Irritable & Resentful
Jason Emde
In the summer of 2008, a year and a half after Maho and I got married, I became a priest and began officiating at weddings in a brightly-lit wedding chapel with stained glass and chandeliers and everything, in Gifu City, Japan. I got the job through a friend of mine, California Jim. Jim and a number of my other friends priested on the weekends to supplement their teaching pay but I’d never seriously considered trying it myself. It seemed like a finkish thing to do and in any case my weekends were for lying around the apartment hungover. After making various plans for the future with Maho, all of which required funding, a few ancillary yen each month became more than a good and mature idea and more of a financial necessity and Jim made the necessary introductions to the boss at Wish , a company supplying priests and choirs to various chapels in Gifu and Aichi prefectures.
Western-style weddings are popular in Japan and no Western-style wedding would be complete without an authentic foreigner in clerical robes. I was instructed to become a priest, so I went online and did so, becoming a Reverend of the Universal Life Church Monastery, which provided a downloadable certificate.
California Jim, who knew everybody, was welcome everywhere, and was famous for being the most contented foreigner in town, as well as a dedicated and attentive husband and father—“Can’t go out tonight, staying in to treat my lady like a lady,” he’d say—later dropped everything and everybody, new house and wife and kid and all, and bolted back to California in order to shack up with a high school sweetheart he’d reconnected with online. That flatlined pretty soon, there were unfortunate complications and hassles, and before long Jim was in rehab. Booze and coke. I see his wife around Gifu sometimes, having lunch with a sober-looking Japanese guy.
§
I proposed to Maho in a park and we got married by handing a stack of documents to a bored civil servant in Gifu’s gloomy city office. A couple of months later we had a wedding lunch at the Grand Vert Hotel. My dad flew over; friends of mine came down from Tokyo; Maho’s grandparents arrived from Chiba. Instead of speeches, Maho and I decided to each pick a song and read the lyrics in each other’s language. Maho read The Beatles’ “In My Life,” with its lines about never losing affection for the people and things that went before, and I read the lyrics to a Nick Cave song, asking the unbelieved-in God to direct my darling, if he felt he had to direct her at all, into my arms. At the party after the party—the nijikai —in a bar called Golden, later that night, California Jim crashed through the door in full KISS make-up and costume, Tom got drunk and kissed everybody, and I started smoking again after more than a year off cigarettes.
§
My training period consisted mainly of practicing the wedding script—an inelegant hybrid of Japanese and English—and watching other priests officiate. The whole endeavour was intimidating. People were spending small fortunes for these carefully prepared ceremonies, which they would, of course, remember forever, with everything that happened digitally eternalized across multiple platforms. The opportunities for mistake, screw-up, and humiliation were legion, were boundless and umpteen. I wasn’t sure that a couple of plays in high school and an unexamined self-confidence bordering on arrogance would see me through.
“I still get nervous, every time,” said one of the other priests. This was a worryingly common theme.
In the empty chapel I was led through my paces by a supervisor or two, gently corrected, calmly redirected, and politely praised. Like this, like that, like so. Memorize this part of the script; turn the certificate toward the groom for signing; bow, bow, don’t bow, bow. Wait for the guests to leave and then join the hall staff to prepare for the Flower Shower, which occurs in the courtyard and during which you clap, like so.
The chapel’s courtyard is a clean, attractively treed space that on sunny summer days feels almost Mediterranean, with its shade and arches and burnt sienna roof tiles. The mundane and unpoetical city outside is hidden, disappeared: a typically grim elementary school, a dry cleaners, a defunct bakery called Mule .
Between rehearsals I paced my apartment, contending with the script:
Love is patient, and kind; love does not envy, or boast;
love is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful and it does not rejoice at wrongdoing,
but rejoices with the truth.
Which in Japanese is:
Ai wa kanyou de ari, ai wa nasake bukai.
Mata, netamu koto o shinai.
Ai wa takaburanai, hokoranai, busahou o shinai,
jibun no rieki o motomenai, iradata nai, urami o idakanai.
