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.
“You 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.”
My beautiful mother had learned a great
deal along the rocky run of her own experience and now she was passing it on to me. Because I was at that moment in desperate need of guidance, I decided to take her advice to heart. I remember sitting on the top of the stairs in her house and thinking that I didn’t have another breakup in me. I was already too thin and too sad. I couldn’t call all my friends again and cry on the phone. I had used up all the sympathy I had coming for the next five years. I was just going to have to let this one go. As much as I loved David, and I loved him the way you love the person who saves your life, I understood that I had avoided catastrophe by the thickness of a coat of paint. He had done me the two greatest favors that anyone had ever done me in my life: he got me out, and then he let me go.
It was on that day, on those stairs, that I decided I would never divorce again. I was as grateful for divorce as I was for my own life, but it had done me in. I now fully understood the passion with which my mother had promised not to be twice-divorced, and how holding on to her second marriage was like holding on to a bucking bronco set aflame. She did not let go through all the hell of her marriage, simply because she’d sworn to herself she would not let go. But now, with David gone, I saw a much simpler path: if I never married again, I would never again be divorced. In short, I had found a way to beat the system. I was free.
Snow White finds happiness with seven dwarfs. She isn’t settling. She is very, very happy.
Here’s a fail-safe recipe for popularity: be twenty-six, cheerful, and completely over the idea of marriage. Not in a coy way, not in a way that says you secretly hope someone will talk you into it. Wash your hands of wedlock and watch the boys fly in. At the moment that other women my age were starting to ask their boyfriends if their intentions were serious, I was explaining to mine that life was short and this was fun and that was all. Well, that’s not entirely true: I remained serious about love; I just gave up the notion that marriage was the inevitable outcome of love. I took my mother at her word and had some wonderful, long relationships with people I deeply enjoyed but would not have wanted to marry for a minute. Once I decided I liked someone well enough to want to spend time with him, I set aside my judgment. Did he leave his clothes in twisted piles on the floor? Fine by me, I wasn’t the one picking them up. Was he always late? For everything? That could wear over the course of a lifetime but for a year or two it wasn’t really a problem. Did I find his father impossibly grating? Yes, but who cared? We would not be spending holidays together for the rest of our days on earth. Not only was I dating for the first time in my life, I could put aside the constant assessment of character that talk of forever inspired. I decided instead to fall in love with a good sense of humor, a compassionate understanding of Wallace Stevens, an ability to speak Italian or dance on a coffee table.
My mother was happy as well. She had married Darrell, who was easygoing, adored her completely, and made his own pasta, three qualities we had not previously seen in our family. Of course, Darrell had his own ex-wife and three grown children, but they were all intelligent, highly civilized people who were willing to attach the complicated web of their family to the complicated web of ours. My mother’s third marriage bespoke a real learning curve.
Not only did she have a good husband, she had a good job. After her final split from Mike, she returned to work as a nurse in the office of an internist named Karl VanDevender. They got along well. It seemed that everyone got along with Karl. He was a genial person and a good doctor, the kind of man people speak of as being golden. But even the golden have their problems. One night my mother called to tell me that Karl’s wife had left him.
Part of removing myself from the cycle of marriage and divorce involved limiting my interest in the marriages and divorces of other people. The marriages and divorces of other people are deeply private things. Both the successes and the failures are based on an unfathomable chemistry and history that an outsider has no access to. I knew from experience that any story I heard on the subject was unlikely to be entirely true, and that the truth was none of my business anyway. I made it a point to wish every marriage well, and to feel a moment of sorrow for any divorce, and that was all. The report was that Karl’s wife had left abruptly, there hadn’t been any arguments, and that the whole thing, as he had told my mother, came as a complete surprise. I wondered if any divorce ever really came as a complete surprise, and if it did, well, that was probably your answer as to why someone was divorcing you.
I had met Karl a few times over the years when I had stopped by the office to bring something to my mother. If I saw him in the hall we would have a brief exchange of pleasantries (hello how are you very well and yourself?). After my first book was published, he took my mother and me out to lunch and told me endlessly how lucky I was to be a writer. He said it so many times I finally told him I thought it would be strange if I sat there and told him how lucky he was to be a doctor. That was all there was to it. He asked me to mail him a list of my favorite books. He had been an English major in college. He wanted to know what he should be reading.
