Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (9 page)

Michael.

I would say his name and imagine that he could hear me.

I still love you, Michael. I still love you.

In saying it out loud, I was able to make it real again. So I was not an ordinary country schoolteacher’s wife, but that passionate young woman again, victim of that greater kind of love. A stream of whispers pouring out of me:
I still love you, I still love you,
over and over so that the words might make a line that would carry up and up, across the galaxies and find where he was. How many words would it take to get to America? How many to bring him back to me again? He would never forget me. Not Michael. Love like we had never dies. It never grows old or dulls with the bland, gray shades of familiarity. Love as vibrant as ours would live forever.

In those early years, my husband became my family. I visited my parents only occasionally and always out of duty rather than pleasure. The estrangement brought about by Ann’s refusing my dowry never healed between my aunt and myself. I think now that by staying angry with her it was a way of keeping Michael alive in my heart. My mother’s humiliation at being refused my dowry softened in time, especially once she knew I was settled with James. Although I did grow fonder of my husband, I could not say that I loved him. But I did come to understand that being married to him was not the disaster that I thought it would be. Although I did not fully appreciate it at the time, we had a good life. James, spurred on by my example, started to rise early and developed more of an interest in small farming, so we had a modest head of cattle in addition to his teaching income. I kept hens and reared pigs for the slaughter as my mother had done, and James took up beekeeping when war loomed and sugar shortages were threatened. Between us, we were virtually able to feed ourselves and sell any surplus honey and eggs to a shopkeeper in Ballyhaunis. With the spare cash, we made improvements to our house. We had running water in the scullery and a range built into the wall where the fire had been. I had the tailor, Tarpey, make me three suits a year, and I bought fabric from him to make my own dresses. One year, we had a four-day holiday in Dublin. We stayed in great style at the Gresham Hotel, took tea in Bewley’s Coffee House. I bought cinnamon and coriander and all kinds of spices from Findlaters on Harcourt Street. We went to the cinema and saw
Random Harvest,
then walked up and down O’Connell Street into the late evening. I wore a lilac suit and James a long trench coat and a Trilby hat cocked over one eye. I had bought him the gift of an ivorycapped walking cane, and he swung it grandly as if he were an English gentleman. I remember thinking that I was lucky enough to be married to such an elegant man. Although I would always stop myself short, always pull back. I was afraid to let go and let myself love him. Afraid I would lose the bit of power I had, if I didn’t keep him at arms’ length. Those few days in Dublin, though, I felt as if we had everything we could possibly want in life. And we did. Except for the one thing each of us wanted more than life itself.

For me, it was Michael.

For James, it was a child.

James knew I did not want children early on in our marriage, and being an educated, sensitive man, he went along with my wishes and took steps to avoid impregnating me. There are ways that are not against nature or God, but they only work in tandem with luck. And we were lucky.

I had witnessed the birth of my cousin Mae’s first son, and any idea I may have had about having a baby had been thrown out with the bucket of blood that she shed. When the midwife saw how shocked I was, she said, “It’s the most natural thing in the world.” So is death, I thought—and we spend a lifetime avoiding that.

I was not maternal by nature. Babies and children left me cold. Some women who don’t love their husbands have children so they can have somebody to love. I needed to love the man I was going to have children with, if I was going to sacrifice my body, my dignity in that way. I was prepared to shrug off the snide comments as the years passed without our conceiving. The sideways looks in Mass when another infant was christened, their screams reverberating around the chapel eaves, drowning out the priest’s murmuring. Neighbors and James’s sisters looked at me with disappointment, disbelief, and latterly, pity. I didn’t care. I thought they were all fools. Babies, as far as I could see, were selfish, squawking, sucking parasites.

No. I was not one of nature’s natural mothers.

After six years, without saying anything, James stopped withdrawing from me during lovemaking. He was well over forty and I was edging ever closer towards thirty.

