The Wedding Announcement & Subtext

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment for 14 January 2008
Prompt: Subtext


Subtext to Costas Christulides and Paige Veach's Wedding Announcement

« Πоυ̃̃ εĩναι τо μπάνιо » (Pwieenai toe banyoe?) It was merely the phonetic pronunciation of the Modern Greek for “Where is the bathroom”, but it impressed Costas Christulides
- Paige


I first shook hands with Costas over a Manhattan conference table two years ago as we started negotiations for a mega merger among several international corporations. The largest of them had hired me, a partner for Davis Polk, to represent them. Costas managed the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch. After a few weeks, Costas and I started to dine together between the workday meetings and burning the midnight oil. It was a good time to talk about business in a more relaxed atmosphere. That’s when I tried out my college Greek.

Costas was second generation Greek from Detroit. In 1960, his parents had emigrated from small towns on mainland Greece. They met in Grand Central while waiting for the Detroitian. Mr. Christulides had worked his way into national management for General Motors in Detroit. He died several years ago. Costas’s mother retired from teaching last year and works as a docent for the Art Institute of Detroit.

Like Costas’s parents, I was from a small town. Unlike them, my hometown was in America and in the Deep South at that - Halprin, Georgia, to be exact. My father is the president of a real estate company and my mother is a teacher.

Like Costas, when I was living with my parents, I wanted nothing more than to live far away. Costas attended Dartmouth and MIT’s Sloan School. I attended Harvard and Yale’s law school. We both moved to Manhattan for our careers.

Anyway, in the last weeks of the merger-negotiations, our dinner conversations often ended with Costas talking about his wife and how she refused to grant him the divorce he wanted. The Greek Orthodox Church took a very dim view of divorce.

Although Costas did not talk about his marital situation as much as I am afraid I have suggested, he talked enough to try my patience – which I do not have a lot of. I asked him whether he would like to meet a friend of mine who had a very good record of negotiating successful divorces. At first, Costas did not seem at all interested and he talked about the joys of dual citizenship and of crewing a company yacht around the southwestern coast of Turkey. But when we parted for the evening, he asked to meet my friend. To make a long story short, Costas’s divorce was finalized six months ago.

When we announced our engagement, mother and Daddy were their usual gracious selves to Costas and Mrs. Christulides. However, when they were alone with me, they made it quite clear that they did not approve of Costas’s religion. As far as my parents were concerned, Greek Orthodoxy was worse than Roman Catholicism. You see generations of Veaches have had a pew in Halprin’s First Presbyterian Church.

I thought my parent’s objection was just silly, but Costas said that he would readily join the Presbyterians – no problem. After all, he said, it was not a matter of conversion, but only one of switching denominations. Besides, he was not the only son. So, we reserved the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church for a December wedding.

Mother and Daddy had a marriage announcement placed at the top of a page in the Sunday New York Times. The photo of us that headed the announcement was not entirely to their liking – Costas’s jacket collar gaped and his hairpiece was too obvious – but I was positively glowing and they could not resist. Besides, no one ever looks at the groom.

Costas’s ex-wife worked in the newsroom of the New York Times. When she heard about our marriage, she hacked into the pages of wedding announcements and added the following sentence to our blurb:

“The bridegroom’s previous marriage ended in divorce.”

Costas’s mother and my parents were horrified. He and I rolled our eyes and as soon as we could get our business affairs in order, we spent our honeymoon exploring the ruins and mountains of central Turkey.