This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (27 page)

My beautiful mother had learned a great deal along the rocky run of her own experience and now she was passing it on to me. Because I was at that moment in desperate need of guidance, I decided to take her advice to heart. I remember sitting on the top of the stairs in her house and thinking that I didn't have another breakup in me. I was already too thin and too sad. I couldn't call all my friends again and cry on the phone. I had used up all the sympathy I had coming for the next five years. I was just going to have to let this one go. As much as I loved David, and I loved him the way you love the person who saves your life, I understood that I had avoided catastrophe by the thickness of a coat of paint. He had done me the two greatest favors that anyone had ever done me in my life: he got me out, and then he let me go.

It was on that day, on those stairs, that I decided I would never divorce again. I was as grateful for divorce as I was for my own life, but it had done me in. I now fully understood the passion with which my mother had promised not to be twice-divorced, and how holding on to her second marriage was like holding on to a bucking bronco set aflame. She did not let go through all the hell of her marriage, simply because she'd sworn to herself she would not let go. But now, with David gone, I saw a much simpler path: if I never married again, I would never again be divorced. In short, I had found a way to beat the system. I was free.

S
now White finds happiness with seven dwarfs. She isn't settling. She is very, very happy.

H
ere's a fail-safe recipe for popularity: be twenty-six, cheerful, and completely over the idea of marriage. Not in a coy way, not in a way that says you secretly hope someone will talk you into it. Wash your hands of wedlock and watch the boys fly in. At the moment that other women my age were starting to ask their boyfriends if their intentions were serious, I was explaining to mine that life was short and this was fun and that was all. Well, that's not entirely true: I remained serious about love; I just gave up the notion that marriage was the inevitable outcome of love. I took my mother at her word and had some wonderful, long relationships with people I deeply enjoyed but would not have wanted to marry for a minute. Once I decided I liked someone well enough to want to spend time with him, I set aside my judgment. Did he leave his clothes in twisted piles on the floor? Fine by me, I wasn't the one picking them up. Was he always late? For everything? That could wear over the course of a lifetime but for a year or two it wasn't really a problem. Did I find his father impossibly grating? Yes, but who cared? We would not be spending holidays together for the rest of our days on earth. Not only was I dating for the first time in my life, I could put aside the constant assessment of character that talk of forever inspired. I decided instead to fall in love with a good sense of humor, a compassionate understanding of Wallace Stevens, an ability to speak Italian or dance on a coffee table.

M
y mother was happy as well. She had married Darrell, who was easygoing, adored her completely, and made his own pasta, three qualities we had not previously seen in our family. Of course, Darrell had his own ex-wife and three grown children, but they were all intelligent, highly civilized people who were willing to attach the complicated web of their family to the complicated web of ours. My mother's third marriage bespoke a real learning curve.

Not only did she have a good husband, she had a good job. After her final split from Mike, she returned to work as a nurse in the office of an internist named Karl VanDevender. They got along well. It seemed that everyone got along with Karl. He was a genial person and a good doctor, the kind of man people speak of as being golden. But even the golden have their problems. One night my mother called to tell me that Karl's wife had left him.

Part of removing myself from the cycle of marriage and divorce involved limiting my interest in the marriages and divorces of other people. The marriages and divorces of other people are deeply private things. Both the successes and the failures are based on an unfathomable chemistry and history that an outsider has no access to. I knew from experience that any story I heard on the subject was unlikely to be entirely true, and that the truth was none of my business anyway. I made it a point to wish every marriage well, and to feel a moment of sorrow for any divorce, and that was all. The report was that Karl's wife had left abruptly, there hadn't been any arguments, and that the whole thing, as he had told my mother, came as a complete surprise. I wondered if any divorce ever really came as a complete surprise, and if it did, well, that was probably your answer as to why someone was divorcing you.

I had met Karl a few times over the years when I had stopped by the office to bring something to my mother. If I saw him in the hall we would have a brief exchange of pleasantries (
hello how are you very well and yourself?
). After my first book was published, he took my mother and me out to lunch and told me endlessly how lucky I was to be a writer. He said it so many times I finally told him I thought it would be strange if I sat there and told him how lucky he was to be a doctor. That was all there was to it. He asked me to mail him a list of my favorite books. He had been an English major in college. He wanted to know what he should be reading.

At the time that Karl's marriage was breaking up I was thirty years old and living in Cambridge, where I had a fellowship at Radcliffe College. My mother continued to call with updates. Karl's situation had taken over her work life. Not only did he confide in her, it seemed that no one in the hospital talked about anything else. It's a wonder that patients didn't die while doctors and nurses discussed the fate of Dr. VanDevender. He didn't want a divorce, but if his wife refused to come back, he planned to remarry as soon as possible. Eager candidates were lining up around the hospital. My mother claimed the call volume into the office had increased tenfold: men and women called wanting Karl to date their mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, tennis partners. Women called wanting to ask Karl out themselves. He was forty-six and handsome. He had a good income and even better manners. It was springtime, and depending on how long it took for the divorce to become final, it seemed very likely that Dr. VanDevender would find someone to marry by Christmas.

Up in Cambridge, I felt sad for Karl in the way you feel sad for someone who is about to embark on a long round of chemo and radiation. He was at the start of something I had completely finished and the notion of anyone having to face that, even someone I scarcely knew, made me feel sick.

“You'll never guess who Karl wants to date now,” my mother said to me one night on the telephone. He had gone out with several women by that point. He had gone to Bali on a date.

It was supposed to be a guessing game but I told her just to tell me.

“You,” she said.

He was sixteen years older than I was, lived a thousand miles away, and was my mother's boss. “That's not going to happen,” I said.

