The Marriage Book (40 page)

Love seems the swiftest, but is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

WARD JUST

“HONOR, POWER, RICHES, FAME, AND THE LOVE OF WOMEN,” 1973

Ward Just (1935–) is a novelist and essayist whose focus has often been power, whether in politics or passion. He titled his 1973 novella (and the collection that later contained it) after a quote from a Sigmund Freud lecture about the roots of the artist’s neuroses: “He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions.” Here the narrator, a Washington lawyer named Wylie, has just had lunch with his friend Charlie, a married stockbroker.

As he was paying the check and we were preparing to leave, he said an extraordinary thing. “Of course, once you clear away the underbrush, women’s liberation and hedonism and the rest of it, the heart of the problem is the death of romantic love. Marriage can’t sustain it. Could once maybe, but not now. Maybe it never could. And we both know that we’re romantic animals. If you don’t get it one place you’ll get it another. Try to suppress the impulse and you’ll dry up like a prune. Indulge it and you’ll end up in a motel somewhere with a teen-ager.” He carefully signed the check and put it in the center of the table, the pencil placed just so across it, diagonally. “There’s nothing in the contract that says it has to dry up, but it does—and I have a hunch that the reasons are identical to the ones that keep the marriage together. Civility, compromise, and a suppression of rage.”

OLD JOKE

My wife and I have the secret to making a marriage last. Two times a week, we go to a nice restaurant. A little wine, good food. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.

STANLEY KUNITZ

“ROUTE SIX,” 1978

No American poet had the longevity and few the critical acclaim of Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006), whose seven decades of writing culminated in his being named the United States Poet Laureate at the age of ninety-five. Countless other honors had preceded this one, as had his devotion as professor, book editor, poetry ambassador, and, not incidentally, gardener. Kunitz was married and divorced twice; his third marriage, to the artist Elise Asher, lasted from 1958 until her death two years before his.

The city squats on my back.

I am heart-sore, stiff-necked,

exasperated. That’s why

I slammed the door,

that’s why I tell you now,

in every house of marriage there’s room for an interpreter.

Let’s jump into the car, honey, and head straight for the Cape, where the cock on our housetop crows that the weather’s fair,

and my garden waits for me

to coax it into bloom.

As for those passions left

that flare past understanding,

like bundles of dead letters

out of our previous lives

that amaze us with their fevers, we can stow them in the rear

along with ziggurats of luggage and Celia, our transcendental cat, past-mistress of all languages, including Hottentot and silence.

We’ll drive non-stop till dawn, and if I grow sleepy at the wheel, you’ll keep me awake by singing in your bravura Chicago style

Ruth Etting’s smoky song,

“Love Me or Leave Me,”

belting out the choices.

Light glazes the eastern sky

over Buzzards Bay.

Celia gyrates upward

like a performing seal,

her glistening nostrils aquiver to sniff the brine-spiked air.

The last stretch toward home!

Twenty summers roll by.

JAMES WOLCOTT

“NOISES ON,” 2005

Best known as the longtime
Vanity Fair
culture and media critic, James Wolcott (1952–) has also published one novel, two nonfiction books (the recent one a memoir), articles for
The New Yorker
, and a blog for
Vanity Fair
that covers television, film, theater, books, and just about anything else, including the occasional peek into his own life. This essay appeared in an anthology of men’s writings about love and relationships.

Wolcott is married to Laura Jacobs, a fellow
Vanity Fair
contributing editor.

Sporadic infighting kept things hopping under our own roof, before and after we moved out of The Heights into an actual house with porch, haunted garage, the whole bit. The dialogue sometimes varied, but the sound effects were consistent: my parents’ raised voices, punctuated by the rattle of car keys palmed off the kitchen table—slam of the screen door, slam of the car door—squeal of tires as the angrier of the two tore off to the American Legion or another of the fine drinking establishments along Route 40 (with free fistfights in the parking lots on weekends). One night, between jingle of keys and slammeth of door, my father ventured upstairs to make a dramatic announcement. This was unlike him, to take time out from a busy battle royal to address the junior partners. His voice was low and grave. “I’m leaving your mother, moving out of the house,” he said. “Look after your brothers.” I was the oldest of three brothers (another brother and sister would join the family album later). My father’s tone carried such a toll of finality that one of the younger ones began crying as soon as the car left the driveway. And I remember assuring him in classic gruff-sergeant older-brother manner,
Ohhhh, he’s not going anywhere, he’ll be back, go to sleep
. My father wasn’t given to bluffing; in his own mind he may have reached a grim decision, yet the precocious critic in me (I must have been eleven or twelve then) didn’t buy his exit speech for a sec—he was hanging his words a little too heavy, overweighting them for scare effect. He had committed the crime of hokeyness. My parents murdering each other, sure, that I could believe back then. But divorce? Nah, never happen. And it never did. Forty-some years later, these two former combatants are still together, sober for more than two decades, and getting along better than they ever did, fond of each other in ways they never were before, back when the furniture seemed to levitate. Family get-togethers today are as calm as Quaker services. My parents didn’t confront their demons, they outlasted them, tuckered them out. That wouldn’t work for everybody, but it worked for them.

