Sometimes, it’s true, I grow bored, deeply bored, with our system of finely measured equivalences. Another time, when things weren’t going well with me, I woke in the night and feared she might be suicidally depressed when I rushed into the hall, I nearly collided with her, hurrying toward me with her arms held wide and a look of rescue in her eyes. One evening I thought of the answer to a crossword clue we’d both been stuck on the day before when I entered her room, I found her sitting up in bed, folded newspaper in hand, filling in the answer with a yellow No. If my first wife catches her hand in a door, I howl with sudden pain when I’m thirsty, she gulps down a glass of iced limeade if I knock into a table edge, a purple bruise shows on her leg if she trips on the edge of the rug, I fall to the floor. These arrangements are perhaps known to every marriage, but ours has developed more intimate refinements. I remind her of her appointment with the hairdresser on Tuesday at one, she makes sure I don’t miss my dentist’s appointment on Thursday at four I drive with her to her mother’s house in Vermont on the third weekend in July, she comes with me to my father’s house on the Cape for the second week of August I praise the trim lines of her new yellow sundress, she’s pleased by the crisp look of my new light-weave button-down. If, on a Sunday morning, I wake up late to find she’s made me a plate of big blueberry pancakes, just the way I liked them as a boy, with a square of butter melting its way in, then the next Sunday I’ll serve her a two-egg omelette with green peppers and chopped onions, exactly the kind she remembers from summers at the cabin on the island when she was a girl. I say only that, speaking strictly for myself, there could have been no other way.Ībsolute equals, heart-sharers, partners in love-that’s how we think of each other, my first wife and I. Whether this solution to the difficult problem of marriage is one that will prove useful to others, or whether my approach will add nothing to the sum of human knowledge, is not for me to say. Never have I considered myself to be a man with thirteen marriages but, rather, a man with a single marriage, composed of thirteen wives. Even though I married my wives one after the other, over a period of nine years, I never did so with the thought that I was replacing one wife with a better one, or abolishing my former wives by starting over. What’s clear is that I love my wives, each alone and all together, and can’t imagine a life without all of them. People sometimes ask, “Why thirteen wives?” “Oh,” I always say, putting on my brightest smile, “you can’t have too much of a good thing!” In truth, the answer is less simple than that, though the precise nature of the answer remains elusive even to me. My wives get along very well with one another, though their relation to me is more complex. Later, in the front room, we play rummy or pinochle in small groups, or sit talking in faded armchairs and couches. Each of my wives has her own room, as I have mine, but we gather for dinner every evening in the high dining room, at the long table under the old chandelier with its pink glass shades. We all live together in a sprawling Queen Anne house with half a dozen gables, two round towers, and a wraparound porch, not far from the center of town.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |