Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

by Ada Calhoun

  When we choose someone to marry, part of what we promise is that we will not forget that at some point, in the glow of a parking lot far from home, someone else is sure to look like a god or goddess. Maybe I need to remember that when it comes to monogamy, opening the door a crack makes it hard to keep the wind from blowing it all the way ajar, letting in more bad metaphors about doors and windows. Maybe I need to remember that I would be miserable living in Philadelphia.

  Ultimately, Damayanti was able to pluck Nala from the row of gods. How?

  I couldn’t remember, so I texted the Sanskrit chairman.

  “She doesn’t really recognize the king,” he wrote back, “but she recognizes the gods are not the king. There are various markers of gods: They don’t blink. They float about six inches off the ground, which means there is no dust on their feet. Their garlands never wilt. And they never sweat.”

  Nala is a human being, which means he has things the gods don’t: dust, sweat, wilting—imperfections. Other men—the heartthrob on tour, the Sanskrit chairman—they are so perfect, superhuman, gods of adventure and attention. They are too perfect. They aren’t standing on the ground but floating just a few inches above it. The second I chose one, I would drag him down into the dust. He would sweat, and his garlands would wilt.

  Modern relationship sage Tyler Perry says that when we’re married, we need to keep in mind the 80/20 rule. Our partner, he says, will give us 80 percent of what we want. When we look at other people, we see only that they have the other 20 percent. Of course, if we ever left our partner for that other person, we would again get only 80 percent of what we want, just a different 80 percent—new joys, new problems. And looking around, we would still see the missing 20 percent in other people.

  I wouldn’t want to trade in my current problems for new ones with someone else.

  And yet, sometimes other people are so great. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have our 80 percent at home and then a few 20 percents scattered about elsewhere—and by “we,” I mean me and not Neal?

  “There’s that saying, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, too,’ ” says a friend of mine who, when I met her, was in a three-way relationship with her husband and another man. “But I hate that expression. Shouldn’t it be ‘You can’t eat your cake and then still have it?’ In France it’s ‘You can’t have the butter and also the money to buy the butter.’ That’s better. But also, if you could find some way to have both things, shouldn’t people say, ‘Well done!’ rather than judging you?”

  I don’t think her wanting more than 80 percent was necessarily the cause, but I ran into her recently and she told me that she and her husband had separated.

  The romantic fairy tales we grew up with—where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene—are not useful for grown-ups. We have to keep living after the credits roll, navigating our way through broken appliances and aging parents and temptation-filled business trips.

  But where the Brothers Grimm are useless, Sriharsha offers some comfort. Nala and Damayanti eventually marry. They encounter good luck and bad luck, jealousy and redemption. At one point, he is turned into a troll. She almost runs off with someone else. They come back together. Their marriage is full of tragedy and chaos and mystery and triumph, and it lasts until death. It’s one of the great love stories of all time.

  * “She talks like she’s pretty,” a friend of mine once said about another woman we know—a vicious thing to say, but the woman really did talk that way. For women, admitting that you might have any kind of attractive power constitutes bad manners. This makes it tricky to write about sex without sounding like you’re saying, “Look, someone wants to sleep with me!” I realize this presents you with an obligation to scrutinize my author photo.

  Oh good, you’re back.

  TOAST 7

  “Love Is Strong as Death”

  No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I’ve been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface.

  —Madeline L’Engle, The Irrational Season, 1977

  SINCE GETTYSBURG, Oliver has cycled through a number of obsessions. One of his leading interests has been World War II, enhanced by the knowledge that two of his great-grandfathers were soldiers (one fought in the Battle of the Bulge and earned a bronze star, and another fought at Guadalcanal and earned a bronze star and a purple heart). His other fixation is Pokémon, because what child doesn’t love to baffle and defeat his parents? (“Has an adult ever won a Pokémon battle?” I asked. “Not with that attitude,” said a friend.)

  Recently, he became fascinated by the Titanic. One afternoon we watched the sadder-than-we’d-recalled A Night to Remember. “That wasn’t the best idea we ever had,” Neal said, as we took a tear-stained Oliver to the playground, which we hoped would distract him from the tragedy of noble passengers giving up their seats and perishing in the ocean.

  Luckily, Oliver ran into a friend, and they took turns riding Oliver’s bike through puddles in the twilight shadow of the defunct Domino Sugar factory. It was what they call the violet hour, but that playground glowed something beyond; it looked like it was made of gold. It began misting, but we didn’t make them stop playing. We had another hour until it was time to think about dinner. And they were laughing and the rolled-up cuffs of their size 10 pants were soaking up rain from puddles. There are moments in my life that from the outside looked like nothing but that I will never forget until I die, and that is one of them.

