It may very well be true that the many couples milling about One Centre Street’s white-walled second floor are madly in love with one another. The city clerk’s love, however, they will have to do without. Kindly interest and a tender officiary have their place, but that place is not the Wedding Chapel of the City of New York. No, there is romance in the air, but it’s not the name-brand stuff — more like the sort a person might come across were they to breed a Las Vegas drive-through with the Atlantic Avenue DMV. One might also note about the place, in the spirit of strictest accuracy, the faint but undeniable whiff of morning roll call in a ninth-grade homeroom.

That, at any rate, is what the deputy city clerk brings to mind as she stands in the chapel doorway calling out the names of that batch of betrothed — a stern but good-natured schoolmarm keeping her herd of charges in check. Young couples seemingly straight from college, older ones having at a second go-round. Blonde Russian brides with their grinning well-gelled grooms, a dapper African man with a red handkerchief poking out the pocket of his pinstriped suit. White blouses, blue blazers, charcoal slacks, here and there perhaps a lily in the hair; mothers, fathers, friends, the odd onlooker with nothing better to do; a pregnant Korean girl in a cream-colored dress, hands rubbing her swollen stomach as she paces back and forth in the corridor. They all wait in the narrow hallway for their turn to come, clustered around the blue plastic chairs pressed against the marble walls, modest parties of three or four or five, clutching flowers and forms and purses and each other’s hands.    

“Gary and Denise, Julio and Erica, Alexander and Olana, Abrahim and Shareta…”

They file in clumps into the chapel. “Shar-reeeeta,” corrects Shareta under her breath as she passes through the door.

The clerk stops the last couple in line just outside the entrance.

“Where’s your witness?” she asks.

The bride, a thin Asian woman in a pale green skirt looks up to her husband-to-be.

“She went to the bathroom,” she says.
 
The clerk manages, by dint of nothing more than her heroic capacity for self-control, to suppress an eye roll.

“Go find her,” she says. Obeying, the woman clatters off down the hall in a nervous half-trot, leaving her interlocutor waiting in the doorway impatiently, grey hair growing greyer by the minute.

Because, as anyone with business on the second floor should know, so far as marrying goes, the witness is the indispensable man. Without him — or her, as the case may be — the show can’t go on. Which means that three is the critical number at One Centre Street. A bride and a groom holding one another, and beside them some well-dressed straggler with a camera in their hand. One sees quite a lot of it around. (Later that week, I saw a just-married couple step in to serve as witnesses for a pair of strangers. The thing done, the two new families stood together for a photograph, the mother of the second pair pulling their new acquaintances close for a kiss before they left, declaring, quite accurately as it happened, that “without you guys we would be outside in the street crying.”)

Once all the celebrants have been gathered up (the woman returns with her witness a few moments later) the clerk shuts the chapel door and the ceremonies begin. They take all of about a minute each — a bit of legal boilerplate followed by a call for objections, and then ending finally with a kiss before the brown wooden podium that serves, one supposes, as New York’s secular analog to the altar.

This afternoon, Gary and Denise make it out first, she in a seafoam green dress, he in teal slacks and a pair of saddle-shoes colored to match, striding away in each other’s arms like they’d just been married in a high mass at Notre Dame. The majority, in fact, emerge from the room with smiling faces. The happy couple beaming with a rectangular marriage certificate in hand is far and away the most popular photo of the aftermath.

There are a few, though, who come out a bit uncertain as to what exactly it is that they’ve done. “It was so very quick,” one newlywed says upon her exit, a faint look of concern on her face.

“Oh, but still, it is so exciting,” her friend, the party’s indispensable third, insists.

“Mmmm,” the bride says, somewhat less than convinced, as the two of them, a vaguely shell-shocked new husband in tow, head off in the direction of the elevators.

And perhaps she is right to be unsure. After all, such a scene offers very little to sustain that central solipsism of the wedding ceremony — the notion that because the day is important to the bride and groom, it is, in fact, an important day. But maybe one is best rid of this illusion anyway. Let’s be honest. Even at your more conventional affairs, only a very few are primarily concerned with the nuptials themselves. The groomsmen are occupied with picking up the bridesmaids, the uncles are most interested in abusing the open bar. Even the priest, were he to admit the truth, would have to concede that he’d rather be back at the rectory watching Notre Dame. All the city’s service does is make such indifference explicit.

Which is by no means to say that the business is without merit. Just as the deputy clerk calls the next round of couples out of the hallway, a heavyset man in an MTA tank-top settles into a seat just down the way. He has come there with his wife of many years to look up an old marriage record. At last she has gotten the paper they came for, and as she sits down beside him and opens her purse to put it inside, a look of pure disgust crosses his face.

“I dunno why you need all that junk in there,” he says, nodding towards her bag.

She glares at him through her tired blonde hair and then, without a word, stands up and walks to the elevator bank. A few moments later he follows behind. Undying devotion, let no one deny its charms.