My Best Man

I got married just about a year ago, and Joey wasn't there.

He was supposed to have been my best man. I asked him a few months before the wedding, on the phone, in the course of a conversation ostensibly about something else. It was our way to bury the lead (as they say in the newspaper business), to act as if nothing in the world was surprising or shocking or scary or exciting or really worth much more than a smirk and a shrug. So I shrugged him my request and he shrugged me his reply, but my heart was racing as I asked him, and I knew from his casual "thanks", offered just before we hung up, that he was touched. It happened just as I predicted it would.

But I really didn't know what to expect from him as best man. Would he try to organize some sort of bachelor party? Would he give some sort of moving or funny speech? I was never in any doubt about who should be my best man - I knew who my best man would be long before I knew who I would marry - but the role of best man would have required something of Joey that was not normally part of our emotional repertoire. To be a best man requires, during the toast anyway, a certain emotional candor: you can joke and tease and tell ribald stories if you like, but at some point you have to become sincere, even a little hokey, as you wish the couple all the happiness in the world and express your unfailing love and support.

Joey and I did not do hokey, at least not in front of each other, and especially not when others were looking. We had both served as best men in other weddings (indeed, I had recently been the dude of honor at the wedding of my friends Emiko and Steve), and, although I don't know anything about the sort of toasts Joey would give, I imagine he went for the same balance of wit and sincerity that I had attempted in mine. But to be honest, had it been his wedding, I would have struggled. The wit would not have been a problem, and there are plenty of embarrassing stories I could have told, but the sincerity? You might as well ask me to take my clothes off and dance on the table. I could do it for other people, but not for him.

When our mother turned fifty, her friends threw her one of those "when I am an old woman I shall wear purple clothes and a red hat" parties. Honestly. I'm not sure what all the components of the party were, but I do know that one element was a sort of scrapbook to which Joey and I were asked to contribute something - a poem, if I'm remembering correctly - and we both complied with the request. Some time later, when we were both back home, our mother offered to let us see the scrapbook, but we both declined. We hadn't seen each other's poems, and we didn't want to. In fact, I distinctly remember explaining to her that I didn't want to see Joey's poem because then I would lose all respect for him, a sentiment with which he expressed his firm agreement. I knew that my poem had been heartfelt and sincere, and I feared his had been the same, and I no more wanted to see his than I wanted him to see mine.

I should point out that we were usually this way with everybody, not just each other; for complex reasons having to do with nature, nurture, gender, a swelling in the part of the brain that controls motor functions, and probably something resembling insecurity, we did not offer the world many glimpses behind the curtain. We were both growing out of it, I think, allowing more and more people to see our vulnerabilities and so forth, but that is much easier to do with people you haven't known your whole life. We had had twenty-eight years of brotherness through which to develop a rhythm, a style of interaction, that was simultaneously intimate - like speaking-in-code intimate - and aloof, and there was no way that was going to change without a prolonged and deliberate act of will. Or wills.

I like to think that he would have indulged in a bit of hokey sincerity in his best-man toast, but I really can't say how likely that was. I do think I had been trying to tear open the curtain a little bit in those last few months. My asking him to be my best man, subdued though it may have been in the execution, was itself quite a bold step in that direction. Several months earlier, Kate and I had decided that we would tell him, before we told anyone else, that we were engaged. That was another heart-racing moment, sitting in a darkened Nashville pub with Kate beside me, as I waited for a suitably inconspicuous moment to tell him our news with as much nonchalance as I could muster. He adjusted himself in his chair and smiled, which was how I knew he was moved, but otherwise he accepted the news as calmly as he would have accepted the news that we were planning to buy a new toaster.

I tried several times in the following days, as we drove together on what would be our last road trip to Oklahoma, to draw him out a little on the subject - I said how weird it was to be getting married, I even asked him if he and Tina might do the same thing someday - but all I got were evasions and monosyllables, although he did finally say that he "wouldn't be surprised" if he and Tina might someday get married. "Well," I thought (but didn't say), "I should certainly hope you wouldn't be surprised."

This is what I was up against. But as I said, this was difficult territory for me, too; neither of us quite knew how to show one another the men we had grown up to be. But I do think we would have gotten there in time, and the wedding would have accelerated that process substantially, whatever sort of toast he ended up giving.

As it happened, four people stood in for Joey on the day of our wedding. Our three cousins - Clay, Michael, and Jake - stood beside me during the ceremony, and my old friend Jason gave the toast. They'll never quite know just what that meant to me. And the wedding, well, if you've been reading this blog for a while - and, of course, if you were at the wedding - then you know what the wedding itself meant. The word that keeps returning to me is "elevated." It elevated me, us, leaving us on a higher plane - permanently, I think - where everything glows just a little bit brighter. It's a paradox, but it's true, that in his absence he somehow became more present, as if his energy and his love had been rerouted through all the other people there. And if that's not hokey sincerity, I don't know what is.

I've just been reading the last of the Tennyson poem tonight, and it also ends with a wedding. Tennyson's sister had been engaged to his friend Hallam (the object of the elegy), and several years after Hallam died she married someone else, in the same church where their father and other family members were buried. The closing sections of the poem explore the way grief can become folded into joy - both emotions are, after all, expressions of love - and there was one section in particular that struck me. The poet is addressing his dead friend, remembering an earlier time when he was able to shake off his grief (when he "rose up against my doom") and hoping that he might be able to do so again now (to "slip the thoughts of life and death" like an "inconsiderate boy"). It goes like this:

Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then,
      While I rose up against my doom,
      And yearn'd to burst the folded gloom,
To bare the eternal Heavens again,

To feel once more, in placid awe,
      The strong imagination roll
      A sphere of stars about my soul,
In all her motion one with law;

If thou wert with me, and the grave
      Divide us not, be with me now,
      And enter in at breast and brow,
Till all my blood, a fuller wave,

Be quicken'd with a livelier breath,
      And like an inconsiderate boy,
      As in the former flash of joy,
I slip the thoughts of life and death;

And all the breeze of Fancy blows,
      And every dew-drop paints a bow,
      The wizard lightnings deeply glow,
And every thought breaks out a rose.

A sphere of stars about my soul: that was me, pretty much, just about a year ago. And, when I think about it now, every thought does, indeed, break out a rose.