At the time that Karl’s marriage was breaking up I was thirty years old and living in Cambridge, where I had a fellowship at Radcliffe College. My mother continued to call with updates. Karl’s situation had taken over her work life. Not only did he confide in her, it seemed that no one in the hospital talked about anything else. It’s a wonder that patients didn’t die while doctors and nurses discussed the fate of Dr. VanDevender. He didn’t want a divorce, but if his wife refused to come back, he planned to remarry as soon as possible. Eager candidates were lining up around the hospital. My mother claimed the call volume into the office had increased tenfold: men and women called wanting Karl to date their mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, tennis partners. Women called wanting to ask Karl out themselves. He was forty-six and handsome. He had a good income and even better manners. It was springtime, and depending on how long it took for the divorce to become final, it seemed very likely that Dr. VanDevender would find someone to marry by Christmas.
Up in Cambridge, I felt sad for Karl in the way you feel sad for someone who is about to embark on a long round of chemo and radiation. He was at the start of something I had completely finished and the notion of anyone having to face that, even someone I scarcely knew, made me feel sick.
“You’ll never guess who Karl wants to date now,” my mother said to me one night on the telephone. He had gone out with several women by that point. He had gone to Bali on a date.
It was supposed to be a guessing game but I told her just to tell me.
“You,” she said.
He was sixteen years older than I was, lived a thousand miles away, and was my mother’s boss. “That’s not going to happen,” I said.
Months later, when I was home visiting, Karl called and asked me out to dinner. Ever the fan of clarity, I explained my position on the matter. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” I said, “and I’m happy to talk to you, but I’m not going to date you. This isn’t a date, okay?”
“Not a date,” he said. “A meal.”
The woman who owned the restaurant where we had dinner sent the waiter to our table three times before we had finished our entrées. “She needs to speak to you privately in the back,” the waiter said. Three times Karl dutifully went to see what she wanted. She told him she was having heart palpitations; would he just listen to her heart?
“Wow,” I said, when he came back to the table.
Finally, the owner gave up all pretense and brought her racing heart to our table, sitting in our booth very close to Karl. She was stunning, an ice-white blonde with blue eyes and cheekbones so prominent they looked almost painful. She put her hand on his wrist and asked him when he planned to call.
“You’re in serious trouble,” I said when we got in the car. His manners were too good not to go when he was called away, and they were too good not to realize that lengthy, repeated absences constituted bad manners. He called me se
veral times that week to talk. He said he just wanted to be married, to his wife, to someone, but he couldn’t possibly exist in his present state.
When Gautama achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha, Lord Brahma was so moved that he came down to earth and knelt before him. Lord Brahma asked that the Buddha teach the dharma because there were so many people on earth who were living in a state of terrible suffering and this true path could ease the pain of many. The Buddha was reluctant at first because he didn’t see his wisdom as being easily transferable. Everyone had to learn the dharma for themselves. But the Buddha practiced compassion, and so he was moved. He agreed to help all he could with the knowledge he had found.
I’m sorry—am I comparing myself to the Buddha? Yes, in this one small instance, I am. I had used my knowledge and my experience to save myself and now I had the chance to step beyond my life of happy self-preservation and save someone else. Like the Buddha, I was hesitant. I knew that I would be taking on something enormously complicated. Of course this was not exactly altruism on my part. Karl was so handsome and charming and lost, there was something irresistible about him. But he wasn’t my type. I liked men who could be found on the couch reading Proust in the middle of the day, men who were boyish and broke, who hung on to outdated student IDs, who rode bicycles and smoked at the same time. Karl had no existential angst as to whether or not his life had meaning. He put on a beautiful suit every morning and went out to do important work, not writing book reviews but saving human lives (and doing it with none of the fanfare I witnessed in those book reviewers). It seemed to me that dating outside one’s natural inclinations fit perfectly within my mother’s dictum. Here was a man I liked, a man who was tumbling so thoughtlessly towards a second marriage that a second divorce seemed the likely outcome. I could possibly talk him out of the mistake he was poised to make, or at the very least offer him a little safety until he pulled himself together. I could keep an eye on his two teenaged children, because, operating from a wealth of experience, it seemed to me they stood to lose the most in a reckless second marriage. The third time Karl and I went out I kissed him; I told him I would help him. He said that he needed some help. Then he asked me to marry him.