It constituted absolutely fraudulent—and possibly
criminal—use of a Jacuzzi, and if my own level of stress hadn’t long past
crossed—OK, limped across—the finishing line of impending insanity and death, I
would have complained to the manager of the hotel about it.
We were in St. Thomas, where we had fled to escape a street
festival—which was actually an invasion of 500,000 youngsters who were getting
drunker by the hour. Since two years ago Mr. Fernández had been the target of a
rum bottle flung by a group of these youths—I was still retrieving bits of it
the following December, on those rare occasions when I decided to clean—it
became clear: Retreat was the sensible alternative. And however expensive
taking a forced vacation might be, the alternative was worse.
So we were in a Jacuzzi in St. Thomas, soaking the year 2014
away: We had lost a beloved cat, we had both been ill for a quarter of the year
with the chikungunya, and we seemingly had settled into the lowest part of the
U of happiness—our fifties, when worries about aging parents, about impending
retirement, about errant children, make this the least happy decade of life. We
had, in short, utterly earned a life pass to the Jacuzzi, even if we never
again faced an unpleasant moment for the rest of our lives. And so the hot
water was blasting away at muscles that made the cables of the Golden Gate
Bridge look limp, when a very nice couple from Minnesota—Mary Jane and Allen—joined
us in the Jacuzzi.
Joan Didion once wrote that hotels were social constructs,
by which she meant that anybody who was staying at the hotel—and who could be
paying to do so—would be perfectly fine to watch your stuff—or even your
kids—on the beach as you threw yourself in the water. True, the gentleman in
the red t-shirt with the news in white: “Mr. President, I built my business?” I
didn’t have to, and certainly didn’t want to, spend time with him, but that
wasn’t the point. And that was? That however much he wasn’t, there was a way
that he was, one of us.
So hotels offer the possibility, or rather, the function
like a kind of debutante ball for potential friends: Everybody there was
eligible and we got to choose. And so the couple who joined us very quickly
climbed onto the A list, since all of a sudden, and with no coordination, we have
begun to present ourselves as husband and husband, and correct diplomatically
those who call us “friends,” or “partners,” or whatever is less offensive to
more conservative ideologies.
Has anyone ever written about the dayliness of discrimination? Probably not, since my computer had to
be taught “dayliness,” and since it doesn’t know that discrimination is seldom
a gale, but too often a leaking faucet. Which means that the first time we
stayed in a country inn in Puerto Rico, over twenty years ago, we were both
nervous: Would they let us in? Would it be a problem, two gay men in a room?
Would other guests stare, whisper, leave the room? We breathed a sigh of
relief when no eyebrows were raised.
Right—so that weekend a month ago in St. Thomas? Well, we
wrote down “husband,” as each other’s relation to the other, and never imagined
that it would be a problem. And there’s something more: People are more clued
in, and don’t jump in to impose friendship or any other relationship on us. So
we spent the weekend gently cluing in the world, and guess what? Nobody had a
panic attack.
Least of all the couple from Minnesota, mentioned above, who
remarked that they had gotten married in Minnesota after nine years of living
together, since weddings? Well, who could take seriously a 23-year kid in a
rented tuxedo who was making the ludicrous promise to love and obey to an
equally clueless—and ridiculously clad—girl? But in Minnesota, after the
marriage ban was lifted, an amazing diversity of ages, races, families came out
and were desperate finally to legalize their relationships. And so, said Mary
Jane, the very thing that was supposed to decimate the institution of marriage
had actually strengthened it. And they had gotten married, and their
relationship was different, and better, somehow. And was that the case with us?
The morning of our arrival to St. Thomas, I had awoken in
San Juan tense, irritable, anxious about not having a printed boarding pass, worried
about the cats, and utterly exhausted, since the sheer effort of getting away
seemed enormous. So my reaction to Raf, when he enquired why there were never
enough white socks? It was entirely unspoken, and for those of you married, you
can skip the next paragraph:
There are never enough white
socks—and thanks ever so much for pointing out this appalling if not horrific
situation, since I will definitely add that to the urgent list of matters that
I alone attend to—since there is only one person who washes white socks,
and that is the person who overlooks the white socks that you
take off and throw all over the place and that person washes only those
which are in the hamper with the whites. So if you would like, I can take time
away from cutting the weed trees with a hand saw in the back balcony, thereby
offending a woman with considerable resources and clout, and go running around
the apartment in search of little errant white socks!
Full disclosure—I am the one who throws my socks around.
Which isn’t the point. And the point is that, while I
savored my response greatly, I also savored it privately. And so when Mary Jane
asked: Had marriage changed our relationship, and for the better? Both of us
looked at the other—one of those long looks that you have in relationships, in
which you know your answer, and wonder about the others.
“Yes,” we said in unison.
