The Story of a Marriage

by Geir Gulliksen

  And Timmy’s adult hands, strong, with short nails. She stroked the little girl’s cheek and asked her to open very wide. And she did. My daughter opened her mouth, a plastic dog in her hands, she felt completely safe, ready to do anything she was asked, and Timmy leaned forward and stared into that little gaping mouth. Her tonsils were swollen, that was obvious. There was medicine for that, and Timmy could write a prescription. Or perhaps she couldn’t, not formally, it would be another two years before she was fully qualified. But for me it felt as though she took charge of my child, and simultaneously took charge of me. She’d made us both feel safe. She was secure in herself and in the world, and I felt secure in her presence.

  Such encounters, fleeting and completely open, happen all the time. All of us meet people we could fall in love with, everywhere and anywhere. Quite unexpectedly you look into the face of someone who looks earnestly and searchingly back at you. A person who has something you’d like to possess, an attitude, confidence, playfulness. It rarely comes to anything; perhaps you’re already in a relationship, and he or she is also in a relationship, and you both move on. Most of these encounters are forgotten because they lead to nothing. You pass someone you might have married as you board the bus, your glances meet, but you never see each other again. And as you get off the bus you pass another person with whom you could also have lived quite happily. One of you gives a tentative smile, the other smiles back, but it’s too late. Everywhere there are people who might have found each other, but don’t. If all of these people reached out to each other, few marriages would last more than a day, a week or a month—or perhaps a couple of years if they were helplessly happy. Incidentally, there is probably always something helpless about happiness, in devoting oneself to another.

  But she was in a relationship already. And it was obvious, she thought, that I was too, I was unlikely to be alone with such a young child, few men are. We shook hands, somewhat formally, and looked into each other’s eyes, smiling lightly, and for just a fraction longer than necessary. Then I left with my daughter in my arms, but as we reached the corridor, my eye caught hers again. She hadn’t counted on that, it did something to her, I seemed so safe, warm and vibrantly alive to her, she didn’t know that she was the cause of this security, warmth and vibrancy, she didn’t recognize her own confidence when it was reflected so strongly back to her.

  A closeness, a calm, a potential tenderness.

  She liked to be near me because I liked to be near her. She watched as I carefully shut the door of the office where she sat. She heard our voices out in the corridor. The baby-voice was suddenly loud and clear, liberated from all shyness. She heard my daughter say that the lady was very kind, and she heard the young father’s self-assured voice answer. He was, she understood, in agreement.

  That was all, it lasted no longer. My daughter was her very first patient. Later, neither of us could remember whether my own GP was present, she must have been, but in our story of that first meeting nobody else is present apart from my child. A few minutes’ sympathetic and friendly exchange. Under normal circumstances we’d have forgotten each other afterward. Timmy was still a student, so was I, and in addition I was, or rather wanted to be, a writer. I had ambitions to be a journalist, somebody who wrote in-depth articles on a wide variety of topics. Most of all I wanted be a science journalist, so I regularly followed lectures outside my own discipline. That was how we met again. We attended the same lecture series, probably on social medicine, it was a main area of interest for her. And I was interested in most things, so it seemed, and she recognized me instantly.

  Or, not quite. She recognized me, but couldn’t remember where from. I was looking at everyone, I turned unabashed to all and sundry, as if everyone held secrets into which I longed to be initiated, as though everyone apart from me knew how life should be lived. I had one of those faces, wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, always alert and interested. She walked past me during a break and said hi, and I said hi back, rather vaguely, since I couldn’t place her either. But I smiled and she saw I looked pleased, as though I associated her with something nice. Suddenly she remembered where she knew me from, and in that instant I remembered too, and we immediately started talking.

  It was a long conversation that lasted nearly twenty years. In the beginning I used to stand and wait for her before or after lectures. I was the man she had entered into conversation with, the man with the crumpled shirts, the man with a worn-out jacket with the seams torn at the cuffs and threads dangling over his hands. A certain unkempt look that appealed to her perhaps. But I was also a person who expressed interest in her and in what she knew, in what she was studying. I’d listen as she explained the world for herself and for me. She recognized my smile and scrawny shoulders from far away, head lifted, neck stretched long, afraid of missing anything. I’d wait for her, she’d walk over to me and we’d leave together.

  We started arranging to meet. We took long walks, wandered the streets. I was married, I had a small child, and yet I wanted to spend all my time with Timmy. I frequently had the pushchair, and it was on one of these days that she first sang to my daughter. A lullaby she’d learned from her father, about a little boy who sat on a mountaintop and played a horn, a ram’s horn. After we moved in together she always sang it for my daughter, and later she sang it for our two sons, up through the years, until suddenly she no longer sang it, at least not that I heard.

