I nodded. “I think being yourself—your true, entire self—is always going to feel like you’re swimming upstream.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But if the last few years with you have been any indication, I think it also feels like taking your bra off at the end of the day.”

I laughed. “I love you,” I said. “Don’t ever leave me.”

But when she said, “I love you, too. I never will,” we both knew she was making a promise she couldn’t keep.

I couldn’t stand the thought of losing her again, losing her in a deeper way than I’d ever lost her before. I couldn’t bear the idea that I would be forever without her, with no tie to her.

“Will you marry me?” I said.

She laughed, and I stopped her.

“I’m not kidding! I want to marry you. For once and for all. Don’t I deserve that? Seven marriages in, shouldn’t I finally get to marry the love of my life?”

“I don’t think it works that way, sweetheart,” she said. “And need I remind you, I’d be stealing my brother’s wife.”

“I’m serious, Celia.”

“So am I, Evelyn. There’s no way for us to marry.”

“All a marriage is is a promise.”

“If you say so,” she said. “You’re the expert.”

“Let’s get married right here and now. Me and you. In this bed. You don’t even have to put on a white nightgown.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a spiritual promise, between the two of us, for the rest of our lives.”

When Celia didn’t say anything, I knew that she was thinking about it. She was thinking about whether it could mean anything, the two of us there in that bed.

“Here’s what we will do,” I said, trying to convince her. “We will look each other in the eye, and we will hold hands, and we will say what’s in our hearts, and we will promise to be there for each other. We don’t need any government documents or witnesses or religious approval. It doesn’t matter that I’m already legally married, because we both know that when I was marrying Robert, I was doing it to be with you. We don’t need anybody else’s rules. We just need each other.”

She was quiet. She sighed. And then she said, “OK. I’m in.”

“Really?” I was surprised at just how meaningful this moment was becoming.

“Yeah,” she said. “I want to marry you. I’ve always wanted to marry you. I just . . . it never occurred to me that we could. That we didn’t need anyone’s approval.”

“We don’t,” I said.

“Then I do.”

I laughed and sat up in our bed. I turned on the light on my nightstand. Celia sat up, too. We faced each other and held hands.

“I think you should probably perform the ceremony,” she said.

“I suppose I have been in more weddings,” I joked.

She laughed, and I laughed with her. We were in our midfifties, giddy at the idea of finally doing what we should have done years ago.

“OK,” I said. “No more laughing. We’re gonna do it.”

“OK,” she said, smiling. “I’m ready.”

I breathed in. I looked at her. She had crow’s-feet around her eyes. She had laugh lines around her mouth. Her hair was mussed from the pillow. She was wearing an old New York Giants T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder. Convention be damned, she never looked more beautiful.

“Dearly beloved,” I said. “I suppose that’s just us.”

“OK,” Celia said. “I follow.”

“We are gathered here today to celebrate the union of . . . us.”

“Great.”

“Two people who come together to spend the rest of their lives with each other.”

“Agreed.”

“Do you, Celia, take me, Evelyn, to be your wedded wife? In sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, till death do us part, as long as we both shall live?”

She smiled at me. “I do.”

“And do I, Evelyn, take you, Celia, to be my wedded wife? In sickness and in health and all the other stuff? I do.” I realized there was a slight hiccup. “Wait, we don’t have rings.”

Celia looked around for something that might suffice. Without taking my hands from her, I checked the nightstand.

“Here,” Celia said, taking the hair tie from her head.

I laughed and took mine out of my ponytail.

“OK,” I said. “Celia, repeat after me. Evelyn, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love.”

“Evelyn, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love.”

Celia took the hair tie and wrapped it around my ring finger three times.

“Say, With this ring, I thee wed.”

“With this ring, I thee wed.”

“OK. Now I do it. Celia, take this ring as a symbol of my never-ending love. With this ring, I thee wed.” I put my hair tie on her finger. “Oh, I forgot vows. Should we do vows?”

“We can,” she said. “If you want to.”

“OK,” I said. “You think of what you want to say. I’ll think, too.”

“I don’t need to think,” she said. “I’m ready. I know.”

“OK,” I said, surprised to find that my heart was beating quickly, eager to hear her words. “Go.”

“Evelyn, I have been in love with you since 1959. I may not have always shown it, I may have let other things get in the way, but know that I have loved you that long. That I have never stopped. And that I never will.”

I closed my eyes briefly, letting her words sink in.

And then I gave her mine. “I have been married seven times, and never once has it felt half as right as this. I think that loving you has been the truest thing about me.”

She smiled so hard I thought she might cry. But she didn’t.

I said, “By the power vested in me by . . . us, I now declare us married.”

Celia laughed.

“I may now kiss the bride,” I said, and I let go of her hands, grabbed her face, and kissed her. My wife.

SIX YEARS LATER, AFTER CELIA and I had spent more than a decade together on the beaches of Spain, after Connor had graduated from college and taken a job on Wall Street, after the world had all but forgotten about Little Women and Boute-en-Train and Celia’s three Oscars, Cecelia Jamison died of respiratory failure.

She was in my arms. In our bed.

It was summer. The windows were open to let in the breeze. The room smelled of sickness, but if you focused hard enough, you could still smell the salt from the ocean. Her eyes went still. I called out for the nurse, who had been downstairs in the kitchen. I think I stopped making memories again, in those moments when Celia was being taken from me.

I only remember clinging to her, holding her as best I could. I only remember saying, “We didn’t have enough time.”

It felt as if by taking her body, the paramedics were ripping out my soul. And then, when the door shut, when everyone had left, when Celia was nowhere to be seen, I looked over at Robert. I fell to the floor.

The tiles felt cold on my flushed skin. The hardness of the stone ached in my bones. Underneath me, puddles of tears were forming, and yet I could not lift my head off the ground.

Robert did not help me up.

He got down on the floor next to me. And wept.

I had lost her. My love. My Celia. My soul mate. The woman whose love I’d spent my life earning.

Simply gone.

Irrevocably and forever.

And the devastating luxury of panic overtook me again.

Now This

July 5, 2000

SCREEN QUEEN CELIA ST. JAMES HAS DIED

Three-time Oscar-winning actress Celia St. James died last week of complications related to emphysema. She was 61 years old.

From a well-to-do family in a small town in Georgia, the red-haired St. James was often referred to as the Georgia Peach early in her career. But it was her role as Beth in the 1959 adaptation of Little Women that brought her her first Academy Award and turned her into a bona fide star.

St. James would go on to be nominated four other times and take home the trophy twice more over the next 30 years, for Best Actress in 1970 for Our Men and for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lady Macbeth in the 1988 adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy.