faulty vision

It wasn’t only my great-aunt who was bemused by my new acquisition. My father’s younger sister, come from Japan to attend my wedding, commented first on the Guy’s resemblance to my dad before remarking that after all, every girl did end up marrying her father.

This isn’t the sort of sentiment that instills a new bridegroom with feelings of confidence. My religion is particularly disinclined to the display of the recently deceased — “recently” being a word that, in this case at least, refers to anything less than 39 years — so there hasn’t been a lot of my father in evidence around the apartment. Being advised that one looks like one’s wife’s father might be enough to discourage the weak-hearted, or at least suggest some unpleasant ideas about why said wife — beautiful, talented, intelligent, amusing, charming, sweet, and in all ways so much better than one — consented to get married.

It’s possible that the Guy, along with his already revolted fixation on sibling similarities, started to wonder just why his new wife chose to keep her father’s pictures carefully under wraps. To avoid scaring him off, perhaps? He had a conflicted first week of marriage.

Of course, my father’s younger sister is a little hard to take seriously. Early on during the reception, she informed my cousin’s perfectly attractive wife that she would look so much better if her hair was up like Sako’s. Later, viewing my sister’s ex John for the first time, she apparently grabbed the very same cousin’s wife and demanded to know who he was. When she was told John was Sako’s date, my aunt apparently looked him up and down and licked her chops. Not at all metaphorically.

It takes all types. As I like to remind people on a fairly regular basis, Japan is a fairly small country with a relatively finite population. If you factor in my paternal side’s nobility, the regularity with which said nobility used to kill each other off, and the limited options when it came marrying other nobility, well. This is why the Japanese never invented forks. They didn’t want to be reminded what family trees could look like.

In retrospect, this seems the perfect revenge. After all, the Guy was the one who started out our relationship by casually mentioning that I bore a striking similarity to his mother. If I had been a more experienced dater, he might have lost me right then and there.

Heisenberg is not particularly impressed by my new husband. Not that he was particularly impressed with the Guy before, but now that the Guy’s become something in the way of a permanent fixture, the cat has discovered that there are whole new disadvantages in having a live-in roommate.

For example, the Guy doesn’t believe that Heisenberg exists.

Heisenberg doesn’t believe that the Guy should be allowed to breed.

Part of this is because the Guy used to have hair down to his waist, which I think I have mentioned before. This is not commonly known to most people, but tails are to cats what penises are to men: a sign of virility utterly unrelated to fertility or intelligence. Your average cat looks down on a tail-less Manx in much the same way it looks down on your flat-rumped human or your smooth-assed litter box, whereas animals that have large, robust tails are generally revered for an attribute that might or might not have diverted valuable resources from more useful physical developments in, say, the brain pan. It is a fact that I have, more than once, caught Heisenberg attempting to lob some steak I’d planned for dinner out the window as an offering to the neighborhood raccoon.

In the past, Heisenberg has considered the Guy a valuable catch, precisely due to that aforementioned tail of hair. It was useless to explain to him that the hair was like fur, utterly lifeless and (in the Guy’s case) a swiftly rotting corpse. He persisted on viewing it as a sign of virility, and practiced his worship by hiding behind the bedroom dresser at night, hopeful that he might observe some sort of coitus phenomenus.

Imagine his dismay, then, when the Guy actually went to a salon the week before the wedding and cut his hair.

The salon the Guy went to was a remarkably good one: Ciana, in Los Altos. I wandered around the small shops while I waited for him to reemerge, and suffered something of a revelation when he ambled back out again an hour later, cleaned, pressed, shorn, shaved, and unscruffed. A solid foot of hair, if not more, was gone. He grinned at me. I gaped at him.

Heisenberg screamed like a little girl.

“They massaged my head,” the Guy said accusingly while we sat at lunch. Heisenberg, still shrieking, crawled under my chair and cowered there like a pocket-sized banshee. The Guy stroked his newly shortened ponytail gingerly, mourning over the lost hair. “I fell asleep. They suggested some, they cut it off and it was a little short, so I said higher. And then they said I could donate it to kids with cancer who don’t have hair, so I said go ahead, and–”

He paused and frowned. “I think they tricked me,” he said, darkly. “They lulled me into cutting my hair. It was some sort of plot, wasn’t it? You planned it with them.”

The fact that his hair could be used to help kids with cancer did, I think, reconcile the Guy to the loss of his hair, though he persisted on telling his friends that I had castrated him. His brother from England, told this story, wavered. “Is that some kind of a joke?” he demanded, with an uncertain smile. “You’re serious? Haven’t the kids with cancer suffered enough?”

Anyway, there it goes. The Guy’s hair is finally healthy and manageable, and he has ceased to shed — did I mention he was shedding copiously in the days approaching the wedding? — all over the floor. Meanwhile, Heisenberg sulks under the sofa, convinced that, given the chance, I will bob his imaginary tail.

How I’m supposed to do that to an imaginary cat, I have no notion. Call an imaginary vet?