By the day of my inaugural weddings I was comfortable with most of the script; the only part that harassed me in any serious way was a phrase in the declaration: “Kami ga awaserareta mono o…” What God puts together. Awaserareta—that one word loomed huge and unsayable near the bottom of the second-to-last page. I hated that word. I still do. I stomped around, practicing and abusing it. Awaserareta. Stupid put-together-by-God whatever. A-wase-ra-reta.
Mid-summer; somebody’s big day. I stood trembling in the vestibule, irreligious in my robes, clammy-handed, scared, way worse off than the groom. My nervousness felt transmittable, like my jangling axons and dendrites could leap from me to everyone around, the groom, the staff, the crowd, the universe. Organ music started up in the chapel and the staff swung the doors open; crowd hum, expectant and jovial, thundered in my ears. Energized by a quick panic attack and perspiring wildly, I took four steps up the Virgin Road, paused, bowed, and preceded the groom to the desk and Bible and ring pillow under the silver cross that hangs on hooks for convenient removal before priest-less weddings, which the chapel also offers.
Enduring malarial shakes, simultaneous dry mouth and superabundant salivation, and all the rest of the usual symptoms, I somehow got through the whole nerve-wracking thing without any calamitous mistakes; awaserareta, to my goggle-eyed surprise, flowed effortlessly into the world. My performance was far from perfect, but it was serviceable. I approached my supervisor.
“Dou datta?” I asked. How was that?
“Chotto hayakatta desu ne,” she said, carefully. A little fast, meaning very fast, supersonically, intergalactically fast.
I had two more weddings that day and massaged my anxiety by calculating how many yen I was making every minute: a little more than 700.
§
Why do people get married? Why did I?
“Why did you marry Hanako?” I asked my English pal, Tom.
“She was the closest female equivalent to you,” he said.
I never wanted to get married and never thought I would. I loved well a few times, and badly often, and there were a few occasions when I veered near to marriage, swept up by the pulse and power of very generous, very open-minded women: Kia, Hiroko, Izumi…But should I get married? I wasn’t skittish or timid; it simply never seemed to be the right and obvious thing to do. And so things would build and break. I’d always thought that the idea of get-married-or-break-up was fake and false until I realized it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. Goodbye, Hiroko. Goodbye, Izumi.
Then, still careening after the spectacularly messy break-up with Izumi, and reeling further after the sudden death of my mother, drunk all the time and generally very corny and sordid, I met Maho, who was working as a hairdresser in a salon called Help. I was instantly smitten, but you can’t trust smitten and what was she going to find appealing in a senescent stumblebum of a foreigner twelve years her senior, anyway?
“Why do people get married?” I asked my pal, Victoria.
“We got married,” Victoria said, talking about her and her South African girlfriend, Amanda, “because we fucking could.”
You’re lucky is one of those automatic and meaningless things people like to use when congratulating somebody on a healthy relationship, as if, after putting in the necessary hours of practice, all you had to do was sit back and let love, all juice and wriggle, fall into your eventful lap. This is bullshit. Relationships are crusades of effort and application. I was lucky to meet Maho—ten minutes either way and I would have missed her in this too big, too busy world—but the rest was unceasing try, on both sides. Exertion assisted and promoted by mutual delight and sexual compatibility, but exertion nevertheless. You have to want it, and you have to feed it. The rest is steam and chemicals.
“Why did you and mum get married?” I asked my father.
“We both loved teak furniture and spent many Saturdays at Ego Interiors on Fort Street in Victoria, deciding on what furniture we loved best,” he said. “Reason one.”
My parents’ wedding pictures, from 1968: the middle-aged priest with his little Hitler moustache, my parents impossibly young, my grandparents looking just like themselves. In some of the photos everybody’s dead, now, but dad.
§
The wedding script I use is pasted into a photo album and, over the years, over the course of something like seven hundred weddings, 1400 brides and grooms, almost 40,000 fathers and mothers and guests, I’ve supplemented it with various helpful quotes and reminders and photographs of my kids, useful for dispelling at least some of the disabling anxiety I still get almost every time, every wedding. There are cortisol-lowering tips, Buddhist axioms, a drawing my son Joe did for me that says, in his kindergarten scrawl, dada ganbare, which means do your best, dad. There’s Marcus Aurelius:
Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power.
