Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (27 page)

When I was finished, he walked over to the side of the stage, standing almost directly beneath me. I was sorely tempted to bury my heel in the top of his head. Not for the first time, I wished I had worn stilettos to work.

“Hi, Tressa.”

I hate men. Behind me, I had a smug husband saying, “I trust you” when he so did not, and in front of me I had a lecherous, manipulative ex who probably wanted a fuck, and would probably be just crude enough to ask me straight out for one.

“You free for dinner?”

Same thing.

“Where’s Jan?”

“She’s not here.”

Then he gave me this thoroughly-delighted-with-himself grin.

I couldn’t be bothered with this man anymore. He was an insult to the principle of marital trust. I found him so appalling that he could no longer tempt me.

So I looked at one of the richest, cleverest, and most admired men in the food industry in America and I thought, What is it that I hate about you so much? Then I saw it, clear as the blue Miami sky. Angelo lacked integrity. And the reason I could see it with such clarity is because I was married to a man who
had
integrity so I knew when it was missing, and in Angelo Orlandi, it was missing in spades.

Angelo had high standards when it came to organic farming and food politics and arugula and slow-roasted garlic sauces. But he had no integrity in his marriage, with his wife, with the human being who was supposed to be closest to him. And I realized, in that moment, that integrity of that sort was the only kind that counts. Or rather, it’s the only kind that counted for me. Great men, good men, humane, heroic, brilliant, history-making men shit on their own doorsteps all the time. And that’s fine. I just didn’t want to be married to one of them and, thankfully, I was not.

So Dan won. He won the stupid test I had set him before the Orlandi weekend. That it had taken me this long to figure it out was no credit to me, yet it was so simple. You make a promise, and you keep it—not until you don’t feel like keeping it anymore, not until you got bored or restless or someone more exciting, more interesting comes along. You say you are going to do something and then you do it. In the same everyday way that we do things that we don’t feel like doing, like getting up on a frosty morning to do a photo-shoot with a photographer you hate because you have a deadline to meet.

The same goes for living with the same person day in and day out for the rest of your life. You don’t always
feel
like doing it, but you do it because you said that you would. And that, I realized, is how love grows.

“Go home to Jan,” I said.

Angelo looked at me like, “What is
that
supposed to mean?”

*

I went straight upstairs to phone Dan. I had a compulsion to tell him that I loved him. Say it first. Without analysis or thinking about whether I really,
really
meant it or not. I just wanted him to hear it. I wanted to give him that.

I stepped on an envelope that had been pushed under my door and opened it impatiently, assuming it was something to do with tomorrow’s work schedule.

It was a typed hotel memo, marked
URGENT
:

“There has been an accident. Please call Gerry.”

There are so many things about marriage that are never spoken of either within or outside it.

Although nobody ever said it, it was understood that the death of a first wife in childbirth could be the making of a man. He was free to marry again, and it was often the second wife’s dowry that made his fortune.

Similarly, the death of the man of the house could be viewed as a relief. There were those families with a dozen children, a two-room cottage, and no privacy for a wife to object to her husband’s advances. Some women would send their husbands to the pub with the week’s housekeeping, praying that he would get so drunk that he might fall and hit his head on a rock and be found dead in a ditch in the morning. There would be weeping and wailing and genuine grief. But there would also be a widow’s pension that would see the elder children through school and the younger ones fed properly.

I never suffered hunger or indignity at the hands of my husband and yet, at times I had wished him dead. In the early years of our marriage, I fantasized about it. What would happen if some terrible tragedy should befall him? Then Michael would come back and marry me, the young widow.

I could have been forgiven for such thoughts during my youth and given the circumstances under which we were married, but as the years went on, I continued to harbor the occasional petty death wish, whether over a pompous comment or a query as to how I had prepared the ham, as it was not as much to his liking as usual. Right up into my fifties, when I was fit and strong and still perceived myself as an attractive woman, at times I would look at James and think that if he were to die, I might have ten good years left to make another life for myself entirely.