The same pattern holds for the rest of the clan, some of whose marriages once resembled
mutual-destruction pacts—Apache dances without the dancing—while others seemed to grow moss up the sides through sheer mutual tedium. But then what bystander, even a close relative, knows what truly goes on inside anyone’s marriage? Each marriage is a country unto itself, with its own lingo, customs, unwritten regulations, secret passwords, telepathic powers, and historical landmarks (the picnic table under the one shade tree at Denny’s where they first held hands). All I know is that nearly all of the marriages in my family have so far gone the marathon distance. I have one uncle, he and his wife are in their eighties now. Last time my mother mentioned him I was amazed this uncle was still above earth. I figured this crusty character had long since been discontinued due to heavy taxation of the liver. Back in the day, this uncle’s favorite form of greeting—which he extended to everyone, friends, strangers, and kids alike—was to flip his blunt middle finger. That was how he said hello. He could be driving by—you’d wave at him—he’d flip the bird. Little memories like that stay with you through the years. Today he’s lame and near blind, as is his wife, both of them falling apart and yet
still together
, looking after each other as best they can. Hit after hit to their health, an accumulation of wreckage, and the two of them are still hanging tough.

GARRISON KEILLOR

“HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR MARRIAGE IN JUST ONE DAY,” 2006

Off and on (mostly on) since 1974, Garrison Keillor (1942–) has been host of the weekly public-radio show
A Prairie Home Companion
, during which he offers his folksy, funny, and often profound tales of the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where, as he repeatedly puts it, “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Keillor has written novels and a screenplay set in the same all-American location, and from 2005 to 2010, a weekly newspaper column, in which this article appeared.

Married twice before, Keillor wed violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson in 1995.

Every marriage has its ups and downs. There are the days when you look at your spouse and hear choirs humming Alleluias and there are the days when you wonder, “Who are you and what is your stuff doing in my house?” Those are the days when you play golf. Fishing works, too, or writing sonnets or digging post holes. It keeps the two of you apart for a few hours and usually that’s all you need.

I have an after-dinner speech about marriage that is 15 minutes long and somewhat funny. (“The rules for marriage are the same as for a lifeboat. No sudden moves, don’t crowd the
other person, and keep all disastrous thoughts to yourself.”) As a thrice-married guy, one feels an obligation to share such insights.

So I found myself in a cab to LaGuardia to catch a plane to Atlanta to give the speech. (I was in New York to speak at the Edith Wharton Society but not about marriage since she had a miserable one.) The cab stops at the tollbooth on the Triborough Bridge, and I hand the cabbie a $5 bill for the toll, and he waves it away and gives the man in the booth a $50 bill, which turns out to be counterfeit. “Not just counterfeit,” the toll-taker says. “It’s lousy counterfeit.” The $50 bill is confiscated, forms are filled out, I pay the toll and we get to LaGuardia thirty minutes before flight time. I give the driver $25 for a $23.75 fare and he yells, “Why take it out on me?” Because you knew the bill was counterfeit, that’s why. I’m no rube. I didn’t just fall off the cabbage wagon.

I dash to the plane. I am flying to Atlanta to speak at a benefit luncheon, and I dislike benefits because you have to endure other people’s gratitude, which can be exhausting. This sounds ungracious but it’s true. You go speak for free to a banquet of the Episcopal Promise Keepers of Poughkeepsie or the Honorary Society of Menomonie Economists or the Scandinavian Skin-Diving School in Schenectady and thirty people tell you what a wonderful thing you’re doing and it wears you out. If one person would tell you a joke instead, you would throw your arms around him in gratitude.

I get on the plane and I’m in seat 8D on one of those toy jets that airlines have introduced, which are designed for groups of fourth-graders. The seats are hard on the vertically gifted such as myself, so that when the man in 7D reclines his seat, it almost kills me. If Abraham Lincoln were sitting in 8D, he would give up on that “malice toward none” concept and club 7D on the top of his little bald head. But I bite my tongue, and I also do not shoot my neighbor in 8C, a piggish fellow in an expensive sweater and tasseled shoes, snarfling his lunch while poring over the
Wall Street Journal
and poking me with his elbow as he eats. I come from a part of America where people apologize if they poke and make sure not to do it again. He comes from a part of America where you push your way up to the trough and elbow other people out of the way.

The benefit luncheon in Atlanta is not a happy time. It is an organization of Very Rich People Helping Wretched People Without Having To Be In The Same Room With Them, and it’s full of alpha males of the sort you see strutting around airports with cell phones clipped to their ears hollering at somebody in Cincinnati and gushy women who tell you they adore your television show and never miss it on Sunday night, even though it’s radio and it’s Saturday. I give my 15-minute speech, which suddenly isn’t amusing at all, and the president of Very Rich People gives me a hideous Lucite plaque in gratitude for my generosity, which I deposit in a trash bin at the airport, and I fly home to Minnesota, and there is my elegant wife waiting at the curb in her car.

It
is so good to see her. We’ve been married ten years and surely we have problems, but at the moment I cannot think of a single one. We drive through the streets of St. Paul and there is no place I would rather be. Misery is the secret of happiness in marriage. Go make yourself miserable and then come home.

BILLY GRAHAM

NEWSWEEK
INTERVIEW, 2006

Next to the nine popes who have spanned his lifetime, the minister Billy Graham (1918–) has probably been the most recognizable Christian leader of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A deep believer in the power of prayer and repentance, Graham in this interview lamented some limitations of aging, but counted his sixty-three-year marriage to Ruth Bell among the blessings. She died the following year.

At night we have time together; we pray together and read the Bible together every night. It’s a wonderful period of life for both of us. We’ve never had a love like we have now—we feel each other’s hearts.

OLIVIA HARRISON

INTERVIEW,
GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD
, 2011