They grind and kiss and fondle one another in the living room for a few overheated minutes and then she gently pushes him away. –We don’t know each other well enough for this, she says.
B feels apish hulking about in her living room with his hard-on like a teenager’s advertising its intrusive presence, so he makes a nervous joke. –I thought we were getting acquainted pretty well there for awhile, he says. His arms hang awkwardly at his sides like uninvited guests.
–Do you still want to take a nap? she asks him. By this time she has created some distance between them, turning on an art deco lamp in a dark corner. I can put you up on the couch in my study.
What B wants to do is fuck—it is the only thing he has on his mind—and he struggles in vain to conceive of some other alternative. —I think I should go home now, he says.
–Oh, please! she says. Don’t you think we ought to talk about what happened?
–Whatever happened, he says, working to disguise the annoyance he feels, common sense prevailed.
–You don’t mean that, she says. At least say what you mean. You’re angry at me for rejecting you. Admit that that’s what you feel.
–Tamara, I don’t know what I feel, B says. I want to go home and think about what I feel. Inertia holds him in place though he has thought about moving toward the door, which is only a few steps behind him.
–If I agreed to have sex with you, she says, then you’d stay? Is that what this is about?
This is a version of a nightmare B has had before. He watches himself studying the collection of song books in her bookcase as if some title or other might explain something. “The Dying Cowboy’s Lament” holds his attention. –Stop jerking me around, he says, suddenly furious with her. I wouldn’t have touched you if you hadn’t come on to me first.
–I don’t know where you’re coming from, she says, lip quivering.
Eventually, he gets out the door, feeling twice mugged.
He promises he will call her as he makes his escape—that standard unworthy line—compounding his lies.
As he unlocks his car and eases himself into the driver’s seat, he notices his father carrying a brown bag from the liquor store trudging toward him, eyes inward, lost in some private dialogue. B ducks down in his seat and waits for his father to pass, reasonably sure he has not been noticed.
Just as his father’s shadow slides by, he hears his name being called, a woman’s voice floating his name in the air, and B notices in his side-view mirror, Tamara coming up right behind his father, waving in B’s direction as if he were a taxi she was hoping to claim. His father stops in his tracks and turns to press his face to B’s window, discovering (or so B allows himself to imagine) a familiar figure hunched behind the wheel of the parked car, the ungrateful dissembler he sometimes acknowledges as his son.
B and his father walk over together to Tamara’s place and B rings the bell.
–This is my father, Hudson, he says when she opens the door.
–He wants to apologize for not keeping his appointment last week, his father says. I want to tell you he does the same thing with me so you don’t have to take it personally.
–It’s a pleasure to meet you, Tamara.
–The pleasure’s all mine, she says. I heard you were a wonderful painter, Hudson.
–Tamara, you’ll have to come up to my studio one of these days and make your own judgments, his father says. I’ll tell you this much, if it had been me, I would have kept my appointment to see you.
–I believe that, she says. Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine?
As they talk, B feels himself growing dimmer, fading by imperceptible degrees. At some point, after his father follows Tamara into her small apartment for a glass of white wine, he disappears, sucked up into the black hole of his own space.
IX. INTIMACY
1.
The invitation came by phone on a holdover winter morning in late March and caught B musing on the opening phrase of a poem. Perhaps because the offer seemed so improbable, or perhaps merely because he was distracted, he accepted without hesitation.
The Femmes Club, an organization of previously married women, was looking for a speaker on the topic: —After Marriage, What? said his caller, a throaty-voiced woman (he assumed it was a woman though couldn’t be sure), and he had been brought to the Club’s attention (he couldn’t imagine from what source) as a controversial authority on the subject.
–I’m flattered that you thought of me, B said, his response on automatic pilot.
–Well, to be honest, said his caller, you were not our first choice, but when our first choice became unavailable you were the unanimous selection to replace her. And now that I hear your voice I think we’ve got our hands on absolutely the right person.
