Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.
He presses his forehead against the cold window pane until it fogs over. The front and back doors are locked, and his keys do not open them. At the side of the cottage, he separates the thick growth of vines and peers into the bedroom window. Nothing remains of what had been in place when he left that morning.
He feels himself telescoping to a distance above, looking down on the scene, watching himself wander back to the front yard. Next to the bare willow tree he sees the sign: FOR SALE.
He heads for the pub in town.
Inside, the warmth and dim lights are a familiar welcome. It’s a busy Friday night, with only a few seats left at the bar. The sounds of end-of-week chatter fill the space. He sits furthest from the door, the wind rushing in, with wet snowflakes and the last of the autumn leaves. Avoiding the mirror behind the bar, he fixes his eyes on the array of bottles in various shapes and colors below it. He tries not to, but can’t help thinking about those early years when they came here together every Friday night, taking one of those cozy side tables, where other young couples are seated now, clinking glasses, smiling, their lives ahead of them.
He is remembering how they each would order a different cocktail of creamy pink, frothy green, sweet and fruity or the “grown up” ones—clear, amber-colored and bitter. It was all amusement, sipping from the other’s glass. He does not care to recall how many years it has been since he began coming here alone—first at lunchtime, then most nights.
He tries to lose himself in the music, the noise, the vodka, forget for now that she is gone, and all that is lost to him. After a second double vodka, his mind and memory cloud over, and his heart is a cold stone.
He drinks until the bartender leans into him, “Better get going.” This time, he gets up without protest, and sets his course for the few blocks back to the vacant building he used to call home. Home, home, home swirls in his mind like the frozen flakes sweeping around him.
He has already decided, he will stay the night in the empty house. When he arrives, he stares at the little cottage, trying to bring it into focus, remembering the sounds and warmth of it when he arrived, unsuspecting, the night before. Unsteady, he manages to make his way to his car to get the blanket—the one that’s been in the back seat since the children were small. He crunches over the frozen walkway to the back door, covers his fist with the blanket and shatters the window. He pulls out a few shards of glass, and edges his hand in to unlock the door. He turns up the heat to warm the icy cold, and stumbles into the bedroom they once had called “the marriage suite.” He wraps himself in the meager blanket printed with elephants and balloons, and falls to the floor.
After a sound sleep, he opens his eyes to morning light, feeling wide awake, despite a headache. The memories and self-reproach he warded off the night before flood in with a brilliance, like the sun shafts on the bare wall in front of him. He pads to the bathroom to splash his face. He notices pieces of the white shaving mug with blue sailboats—shattered on the floor—in nowise reparable.
He wants to make himself presentable, make a plan, make some calls, get everything straightened out once and for all. Instead, he returns to the bleak room, eases himself down to the floor and stares at the ceiling, where memories begin to appear as visions before him, some bitter and dark, some too sweet and too light to bear.
The Meeting
She was lovely, vibrant, open and gentle—and as lonely as he, both of them ambitious with the necessary, youthful illusions about life, love and themselves. They grew up in the small, seacoast town in New England, but hadn’t traveled in the same social circles. She went to private high school off the island; he had thought her snobby. He was a star soccer player at the public high school; she thought him arrogant. They had mutual friends, but not until they were home on spring break in their last year of college did they really “see” each other.
That summer arrived with promise in the air and wonder in each other, in the place they had lived all their lives, discovering it together as a new world The woods they had walked in as children were now, Arden forest itself,” she had said. They whiled away the days on warm beaches, chatted on sunny cafe decks, shared oysters and champagne at intimate tables overlooking the bay, and hiked on rocky paths high above the ocean.
In the evening lying together, ocean air wafting in and the light and color of sunset filling her small room, she read sonnets to him and said, “I feel I am in a Matisse painting.” He could not stop wondering if her interest in him would fade in the fall. Their first Christmas together, she gave him a self portrait she had attempted, reminiscent of Matisse. He copied lines from a sonnet she had once read to him.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
He rolled the parchment into a scroll, placed it in a tiny bottle and tucked it into a small boat he had carved out of driftwood.
He adored her for challenging him to think beyond their place and time; she loved that he urged her to be in the here and now, the simplicity of which she respected and felt was true. In short, each had sensibilities and qualities the other lacked; they felt a void being filled, a missing piece fitting into place to make a whole of their life puzzles.
One day they sat resting along Old Garden Path, he looking out across the rocky cliffs that drop off from a height to small slivers of seaweed-strewn strands. She was reading Albert Camus and often felt anxiety setting in at what she found in his existentialist musings, but also understood much of it as plain common sense.
“Listen to this. Camus says a person should know about himself,” she read, ‘like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects…know how far he can go, foretell his failures…and, above all, accept these things.’”
He remained gazing out to sea until she asked, “Well, what do you think?”
”What’s the point? I think it’s impossible,” putting his arm around her, “but I guess we still have a few years to figure it out—if that's the goal, but I don’t want to try to foretell my failures, whatever that means. I’d rather move toward my successes, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, yeah, sure, but if we don’t get some perspective now, I mean…”
“Oh, look, something out there just beyond the waves,” spotting a form bobbing and turning above the surface. They began running, keeping their eyes on the figure appearing and disappearing again into the blue-green waves. Further out, white sails drifted all in a row.
“A whale?”
“A seal?”
Then they lost sight of the shiny sleek form in the sun reflecting off the water. Overheated and exhausted, they dropped to the ground, laughing and holding each other.
