by Wendy Walker
Randy laughed again, harder this time. “I’ll let you know how that turns out.”
“I’m serious. How will you ever get married after seeing this parade of crap?
“I don’t believe in marriage.” He said it matter-of-factly in mid-bite, as though it didn’t call into question the bedrock of nearly every society across the globe.
“You don’t believe in marriage?” She tried to look at him in brief increments as she ate, maybe catch some expression on his face that might temper the impact of his statement. But there was nothing. He was dead serious.
“No. Have you ever studied it? Marriage?”
Marie sighed. From the tone of his voice, she knew’he was off again, in that overanalytical head of his. Aside from exercising one’s intellect, what was the point of studying something that had been around forever’ that was embraced as sacrosanct in every modern culture, from the West to the East, to the most primitive Third World societies. Marie was more concerned with figuring out how to make the damned thing work.
“The Evolution of Marriage, I think it was called.”
“I bet you were the only guy in the class.”
“There were two of us. Me and the professor.”
“And what did this professor teach you that made you stop believing in marriage?”
“Just that the concept behind marriage’the lifelong monogamous union of a man and a woman’is contrary to the most basic aspects of human nature. Did you know there are only a handful of animal species that are monogamous? And scientists aren’t even sure they truly are.”
“But we’re different from other animals. The most advanced species.”
Randy let out a sarcastic laugh. “Supposedly.”
With exacting conviction, he laid out his professor’s theory on the origins of marriage. “Look, from everything we know about human existence, marriage in one form or another has been present since the beginning of recorded history. Before that time, we were cave dwellers, functioning like the small communes that can still be found on the fringe of some societies. The men were the hunters, leaving in packs for long stretches of time to find meat. The women were the gatherers, tending to the children and to each other, gathering plant-based foods to eat and to store for the months when the land was barren. Procreation was random, spreading genes throughout the clan, ensuring a wide cross-section of human offspring. It was Darwinism at its best.
“But over time, man began to herd animals, developing skills that enabled the clan to remain in one location indefinitely. This bred the desire to own property, and men began to carve out the land. Then they started to have desires about that land, putting so much work into the harvests and herding. They wanted to leave it to their children. That’s where marriage came in. In order to leave property to their children, it became necessary to know whose offspring were whose. So, after thousands of years procreating at the whim of their desires, men found it necessary to have dominion over a woman, or several women as the case may be. They had to know that the children were by their seed, and no one else’s. Henceforth, marriage was born’and now continues on as an artificial construct to facilitate property ownership.”
Marie was quiet for a moment. What the hell could she say to that? She hadn’t done much thinking about the history of mankind, or anything existential for that matter, since having children. There was simply no time, not when she had enough to analyze right outside her door. Still, her brain was far from atrophied.
“OK. Assuming all that is true, it seems to me that marriage also stems from the evolution of human intelligence, every bit as much as our sophisticated economies and understanding of the world. It’s the evolution of love.”
“Love is love. Marriage is about possession. Think about it. Think about everything you’ve said about Hunting Ridge housewives.” Randy’s face was serious, and it scared Marie that she had helped foster such cynicism in a man so young. “The complete division of labor where men work and women serve them, the submission of woman to man as the head of the household. With the exception of monogamy’which is really a myth when you look at the statistics’marriage has done very little to change the basic social structures of our ancestors. Yet people, as individuals, have evolved greatly. Hence’the persistent discontentment of the masses who subject themselves to marriage.”
Marie put her fork down and popped open a Diet Coke. She looked at Randy, so casually eating away and spewing forth his theories as though they had no bearing on his life. And she’d actually started to believe she had him figured out.
“So you’re saying that marriage is antithetical to evolution.”
“Right.”
“That people who get married will be forever stuck in the cave-man days.”
“Right, only worse. Stuck in the cave with one cave man, one cave woman.”
“Then how can you explain the fact that every movie, every love song, every school daydream is based on finding a spouse? Don’t you believe in lifelong love?”
Randy was quiet for a moment, but only a brief moment. And in his response, Marie detected a sad resolve. “I don’t know about love. But the rest of it is straight, unadulterated socialization. We’re told to crave monogamous love from the day we’re born. Of course it preoccupies us. Then we move on to money, religion, finding redemption before we die.”
“I’m sorry,” Marie said when he was finished.
He looked at her with a puzzled expression. “What for?”
Marie smiled. “I can’t imagine life without the dream of love. Even when it’s hard. Even when my ass of a husband is out playing golf. There’s a reason I fight to get back to that place with him.”
“I don’t get that. You’re one of the smartest people I know.”
“You’re young. Believe me, there are a lot of people smarter than I am.
Randy shrugged.
“Didn’t your parents believe in love?”
“I think they did when they got married. But my mother needed her career. She was a professor, and there was a position at Stanford.” Randy stopped himself, and Marie could see a piece of him now, clearly, through the small window her question had pried open.
“My mother left when I was four.”
Marie drew a breath and, with everything inside her, held back from reaching over and taking his hand. In an instant, with that one statement, the things she had wondered about Randy Matthews dissolved into understanding. His obsession with marriage, his views on life and love. The reason he was pursuing a career in father custody law.