And so we talked: Mary Jane is a writer and activist, and
they both had travelled to Wisconsin, to protest with thousands of others the
Walker administration’s attack on unions. Nor was Mary Jane limited to just
activism, she also knew immediately about the totally bizarre things that
immigrants or the sons thereof got up to, presumably to whittle away the
endless Wisconsin winters.
“Oh, you mean like the Dickeyville Grotto?”
How could I have forgotten?
“Why didn’t you ever take me there?” cried Mr. Fernández,
appalled at my treason. Why not—who could not want to see this:
Even better, this, with its almost Victorian zeal for
self-and-other-improvement:
Yes, under the Papal flag and the American Flag are embedded—according
to the website…
…in stone, mortar and bright colored objects-collected
materials from all over the world. These include colored glass, gems, antique
heirlooms of pottery or porcelain, stalagmites and stalactites, sea shells,
starfish, petrified sea urchins and fossils, and a variety of corals, amber
glass, agate, quartz, ores, such as iron, copper and lead, fool's gold, rock
crystals, onyx, amethyst and coal, petrified wood and moss…
…the
telling and teaching words, “religion” and “patriotism,” the two concepts which
the venerable Father Mathias Wernerus held dear.
And
Wernerus would be? Well, in a letter quoted in
the website, he signs off as “the Builder:” Here’s what he has to say:
It
is about five years now that this work was started. Many reasons urged me to
put up 'Religion in stone and Patriotism in Stone.' The main reason why it was
done I could not reveal. The last day will tell you more about that. I can only
say that Almighty God and his Blessed Mother, in whose honor we worked, blessed
us in such a way that 'we built better than we knew.' Thanks to His almost
visible blessing from Heaven, we made the formerly unknown village the point of
attraction for countless thousands of people. God's wonderful material
collected from all parts of the world has been piled up in such a way that it
appeals to rich and poor, to educated and uneducated, to men, women and
children alike. Future generations will still enjoy the fruit of our labor and
will bless the man that conceived and built this thing. Thanks be to God."
Well,
it was a not-so-subtle message to protestant Americans: Catholics can be just
as patriotic as the rest of the country, and according to Wikipedia, the Grotto
(always capitalizes in the official website, so it seems wrong not to here as
well) attracts 40,000 to 60,000 people a year. Among which might have
been Raf and I, but it was often a good idea to use a bit of judgment about
where to take Mr. Fernández, since he had seriously been on the verge of social
disaster at the informal musicale I had taken him to, at the gracious home of a
friend.
It was an event I remember frequently, since I am on most
days playing Bach suites in the Poet’s Passage, and what if I am playing at the
level at which the lady—those decades ago—sang her Schubert lied? Because she
“dressed” it, not for the opera, but rather in the way my uncle dressed
turkeys. And here, flown directly in from the Internet, is a description of that
process:
1 Cut the wings at the
first joint. ...
2 Cut the tail right at
the base but above the gland. ...
3 Cut the feet at the
joint. ...
4 Remove the head at the
neck. ...
5 Remove the insides.
...
6 Separate the liver,
heart and gizzard from the innards. ...
7 Remove the crop. ...
Save
the tail feathers.
All
of this can be seen in glorious detail at the website of Georgia
Pellegrini, and for anyone wondering why you should save the tail feathers?
Georgina has the answer!
They are awfully purty. They make a nice headdress for cocktail
parties.
See more at: http://georgiapellegrini.com/2011/04/19/blog/field-dress-turkey/#sthash.hmk2y9L3.dpuf :
OK—so the singer at
the musicale had removed the heart, gizzards, and liver from the innards of her
Schubert song, and fortunately, we were at the back of the room—or maybe it had
become the salon—since we had made
the fatal mistake of looking at each, not in the way we had looked at each when
Mary Jane had asked, had getting married changed our relationship? And had we
wondered not at our own but the others answer?
No, we were young,
we were in love, and it was apparent what was in our four eyes: rampaging and
nearly-impossible-to-suppress hilarity. So the singer warbled and wobbled from
one flat, shrill note to the next, and her accompanist was a model of solemnity
as he stumbled his way through the score: At one point they became badly
disengaged in the process, and glared at each with apparent annoyance.
It’s a kind of
torture, wanting to laugh and not being able to, and the only other thing to be
done about it was:
1.
NOT
look at the other
2.
NOT
breathe
3.
Pray
for deliverance
So with that behind
us, I was going to take Mr. Fernández to Dickeyville? To look at things like
this, about which there is this description:
Visitors from far and near again and again told the
builder that the flower pots that stand on either side of the Holy Ghost Church
are some of the most beautiful they have ever seen.
So we sat, Mary Jane and Allen and my ungrottoed but anyway still-my-husband and I and were both in
Wisconsin and in the Jacuzzi, where two or three of us had every right to be. Because
I don’t know about Mary Jane, but Allen?
…stay tuned!