He hears it now—her summer laugh, long since silenced. By the new year, they had planned on marrying one day and settling near that path with a view of sea meeting sky. But not until establishing careers in Boston—law for him, journalism for her. Many plans came into focus, but they married earlier than they had planned—with a child on the way. Then those plans were stretched out over many years until they vanished into a distant horizon.
He turns his eyes away from the ceiling, closes them for a moment and sits up. The sun has moved across the room. He wants to get up, but, he lies down again to see what else will be revealed to him, as if he has no control over the apparitions.
The Marriage
There she is—so young, fresh, beautiful. He can smell her scent; feel her softness, hear her voice, see her gestures—light and fine. It is pain to recall his urgent desire, fierce and fiery and later, his resentment that she had neither his intense, frequent appetite, nor his need for intimacy.
Then come images of the cottage passed on to her from an aunt who had stipulated that it be in her niece’s name only, warning that, “Mr Right was all wrong.” His senses fill with sights and sounds of how it once had been: manicured lawn, hydrangeas and lilacs; children playing under the willow tree, white sheets billowing out from the clothesline like sails in the wind. He thinks of the salty scent of them tucked into the bed. They had brought their babies home and lay with them there, she nursing and singing them to sleep, he yet unaware of life changing—slowly, but already shifting.
With free-lance writing and waitressing at the pub, she supported him through law school. He didn’t find a “suitable” Boston law firm, insisting on a practice in town, “safer and close to home.”
“The worst decision of your life and a curse ever after on you, our family and the town,” she later railed. For her, securing work, care of the children, private school tuitions, domestic chores, all came before him, he knew. Years expanded into decades, her intended brilliant career seemingly impossible, or so she thought, with children and responsibilities, and his practice languishing in lethargy amid town talk of questionable dealing and compromises.
As the past spreads out before him, even now, he feels the old desire—despite the years of refusals and excuses, she merely tolerating his lips, his hands, his weight, with the knowledge that she knew that he knew.
The vivid colors of their dreams faded; neither having measured up to the expectations of the other, or of themselves.
A Shattered Vessel
It all came with a searing clarity one night, on a business trip in San Francisco where he visited an old friend, recently remarried. The couple couldn’t wait to show him the courtyard they had designed and created together. It was edged with lush ferns in front of fragrant, night-blooming jasmine, its white blossoms wavering like sparks in the moonlight. He noted how kindly they spoke to each other, how he deferred to her, how she looked at him, how they finished each other’s thoughts, and held hands after dinner.
On the way to his room that evening, he caught sight of them through their half-opened door. In gentle embrace, they leaned into each other, gestures full of promise. He closed the door behind him and stood by the window, unable to move, a warm breeze drifting in off the bay. The light and weight of the evening was a revelation to him, but also an irrevocable blow.
That night he dreamed his wife came to him in the dark. When she drew near, in a white flowing robe, he saw it was all jasmine flowers. He inhaled the fragrance of their perfume. When he reached for her, she vanished, and he awakened. He intended to stay awake, review his life, put it into perspective, but he fell back to sleep.
When he arrived home the next day, he seemed to notice for the first time that the cottage was in sore need: rotting cedar shakes, cracked chimney, leaning picket fence, crumbing stone wall and unweeded gardens. Likewise, his office now seemed dark, damp and cluttered. He allowed himself to recall the old rumors about his practice and his marriage. He sensed how things were and were not, but didn't know what to do. He came to believe there was nothing to be done. He did nothing.
Again, he rolls over, props himself up, wanting to leave that house, but once more he gives over to the last scenes playing out in between futile questions:
What if I had? Why didn’t I? If only I could have.
The Impediments
It had been a long decline: the practice, the cottage, the marriage, he begging her to love him, she begging him to save his reputation and their family. He feels the sting of harsh, accusatory words exchanged one too many times and imprinted on the other’s soul. They seemed now to reverberate in the empty room.
They had once been pure vessels waiting to be filled to the brim with all that was lacking, wishing to be known by the other, to learn from the other what yet was unknown. What each needed was taken in at first, a thirst quenched, and savored. With time, the other’s deficits were exposed, and the draft grew bitter with resentment.
Don't see me as I am. Don't change me.
How many lovers discover that neither one receives what is longed for, what they think they want, need or deserve? To be free to develop separately, yet to live and grow together. How? Maybe that wisdom can be imparted in an instant, or take a lifetime, if ever. Lovers’ illusions and self-deceptions, unfounded rationales, too much pain and sore need, all intertwined.
Infinite are the ways of creating a glittering shell of appearance, while the core of suffering goes unseen, unnoticed, unacknowledged. What devices, defenses and denials mask the myriad roots reaching in every direction, compromising a once solid structure?
Quiet, quiet…hear the vines growing?
With daylight already fading, he lifts himself up. He runs his fingers through his hair and wraps the blanket around his shoulders. He goes to pick up the pieces of the shattered mug and puts them in his pocket. He wanders into each room, lingering a moment, then goes through to the kitchen. He covers the broken window with the blanket. Next to the magnet on the refrigerator: ”If you're going through hell, keep going,” he leaves a note:
I am a wandering bark.
Outside, the day’s sun has melted last night’s snow. Rivulets run through the cracks in the walkway. He pulls at a strand of ivy clinging to the cottage wall until it loosens and carries it with him to the pub.
*“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks/But bears it out even to the edge of doom” from Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare.
