A Marriage in Four Seasons

by Kathryn Abdul-baki

  “You’re right, I don’t,” she said. “Would it do any good?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would it make a difference if I kept saying I love you? To either of us?”

  “I just like to hear you say it. Don’t you want to say it?” He twisted the intricate silver ring on her middle finger, a piece of tribal jewelry she told him she’d bought in an Afghan bazaar. Its complex pattern seemed as convoluted as their discussion.

  “You don’t say it much, either, Richard.”

  “More than you do. Anyway, men don’t verbalize love as much as women.”

  She burst out laughing.

  “You know what I mean. Women are more emotional. I just find it interesting that you don’t talk about love.”

  “Interesting or troubling?”

  “Both.” He turned and stared into her eyes. They appeared murky in the dim light, like lake water that has absorbed the rich minerals of the surrounding soil. He longed to dive in and hit bottom, to discover what was really there.

  “What good would it do to say that we love each other all the time, Richard?”

  He took a deep breath. “It would make us feel closer.”

  She rolled over on top of him, stretching out long and digging a space between his legs with her own. Resting her chin on his chest, she continued to stare at him. “But I do feel close to you. Why else would I be here?”

  He smoothed stray curls from her face. “We have so little time together. It’s all we can do to pop in and out of the sack. I’d just like to feel there’s more to our relationship. Know what I mean?”

  “No,” she said, although he knew perfectly well that she had to know how much he missed her and that he was frustrated by these brief dates, which was how he’d come to see them.

  She laid her cheek on his rib cage, the heat of her skin searing him. “I love you, Richard.”

  He hugged her tighter, quickly cheering up. “I love you, too.”

  She lifted her head and smiled. “So, what’s next? Are we going to run off together?”

  He stared at her.

  “See?” she said, noting his surprise. “Why all the fuss? Why do you want me to profess undying love for you if you’re not going to do anything about it?”

  “I hadn’t thought you wanted—”

  “I don’t,” she said quickly. Then added almost to herself, “It’s all meaningless.”

  He raised himself up. “Don’t make it sound so hopeless. We can give this relationship meaning.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not meant to have meaning. It’s unnecessarily stressful to insist it does. Have no expectations or attachments, Richard. You’ll be much happier.”

  He felt a swell of irritation. “Maybe that works for you, Belinda, but I can’t help feeling attached to people I love. And I like having expectations in my life, something to work toward, something to motivate me.”

  She chuckled. “The only motivation you need is to enjoy yourself, to love what you’re doing. Don’t give abstract things unnecessary importance.”

  “That’s not enough for me.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself, but life is unpredictable. It’s unreliable and temporary. We’re all much better off looking at things rationally.”

  He looked away from her, an exasperating gloom creeping into his bones. He felt abandoned, as if she had physically left the room.

  “I feel so separated from you when you talk like that,” he said.

  She sighed, softly. “Separation is an illusion. Something we make up. We’re never separate from each other.”

  “Well, I can’t think of anything more absurd than to love someone and feel it’s all meaningless.”

  “But that’s what life is, Richard. Meaningless. There’s nothing more than here and now, no other meaning,” she said evenly. “We deceive ourselves into assigning things such significance. The only thing permanent in the universe is its transience. Life is revolving, coming and going all the time. That’s the beauty of it. And we have to go with the flow. Just a constant moving along. Perfection. But it’s best not to talk about it so much.”

  He did want to talk about it, though, or rather about them. He wanted her to wonder if they’d ever have a future together, to worry about the precariousness of their situation, to tell him she’d be broken-hearted if they split up; but she only seemed concerned with the present and their brief times together. Most men would have been grateful for such an undemanding lover, but Belinda’s detachment unsettled him. He was used to interdependence, like he had with Joy. He was becoming aware of his own rising neediness, and this made him uncomfortable.

  One afternoon in Brooklyn—he couldn’t even remember the name of the hotel—there was a sagging wooden curtain rod that made the entire room look lopsided, as if they were slowly sliding downhill. To right himself, he found he was tilting his head whenever he glanced at the window.

  He would always remember this room because it was where she did this maneuver while crouching behind him on all fours. She told him afterwards that some village women in Burma had taught it to her. He asked her to do it again, marveling that an American woman tourist could wheedle such raunchy details out of secretive Asian women, and he couldn’t see anybody, Burmese or otherwise, doing it any better than she.

  He laughed after the first time, astonished and almost embarrassed that her tugging on him like this could be so pleasant. He couldn’t begin to imagine Joy ever crouching that way or doing something so naughty. He told Belinda that, but to his surprise, instead of taking it as a compliment, she frowned and admonished him for being critical of Joy.

  Later, as they were getting ready to leave, out of the blue she asked him whether he and Joy were planning another baby.

  “No,” he said, flatly.

  “Why not?”

  “We tried for nearly a year. It didn’t happen. Now—I’m certainly not ready.”

  “What about her?”

  “She doesn’t seem to want to now.”

  “But you guys will in the future, won’t you?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. We’re just not thinking about it now.”