Months later, when I was home visiting, Karl called and asked me out to dinner. Ever the fan of clarity, I explained my position on the matter. “I'm sorry for what you're going through,” I said, “and I'm happy to talk to you, but I'm not going to date you. This isn't a date, okay?”

“Not a date,” he said. “A meal.”

The woman who owned the restaurant where we had dinner sent the waiter to our table three times before we had finished our entrées. “She needs to speak to you privately in the back,” the waiter said. Three times Karl dutifully went to see what she wanted. She told him she was having heart palpitations; would he just listen to her heart?

“Wow,” I said, when he came back to the table.

Finally, the owner gave up all pretense and brought her racing heart to our table, sitting in our booth very close to Karl. She was stunning, an ice-white blonde with blue eyes and cheekbones so prominent they looked almost painful. She put her hand on his wrist and asked him when he planned to call.

“You're in serious trouble,” I said when we got in the car. His manners were too good not to go when he was called away, and they were too good not to realize that lengthy, repeated absences constituted bad manners. He called me several times that week to talk. He said he just wanted to be married, to his wife, to someone, but he couldn't possibly exist in his present state.

W
hen Gautama achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha, Lord Brahma was so moved that he came down to earth and knelt before him. Lord Brahma asked that the Buddha teach the dharma because there were so many people on earth who were living in a state of terrible suffering and this true path could ease the pain of many. The Buddha was reluctant at first because he didn't see his wisdom as being easily transferable. Everyone had to learn the dharma for themselves. But the Buddha practiced compassion, and so he was moved. He agreed to help all he could with the knowledge he had found.

I
'm sorry—am I comparing myself to the Buddha? Yes, in this one small instance, I am. I had used my knowledge and my experience to save myself and now I had the chance to step beyond my life of happy self-preservation and save someone else. Like the Buddha, I was hesitant. I knew that I would be taking on something enormously complicated. Of course this was not exactly altruism on my part. Karl was so handsome and charming and lost, there was something irresistible about him. But he wasn't my type. I liked men who could be found on the couch reading Proust in the middle of the day, men who were boyish and broke, who hung on to outdated student IDs, who rode bicycles and smoked at the same time. Karl had no existential angst as to whether or not his life had meaning. He put on a beautiful suit every morning and went out to do important work, not writing book reviews but saving human lives (and doing it with none of the fanfare I witnessed in those book reviewers). It seemed to me that dating outside one's natural inclinations fit perfectly within my mother's dictum. Here was a man I liked, a man who was tumbling so thoughtlessly towards a second marriage that a second divorce seemed the likely outcome. I could possibly talk him out of the mistake he was poised to make, or at the very least offer him a little safety until he pulled himself together. I could keep an eye on his two teenaged children, because, operating from a wealth of experience, it seemed to me they stood to lose the most in a reckless second marriage. The third time Karl and I went out I kissed him; I told him I would help him. He said that he needed some help. Then he asked me to marry him.

I shook my head. “That's the whole point,” I said. “I'm the only person you're going to find who isn't going to marry you.”

And I didn't. For eleven years.

I
don't know how it happened. We weren't particularly happy early on in our relationship. Seeing someone through a divorce means not always seeing them at their best. We broke up a couple of times, but then circled back to one another, connected by some sort of invisible string. Every year in September, the month in which we had started to date, we would say to each other, Should we keep doing this for another year? For the first several years we were never very sure, and then we were. I didn't want to stay in Nashville, but somehow I never left. Then David called me out of the blue. I hadn't heard from him in years. “I hear you're marrying some doctor,” he said. “I wanted to say congratulations.”

“You need to get a better source,” I said. He said that he missed me. “Are you missing me because you think I'm about to get married? Because I'm not. I'm really not.”

I didn't hear from him again.

Time passed and I had a harder and harder time remembering why Karl wasn't my type, or remembering what my type had been. It was as if we were growing into one another. He was smart and kind. My family loved him, I loved him. He encouraged me in everything I did. His answer to every question was yes. He was proud of me, and he never found a way to undermine my success or spoil a happy moment (a quality, I will tell you, that is hard to come by). And all that time he never stopped wanting to get married.

“We're happier than the married people,” I said. “Why do you want to be like them?”

Besides, not being married had saved us. Had I said yes to Karl's initial proposal, or really to any of the proposals that came in the years that followed, I don't think we would have made it. By not living together, we could fight and then step away to cool off. I would think,
At least we're not married
, which is so much better than thinking,
I can't stay married to you
. I also thought our status was good for his children, who at this point weren't really children anymore, but still, they'd had enough change to deal with. I bought a small house three blocks away, an easy walk, and Karl and I had dinner together every night. People bothered us endlessly about our arrangement, but as far as I was concerned, what we had wasn't broken and didn't warrant fixing.

Karl remained unconvinced, especially when we returned from vacations and he dropped me off at my house. Often he was angry at me at the end of vacations. “I don't want to live this way anymore,” he would say.

But how could I, who carried divorce in my veins all the way back to Denmark, be absolutely positive that it wouldn't happen this time? It would take an impossible leap of willful naïveté on my part to change my story now, no matter how much I loved Karl, I wasn't naïve. And I wasn't getting married.

One year, just before Christmas, Karl brought home a basket of cookies that some of the nuns he took care of at a local convent had made for him. There were a dozen different kinds of sweets, each wrapped separately in its own perfect little package. Karl had me unwrap them all until I found the one with a diamond ring inside. “Don't worry,” he said, seeing the worry on my face. “It isn't an engagement ring. This is a you've-been-here-a-really-long-time-and-you-deserve-a-nice-ring-without-getting-married ring.”