Then, too, Melbourne was a good city for people like us. It was culturally and ethnically diverse and many of our friends were also expatriates, or else they were the kind of locals who gravitate toward people from someplace else. It was an easy place for us to be together and we were happy there, which, I guess, is why we decided to get married.
We did it the way we did everything, quickly, lightheartedly, the way you do things when you’re young. The kicker was that we told no one—not our parents, not our siblings, not our friends. We just got up one hot, bright summer morning, almost a year to the day from when we’d met, packed our bags, dropped a house key with the neighbors, and took a taxi to the Mint.
The Melbourne branch of the Royal Mint was a large, handsome building that fronted onto William Street not far from Flagstaff Gardens. It had been built in the late 1860s, when Melbourne was awash in gold, and was styled after a Renaissance Italian palazzo. The building itself was set back from the street in a large lot surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with a pair of great gates opening onto a courtyard, rather like a foreign embassy. There was a gatehouse and a guard and it was possible to drive right in, but the taxi driver dropped us at the sidewalk and we entered the compound on foot, carrying our bags.
Inside the building it was cool and dim and it was hard, at first, to see anything. We were the first wedding of the morning and there was no one about when we arrived. We stood around in the foyer for a while wondering what to do, until finally a young man came out and ushered us into a formally furnished room. It was clearly the room for the smaller weddings—I could see a larger similar room across the hall—but it was still big enough to feel empty with just the three of us in it. After a few more minutes we were joined by a middle-age man who shook our hands and introduced himself as the registrar.
“Um, do you have any witnesses with you?” he asked, as though perhaps we had just forgotten to bring them in.
“No, sorry. I’m afraid we haven’t.”
There was a short, awkward pause and then he said, “No problem.” He whispered something to the younger man, who promptly disappeared and returned a few moments later with Tony and Tony, the parking attendant and the clerk.
“So, shall we get started?”
It was over almost before it had begun. The registrar said something brief and formal and we said something like ‘T do.” There were no rings to exchange and, since we had also neglected to bring a camera, there is no record of the event beyond the official Marriage Register, now filed away in some cool archive, and the certified true copy they gave us when we left.
I had convinced Seven to buy a suit for the occasion, the first, I think, he’d ever owned. It was black and beautifully cut and almost silky. It cost him two weeks’ wages and he looked so spectacular in it that everyone in the store stopped what they were doing when he stepped out of the dressing room with it on. I had much more trouble figuring out what to wear. After a week or so of desultory looking, I ended up with a little black-and-white print dress made, improbably, of cotton jersey. It had bell-shaped sleeves and a scoop neck and the faintest hint of a flare. It came to just above the knee and I wore it tied with a belt of the same fabric and a pair of little black flats. It was nobody’s idea of a wedding dress, and one day, many years later, I came across it in a trunk when my eldest son happened to be standing nearby.
“Look, this is the dress I got married in.”
“Looks like a nightgown,” he said.
Of course, we eventually had to explain to any number of people, including our mothers, why we had not told them what we were planning to do. And not only that, but why, when we saw them all shortly thereafter—we were married at nine in the morning and caught a plane out of Australia at noon—we still didn’t tell them what we’d done. In fact, we managed to spend two months traveling, from Melbourne to Auckland to Boston and back, visiting everyone we were related to, without ever telling them that we were married.
The longer we neglected to mention it, of course, the harder it got to explain, and when I finally informed my mother—about four months after the fact and by mail—she said it was the most cowardly thing anyone in the family had ever done. No doubt she was right, but it was such a complex set of motivations that had prompted us, first, to forgo any kind of celebration, and then to keep the fact of it to ourselves.
