Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (25 page)

As if by magic, a hush went over the crowd as we heard the
clack
of helicopter blades overhead. Silence ruled for a second while we took it in: Was it really—could it be? Then everyone was whooping and shouting. The noise was deafening. Four hundred and fifty thousand people cheering in our special guest, welcoming a new dawn of hope for the future, celebrating the newfound prestige of our country, our county, and the blessed, holy townland of Knock.

I pushed my way angrily through the thick soup of people. I thought I would never escape that crowd. The rain was a soft, damp mist that made my clothes itch and stuck inside my nose, making it hard to breathe. I don’t know how long I walked, but it was farther than it had taken me to get in, and I was despairing. Eventually, weeping with frustration and fear, I grabbed a stranger and said, “Which is the way out?”

He signaled me to grab his coat and dragged me through the final thicket of hopeful head strainers. The road outside was cordoned off, but I must have looked dreadful because the man put me in the care of a steward. He found a stool and sat me by the door of St. John’s to wait for the Toureen bus. It was a four-hour wait.

They say there is no fool like an old fool, and through those four hours, there was no one felt more of a fool than I. I was drenched to the skin, my knees stabbed at me, and my very bones creaked with damp. I remember thinking what a stupid old woman I was and what a cruel thing love is when it robs you of your good sense, your propriety, your dignity. It could hibernate inside you forever, then a smell, a name, a memory could prod the peaceful sleeping beast and make it howl with hunger. I thought of the bag of baked-ham sandwiches I had packed that morning and left with Mae so that if I met Michael Tuffy I would not be carrying a plastic grocery bag with me. She, and all the ICA, would be enjoying them now with their flasks, cozy in their rainproofs and sensible wellington boots. Other women our age were watching us all from the comfort of their homes, or in the hall in Toureen with friends. I was here, alone in an unsuitable cardigan meant for a much younger woman, my feet frozen in a pair of flimsy fabric shoes, looking for an old sweetheart in a crowd of nearly half a million.

*

Eventually, the bus came and the crowd that had gathered around me all struggled on board, anxious to escape the rain and get stuck into a nice hot cup of tea in St. Mary’s.

“Wasn’t he fantastic, though!”

“‘The goal of my journey,’ that’s what he called us.”

“He came as a pilgrim, like the rest of us, that’s what he said.”

“Ah, but sure, he has great humility. He’s the Pope, what d’ye expect!”

Everyone was buzzing, and I smiled weakly back as they bantered and recalled the Mass in every euphoric detail.

I had not achieved the goal of my journey.

I took a window seat and looked out as the bus crawled its way past the knickknack shops and postcard stands. Hotels promising soup and sandwiches for under one pound. The hunger had gone off me. I was beyond it.

I wondered then, would I ever get beyond that promise made and broken, no matter what age I got to be?

Waiting for somebody to forgive you is slow emotional torture. It had been three weeks since the Ronan business and things were far from resolved. Dan moved back into our bedroom, but would lie next to me like a frigid schoolgirl, terrified I might touch him after I made a couple of aborted attempts to seduce him. I tried to be patient but after a few days playing the reformed, ashamed hooker, I snapped, “Jesus, Dan—I’ve said I’m sorry!” He gazed through me with a look of anguish to illustrate that I would never know or understand the depths of his pain.

I didn’t know why I was still there.

Why
was
I still there?

Maybe it’s because I knew there were two ways to get salt out of ham. The first is to do what Bernadine did and leave it to soak, let the salt release itself slowly, then rinse it clean and soak again. Rinse clean and soak as often as you can, for as much time as you can spare, and the salt will eventually out.

The second is to boil it really fast in Coca-Cola.

Both methods work, but I think the first one tastes better because you have to wait for it. My belligerent self would argue it should taste exactly the same, but the point is I always take the harder option when it comes to food, and the easy option when it comes to relationships. So I was trying to do it the other way around. Every time Dan and I had a brief toxic exchange, I rinsed it off and started again. Maybe I was imagining it, but things seemed to be thawing.

