This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

  But the woman had remarried. Where did that leave us? “I thought it was one out of two,” I said.

  And maybe because he was feeling secure with his wife who was a thousand miles away, he shook his head. There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness. “Two out of three,” he said.

  When you think of that statistic, think of me. I’m the one who did it; I divorced. I pulled the moral fabric of this country apart.

  Time magazine ran an editorial not long after that by a man who cried out for “supervows” in this age of disposable marriages. Supervows would demonstrate a higher level of commitment. They would be part of a more serious ceremony. There would be promises, legal and binding, that the couple would submit to lengthy marriage counseling before divorce, that they would seek divorce only after being married a certain length of time. Divorce, the writer said, had become too easy. Waltz in, waltz out.

  Waltz in, maybe. Make marriage harder if you want to. Outlaw those Vegas chapels with the neon wedding bells, require marriage applications modeled after tax forms, but leave divorce alone. It’s grueling. I have never known anyone who went into a marriage thinking they would have to get out, and I have never known anyone who got out simply. To leave, you have to involve the courts. You have to sue the person you live with for your freedom. You have to disconnect your life from another life and face the sea alone. Never easy, blithe. Never.

  Nor do I think anyone should have to wait three months or six or nine, depending on the state, for a divorce to take effect. Termination is a serious business, but we do not need the state to mandate a waiting period so we can see if we really know our own minds. Three weeks after I left my husband, he called to say I had a week to come home or file for divorce. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even been thinking about divorce; I wasn’t planning any further than five minutes ahead. But since I knew at the end of the week I couldn’t go back, I called a lawyer.

  It turned out my husband was bluffing, thinking that a tough ultimatum would bring me back. When I told him I had filed for divorce, he told me he wouldn’t give me one. He refused to sign the papers. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where we had been living, contested divorces had a three-year waiting period. We would be legally married for three more years. What choice did I have? I settled myself in for the wait, but it wasn’t so long after all. One day about six months later the signed papers just showed up. My life in the mailbox, stacked between catalogues and the electric bill. I never knew what brought on the change of heart. I never saw him or spoke to him again. We were divorced.

  I have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn’t give herself because she was married. It didn’t matter to society that she had been wronged by her husband. They felt her life was over. Thanks to the modern age of divorce, my life is not. I am coming to see that as a blessing and not something to be ashamed of. I am starting to think that my life is a good thing to have. I do not believe that there were more happy marriages before divorce became socially acceptable, that people tried harder, got through their rough times, and were better off. I believe that more people suffered.

  Divorce is in the machine now, like love and birth and death. Its possibility informs us, even when it goes untouched. And if we fail at marriage, we are lucky we don’t have to fail with the force of our whole life. I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce. Like Communion, it is a slim white wafer on the tongue. Like confession, it is forgiveness. Forgiveness is important not so much because we’ve done wrong as because we feel we need to be forgiven. Family, friends, God, whoever loves us forgives us, takes us in again. They are thrilled by our life, our possibilities, our second chances. They weep with gladness that we did not have to die.

  (Vogue, April 1996)

  The Paris Match

  THERE ARE THINGS people do when they are first in love: they surprise one another with trips to Paris; they make reservations in impossibly expensive Paris restaurants; they have conversations about former lovers while they eat in those impossibly expensive Paris restaurants. All of these things can happen after years of marriage as well, but the chances are infinitely smaller.

  Karl and I had been together a little more than a year. He arranged the trip and I made the reservations for a very late lunch. I can’t remember how it all got started, but sitting in Taillevent, at such a beautiful table right in the center of the room, the conversation somehow turned to Mark. My relationship with Mark had been an amicable one that had come to a mostly amicable end. Karl’s question was if we had fought very often. Or maybe I asked Karl if he had fought with his ex-wife, and so in return he asked me about Mark.

  The waiter came and handed me a wine list the size of a tombstone. I turned the pages for a moment, the way I might have turned the pages of a calculus exam, with some interest and not a single spark of comprehension. “White,” I said, and Karl, who doesn’t drink, just shook his head.

  “The worst fight we ever had wasn’t exactly a fight,” I said. “We were playing a word game. When he told me about it I said I wanted to play, but then I couldn’t figure out the answer and he wouldn’t stop. He just kept playing it and playing it, and, I don’t know—”

  The waiter came to take our orders. We ordered something. Some food.

  “What?” Karl asked after the waiter had gone.

  I remembered the fight very clearly. We were in the car, and Mark was driving, and when we got to a red light I opened the door, got out, and walked through the traffic to the curb, something I have never done before or since. “I thought I was going to kill him.”

  “So what’s the game?” he asked.

  “It isn’t hard. That’s what’s so awful about it. Once I actually got it, it was simple.”

  Karl sat back. He was beautiful in the rich light, beautiful between the damask draperies and the thick white tablecloth. He rested his fingers against the heavy fork beside his plate. “Tell me how to play. I’m good at these sorts of things.”

  We hadn’t been together long enough to know that we shouldn’t talk about old lovers. We probably hadn’t been together long enough to go to Paris. No two people are ever together long enough to enjoy word games.

