by Ann Patchett
I shook my head. “That’s the whole point,” I said. “I’m the only person you’re going to find who isn’t going to marry you.”
And I didn’t. For eleven years.
I don’t know how it happened. We weren’t particularly happy early on in our relationship. Seeing someone through a divorce means not always seeing them at their best. We broke up a couple of times, but then circled back to one another, connected by some sort of invisible string. Every year in September, the month in which we had started to date, we would say to each other, Should we keep doing this for another year? For the first several years we were never very sure, and then we were. I didn’t want to stay in Nashville, but somehow I never left. Then David called me out of the blue. I hadn’t heard from him in years. “I hear you’re marrying some doctor,” he said. “I wanted to say congratulations.”
“You need to get a better source,” I said. He said that he missed me. “Are you missing me because you think I’m about to get married? Because I’m not. I’m really not.”
I didn’t hear from him again.
Time passed and I had a harder and harder time remembering why Karl wasn’t my type, or remembering what my type had been. It was as if we were growing into one another. He was smart and kind. My family loved him, I loved him. He encouraged me in everything I did. His answer to every question was yes. He was proud of me, and he never found a way to undermine my success or spoil a happy moment (a quality, I will tell you, that is hard to come by). And all that time he never stopped wanting to get married.
“We’re happier than the married people,” I said. “Why do you want to be like them?”
Besides, not being married had saved us. Had I said yes to Karl’s initial proposal, or really to any of the proposals that came in the years that followed, I don’t think we would have made it. By not living together, we could fight and then step away to cool off. I would think, At least we’re not married, which is so much better than thinking, I can’t stay married to you. I also thought our status was good for his children, who at this point weren’t really children anymore, but still, they’d had enough change to deal with. I bought a small house three blocks away, an easy walk, and Karl and I had dinner together every night. People bothered us endlessly about our arrangement, but as far as I was concerned, what we had wasn’t broken and didn’t warrant fixing.
Karl remained unconvinced, especially when we returned from vacations and he dropped me off at my house. Often he was angry at me at the end of vacations. “I don’t want to live this way anymore,” he would say.
But how could I, who carried divorce in my veins all the way back to Denmark, be absolutely positive that it wouldn’t happen this time? It would take an impossible leap of willful naïveté on my part to change my story now, no matter how much I loved Karl, I wasn’t naïve. And I wasn’t getting married.
One year, just before Christmas, Karl brought home a basket of cookies that some of the nuns he took care of at a local convent had made for him. There were a dozen different kinds of sweets, each wrapped separately in its own perfect little package. Karl had me unwrap them all until I found the one with a diamond ring inside. “Don’t worry,” he said, seeing the worry on my face. “It isn’t an engagement ring. This is a you’ve-been-here-a-really-long-time-and-you-deserve-a-nice-ring-without-getting-married ring.”
Which made it the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Months later, I was having dinner with my friend Beverly in New York and she asked me about the ring. The two women at the next table, who were so close they might as well have been having dinner with us, asked if they could see the ring too, and I gave them my right hand. “When are you getting married?” one of them asked.
I explained that I wasn’t getting married, that this was just a ring from the person I loved.
The other woman at the table took my hand. “Does he want to marry you?”
I told them that he did.
“Wait a minute, he’s a good guy and he loves you and he gives you this ring and wants to marry you and you’re not going to marry him?”
“And he’s good-looking,” Beverly said, egging them on. “And he’s a doctor.”
“I just don’t want to get married,” I said.
The women looked at me with crystalline loathing. “Then you should give him back,” one of them said, and they both returned to their dinner.
Give him back to whom, I wondered. To them?
The years go by in a perfectly fine life until the day Snow White takes a bite of the apple and falls to the floor. The Buddha sits down beneath the lotus tree and vows not to move until he has achieved enlightenment. Everything stops, and that is the moment of change. This is the story of a happy marriage.
Karl decided to go to the Mayo Clinic to have a physical. He’d never done anything like that before. In fact, he never got physicals. If he made an appointment to see one of his partners, he’d wind up never going, and if he did go they would just sit around and talk. He’d only be gone one night, and no, he didn’t want me to go with him.
“Is everything all right?” I asked. “Do you feel all right?”
He told me he was fine.
It was the beginning of March. I drove him to the airport early in the morning. He didn’t call until that night.
“Well,” he said. “I failed a test.”
I was standing in front of my living room window, staring out at the pitch-black dark. “What test?”
There had been an abnormal treadmill test, and then an echocardiogram that showed his heart beating at half its normal function. The left ventricular ejection fraction was at twenty-five percent. Normal was fifty-five percent. They had scheduled an arteriogram for the morning.
“I’m coming up,” I said.
“Don’t come up,” he said. “We’ll know more after the test. It’s probably all going to be fine. And anyway, there’s supposed to be a blizzard.”