People would make assumptions if you remained childless, and one of the assumptions they made was that your husband was not a “real” man. James was educated, kept himself neat, and had married late. He was an easy target, and I felt for him because I knew people would be talking. Extra pressure came every year as his brothers’ wives and his one married sister were having at least one baby a year between them. I could see James was hurt that we were seen to be not “producing,” and I assumed his pride was taking a bashing.

I said nothing when he changed our routine. I just took myself from the bed immediately after we had made love, washed myself thoroughly, and prayed.

The tension we had experienced in the first year came back into our marriage as if it had never been away. James had grown more sure of me, but I was still no pushover, and we waged the second of our long-standing silent wars. I became physically elusive, which was my only weapon. James in turn started to behave out of character, which I found unsettling. When I scolded him (as I did almost every day) over some household trivia, I could see his chin set in anger, and once or twice I feared he might rise up at me. He became irritable, criticizing the priest and complaining about his job on an almost daily basis. One Sunday, I caught sight of him as he looked up from his book to check the weather through the kitchen window. Pure sadness washed across his face, an expression of devastated loss like there had been after Ellie died. James had a long nose and slim delicate features that gave him an erudite, refined expression. When that confident, sophisticated face became sullied with anguish, the extremity of it tore at me terribly.

I wanted to reach over as I had done the night we buried Ellie. Except that this time I knew exactly what words would make his sorrow disappear and I couldn’t speak them because I knew I was not prepared to follow them through. If I were a different, weaker kind of woman, I might have lied his pain away.

I did not love James but I was not coldhearted and I could see that he was hurt. My mistake was in believing, after almost ten years of marriage, that I knew him. I thought that his pride was at stake. That it was his craving for convention, the respect of his peers that was making him want a child. You can live a lifetime in ignorance of a person if you don’t put your own needs aside to give them room to show you who they really are.

It was only after our daughter was born that I came to truly understand how James simply yearned to be a father.

I was scheduled to go to the Food Writers’ Symposium in Chicago the following week, when my agent, Roseanne, rang to discuss various business. It felt weird talking to her standing in the middle of the half-painted hallway in my wreck of a house. It was my voice, saying the same sort of stuff as usual, and even though it had only been the usual number of weeks since I’d gotten her bi-monthly “darling” call, it felt like I had been out of circulation forever. I often hide away, especially when I am working on developing recipes. But with the wedding, and the house move, and no kitchen to work in, it felt like I had gone into hiding from myself.

I was lost and started to think about who I had been before I met Dan: Tressa Nolan, thirty-seven, Irish American, single, successful food writer, living comfortably on the Upper West Side. My morning routine had been a ten minute walk in the park, followed by a Mocha Frappuccino coffee from Starbucks; my morning’s work interrupted by delivery guys arriving with fish, meat, and organic dairy. Then I’d meet a girlfriend for lunch, or else think up an excuse to wander down to Citarella and splurge on chocolate or delicious olives, followed by a root around Westside Market’s vegetables, looking for ideas. All of the best ingredients I could possibly need were within a few blocks or could be ordered to the door.

I had liked my life how it was, and realized that I had lost it. Literally.

The house, Dan, his family, mall shopping, the two of us pushing a grocery cart around Farmers’ Market with thousands of other Saturday supermarket couples, that was my life now. It didn’t feel like it belonged to me, and I didn’t know that it ever would. I had spent years creating a routine that worked and that was now gone. I had to find new shops, new suppliers, and I felt too set in my ways to be bothered. Truthfully—I didn’t know that I felt committed enough to my new life to start over.

I didn’t know what I was expecting from married life. Was the life I wanted just the life I had with the additional benefit of testosterone? The same of everything with somebody strong to put up shelves and demystify furniture instructions? Was I really that shallow? That cynical?

In some ways, I wished I was.

The truth was, the vision I’d had for myself was what I had: a good man like Dan and a big old house to renovate, with enough of a plot out back for vegetables.

