Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (6 page)

The thing that I love about the city is that it is always changing. You don’t need to move because it moves around you. Restaurants transform themselves from Indian to Italian overnight; neighbors replace themselves every couple of years. If you redecorate, then sit still for a while and a new neighborhood will join you.

Since then, I have lived in this two-bedroom apartment on West Seventy-seventh every which way. Lived with a single futon until my job as a magazine editor yielded enough for me to decorate in late-eighties chrome and white leather. Then Parisian purple and gold-leaf chic through the self-consciously stylish nineties until, after years of lobbying the board, I finally got to knock down that wall and get the huge open-plan kitchen and living space I’d been dreaming of forever. My apartment is finally home.
My
home. First and only problem right there. I am not alone anymore.

The superintendent’s hole in the basement was never an option, so Dan had been more or less living in my apartment since we met. Out of pure necessity, I paid lip service to the quaint “what’s mine is yours” principle. I tried to restrain myself when he put his boots up on my original Eames chair and terrorized my much-loved kitchen implements with his clumsy ham-size hands. He put my Edwardian potato ricer in the dishwasher, where I found it rusting, devastated by the careless attack.

I didn’t know if I could accommodate Dan in my life forever, but I did know I couldn’t accommodate him in my apartment for much longer. It sounds dreadful, but I was beginning to think I would feel more in control renting it out to a high-paying tenant and living elsewhere with my lumbering husband.

Perhaps Dan putting my potato ricer in the dishwasher was part of some Machiavellian plot to move me to Yonkers?

Whatever.

Almost as soon as we got onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, I felt the agitation that fusses through me when I move too far out of the city. There is this snobbery, a superiority complex I have from being reared in the most cityish city in the world. No other city can quite match the cool island sanctum of Manhattan, but nowhere falls as glaringly short as some of the areas that surround it.

The roads yawn out from four lanes to eight and the landscape makes that subtle shift. I started to see four-wheel-drives, the occasional pickup, strip malls, aluminum siding, and patches of grass that are not public parks but owned by individuals. To me, this has always been a place with more space, yet less room to breathe; more churches, but less soul; more light, more sky, yet less to look at.

All the while, Dan babbled on and on about the area and the friends he had there. He was painting truly awful pictures for me of barbecues on decked patios, with jumbo packages of chemically spiced meat from price clubs frequented by people named Candy who have feathered bangs and use ketchup as a cooking ingredient.

His thought process is spoken out loud and along the lines of happily ever after in the suburban outback. Mine is a terrified implosion of panic. I knew that all I had to do was look at the house, say, “I don’t want this,” and things would stay as they were. But this is what Dan wanted. It’s who he was, a man of simple tastes, conventional in that everyday, unremarkable way. I wanted something,
someone
different, a soul mate, and Dan wasn’t it. With the right person, I could share Yonkers in an ironic, postmodern way. But with Dan, clearly, that was not going to happen.

We had been married one month. Dan bought me flowers. A mixed bunch in cellophane from a deli. It’s the thought that counts—yet I just kept getting caught up in all these ways in which we were not right for each other. I don’t need expensive flowers. I like simple but stylish. So buy me daisies from a florist, not roses from a deli. It’s a small distinction, but a significant one to me. Shouldn’t the right guy just know? Of course, it doesn’t matter. It’s a detail. Except that now that I was wedded to this person for life, a detail, barely discernible in the heady fog of our early romance, became intolerable once it had the weight of a lifetime attached. I know that it is hard adjusting to living with somebody else, but it just seemed like there were too many things: plaid shirts, fishing catalogs, the wrong flowers. Then the basics, which I hadn’t chosen to notice before. Every day I seemed to become fixated on a different one. He blows his nose at the table. Once I noted this, I could see nothing else; he appeared to be blowing and wiping his nose continually. Dan was a professional nose-blower. How had I never seen this before? I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. Because even though we were married, I didn’t have that right.

