Reader, I Married Him

by Tracy Chevalier

  “Ouch,” I protested as she pressed her thumbs into the tightness of my jaw.

  “Eventually she sought advice, they both did, from a senior rabbi, but it wasn’t long before she’d run off with the rabbi and six months later they were married. Turn over now, and I’ll see what’s up with your poor shoulders.”

  When I got home, reeling and uncoiled, I looked up transference.

  Transference is a common aspect of the therapeutic process. It is a phenomenon characterised by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another and under most circumstances should be discussed and examined and moved through with the therapist. Unless, for instance, you have a phobia of spiders, and this particular person reminds you so much of an ex-lover that you’re in danger of setting off for a dangerous trip into the rainforest untreated. In which case—change therapists!

  My boyfriend called while I was reading and guiltily I closed my laptop and listened to his news. He was in Berlin, had secured the contract he’d been chasing, although in order to be certain of it, he’d have to stay on for one more week. He loved me, he said, and missed me, and for the first time in a long while the little voice inside my head didn’t add any bitter or cynical remarks.

  That night I had supper with a friend. She had married early and now had teenage children, about whom, just for tonight, she was eager to forget. “White wine?” She flagged down a waiter and ordered a bottle. She had a lot to tell. Her husband was being transferred to Seattle, and although she was worried about leaving her house, the children’s school, her dearest friends, she was excited too. “And you?” She looked at me with pity. The last time I’d seen her, I was raw with the wounds of my discovery—a text message, white on the black screen of my boyfriend’s phone, its yearning, sexually explicit tone, impossible to ignore.

  “I’m well,” I told her, and I couldn’t help myself, I blushed.

  “Oh my God.” Her eyes widened. “You’re fucking someone new!”

  “No!” I protested, and I waited while our glasses were filled, although I knew I’d have to tell her. About the dream. The kiss. The glowing words of love. “Obviously,” I ended, “nothing is going to happen.”

  But she laughed. “Why not?” She was alive with it. “Who cares about ethics? It may be destiny, the way you two were supposed to meet.”

  “No, no,” I tried to interrupt her, to tell her about the stoop of his shoulders, the soft slope of his paunch, his wife!

  She was having none of it. “Maybe you’ll run away together.” Her eyes were bright with the vicariousness of my living. “And I for one will be delighted. After seven years with . . .” she stopped herself. “You deserve to be happy in love.”

  She poured us both more wine and as she did I thought of her husband, boring, older, let’s face it, practically bald, and how content she had always seemed with him. Had I been blinded by my boyfriend’s easy charm, his energy, had I been struggling all these years along the wrong path? “I do think about him ninety per cent of the time,” I gave her what she wanted, and she raised her arm and signalled for more wine.

  As we drank, chattering our way into the future, I thought of the therapist and how his face changed as he looked at me—a soft look, a sort of melting, and my heart flipped over like a fish.

  There were flowers in the room when I next entered. Had there ever been flowers before? And beside the flowers there was a photograph of his wife.

  “So, how are you?” he asked when, after some long minutes, I still hadn’t spoken.

  “I’m not sure where to start.” I felt a cold sweat collecting, the eyes of his wife resting on me, amused, and it occurred to me, all I had done was swap one object of obsession for another. “My work’s going well,” I tried. I’d hardly mentioned my work to him, but it was true, through all of the recent turmoil, new commissions had been flooding in. He smiled his encouragement and, glad to feel him closer, I told him about my new designs. “I’m branching into wallpaper, I’ve created a line with hearts and wheels,” and I stopped then, because I saw how this creation had been inspired by my dream.

  “Yes?” He was waiting.

  “Transference.” I swallowed. “I looked it up.”

  His smile remained. “And what did you find?”

  “Well . . .” I tried to tell him about the spiders and the rainforest, in the hope that he would laugh.

  “Transference and counter-transference happen all the time,” he said. “Romantic, erotic . . .” I shook my head. “Therapy is all about the relationship.”