  “But she lost her baby. Can’t you give her another?”

  He looked at her, puzzled by her insistent tone. “I suppose I could, if it were safe and she wanted one—and if I wanted one. We tried once, and it didn’t work. So, subject closed.” He flashed back to those injections Joy had to give herself, the accompanying weight gain, the inevitable depression that seized both of them when each month turned up a negative pregnancy result.

  “But don’t you want one? Don’t you want to be a father?” she persisted.

  He sighed, impatient. “Not now. Can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure.” She fished around in her bag, pulled out a comb, fluffed up her bangs, then looked at him, a little sadly. “It’s not fair for her not to have a baby if she wants one. Having a baby is an act of faith. A child creates hope for the future.”

  “I thought you didn’t care about the future. I thought the present is all that matters.”

  “Living in the present doesn’t mean denying the future. You just don’t dwell in the future; but you consider it from here. Maybe Joy is the kind of woman who needs that positive pull. Having a child makes us go forward, no matter what. It opens us up to the universe in a way nothing else can.”

  “How would you know?”

  “It’s only logical. I don’t have to have given birth to know that by having a child, we go with the flow of life rather than blocking it by closing ourselves off in fear.”

  He looked at her. Was he closing himself off in fear? He had gone with the flow of the universe, had put his trust in the future, but he’d been lashed by the cold-heartedness of that universe. That universe had imploded around him in that instant in the delivery room. His breath had been ripped out of him. He was still crushed by the weight of guilt at what he might have contributed, even organically, to the infant’s
death. A part of him and that universe he once belonged to had died and would never come back.

  “Well, it’s not up to us. We have to wait,” he said, upset that they’d ended their intimate afternoon on this sad note regarding his home life.

  “There are other ways—”

  He interrupted her. “I know there are, but we’re not interested.”

  “Don’t you think you owe it to her—to both of you—to consider other options?”

  “Options?”

  “Artificial insemination? Or have you thought about adoption?”

  “I told you, we’re not interested.”

  “But have you looked into it? I have several friends who’ve had good luck with—”

  “We’re not adopting.”

  “Well, a surrogate, then. The baby would still be all yours. Lots of couples—”

  “Belinda! Damn! You’re pushing something you know nothing about, and you certainly do not know about our situation. I didn’t come here to see a marriage therapist. You’re ruining our time together.”

  She started, as if awakened from a trance. He had never barked at her like that.

  She now looked unhappy. “You have to be creative, sometimes. Don’t limit yourself with old thinking. Create what’s right for you.” She picked up her things, glanced at herself in the mirror, and smiled. “You’d make an excellent father.”

  Before he could respond, she quickly gave his cheek a peck, as if to apologize, and led him out of the room.

  11

  “Why do we always go to hotels?” he complained one afternoon over drinks at a Soho bar. The bar was near the NYU campus and was so jammed with college kids that he felt out of place. Even Belinda, although dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, looked older than the rest, more like a grad student.

  “I’d like to see your place for a change,” he pushed, feeling rebellious. “Aren’t you allowed to have guests?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am, and you’d like my place.” She’d already told him she rented the bottom floor of a house in Paramus not far from the preschool where she taught.

  “Well, I’d like to see it. Let’s meet there, next time.”

  “But I love hotels,” she said.

  “I just think your place would be more personal. We can cook dinner for a change.”

  She grimaced. “My cooking’s not that great.”

  “I’ll cook. I make a great coq au vin. It would be cozier, more real.”

  She sipped her beer. “Hotels aren’t real?”

  Despite his disappointment that the prospect of a shared domestic experience didn’t seem to excite her, there was foam on her top lip that he wanted to lick.

  “Hotels are temporary,” he said. “I want to feel more permanence.”

  “Permanence?” She smiled. “Life isn’t permanent, Richard. Life is a hotel. We’re all just guests in this big hotel on our way to somewhere else.”

  “Don’t go flaky on me.”

  “I’m just being realistic. Life is just one long space of waiting. Most of us are just waiting for our lives to start, waiting to be with the one we love, waiting for our children to be born and then to grow up. We’re always just waiting. It’s a human tendency, but we waste our lives that way. I find hotels comforting. By living in the present, we accept life’s transience and live each moment fully. And we don’t get attached to hotels. It would be different if we went to my place, or even to yours.”

  “We can’t go to my place,” he said.

  “I know, but if we could, there would be evidence everywhere of your other life, pictures of your wife or the family dog.”

  “Joy has a cat.”

  “A cat?”

  “Ophelia.”

  She smiled. “Shakespeare. But I couldn’t make love to you with Ophelia looking on and surrounded by all those reminders of your other life. In unfamiliar rooms, we can be anywhere we imagine, create our own reality. And,” she said, taking a breath, “hotel rooms remind me not to expect more than these moments with you. They remind me to stay in the now, Richard.”

  “Damn it, Belinda!” It frustrated him that she refused to think about them as an actual couple. “Our reality is whatever we make it. It’s wherever we are. Reality isn’t just my marriage or your work or the kids you teach. It’s you and me, too, in the now and after.”

