The Golden Condom (29 page)

Lilly didn't exactly lower her voice when she spoke her husband's name, but it brightened, and her eyes softened, every time she did so, and the many circumstances in which she evoked him suggested that he was a constant point of reference; her inner monologue was dialogue and communion. She often referred to him both obliquely and directly, and yet it was never morbid or off-putting, because he was so alive for her. For example, when I told her I was marrying a man who was eight years younger than I, she replied, “Ah yes, the perfect age difference,” since it was the interval between hers and Emil's age, even though in reverse.

Was she just living in a bygone era, obsessed with lost love, immersing herself in it to avoid her present loneliness yet afraid to move on? I think not. She seemed not so much clinging to her past as buoyed up by it; she saw life through the lens of their relationship and the power of his personality. Her solitude was not lonely. Hers was a quietly intense, self-contained world, infused with memories that were living presences, into which others were welcomed. Freud said that “neurotics suffer from reminiscences,” but Lilly was consoled by hers.

Psychoanalytic theory, from Freud's day to the present, has not had nearly as much to say about healthy passion as about the more grotesque pathological kind. What would it make of hers? Self psychology, the modern theoretical approach founded by Heinz Kohut, would recognize Emil as Lilly's “selfobject,” her internal touchstone of sustenance, solace, and self-esteem. Making use of another in this way is a sign of mental health and a source of stability. But Otto Kernberg,
2
who has written extensively about the prerequisites for long-term erotic fulfillment, might be wary of an all-consuming romance after death like hers and question her unassailable fidelity. According to him, an earmark of mature love is the ability to grieve fully for the dead beloved, to retain the relationship within oneself, and then to accept (and to seek) a new partner “without guilt or insecurity.”

In Lilly's case, giving herself to another would have been sacrilegious, because she felt that she had the ultimate experience of marriage, and it sufficed for her. Their relationship was so unique and precious and so vividly present that it could never be superseded. Emil's love for her, and hers for him, continued to fulfill her. To seek another love would be an unthinkable act of infidelity not only to him but to herself and to the woman she had become, the life she had had, because of him. It was choice, not fear or limitation in her ability to relate, that bound her eternally to him.

I was always struck by the remarkable contentment, the lack of bitterness, that Lilly exuded as she faced old age and death alone; she had two grown sons and several grandchildren, but they had their own lives at some remove from her. Of all the American institutions she admired, she loved Thanksgiving the most, because, she said, “I have so much to be thankful for.” She took joy in small things and seemed utterly devoid of the envy that many in her situation are corroded by (with one glaring exception: “The only thing I've ever envied,” this fine musician confessed without a trace of irony, “is my brother's perfect pitch”). Other than a severe mouse phobia—Emil once found her in their hotel room after a traumatic sighting, standing on one leg on the bed, trying to read a book while she waited for him to rescue her—I never saw a sign of psychopathology such as depression, intense anxiety, or withdrawal in her.

A birthday card she sent me, one of the few I have ever saved or whose message I've remembered, epitomized her attitude: “Life itself is life's great treasure.” And she did not hoard her treasures; her wedding gift to me was an exquisite set of sleek red-and-gold-banded art deco demitasse cups from her trousseau. The gesture brought to mind “Hello, Young Lovers” from
The King and I,
one of the most generous love songs ever written, in which the middle-aged heroine Anna exhorts a pair of furtive lovers not to pity her, because their passion recalls her own. Lilly was overjoyed for me.

*   *   *

The risk that my silent patient daringly embraced, my formerly shy Viennese friend had actually endured: the loss of the man who had given her a voice and saved her—my patient, from a life of degradation, Lilly, from literal death in the Holocaust. Like Pygmalion, each man was irreplaceable to the woman he had rescued—with her active participation—from silence and enlivened through love. At the beginning, my patient did not know that she could sustain herself through him even if he died, but I knew that she could, as Lilly had done; he was hers forever.

Lilly, the most romantic, fulfilled soul I have ever known, was alone but not lonely. My patient had been lonely as only a person without a center, who had never known comfort or been prized before, can be. Thanks to her husband, she could never feel that way again; even his death could not take away what she had become. Kohut would say that she, like Lilly, used her husband as her selfobject.

I say they are both true lovers, sustained from within, and mated, like swans, for life.

*   *   *

Both my patient and my friend clearly idealized their husbands; they found fathers and mothers and saviors in them. This was realistic on their parts; the personalities and actions of both men made them highly idealizable. But the way these women looked up to and needed their husbands did not make them dependent or infantile; they functioned as professionals in their own right and as friends and soul mates to the men they admired, and they were admired in turn by their husbands. Their attitude was an essential part of their fully adult appreciation of how remarkable their mates and their marriages genuinely were.

Psychoanalytic theorists are ambivalent about whether idealization is a sign of mature love or a regression to childish reliance on a parental stand-in who cannot be seen as realistically flawed because the fantasy of the loved one's perfection shores up an immature sense of self. Michael Balint, one of the original members of the British object relations school of thought, believes that idealization “is not absolutely necessary for a good love relation” and agrees with Freud's observation that idealizing a beloved can actually hinder the development of fulfilling love as an adult; perhaps Freud was speaking from personal experience, since his adoring letters to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, are full of idealization, and there are questions about how ultimately satisfying that union was. But Otto Kernberg claims—and I agree with him—that “a mature form of idealization” is fundamental to a marriage of true minds. I believe that this type of adulation must not just be one-sided, and, unlike Kernberg, I think it can outlast death. Not every marriage is like my patient's or Lilly's, but the deepest ones are. They are like the halves of the reunited primordial egg that Aristophanes refers to in Plato's
Symposium
: “And when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself … the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight … even for a moment: These are the people who pass their whole lives together.…”

*   *   *

When I went to see Lilly in the hospital during her last illness, she was welcoming, overjoyed to have company, full of praise for the care she was getting, thankful for the first solid food she was able to eat. She gently corrected my husband's German accent when he wished her a gallant farewell. There on the table next to her bed, where she could gaze at it until the last, was Emil's photograph. It was as though her favorite Schubert song, “Du bist die Ruh,” was silently surrounding her, bearing her back to him:

You are my peace, my joy and rest,

You are the yearning in my breast

I pledge to you, my sacred place,

all pain and joy.