Feeling her pity, Randy looked at her squarely, the nonchalance returning to his face’the window closing. “I’m not who you think I am. Some poor, motherless kid.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Yes, you do. But that’s not who I am. I faced those demons a long time ago. I’m at peace with it. I have great respect for my mother. She made the only choice she could. She was miserable being a housewife, and my father refused to alter his career to accommodate hers. It was an impossible situation, manufactured by the institution of marriage. I can’t help it that I see things for what they are. It’s not something I can turn off so I can fit in with the rest of the world.”
Marie smiled, nodding her head in a show of respect for his wishes. He did not want to be pitied, or judged, or stamped with a label, though she was not at all convinced he had escaped his childhood unscarred.
“OK,” she said. “Is there anything else you’d like to share this afternoon?”
“No. Not unless you want to talk some more about vaginal rejuvenation.” He was smiling now, his lighthearted spirit having taken over the room once again.
Marie crumbled up a paper towel and threw it at him, catching him squarely between his eyes.
They were still laughing when the phone rang.
THIRTY-SIX
THE REAL MRS. KIRK
JANIE DROVE THE CAR, unable to comprehend the thoughts that were in her mind. Can he smell the smoke? What did I do
with the key card? Now beside her, his seat fully reclined to keep the blood flowing and a hospital band still attached to his wrist, was her husband.
Her fears had been put to rest the moment she arrived. It was a mild anxiety attack, one that was quickly resolved with medication. There was no imminent threat to his health. They had placed him on a monitor, prescribed a mild sedative. Then they’d released him into the care of his wife.
Listening to the doctor’s explanation, his instructions for the next few days, and the longer-term plan to stave off compounding stress’never had she felt so disconnected from herself. She was the woman standing beside Mrs. Daniel Kirk’the other woman, the cheater, the liar, the ungrateful woman. Not to mention the closet smoker. There were so many secrets it seemed unbelievable that no one saw through the doting wife to the woman walking her husband to the car, helping him inside.
And now she was worried about getting caught.
“Are you OK?” she kept asking him again and again, as if acting the part might somehow transform her.
“Yes! I’m fine. Please, stop worrying,” Daniel said. He was more embarrassed than worried, the attack having occurred at the office where explanations would now be required. Once he was certain that he was out of the woods, he had asked the doctor twice: Are you sure there’s nothing else wrong with me? And his disappointment at the answer had surprised everyone but her.
“We’ll think of something to tell them. Your medical records are private. They’ll never know,” she said, thinking she’d found a way to help.
“I can’t let them think I’m weak, Janie. I’ll be put out to pasture.”
“What about a blood clot? In your leg, maybe. It cut the blood flow, made you dizzy. They can fix blood clots.”
Daniel was watching her now, a strange look on his face. “I forgot how good you were at that.”
Janie smiled, looking back at him for a second as she wound her way through the back roads of Hunting Ridge. “At what, Dan?”
“Lying.”
The word stopped her cold. Still, she held the smile and managed a laugh. He was talking about her teenage years, the stories she’d shared with him about sneaking around her parents. She had been a wild child, and there was a time when he’d found that irresistible. He was referring to those years now, making an off-color joke to add some levity to a day that had terrified them both. That had to be it. That, and the sedatives’maybe.
Still, as good as she had been in covering her tracks, there were some things that could not be manufactured, subtle distinctions between those in love and those faking it that he might have picked up on. The weakness of her arms as she wrapped them around him to return a hug, the shortness of her looks when their eyes met across a romantic restaurant table. Her recoil at his touch in the bedroom. They were signs that were often spotted in retrospect, after a break-up, small details that in hindsight were glaring. It was possible Daniel had made an early detection.
Her throat felt constricted as she turned her eyes back to the road. How odd it was, this sense of utter panic at the negligible possibility of his knowing. Every time she’d been with the other man, from that explosive first encounter, to the things they’d done in that motel room, she had wondered if she wouldn’t embrace her freedom if it were thrown her way. Yes, it would be complicated. Yes, the children would suffer. But she would not be human if the thought never came to pass. JVhat if he knows? And now the answer stood before her, so clearly that it felt unshakable. She did not want him to know. Not because newfound love had magically washed over her. No’looking at him next to her, she could feel the same dearth of emotion that had driven her to abandon her own conscience. But the answer was there just the same. For whatever reason, she could not let go of her marriage.
THIRTY-SEVEN
THE PAST
“MOMMY, WHAT ARE YOU doing?”
With Dora the Explorer just ending, Jessica turned her attention to her mother and the book on her lap. Curious now, she moved closer until she was almost on top of her sleeping baby brother.
“Can I see?”
“There’s nothing to see. It’s grown-up reading,” Love said, pulling the book away from her child. It was just paper and ink, but she felt an instinctual fear that it might somehow be toxic.
“Can I see?” Jessica asked again as she maneuvered around Baby Will and sat on a pillow near her mother’s head. Love sighed, then opened to a page. Looking down at the words, Jessica pretended to read as she had seen Henry do, her face squinting with a concentrated stare.
“It’s grown-up writing, Jess.”
“About real monsters?”