I didn’t love him. You have to love somebody before you can scream bloody murder at him for something as stupid as blowing his nose.

So I was living with this frenzied monologue in my head continually bleating on about all the irritating little things he did. He left the bathroom door open and talked to me while he peed. He needed a nasal-hair trim. He left his knife in the open jam jar. He put the butter back in the fridge, so it was always hard. I was boring
myself
with my endless list of petty complaints.

Dan and I were not made for each other, I knew that. He had no idea what was going on in my head. If he did, then it would undoubtedly be the end of our marriage. Perhaps I’d find the courage to come clean and do the right thing by both of us. Maybe I was just not cut out for marriage at all. Unable to compromise, or uncompromising. The former was bad, but isn’t the latter a compliment? It means sticking with it, holding out for the real thing.

I wanted to be married. I wanted children, or at least one child. I am a food editor and writer. I create a feeling of home in magazines that people aspire to. I wanted to create something special with somebody else. But there has to be something more. You can’t spin a lifestyle out of nothing. Otherwise it is just style with no life. You need love to build a home with conviction. And that crucial ingredient was missing for me.

I got married because I didn’t want to be alone. Yet driving away from the city, my old life behind me and the possibility of a new one in front of me, I never felt more alone in my life.

I hated James that first year. I thought him arrogant, the way he carried himself in public, as if he were equal to everyone else. I felt I knew my place and I remember him introducing me to the doctor and his wife and being annoyed that he thought we were suitable for such grand company. The lady invited me around for tea and it irritated me even more that they both appeared to like James. I told her I didn’t have time for such niceties as my husband worked me too hard. I could see she was shocked by my brashness, but James laughed at my attempt to embarrass him, as if I was the wittiest woman around.

He was always in his element showing me off. Everywhere we went, he attracted people like a magnet, and the first thing he would always do was introduce me as his wife, his face flush with pride as if to say, “Look what I’ve got.”

Although we both knew I did not belong to him. Not in any way that mattered.

Kilkelly Church had a long aisle and was rather grand. James and I had a place in the second row, just under the pulpit, where, as teacher in the local school, James was expected to sit. As he ushered me into the church pew before him each Sunday, he would place the flat of his hand gently on the small of my back. And for the first full year of our marriage, that was the only time James touched me.

*

From the first night we spent together, I made it quite clear that if James Nolan wanted his marital rights, he was going to have to take them. I would not fight him off, my body was his property and it would be against God to deny him. But he knew how I felt. While I never said it, my dislike for him permeated our home. I made sure I was an exemplary wife in every way around the house. Up at six every morning with the hens fed, fire lit, and his shaving water warmed and waiting for him before he rose at eight. He ate hot porridge with cream and there was meat with two vegetables on the table at one o’clock each day. For tea, there was always a choice of cake, tart, or bread and jam. His shirts were starched and pressed and every item from his socks to his felt trilby hat were darned and steamed until they were restored to a better condition than the day they were bought. The house was so clean that a visitor might feel awkward putting a boot on my shiny flagstones, or dragging a dirty coat on one of my chairs. I was so scrupulous in my housekeeping that the very ashes in the grate held themselves in a tidy pyramid for fear of me.

If I worked hard, I knew that no one being, not even God, could question my honoring and respecting my husband. Only James and I knew that he did not want my honor or my respect. He wanted my love. I was withholding it and angry, and I did not have the love he wanted in me to give to him. I had already given it all away to somebody else.

Only when our bedroom door closed at night did the truth of our loveless arrangement emerge. James continued to sleep on the settle at the side of our bed that I had made up for him on our wedding night. I remember shaking with fear that first night in a stranger’s bed, terrified that a man with whom I was barely acquainted would suddenly leap on me in the darkness. As the hours progressed, I almost wished his brutality upon me, so that it could be done with and the terrible waiting over.

