did, he was a big perspirer, as he freely admitted, “I just have to run up the stairs and my shirt is soaked,” after he pulled off his shirt and wrapped himself in his heavy black toweling bathrobe, he summoned his three sons to a meeting in his study. “There are questions in your heads I want to address,” he told them. “In the first place, nothing is changing. I am still your father, that is number one, and with regard to you two, I will always love your late mother just as before, that is number two, and as to you, my youngest child, I continue to be sorry about the circumstances, but you know this, and you are my son as much as these other two, that is number three; and so, status quo, you understand this. Also, to get down to brass tacks: you are all aware that there exists a pretty ferocious prenuptial agreement which Vasilisa has signed without demur. Relax: your inheritance is safe. Status quo is maintained. Also, for me, after so many decades of being the father of all of you the idea of one more is not to be considered. Baby, I have said to her, to me baby is a four-letter word. This also, she does not object to. There will not be a fourth brother. There will not be a first sister. Status quo. This promise I give to you on this, my wedding day. From you, I want only acceptance of my wife. No gold is being dug here, no inheritance-stealing babies are being made. I was not obliged to inform you of these matters but I have chosen to do so. At my age I ask you for your blessing. It is not necessary, but I request it. I ask, please, permit your father to have his happy day.”
In the garden after the judge had come and done his work and gone and Nero and Vasilisa were man and wife I watched them dance again as they had danced in Florida, the years dropping away from the old man as he moved, so erect, so agile, so light on his feet, so attentive to his partner, the language of the dance whispering its magic words and making him seem young again. And she in his arms, releasing the power of her beauty, coming in close with her lips against his ear, then arching her bare back and leaning away from him, and again and again in toward him and out away from him, rhythmically, overpowering him by the most powerful spell of all, the come-here-go-away seduction; Vasilisa letting him hold her and move her, telling us without needing to tell us: I am fearless, I have him, with all the witching power of my body I have commanded him to hold me so tightly in his arms that even if he wanted to he could not let me fall.
This is not a dance, I thought, it’s a coronation.
The sons of Nero Golden watched and learned. Petya watching from an almost hidden place behind the children’s climbing frame and slide, holding the rods of the frame as if they were prison bars. At one point I was standing beside him and he said, “The quantity of love in our father is finite. It does not expand or contract. Now that it will be spread more thinly there will be less for us.” But whenever Vasilisa looked in his direction he smiled broadly. “It’s best not to antagonize the new queen,” he said solemnly, as if confiding a state secret. “She could decide at any moment to have us killed.”
His brother Apu stood under a tree surrounded by his customary group of downtown arty types, painters, club-goers and Italians, and, beside him, chain-smoking, in his usual velvet smoking jacket with white wing-collared shirt, Andy Drescher, the famous professional curmudgeon for whom he unaccountably had a soft spot. Andy was a New York icon who had not published anything since his two volumes of poetry back in the eighties but somehow lived well at the highest echelons of the city with no obvious source of income or other means of support. I imagined him in a small cold-water walk-up eating cat food from the can and then dusting off his velvet finery and heading out to the smartest soirées to smile with desirous resignation at pretty young men and sourly to bark his celebrated complaints. His list of things and people to complain about grew constantly longer and included, at the moment, going to the movies, Mayor Bloomberg, the concept of marriage, both gay and straight, the concept of watching television when one could be having sex, machinery (all types, but especially smartphones), the East Village, mood boards in fashion designers’ studios (which he called organized stealing), tourists, and writers who published books. He offended poor Riya that day (but then, he offended everybody) by mocking the Museum of Identity where Riya worked, and the idea that one could be whatever gender one chose if that was the way one felt. “I’m going to buy a ten-million-dollar apartment next week,” he told Riya. “Ask me how I can afford it.” Riya fell into the trap and asked. “Oh, I’m now a transbillionaire,” came the reply. “I identify as rich and so consequently I am.”