–I’m curious to know where you got my name, he said, wondering if a new career as occasional speaker might be opening up to him.
–I’m sorry I don’t have my notes in front of me, she said.
He wrote down the pertinent information on the back of an envelope—the time, the place, the occasion, the duration of his performance (60 minutes including Q & A), and put it down in a prominent place on his dresser top among the other scraps of paper with important notations. He imagined he had a lot to say on the subject—he had been married three times, hadn’t he?—but when he sat down in front of his computer to knock out a draft or assemble some notes, his collected wisdom seemed to exhaust itself in half a page.
He blamed his difficulties on the broadness and ambiguity of the topic. What was meant, after all, by “after marriage”? Was it divorce, which had been his original idea, or the dailiness of the marriage itself?
He woke in the middle of the night with the idea of interviewing each of his former wives on what it was like to have been married to him. It would be a way of positioning himself in the talk from the vantage of a person who had gone through the ordeal with him. The idea lost some of its luster in the morning when he remembered that one of his former wives was out of the country and another, still unforgiving, was not likely to give him the time of day.
After some anxious deliberation, he did call G, his most recent ex.
–I’m curious, he said, after asking how she was and not waiting for an answer, what was it like to be married to me.
–Pure hell, she said, laughing.
–You don’t really mean that, do you? I know the last year was difficult. What was it like before things went bad?
–The only thing I remember is the last few months and how much I hated you then.
–You don’t remember the early years of our marriage being a happy time? We did live together for sixteen years.
–Fifteen years, eight months and three days, she said.
–Did you feel there was a tug of wills between us from the very beginning?
–As a matter of fact, yes. Though we did get by that after awhile.
–We did, didn’t we? How did we manage to do that?
–It’s not something I’ve thought about, she said. This is beginning to seem like one of those unsolicited calls you get that pretends to be a survey and then at the end they try to sell you something.
–Come on, he said. What can I possibly be selling? I have nothing to sell.
–It took me 15 years to find that out, she said. He refused to take the bait.
–I’ve been asked to give a talk on marriage and its aftermath, he said, and I would like to present your side of things as a counterbalance to mine.
–So you do have an ulterior motive for this call, she said. You want me to give you material for your talk. I don’t think that’s appropriate, do you? You can say, on the authority of one of your former wives, that when it mattered you were not capable of real intimacy, and leave it at that.
–And you were, I suppose? he said, surprised at the belligerence in his voice.
–Oh fuck off, she said.
–I love you too, he said.
And
she hung up, not right away, but after a beat or two of indecision. He had the sense, lying down—their conversation had exhausted him—that he had heard whatever it was she had decided not to say.
She was another man’s wife, that’s all he remembers about their first meeting, not the place or time of day or how attractive she looked or what words they exchanged. He was teaching at a large Midwestern university then, was working on a book of poems. When his officemate was away, she, who he would one day marry, sat, uninvited, at the other desk in his office and read or watched him silently, sphinxlike in her silence. He recognized her somnambulistic presence as a kind of summoning, though he didn’t have time to pay attention. Her sadness, if that’s what it was, fed into his. She was like some stray cat who had adopted him.
At first her relentless presence burdened him. She had come to him to be looked after, which was his role with women (she knew that right away), but he didn’t want the job or didn’t want it quite enough to give up whatever else he was tending—his book, his courses, his own unhappy marriage.
If she was not in the room with him, she was always somehow there on the periphery of his vision. He could tell she was annoyed that he paid so little attention to her, but she was not his responsibility even though she acted as if there was some unspecified pact between them.
It gets so, that when she is not there, those days she does not show up, he suffers the rebuke implied by her absence.
On the day of JFK’s assassination, she calls him at home for the first time, inviting him to a mourners party at some graduate student’s pad. She is crying when she makes the call and pleads with him to come. He says he will try to make it, which she doesn’t accept.