You might assume that contentment is the right of the elderly, but you’d be wrong. Peace of mind does not come with time or age or routine. It masquerades as a product of luck and personality but in fact, serenity is hard won through prayer and perseverance and an understanding of hardship.

For some people, hardship is a husband who beats them or the death of a child. Others will search for and find hardship in an everyday rain cloud.

The trick to contentment is knowing when hardship has passed, and appreciating its absence for every moment that it is not there. I was never content with James because I was determined not to be. I looked at him and saw what he was not. What he never could be.

*

When the doctor told me James was dying, the shock was harder for my having wished him dead.

There is so much you can say about a person dying, yet there is so little worth saying. We get caught up in the language of disease, use it to distract ourselves from the truth of what is happening; we become experts in diagnosis, in treatments, yet cannot say the only thing worth saying, which is that soon this person will not be with us anymore.

James had a heart condition and bowel cancer. He was seventy-eight; the doctor talked about cell growth and breathing patterns and blood pressure. In the year he was sick I learned to use a syringe; I cleaned and fed him like a small child and, towards the end, like a baby. I would not let a nurse into the house or see him suffer the indignity of being fed or washed by anyone but his own wife.

When you and Niamh came to stay during that time your mother and I fought. She wanted to tend him and I would not let her. Niamh called me a “stubborn old bitch.” I never told her then that James thought he was her hero. He could not have borne his daughter seeing him as reduced as he was.

“Read to him,” I said.

They say that it is not until you lose both parents that you finally mature into an adult. But a life partner dying brings home the inevitability of your own death. There is nothing that can prepare you. I wondered, but wouldn’t say aloud, if Niamh would be here to nurse me when my time came. Or who would comfort me at the end of my life?

James kept saying it, “I am dying. I am dying,” and I kept swatting him back like a kitchen bluebottle.

“I’m not afraid,” he said, “I’ve made my peace. I just want to know that you’ll be all right. Bernadine...”

To the end, even in the morphine-induced throes of his pain relief, James said my name, “Bernadine,” as if I were the answer to a prayer. The great love of his life.

*

We lived a year like that: me watching him so closely that I could not see him anymore. I saw only individual details like the fine membrane of his skin as I changed his drip, rheumy eyes that needed cleaning, a mouth peeled back in a noiseless scream as the periods of ease that the morphine gave him became shorter. I shaved him, washed him, trimmed his hair and nails. I changed his sheets every two days, his pajamas every day. When people came, I put a shirt and a tie on him and covered the bed in Foxford tweed rugs to take the bare, bedridden look off him. I aired his room and filled it with flowers, and I banished the smell of death from our house.

You can study death, you can talk about it, you can know it is going to happen, but nothing can prepare you.

When you care for the dying, you don’t absorb the things you so desperately want to remember after they are gone: their voice in whispered prayer, a hand that grips, eyes that move across you, a chest moving up and down in breath. Life to the end is a series of small miracles you can only appreciate after your beloved is gone. The instant the miracles cease, you wish you had looked harder, treasured the gift of life itself.

You wish you hadn’t wasted so much time wanting more.

I had not truly realized how attached I was to my life back in Yonkers until I became completely cut off from it over the next few hours.

I am cell-phone dependent—I use it for everything from keeping a diary to taking pictures to reminding me of my to-do list. It always irritated the hell out of Dan that I seemed constantly distracted by my “little buzzing box,” as he called it, so when I accidentally dropped and smashed it the day before my trip to Miami I decided, as an experiment, to live without it for a few days. Just to prove to him that I could. “Cell phones are for emergencies,” he was always saying to me. Good call, Dan. Now there was an emergency, and I had no cell.

