The Golden State

The restaurant thing was supposed to follow a Turkish civil ceremony in a municipal hall, the official wedding ceremony. Originally when I found out I got the Institute job we were going to do a legally sanctioned thing and get married in Turkey and then apply for the U.S. K-3 nonimmigrant visa from Turkey, which is kind of a combo fiancé/marriage visa which would have let us start the process in Turkey and let Engin come to the U.S. with me and then do the rest of the applying there. But then we were advised by acquaintances and the Internet that this visa was basically nonoperational. And the K-1 fiancé visa takes eons, up to a year, and you can’t be together in the U.S. while you wait. So then we decided that we would forgo an official Turkish marriage and just have a nice dinner and then commit what I consider to be mild visa fraud by taking advantage of a loophole in U.S. visa policy that allows you to apply for a fiancé visa as a sort of fait accompli. Your honey comes to the U.S. on a three-month tourist visa, and you get married right before the three months is up, the idea being that your passion is such that it can be satisfied only through immediate entry into the marital estate. You have only a few family and friends, which is conveniently how many family and friends I have, you take a few pictures, you file simultaneously the I-130 Petition for Alien Relative and the I-485 Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status for your spouse who has now overstayed the B-2 tourist visa, and you spend a thousand dollars in fees and throw yourself on the mercies of a sympathetic visa officer who asks you a bunch of invasive questions and wants to see your text messages and makes you swear up and down you had no intent to marry when your honey got his tourist visa, and then you avoid leaving the U.S. until the green card is secured. That’s how Engin got his green card, the one which let us make a baby and from which it should have been a sure thing to move to citizenship. The miracle is that we got that one effortlessly, and then lost it basically through a malicious fluke. It’s obvious from all of this stuff incidentally, that they don’t want you to marry someone who’s not from the fucking United States, all you have to do is read the reams of alphanumeric gibberish on the relevant websites.

Anyway although it was foolhardy from an immigration protocol standpoint we had a big dinner in Istanbul but we told everyone to assiduously avoid thinking of it as a wedding so we didn’t get nailed by USCIS if they found for example a Facebook photo that appeared marital. The night before the dinner Pelin threw me a semi-ironic henna night in her apartment—a relief since like all once-traditional events in late capitalist urban environments the henna night sometimes takes the form of a giant boondoggle with hotel, caterers, costume changes, god forbid a belly dancer, etc. But this was just her and Engin’s select relatives and friends and two women I invited from my teaching days and they all made jokes I didn’t understand and sang “Yüksek Yüksek Tepelere” or “To the High High Hills” which has lines like “I miss my mother, I miss my village” and I got drunk and cried and everyone laughed because crying was actually the thing to do since historically you were facing the loss of your hymen the onslaught of your mother-in-law and the advent of family life and everything that comes with it. Then we went out to a bar and met Engin and we danced to a terrible pop song called “Married, Happy, with Kids.”

I loved the nonwedding dinner. My godparents who had been posted in Nicosia with my parents were now posted in Tbilisi and they came all the way to Istanbul in honor of my mom and dad and discreetly avoided consular discussion. Murat, his gallbladder healed and in Istanbul for a sabbatical, came in spite of his reservations about the marriage and the Ph.D., and though he was obviously still grumpy with me, he and his wife were charming with Engin’s dad who had been forced to buy a new suit and tame his beard for the occasion. Murat is married to a Dane and they are one of a handful of dual-national marriages I know, which all seem to follow one of two models, which is either both parties are super classy intellectual types who meet in some prestigious university setting, or summer-love style unions that take place between people who are highly mismatched class-wise, like a bluestocking and a villager, and are presumably predicated on very strong mutual attraction. Engin and I don’t seem to fit into either of these models.