  A man I know who just celebrated his thirty-ninth wedding anniversary tells me that he thinks one gift of a long marriage is a new kind of quiet:

  A number of years ago, Gerry and I were coming home from the opera and were waiting for a crosstown bus. As is her wont when we walk down the street together, we either hold hands or, more commonly, she has her arm looped through mine. As we waited in the bus shelter with a fair number of people, there was a drunk who, upon seeing Gerry’s arm wrapped in mine, pointed at us and said, “You two have been together a long time! What’s your secret?” I turned to him and said in a loud voice so everyone could hear, “We don’t talk to each other!” Needless to say, everyone cracked up. But later I decided that it’s true: marriage is not only the talking to each other, but also the silences, which are also expressive. After people are together for a long enough time, it is perhaps the silent communication that becomes more meaningful and also more cherished. That’s something that I don’t think not-married people or newlyweds can understand.

  “Marriage is built upon grace,” writes the Christian writer Edward S. Gleason. “It is not a contract that depends upon the exchange of goods and services, based upon what each does to and for the other. Marriage is a condition of being, not doing. Marriage is based on who we are with one another. Marriage lives and grows with grace, and without grace marriage dies.”

  Virginia Woolf called these instances of grace “moments of great intensity,” Thomas Hardy “moments of vision.” Woolf says the dailiness of life is oppressive, but that every so often—on the fifth day of the week, she suggests—“a bead of sensation (between husband and wife) forms which is all the fuller and more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. . . . How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions?”

  Widows and widowers often say that what they remember with the most emotion aren’t the big moments but the little eccentricities, as cherished in retrospect as they were annoying in life. Robin Williams’s character in Good Will Hunting missed his wife’s tendency toward flatulence in her sleep. In About Alice, Calvin Trillin recalls that his elegant late wife “might respond to encountering a deer on a forest path by saying, ‘Wowsers!’ ”

  “Squeezlefleeps! Flernst!” Neal says, calling our son to dinner. “Wash your hands! Shuntz! Garf! Strezel! It’s deeeener time!”

  If you’d asked me w
hen I got married if I would ever tolerate insane accents and made-up words in my home, I would have said no. I do resist sometimes. I was livid when Neal used “Squeezlephleeps” in a game of Hangman, because Squeezlefleeps is totally spelled with an f. But mostly I’ve succumbed.

  Recently I was working on a story about a child welfare reform referred to as “baby courts.” At dinner, I mentioned how that day I’d had to witness the struggles of families plagued with chaos and addiction and suffering.

  “Did you say this reform is called ‘baby courts’?” Neal said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He was quiet for a minute and then in a high-pitched baby voice he screamed, “I’m out of order? You’re out of order! The whole damn system’s out of order!”

  Oliver laughed so hard he fell out of his chair.

  How might we learn to appreciate our spouse’s quirks in the moment? How might we teach ourselves to miss the present the way we miss the past?

  While our kids watched cartoons, a friend of mine told me how she does it:

  Last night I called my husband to find out where he’d put our daughter’s medicine, because he usually forgets to give it to her in the morning and so I know where it will be: wherever I left it the night before. But this time, it wasn’t there. He said, “Check under the couch.” Apparently, it had fallen, and in the rush to get the kids out the door, he hadn’t looked for it. I felt a flood of rage. I come home from working all day and now, while making dinner for the kids, I have to go searching under the couch? I could have yelled at him. Years ago, I would have. Instead, I shook my head and got on with my evening. I think of being married as being in the Bon Jovi song “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Or a dodgeball game where you’re together on one side and the whole world is on the other. Feeling exhausted or getting a crush on someone or being broke or having a sick kid—it’s all just another ball aimed straight at your face.

  What she’s describing, more or less, is the lesson of the wedding-ceremony staple from the Song of Solomon in which the bride says, “My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” In others words, You and me, babe, against the world.

  When Neal eats soup, his teeth touch the spoon: clack. He slurps coffee. He tends to avoid using a knife, because he never learned how to properly cut meat, so he will bring large strips of steak to his mouth and gnaw away. He eats salad with his hands. He gets water out of the fridge in the morning, and when he does he brushes past me in our tiny kitchen while I’m making myself coffee, and how hard is it to wait two minutes?

  When he gets annoyed, he sometimes curses loudly, even if I’m sleeping, even though he knows once I’m awake I never fall asleep again.

  He talks so much. He loves to talk—especially, it seems, when all I want is to bury myself on the couch in my laptop and headphones. I listen to him talk about the Mets game and struggle to keep looking into his eyes while behind mine I am far away, in the Internet netherworld. And then he’s annoyed that I’m distracted.

  “You look like a forest creature startled in a clearing,” Neal said on one of these evenings. “And all you’re thinking is ‘Should I bolt now? How about now?’ ”

  I try to be better. I make an effort to close my laptop and to say, “Tell me why you’re so happy about the latest Mets trade.”