I, for one, had never wanted to be a bride. The wedding gown, the veil, the walk down the aisle, none of it had ever appealed to me. But even if I had wanted a party, where were we going to have it and whom would we invite? Seven’s family were all in New Zealand; my family were all in the States; all our friends were in Australia. One couple we knew had gone through the whole performance three times over: once in Australia for their buddies, once in New Zealand for the groom, and once in Canada for the bride’s family. But if I couldn’t see myself getting through one iteration, how was I going to survive three? Then there was the fact that one of Seven’s sisters was getting married in New Zealand at almost exactly the same time—we were actually on our way to her wedding when we left our own to catch a plane—and we didn’t want to steal any of her thunder.
Of course, none of that explains why we didn’t tell anyone. But I think the answer is we just didn’t think it was anybody’s business but our own. We liked the privacy and the way the casualness of the performance masked the seriousness we felt. It was, I later came to think, quite Polynesian in this discontinuity between the appearance and the meaning, between the surface and the deep. Maoris, as Europeans have long noted, are skilled dissemblers, and many of the oldest stories are filled with ruses, ambuscades, strategems, and tricks. I myself have never been able to tell when anyone in Seven’s family is teasing me or when Seven himself is telling me something untrue. It’s a power play but also a challenge: to be able to keep a secret and to know when one is being kept.
I suppose there was one other thing though, and that was the fact that a marriage like ours was bound to raise eyebrows in some quarters. We were such an unlikely couple. I was small and blonde, he was a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound Polynesian. I had a Ph.D., he went to trade school. I liked opera, he liked motorsports. Actually, he liked opera too, but I never learned to like car racing. I used to enjoy telling the story of our first meeting. It was my story, really; I never heard him tell it. “He thought I was rich,” I would say gaily to people we met at parties. “Poor thing, you can imagine how disappointed he was when he found out!” And then I would laugh as if this were the funniest thing, while Seven stood there looking impossibly handsome in his black Saba suit.
It was a complicated bit of banter and no one ever knew just how to take it. Who was I having on? But I doubt even I could have answered that question. All I knew was that I was compelled to acknowledge, even if only backhandedly, the heady mix of stereotypes about class and race and sex and power that surrounded a relationship like ours.
“Nah,” he would say after a moment. “We didn’t think she was rich. We just thought she was a tourist.”
Our idea was to get married and then make our way across the Pacific, ending up in Boston, where Seven and my family would meet each other for the first time. We traveled by way of New Zealand, where I wore my own wedding dress to my sister-in-law’s wedding and enjoyed myself at her reception as I never would have had it been my own.
She had invited hundreds of people and, in order to feed them, her brothers dug an enormous hangi. A hangi is an earth oven, also sometimes called an umu. It is made by digging a pit in the ground and filling it with firewood and a layer of rocks. When the wood has all burned down and the rocks are hot, wire baskets of food are added—chicken, beef, and pork on the bottom, potatoes, pumpkin, and kumara on the top. The whole thing is then covered with wet sheets and buried under a layer of earth and left to bake for several hours.
It was a terrific party, with music and dancing well into the night. At some point, in the early hours of the morning, I found myself sitting at the edge of a large,
noisy room with Nana Miri. I had had too much to drink by then and was feeling sentimental. Nana Miri had always been kind to me and, before I knew what I was doing, the secret of what Seven and I had done spilled out. I’m not sure which of us was more startled.
“You have to promise you won’t tell,” I told her. “Promise. You’re the only person who knows.”
Nana Miri frowned a little. “OK. I’ll keep your secret for you. But it won’t be easy,” she said.
I realized instantly the awkwardness of the position in which I’d put her. “We’ll tell them soon,” I said. “Don’t worry. Then you’ll be off the hook.”
A few days later we flew to Hawaii, where the clerk at the hotel took one look at us and said, “Honeymoon suite?” We opted instead for a rental car and drove to the North Shore, where we found a rundown old beach club that catered to surfers. For nine dollars a night we got a room in a dilapidated bungalow with a mattress on the floor. There was an open-air kitchen and a communal bathhouse and a pair of enormous banyan trees at the edge of a wide, white beach. I bought myself a hibiscus-print muumuu and Seven borrowed a Hawaiian sling—a kind of hand-powered spear gun propelled by a heavy-duty rubber band—and dove into the sea, emerging a few minutes later with a fish skewered on the thin steel rod.
