By Brian Doyle -
I am not so stupid as to make any public comment
whatsoever about the character and nature and music of my marriage, which I
understand less about year by year anyway.
My marriage, like every other marriage that is or was or will be, is
different from every other marriage, and my marriage changes shape every 11
minutes or so, and my marriage, like every other marriage, is ultimately an
utterly ephemeral thing, a shared idea, a mental and emotional constrict which
both parties believe in to varying degrees at the same time or else there you
are at the bus stop muttering about how you used to be married. Also, the person to whom I am married, or to
whom I was married 11 minutes ago, is a mysterious, changeable country whom I
simply try to savour and appreciate rather than attempt to understand, or God
help us all, predict in any way, shape or form whatsoever, such predilection to
prediction being the surest road to muttering at the bus stop.
Yet there have been many riveting moments in my marriage
and I recount them here cheerfully so that you can tell me what they mean, for
I have no idea. Like when our three
children were hauled wet and startled from the salt sea of my wife’s womb and I
saw her spleen and thin layer of subcutaneous fat, which I thought was pretty
cool but she didn’t. Or the time we lost
a baby in utero. Or all the times she
has fallen asleep on my shoulder watching movies and the way she wakes with a
start and asks anxiously did she drool or snore? Or the way she becomes so absorbed in the
paintings she paints that she loses track of the time and hoots with surprise
when she realises how late it is. Or the
way she reads by the fire wrapped in a caftan.
Or the way she forgets the milk for her coffee is boiling and yelps with
surprise every single morning when it boils over. Or the way she loves to work in the yard,
rain, or sleet or shine. Or the way she
laughs from the very fibre of her being sometimes with a dear friend on the
phone. Or the way she loses her temper
sometimes suddenly and slashes and slices with a stunning tongue. Or the way she retires upstairs sometimes in
tears, overcome by exhaustion and rude children and unsubtle husband. Or the way she our love affair has waxed and
waned and ebbed and flowed and worn so many different coats of motley that
sometimes I conclude it has died and sometimes I am agog that it has been born
once again miraculously from ash.
Many times I have concluded that all marriages are nuts
and my marriage is nuts, but I find myself delighted by her company which is
endlessly stimulating sometimes in ways beyond hilarity or sensuality and
sometimes in ways so frustrating and heartrending that I go pray and walk and
hum and fold laundry and recall that I am no gleaming, glittering prize either,
I am just a guy, muddled and humming.
I remember everything, I am memorious, that’s my gift and
my curse, and I remember the way her voice once came shivering out of the dusk,
telling me about her dad who had just died whom she loved madly, she was his
last child, his late-surprise daughter, and I remember the quiver of joy in her
high-beam eyes when we danced on our wedding day, swinging each other so fast
and wild that if either let go we’d still be orbiting Neptune, and I remember
the million hours she rocked and consoled and bandaged and fed and cleaned and
snarled at and sang to our children, and the million hours we have wrestled
with ideas and locked limbs, and I know the sound of her sob, and the lilt of
her laugh. The lurch of her logic and the flare of her fury, yet after 20 years
I know her hardly at all; which may be crucial for marriage is a verb, and why
I am married, and why the most momentous moments of my marriage seem to me to
be incontrovertibly and inarguably the next 11, of they come, which I hope they
will, I pray they will, though no-one, including most of all me and my wife,
knows if they will come, or what they will bring, which seems to me somehow the
secret of the whole thing.
But what do I know?
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