Take away, then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a
mariner who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm,
everything stable, and a waveless bay.
And Walt Whitman:
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the
midst of irrational things…
And Tibetan Lama Dudjon Rinpoche:
If you see something horrible, don’t cling to it.
I read these in the vestibule, waiting for the staff and the groom, five minutes before the beginning, listening to the audience through the walls, dancing with the panic and trying to take big, deep, diaphragmatic breaths, irrational in the middle of cheerful, happy things.
§
In the beginning I was the Sunday priest, and Alabama Jim—a gaunt long-timer with a pronounced limp and long, lank hair—was the Saturday guy, but he got canned and I became the whole weekend guy. My scheduled weddings doubled; my hangovers dwindled. Performing weddings hungover was a bad idea. Very bad.
Most Saturdays and Sundays I bike from my house to the chapel, early enough, always, that I have time to change clothes, rearrange my hair, check my face, and gargle quickly and well. Forty-five minutes before the ceremony the choir and I lead the bride and groom through a quick rehearsal, and then it’s the show. The entrances; a veil-down ritual between the bride and her mother; a hymn; a bible reading; vows; rings; the groom may kiss the bride; a blessing in English; a declaration that the couple are man and wife; “Amazing Grace”; a final blessing; the courtyard Flower Shower. The entire thing usually takes about fifteen minutes, longer if the couple walk really slowly or if the Ring Kid, nerves short-circuited at the foot of the Virgin Road, freezes and needs to be elaborately coaxed and bribed and, finally, manhandled to the front.
Something goes wrong every time, but the one mistake I’m absolutely not allowed to make is screwing up the names of the bride and groom. If and when I stumble over a word I can feel my face redden and the heavens fall and am instantly convinced the entire wedding is a cataclysm and a debacle, but the guests, all trapped in their own little worlds, their own stumbles amplified, their own fears foregrounded, never notice or care. Everything moves on, the world continues, and I remember all over again that it’s not about me, none of it. But I stand there anxiously sweating anyway, in my costume, thinking un-Christian thoughts and rippling with nervousness, fearing instantaneous dyslexia, spontaneous lobotomy, unquenchable nosebleed, zestful flatulence.
§
There are, it must be said, many irksome wedding hassles. The chapel and associated rooms and buildings—reception, flower factory, restaurant, waiting areas—were clearly designed by an incompetent cretin for maximum vexation, at least for the chorus and me. The closet set aside for all six of us is ludicrously small, crammed with the photographer’s supplementary equipment—tripods, mini-bleachers, glossy sample albums, assorted bits of crap—and, idiotically, accessible only through the chapel itself, which is, even between weddings, constantly being invaded by invincibly chirpy, clipboard-wielding, hard-laughing, hand-clapping sales staff trailed by politely inquisitive young couples with $20,000 to spend. The chorus and I are constantly being shooed into our closet with the barked summary “Shinki kuru,” which means New is coming. We are not to reappear until invited to do so, and to hell with my weak and nervous bladder.
The hand-clapping, it turns out, is to demonstrate the holy acoustics of the chapel and how loud and impressive all the clapping will be when the couple kisses and so on.
There is no staff bathroom, a clever oversight by the sinister architect, and since the chorus and the priest, robed or not, are not meant to be seen by any of the family or guests before the ceremony, this is problematic. I am internationally famous for my tiny, excitable bladder, which, dynamized by pre-wedding nervousness, becomes less sensible than ever. Crazed, paranoid, apologetic dashes result and, sometimes, I’m refused entry back into the chapel—Shinki kuru!—and am forced to take unobtrusive cover somewhere, lest somebody see me, but I have to stay nearby, of course, so that I can be easily summoned for the rehearsal.