  I told him then, about the train, the circle of light, how our feet were touching, everything in fact, except the kiss. He withdrew a little, as people do when you admit to having encountered them in dreams, and I braced myself, expecting him to get up and move away. But he stayed in his chair. “It’s the strangest thing,” I was talking to myself now. “Last winter when I discovered . . . that text . . . it felt as if my heart was broken, but now . . .” and I saw it had been true for some time, “it feels as if my heart has broken open.”

  His lip disappeared—his smile was so wide—and my insides melted with the strength of what was possible. “Thank you,” I said, and to steady myself I glanced up at his wife.

  That night my boyfriend returned from his trip. “I missed you.” He twined his arms around my waist, and without taking off his coat he lifted me up and carried me through to the bedroom.

  “No,” I said quietly when he put me down, “I’m sorry, I just—”

  “I’m sorry,” he interrupted, and when I dared to look at him, to look into his face, I saw that he was scared. “I want you to know . . .” His voice was very low, his face pale. “If you want me I’m yours. “

  “Is this a proposal?” I bit my lip.

  “I’ve changed,” he said. And I thought how much, how often, I’d wanted to hear those words.

  “Thank you.” I took his hand. “I’ll have to think about it.” But I didn’t tell him, not yet anyway, that it was me who’d changed.

  That next session I had almost nothing to say. I listened while the therapist talked and I smiled at him. The mistake we make, the masseuse had told me, once my pulses had eventually stilled, is to think that love must be about possession. You can love someone in a pure way. You can hold them in your heart. And nothing has to happen.

  THE MASH-UP

  LINDA GRANT

  THE WEDDING WAS PERFECT, up to a point.

  Because we were what Ali called a mash-up couple, we had to find a way of celebrating our marriage with a nod to both families, a ceremony that would make them feel their traditions were respected and that neither side had the upper hand. These things can turn ugly if not handled properly, with slights and sulks and stormings out and long-borne grievances and grudges stumbling to the surface like aggrieved old drunks. At least on my side of the family. My grandmother has not spoken to my aunt Dolly for forty-three years, since she was not placed at the top table at Elaine’s wedding.

  We went online and found a character called Rabbi Larry Peirera. He was prepared to conduct a wedding ceremony of our own devising, like those websites Ali used where you could customise your Nikes. Rabbi Larry, as he told us to call him, was an endearing fellow, a little mushroom of a man with a black boyfriend. When we met with him for the first time, at a bar in Shoreditch, we spent several ice-breaking minutes discussing the symbolism of our three sets of tats and he told us wonderful stories that started funny, and ended in heartbreak, of the long-ago centuries in the Sephardic world where Jews and Muslims lived side by side. “But I’m not a Muslim,” Ali reminded him. “I’m Persian.”

  “Of course,” Rabbi Larry said. “Indeed, the grave of our Queen Esther is in your lands.” Then he ordered coffee martinis and we planned our wedding.

  I explained that my parents were what you call three-times-a-year Jews, the type who go to synagogue for the High Holy Days, driving from home till they get two blocks away, then discreetly parking out of sight. “Out o
f respect for the rabbi,” Rabbi Larry said. “Of course. And why not? Let hypocrites be hypocrites if that’s what makes them comfortable. There’s enough trouble in this world without waging war on wonderful people like your parents.”

  On those occasions my mother would wear an unbecoming hat, my father would wrap his tallis around his shoulders and hold his siddur as if he knew what the words meant. Looking down on him from high in the ladies’ gallery, you could tell from the expression on his face, that pinched look he got, that he was thinking about business, about cheap Chinese imports and the demand for quality being met these days with blank stares.

  We wanted to shake all that up, make something modern. “Like our globalised world,” said Ali, who is a business analyst at Bloomberg.

  He explained to Rabbi Larry that his parents were what they call militantly secular. Richard Dawkins was their hero. “What a fellow,” they’d say. “At home they’d torture and murder him, but here he is allowed to say what he likes and nobody does a thing.” The family had got out of Iran in 1983, leaving behind a mansion in Tehran and a whole valley somewhere beyond the city. At home they had been religious the way my parents were religious, Ali’s grandmother in mini-skirts and spike heels drinking cocktails at downtown hotels, fasting at Ramadan (“good for the figure”). Once they got to Pittsburgh and set up the dry-cleaning businesses, they started hating Islam. When the Twin Towers were attacked they said, “We’re not Arabs, you know, those barbarians, we’re Persians.”

