Sunday 18 February 2001
The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness. Today is the wedding day of Leo, the first-born. He is thirtyfour; he has not hurried, but now he is to marry and the next instalment of family history has been ensured. There is, in the jokes of his many ushers, his parents’ smiling efficiency, the kisses and handshakes of his older relatives, a sense of relief. The wedding will begin in fourteen minutes. Grandchildren frolic in the bright sunlight. Elderly and difficult cousins, naphthalene-scented in ancient Marks and Spencer’s good winter coats, raise their chins and ignore each other, their cheeks wet with wind-tears. Despite the intense cold of this February day, nobody wants to go inside. It is much more fun to circulate, speculate, pretend to ignore the onlookers, wait for the photographers to look your way.
But they will not. No one is interested in you. There is one star of this show: tall and distractingly voluptuous in sea-green silk devoré. With her in their midst, this brilliant schtuppable pioneer, who could not be happy? Every one of the three professionals’ cameras, the eighty-one amateur Nikons and Canons, points at that bone structure, that smile. Lean handsome old men, short dark sharp-suited young men, shrunken great-aunts with lizard eyes watch each other, watch the celebrities, but most of all watch her. Even the passers-by are unable to pass by. Whether or not they recognize her, their eyes are drawn in one direction, in her direction: at Rabbi Claudia Rubin, mother of the groom.
It is time to go in, but no one can quite break free. She shines amongst them, caramel-skinned, narrow-eyed, with a brain women envy and an opulent, maternal, fuckable body which makes men weak. Those guests who do not know her well mill cautiously in her direction, hoping for their moment. Those who do remain nearby, reluctant to release their hold.
Almost forgotten, the bride, Naomi Grossman, and her parents are approaching the synagogue in a car from Woodside Park. They are mute with excitement. Rabbi Rubin has been so good to them, letting their own rabbi lead the service, insisting on paying for the reception and flowers and photographers, for all that catering. What could they do but stand back and let her take charge?
‘Nearly time,’ murmurs Claudia’s husband, Norman.
‘Mm,’ says Leo.
‘Hooray!’ says Claudia to one guest, then another. Her dress is tight: not unseemly, but it shows her at her confusing best. ‘All the way from Newcastle with your sore leg! Thank God you’ve come. I have the most unbelievable blisters. You smell amazing. If it rains, we’re screwed.’ Even her youngest children are attentive, affectionate, as close as a family can be: tall handsome Simeon at her left shoulder, lovely Emily at her right. If this, the few minutes before the wedding, could be frozen and kept unsullied by the future – the Rubins in their heyday – their happiness would be complete. But it cannot be frozen. Things happen.
Perfect cadences throughout! This is highly assured, delightfully fresh, spirited writing. A stylistic masterclass which still retains its humanity and interest: from the artfully bathetic ‘doomed to happiness’;to the provocative use of the pronoun ‘you’; to the marvellously near oxymoronic ‘fuckable’ maternal body. Like Barbara Trapido without the magical realism and perhaps with more social acuity.
Wouldn’t you want to be at this wedding?
Am in awe!