§
The chorus and I represent an aggregate of something like 75 years of chapel experience. Since we’re the ones who actually do the weddings we know more than anybody how they work, what’s wrong with them, where the energy dips and drops, what’s clumsy and uncomfortable. But nobody ever asks us about anything and our complaints and suggestions are generally rebuffed with the ubiquitous shikataganai: it can’t be helped. Recently, in a spasm of mostly short-lived nostrums, Wish transferred a bunch of experienced hall staff and brought in a quartet of women, officially known, I was startled to learn, as the Femmes. The chief Femme is reasonably capable, if unconversant with the particular situation at our chapel, but her slack-jawed underlings are chiefly remarkable for their mediocrity and incompetence. The Femmes have introduced a number of unnecessary catholicons that improved nothing at all, do a lot of standing around, and are regarded with impressively frank contempt by the chorus.
jama jama jama! shut up Femmes! Yuri, the soloist, texted me. Jama means hindrance, impediment, inconvenience.
The hall staff, once haughtily in charge of operations, have receded; the photographers slip judiciously in and out; the cleaning staff are whispery phantoms who float up from their subterranean room, sweep, and vanish. From time to time a supervisor will arrive, observe a wedding, nod gravely, and split.
My Japanese is far from perfect and I generally don’t understand a word my supervisor says but, thanks to the vagaries of the language, I get away with sou desu ne, a tremendously useful Japanese platitude that means, essentially, Yes, I see. My current supervisor—they change with kaleidoscopic speed—will summon me to the side of the chapel for an urgent conference and speak in rapid, high-priority Japanese for 15 minutes.
“Sou desu ne,” I murmur, nodding, imperturbe, knowing Yuri will fill me in later if there’s anything important, which there never is.
§
Between high school and college I worked for a year at a hotel in Banff, as a chambermaid, first, and then as front desk staff. Banff is beautiful, all perfect alpine glory and Rocky Mountain vista, but it’s a shallow, crustal beauty. Underneath, not even deep down, right there, in the windowless bunkers, in the reeking staff accommodation kitchens where all the knives are hash-burned and nobody ever washes anything, ever, all is underfunded, transient, poorly ventilated, filthy, red-eyed, hungover and infected, irritable and resentful. The beauty glides on a subsurface that is greasy contention and primitive, pimply smash and grab. There’s a world going on, underground. None of the millions of tourists who pass through ever see it, or care to.
Backstage at the chapel things can get pretty near the knuckle. Events teeter and wobble; mistakes are made; hostilities hum and crackle. The chapel’s air-conditioning system is the vector for ceaseless, low-grade warfare between the Femmes on one side and the chorus and myself on the other. Japanese summers are brutally, tropically hot, the chapel is small and windowless, and, for some inscrutable reason, the staff prefer to keep the air-con on between weddings instead of during. The minute the first guest enters, the air-cons are either raised to the universally-approved 26 degrees or simply switched off entirely. Soon anywhere up to 100 guests and staff are liquefying, the guests fanning themselves with wedding programs while the priest, up front under the lights in his summer-rancid robes, is tilting his head backwards so that the sweat rivering down from his wilted hairline runs harmlessly into his ears, unseen, instead of dripping off his nose and chin in prismatic globs.
I have my little routines and schemes, my little apotropaic rituals, to get me through each nerve-wracking weekend, but I still don’t know what to do about the anxiety dreams, the ones with the missing script, the ceremony underway, the backstage area darkly vast, clots of confusion and reprimand, limitless slogs through rhubarb and fuss.
§
I was worried, at first, that I wouldn’t be able to conceal my disdain for the couples themselves, spending enormous amounts of money for fake weddings in a fake church, but I generally find them charming. They’re almost always younger than me, they look magnificent, and they’re endearingly nervous and keyed up; I end up feeling protective instead of contemptuous. Occasionally a couple will seem or feel ill-suited, badly mis-matched, unhappy, disconnected, but more often there will be an obvious and likeable affection, little jokes, little tendernesses, something lovely in the way they kiss each other. I look at them from behind as Yuri sings her solo in “Amazing Grace,” the groom’s handsome shoulders, the bride’s beautiful, naked back, and I think Good luck. Go well. And if one of the fathers in the front row cries a little I think of my sons and look up, blinking, at the chandeliers, which swim and burst.
