This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (26 page)

It would not be revisionist to say I was miserable right from the start. But hanging on to miserable relationships was something I was born for. Had I known anything about the elegance of quitting at the right time, I would have made so many people, starting with myself and Dennis, so much happier. Every week, every day that I stayed with him, I compounded my mistake. As hard as I searched for possible exits, I found none. Again, had I had even a passing contact with, say, a back issue of
Cosmopolitan
, I would have been able to figure out that the world wouldn't end were I to pack up and leave. But Dennis seemed so sad, and how could I leave someone who was sad, especially when it was my job to make him happy?

Then one summer night we were taking a walk by the Iowa River and Dennis dropped to one knee, pulled out a diamond ring, and asked me to marry him. He might as well have pulled a knife. The word
no
flew from my lips before he had articulated the entire question. I then dropped to
my
knees, horrified by every single aspect of what had just happened. I could have walked into the river and sunk. I said I was sorry, and I was sorry, but I had had the kind of overt visceral reaction that could not be undone. It was a true disaster for both of us, and for our different reasons we looked at the ground, trembling. I was twenty-three and he was thirty. We had never talked about marriage, and certainly there would be no talking about it now. I didn't even get a real look at the ring, which had appeared, a brief spark of light, and then was gone.

Many months went by and still we continued living together, considerably more miserable than we had been before. We moved to Nashville, thinking we might be in need of a geographic cure. Nothing improved. Dennis did not forgive me. And then one night, after an enormous amount of suffering, I finally figured out a way to make it better. “Okay,” I said while we were sitting in the living room. “Okay, we'll do it.” And he went and got the ring out of his dresser and gave it to me.

We were married in June 1988. My wedding shoes were lost the day of the ceremony and never found. We married outdoors and bees swarmed the flowers in my hair during the exchange of vows. The wedding cake melted in the heat, and because there wasn't time to make another cake, my sister frosted the empty pans so that we could take pictures in which we pretended to slice. The car threw a rod through the engine on our way out of town and we spent our honeymoon, and all our honeymoon savings, at a Gulf station in Pulaski, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. The marriage, which lasted fourteen months, was an unmitigated disaster.

We moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where we split a teaching job at a small liberal arts college. Since we didn't know anyone there, we could do a pretty good public presentation of a happy couple. Oddly, what I fell back on during that time were the lessons of my high school home economics classes. I decided I would maintain stability through food preparation. I made chicken or fish with a vegetable and a starch (rice, potatoes, pasta) seven nights a week. I made dessert. We drank huge quantities of milk. I had no idea what it meant to be married, what it meant to be a wife, other than I was supposed to make dinner, do the laundry, clean and iron. I was playing house. In retrospect, Dennis, who raged and slammed and could go for days without speaking to me, literally days without a single word, was probably every bit as terrified as I was. We were both falling back on what we knew and were completely unable to help one another. The next summer, exhausted by our lack of success, we went off to separate writers' colonies—summer camps for adults—and there, after two months without him, I finally found a bright red exit sign glowing in the dark.

At the risk of raising any hopes prematurely, I should say that this was not the exit sign that led to happiness, but the door that took me to the darkest part of my unhappiness, after which there began to be less darkness.

“W
rite the story of your happy marriage,” Niki says.

“I'm trying,” I say.

I
t happened in early August, at the end of my first day at Yaddo, an artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. I was walking through one of the common rooms late at night where a group of women were talking and a young man was sitting in a corner, writing in a notebook. Another woman then came through the door behind me and she was crying. She said she thought she was having a miscarriage and needed a ride to the hospital. Did anyone have a car? The man with the notebook had a car. “Shouldn't a woman go, too?” I said, thinking that if it all turned out badly someone might need to go back and hold her hand. The other women in the room looked at me blankly, and so even though I knew none of them, I said I would go. The three of us got in the car and drove to the hospital. As the woman was rushed away, the man and I promised to wait. We sat in the waiting room, and later on a bench outside the hospital, talking and smoking, until the next morning.

David, the man with the car, had an excellent grasp of psychology. He was a year and a half older than I was and had already been in two psychiatric wards. He had put in long hours with a psychiatrist. He was also considerably smarter than anyone I had ever met in my life. I was not one to talk about my troubles, which was probably one of the reasons I had so many of them, but he knew the right questions and, after all, we had a lot of time to talk. By midnight, David had heard the story of my unhappy marriage, chapter and verse. By three in the morning he was delicately suggesting that the way I was living was no way to live. When the third member of our party reappeared around six, she was surprised and touched to find we had waited. She had not lost the baby, and on that happy news we drove her back to Yaddo to rest. David and I were hungry, so we headed out to a diner for breakfast and stayed well past lunch. There was still a lot to talk about, and so we went back to Yaddo and talked until late in the night and saw the break of the next morning, at which point he came back to my room and we stopped talking.

I do not believe that I am entitled to a free pass on this one because of my childhood or my unhappy marriage, and truly, what I regretted was not my infidelity but the fact that I was forfeiting my status as the injured party. You can't be downtrodden and oppressed
and
be the one having the affair, so I chose to keep the affair a secret. More than twenty years later I think: the house was on fire and I jumped out a window instead of going through the front door. How I left is not important to me now. I got out.