But the important expectation, the only one that mattered, was that I would be happy. And I wasn’t.

Happily ever after—so how does that work? Two months into my marriage and I was miserable. It was just not working.

I woke up in the morning and the first thing I thought was, “I don’t love Dan.”

I’d work like a dog all day so that I didn’t have to think about it, then last thing at night it came back: “I don’t love Dan.”

I wanted to love him. I
needed
to love him, but I just couldn’t. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, never would.

What the hell was I going to do? I couldn’t stay married to a man who I didn’t love because it was not fair to either of us. Dan had it all there on paper. He was handsome, a listener, affectionate— I knew he would make a wonderful father and a loyal husband. And he loved me. He really did.

So why couldn’t I just love him back? I knew in my head that I had married a good man, but my heart just wasn’t responding. It felt flat and underwhelmed and I knew that wasn’t right. It was a mystery to me that I could see all of Dan’s good qualities but I still could not drum up a feeling of love for him. But then I knew that falling and, more important, staying in love is a mysterious process. You just have to wait until it happens to you. Maybe I just should have waited longer.

Maybes aside, I knew that Dan deserved better than this. He deserved a woman who adored the ground he walked on. A woman who would do anything for him.

A woman who would give up the most important event in her work calendar to attend his niece’s first communion.

*

He had dropped hints about it, but he wouldn’t ask outright. Dan knew that this conference was really important to me. I had told him that on Sunday, as soon as we had left his mother’s. He had told me that his entire family was gathering afterward at his Mom’s for an informal reunion with some cousins from Ireland. His mother’s brother, whom she hadn’t seen for twenty years, would be there. It was kind of a historic event really. Not just Deirdre’s first communion. He hadn’t mentioned it before because he knew it clashed with my conference.

I told him that was really understanding of him and gave him a kiss.

The following day over breakfast Dan mentioned in a voice that was meant to sound casual, but didn’t, that actually, there would be quite a lot of people who weren’t at our wedding coming to the first communion. I looked forlorn and said I was really sorry, that it really was, truly, a terrible pity that the two things clashed. That if it had been any event other than this, I might have been able to change it. He shrugged and said it didn’t really matter, but he looked as if he had just been run over by a bus.

The theme continued over supper with the revelation that it was a real shame I couldn’t make it to the first communion because his Uncle Patrick was kind of coming over from Ireland especially to meet me.

I kept my head. That was just awful, I said, but I felt sure I would get the chance to meet Uncle Patrick while he was here— perhaps your mother could bring him around for supper the following week? Not possible, unfortunately, said Dan, because Uncle Patrick was going to stay with his friend, the priest, in Los Angeles the day after the communion, and this really was our only chance to meet him.

A tragedy, I conceded. If only somebody had taken the trouble to notify me when Uncle Patrick was booking his flights, then we might have arranged our lives around his trip. It was a last minute thing, Dan rushed to inform me, he got a cheap deal. I was drawing breath on my final “Oh well, never mind,” when Dan launched into a soliloquy about how his sister Kay had been really upset when he had broken the news that I might not be going. And poor little Deirdre, who had been telling all her friends that her new aunt would be at her party, was upset as well. Then he ended with the extraordinary information that his Mom hadn’t made it clear how important this Sunday was to her because she didn’t want to put us under any pressure.

So. No pressure then.

“What can I do, Dan?”

There was a pause. Check-mate. I didn’t walk away because I got this terrible feeling that it wasn’t over. It should have been. Important work event for his new wife versus lunch with aging distant relative? No competition surely.

Dan looked down at his feet and eventually said, “You could cancel your trip.”

He said it really quietly and meekly. Like he knew he was wrong. More than that—like he was afraid.

I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. I had never seen him like this before. Vulnerable. Exposed. When he looked up at me, his chin was shaking and he was looking at me in that I-don’t-care, defensive male way. The look they put on before the inevitable rejection, so they save face.