The Story of a Marriage

by Geir Gulliksen

  —I know you love me,

  and then I let her go, almost pushing her away, so as to look into her face, I suppose. And she couldn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say. She looked back at me, then nodded, and put on a bright smile. It was all she had to offer me. And then she left. I stood holding the door so she couldn’t close it behind her. But she walked as fast as she could, she did not want to turn and look at me.

  * * *

  —

  She thinks about it, then thinks about it no more. She gets up and goes to the window, it is dark outside, she sees her own face reflected in the glass. She remembers one evening toward the end of what had once been our life together, just before we ceased to know each other. She had heard a noise coming from the bathroom, she opened the door and saw me leaning over the sink crying. I gazed up at myself in the mirror. It looked, she remembers, as though my face had been torn apart, she stood a moment and watched me, the tears ran, snot ran, spittle ran, I gasped gurgled wailed and wept like a child, she thought, but as I stood there I stared into my own eyes. She recalls that moment, she sits and thinks it over for an instant, then gets up and goes out of the room, and remembers it no more.

  10

  A conversation was to take place in the cold light of day, in an office, or in the waiting room outside an office, we sat side by side waiting to go in, we couldn’t get up and leave, so we could finally talk.

  —What happened to us, do you understand it?

  —One day you suddenly pulled away from me, you wouldn’t touch me, couldn’t talk. It was like some awful illness, this love of yours, it came so suddenly and turned everything upside down.

  —For me it was as though I was suddenly well. And I hadn’t even known I was sick, because I liked my life with you. I thought I was happy, if that word can still be used. But shortly after I met him, I turned and looked again at what had been my life.

  —And the thing that was missing was him?

  —I don’t have to answer that.

  —I remember one night you were standing at the window smiling to yourself, and I asked what you were smiling about. I knew, but I had to ask anyway. You said you were just thinking. You didn’t want to tell me more, but continued to smile, somehow secretively. You probably wanted to show me that something wonderful had happened to you. And the wonderful thing was that you were freeing yourself from me.

  —I don’t remember that.

  —You wanted to show me how in love you were.

  —You were the closest person to tell.

  —A little later your phone rang. You went into the bathroom to take it. I heard your voice, heard you talking to him in there, for just over an hour.

  —I was ruthless with you.

  —Yes.

  —It was inevitable.

  —I’m glad you used that word.

  —What? You mean ruthless?

  —Yes, it helps me to hear you say it.

  —I understand. But.

  —But?

  —But you know…

  —What? Oh yes, you’re thinking that it’s not really you saying these things.

  —Well, it isn’t. You’re putting words in my mouth. You’re imagining that I’m sitting here talking to you. You just make me say what you want.

  —Not what I want, I’ve tried that, it doesn’t work. I can’t get you to say anything other than what I think you would have said if you were really here. But it helps to imagine it. To hear you say it.

  —So what is it that you wish I would say?

  —That I’m not able to make you say?

  —Yes.

  —Sorry perhaps.

  —Isn’t sorry too easy, Jon? And what should I really apologize for?

  —For letting it happen? And for not knowing enough about yourself to see what you were doing, together with him, so that it looked as though you had no choice in the end.

  —In the end, I had no choice.

  —Exactly. And I wish you could apologize for that, Timmy.

  —Isn’t there something you’re forgetting?