On the other hand, maybe my thermometer was just adjusting to the cold. Or maybe I only want something when I think I can’t have it. Now that Dan had withdrawn his love from me, I missed it. The irony is that now that I had finally grown up enough to appreciate his qualities, I’d managed to turn the gentlest, nicest man in New York into a hardened cynic.

Surprisingly, Dan made no fuss when I announced Doreen would be coming for the weekend.

“That’ll be nice,” he said flatly, then lied, “I like Doreen.”

Dan claimed to like everybody. For example, he claimed to like Doreen but actually she made him feel uncomfortable. They are from planets that make Mars and Venus look like near neighbors. Both are great people, but in such different ways that I find it almost impossible to reconcile their presence in a room together.

Why had I invited Doreen up for the weekend while Dan and I were in the throes of a marriage crisis?

In fairness, it had to be done sometime. Doreen was my best woman after all, and Dan was, despite appearances to the contrary at the moment, my husband. If nothing else, I thought, she could give Dan and me some distraction. Gerry proved an unwitting mediator while we were building the kitchen, and perhaps Doreen would fill the same role. The way things were right then, it was a straw worth clinging to.

*

The house was really taking shape, just as our relationship seemed to be falling apart. The irony of that was not lost on me.

As I prepared the place for Doreen’s visit, the experience was made all the more pleasurable by the fact that I knew Doreen would subject every detail to her built-in style radar. It was a challenge that I enjoyed rising to. Especially as I needed a challenge I could control: Like, did the scented candle in the guest bedroom coordinate with the hand soap in the guest bathroom? I had no control over my husband’s feelings, so I was catching my attention up in meaningless details—feathering the edges of cotton napkins, arranging Moroccan glasses by bedside tables, and hanging fresh herbs to dry in the kitchen. Hoping that the bigger things, like unfinished paint work, wouldn’t be noticed. The same tactic went for Dan as I tried to convince myself that the ludicrous minutia of good housewifery—like changing the blades on his razor, ironing his boxers—would eventually add together to heal what had happened. And I was resentful when he didn’t notice my unasked-for efforts, as if he believed ironed underpants were his birthright. Ultimately, I’d been looking for reasons to hang my anger on, something outside of myself to blame for all this frustration and shame.

*

Doreen arrived in the early evening and it was awkward. Not between her and Dan but, strangely, between her and me. I guess that was because we hadn’t seen each other since the wedding.

“This is all rather precious,” was the first thing she said when she entered the kitchen and picked up a floral milk jug I had rescued from Eileen’s vast and largely ghastly collection.

“The jug or the kitchen?” I asked, not really wanting the answer.

“Is there a correct answer to that question?”

We gave each other a sardonic smile, but mine lacked commitment and hers lacked humor. Cruel wit had once been our intimate language, that we could take it from each other was an illustration of how close we were. Suddenly, I felt like the wit was missing and only the cruelty was left. Maybe I was having a crisis of confidence. I didn’t want my house to be fussy and precious but I wasn’t confident enough to defend it against Doreen’s cutting style review.

So I didn’t ask again, and got on with preparing our supper, a ludicrously fattening carbonara with roasted garlic and Parma ham and a salad fresh from the garden. Dan was puttering in and out of the kitchen and at one point rewarded me with, “That smells good, honey.”

Doreen raised her eyes to heaven and I was immediately conscious of our folksy homeliness, even though the pleasant communication was a minor breakthrough for us. Aside from that brief moment, Dan kept out of our way for the first few hours, as Doreen entertained me with gossip about friends and colleagues. After we’d eaten, Doreen threw in a couple of unnecessarily graphic sexual anecdotes, designed to shoo him away from the table in embarrassment. Which they did.

“Marital bliss?” she quipped, after Dan had excused himself to go and meet Gerry for a beer.

I hadn’t realized I needed to talk until I had my old friend in front of me, asking. It all came tumbling out of me: my lack of certainty about Dan, kissing Angelo and Ronan, how I had ruined everything and just wanted things to be OK with my marriage. It felt good to get it all out in the open, and I realized how much I had been carrying around in my own head for the past few months. Doreen nodded sagely for the time it took me to get everything off my chest and her face was full of genuine concern. She opened another bottle of wine while I was talking, and kept our glasses filled. I always took responsibility for our food, she for our drink. It felt old and familiar. Safe.

