There was a rehearsal the day before the wedding, and I went back to my apartment so we wouldn’t see each other before the ceremony. In the wee hours of the morning—I could barely sleep from the excitement—I woke up and found Mama crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “I didn’t get to do anything! I never had a wedding of my own, and now—all this, and I didn’t help with anything. I didn’t even cook or make rice or my Puerto Rican wedding cake. There’s nothing for me to do.”
“Well, that’s not true, Mama. There’s…” I racked my brain trying to find something the wedding planner hadn’t already covered. “You know what? I have some almonds. I was thinking, we should do little, like, little—you know, do them up in little bags. You know how much he likes almonds, so I got them, but I haven’t had time to put them on the table and make them pretty.” This calmed her for the moment, and the next morning, I called the planner and begged her, “Please, please, find something for my mother to do.”
My husband-to-be called and said, “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I’m great. Excited,” I said.
He said, “Me too.”
I went over to the church to get dressed, and while I was having my hair done, I heard helicopters overhead. Nervously, I asked Daddy, “Do you hear that?”
“Yeah, that’s for you,” he said.
“The groom asked for a police escort,” said the planner. “The press caught on.”
My fiancé called me and said, “Don’t worry about it. I have a way to get there. They won’t see me.”
A vision of him being wheeled into the church in a roadie case crossed my mind.
“I’m having a limo come over,” he said, “but I’m riding in the back of the van with the flowers.”
That made me laugh, because he was wearing a clean, crisp, tailored white suit, and I had a hard time picturing him squatting in the back of a van among the gardenias and orchids. You can see half of his wedding suit on “Holy River”; it’s the bolero jacket. On the back is his symbol with an M superimposed on it. I’d never seen this combination of his new name with my initial. I didn’t know that he’d had it monogrammed all over our home—the china, curtains, napkins, and towels. When I walked down the aisle and saw it for the first time, I was overwhelmed.
Also a bit overwhelming were the flowers. I’d ordered what I thought was a lot of them, though I did tell the wedding planner, “These columns for three hundred bucks a whack? Not happening. We’re only occupying the first couple of rows in the church.” Without telling me, my husband-to-be had ordered an additional half million dollars’ worth of flowers and had them flown in the day before the wedding. White and gold orchids. Gardenias on the railings. Roses and huge arrangements on pedestals. The flowers I’d budgeted with the wedding planner were pretty much a joke next to all that. After the wedding he asked me under hypnosis if I was upset that we didn’t have a big church wedding, and I told him, “I’m glad there were only a few people in the church. More room for angels.”
Kirk’s brother officiated at the ceremony, which went off perfectly, and afterward there was a private dinner at Paisley Park. I was astonished when I got there. The sleek corporate white and gray walls were painted sky blue with puffed white clouds. The purple carpet was decorated with signs of the zodiac. A kaleidoscope of colors and murals made every corner beautiful. The wall above the elevator was lettered boldly:
ELEVATE
I loved that and a million other small, perfect details. There was nothing dull about Paisley Park before, but this was like opening the door to Oz—if Oz was serving a vegetarian meal with edible flowers. Our first dance as a married couple was one of the songs he’d been working on: “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife.”
friend lover sister mother wife
air food water love of my life
After dinner, we went back to the house to change clothes for the big party on the soundstage. Gianni Versace had generously sent me a selection of dresses for the big reception, and I chose a white strapless number with the greatest turn-around skirt ever made. It was gorgeous.
We got out of the car, and my husband carried me over the threshold on his shoulder like a sack of coffee beans. The house had been completely redone to make it our home. He took me by the hand and showed me every room. The foo foo magicians had been to my apartment, packed up all my stuff, and had everything put away neatly by the time we arrived. Upstairs in an anteroom outside the master bedroom, there was a crib. My husband went in and cued up the other song he’d been working on: “Let’s Have a Baby.”
Too bad that gorgeous Versace dress never made it to the party.
??nine
The next morning, I found that my bags were packed.
“Where are we going?” I asked my husband, and he just smiled.
When we got to the airport, we went to the gate for Hawaii. We were both ridiculously happy. Never before or since have I experienced that particular level of being in love. It was so strange and wonderful to look at this beautiful man and think, Husband.