  He tries, too. He no longer tells me every detail of his day. But still our natures creep through around the edges of our good intentions.

  “God, do you have to look at your phone right now?” he says, and I did not even notice that I’d reached for it while he was talking.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to do something,” I say.

  “I know: ‘Just a minute,’ ” he says.

  I feel guilty for a second, then angry—I have to work—and then numb as I lose myself in what I wanted to do that wasn’t talking about how our team still needs a solid middle reliever.

  And over and over again it goes, year after year.

  I could assemble an impressive binder of data points explaining why we shouldn’t have lasted even this long: boredom, wanderlust, fights over money, over sex, over parenting; fundamental differences in temperament. But staying married does not benefit from who’s-done-more, who’s-behaved-worse lists. Once my mother, upon hearing a friend of hers rattle off a list of all the ways in which her husband had proved disappointing, said, “Marriage is one game where the second you start keeping score, you’ve lost.”

  In 1912, as the Titanic was sinking, a woman named Edith Corse Evans pushed her friend Caroline Brown ahead of her into a lifeboat seat. Evans drowned that night in the cold water, one of only a few first-class women not to make it out alive.

  I like to think she died happy, knowing that Brown’s children would see their mother return to them. A plaque at Grace Church in Manhattan says, “in the midst of life [Evans] gave herself for others . . . trusting in Him who hath made the depth of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over. Love is strong as death.”

  Viktor Frankl says the mental image of his wife helped him survive in a concentration camp. “Had I known then that my wife was dead,” he writes, “I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.’ ”

  A few years ago, Neal and I were fighting—an awful fight, our worst as of press time—and I was happy to be attending a wedding alone in New Orleans and staying with an old friend who had just had a baby.

  “Do you ever fantasize about your husband dying?” I said as we pushed her daughter’s stroller along the sidewalks of Mid-City. “I mean, not that I would ever kill Neal, of course, but sometimes I imagine, just, poof.”

  She was quiet for several seconds, long enough for the awfulness of my statement to sink in. Yes, she and I had kept each other’s darkest secrets dating back to elementary school. But this might have been over the line.

  “Well,” she said finally, “what I usually imagine is the widow part. Everyone would feel sorry for me. They would bring me food and flowers. I’d find out who’s had crushes on me. And I’d have an excuse for wearing rumpled clothes every day. Really, what’s not to fantasize about?”

  One evening, Oliver, inventing ever more ways to delay brushing his teeth, enlisted me in a volleyball-like game with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag he’d inflated like a balloon. We were playing to seven points, and he was already up 4–0—having, I should say, a significant playing-field advantage in that the coffee table was right behind me and so he could throw the bag behind the table to score a point pretty easily. Then on one turn he surprised me by throwing it straight. Unprepared, I caught it right in front of my face, but not before the little plastic lock on the bag had scratched my cornea, causing me to crumple in pain. “You need to make up a better story,” Neal said when he got home from work and saw me with an ice pack on my eye. “There’s nothing less dignified than being blinded by a plastic bag.” Injuries often come in waves in our household. Soon after the bag incident, I was at the library, trying to meet a deadline, when I got a call from the school nurse. Oliver likes visiting the school nurse because he loves going home early when he can convince her that a cough or a playground scrape warrants it. So I am usually suspicious when I see that number pop up on my phone. But I stepped into the hallway to answer, and the nurse sounded more concerned than usual. She said he’d fallen on the playground playing tag with a friend and hit his head on the concrete. I asked to talk to him, and when she put him on, he could barely talk he was crying so hard.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said, then threw my stuff into my bag and ran to the subway.

  “It could be a concussion,” the nurse said when I arrived.

  I took him to his doctor.

  She conducted a neurological exam that showed he was probably fine but that we would have to do “concussion protocols”
just to be safe. That meant waking him up every three hours that night and forbidding him from going to school or doing homework for a couple of days. Oliver smiled as if she’d put him on a strict regimen of ice cream and puppies.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” she said as she filled out the paperwork.

  “An inventor,” he said.

  “What are you going to invent?”

  “I have a lot of designs,” he said. “I’d like to tell you about them, but I don’t have patents yet, so . . .” Then he told her about various inventors who were robbed of their work because they were too chatty.

  “Bright kid,” the doctor said, handing me the forms.

  There is probably a better feeling than hearing your child praised, but I doubt it can be obtained legally.

  Love and death, they meet in marriage. When you die married, you get plots side by side on a quiet hill or jars side by side on a shelf. No sign anywhere about how much you fought, how often you had sex, who had affairs, whether you liked each other’s in-laws, or remembered anniversaries, or lived apart for a full year, or absolutely did not agree on where to send the kids for school. The epitaph just lists the dates you were alive, and that you were married until the end.