  The waiter returned and instead of bringing me a glass of wine, he poured the wine into my glass right from the bottle. This struck me as very sophisticated. Our appetizers came. They were something I wanted. Something I had chosen carefully. I remember that when I bit into whatever it was, I closed my eyes, stunned that anything could be so delicate, so delicious. “I say a word, and then I tell you if the word is or isn’t it. For example,” I picked up my wineglass. “It is glass, but it isn’t wine.”

  Karl nodded.

  “Now you can ask me one word, and I’ll tell you if it is or it isn’t, and we keep going until you figure out what the difference is.”

  “Is it a plate?” he asked.

  “It isn’t a plate, but it is a bottle.”

  He waited a minute. He thought it over. “I don’t get it.”

  “It takes some time,” I said. “It’s a rabbit, but it’s not a box.”

  He finished his appetizer, whatever it was. He didn’t offer me a bite. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a tree but it isn’t a leaf.”

  “I give up,” he said.

  “It’s Woody, but it isn’t Mia.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Tell me.”

  I went on for a while, not telling him, throwing out words in patterns that irritated him profoundly. The main course arrived. I can very nearly smell it now. It was so succulent, complex, divine, but I cannot for the life of me say what it was. “It’s pretty,” I said. “But it isn’t shoes.”

  “Stop it.”

  “It isn’t stop o
r go or wait.” Even as I said it, I could see myself stepping out of the car into traffic. It is traffic. I had told Mark I was through if he didn’t tell me the answer. I said it much more colorfully than that. But when the answer came to me later, an easy lightning bolt slicing open my head, I wasn’t angry anymore. I got it. It had taken me more than an hour but I got it, and that joy, so sudden and unexpected, was the reward.

  The waiter kept refilling my glass, though I don’t remember asking him to. The desserts were sublime, and we pushed them aside. The bill—I do remember that much—was $350. We may as well have piled the money on the table and put a match to it. This had been the best meal either one of us had ever had in our lives, and we missed it.

  “I’m glad I found out now what kind of person you are,” Karl said. He had never been so angry at me, not before or since. I knew how he felt. As we were walking away from the restaurant, I broke down and told him. I did it because he was walking so quickly and my heels were too high and I didn’t know how to get back to the hotel alone. I told him, and I ruined everything. Mark had been smart to weather my fury so that I could find the answer for myself, because once I found it, I forgave him. Karl, on the other hand, just stayed mad. He told me I was cruel and cold, and the next night at L’Arpège, he told me it was over.

  “You’re not breaking up with me in a fish restaurant in Paris,” I said. “Not over this.”

  And so he didn’t. We stayed together for ten years after that, and then we married. It has been a very happy union. Our fight in Taillevent is a tattoo on our relationship, though. Neither of us will ever forget it, but it all strikes me as funny now. The sad part is that the meal is gone forever. It’s a fault of our brains to remember the fight while forgetting the sole. Was it sole? I know what I said, but I can only dream about what I must have eaten.

  (New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2006)

  This Dog’s Life

  IT HAPPENED LIKE this: after a walk in the park, Karl and I saw a young woman sitting in a car talking to a dog. Even from a distance, through the hard glass of the windshield, we could tell this was an exceptional animal. Karl, never shy, tapped on the window to ask her what kind of dog it was. We live in Nashville, where people do things like this and no one is frightened or surprised. The young woman told us the sad story: the dog—who was on closer viewing nothing but a mere slip of a puppy—had been dumped in a parking lot, rescued, and then passed among several well-intentioned friends, none of whom were allowed to have dogs in their apartments. The dog had finally landed with the young woman in the car, who had been explaining to said dog that the day had come to look cute and find a permanent home.

  The puppy was doing a knockout job at being cute. She was small and sleek and white. The sun came through her disproportionally large ears and showed them to be as pink and translucent as a Limoges teacup held up to the light. We petted. She licked. We went off to think it all over. In the end we came back for the dog.

  I didn’t think it would be this way. I thought when the time was right I would make a decision, consider breeds, look around. The truth is, I too was a woman who lived in an apartment that didn’t allow dogs. But when fate knocks on the door, you’d better answer. “Let’s call her Rose,” Karl said.

  I was breathless, besotted. My puppy tucked her nose under my arm and the hundred clever dog names I had dreamed up over a lifetime vanished. “Sure,” I said. “Rose.”

  All I had ever wanted was a dog. Other girls grew up dreaming of homes and children, true love and financial security; I envisioned shepherds and terriers, fields of happy, bounding mutts. Part of my childhood was spent on a farm where I lived in a sea of pets: horses and chickens; half a dozen sturdy, mouse-killing cats; rabbits; one pig; and many, many dogs—Rumble and Tumble and Sam and Lucy and especially Cuddles, who did justice to his name. Ever since that time I have believed that happiness and true adulthood would be mine at the moment of dog ownership. I would stop traveling so much. I would live someplace with a nice lawn. There would be plenty of money for vet bills.