  —You mean my part in everything that happened? You mean I should have let you be, I should have put up with you suddenly being hopelessly and madly in love? Yes, I should have. I’d prepared myself for something like that to happen, you and I had both prepared ourselves for years, even though we didn’t realize it, so I should have held out and waited for it to pass. It might have taken a long time, a year, several years perhaps, before this infatuation released you. But I ought to have held out. We’d have been the kind of couple who each live their separate lives. Lots of people do, despite everything. You’d have been at home less, you’d have traveled more frequently and further away. He’d have come to pick you up and given you lifts home. The neighbors would have got used to seeing his car. The kids would have got to know about him. Everyone would have guessed what was going on, although few would have thought it through to its conclusion. And we’d have stopped talking about it. It would have been a tacit agreement between us. I wouldn’t have expected so much from you. We’d have slept with each other less often. We’d have stopped kissing, apart from when something extraordinary happened. Little kisses, like a friendly pat on the shoulder. We’d have lived our own lives, with different interests and different friends. I’d probably have gone a bit to seed, but many men do. I’d have worn my old summer jacket too late into the autumn, and my winter jacket too late into the spring. I’d have overeaten, worn downtrodden shoes, waited too long for a haircut and taken less care of myself. My willful self-neglect would lose its charm. And then I’d have started taking more exercise, like you, to compensate for the humiliation. Or perhaps I wouldn’t even see it as a humiliation. Love is about power, and power relations shift continually, even between two people living together. Sooner or later I would also have fallen in love, an easy, mild, non-committal love, to restore the balance. No doubt I’d have met someone at a writers’ workshop. Somebody with short hair and dainty glasses, who smelled of expensive moisturizer and wore a short, gray cashmere golfing cardigan. One of those deliciously soft cardigans! Whenever she stretched, the little cardigan would have ridden up, exposing her pale naked midriff. And whenever I put my arms around her, she’d have nestled against me devotedly, as I never knew you to. I could have lived like that, I could have been her reliable, friendly lover. An adult, sensible relationship, a kind of simple happiness, seen from outside. Although I wouldn’t have let it go that far, I’d have been too ambivalent, I would have gradually extricated myself. I’d never tell you about her, we’d no longer share things like that. And if you’d stayed together with Gloveman, sooner or later you’d have come home after a row with him. And I’d have been there, as always. I’d have noticed there was something about you, and hopefully I’d have understood that you needed space. You would have taken a bath, eaten chocolate, unusual for you. Then you might have sat down beside me, without saying a word, and I’d have held you, also without a word. You might have fallen asleep perhaps, with your head on my shoulder, and then woken up not knowing which of our two shoulders you were resting on. And sooner or later I’d have felt your hand on me again, that warm touch on my neck as we were driving. Or on my forearm, when you wanted to hold me back to tell me something. I’d still have thought about what that hand had been used for, all those times you were with him and not me. But perhaps you would start to miss what you and I had together, how we used to flirt with each other through other people, how we believed that we’d create another kind of life. Or was I the only one who believed it, that we could create something that nobody else had come near? It was all much simpler and more pragmatic for you. But still. If I’d not been so fearful, so desperate and so agitated, if I’d just let you do what you wanted with him for one or two or three years, then you would doubtless have come back and become the person you were before, with me, don’t you think? And wo
uldn’t we then have lived with a more mature kind of love, a more moderate and realistic tenderness? Our confidence, once shattered, could be gradually rebuilt. And our faces, ravaged by life, would gradually look more worn, softer and kinder than before. I see our faces turning to each other with a strange kind of resignation, a more composed and gentle curiosity. Don’t you think? And couldn’t this life have been stronger than the first we tried? Mightn’t that have been a possible life for the two of us? Why don’t you answer?

  11

  Some weeks afterward something happened to me. Something took form in the dark, in my body, as I slept. Our older son was the only one who noticed it, and he told nobody. Timmy and I had recently left each other, that was how we put it, we each lived in the house every other week now, and this was my week with the kids. I was home, it was evening, my youngest boy was asleep, and the eldest was in his room at the computer. He was playing The Sims, but he had his door open, unusually, because he wanted to keep an eye on me.