§
How do you know the One’s the One anyway? How did I?
“Why did you get married?” I asked my pal Patrick, who impulsively proposed to his girlfriend while on vacation.
“It seemed like a very romantic thing to do,” he said. “Proof of my commitment.” He thought about it. “I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I just knew.”
I just knew.
In 2007 Maho and I flew to Canada for a ring blessing ceremony in my dad’s backyard, overlooking Kalamalka Lake. October in the Okanagan, leaf-busy and cool. Perfect. My dad’s friend, Jake, a genuine priest, agreed to officiate.
“What kind of ceremony do you want?” he asked. “Any requests?”
I pretended to ponder this. “Could you go easy on the, you know, God stuff?” I asked. “I’m not particularly religious and, uh, my wife and her family are Buddhists.” This was not precisely true or untrue.
Jake nodded. “Not a problem.”
Before everything started I went and sat in the driveway and had a smoke. A neighbourhood couple enjoying an afternoon stroll passed by and looked down into the backyard.
“Oh, look,” said the woman. “Somebody’s having a wedding.” She noticed me sitting there. “Are you getting married?” she asked.
I said I was.
“There’s still time to escape!” said the man.
Maho and I, in Japanese clothes, kimono and hakama, holding hands, walked down into the green backyard. Old friends, my best friend, two old and famous crushes from high school, my first grade teacher, Mrs Rueger, my college poetry prof, my aunt, my brother, my sister and her husband, a niece or two, my nephew. The leaves and the lake and the leaves across the lake. October 13—my father’s and Maho’s mother’s birthday. My own mother dead two years.
Jake, blindingly be-robed, decided to not only not go easy on the God stuff during the ceremony but to go, instead, for ecclesiastical excess, adding tons of additional Gods to the standard script.
“We thank God for this beautiful afternoon, this God-created and God-blessed day, perfect for bringing Jason and Maho together in the eyes and hands of God, forever and ever in God,” he said. “Thank you, God, for your godly mercy, your godly love.”
Maple leaves, Halloween-orange, fell off the tree.
“Amen,” said Jake.
We all went down to a lakeside pub for drinks and music and talk. Paul and his wife played guitar and sang, and then we all sang; my best friend, still alive but starting, even then, I think, to cling to horrible things, gave a happy, extemporaneous speech; my dad shot pool with my nephew. I sat happily chatting with Mrs Rueger, whose presence at the ceremony was an honour and whose fault much of this was. She’d taught me to read, which had directed me to Kerouac and Japan and Maho’s arms.
“Thank you,” I said.
Later my father drove Maho and me to the Prestige Inn, where he’d reserved a room for us. Somebody’d given us a bottle of champagne so we had some of that and smoked a couple of cigarettes and took a shower. We started fooling around; it was our third wedding night and we were happy and hungry for each other. Reaching around behind me to change the water temperature, but unfamiliar with Canadian hotel taps, Maho accidentally changed it to blistering; the water hit my back with a catastrophic sizzle. I briefly jogged in place, whooped, wobbled, flipped backwards out of the shower, flopped gracelessly through the curtain, and ended up folded double, wedged between the toilet and the tub, my crestfallen hard-on wilting sadly in the steam. Maho was also bent double, screaming with laughter in the shower. Further evidence, though none was needed, that she was the One.
“Your feet!” she said, demonstrating with her fingers on her opposite palm. “Haaaaaaaa!”
That was eleven years ago. We were messy and hopeful then, and still are, we’ve commingled our souls in our sons, we only rarely insist on our own ways, or rejoice in wrongdoing, and we are, from time to time, patient and kind, and everything is calm and stable and waveless, sometimes, and we continue to begin, hoping to cease not till death.
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Jason Emde is a teacher, writer, amateur boxer, and graduate student in the MFA Creative Writing program at UBC. He’s also the author of ‘My Hand’s Tired and My Heart Aches’ (Kalamalka Press, 2005) and his work has appeared in Ariel, The Malahat Review, Anastamos, Prometheus Dreaming, Panoply, and Cleaver.
