Living Out Loud (12 page)

I
have been married for almost ten years to the same person. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe. Neither of us were sure that any human being could be expected to live over the long haul with anyone as stubborn, opinionated, and difficult as the other. Somehow it has worked, and it is not a gross exageration to say that this is partly due to the fact that I am a much better cook than he is, and he tells much better jokes than I do.

A lot of people don’t understand how important these little things are to a marriage. I realized this when I was reading a magazine article about bachelors, many of whom were participating in organized sports instead of having relationships with women, just like their football coaches told them they should do when they were seventeen. Many of these bachelors seemed to think that it would take a lot of compromise and change on the part of both partners
to stay married. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One touchstone of marriage is security, and nothing makes you feel more secure than knowing exactly what another person is going to say or do at any given time. If my husband just cut into a slightly pink pork chop and scoffed it down, instead of holding a piece up at eye level, looking at it as though it was a murder suspect, and saying, “Is this cooked enough?”—well, I’d become pretty suspicious, I can tell you that.

I felt this sense of continuity just the other night. It was a cold night, a wintry night, and I was getting ready to go to sleep when my husband said, “I don’t like that nightgown.” And once again I felt that magic little thrill you always get when you realize that some things in your life are immutable. It was a flannel nightgown I was wearing, one of those little numbers that looks like a fallout shelter and is designed to reveal only that the body beneath possesses ankles. It’s warm and comfortable, but I’ve always known, deep in my heart, that the only person who would consider it seductive would be Buddy Ebsen. Once a year my husband looks at one of these things and says, “I don’t like that nightgown.” I guess if I was what my grandmother used to call a dutiful wife, I wouldn’t wear them. But just think how out-of-kilter that would throw my husband’s whole existence.

Luckily neither of us ever has to go for long without these little touchstones that keep our relationship solid. More than that, I think they bring home to me constantly the differences between men and women. These are important to keep in mind, because the clearest explanation for the failure of any marriage is that the two people are incompatible—that is, that one is male and the other female. There are all those times when I’ve purchased a new dress for a special occasion and my husband has glimpsed those telltale price tags in the trash. “Did you need a new dress?” he will always say, once again
illustrating the gender-based distinction between necessity and desire. Or there’s the ever-popular “You look fine without makeup,” usually uttered when I am applying eyeliner five minutes after he has determined we should be in the car. To which the obvious answer is, “The only place I’ve ever gone without makeup is to the recovery room.” I think it’s worth noting that I was once at a party at which a man said quite loudly, “You look fine without makeup” and eight women turned around, each thinking it was their husband.

(Of course, these things can backfire on you, too. If I ever am divorced by my husband, for example, it will probably be because I have made it a practice throughout my life never to put the caps back on things. With those grounds and the right judge, he could probably get the kids, the house, the dogs, and all the toothpaste tubes, as well as the jar of mayonnaise that has tinfoil molded over the opening.)

However, I am beginning to think that the flannel nightgown is larger than this, figuratively as well as literally. Perhaps it is an extended metaphor for the difference between what men want from a marriage, and what women want. There’s a real temptation to say that women want a relationship that is secure, comfortable, and enduring, while men are really looking for excitement, sex, and black lace. Obviously those are stereotypes. Lots of the bachelors in this magazine piece seemed to be interested in a secure relationship, although some of them had settled for touch football instead. I even have one friend, who previously had the kind of lingerie collection usually confined to a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, who fell in love with a man who thinks flannel nightgowns are sexy, in the way the librarian with the bun and the glasses turns out to be something else entirely once she takes her hairpins out. (I know your next question. Forget it. This man is not available. He is taken.) And I know lots of women are interested in having some excitement in their lives, although a great many of the single women I
know wish that excitement didn’t so often include cheating, lying, and uncomfortable undergarments.

It’s a little late for me to fall in love with a man who likes cotton flannel and the allure of the dowdy. I’m already taken, too. And I know all his little winning ways, and he knows mine. I believe this is the secret to a successful marriage. It beats me why someone like Madonna, for example, would think she had irreconcilable differences with Sean Penn. Now there’s a man you can count on: point a camera and he throws a punch, as predictable and consistent as can be, still spitting and swearing and indulging in fisticuffs, the same guy today as he was the day she married him. I like a certain reliability in a man, and I’ve got it. I put a plate of radicchio salad on the table, step back, and count to five. “What is this stuff?” my husband says suspiciously, poking it with his fork. It warms my heart.

E
ach night for the last week, as I have gone out to walk the dogs or leave the trash at the curb, the boy and girl have been shadows in the doorway of the house next door. Even when it was raining, lightning bisecting the sky, they were there, entangled in one of those kisses that last forever, that end only when the oxygen supply gives out. One night the boy spoke as the dogs sniffed at the steps below. “Do you know how much I love this girl?” he asked, a rhetorical boast to a middle-aged stranger.

“Oh, God,” I said, tugging on the leashes, and though the lovers might have thought my response indicated disapproval, it was really the shock of recognition, sharp and silver as the lightning. I remember being in love like this. Entering into a state more like a tropical disease than a relationship, listening to one catchy piece of bubble-gum music over and over again and getting the same odd feeling in the stomach and the
chest. When I was in high school, the song was by the Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”: “Though it’s gonna make it that much better/When we can say goodnight and stay together.” The big payoff. Not so much sex, at least for the girls, as a kind of mythical domesticity: napkins and matching place mats, unlimited kissing, no adults, flowers every day. What our parents referred to as playing house.

It’s getting on to ten years that I’ve been married. I’m not sure when I realized that reality was going to be both something less and something much more. Luckily many of us know this before we marry, or there would be even more disasters than we now suffer through, many more people packing away an expensive wedding album in some corner of the basement where, it is hoped, it will mildew.

When I was younger, I tended to fall in love with just one thing: a kind of bravado, a certain smile. (The girl in the doorway, I am convinced, has fallen for blond hair and a crooked grin.) I even fell in love with a certain set of bony shoulders in a sport jacket years ago. But unlike a lot of my friends, who went through more than a few Mr. Wrongs and have now settled down with Mr. Maybe, I married the person inside the sport jacket. And I held on like a dog with a bone to a love affair between a girl whose idea of awesome responsibility was a psych midterm and a boy who painted his dorm room black, long after that boy and girl were gone. I held onto what has been going on in that doorway long past the time when I was really too old to believe in magic.

Truth is, I still believe in magic, and it’s still there, although there’s no point denying that it is occasionally submerged beneath a welter of cereal bowls, dirty shirts, late nights, early mornings, and all the other everyday things that bubble-gum music never reflects. But what I didn’t know about marriage, the less magical parts of it, has become perhaps more important to me. Now we have history as well as chemistry. An
enormous part of my past does not exist without my husband. An enormous part of my present, too. I still feel somehow that things do not really happen to me unless I have told them to him. I don’t mean this nonsense about being best friends, which I have never been able to cotton to; our relationship is too judgmental, too demanding, too prickly to have much in common with the quiet waters of friendship. Like emotional acupuncturists, we know just where to put the needle. And do.

But we are each other’s family. And while I know people who have cut their families loose, who think them insignificant or too troublesome to be part of their lives, I am not one of those people. I came late to the discovery that we would be related by marriage. I once made a fool of myself in front of a friend in the emergency room of a small resort hospital after my husband’s stomach and a bad fried clam had had an unfortunate meeting. “Are either of you related to him?” the nurse asked, and we both shook our heads until our friend prodded me gently in the side. “Oh, well, I’m his wife,” I said.

There is something so settled and stodgy about turning a great romance into next of kin on an emergency room form, and something so soothing and special, too. I suppose that is what I find so dreadful about divorce; lovers are supposed to leave you in the lurch, but your family is supposed to stick by you forever. “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relations,” the folksy folks always say. Ah, but in this one case you can. You just don’t realize it at the time.

What does it mean that I do not envy the two of them, standing in the doorway, locked together like Romeo and Juliet in the tomb? I suppose when I was their age I would have assumed it meant that I was old and desiccated. But of course what has really happened is that I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still get an enormous kick out of infatuation: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach,
the adrenaline to the heart. At a cocktail party the other night I looked across a crowded room and was taken by a stranger, in half profile, a handsome, terribly young-looking man with a halo of backlighted curls. And then he turned and I realized that it was the stranger I am married to, the beneficiary on my insurance policy, the sport jacket, the love of my life.

   BECOMING   
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MOTHER