I was pacing a circle through my house: living room, kitchen, dining room, living room, kitchen, dining room, again and again while my dog followed behind. I could not stop walking. Neither Karl nor I was alarmist by nature but I was feeling decidedly alarmed. I was at the airport first thing the next morning.
“The plane might get to Minneapolis,” the ticket agent told me. “Might. Or they could close the airport and you’ll wind up getting rerouted. But even if you make it that far there’s no way you’ll get a flight to Rochester. It’s a whiteout.”
I said I’d give it a try.
All these years I had thought to be afraid of only one potential ending: by not marrying Karl, we could never get divorced. By not marrying him, he would never be lost to me. Now I could see the failure of my imagination. I had accounted only for the loss I knew enough to fear. I sat in the boarding area. The flight to Minneapolis was delayed indefinitely due to heavy weather. “The way things are looking up there, we don’t know when we’ll be able to go,” the agent announced over the loudspeaker, but then two minutes later she came back on. “Let’s go right now,” she said.
Clearly, this was a plane full of Minnesotans going home, not Nashvillians heading north. Everyone trudged on board without blinking and we flew away. “Lotta snow up there,” the pilot said.
In Minneapolis, the situation was considerably worse. There were maybe twenty of us waiting for a small commuter plane to Rochester while we watched the snow beat into the windows. Rochester was having its worst blizzard in ten years. I looked at my watch. Arteriogram time. I had figured out everything except what I was supposed to do without him.
The pilot came and stood behind the ticket counter. “It’s bad up there,” he told us. We stared back at him, buried in our coats and hats and scarves. “What do you say, give it a try?” We stood up together, all of us one unit. We wanted to try.
Of course you know the plane did not go down in the blizzard.
This is a true story and I am here to tell it, but it occurred to me for the entire fifty minutes of the flight that my being killed while trying to get to Karl who was sick would place a burden of irony on the rest of his life. I was in a single seat, and in the single seat behind me was a father who was loudly and continually threatening his two sons across the aisle. The two sons, who were maybe ten and twelve, were beating each other, smacking and pinching and screaming like a couple of wolverines strapped into adjacent seats. Between the father and the sons, it was the worst behavior I have ever seen on a plane. Then, suddenly, all three of them stopped. That’s how bad the flight was. We were pitching sideways through the snow, plummeting, climbing, and in the same instant they each put their hands in their laps and did not make another sound.
How the pilot saw the runway, how he saw anything, I will never know. We were in the air and then we were skidding to a stop and the passengers clapped and cried. I couldn’t see an airport, a tower, a plane. It was as if heavy sheets of white paper had been taped over all the windows. “We’re here,” the pilot said. “Last one in. The airport’s closed.” We had arrived in Rochester ahead of schedule.
I made it to Karl’s hospital room about thirty seconds before they wheeled him in. “See?” he said to the nurse when he saw me there. His voice was bleary from anesthetic. “Didn’t I tell you she’d be here?” He took my hand. “They said no, she can’t make it. They said everything’s closed. And I said you don’t know Ann.” And then he drifted off to sleep.
Explain doubt to me, because at that moment I ceased to understand it. In return I will tell you everything I know about love.
They found no blockage in the heart, no arteriosclerosis. It was a parvovirus. He had a cardiomyopathy. The cardiologist explained to me that nearly half of the muscle tissue in Karl’s heart was dead. They would put him on a beta blocker called Coreg. He would stay on it for the rest of his life. If his ejection fraction, the volume of the blood the heart was able to pump, fell much lower—say, to twenty percent—he would then be eligible for a place on the heart-transplant list.
I asked the doctor if there was any chance that things could get better on their own, that the situation could improve with time.
“Heart muscle tissue doesn’t regenerate,” he said.
Two days and many tests later, we were in the airport in Rochester for a flight back to Nashville. The snow had stopped and was now plowed into towering banks. Karl and I stood together at the window, his arm around my shoulder, looking out across the field of white. “I guess when we get home we should get married,” I said.
Karl nodded. “I think so.”
“I’ll put my house on the market.”
“Good,” he said.
And that was it. After eleven years of discussion there was nothing more to say. “Every relationship you will ever have is going to end,” my mother had told me. If Karl needed my help, if there were decisions to be made in a hospital, I could do nothing as his girlfriend. He needed a wife. Maybe he had always needed a wife.
Karl admitted to me later that he had gone to Mayo thinking that there might be a problem. He was too tired. He was getting old too fast. Whatever had been wrong with him before, whatever I had not previously noticed, the Coreg made worse. If it was keeping him alive it was doing so at the expense of his health. He had trouble catching his breath, he had a hard time going up the stairs, he wasn’t to lift anything. Literally, he was gray. All I wanted to do was get married.