  He sat watching me clear the fridge, throwing out old food. I let any food stay that I had bought myself. And I didn’t remove any food Timmy had recently bought. But anything we’d bought together when we were still a couple, still married, I took off the shelves and threw away. Pots of mustard and tubes of Kalles Kaviar, jars of olives and anchovies, taco sauce and mango chutney, a greasy jar of sun-dried tomatoes, cloudy capers, dehydrated jam, a moldy tub of low-fat sour cream, cans of beer and a wrinkly salami sausage, shrunken lemons and the corpse of a lettuce that was brown at the edges. I also threw away an unopened jar of honey, several tubes of mayonnaise, untouched tins of tuna and a whole pack of hot-smoked salmon. I threw away everything that had been there from before. I eradicated our old life. I filled one rubbish bag after the other, tied them up and took them outside to throw them away. The heavy plastic lid of the bin shut with a resounding thud outside, harsh, intransigent, as our son listened on. But I must have felt better afterward, since I sang as I walked back in. He disliked it intensely, that I sang and that I was throwing out food that had been our family’s food. It put me on the wrong side, I was accelerating the violent changes to our family. I was obviously eager to forget everything that had been, and for that he despised me.

  The moment I’d started clearing the fridge, he’d come out and asked what on earth I was doing, and why I was throwing away our food. I told him there was too much old stuff, and the fridge needed a clean. He watched me as I proceeded to dispose of everything we used to put out on the table for breakfast or supper in the life that had been ours. A tin of pâté that no one had ever eaten, that had never been opened, but that we always put out on the table, that had to be put on the table for his world to be stable, as he needed it now, more than ever. I sorted the old from the new with rapid, insensitive gestures. I failed to understand his objection, his rage, his despair. He stood and watched me, felt a burning sensation behind his eyes, the nauseating throb of his pulse in his ears. He cleared his throat loudly, but I carried on. I shoved my arm deep into the fridge and pulled something out that had frozen to the back, I turned toward him with a shriveled pepper that looked like the wrinkled heart of a small animal, I asked if he wanted it, I meant it as a joke, but he shook his head in disgust.

  He went into his room and closed the door. He slammed it hard, his eyes filled with angry tears, though I clearly didn’t notice that either. A bit later it went quiet in the kitchen. He started to wonder what I was doing. Perhaps I’d started clearing out everything else that belonged to our old life, perhaps I was sitting there deleting pictures. He emerged from his room, pretending he wanted to watch TV. But I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a book, I’d poured myself some red wine into a small kitchen glass. I looked up and smiled ruefully at him. He disliked that too, the new smile I’d adopted since the divorce. It was he who called it the divorce, despite the fact formalities were still incomplete. He loathed the word and said it as often as he could, pronouncing it as two sharply distinct sounds, dee and vorce. He made it sound like an appalling mistake, and it was, especially for him. Our family had been cracked open, everyone we knew could look inside, or thought they could. He was ashamed of us. He looked at me, hunched over my book, motionless, almost as though I were asleep. Suddenly I looked up at him and asked if he was hungry and whether we should perhaps eat something together. He refused politely, he’d eaten a burger on the way home, but he didn’t want to tell me that.

  He sat in front of the TV and watched me go to the fridge again. There was only one thing I hadn’t had the heart to throw away, and that was a bowl of leftover risotto. He knew why: these were the remains of the last meal I’d made for her. She’d been away on a work trip, and when she came home late that night, I was waiting with her dinner. There was nothing unusual in that, it was what followed that was unusual. We sat at the table and talked, and very calmly we ended our relationship. She cried a little, not much. A few tears rolled down her face and fell into her food. I’d cried so much already—he’d heard and seen it frequently over the past year—so he presumed that I’d finally become cold and resolute. Afterward she went to bed in the spare room and I tidied up. I put the leftovers in a little bowl on the top shelf in the fridge, and since then the bowl had stood there.

  That was three weeks ago.