  She leaned back, raised her hands behind her head and rested her head in them as though it were suddenly too heavy to be unsupported.

  His gaze traced the smooth crescent of her neck at the open collar. Then, to his annoyance, he noticed a young man at the bar staring at her, too.

  “Do you have a headache?” he asked.

  She opened her eyes. “No.”

  “You look tired.”

  She brought her hands down to her lap. “I’m fine.”

  “You know?” he said. “Sometimes I wonder what you see in me.”

  Her eyes widened. “Why do you say that?”

  “You love the exotic, and I’m not that, at all. You’re like a butterfly I’m constantly trying to net. Why don’t you fly off in search of other butterflies? Wouldn’t you be happier?”

  “But I don’t want a butterfly—”

  “What do you want?” he cut in, hearing the interrogator’s tone in his voice.

  She shrugged. “You’re stable. That’s what I love about you. And you’re always here.”

  “Here where?”

  “Wherever I am, you’re here for me. You’re dependable and strong. I love that about you.”

  He sucked in his breath. He hoped this wasn’t the entire story. He certainly didn’t want to find that her attraction to him was simply because she saw him as “stable” or “dependable.”

  The young man at the bar was still appraising her. “Let’s get out of here,” Richard said abruptly, summoning the waitress for the check.

  The waitress, a young girl with several pencils stuck in her twisted-up hair, looked at Belinda, then at him. He wondered if the waitress assumed he was a father coming to visit his jeans-clad daughter at college.

  The bed in the hotel creaked with each movement, and there was a ravine in the middle of the mattress that he kept sliding into.

  “You know you’re in the Village in a bed like this,” Belinda said with a snicker.

  “How do you find these places?” Richard asked, unable to hide his irritation.

  “Yellow Pages.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “This one, I did. I don’t know any place here, and I liked its name: the Concord. Sounds so posh, but I knew for ninety bucks there had to be a catch.”

  “The bed.” He pounded a pillow between them in the middle to fill in the dent.

  She folded her leg over the pillow and around him, curling next to him like a child. “You don’t enjoy hotels, Richard? I thought you traveled a lot.”

  He thought about this for a moment. “As a matter of fact, I don’t much like to travel.”

  She lifted her head with a start, staring at him as though to see whether or not he was joking.

  “I don’t,” he admitted, almost disappointing himself by the truth. “When I was growing up, my dad landed in one embassy after another, and so my brother and I had to travel to visit him. Some of it was fun, I guess, but it was nonstop at times. And we had to fly to the West Coast to visit our mother several times a year.” He’d already filled her in on his parents’ divorce. “I actually feel best when I’m at home.”

  She inhaled. “Wow. I can’t imagine life without travel. I once spent a week with a friend in Dubai. The Arab women there have their own wild parties at night, disco parties with dancing and painting their bodies with henna. They don’t need the men, at all. They wear these long, gold-embroidered gowns—like sparkly fireflies. I never saw so many gorgeous women having so much fun in one place. In the West, we assume they’re all downtrodden, miserable, and missing out on the freedoms the rest of us have. But I saw a bunch of joyful women having a blast.”r />
  Richard imagined the mad, estrogen-fueled scene. “I assume this was a moneyed bunch.”

  “It’s not all about money. I also spent time with some village women in Africa. There was no water to bathe in for weeks. Amazing what you can adapt to. They were all so kind to me. They made me bathe first so I wouldn’t run out of water. These experiences make me realize how fortunate I am here at home. And yet, I feel so alive seeing people cope with hardship.”

  “Well, I have no burning need to face the unknown so intimately,” he said, butting in. “And I like clean places. Yes, clean. I admit it. Besides, I feel I’ve traveled to enough weird places vicariously through you.”

  She turned on her back as though to contemplate this, then climbed back onto him, straddling him and sitting upright.

  He felt her heat radiating through his groin and cupped his palms over her breasts, reminded of the perfectly shaped Indian mounds in Arizona he’d explored as a kid.

  “I can’t imagine being confined to this sanitized country,” she said, pursing her lips. “New York at least has personality. But God, Richard, the world out there is so different. The best night I ever spent was in the Himalayas under the stars. And the markets of Marrakesh, the food grilled in the streets of Delhi, the spices, the flowers blooming over broken walls, garbage rotting . . .” She crinkled her nose. “I even like the stink of urine in the streets.”

  She paused, and then her voice dropped. “Only once was I really afraid. In Yemen. I saw a woman being raped.”

  He thought he misheard her. “What?”

  She nodded.

  He removed his hands from her breasts and placed them on her knees.

  “In Sana’a. Some mix-up in my visa landed me in a jail cell with a Bangladeshi housemaid who’d been arrested for stealing something. That night the jail guard came into our cell and climbed on top of her. Just like that. I called for help, but she shook her head for me not to. Thank God, it didn’t take him long. When he left, the woman told me he did that every night, just came in and raped her, but it was better not to complain.”