Elizabeth

Photo by David Paul Ohmer

So ours wasn't the only wedding taking place at the hotel that night. When we arrived, the lobby was filled with lavishly dressed, flashily bejeweled strangers, and we had to carefully navigate our way through this bigger, brighter guest list to get where we were going. On the freestanding easel near the registration desk, their nuptials pronouncement ate up the top three-quarters of the placard, while ours was laid out below in tiny, crouching font like a dismissive footnote to their story. There was even an inset picture of the two of them, heads tilted together, looking out blissfully at a world just waiting for them. He seemed run-of-the-mill handsome, but she was double-take beautiful with her buzzcut hairdo, high-ridge cheekbones, and milky Eurasian eyes. Not for them, and certainly not for us, but also populating the lobby and the sidewalks and jamming the front and side entrances were TV and newspaper reporters, cameramen, and all manner of technical people wearing headsets and unspooling dark wire and communicating by walkie-talkie. It so happened that Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the hotel that week during a short run of a play at the Wilbur Theater. Supposedly she had an entire floor for herself and her entourage. There were celebrity gawkers with signs and autograph books; one man held up a marry me, liz sign; a woman wore a Cleopatra headdress. I'd read something in the paper that described the latest version of the star as being all but unrecognizable, having to be seen to be believed. This was during one of the fat periods of her life when she went on months-long gluttonous rampages where her reckless appetite haunted her every waking minute, as she later confessed in interviews. She was also between husbands. She was unmarried and unhinged. A strange and unnatural state, she said. Like half of her was missing. Even though, ha ha, she was twice her usual self.

Our wedding was to take place in a single meeting room off the main lobby. No Grand Ballroom for us. No hand-painted frescoed ceiling. No crystal chandeliers with light-catching teardrop pendants. They dressed up the meeting room with gold paper bunting hung along the wall molding and stretched over the double doors, but you could still see a lectern pushed into one far corner and a stack of gray metal folding chairs in another. Still, that was all the space we needed; we only had about twenty-five guests. It took just three rows of eight chairs across to set up for the ceremony and four round tables to accommodate everyone at the reception.

My fiancée, La—christened Maria Lara, but anyone who knew her at all called her La—was from Peru. Thus the bird-of-paradise centerpieces. Thus the giant retablo sitting on a fake marble pedestal at the front of the room, its hand-painted wooden doors flung open to reveal a folk-artsy Mother Mary holding the baby Jesus with a hundred intricately lacquered angels glued to the back wall of the box. La's family guest list was limited to her mother and brother, who had flown up from Lima.

Her mother was almost seventy by then—she'd had La when she was forty-four—and as the result of progressive glaucoma was almost completely blind. She could see peripheral movement if something appeared inches away on either side of her face, but nothing she could readily identify, and nothing happening right in front of her. She wouldn't have been able to make the trip if she hadn't been able to cling to the arm of La's brother, Alonzo, and listen to his vivid descriptions and translations of everything that was going on all around them, though how reliable a narrator he was I could never tell. Sometimes I would see her frowning when a smile was called for or appearing pleased when a somber expression would have been more appropriate to...