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it, she almost seemed to
unfurl.
Even the registrar, who had seen it all—horsy women marrying weaselly men, elephantine men marrying owlish women—raised an eyebrow at this most unnatural of unions as they approached his desk. Cat and dog.
    â€œHullo, Father,” said Archie.
    â€œHe’s a registrar, Archibald, you old flake,” said his friend Samad Miah Iqbal, who, along with his diminutive wife, Alsana, had been called in from the exile of the Wedding Guest Room to witness the contract. “Not a Catholic priest.”
    â€œRight. Of course. Sorry. Nervous.”
    The stuffy registrar said, “Shall we get on? We’ve got a lot of you to get through today.”
    This and little more had constituted the ceremony. Archie was passed a pen and put down his name (Alfred Archibald Jones), nationality (English), and age (47). Hovering for a moment over the box entitled “Occupation,” he decided upon “Advertising: (Printed Leaflets),” then signed himself away. Clara wrote down her name (Clara Iphigenia Bowden), nationality (Jamaican), and age (19). Finding no box interested in her occupation, she went straight for the decisive dotted line, swept her pen across it, and straightened up again, a Jones. A Jones like no other who had come before her.
    Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti and swept it over new couples, where Clara met her only wedding guests formally for the first time: two Indians, both dressed in purple silk. Samad Iqbal, a tall, handsome man with the whitest teeth and a dead hand, kept patting her on the back with the one that worked.
    â€œMy idea this, you know,” he repeated again and again. “My idea, all this marriage business. I have known the old boy since—when?”
    â€œ1945, Sam.”
    â€œThat’s what I am trying to tell your lovely wife, 1945—when you know a man that long, and you’ve fought alongside him, then it’s your mission to make him happy if he is not. And he wasn’t! Quite the opposite until you made an appearance! Wallowing in the shit-heap, if you will pardon the French. Thankfully,
she’s
all packed off now. There’s only one place for the mad, and that’s with others like them,” said Samad, losing steam halfway through the sentence, for Clara clearly had no idea what he was talking about. “Anyway, no need to dwell on . . . My idea, though, you know, all this.”
    And then there was his wife, Alsana, who was tiny and tight-lipped and seemed to disapprove of Clara somehow (though she could only be a few years older); said only “Oh yes, Mrs. Jones” or “Oh no, Mrs. Jones,” making Clara so nervous, so
sheepish,
she felt compelled to put her shoes back on.
    Archie felt bad for Clara that it wasn’t a bigger reception. But there was no one else to invite. All other relatives and friends had declined the wedding invitation; some tersely, some horrified; others, thinking silence the best option, had spent the past week studiously stepping over the mail and avoiding the phone. The only well-wisher was Ibelgaufts, who had neither been invited nor informed of the event, but from whom, curiously, a note arrived in the morning mail:
    Â 
    February 14, 1975
    Dear Archibald,
    Usually, there is something about weddings that brings out the misanthrope in me, but today, as I attempted to save a bed of petunias from extinction, I felt a not inconsiderable warmth at the thought of the union of one man and one woman in lifelong cohabitation. It is truly remarkable that we humans undertake such an impossible feat, don’t you think? But to be serious for a moment: as you know, I am a man whose profession it is to look deep inside of “Woman,” and, like a psychiatrist, mark her with a full bill of health or otherwise. And I feel sure, my friend (to extend a metaphor), that you have explored your lady-wife-to-be in