  They insisted on no trace of Islam at our wedding ceremony, but there were certain Persian traditions such as the women of the two families coming together to grind sugar over a canopy above the bride and groom’s heads to sweeten their lives. These elements could be present, they suggested.

  Ali and I were getting married in Stoke Newington Town Hall. The place had a large enough banqueting suite to accommodate the thirty-four Persians who were flying over as well as the Israeli contingent, my mother’s cousins who moved there in the seventies, attracted by kibbutz life. “From peasants to peasants in two generations,” my grandfather had said scathingly, not comprehending why anyone would give up the good life in Manchester to pick oranges under a scorching sun. The kids of these cousins all worked in the field of algorithms.

  The Persians and the Israelis came down on the family meal the night before the wedding like wolves on the fold. “What is a fold?” asked Ali. “I think it’s where they keep sheep, or something,” I said. In case there were any pork-free eaters in the crowd, the buffet consisted of a lot of lamb in various guises. Our families were big eaters. Both sides arrived wearing abundant gold jewellery, and they felt to each other, my mother said, like long-lost relatives, except the Persians took to the dance floor at the drop of a hat and they were all amazing dancers, whereas Jews, as everyone knows, ain’t got no rhythm and are clumsy on our feet. We took them through the order of service for the big day, and everyone agreed that Rabbi Larry had done a great job. There was going to be the traditional Persian knife dance. “Don’t cut yourself!” cried my aunt.

  We spent the night apart, me at my friend Emily’s house, Ali at our flat. My dress was Valentino, a very simple column, white, cape-back, which my uncle Phil got me at cost. No veil, just flowers in my hair. Ali bought a Paul Smith suit. Our wedding outfits hung shrouded in the wardrobe. Soon we would be the people who wore wedding clothes, then we would be married and in that future we imagined there would be no clouds, for we were beautifully suited to each other, I was the small noisy inquisitive bossy one, while Ali was quietly neurotic and thoughtful. We held each other’s self-destructive tendencies in check.

  First we had the short civil ceremony at Clissold House, in front of a small group of close family and friends. We said the words, we signed the register, then we walked hand in hand across the park to the town hall and sailed in, bridesmaids and groomsmen flowing behind us. Rabbi Larry was waiting to meet us by the canopy, looking pleasingly rabbinical. He had prepared some beautiful readings, from the Song of Solomon and the Persian poet Hafez. We were married; I had married him, the love of my life.

  But before the food was brought out, and the speeches, and the first dance, the final symbolic act of our marriage took place, the little Jewish ritual. Rabbi Larry had had a special wine glass commissioned that was inscribed with both our initials. He took a folded handkerchief from his pocket and held it up as if he were about to perform a conjuring trick, then he wrapped it around the glass and laid it on the floor. Ali trod on the glass; he smashed it. Then he let out a piercing scream, which was rounded off by a kind of ululation. “Fuck fuck fuck, oh God help me!” I looked down at his foot. A long shard had pierced the thin leather of his shoe.

  Rabbi Larry cried out, “I never saw this happen—this never happened to me before!”

  “To you?” I said. “What’s happening to you? Look at Ali, he’s going to bleed to death! Help him, someone. For Christ’s sake, will someone please do something!”

  There were five doctors in the house, who all came running. The consultation was quick. “He needs to go to hospital,” said Dr. Stephanie Weinstock, my mother’s sister’s daughter, the dermatologist specialising in psoriasis who is married to Anthony Weinstock, the orthopaedics man who specialises in ankle replacement. The Persian doctors agreed, strenuously. “He must go to the emergency room, get an ambulance, quick, quick!”

  “Come on, darling,” I said. “Take my arm.”