  She told me about her background, where she came from, what kind of child she’d been. I did the same. I talked about trees and birds, talked about meaning, about life, and how I wanted life to be. She told me about her studies. We talked about the kind of food we liked to make, shared our thoughts on politics and sex and how children should be brought up. We were driven, purposeful, something inside us knew what we both wanted with each other long before we acknowledged it ourselves. My daughter started to recognize her.

  One morning we were out together; she had a break from lectures, I was looking after my daughter. I was pushing the buggy and she was walking beside me while my daughter slept. We sat on a bench. I turned to her. She knew what I would say before I said it. She had known it would come, while not really knowing, but she had no doubt as soon as I began.

  —Imagine if the two of us could be friends.

  —We can, we already are.

  —I mean very good friends.

  —That’s what I mean too.

  Something in my face altered, I moved too close and she had to look away, but I said:

  —I mean more than friends. I’m in love with you.

  * * *

  —

  She was in her mid-twenties, I was a little over thirty, our lives were just beginning. She was about to qualify as a doctor, I had recently started out as a journalist, freelancing for some weekly newspapers, hoping for something permanent. We both came from families in which nobody had ever gone on to higher education. Our families had been made up of smallholders and fishermen, sailors and artisans, lowly office workers and unskilled factory laborers. She and I were the products of a rise in living standards for all, and we went off to university with a blissfully unaware sense of entitlement, which only decades of prosperity in Norway had made possible. But early in our schooldays we had embarked on another education, a training for careers in love, courtship, cohabitation, the devotion to another that would supposedly make it possible to hold out against all else. She started finding herself boyfriends at thirteen, I began with girls a bit later. By the time we met we had each had a series of partners and we had both lived with people, I’d even had a child and got married. Now, these relationships were revealed to us as nothing but a preliminary exercise for this unique moment. We had, at long last, found each other. We reached out to each other, we put our arms around each other, our faces drew close, we opened our mouths, and kissed. I stuck my tongue in her mouth, she was taken aback, it happened so suddenly, but then she met my tongu
e with hers. There followed uninterrupted kissing with tongues for a full minute or more, then we pulled our faces apart and stared at each other with fresh eyes. We were finally an “us.”

  She thinks she can recall our voices, they must have been gentle, open. Voices reflect each other’s pitch, and we talked on together, very softly, softer than we’d talk to anyone else. It sounded warm and slightly childlike, light and intimate. We found a tone and volume which we made our own, which we shared with nobody else. We sat on that bench for a long time, kissing and embracing. She felt my hands under her clothes. I was moving fast, she’d not experienced that before, already after that first kiss I was stroking her stomach, touching her bare skin.

  My daughter woke up. She was lying in her buggy with a blanket over the hood to keep out the light. Now she pulled it down, and lay there looking at us. Her gaze as open and assured as only a child’s can be. She was two years old, with a pale, round, sleepy face; she sat up and said:

  —What are you doing, Daddy?

  Timmy remembers that now, it comes to her one evening when she’s out for a walk, she’s not thought of it for years, but suddenly she recalls the two-year-old’s voice, breathy and crackly with sleep. That little voice that burst so softly, so innocently in on the life we had already started to build together.

  * * *

  —

  So we became a couple. I went home, ended it with the child’s mother, the woman I’d married just a couple of years earlier. She, the mother of my child, soon to be the woman-I-was-once-married-to. She’d been such a young mother, and I’d called her my Sweetgrass, though later I called her Sad Honeydew, and then she became Blind Thistle. But she never knew of these other names, I never said them aloud. Though she must have noticed the shift. One day there were three, me and her and our baby, there was never meant to be anyone else, another child perhaps, that might have come—would have come if we’d stayed together. She was a musician, played the guitar and sang, wrote her own songs. She’d started to make a living from it, just about. A time would come when she’d make a reasonably decent living from it, but I was out of her life by then. Later still, she began teaching, though by then she’d given up playing long ago. And our daughter had finally grown up, and was no longer dragged between two parents who didn’t speak to each other.

  It was a Thursday in May. Something caused my Sweetgrass to change for me into Sad Honeydew and eventually into Blind Thistle. She was sitting there with her guitar, she could spend the whole day playing a single chord, or so it seemed. When I came in, she looked up at me with one eye shut, as she always did, a problem in one of her pupils caused her to squint at the world one-eyed, as though the light were too strong. All her life she had prepared herself for bad news, for personal catastrophe, but not from me. I was the man who would always be there, holding out with her, the man who would make it possible for her to get up in the morning, to get dressed and brush her hair and apply an uneven line of lipstick before going out. I was the father of her child. The father of a miracle which made me even more precious to her than before. It was the three of us now. We would take care of our child and of each other whenever the world started to rock. Which the world frequently did, for us both, for no apparent reason.

