Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (26 page)

Doreen had been really bitchy all day, but I knew it was her own insecurity at play. She could see that, despite everything I’d told her, Dan and I were on our way to being settled. And it unsettled her for some reason. It was what she had always said she wanted for me but now that she saw me with it, it felt alien to her.

I was in the midst of a marriage crisis, just keeping myself afloat by trying to second guess my husband’s emotions and keep my own in check, and I didn’t have time for self-obsessed and, let’s face it, just plain mean girlfriends anymore. So did Doreen have my best interests at heart here?

No, I didn’t believe so.

Was she flexible enough to make the adaptation necessary to be a supportive friend to Tressa the married woman?

Seemingly not.

Oh, and plus? She was pissing me off with her bad-mannered attempts at humor.

“Don’t talk to my husband like that, Doreen.”

“Like what?”

She raised her eyebrows at me, falsely incredulous.

“In that patronizing tone; he’s not a child.”

Dan talked over me with, “Hey, wait a minute, honey. It’s okay...”

I was irritated with him butting in, but at the same time, I heard his old softness in the word “honey” and I knew I couldn’t back down.

“No, Dan, it’s not...”

In a show of emotional intelligence, my husband said, “I’ll make coffee,” and bolted at full speed toward the kitchen door.

“I can hear what you are trying to do, Doreen,” I said, “and it is
not
OK.”

“You are a fool, Tressa, and I am not going to be spoken to like this,” Doreen said simply, and walked toward the door. On reaching it, she turned, rather grandly, saying, “I’ll send a car later for my things.” In that stylish gesture I realized, yes, I was going to miss this woman, this friend in my life, but the hard truth is that fifteen years of friendship can be flushed when the stake is a marriage.

Even a short, shaky one like mine.

I didn’t even bother looking for James when I got to St. Mary’s Hall, because I knew he would be caught up in some responsibility or other. So I was surprised when I found him waiting for me at the door. The hall was not as packed as I had expected it to be. There were chairs along the walls, not all of them taken, and there were tables dotted across the vast dance floor. Four large television sets sat on trestle tables on the stage. It was a predictable crowd, our neighbors in age and locality were largely here.

I looked around to see who I might sit with. Rather, in the humor I was in, who I might
not
sit with. I spotted Aine Grealy right away. She looked across and waved me over enthusiastically. She was up to no good, and it was only then that I saw who was sitting with her.

Michael.

I lost my balance, but James, who had appeared beside me, caught my arm.

“Would you like some tea, dear?”

James spoke into the muted murmur of village curiosity. The room had quietened by half, the polite pretended to talk while others openly stared. There was not a sinner in the place who did not know the connection between Michael Tuffy and me. And if there were any gaps, Aine Grealy had spent all day filling them in.

I started to shake, and gripped onto James’s steady arm. He did not let me go, but glided me across the floor towards his lifetime’s rival.

“Aine,” he said. “I wonder if I might ask you to help me prepare my talk. There’re a few translations that could use your expert opinion.”

He gave her no choice but to peel herself away, although she no doubt consoled herself with spending an hour sharing her brilliant brain with my husband.

Michael stood up and held out his hand to greet me. As I sat down on the seat next to him it was all I could do to keep my breath from exploding out of my mouth. If I opened it to smile at him, it would surely draw back over my cheeks in a shocked sob and then everyone would know. Even him. Especially him.

I had never in my mind’s eye envisioned Michael as an old man. The last time I had seen him, we had both been young and full of vigor. I had watched myself age, and in the evidence of getting older, I had pushed my handsome young Michael further into my memory. As decades passed, I let him rest in the place of dreams where the young stay beautiful forever. As the years moved on, I stopped wondering.

Now he was here. He was wearing a brown suit that was out of fashion, and a blue shirt that did not go well with it. Much of his hair was gone and his face was lined. The blue eyes remained.

He was my own Michael. The same as that first night we had seen each other in Kitty Conlan’s parlor, and I had known we were meant to be together. The years had passed like a moment, as if he had just turned to pick a flower for my hair, and now I was sixty. I knew from his eyes that he didn’t care I’d aged. I knew I looked the same to him now as I had then. We had grown older, yet the beauty we had seen in each other when we were young had seemed to simply mature, like exquisite wine.

Eventually I said, “Michael Tuffy.”

He smiled at me. Broad, brave mischief.

“You look the same,” he said.

I shrugged and looked away. I was afraid to hold his eye for too long.

We sat looking forward for a moment, not needing words but locked together in our world as we had always been. I had questions to ask, but there was time enough for that. He leaned over to me and I could feel his breath next to my ear. Like the warm breeze on the beach in Enniscrone the day I dreamt I saw him.

“Do you remember how we were, Bernadine Moran? Do you remember how it was then?”