I got straight onto the hotel line and called home. It kept switching to voicemail and I thought the line was engaged until I remembered that I had bought a dinky retro phone unit the week before. Discovering it had the wrong cable fitting I remembered, with shocking clarity, that I had forgotten to plug the old one back in and neglected to tell Dan about my mistake so there would be nothing ringing in the house. I wasn’t panicked about the home phone because Dan had a cell, too, and I was diligent about keeping it charged. But I was in Miami—so Dan’s cell was dead as was, of course, the chaotic Gerry’s, which also switched immediately to voicemail. Starting to get desperate, I rang Eileen’s house, certain that she would know what was going on. The phone was answered after half a second by one of Dan’s infant nephews who gurgled prettily at me before dropping the receiver on the floor and wandering off. I could hear the noise of adults talking in the background and frantically shouted, “Hello? Hello?” to no avail. This was a common occurrence in the Mullins household, and as their visiting rota was so vigilant, Eileen barely used the phone. It might be days before the mishap was discovered. Kay’s cell phone number was in my phone, as was every other number that might lead me to finding out what had happened. Addresses, too, so I couldn’t even call information. I memorized nothing—no need when you have a buzzing box to hold all the information you need, right? God was clearly conspiring against me, so in a state of rising panic tempered by pure frustration, I rang the airport and booked myself on the first plane back to New York.

My head was spinning with dreadful possibilities all the way back. I had no idea what had happened, did not know if Dan was dead or alive. I went through every scenario in my head. He had fallen off that cursed bike, perhaps he had decided to refelt the garage roof like he had been threatening to do for weeks, or— Jesus—there was major electrical work going on in the house. Please don’t let him have got himself electrocuted.

What did “accident” mean, anyway? It could mean he was dead. “There has been an accident,” that’s what they say in the films. No. “There has been a terrible accident,” is what they say when someone has died. He wasn’t dead—was he? No, surely Gerry would have said. Or not. It’s not the sort of thing you’d leave with a hotel receptionist: “Husband dead. Please phone home.”

If it was really serious, Gerry would have told the hotel, and they would have interrupted my talk.

I flagged a steward and ordered four whiskies. I threw them down back to back and slept my way out of my panic.

I was nudged awake five minutes after landing to an almost empty plane. My head was thumping as I made it to the taxi stand, and my heart joined in with it as the line snailed along and I wondered whether to faint my way to the top of it. Once in the cab, I didn’t know where to go. A hospital, but which one? Did the accident happen at home or in Manhattan? I decided to go home first.

My hands were trembling so hard I could hardly get my key in the lock. I fell in the door, weak with dread, and made my way toward the back of the house. If there was a note, it would be on the kitchen table. There was a faint sound of voices to my left so I opened the door to the living room and walked in.

The TV was on and Dan was asleep on the sofa. His head was back, his mouth was open, and there was a perfectly healthy man’s snore emanating from it. He had one of my good patchwork quilts tucked in under his neck, and it looked out of place with the surrounding bachelor debris: three Domino’s Pizza boxes, an ashtray with a couple of half-smoked reefers, and a pile of Budweiser cans.

Some kind of an unholy rage rose up in me.

“What the hell is going on!” I shouted.

Dan leaped up in shock, then recoiled in pain. As the blanket fell aside, I saw that his arm was in a sling.

“Ouch!”

“I thought you were
DEAD
!”

He looked kind of annoyed himself, cradling his hurt arm.

“Sorry to disappoint you!”

I sensed Gerry loitering behind me, and I swirled on him like a dervish before he had the chance to retreat.

“And you’ve got some bloody explaining to do...”

“I’m sorry, Tress, I swear—I tried calling you again, but my cell phone was dead and...”

I had never felt so angry in my life. My extremities were fizzing.

“Don’t blame Gerry, babe, it was my fault. I took my eye off the road for a second and there was this piece of wood or something...”

“Next thing—wham, he goes down and I’m a coupla’ hundred feet behind him on the Harley and I go ‘shit!’”

“And I went down and next thing I remember I’m...”

“Shut up, the pair of you!”