  The bowl contained large swollen grains of rice, cooked in white wine with Italian porcini, crispy bacon, beetroot, thyme, grated Parmesan. Now I scraped the crusty leftovers into a pan and heated them. He sat with his face turned toward the television, but continued to follow my every move. He saw me continue to throw away food that I found in the cupboards. Seed mixes, packets of raisins, torn bags of flour and half-empty packets of biscuits. Even unopened packets of crisps and peanuts were binned, simply because they belonged to our old life. He decided he would get the bags of crisps and peanuts out of the bin the next day. He would fetch everything out and put it back in the cupboards as soon as Monday came and I moved back out. The remains of our divorce-supper were the only food I’d saved, and weirdly I now wanted to eat them. He watched me stir the rice in a frying pan until it was hot and soft and golden again. I ate straight from the pan standing at the worktop. It seemed such a demonstrative gesture. So uncharacteristic. He moved to another chair so he wouldn’t have to watch. He was slowly drawn into what was on the screen, a documentary about religious sects in the USA. A former member of the Scientologist Church was saying she would never be herself again. She’d been made to believe her old life was empty, but now she longed to return to what had once been normal and ordinary. He turned up the sound, wanting me to hear what she said. Her words took on another meaning for us, here in these rooms, right now. He heard me rinse the frying pan and wash it under hot running water. He had no idea how, but he knew I’d left remnants of food in the sink. I’d always been the one who insisted that the sink should be cleared of any bits, rinsed out and wiped dry. I’d always been the one to clean up after Timmy and the kids whenever they didn’t do it properly. Now I was just leaving it, and he had a feeling that was how I intended to go on. Crumbs, leftover yogurt, tea leaves, from now on I’d leave them all in the sink, just as she always had. He saw through me, he saw I was trying to be like Timmy had been, as if that could help us now.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening he saw me lying in bed with all my clothes on and the duvet pulled up halfway over me. I’d dropped off. I no longer closed the bedroom door, the way she and I always had. I lay in the middle of the bed, as though my body had fallen from a great height. The light was still on. He disliked that, the door being left open so he had to see me lying there on his way to the bathroom. And the fact that I hadn’t gone to bed properly, I probably hadn’t even brushed my teeth, he felt my toothbrush and it seemed dry. He came in and turned off the reading lamp above my head. I didn’t wake up. He closed the door, went into the kitchen and fried an egg. On his way to bed, he opened my bedroom
door again. I had turned over and was lying on my side. I’d obviously got undressed. He saw my face in the light from the hall, yellow, like an oriental mask, a face that depicted eternal grief, and I was sleeping with my mouth open.

  Two weeks later I had begun to change physically. I had grown thinner, my cheeks were sunken and my cheekbones dominated my face. But it seemed to him that I was pleased about this. One afternoon I punched a new hole in my belt with a kitchen knife, I said I needed to buy new clothes, I’d gone down two sizes. I was cultivating this, that was clear, I felt both sorry for myself and simultaneously pleased, which upset him even more. He was in despair over me, I seemed completely unaware of what was really happening to me. The problem, he realized, lay in the fact that we used organic arborio rice specially imported from a small Italian producer. Mixed in it there had been some minuscule grains of unpolished rice. These grains had gone into the packet just as they’d grown in the field, husks and all. It wouldn’t take many, perhaps just a couple of these tiny grains. They’d sat on the extreme edge of the wok as I made the risotto, and maybe looked like pieces of hot golden onion, so that I didn’t turn them with the spatula or stir them into the bottom of the pan. They’d remained uncooked and unconsumed, first on the top of the risotto and then at the bottom of the leftovers dish. It was also possible that I’d kept the food that was left on her plate too, and that the salt in her tears might have released a chemical reaction. He’d read articles online about life under the ice on alien planets, about new diseases appearing in the guts of people who ate genetically modified food. The unpolished grains of rice could easily have been transferred to the bowl of leftovers, which I’d heated up and shoveled into my mouth, straight from the pan. I’d eaten the whole lot, even those two lonely grains of rice that came untreated from the rice fields of Genoa: tiny capsules of life, just waiting for the chance to germinate.