GOODBYE, MISS HAVISHAM

By LANCE MORROW

Katie Couric suggested that castration might be in order. That seemed a little extreme. What criminal outrage had reduced America's bouncy, breakfast-time kid sister to such a primitive fantasy? A serial child-rapist? An AIDS-carrying seducer infecting half of an upstate county's woebegone girls? No. This was serious. This was primal.

Couric was interviewing Nicole Contos, 27, a Manhattan kindergarten teacher who was to have got married to a 35-year-old lawyer, Tasos Michael. Bills for the wedding, to be paid by Nicole's father, a businessman who owns the American Banana Co., were said to be running as high as $125,000.

Nicole's story: 250 wedding guests assemble at the church. The bride arrives in her bridal radiance. The appointed hour. No groom. Hmmm. Buzz, buzz. Time passes. Still no groom. Fidget and buzz. Guests swivel in their pews to scan the back of the church, in mounting alarm. At last, the best man--looking grim, dressed in street clothes, not formal wedding regalia--appears and reports that, Sorry, the groom has decided he cannot go through with it. Shock, tears, consternation--The Philadelphia Story upside down, or turned sideways, anyhow.

Family consults. Traumatized bride digs deep, smiles through her tears at last, and decrees: Party on! Guests decamp to the fancy hotel and hold a defiant non-wedding reception, the non-bride dancing as the band breaks into I Will Survive.

It seems to me that Nicole Contos' aborted wedding represents a minor but vivid defining moment in the battle between the sexes. Women who heard about the case--and after a while last week it was hard not to hear about it--tended to go atavistic, as Katie Couric did. A couple of women lawyers I informally consulted misplaced for the moment their respect for due process; they agreed with Couric, drew a sharp, gleaming knife and applied it mentally to a target just south of the groom's waistline. If he doesn't like it, let the bastard go sing soprano to the A.C.L.U. Such was the ladies' thought.

Men's reactions, on the other hand, tended to run as follows: This guy is a real jerk; why didn't he make the decision earlier, and why didn't he have the manliness to tell the bride about it in person? That was the articulated, official male response. But off in a range of the male psyche audible only to guys and dogs, there vibrated the sneaking thought that the fugitive groom--however big a jerk, nay, slimeball--had made good an escape that men, in the yet undomesticated zones of their hearts, always applaud. Something in every man abhors a wedding. Not for nothing are such ceremonies performed by authority-and-punishment figures in black--clergy, judges. And as a guy contemplates the $125,000 trap, his premature hanging, with rosebuds flown in from France, the something in that man's mind cheers a miracle of last-minute escape--even if it is an ignominious miracle. Huck has lit out for the territory.

Such a male reaction is just as atavistic as Katie's castration fantasy. Let us elevate the discussion. What's interesting about this capsized fairy tale is what it tells us about sexual paradigms. The old paradigm in a case like this is Miss Havisham, in Dickens' Great Expectations. Miss Havisham had been left at the altar many years before. She stopped the clocks at the moment of abandonment. She shut herself off and lived ever after in the ruins of her nuptial hope. She trained up the lovely young girl Estella to take her revenge upon men.

And the new paradigm? Diana, Princess of Wales. Last week's jilted bride, Nicole Contos, followed the essential outlines of Diana's example. The script: 1)The man (Prince Charles, or Tasos Michael) is a rotten, unfeeling, abusive cad, and inflicts a humiliation upon a naive and innocently hopeful young woman. 2)Instead of a Havisham withdrawal, however, the young woman goes vividly public with her trauma and plays the story out in the media, turning her shame not only into triumph but into revenge. Thus Nicole paraded her drama all over national television last week. Broken dreams make you a star. The contemptible non-groom was holed up in Tahiti, where the honeymoon was to have been. The louse did not get to the beach much, because a cyclone blew up in the Pacific. Nicole's image filled the electronic air--the dancing martyr, the New Woman.

The gut reactions (She: Castrate! He: High fives, buddy!) did not address practical questions. For example: Is it not infinitely better in the long run (even granting the untidiness of the groom's withdrawal) that Tasos obeyed his existential impulse and fled? Did Prince Charles have a similar impulse on his way to St. Paul's Cathedral in 1981? ("The hell with it, I just can't go through with this!") What if he had left Diana at that altar? No wedding, therefore no years of misery? On the other hand, no Wills and Harry? No bulimia, no "New" Diana? No Dodi? No paparazzi? No crash?

This is a forest of hypotheticals, impenetrable. As for Nicole and Tasos, what we are looking at here, I think, is a win-win situation.