Getting the goods
Eight months after Sept. 11, I thought I'd buried all of my husband. Finding more of him has meant granting Eddie one last wish.
By A.R. Torres
April 26, 2002 | On April 22, 1999, Eddie Torres and I got married. Although we were desperately in love, it was a marriage of pure necessity, a quick fix for his illegal immigration status, the means to getting a green card. Just a month before our wedding, our relationship had taken a sharp turn toward domesticity. We were no longer lovers hooking up on the sly for street-corner kisses, odd outings and covert dashes to my bed; we were a live-in couple, happily engaged to be married. Now we brushed our teeth together, smiling through the foam at the novelty of this newfound nightly activity.
The date of our wedding, the only important element of our prenuptial planning, coincided with the moon waxing, not waning; the former is good luck, the latter, bad. Mother and mother-in-law-to-be fussed about me in preparation. I was the conduit between them since neither spoke the other's language. I translated their English and Spanish anxiety to each other. The absurdity of the day needed no explanation; it was clear to everyone.
After our City Hall ceremony, we traversed the downtown streets that led to the World Trade Center. Everyone smiled at us, the newlyweds, on this spring day. A perfect bride, I wore the white glossy dress that Eddie bought me from a Queens black market. He plucked it off the rack, sized me just right from his hands-on knowledge of my shape.
Up we went to Windows on the World to toast our newly contracted state and to celebrate the end to Eddie's precarious illegal status. I remember the purple drink made of champagne, vodka and Chambord, but I've forgotten its name. Eddie would have remembered it.
We strove to fulfill the government's definition of marriage. We exchanged rings. I compounded my name with his, and became someone new: A.R.-T. We shared our various bank accounts. We took sweet pictures of our coupledom on all the days of supposed significance.
Marriage did not corrupt our wildness. Instead it legitimized it. Despite the myriad domestic trappings, the familiar bred its own excitement. And I was always startled to find how sweet the words "my husband" tasted in my mouth.
On Nov. 15, 2000, a year and a half after our marriage, we had our green card interview. The fat and unhappy immigration officer, Mr. D., investigated the authenticity of our union. Mostly he focused on me, presuming, it seemed, that I was a crafty woman who sold her U.S. status to this hapless human. Mr. D. demonstrated his knowledge of sham marriages by inappropriately describing his own: how he lived with a manipulative woman for many years solely for pretense in front of their children. With his children grown, he now considered divorce.
We left his office with too much knowledge about Mr. D. and without the official stamp in Eddie's documents that would enable him to visit Colombia, his home. Even though Mr. D. had pronounced us man and wife, he had also found that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had lost Eddie's file. Without a file, he had nothing to stamp. And without that stamp, Eddie could not travel. He was stuck in limbo, allowed as my husband to stay and work, but denied the privilege to leave.
He never did go back home.
On Sept. 11., when Eddie died, the favor I did for him became the favor he did for me. As Eddie's lawful wife, I became the recipient of his earthly possessions, as well as the debts and benefits that would surface in the wake of his death.