It was only in the morning that I realized he had crept silently out of the room not one hour after lying down and spent the night sitting up in the kitchen, reading. I was nearly angrier with him over that than I would have been over the other. I felt deceived in expecting this barbaric ravaging when my Viking perpetrator was adjusting his reading glasses over
The Capuchin Annual.
This I didn’t understand.

Night reading was something James did often in that first year. He never asked or suggested or cajoled or made any attempts on me whatsoever, except in often telling me I looked beautiful. I was not grateful for the way my husband was managing his passions; in my ignorance, I thought him weak. I think now that if he had taken a firmer hand to me that first year, our marriage might have been a more balanced affair.

But then, how suddenly we become saints, willing to give all our hearts once we know our sacrifice is no longer needed.

Against all expectations, what got me through that first year was James’s mother, Ellie, who insisted from the first that I should call her by her Christian name. Widowed young, she had reared seven children, educating the older ones until they were old enough to help support the younger. She was a resourceful, extraordinary woman. Refusing to accept charity from her neighbors, she had farmed her children out to various relations while she spent several summers working in England alongside our local men. The fact that this had earned her respect and status among her neighbors, as opposed to scandalizing them, laid testament to the type of person she was. Ellie Nolan was not a craw-thumping, clergy-worshipping Catholic. She was a hardworking, generous woman who did not care what people thought of her. And it was a credit to our community that she was thought of so highly. I did not know or care about any of that when I found myself living next door to my new husband’s invalid mother. All I knew was that, despite myself, I liked her and she was kindly towards me, which she certainly need not have been.

A routine developed quickly between us. After James had opened the school at nine o’clock, I would cross the short field with a tray for her breakfast. I would cook to please the old woman quicker than I would for her son. I found his praise cloying and false, given the strained situation between us. Ellie’s praise was always genuine though she had no reason to give it. She confided that she was a poor cook and would go into ecstasies over my boxty pancakes, asking for the exact method, then laughing at the idea she would ever make them herself. Ellie could afford to make jokes against herself as she was so very easy to love. Her house was higgledy-piggledy, and as I would start to fuss around the place cleaning, she would call out for me to sit and read to her. It felt decadent somehow to be reading novels and poetry at eleven o’clock in the morning when there was work to be done, but Ellie insisted we feed our minds as well as our bodies.

Her favorite was Sir Walter Scott’s dramatic poem “The Lady of the Lake.” There was still plenty of fire in Ellie, and she loved the bloody descriptions of combat on the Scottish highlands, repeating every syllable alongside me:

Fell England’s arrow flight like rain;

crests rose, and stoop’d, and rose again,

Wild and disorderly.

I waited for the women wailing over their perished loves, and while my voice quivered over some exaggerated declaration of love, I always felt that Ellie knew I was thinking about Michael. She certainly knew about us in the way that everybody knew I had been doing a line with the Yank. I always felt Ellie knew more still—that I did not love her son, despite the fact that I would leap up from my seat before midday and rush back to prepare his dinner.

I believed that Ellie loved James with the fierce, protective passion every mother has for her sons. But she befriended me anyway. She was in my life for such a short time, and yet she had a huge influence. Perhaps because she made me feel that I was not so bad a wife as I pretended to be. Perhaps her unconditional approval made me less cruel than I might have been towards James. Maybe this was her way of asking me to be a good wife to her son after she was gone. Certainly a direct request would not have worked. Or maybe she just liked me and was glad to have me related to her. I don’t know—nor will I ever.

But this is what I believe: Ellie Nolan had more wisdom than I ever earned in the whole of my marriage, or will ever in the rest of my life. In losing her husband so young, she learned how little value we place on real love while we have it. The poetic passions of fiction are just that, a fiction. And the realities of love, the way it fades when you try to grab it, then clutches your guts with a painful squeeze of grief after you have lost it, reach so much further than a young girl’s romantic dreams. Ellie struggled in the aftermath of her husband’s death to feed, clothe, and educate seven children on her own. She understood that poetry and passion were for reading by the fire. But a woman who could cook well and keep a clean house for her working son was a good enough start.