I started to close my eyes to conjure up my private summer meadow daydream that I might share it with him, but as my lids folded down, I saw James across the room.

He was shuffling his feet, half talking to Aine and half looking back at me. His agitation broke my spell. Then, for one second, I caught my husband’s eye. He looked tired and nervous. No sparkling shots of blue, no grand desires, no dreams, no jokes, no promises of passionate delights. Just worn, worried, everyday James.

And I knew I had to get up from my chair and walk over to him. Because however much I loved Michael Tuffy, still and forever, a promise is a promise. James had kept his promise to me and been a good husband. If I answered Michael Tuffy’s question, I would be making a choice. And whatever my heart told me, I had to be loyal to my husband. He deserved my love, but the least I could give him was my loyalty.

I took one last look at my one true love. I held my hands tightly in my lap as I scanned his face good-bye.

“No, Michael Tuffy,” I said. “I barely remember it at all.”

I stood and walked across to James. His face relaxed in relief, and he took my hand and held me by him for the rest of that afternoon.

Michael, I saw, left shortly afterwards.

I believe he returned to America, although I never heard of him ever again.

You don’t have to feel love to give it.

Pobs

Your mother was a fussy eater when she was a child, and on days when she would not trust to my cooking, I would feed her a slice of bread mashed into a cup of warm milk, with a sprinkle of sugar on top. As her taste developed and changed, she would always return to a cup of “pobs” as comfort food. It was the only recipe I could ever get your mother to master, and I know you were virtually reared on it yourself.

Sometimes we can only stomach the simplest of things. This is food for the very young and the very old. As it is only at the very beginning and the very end of our lives that we have answers, I have come around to thinking that, with all of the fuss we make over food, perhaps all any of us really needs is bread, milk, and a little sugar to sweeten it at times.

I was staying in a hotel in South Beach, Miami. Everything was warm and candy colored, even the women in their string bikinis. I was speaking at a conference there and the manager had upgraded me to a suite overlooking the beach. Somewhere behind the clamor of the
Vogue
fashion teams ordering breakfast on the patio beneath my balcony, I could hear the sea.

I missed Dan.

I didn’t think I would and I wasn’t sure why I did.

It’s just that in the past year, my new husband had grown on me. I noticed when he wasn’t here—his clumsy lumbering ways, doing those things I hated, blowing his nose, using hillbilly words, and drinking instant coffee. I didn’t feel madly in love with him. But a small, slow miracle had occurred inside me so that he no longer annoyed me as much as he used to. Maybe that counted for something, or maybe my standards had dropped and I should have been worried. But I found a kind of freedom in shrugging stuff off, and I was going to stick with it. Tolerance is an unfashionable quality—but I found that being irritated wastes an awful lot more energy than you think.

Dan was over the Ronan thing. Kind of.

He didn’t exactly dance a jig when I said I’d been invited to Miami for work for a few days. I asked him rather than told him, although I don’t know what I would have said if he had said “No,” which, of course, he would never have done. He said something much worse, which was, “I trust you.”

There was a menu of potential fights to choose from:

For starters, “Well, gee,
thanks,
honey for allowing me to go to work and earn a living.”

Then a meaty entrée, “Can we
please
put the ‘my wife’s a slut’ card to the back of the pack now?”

And for dessert, that old family favorite, “I never should have married you in the first place!”

The thing that really drove me crazy is that I completely trusted Dan. I
knew
he would never betray me in the way I betrayed him.

Trust is nothing when you have it. It’s bread and milk. Basic. There’s no glamour, no emotion, no drama—you just trust and that’s it. Trusting someone is boring. It’s a nonevent. But take it away—try living without trust—and suddenly your relationship is plunged into a living hellhole. I’ve been there, and I have seen my friends live with men they didn’t trust, men who lie. Not little “no, you don’t look fat in that” lies, but terrifying “working late while really I am banging my secretary” lies.

I always thought you had to be really crazy about somebody not to trust them. Actually, you just have to be with somebody who is untrustworthy. Like somebody who really
would
feel up your friend under a dinner party table. Or somebody who never says “I love you” first.

Dan deserved my trust, but I didn’t deserve his. I would have liked it. It would have made my inner life easier, and made me feel like I was a nicer person. But I didn’t have it. Not all of it, or not yet. Dan had always known that he loved me that bit more than I loved him. When I betrayed him, it shifted the balance too far in my direction.

“I trust you,”
was my punishment for the past and my challenge for a future together.

So I was standing in front of two hundred food industry executives about to deliver my wisdom on memory and food, when the shithead Angelo Orlandi walked right up to the front of the theater and plonked himself down in front of the podium. He was minus Jan and wearing dark glasses so I couldn’t see his eyes. He started to look around the room as I spoke, like I was boring him. It unnerved me, and I stumbled over a couple of sentences.