–I need you to come, she says.
Does he tell his wife (he doesn’t remember exactly) where he’s going when he leaves the house that night? Perhaps he asks his wife to come with him and she says to go without her, which is what he ends up doing whichever way it is. Not long after he arrives at the party (he remembers finishing two-thirds of a Rolling Rock and taking the bottle with him), they leave together in his car. He thinks he is driving her home while she appears to believe (she has been drinking steadily for several hours) that they are going off somewhere on an adventure. When he pulls up in front of her house, she rages at him. He may have brought her home but she’s not leaving the car, she says, insisting that he take her somewhere else. When he turns off the ignition she punches him in the side with such ferocity that he feels the pain through his heavy jacket as sharply as if he’d been stabbed. They sit silently together for an extended period of time, her head on his shoulder. Eventually she leaves the car and walks a crooked line toward her door. She rings the bell and when no one comes she takes a key from her coat pocket and lets herself in.
This ugly misadventure is the most memorable night of their courtship.
2.
B arrived at the Fort Hamilton Armory in Brooklyn for his presentation almost a half hour late, having gotten the time wrong (he had actually sat in the car for 20 minutes, thinking himself early). An impressive crowd of mostly middle-aged women, an array of large purses in their laps, awaited him, almost every seat in the basement auditorium filled. A surly buzz greeted his belated arrival.
The president of the Femmes Club, an imposingly tall woman (the one with the throaty voice who spoke to him on the phone), introduced him to the crowd by reading the bio from the jacket of one of his books, a novel of some 16 years back entitled “A Three-Sided Marriage,” and then added with a small rhetorical flourish, –It’s been a longstanding policy of our club to bring in speakers of widely divergent and provocative points of view and in this case I believe we have someone with the capacity to get a rise out of even the most even-tempered among us. As is also our policy, you will have opportunity to challenge the speaker with your usually thoughtful and hard-hitting questions after his address. I wish to remind you again that anyone throwing objects from the audience will be asked to leave.
B didn’t have to take a reading of the faces in the auditorium to know that he was in hostile territory. He hesitated before beginning, waited for a jolt of inspiration, not daring to look at the inappropriate notes he had written for himself on the coffee-stained cards he had placed on the podium.
–You have me at a disadvantage, he started. I have never given a talk or even a reading in front of a group as large and informed as... (he has momentarily forgotten the name of the club) yours. My expertise on the subject you’ve assigned me is circumstantial and, I would guess from the standpoint of an outsider, unworthy. I have collaborated with three different women on three failed marriages. I suppose I could try to tell you what went wrong in each case, though my memory of telltale incidents is vague on all but the most recent of my failed liaisons. What is it that Tolstoy says—Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer—at the opening of his novel, Anna Karenina, which has also been made into several movies? “Happy families are all alike. Each unhappy family is different in its own way.” I quote from unreliable memory. I think that marriages fail because we hold too high an expectation for them. Or that we hold unrealistic romanticized views of our partners when we marry them. And then when disillusion settles in on both sides, as it will, as it must, we feel tricked and deceived, one of us does or both, which makes us, as I don’t have to tell you, angry and unhappy. Angry and unhappy leads to bad behavior, leads to going outside the marriage to get (and I’m not speaking only about sex but mostly) what we’re not getting at home. Affection, sex, love, companionship. Intimacy. A sense of being desirable. The inability to adjust to the breakdown of illusion and the loss of passion is what brings marriages to grief and irreparable disrepair or allows them to survive in pained, unhappy ways. And then, at least in my case, we start all over again and the pattern reasserts itself. In answer to the question: After Marriage, What?, I would say 1. Disappointment 2. Anger 3. Children 4. Betrayal and 5. Divorce, though not necessarily in that order. What keeps us reading on is that the particulars tend to be different with each new partnership.