For the next three weeks at Yaddo I wandered and wept. I smoked and drank and went to the track at Saratoga Springs to watch the horses run. I stayed close to David, whom I loved with all the bright and voracious energy a burning house has to offer. I called Dennis at the artists' colony he was staying at and told him I was done, I wasn't coming home, I wanted a divorce. He told me he didn't want to talk about it, to just make up my mind and not wreck his time. I went to the swimming pool often, as swimming pools solve a lot of problems if you never sob but just can't stop the constant leaking of tears. In that swimming pool I met a striking dark-haired woman named Edra. Edra knew what was going on with me; probably everyone did. She asked me if I was going to divorce my husband. She had divorced her husband. I told her I didn't know.

Standing waist deep in the swimming pool at Yaddo, I received a gift—it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. “Does your husband make you a better person?” Edra asked.

There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?” she said, running down her list. “Does he make you better?”

“That's not the question,” I said. “It's so much more complicated than that.”

“It's not more complicated than that,” she said. “That's all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?”

Look at this moment closely, two young women in a swimming pool on a beautiful day in upstate New York, because this is where the story starts to turn. The shift is imperceptible for a very long time but still, I can put my pin in history's map and say,
There
. This was a piece of absolute truth, and while I rejected it as inapplicable to my very complicated twenty-five-year-old circumstances, I did not forget it. It worked its way into my brain and then stuck its foot in the door so that other bits of wisdom might follow, while back in present time I slipped beneath the surface of the water and swam away.

David's residency at Yaddo ended three days before mine, and when he left there were solemn oaths exchanged. When Dennis arrived, I told him I wasn't going home with him, but then suddenly he was a wreck and so I relented. We drove back to Pennsylvania, back into the marriage. We had been gone for the entire summer. School was starting in less than a week; there was no food in the house. Dennis, who hadn't seemed to care whether I left or not, was now quite desperate for me to stay. He was ready to roll up his sleeves, he told me. He would do anything to make our marriage work. I knew our marriage wasn't going to work. I knew the difference between bent and broken, and this thing was broken. Still, it might not be the best time to go. I stayed awake all night, staring at the ceiling, staring at my husband sleeping beside me in the bed, and felt that I might shatter into a human-size pile of glass shards. The next morning I went to my office at school and called David. I was going to need a little more time, I said. I was exhausted. I couldn't think. I needed to go to the grocery store. Maybe I could leave tomorrow instead of today. Maybe I could leave next week.

That was when I got my second gift. He told me he understood it was hard, and that maybe I wouldn't leave, but he said it was important to be honest with myself. David had his share of problems with alcohol and drugs, so he knew all about putting off the hard thing that needed to be done until another day. “It's like the old Bugs Bunny cartoon,” he said quietly, “when Bugs is hosting the show and Daffy comes on the stage and says that Bugs told him yesterday that he could host the show tomorrow. And Bugs says, ‘You
can
host the show tomorrow, but this isn't tomorrow, it's today.' Do you understand what I'm saying here, Ann? Daffy does a whole routine about how yesterday tomorrow was today but Bugs keeps picking apart his argument, and Bugs wins. Because tomorrow just keeps on being tomorrow. It's never today.”

I hung up the phone and sat in my office. It was very early on the last day of August 1989. It was always going to be tomorrow unless it was today. I walked home and told Dennis I was leaving. It did not go well, but then there was no reason it should have. I took my purse and the suitcase I had not unpacked from the night before and I left. I ran. I found someone I knew from the English department to drive me to the airport in Pittsburgh and I bought a one-way ticket to Nashville with cash. When I arrived, I called my mother and told her I had left Dennis and that I wanted to move home.

“What took you so long?” she said.

A
little more than a year before, when I had been shopping for wedding rings, I told my grandmother I wanted one like hers, a plain gold band the width of a wire. She took it off her finger. “Here,” she said, and handed it to me. “Fifty years is long enough for me to wear it.” When I came home she was standing in the kitchen of my mother's house. We all lived in my mother's house then. “I didn't do such a good job with the ring,” I said.

She shook her head. “You have me beat,” she said. “The first time I got married I only made it ten months.” Then my grandmother told me that Dennis had reminded her of John Drain from the very first day she met him.

David and I stayed together through the next spring. I flew up to Cambridge, where he was in school, every time I had the money saved. We were talking about getting married, but first he had to stop drinking. He went into rehab and told me that my attending Al-Anon meetings was a condition of our relationship. Al-Anon! Free group therapy in a church basement for people who had no idea that they were just like everybody else! It was exactly the kind of useful, everyday psychology I lacked, so rooted in common sense that they didn't even need a professional to run the meetings. I could see the grave errors of my ways. I could reform and everything would be better. David was going to make it and I was going to make it and we would be together. But the week before I got the final signed papers for my divorce, David fell in love with a woman in his halfway house, and that was that.

“Oh, no,” a woman in my Al-Anon meeting said. “He's not supposed to do that.”

No, I thought, probably not. But there he goes. And there he would have gone had we been married. I remembered one night in a snowstorm in Boston. We were coming home from dinner. David was driving and we hit a patch of ice at the same instant the car coming towards us hit the same patch of ice and we both spun violently around one another and then slid off in opposite directions, utterly unscathed. When the car finally stopped its skid we just stared at one another, too stunned to inhale. “We just missed being killed by the thickness of a coat of paint,” he said.

“Y
ou have to stop thinking you're going to marry everyone you sleep with,” my mother told me. My mother was sorry to see me knocked down again so soon, but she was not sorry that I had lost my crazy-genius, alcoholic lover. “Listen,” she said, “everything ends. Every single relationship you will have in your lifetime is going to end.”

“This isn't helpful.”

My mother shrugged, so what. “I'll die, you'll die, he'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen but it's always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent. It doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.”