  At home, the puppy Rose played with balls, struggled with the stairs, and slept behind my knees while we watched in adoration. It’s not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as “the dogless years,” but I suspected things could be better. What I never could have imagined was how much better they would be. Whatever holes I had in my life, in my character, were suddenly filled. I had entered into my first adult relationship of mutual, unconditional love. I immediately found a much nicer apartment, one that allowed dogs for a ridiculously large, nonrefundable deposit. Since I work at home, Rose was able to spend her days in my lap, where she was most comfortable. We bonded in a way that some people looked upon as suspicious. I took Rose into stores like the rich ladies at Bergdorf’s do. I took her to dinner parties. I took her to the Cape for vacation. As I have almost no ability to leave her alone, when I had to go someplace that foolishly did not allow dogs, I’d drive her across town and leave her with my grandmother.

  “Look at that,” people said, looking at me and not Rose. “Look how badly she wants a baby.”

  A baby? I held up my dog for them to see, my bright, beautiful dog. “A dog,” I said. “I’ve always wanted a dog.” The truth is, I have no memory of ever wanting a baby. I have never peered longingly into someone else’s stroller. I have, on occasions too numerous to list, bent down on the sidewalk to rub the ears of strange dogs, to whisper to them about their limpid eyes.

  “Maybe you don’t even realize it,” strangers said, friends said, my family said. “Clearly, you want a baby.”

  “Look at the way you’re holding that dog,” my grandmother said. “Just like it’s a baby.”

  People began to raise the issue with Karl, insisting that he open his eyes to the pathetic state of maternal want I was so clearly in. Being a very accommodating fellow, he took my hand. With his other hand he rubbed Rose’s ears. Part of my love for Karl is his love for Rose. Her favorite game is to be draped over the back of his neck like a fox-fur stole, two legs dangling on either shoulder. “Ann,” he said. “If you want to have a baby . . .”

  When did the mammals get confusing? Who can’t look at a baby and a puppy and see the differences? You can’t leave babies at home alone with a chew toy when you go to the movies. Babies will not shimmy under the covers to sleep on your feet when you’re cold. Babies, for all their many unarguable charms, will not run with you in the park, or wait by the door for your return, and, as far as I can tell, they know absolutely nothing of unconditional love.

  Being a childless woman of childbearing age, I am a walking target for people’s concerned analysis. No one looks at a single man with a Labrador retriever and says, “Will you look at the way he throws the tennis ball to that dog? Now there’s a guy who wants to have a son.” A dog, after all, is man’s best friend, a comrade, a pal. But give a dog to a woman and people will say she is sublimating. If she says that she, in fact, doesn’t want children, they will nod understandingly and say, “You just wait.” For the record, I do not speak to my dog in baby talk, nor when calling her do I say, “Come to Mama.”

  “You were always my most normal friend,” my friend Elizabeth told me, “until you got this dog.”

  While I’m sure I would have enjoyed the company of many different dogs, I believe that the depth of my feeling for Rose comes from the fact that she is, in matters of intelligence, loyalty, and affection, an extraordinary animal. In the evenings, Karl and I drive Rose across town to a large open field where people come together to let their dogs off their leashes and play. As she bounds through the grass with the Great Danes and the Bernese mountain dogs, I believe that there was never a dog so popular and well adjusted as mine (and yet realize at the same time that this is the height of my own particular brand of insanity). The other dog owners want to talk about identifying her lineage, perhaps in hopes that one of her cousins might be located. It is not enough for Rose
to be a good dog, she must be a particular breed of dog. She has been, depending on how one holds her in the light, a small Jack Russell, a large Chihuahua, a rat terrier, a fox terrier, and a Corgi with legs. Currently, she is a Portuguese Podengo, a dog that to the best of my knowledge was previously unknown in Tennessee. It is the picture she most closely resembles in our Encyclopedia of Dogs. We now say things like “Where is the Podengo?” and “Has the Podengo been outside yet?” to give her a sense of heritage. But really, she is a Parking Lot Dog, dropped off in a snowstorm to meet her fate.

  I watch the other dog owners in the park, married people and single people and people with children. The relationship each one has with his or her dog is very personal and distinct. But what I see again and again is that people are proud of their pets, proud of the way that they run, proud of how they nose around with the other dogs, proud that they are brave enough to go into the water or smart enough to stay out of it. People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.

  When a dog devotes so much of her energies to your happiness, it only stands to reason you would want to make that dog happy in return. Things that would seem unreasonably extravagant for yourself are nothing less than a necessity for your dog, so Karl and I hired a personal trainer for Rose. We had dreams of obedience, of sit and stay and come, maybe a few simple tricks. (She didn’t really seem big enough to drag the paper inside.) I was nervous about finding the right trainer and called my friend Erica for moral support, but she was too busy trying to get her four-year-old son into a top Manhattan preschool to be sympathetic to my worry about finding the right trainer for my puppy. The trainer we ultimately went with was the very embodiment of a dog authority figure. After a few minutes of pleasant conversation, during which Rose jumped on his shoulder and licked the top of his head, he laid out the fundamentals of his regime.