He has said all of the above almost without stopping to breathe and now he collects himself and looks out at the audience. They seem less antagonistic than before, though perhaps that is because several have nodded off and some others, whose eyes are open, have glazed looks.
–Maybe I should have started by telling you something about myself, he continues. I confess when I arrived here I had no idea how to approach the topic. The reason that many of my novels present alternate scenarios to the same event is not because I am a experimental writer, whatever that is, but because I tend to believe that there are always other possibilities in a narrative or a life that might be explored. For example instead of regaling you with my ideas about marriage—the wisdom gained from unhappy experience—I might have described for you some of my adventures in the marriage trade and let you draw your own conclusions. I matured late and my social skills as a teenager with the opposite sex ran the gamut from pathetic to embarrassing. In fact, I was technically a virgin until I was almost 19 and not for want of trying. I was in love with my first girlfriend but we broke up after going together in college for three years, which I’ve regretted to this day. My first marriage lasted nine months, at which point my child bride went home to her mother and never returned. I had an interlude in the army between my first wife and my second, who I met on leave after basic training. A noisy affair with the woman who would become my third wife was instrumental in wrecking my second marriage, which is to say I left wife 2 for wife 3. You have every reason to wonder, as I do sometimes myself, why I expected to be happier with wife 3 than I had been with wife 2. Well, for one, I had already lived with wife 2 for seven plus years and we had by that time thoroughly trashed what had once been an intimate friendship, avoiding each other programatically, rarely talking, almost never making love. Also, I barely knew wife 3, beyond our illicit once-a-week sexual encounters, so getting together with her represented a fresh start, a chance to prove I c
ould make a good life with another person. Wife 2 already knew all my faults and then some, and she was a woman with small tolerance for imperfection. Wife 3, before we were married at least, tended to see me in the most generous light, which gave me renewed sense of pleasure in myself. So what else could I do but divorce wife 2 and move in with the woman whose love I shared, whose love sustained me. I mean, almost anyone in my situation who had an open mind would have done the same. And still, I confess this openly, I was and I am opposed to divorce, I was and I am opposed to adultery, I believed and believe in the sanctity and permanence of marriage. Does that make any sense? I was in love with wife 3, who aside from being a little crazy, seemed almost perfect to me. Love was my excuse for moving on. A loveless marriage is no marriage at all, I told myself. I had to take on faith that there was a time in the distant past, long gone and long forgotten, when I loved wife 2, and even as I acknowledged the probability, I didn’t believe it, couldn’t. Wife 3 was the woman I was meant to spend the rest of my life alongside so in a sense you see it was my first real marriage. You see I had to go through the disappointment and grief of two marriages that didn’t count to get to the one I was meant to have. I don’t believe I thought consciously about my choices in the terms I just offered you, but it stands to reason that those were my reasons. Hey, I was following the dictates of my heart. How could anyone find fault with that? So after 16 years when my third wife dumped me for another, the failure of this marriage was all the more bitter. I had to reevalue my sense of self. If I was this monogamous person, which was how I continued to see myself, how come I had been married and divorced three times by the time I was 47? Actually, I thought my third marriage had been going fairly well until my wife told me she preferred someone else. I could understand that in the abstract. Hadn’t I left wife 2 because I also preferred someone else? So I took wife 3’s disaffection as a kind of poetic justice. I had behaved badly to wife 2 so I got paid back in kind by wife 3. Fair enough. Still I was heartbroken for a few years, even after I moved in with another woman and another woman after that, old patterns reasserting themselves in accelerated time. My post-marital liaisons were merely a variation on the themes already deconstructed so there is no need to describe them for you here. Suffice to say, I am living alone these days, though still dating the last of the women I lived with briefly, still playing the same old game. V and I are probably better friends since we stopped living together, which is another issue that might be explored. A certain residual bitterness remains, which flames out disconcertingly from time to time. We both of us rage over the failure of our once promising relationship, and point fingers and mourn our losses.
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