The Death of a Journalist
(Page 5 of 11)
September/October 1996
Lynda Schuster, Granta (www.granta.com)
I dashed back to the hotel to find Dial sitting on the edge of the bed in my room -- he had somehow coaxed the key from the receptionist -- dressed entirely in white, with matching knuckles. 'I didn't think you were going to show up,' he said tersely. I changed into my wedding outfit. Dial, Jordy, and I then crowded into a taxi, along with a journalist friend who had been enlisted as a witness, and drove downtown to the 400-year-old City Hall. The toothless old registrar, whom Dial had bribed to perform the ceremony -- one could get the certificate only on Thursdays, and it was Tuesday -- was waiting for us outside. He looked at Jordy, then at me, and said in a spray of Spanish, 'Which one of you is getting married? Ha ha!'
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We trooped inside the building, an elaborate colonial relic with beamed ceilings, gilded moldings, and wood-framed windows. The registrar mumbled something entirely unintelligible, to which Dial and I answered, 'Si, quiero,' the equivalent of 'I do.' My knees were shaking, and Dial had to steady me as I signed the register. Then he signed; when he looked up, his eyes were filled with tears. It was such an overwhelming moment that we almost forgot the rings he had brought from Mexico: delicate bands of twisted, burnished gold. We laughed and kissed and posed for Jordy to take pictures. Only one photograph came out, and even that is strangely overexposed. Dial stares steadfastly into the camera with an ebullient smile, while I demurely avert my face; behind us, the room is suffused with a pinkish aura that gives the scene an ethereal, fragile feeling.
Back at the hotel, we bought the only bottles of champagne to be found and shared them with a colonel in the Honduran air force who happened to be in the bar. He regaled us with an anecdote of how his helicopters had made a wrong turn that day into Nicaraguan air space and come under fire from Sandinista soldiers. We laughed (Dial taking notes all the while), finished off the bottles, and retired to our room to call our families in the States. 'Hi, Mom,' I shouted into the phone over what sounded like chattering rodents. 'I'm calling from Honduras. How are you?'
'I'm just fine, dear. How are you?'
'I'm married, Mom.'
Dead silence. Not surprisingly, this sudden telephonic announcement evoked virtually the same response from all my relatives; Ida, a younger sister, sobbed, 'But I don't even know him.' Dial had better luck: Informed of our nuptials, his son Chris was positively ecstatic.
What I quickly discovered that a journalistic marriage differs little from a journalistic romance: Everything is dictated by the story. Our honeymoon was a reporting trip to the country's interior during which we became hopelessly lost and ended up at the Gulf of Fonseca, staring across the inlet at Nicaragua. Dial hurried back to Mexico two days later because the president nationalized the banking system, and we returned to our frenzied attempts at togetherness.
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