1:47 pm Two young men behind us on the train run over the alphabet in rhymed verses. They splotch their lines liberally with a tumbril handler’s expletives, with an old slaver’s Latinate pejorative that splits its two hideous syllables on a double ‘g.’
2:25 pm The South Asian kids fling their fingers ostentatiously as they scroll down their cellphones.
4:05 pm A nap in this hotel room is deep and jagged. The bed is large enough for a Norman duke, his aunt, and his Bolinas paramour.
4:10 pm He is shaving for the second time today. A gray beard, more than anything else, says to the world, “This fellow is a patriarch who is to be replaced.”
5:28 pm At the side of the altar of the church, the groom looms, tall, square-jawed. He directs his gaze, tentative at first, then stalwart, towards the procession of grandparents and mothers.
5:29 pm The cloth of the celebrant’s garment is exceptionally busy, like the décor of the church, which dissolves Byzantine severity into excessive ornament and flourish.
5:29:30 pm In the garish oil paintings of the Stations of the Cross, the scourged Christ is radiantly woebegone and aggressively pale, as if the painter had instructed his model to ape the symptoms of morning sickness.
5:30 pm Each of the bridesmaids’ bouquets resembles a crown of tongues that have been severed, cloroxed, stiffened, and affixed to stems.
5:31 pm The bridesmaids’ expressions, demure at the beginning of their amble, crack by the time they reach the filled pews where they flicker us the occasional mug and wink.
5:33 pm The congregation rises and strains toward the back of the church, where the bride and her stepfather stall, then wheel into view.
5:33:30 All society’s yearning for woman as object of persuasive lust, as heretofore chaste hatchery, as dribbly wet nurse balloons in the histrionics of this moment.
5:34 pm When she smiles, the bride’s teeth elaborate their magnificent straightness.
5:35:15 pm Her auburn kinks are pressed to her scalp and bunched at the nape of her neck.
5:35:27 The bride eschews the goofy mischief of her attendants, and donates her cherishing benevolence, her mildly rehearsed ingénue, and her grace with the detached but pleasant good will of an accomplished gymnast who is no longer the slightest bit unsettled by triumph.
5:36 pm The bride’s stepfather’s smile tucks itself into that corner where respectability negotiates with satisfaction. His crooked arm is casual, his pace understated yet stout.
5:39 pm The celebrant’s father was Jimmy Stewart and his mother Glenda Good Witch, though he has purged himself of his father’s corn and his mother’s imperiousness.
5:41 pm The celebrant has the robust wakefulness of a connoisseur of the ten-minute siesta.
5:43 pm The celebrant soothes the bride and groom through their vows as if he were coaching two swimmers whom he has already taught everything he knows. Folksy, tentative, he stumbles a little, and reads prayers a more ambitious thespian would have memorized. He blesses with a distracted cheerfulness.
