Reading Comprehension/Laura Lippman
Reading Comprehension
On April 20, I married -- as in, conducted a marriage ceremony -- two dear friends, Ann Hood and Michael Ruhlman.
In this month's letter, I'm sharing the readings from the wedding, give or take a few ad libs, minus the actual vows. It was a pretty literary event, which makes sense when writers marry. My contributions were from Raymond Carver and Laurie Colwin, but I counted at least seven more literary references.
Twenty minutes after the "I Do's," give or take, when the wedding party sat down to eat at Barbuto's, there were beautiful napkin rings with the mysterious (to me) inscription "wing towing." I just assumed it was another literary reference. It was. Pay careful attention to the Robert Frost poem below. As I apparently did not, but it was an emotional day.
By the way, this was the fourth wedding I have attended that subsequently appeared in the New York Times Vows column.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/fashion/weddings/ann-hood-marries-michael-ruhlman-writers.html?
Does this make me the Zelig of "Vows?"
"Proposal, " by Raymond Carver
I ask her and then she asks me. We each
accept. There's no back and forth about it. After nearly eleven years
together, we know our minds and more. And this postponement, it's
ripened, too. Makes sense now. I suppose we should be
in a rose-filled garden or at least on a beautiful cliff overhanging
the sea, but we're on the couch, the one where sleep
sometimes catches us with our books open, or
some old Bette Davis movie unspools
in glamorous black and white -- flames in the fireplace dancing
menacingly in the background as she ascends the marble
staircase with a sweet little snub-nosed
revolver, intending to snuff her ex-lover, the fur coat
he bought her draped loosely over her shoulders. Oh lovely, oh lethal
entanglements. In such a world
to be true.
[Laura] Raymond Carver wrote those lines when he knew he was dying. We are lucky that today's wedding does not fall under any such shadow, but as John Irving's T.S. Garp reminds us: "We are all terminal cases." Because this is an engagement borne of a particular postponement, of years lived and miles spanned only to circle back to a path at Breadloaf, where a man called a woman's name and she turned in response to his greeting. When lovers are young, like Romeo and Juliet, their urgency is borne of innocence and ignorance, they cannot imagine anything but love and passion. But when lovers have lived -- loved others, seen the world, pursued their dreams and ambitions, raised children -- then urgency is paradoxically prudent, a product of knowing all the obstacles that love must overcome. Ann and Michael know the world, they know themselves and know there is no reason to wait anymore. Life expectancy may be slightly longer than it was when Andrew Marvell wrote "To His Coy Mistress," yet the dilemma remains: Once we know with whom we should be, why wait?
[Laura read the next passage, chosen by Ann and Michael.]
From “The Third Thing” by Donald Hall
"What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention."
Annabelle, Ann's daughter read: "Hope is the thing with feathers (254)" by Emily Dickinson
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
James, Michael's son, read "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Sam, Ann's son read from the Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
"'What is REAL?' asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. 'Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?'
'Real isn’t how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'
'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.
'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.'
'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'
'It doesn’t happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.'"
Michael read "Crazy About Her Shrimp" by Charles Simic
We don't even take time
To come up for air.
We keep our mouths full and busy
Eating bread and cheese
And smooching in between.
No sooner have we made love
Than we are back in the kitchen.
While I chop the hot peppers,
She grins at me
And stirs the shrimp on the stove.
How good the wine tastes
That has run red
Out of a laughing mouth!
Down her chin
And on to her naked tits.
'I'm getting fat,' she says,
Turning this way and that way
Before the mirror.
'I'm crazy about her shrimp!'
I shout to the gods above.
Ann read "Master Speed" by Robert Frost:
No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still-
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar
[I've excluded the actual vows, which were traditional, with a touch of James Joyce.]
Laura: With the power vested in me by the city of New York, I pronounce you wife and husband. And I will leave you with a short passage from a writer who seems a particularly appropriate one to this setting and this couple. Laurie Colwin was a New York writer with an uncanny ability to write about love and food. In her first short story collection, Passion and Affect, the titular story features several pairs of lovers, including Vincent Cardworthy and Misty Berkowitz. Vincent has to pursue Misty, but he wins her love and takes her to meet his cousin, Guido, and his wife, Holly. The two couples, having had dinner for the first time, are drinking wine after dinner. It seems fitting to note that they have just said goodbye to an another couple -- the genius Arnold Milgrim and his partner, Doria, who likes to knit and is, I believe, wearing a knitted dress that she has made. Doria has spent the afternoon listening to Misty's cousin read Plato, but is still very much coupled with Arnold Milgrim. Thispassage is missing when Colwin, a few years later, expanded the two short stories about these characters into a novel, Happy All the Time. I miss the passage in the novel and I think it's interesting, to contemplate our instincts and how they change and how we revise and how, sometimes, we need to return to our initial impulses, our intuitive sense of what's right, what works.
"They finished another bottle of wine at the dining room table and talked about the wedding. Holly and Misty exchanged genuine looks of sweetness, looks that were rare for both of them. Holly said she hoped they would be friends, and Misty, a little wine-dazed, knew that affection and love were general, once they had been specified. In love with Vincent, she was willing, and almost helpless, to love Holly, Guido, the rugs on the floor, the postman, telephone operators.
'Misty thinks that all this institutionalizing of love makes you live outside the moral universe,' Vincent said.
'She's right,' Guido said. 'I drink to the moral universe.'
'I drink to Misty and Vincent,' said Holly.
'I drink to Arnold Milgrim and my cousin Stanley,'Misty said.
'I drink to a deeply wonderful life,' said Vincent.
They clicked their glasses, and under the fragmented lights of the chandelier, they drank to a deeply wonderful life."
Check Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as another Mystery Box will be up for grabs very soon.
Laura Lippman
May 2017