Love tried not to laugh. In a futile attempt to bridge the television gap between Henry and Jessica, Love had made any movies with “real monsters” off-limits for Jessica. Scooby-Doo cartoons were OK, Harry Potter was not. Inadvertently teaching her three-year-old about real monsters was not exactly a proud parenting moment.
“No. No monsters. It’s just about life.”
“My life?”
“No. Nobody you know. Just a man.”
Nobody you know …just a man. Just the girl’s grandfather, whom she would likely never meet. For the best, Love imagined. Still, there was something terribly wrong about that.
The sound of Bill’s voice in the hall downstairs had Jessica scooting off the bed.
“Daddy!” she yelled, and then she was gone, her attention fully diverted.
Love smiled as she watched her daughter bounce out of the room. A little blond jumping bean.
She returned the book to the night stand. She hadn’t read it’not one word’and her defiance was comforting. That man was from her past, from another universe. And it was in that universe she had ended up in the hospital, nearly dead from a handful of pills. For years she had placed her father in the bin with everyone else who had written her off. Friends, the few she’d had, admiring researchers who’d followed her progress, investing their time and energy. She’d spun out of control, placed their reputations in jeopardy. Her self-destruction had been almost passionate as she immersed herself in degradation. But none of it could take back that night when she was still a girl, or quiet the shame that ate away at her day after day until, finally, she could take no more. Her mother’s pills had been right there, the ones Yvonne had been too righteous to take. Those with front-row seats had orchestrated the spin to keep the story quiet’that after years of a troubled existence, Love Welsh had tried to take her life, but like everything else had failed.
It was in the aftermath of that ugly truth that she’d met Dr. Bill Harrison, the reason she had these three beautiful children. Still, no one ever spoke about it. Not her mother, whose Valium she’d taken’an old prescription that Yvonne had been given when her own mother died. Not Bill, who’d been on his ER rotation. Not even her father, who had been cunning enough to keep it from the media, releasing a statement from New York that very night to the effect that his daughter had been admitted for dehydration and exhaustion following a flu. There’d been no way to prove that she’d suffered an overdose without violating medical confidentiality, so the tabloids had printed the bullshit story, then left it alone. And, as it turned out, the public cared so little about her by then that the story died before the slightest amount of speculation began to gather speed.
Even so, her world had finally crashed that night, leaving her adrift. Still alive but immersed in the sickening feeling of death, she had ruled out another suicide attempt. And yet the same emptiness was there, taking the more subtle form of depression where a powerful anxiety had once been. She’d taken to sidewalk cafes where she could drink coffee and smoke, and most of all, not be home where her mother’s guilt stared her down in every room. At twenty-five, her life had felt over.
Six months later, she’d heard his voice over her shoulder. “Don’t I know you from somewhere? “
She’d braced herself for the humiliation’turning to face some L.A. star-seeker who would quickly realize she was one of t
he fallen. As it happened, it was far worse.
“Dr. Harrison,” she’d said, lighting a cigarette. “Yeah, you know me. Give it a second and it’ll come to you.”
Dr. Bill Harrison had been the only thing from her overdose that she’d allowed herself to remember, and she had used the thought of him to comfort herself in the dark moments that came and went. When he was before her again, the fear that he would reflect on her weakness with disdain had been more than she could bear. She’d taken a long drag on her cigarette and masked her feelings with a facade of indifference.
But with disarming kindness, the young doctor had simply smiled.
“Love Welsh.” His voice had been full of delight.
“Nothing gets past you, Doctor,” she’d said, still feeling irreverent.
“May I?” He’d pulled out a chair then and sat down at her table before she could answer.
“How are you doing?” He was concerned, and his sincerity had pulled her in.
“I’m better,” she’d lied. And he’d seen through it.
“Really? You look kind of thin. Have you been eating?”
They talked then, about her, about suicide and depression. Bill spoke from his brief experience on a psych-ward rotation, and as the son of parents who lived their lives in a state of perpetual unhappiness. Without the slightest hint of judgment, he’d pulled from her things she had told only a select few, things she had thought she would never tell another living person. And he’d listened with the patience that was his way.
“I have to go. I have rounds,” he’d said at the end, and Love felt like grabbing him and never letting go. Then, with a boyish nervousness, he had continued. “But maybe we can do this again. Can I call you?”
Closing her eyes now, Love thought about how easy it had been. She’d written down her number, and he’d called the next day. And the next, and the day after that. On their third date, she’d laughed for the first time in a very long time, and by the end of that month, she never wanted to look back. When Bill gave her a way out, she took hold without thinking. Moving east to raise a family, leaving L.A. for dense woods and suburban charm had been the surest path to leaving it all behind. And the illusion that she no longer cared still meant something. Happily married, content with the sacred occupation of motherhood’all of it protected her from the scrutinizing glare of her own failings. She’d sent little cards to some of her former teachers, announcing the arrival of each of her three children. And some had sent back gifts and kind notes. So happy you ’ve found a life for yourself … congratulations … looks like everything worked out. If they suspected for a moment that she cared about the life she’d thrown away, they would think her pathetic, and that was not something Love could bear. Especially not from her father.