delivered. Frequently
a wedding would be celebrated with a party of great expense. Hundreds of guests would
be fed; spaces much larger than the traditional house were paid for; musicians were
hired; people now came from far away, where once it was customary for only local people
to celebrate a union. The arrangements often cost tens of thousands of dollars, if
not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was frequent that the parents of those
to be wed shared in this expense, as if the expense of this undertaking could not
reasonably be assumed by the parties embarking on what was often referred to as a
“new life.”
This was a messy stew of old and new ideas. Marrying for love was a brand-new practice.
The customs of love in general had dictates, although there were many disagreements,
many minority opinions. Early on, the rules concerned who should, or could, pay for
things like the purchase of food in restaurants, and what that meant, this little
gift-giving of things to be digested.
As the relationship developed, the pertinent matters became who would pay for the
residence, who would make more money and how it would be shared. Love suffered most
when issues of capital intruded. It bred distrust and bad feeling. In this way, the
City and love were at odds.
Sometimes people would simply declare themselves married—even with no one there to
observe this declaration. But declarations of marriage became more onerous and bureaucratic
over time. To be truly married, an official had to preside over the declaration, and
the couple involved had to pay a fee in order to be licensed by the government. So
only the official could say who was wed and who was not.
The state became extremely busy deciding which domestic arrangements were legal and
which were not. In this time with which we are concerned, there were some arrangements
that society utterly forbid: it was illegal for people of a certain age to have sex
with people under a certain age—these ages were picked to define “adult” and “child,”
but didn’t always quite hit the mark—and it was illegal to force people to have sex.
And there were some laws that were less sensible and were quickly falling out of favor.
For instance, it was illegal to exchange money for sex, and it was illegal for men
to marry men and women to marry women. It had also, until quite recently, been illegal
for people of some different ancestries to marry. As well, it had been illegal for
two people to have kinds of sex that couldn’t result in the conception of another
human being.
Sometimes the people prosecuted the crimes—or at least the criminals—themselves. Shame
or violence was almost as good a punishment as imprisonment. But almost always, people
were more forward-thinking than the laws. And the laws that fell out of favor, they
didn’t stay laws forever.
JOHN HAD GRADUATED from his professional school just four months prior to starting this job, which he
had now held for a couple of years. He was very young and very thin, in the fashionable
way of that time. He had freckles that would come and go in the summer sun, and reddish-brown
hair: a handsome chipmunk. He was quick with words and he had no sense of smell and
he couldn’t drive a car and his eyes were pretty bad, so sometimes he wore these old
glasses that made him look funny; they were blocky and dumpy and incongruously old.
Often in the bullpen he’d put his face right up to his computer. He liked working,
but he still remembered the freedom of that summer after graduation—everything had
been so easy.
He had worked briefly as a nonemployee, a “freelancer,” and that meant he made more
money because so-called “freelance” pay was generally higher. It was expected that
the freelancer would pay all his or her own benefits—like health insurance—and, at
the conclusion of each year, taxes. Taxes were a percentage of