  But now I came home with our child in my arms saying that I no longer wanted to be with her. It didn’t make sense. Surely I couldn’t stand there with our child in my arms and say it was over. It couldn’t be over, we were bound together through living flesh. And yet I came home to her and said I have to talk to you, in a voice that boded death and catastrophe.

  Or did I? Was that just how Timmy imagined it all later—the woman who was my new girlfriend before I’d even finished with the previous one? After the kiss, Timmy and I met every day. We took walks and sat on benches. One day we sat in the park, talking about the things new lovers talk about: trees, childhood, what to do for sensitive skin, movies, and the origins of language. We were tentative and unsure, since we didn’t know each other, though we had decided that we knew each other better than anyone else ever could; besides, our bodies were drawn to each other, and thus we achieved a closeness which seemed to eclipse all else. Then my daughter woke up and I headed slowly home with her, Timmy accompanying me part of the way. And then by some grotesque coincidence the woman to whom I was still married ran into us there in the street. I was pushing the buggy, our child’s pale, trusting face gazing up at me, at the two of us, at the trees and the houses and sky. And there right beside me was Timmy, to whom I’d now promised myself, holding my arm, just as the child’s mother had done only days before. She watched us walking together with the pushchair, talking and laughing. We didn’t notice her before she came running toward us, took the buggy and screamed at me.

  Look now, at these two who have fallen so suddenly and helplessly in love. A very young woman and a very young father. Look at the young mother who is in the midst of being abandoned by her young husband, watch how she grabs the buggy and runs off with it. She has suffered the grossest betrayal, and now she has nothing left but her child. She will not let go of that. The child lies there in its buggy, aware of nothing.

  That was the start of the divorce which Timmy heard about only through me. The angry attempts at conversation between two people who had been lovers but who would be lovers no longer. We were meant to tear ourselves free from each other now, each obliged to describe our pain to the other, to discuss the betrayal and disappointment, and the reasons for that betrayal and disappointment, when in truth neither of us had any idea what those reasons were.

  The abandoned person becomes helplessly bound to the person who abandons. She hasn’t chosen this. She screams at me, berates me, cries silent, bitter tears. She can’t sleep, can’t sit still. She thinks she wants to die. Or rather, she wants to live, but only together with me. She rings my new girlfriend, and yells at her down the phone. She rings everybody she knows, talks to everybody, day and night, tries to talk her way to some understanding of what’s happened, of how everything could change so abruptly and without warning. She gets no help from me. I don’t want to talk, I don’t dare to, can’t bear to. I’ve made my decision, all I want is to get away from the life that I’ve lived, the life I’ve suddenly realized I couldn’t hold out with. I don’t think I need to explain myself. I’ve already promised myself to another, and this newfound love, look, how it erases everything else. Or nearly everything, not my child, though I renounce the possibility of seeing her every day. I tell everybody, myself included, that there is no other solution. I choose this new love, and with that I walk away from everything that has been.

  Anybody who wants to can find reasons as to why a young married couple might not manage to stay together. We were too different or too alike. We were too close or not close enough. Too young to know ourselves or each other. We were oversensitive, in our different ways, and insensitive to each other’s sensitivities. The woman whom I had secretly begun to call Blind Thistle talks to everybody she knows, and they all try to help her by explaining how it could happen. But I’m the only one placed to give her any explanation, and I don’t know what to say. I’ve just met someone else, and now I’d rather have her, the other.

  It was that easy and that sudden, as a thin-worn rope that snaps. But, of course, there wasn’t any rope, nor was it even worn out. There must have been a tenderness between us, intimacy, trust. There must have been a loving union of two bodies. Loyalty and the promise of a shared future. And yet it was over in a flash, and then it was as though our intimacy and trust, this loving union, had never existed at all. For how can we conceive a loving union that doesn’t last? Can there ever have been a true union, if it doesn’t last?

  One day, she—the woman who had been so thoughtlessly betrayed—rang me and said:

  —I just want to say one thing.

  —Surely there’s nothing more to be said.

  —Oh yes. There’s more to
say than you can imagine. But you don’t want to listen, and I’ve given up. So I’ll just say one last thing, and it’s this: I hope you’ll experience this yourself one day. I hope with all my heart that you’ll be left in the same way as you’ve left me.

  * * *

  —

  That was the last thing she said. Not the last, of course, but the last that would reverberate between her and me. Years later I could still recall those words and the voice that delivered them, aggressive, tormented, bewildered, a mix of trembling breath and crackling fury, and I could still hear her gasp, gathering whatever air she could muster to launch carefully judged volleys of sound to strike me down. A sort of threat, I believed, a promise she could not fulfill herself, but which she hoped another would carry through. And I did experience it, I was abandoned, I lost the only person I trusted, just as she had done. I too would stand there and be that person who was no longer wanted. That was what she wished for me, and it wasn’t hard to understand why, not even for me.