From Honolulu we set out on the last leg of our journey. I don’t know if Seven was nervous, probably not, but I was apprehensive about this part of our trip. While they had, of course, heard about him, no one in my family had ever met Seven. In fact, no one had ever met a Maori, or been to New Zealand, or even thought very much about that part of the world.
The Pacific laps the west coast of America, and when you are standing in California, you feel as though you could almost island-hop your way across—Los Angeles to Honolulu to Papeete to Auckland—and that, while everything would become progressively less familiar, it would do so in a recognizable way. But the east coast faces in the other direction: to England, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, to the Azores and the Canary Islands. The view from the coast of New England in winter is of the cold, gray, storm-tossed North Atlantic, a beautiful ocean in its own way, but very different from the turquoise of Tahiti or the Bay of Islands’ cobalt blue. The landscape is different, the people are different, the history is different. In New England, one can only describe the islands of the Pacific by analogy—like the Caribbean, sort of, but with Indians—for the older, harsher colonial history of the region has left few traces of a world that still exists in other places.
We arrived in Boston on a bleak late-winter’s day. From the air, the city and all the land around it was a mottled grayish brown, a tangle of roads and buildings and bare, leafless woods. There were patches of snow to the north and west and, as we banked and came in to land, the Atlantic glinted beneath us with a metallic sheen. Coming, as we had, from high summer in the southern hemisphere, the contrast was particularly vivid. I knew that spring was coming to New England and could see in my mind’s eye the pale new green that in just a few months would blanket the entire region. But to Seven, who had never seen a landscape go completely dormant or felt the grip of a really hard frost, everything looked cold and lifeless.
My family met us at the airport: my mother and father, my brother, his wife, and their two children. While I knew they were happy to see me, I also knew that what they really wanted was to see whom I was with. Meanwhile, I was secretly worrying about what kind of impression Seven would make. I had introduced plenty of boyfriends to my family over the years, but I’d never brought home anyone to whom I was secretly married. I worried about both sides of the equation: how my family would seem to Seven and whether he’d pass muster with them. I worried that they would have nothing in common, or that they would fail to locate the few points of experience and knowledge they actually shared. What would they talk about? Sports? Seven was a rugby man, a game no one in my family had ever played. Travel? He’d never been to Europe or Canada or any of the places they usually went. Food? I supposed that was a possibility, though no one in Boston had the faintest notion of kina or puha or rotten corn. Politics, I knew, was a nonstarter. Seven knew almost nothing about world events, and my family knew nothing about the antipodes. But, as it turned out, I needn’t have worried. There was only one subject that interested anyone and that was Seven himself.
For many people in Boston, Seven was the first person they had ever met of his kind. Most had difficulty identifying his ethnicity: he wasn’t recognizably Indian or African American or Asian or Hispanic. People who had been to Hawaii sometimes picked him for Polynesian, and occasionally his accent would tip someone off. “Wow,” they’d say, “are you a Maori?”—pronouncing it may-OR-ee, which always surprised me, since no one had any trouble with the identical vowel combination in “Mao Tse-tung.” But the absence of familiarity was understandable. There aren’t very many Maoris to begin with—the total global population is just over half a million—and they are, with the rarest of exceptions, all on the other side of the world.
Even to me, who was used to him, Seven seemed exotic in this setting. From the airport we went directly to my parents’ house. It had been built at the tail end of the 1950s and designed by an architect strongly under the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was long and low and everywhere you looked there were large expanses of glass. The feeling one had in it, both summer and winter, was of being indoors and outdoors at the same time; the constant drama of falling snow, or light on the pine needles, or rain pouring off the eaves in sheets was always there in front of you. It was filled with an eclectic assortment of Danish furniture, a few American antiques, and a lot of ethnic bits and pieces, including a number of tribal rugs that my mother had carried back from Morocco wrapped in brown paper and string. There were potted palms and art books, and piles of pillows on the window seat. The walls were covered with paintings and prints, which my parents rotated seasonally, when they put on or took off the summer slipcovers and swapped the red and orange and turquoise rugs for white grass matting.