  “No, I’ll go with him,” said his mother, Mamak, who was wearing a striking turquoise floor-length gown with sparkly straps. “He needs a mother’s love, poor darling.”

  “She’s right,” said my mother, in a Donna Karan suit, the pair of them looking as though they were attending completely different functions. “He’ll be back in an hour, don’t worry, we’ll have the meal and hold off on the speeches till he gets back. You can’t leave the guests by themselves, it doesn’t look right.”

  I was crying. “Darling,” I said, “what have we done to you? I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ali said. “I just need a few stitches and another pair of shoes. I’ll be right back. Stay here.”

  He waited in A&E for five hours. They bandaged him up and gave him some pills. “I’m going home,” he texted me, just before eleven. “I’m exhausted. I guess you’re still holding the fort.”

  In those hours trouble had broken out in the town hall. The Persians were starting to question this barbaric ritual. Ali’s uncle Firouz wanted to know how many times this had happened. One of the Israeli cousins said she’d been to a wedding years ago when this happened—a black day, like circumcisions sometimes not working out the way they were supposed to. The men all screamed. One of my second cousins, Ari ben Oren, tried to divert them by going into a scholarly explanation for the origins of the glass-smashing ritual, explaining to them how this was supposed to symbolise the destruction of the Temple. “I thought we agreed no religion?” Fashid, Ari’s father reminded him.

  But with the mention of the Temple, the conversation slid into a discussion of Middle East politics.

  When large groups of opinionated, intelligent people, particularly men, come together, if the talk is not safely diverted to football, then unfortunately politics and specifically international relations are a topic on which everyone has a heated opinion.

  Gradually the wedding party broke down into warring factions. Somehow they had got on to the Iraq war; I wasn’t following the arguments but voices were raised. I tried to go round to everyone with my glassy smile and apologise for the delay in Ali’s return. Some hysteric on his side of the family wondered if his condition had not somehow taken a turn for the worse: maybe he had blood poisoning, maybe his foot had to be amputated. She had heard of such a case. Rabbi Larry had disappeared. The wedding was in a state of suspended animation. The food was eaten, but no speeches, no first dance, or anyone dancing.

  When I got home Ali’s mother was lying on what was suppose
d to be our marital bed, holding his hand while he slept. His foot was heavily bandaged.

  “How is he?”

  “It was a terrible time. The doctors were no good, in my opinion.”

  I stood there in my wedding dress.

  “Best if I spend the night here,” she said. “My poor baby needs me.”

  “But I’m his wife.”

  She shrugged. And under her breath she said something that sounded like, “We’ll see.”

  There is a saying that when a wedding is perfect, nothing that follows can match it. Everything is a let-down after that occasion which you put all your work and planning into, never thinking of the long years of married life that will follow the marriage itself, the wailing kids, the tight finances, the joys and sorrows of being a lifelong couple resisting all the extracurricular temptations. Better for a wedding to go a little wrong; better, even, for it to be a disaster, for it foreshadows all the times that are to come. Marriage is not a romantic fantasy, it’s hard work.

  This is what my mother told me the following day, and yet Ali and I have been divorced now two years, which is nineteen months longer than we were married.

  A friend of mine went to another wedding presided over by Rabbi Larry. “The bride was locked in the toilet and couldn’t get out,” she said. “The whole thing was held up an hour while they found a janitor to release her.”

  Say what you like, in my opinion Rabbi Larry is a fucking jinx.

  THE SELF-SEEDING SYCAMORE

  LIONEL SHRIVER

  JEANNETTE HAD NO IDEA that plants could engender so much hatred.

  For years, she’d left the garden to Wyndham. Weekends outdoors provided an antidote to the windowless stasis of his lab. Though their plot was sizable only by London standards, she’d humoured him. (Whatever was there to do? A little watering during dry spells, a ten-minute run of the hand mower round the lawn.) Having begrudged the dear man neither his solitude nor his superfluous pottering, she treasured snapshots of her husband in muddied khaki trousers, bent over a bed, doing heaven-knew-what with a characteristically intent expression. Now, of course, she knew exactly what he’d been doing. How much he’d spared her.