When I had finished, Doreen reached over and took my hand; it felt small and fleshy, like dough caught between her long manicured fingers.

“Do you want to know what I think, Tressa?”

The relief of my confession over, I suddenly saw how drunk Doreen was. I had been talking and she had been drinking. Now it was her turn to reveal. And instinctively, I knew this was a confession I did not want to hear. Before I had time to come to my senses and shout
“No!”
she said, “You have to leave him.”

I recoiled swiftly, but not physically. She squeezed my hand with drunken emotion and said what she had wanted to say since the day I had told her I was marrying Dan. Everything I didn’t want to hear. Everything I had myself feared was true.

Dan wasn’t good enough for me. He wasn’t “the One.” I should never have had doubts. Doubts are bad, they mean you have made the wrong choice. I shouldn’t have been “settling.” There was no need to compromise; I should have had more respect for myself. I wasn’t even forty yet, there was plenty of time. I should follow my gut instincts and leave now. So Ronan was a shit, but there were other Ronans out there who would make my heart beat and my stomach somersault. I deserved that. I was a passionate woman, blah, blah... deserved to have
all
my needs met... blah, blah... madly in love soul mates... blah, blah, blah.

When she started, I was scared. I thought, I can’t listen to this, it’s too close to the bone. But as she went on, I realized: There was no nerve being hit. And then I thought,
Actually, Doreen, this is bullshit. Dan
is
what I need; he
is
what I want, what I deserve.
Because suddenly I saw that life, love, and marriage are actually a whole lot simpler than this nitpicking, navel-gazing quest for the perfect man. I wanted, needed, deserved to be loved. Doesn’t everybody? And Dan loved me. He deserved me to love him back, and I was endeavoring to do just that. It wasn’t always easy, because I seemed to be naturally attracted to flaky, unavailable jerks but suddenly, knowing the love of a good man and then coming so close to losing it was curing me of that particular obsession. Maybe my natural predilection for dangerous men was changing or maybe this was what mature love felt like. And how much self-respect would I have if I traded in a perfectly nice man to go stand back in a bar in Manhattan waiting for some Hollywood cupid to throw arrows at me?

After all, Mr. Right only feels right until he does something wrong.

I let Doreen finish, then disappointed her by saying I was tired and it was time to go to bed. No dramatic bag-packing exits for me. She drained her glass and patted my arm as if to say,
You sleep on it, girl
—I know you’ll do the right thing.

Dan came in late and stumbled into bed. He was drunk and for once forgot that he hated me, so we made tired, sloppy, ordinary love. He curled away from me afterward and put his arm out to pull me in, but I settled it back onto his belly, then hung back and watched his broad, muscled shoulders slow into the heavy rhythm of sleep.

“I love you,” he said as he finally dropped off.

“I love you, too.”

He always said it first.

*

Sometimes an act of love is not what you say, but what you don’t say, and Dan was saying nothing.

“I mean, Dan, how can you
never
have read William Faulkner. That’s
ludicrous
!”

It was Saturday lunchtime, and the weather was nice, so Doreen and I were sipping Pimm’s in the back garden. Dan was drinking beer and had taken his shirt off. Doreen realized that morning that I wasn’t going to take her advice. In retaliation, she had returned to her “stupid but cute” attitude toward him.

“Still, who needs literature with muscles like those?” and she leaned over to give his bicep a squeeze.

Dan was mortified, but went along with her.

In life, loyalty is something that you earn, and Doreen had more than earned my loyalty over the years. But marriage is a rogue state with its own rules, and one of them is pledging your loyalty to somebody before you can be fully sure that they deserve it. You mess with him? You mess with me. That was the new rule. A husband is instant family. He gets the loyalty of a blood tie without doing any of the work. Except poor Dan was working for it, too.

“Oh yessss—you bagged yourself a regular Hemingway here, Tressa.”

Doreen laughed and patted him on the cheek with one hand, while the other reached for her cigarettes.