Karl’s illness gave us an enormous get-out-of-jail-free card where a wedding was concerned. We told our families that we were going to get married but that there would be no wedding. I had to move and we had Karl’s health to think about. A party would be a poor expenditure of our limited resources of energy. No invitations, no dress, no lists or rentals or presents, which, blessedly, meant no thank-you notes. This thing that would happen between us was a very private matter. My stepsister Marcie listed my house and four hours later it had sold. I moved what I owned using four boxes. I filled them up, drove to Karl’s, unpacked them, drove home again, filled them up, drove back, unpacked them. I looked around Karl’s house now as a resident instead of a regular weekend guest. For the first time I noticed how much empty space there was, empty closets, entire empty rooms. Pictures were leaned against dressers or hung at the wrong heights on preexisting nails. “It’s like you never actually moved in,” I said, though he had been living in the house for nearly ten years.
“I didn’t want to do too much before you got here,” he said.
We asked a friend of ours, a Catholic priest who ran a homeless shelter, if he would marry us. He said he didn’t marry people.
“Perfect,” I said. “Just swing by the house and sign the papers, or I can bring them to you.”
We got the marriage license, which in the state of Tennessee is good for a month, and then a week or so later our friend called and said he was going to a Kentucky Derby party in our neighborhood. He could come by. He sat in the living room with us for a few minutes and said some nice things about love, drank a glass of cranberry juice, signed his name, and went off to his party. Later I had my mother sign as a witness and I mailed the form in. We are as married as anyone.
We went out later that afternoon, bought a new lawnmower.
Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it? I had waited to marry Karl until I thought he was going to die. At night we’d lie in bed in the dark holding hands. “I’m such an idiot,” I said. “We should have done this a long time ago.”
“It’s exactly the right time,” Karl said.
There were two things about marriage that surprised me. The first was that I discovered Karl had been holding out on me. He actually loved me more than he had previously led me to believe. This is not to say he hadn’t loved me for the past eleven years, he had, but there was a portion of himself he kept to himself, thinking that if I wouldn’t marry him, then chances were at some point I would go. It was like finding another wing in a house you had happily lived in for years. It was simply a bigger love than I had imagined.
The second thing that marriage changed was that it opened up an enormous amount of free time in our days. We no longer had to have the conversation about why we weren’t married, neither with one another nor with the world of people who constantly inquired as to the status of our relationship. I had no idea how much time we’d spent on this topic until it was abruptly removed from the lineup. With all the extra hours, we could talk about politics and books and what should be done with the garden in the backyard. We could take in long stretches of companionable silence. I can’t imagine that anyone actually cared why we waited so long to get married; it was just a topic of idle conversation. But after eleven years it was a huge relief to have it stop.
Other than that? We were pretty much the same.
Coreg made Karl crave chocolate. He stacked up chocolate bars in the pantry, chocolate chips in the freezer. He carried half-eaten bags of M&M’s in his pocket. He had never cared about chocolate one way or the other and now he could hardly think about anything else. He wanted it for breakfast in pancakes. And then, about four months after we had signed the papers for our marriage, I noticed that the chocolate I was buying wasn’t going anywhere.
He had stopped taking the Coreg.
“You’re supposed to take it for the rest of your life,” I said, feeling a wave of panic building far, far from the shore, a wave that by the time it was fully realized would be big enough to crush the city we lived in.
Karl shrugged. “I really didn’t like it.”
“You probably wouldn’t like dialysis either, but that doesn’t mean you can stop.”
“Well,” he said, “I stopped the Coreg.” He was completely untroubled by this. It was as if all he was telling me was that he had finally found a way to stop eating so much chocolate.
Frant
ic, I went to talk with one of the cardiologists in Karl’s practice, who backed Karl up like a brother-in-arms. “I never thought Mayo was right,” he said.
Mayo wasn’t right? Was that even one of the options? Karl was supposed to go back to Rochester for a follow-up appointment, but he never seemed to get around to it. Finally, after a great deal of begging and foot-stamping and breath-holding on my part, he agreed to have another treadmill test and echocardiogram in Nashville. The results were normal. Ejection fraction normal. Heart normal. “Everything’s fine,” he told me. Dinner is on the table. The phone call is for you. Everything is normal.
I blinked. “We have three absolute truths,” I said, holding up three fingers for visual reference. “Absolute truth number one: half of the muscle tissue in your heart is dead. Absolute truth number two: heart muscle tissue does not regenerate. Absolute truth number three: there is no dead muscle tissue in your heart.”
“Correct,” my husband said.
“But it can’t be correct.” I wasn’t the doctor but this did not strike me as complicated. “One of those three things can’t be true and I want to know which one it is because if it’s the third one, and you really do have a problem with your heart that you’re now just ignoring, that’s a problem.”
