A Cup of Comfort for Couples (23 page)

My husband is the only insurance agent I know who plays Hindu chant CDs in his office. “It's so soothing,” he says. But nothing could calm him this tumultuous week. Five days earlier, he'd made a shocking discovery about a saleswoman we both trusted, not just as a coworker but also as a friend. Now, Bart had filed a lawsuit against a person he used to have lunch with every week. Friends called to say, “Bart's too nice of a guy.”

I thought I knew what we needed: a change of scenery, something beautiful to wipe away the ugliness of the past week and replace it with color and texture. I thought first of the art museum. Although art is more my interest than his, I love the way my husband's eyes crinkle as he savors my enthusiasm over a work by Cezanne, Monet, Kandinsky, or Noguchi. But it was such a beautiful day. A park maybe or an arboretum?

Then I remembered a place we'd been meaning to see, a sculpture park several friends had raved about, about 45 minutes from home.

“How about Grounds for Sculpture?”

He shifted his body, adjusted a throw pillow.

“It'll do you good to get some fresh air and sun-shine.” Even I recoiled at the chirp in my voice, sharp and artificial.

Miraculously, he rolled into a sitting position, sighed, and reached for his sneakers. He was only humoring me, but I hoped that art and nature would work their magic in spite of his reluctance.

An hour later, we follow the winding path through the trees, past a chrome behemoth that resembles a double-helix strand of DNA. I squat down to fit the entire sculpture into the frame of my digital camera, wobbling a bit as I get up.

At parties, when people ask, “So how did you two meet?” Bart and I grin and answer almost in unison, “At a Puerto Rican pig roast.” Our story is always a hit.

Some thirty years ago, I was a shy graduate student in jeans and a peasant blouse, just off a bad relationship. A friend invited me to a party at the home of a couple I barely knew. She thought it would do me good to get “back out there.” Having nothing better to do on a Saturday night, I made my entrance to a living room full of strangers. Seeing no available seat, I plunked myself down to sit cross-legged on the floor, wedged between the artsy freeform coffee table and someone else's shoes.

As the mass of voices around me sifted into individual conversations, it dawned on me that everyone else was speaking Spanish. So I sat there on the floor, longing for subtitles and smiling a smile that felt carved into my cheeks.

Then I saw him: a bearded guy with sleepy eyes right out of a portrait by Modigliani, slouching against the wall, wearing a look as lost as mine.

The sweet scent of roasting pork and a shout of excitement accompanied the hostess's friends and cousins as they hauled in a huge plank bearing something I'd only seen in cartoons: an entire freshly roasted pig, complete with apple in mouth. As the paper plates were passed around, amid rapid-fire Spanish dialogue, the first stumbling words passed between me and the man I would marry.

Back then, I wrote poetry and dabbled with a paintbrush. He was a philosophy major, stunned to find himself stepping into the family insurance business after his father's heart attack. He played basketball and read Sartre “for fun.”

Eventually I gave him a key to my first apartment. Once we had a fight. Every night for over a week I checked my answering machine in vain for one of his goofy phone messages. Then one night I trudged home from work and noticed the light glowing under my door. A note greeted me in his scratchy handwriting: “Don't be scared. It's only me, the Doctor J of the Insurance World.” Just like that, my mood melted, my body lightened, I flung the door open and raced to him.

In the lush gardens of Grounds for Sculpture, we linger beside a beautifully landscaped pond. A ghostly bronze face hovers over the face of the water, brooding in the soft mist.

“She looks like the Lady of the Lake,” I say, a reference to a character in English literature, which, I realize after I say it, he might be too distracted to pick up on.

Amidst the green, a flash of rose catches my eye. I stray from the path to investigate. “Wait, Bart,” I say to his back.

Lost in thought, he plunges on ahead of me.

“Bart,” I repeat, a little louder.

He doesn't even hear me. I know in his mind he's second-guessing his actions, worrying that the business his father and he built might be in jeopardy.

“
Bart
!” I scamper up to him and touch his shoulder. “Check this out!”

Taking his hand, I lead him into the trees. Our eyes adjust to the mixture of shade and light. We seem to have interrupted a conversation. Two men in nineteenth-century morning coats laze on the grass, the one on the right wearing a straw hat and gesturing with one expansive arm. The woman seated with them looks straight at me. Her fingers rest on her chin. Her skin glows in the dapples of sun. She's naked.

Instantly, we smile. We're standing inside a painting translated into three dimensions, the famous and enigmatic “Luncheon on the Grass,” by Édouard Manet. The real-life trees, river, sunlight, and boat in the background all perfectly re-enact the painting I know so well. Crumpled behind the nude lady are her hat and flouncy blue dress. Apples and bread spill toward us from inside a wicker basket.

I hand Bart my camera. “Take my picture as if I'm in the painting!”

I jump into the scene between the naked woman and her luncheon companions.

Bart is fumbling with the camera. He has only come here to humor me, I realize. Yet I see those eyes crinkle; he seems to enjoy my enjoyment, so maybe it's doing him some good anyhow.

I jump out of the picture, instruct him, then hop back in.

Snap
.

We were married the day after my twenty-fifth birthday, in an informal ceremony in my parents' living room. My dress cost thirty-five dollars, and when people commented that I still used my maiden name, Bart quipped, “I didn't change my name either.”

On our twenty-fifth anniversary, the day after my fiftieth birthday, I woke up in a hotel in the Bahamas, our three brown-eyed sons asleep in the next room dreaming of a snorkeling day.

Rolling over, I said, with a hiccup of laughter, “I just realized something: I've been married exactly half my life.”

“You've been a good sport about it,” my husband said, with a kiss.

