First Marriage
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    They found their rings in a velvet-lined box of costume jewelry in a head shop just off campus. Their wedding photos show the two of them wearing the tell-tale goofy grins of very good Columbian.
    Within days the rings turned the skin on their fingers an unhealthy looking gray, so they embarked upon what they called their Ringless Marriage.
    There was a huge futon covered with an Indian print cloth, and an American flag tacked to the ceiling to shade a bare bulb. There was smoke—from joints, from burned curry, from a hibachi on a rickety rain-worn table on the tiny patio of their third floor efficiency—a pungent haze which made them feel their mid-west college town might almost be Calcutta, or Tangier.
    They went to a free summer screening of Casablanca and left in the middle to make love.
    In cut-offs and sunglasses they played inelegant tennis on the deserted courts behind the stadium until other students began returning for the fall term.
    They told themselves that it didn’t matter, that nothing, really, had changed—not even when one or the other would come home late. They decided upon ‘at the library’ as an acceptable lie.
    By mid-semester the leaves were off the trees and morning frost outlined them on the campus sidewalks. He was learning how Shakespeare’s weather established mood, how an October sky became a blue you couldn’t avoid.