I have too many wedding-related stories to fit into two entries, so I suppose they’ll continue to spill over into regular entries (assuming I actually get up the energy to write regularly) over the next month or so. I apologize for that. I’ll spring them on you between regular, non-wedding related stories; like the shock of removing a band-aid, I suppose. It will be less painful that way.

In the meantime: some pictures from the wedding itself. Later on this week, I’ll put up the pictures that Kimberly sent us from the pre-wedding shower. One of the most outstanding side-effects of getting married is the gathering of friends I rarely get the opportunity to see: Kimberly, Flamingo, Binky, Jazz, Michelle, Melanie — to name just a few of the female persuasion. Tara, the social hostess of the new century, pulled out all the stops. That, however, is a story for another time. (When I have pictures loaded, for instance.)

Mondays. I never thought there’d be Mondays after marriage. So much for that nice little fantasy.

So this past week I saw Shrek 2 (cute) and Harry Potter Escape from Azkaban (the best one yet), had a manicure, bought $1000 in alcohol, got married, and did two weeks’ worth of laundry. Of the past week’s adventures, yes, I will admit that the marriage does rather stand out — though really, Harry Potter is quite good if you happen to like that sort of thing, which I do — and the evidence of its importance is reflected in our apartment, which has gone from its habitual slovenliness to a state of ungrace that would require a long-term federal bankruptcy and generations of shanty-townism to compete.

This is one of those things that will eventually clean itself up, I’m sure, just like the laundry eventually handled itself, and the kitchen will eventually handle itself: housekeeping pixies are a valuable acquisition. They came with my new husband, who regards the mess in the apartment with a wrinkled brow before his eyes glaze over and he drifts happily back to the TiVo.

The majority of the mess is split fairly evenly between gifts from friends and family, and the leftover drinks from the reception. Leftover drinks, it transpires, is something that will eventually plague you if you have a conscientious, professional caterer. Our caterer, Continental Caterers, was appallingly and terrifyingly professional. This is, in case anybody asks, a good thing. Being unaccustomed to dealing with people who not only know how to do their jobs, but do their jobs well, I found it an uncommonly comforting experience working with them, though “working with” is a rather deceptive phrase, as there could be very little intelligent interchange between a highly competent event coordinator and a bride whose IQ was rapidly approaching the level of teacup cozy. The event coordinator in charge of our case — “case” seems a more appropriate word than “account” — attempted to engage me in decision-making, but eventually gave up the effort after several encounters with my special wide, blank stare. Blondes may give you a run for the moron money, but nobody can beat a determined Asian for the ten-thousand yard stare. After all, it was our race that invented bureaucracy.

In the end, he gently took over everything, and I trotted happily off to entertain myself with something shiny. I arrived at the wedding site two and a half hours early, only to find the entire place was almost completely set up. I breathed a sigh of blissful relief and once more puttered off to play with string. It was rather like being cradled in the right hand of God, the left one being busily occupied in whipping up something tasty for my late-night posset.

It seems worth-while to note that there was very little actual work done on my part to get this wedding put together. The majority of my effort was spent collecting professionals to do the work for me: caterer, site administrator, photographer, musician, husband of matron-of-honor, matron-of-honor. Most of my exertions were spent in ensuring that the reception would be entertaining to all invited. In fact, it wasn’t until five days before the actual ceremony that–

–well, more on that later.

My friend Tara, who worked harder than any woman should have to work for someone else’s wedding when she isn’t getting paid — though the blank-eyed stare I gave her when the word ‘bridesmaid’ first came up should have warned her — served as my matron-of-honor. My sister (shown above with John) served as my bridesmaid. The dress is from Macy’s. The necklace was custom-made for the occasion by a friend of my co-worker’s, Sharma Designs. The photograph was done by my great-aunt, Kanae Hirabayashi. Go ahead and do a google search on my great-aunt. At the age of 60, she taught herself bird-watching, e-mail, the internet, and digital photography. At the age of 70, she’s become a famous photographer.

She sent the Guy and me some of the photos she took of the wedding, and casually mentioned in the e-mail that: “I was amazed that you both look so alike that as if you are brother and sister. ”

The Guy has been haunted by that all night, pausing every so often to stare at me with a gloomy expression.

“Stop that.”

“It’s just so wrong,” he wails. “You married your brother!”

I have no brothers. “I can live with that.”

“Ew.”

“Stop that.”

“It’s just so wrong!”

I’ve been getting irregular YM messages from friends who want to know, “So how does marriage feel?” My typical response to this is, “Itchy.”

Insofar as adjectives go, there’s probably a better one out there. It took a few days for the potential subtext to sink in, and by that time it was too late; we’ll see if any of the Guy’s friends sidle up to him, nudge him meaningfully in the ribs and demand, “Itchy? Why itchy? What’ve you been up to to make it itchy?”

Well, there you go. Married life is nothing if your spouse can’t find some way to embarrass you.

Working on the vows…

“Okay. What do you expect from this marriage?”

“Let me throw out some words.”

“Okay.”

“Obedience….”

Silence.

“If you’re not going to take this seriously, we might as well not do it at all.”