Towards me now face

and softly close the door behind …

My eye's whole sight, so much in thrall

in your own light—

oh, fill it all!

 

11

LOVE HIM, HATE HIS POLITICS

How a Liberal and a Conservative Stay Married

Next Election Day, like every Election Day for the last three decades, I'll show up faithfully at my polling place, rain or shine. I'll make it my business to get there even if there's a blizzard, a hurricane, or a tsunami, and if I can't go in person, I'll use an absentee ballot. Once again, I'll be pulling the levers (or tapping the screen) for some people I actually agree with, for some I'm not crazy about, and for others I've never heard of. Of course I'm planning to participate in every future presidential election, but I'll be sure not to miss the midterms, either. On the first Tuesday after the first Monday of every November, for the rest of my life, I'll register my choices for senators, congressmen, governors, state senators, assemblymen, mayors, city council members, and judges. As long as they're Democrats, they can count on my support.

It's a matter of moral obligation, not just civic duty: I've got to cancel out my husband's vote.

For thirty-five years, I, a card-carrying liberal, have been married to a conservative Republican. My husband is not just a fervently committed conservative Republican; he is a
professional
fervently committed conservative Republican—a senior editor of the leading right-wing journal in America.

My husband and I violently disagree on every conceivable political issue, including abortion, gun control, and assisted suicide, as well as on the necessity of an impregnable wall of separation between church and state—all of which he opposes and I passionately support and consider sacred. The only public issues we agree about are that both parties in New York State government are riddled with corruption and that increasing the number of gambling casinos here is a terrible idea. His deepest convictions haven't budged in the thirty-eight years I have known him, and mine haven't, either. Nonetheless, I can say unequivocally that marrying him was the best decision I ever made and that he is probably the only man I could ever live with.

I've long been aware that our mixed marriage is unusual (until recently, I knew of no other among my acquaintances), but I didn't realize just how exotic—bordering on extinct—it actually was until I saw a study from Stanford University
1
stating that the ferocity of political partisanship in the United States is so intense that marriages across party lines are “exceedingly rare”—9 percent—and that the prejudices that each side feels about the other are even more deeply ingrained and virulent than racism. Parents now worry about their children marrying outside party affiliations, and, to my astonishment and dismay, many single people consider political orientation a more important criterion in a potential mate than physical or personality attributes.
2
Our prejudices haven't changed, but antagonism in the rest of the country toward the other side has escalated ominously since we wed in 1980, thanks in part to the Internet and ever more rabidly partisan radio and television.

How did we find each other? So insular was I in my youth that I was not even conscious of knowing any Republicans other than my father and certainly never imagined having one as a boyfriend. I equated conservatism with the fanatical, paranoid John Birch Society. But in my late twenties, I joined a Renaissance singing group, and there he was—tall, clever, with intense blue eyes and a lyrical baritone. I was delighted to discover that he was a professional writer, although I was taken aback when I learned where he worked. It didn't stop me, though; I'd been treated abominably by too many men who shared all my opinions to let his convictions get in the way.

My future husband was considerably more open-minded about love across party lines than I. Even though his parents were both committed conservatives, he grew up in the era when liberalism was the dominant ideology, which gave him much more exposure to the opposition at an early age. He even dated a former Communist in college.

Our wedding was a bipartisan affair. My mentor, one of the early victims of the McCarthyite purges, gave me away, and my husband's publisher, one of McCarthy's most avid enforcers, gave a reading. A knowing friend quipped, “Bedfellows make strange politics.” Somehow everyone behaved, setting a trend that we have emulated—and worked at—with only a few painful exceptions ever since.

The most bruising of those exceptions occurred in 1989, the only time we had our version of a knock-down, drag-out confrontation, and it was so unnerving that I remember all the particulars. It was initiated by me; my husband knew better than to broach so radioactive a topic. One morning, I picked up
The New York Times
and read the front-page headline about the Supreme Court's
Webster
decision, which allowed states to place significant restrictions on abortion rights. I knew that this would open the door to massive efforts by conservatives to dismantle
Roe
v.
Wade
, and I was beside myself. I said, half under my breath but audible all the same, “This is the end. I'm going to have to join a protest march.” He uncharacteristically rose to the bait and countered, with grim determination, “If you march, I march.” Fortunately, I knew not to respond to his counterpunch and let the tension escalate into real warfare; this was a fight neither he nor I could win, with the potential to destroy everything we had carefully built and that we both cherished, without accomplishing anything. We kept our distance for the rest of the day. It was torture. I felt lonely and bereft, and so did he. That night, we agreed to disagree and drop the subject. We pulled ourselves back from the precipice and have made sure never to approach it again.

Even after I learned to inhibit such outbursts, it took our first decade together for me to fully accept how yawning our ideological divide really was, despite how much we were in harmony about virtually everything else. Slowly, I became reconciled to the fact that not even my considerable powers of persuasion—not to mention the self-evident correctness of my positions—would make him change his mind, but, alas, it is so; he never even tried to change mine.