In summer the house was cool and shady and the paintings were mostly green. But in winter it was a riot of color. I had never seen Seven before in an environment like this, dressed in his suit or a charcoal sweater, his hair now long and tied back in a ponytail, his skin a dusky brown from the summer we had just left. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of him against the plum-colored linen velvet of my mother’s sofa, the corner of a saffron cushion peeking out from behind his back, the big red Japanese painting on the wall behind him, and think, my God, it’s an Ingres.
In 1775 the great English portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a man known as Omai. The portrait depicts a tall, exotic-looking figure with a broad, handsome face, black hair, and light brown skin. Barefoot, draped and turbaned in white, he stands with one arm outstretched, the other clasped against his body, showing clearly the tattooing on the back of his hands. Behind him tower masses of cloud and moody shadow and, in the far distance, a little landscape with palms and mountains and perhaps a beach. The body is that of a man, but the face is young, with a full, sensuous mouth, soft cheeks, and strong black brows. In the figure’s dark, almond-shaped eyes there is a contemplative, unfocused look, as though he had drifted into some reverie or meditation.
It is hard to say exactly how good a likeness the Reynolds portrait is; other contemporary sketches, even some by Reynolds himself, suggest that it somewhat idealizes the subject. But that, in a sense, is neither here nor there, for what Reynolds aspired to paint was less a likeness than a representation of some quality or idea that the sitter was supposed to embody—wit, for example, or innocence, or understanding. In the case of Omai, the idea was nobility, specifically the nobility of man in his natural state.
What many people do not realize is that almost from the very beginning there were Polynesian adventurers who took passage on European ships and traveled back in the opposite direction to England, America, and France. They were, in many ways, the inverse of figures like Charlotte Badger—ambassa
dors rather than renegades—but they too served as intermediaries and go-betweens on what Spate calls “the grinding edge” where two cultures meet. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, islanders from most of the major groups—Tongans, Hawaiians, Marquesans, Maoris—were crisscrossing the great oceans of the world, many of them, like Herman Melville’s Queequeg, on whalers or sealers or other types of commercial vessels. But the earliest of these voyagers sailed in the late-eighteenth century on the very first expeditions into the Pacific with explorers like Bougainville and Cook.
Omai was a Polynesian from the Society Islands. He had been brought to England by Tobias Furneaux, who was captain of the Adventure, the ship that accompanied Cook’s Resolution on his second Pacific expedition. Still driven by the specter of the Unknown South Land, Cook’s aim on this voyage was a circumnavigation in the highest southern latitudes he could manage, through the only remaining region in which Terra Australis Incognita, if it existed, could lie. After a first pass through the Southern Ocean in the summer of 1772-3, Cook decided to winter over in the islands of central Polynesia. There each of the ships picked up an islander. At Raiatea, northwest of Tahiti, the Resolution was joined by a young Bora-Boran known to the English as Odiddy, while at nearby Huahine, a Raiatean named Mai—or Omai, as he would come to be known—joined the Adventure’s crew.
It was Cook’s intention to return both of them to the islands the following winter. Two previous attempts to bring Polynesians to Europe—one by Cook himself on his first voyage, the other by Bougainville—had both resulted in the islanders’ deaths, from dysentery and malaria in one case, from smallpox in the other. Odiddy was duly deposited at Raiatea when Cook finally headed for home. But a series of misadventures, including a storm that separated the two ships and the murder in New Zealand of a boatload of his crew, prevented Furneaux from returning Omai to the Society Islands. Distressed, dismayed, and shorthanded, Furneaux decided to abandon the voyage and, instead of following Cook into the Southern Ocean as he had planned, he headed for home with the young islander still on board. And thus it was that Omai arrived in London in the northern hemispheric summer of 1774.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 9