In the park, a family of live peacocks scampers out of our way. We pass a rough-hewn Stonehenge object decorated with carved whirls and swirls, and a fiberglass Loch Ness monster flailing its tentacles out of a fountain. I'm lost in exploration, the music of water playing over soft rapids. Then I make out a form in the shadow, my husband on a marble bench, his dark eyes turned inward. Suddenly, I'm aware of the sun's heat pressing on the top of my head.

What am I trying to do
, I ask myself.
I
can't
force him
to lift his eyes, to look, to smile
.
I
can't
make him get over
his frustration by artificial means
.
Maybe it
isn't
right to
distract him from his loss
.
He has a right to his feelings
.

“I used to think I was a good judge of character,” he says as I approach him.

“Come on,” I say, prying him off the bench. “Just a little farther.”

And then I add, “You sensed something was wrong, remember? You kept saying, ‘I'm concerned about Susan. She always makes excuses not to have lunch with me anymore.' Now we know why. She couldn't face you. Her conscience was bothering her.”

We talk as we walk, that familiar glow between us. I don't have anything profound to say or any solutions to offer, but maybe, like the Hindu chant music playing in his office, after half a lifetime of practice my presence just calms him down. If there is a secret to our longevity, maybe it is in this.

“We'll be all right,” I tell him.

At the top of the observation tower, I snap a photo of Bart, a slightly more relaxed look on his face, as in the background the sun and clouds knit together.

Our feet back on the ground, my husband says my name. “Faith?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for marrying me.”

Suddenly, in front of us, a grassy hill arises, dotted with bright red poppies. A woman stands on top of the hill, captured in the instant when she whirls around to glance at us, her long skirts swirling in the wind, her lips parted, scarf flying, green parasol tipped.

A shared breath escapes both of our mouths. “Wow.”

We both recognize this as a 3-D replica of Claude Monet's painting “The Stroll.” The steep slope evokes the upward perspective of the vertical canvas. The woman at the top of the hill is Monet's wife, Camille. Throughout their years together, Monet painted Camille more often than any other model, his brush snatching single moments before they evaporated into the air, right up until his last depiction of her, a work called, “Camille Monet on Her Deathbed.” Yet, here she is, high above us, alive, fresh, and young.

My sandals keeping pace with his sneakers, in this place that marries art and nature, I soak in a little of what the Impressionists knew. That a shared moment is a complete composition. That if we stroll together today, as colors flicker in our eyes, then yesterday and tomorrow will take care of themselves.

As we pass, Madame Monet seems to smile at us, just as her husband painted her, with her young son Jean partly visible in the background, dancing between the sun and wind on a hill sparkling with poppies.

—
Faith Paulsen

The artworks described in this piece include “Dejeuner Déjà Vu” and “Poppied Hill,” by Seward Johnson, at Grounds for Sculpture in Harrison, New Jersey.

Willow Weep No More

T
hey have seventy-one years of marriage between the two of them, although together they just celebrated eighteen.

Mom says, “He is my third marriage but my first husband.”

My parents, Trudi and Marty, met in 1963, when both were involved in the Midwest region of United Synagogue Youth. Mom lived in St. Louis and Dad lived in Des Moines. Over the next two years they saw each other only six times, but they sent letters daily. When Mom arrived at camp the summer of 1965, she saw Marty holding hands with another girl. She cried for two weeks.

In the fall, she started her senior year of high school. In art class she expressed her feelings through painting with a self-portrait entitled “Willow Weep for Me.”

The next summer, Mom and Marty saw each other at camp again. Although they did trade a glance or two, they did not exchange a single word.

Two more years passed, and no letters passed between them. Eventually, Mom accepted an engagement ring from another. Then, on a Thursday night, she received a phone call.

“Don't get married,” Marty said. “Come to Des Moines and meet my parents.”

She agreed and went to tell her parents.

Her mother's reaction was quite simple. “We have two-hundred-fifty Cornish hens ordered for your wedding in two days.”

The trip to Des Moines never happened.

After fourteen years of marriage and three daughters (I am the middle one) my mom's marriage ended. After some time and consideration, she decided to find Marty. Going about things the old-fashioned way, without the luxury of Google, she talked with friends and went to the library for phone books. She took a chance and called the now “Dr. Rosenfeld” at his office. It was a simple conversation.

“Hi. I'm divorced, and I heard you were, too.”

His reaction was not what she had hoped for.

“I remarried, and we just had a baby,” Marty said.

Again, she hung the self-portrait on the wall . . . and wept.

My younger sister, Tiffany, followed in my mother's footsteps and joined the same region of USY that Mom had been in almost thirty years earlier. She attended the fall conference in Des Moines. One evening during a large group dinner, a gentleman in a light-blue sport jacket walked on stage and, amid the hundreds of teenagers, took the microphone and simply asked, “Does anyone out there know Trudi Lasky?”

My sister, very shy and quite surprised, raised her hand, stood up, and said hesitantly, “That is my mom.”

Marty introduced himself to Tiffany and explained how he knew Mom (although I am pretty certain he left out many details). She snapped a few pictures and accepted his phone number, assuring him that she would pass it along to Mom when the weekend conference was over.

But my sister was a little uncertain. Mom was in the middle of her second divorce, and that marriage, like her first, was far from healthy. Tiffany wondered whether she should develop the pictures and give Mom the phone number now or wait until some semblance of normal returned to our lives. Then again, what was normal? Why not give this a shot and move ahead with a new normal?

Tiffany told Mom about her surprise visitor in Des Moines, and the two decided they should develop the film immediately. After all, Mom had not seen Marty in almost three decades. However, by that time, the new puppy had decided the roll of film was a chew toy, so there were no pictures. But on Tiffany's urging, Mom called the number, and although she had no picture, she finally heard Marty's voice again.