Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (28 page)

I had learned that trick from a book called
Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America's Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship
, by John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman--two (happily married) researchers from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle who have received a lot of attention lately for their claim that they can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a couple will still be married in five years merely by studying a fifteen-minute transcript of typical conversation between the husband and the wife. (For this reason, I imagine that John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman make terrifying dinner guests.) Whatever the breadth of their powers may be, the Gottmans do offer some practical strategies for resolving marital disputes, trying to save couples from what they call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Stonewalling, Defensiveness, Criticism, and Contempt. The trick I had just used--repeating back to Felipe his own frustration in order to indicate that I was listening to him and that I cared--is something the Gottmans call "Turning Toward Your Partner." It's supposed to defuse arguments.

It doesn't always work.

"You don't know how I feel, Liz!" Felipe snapped. "They
arrested
me. They handcuffed me and marched me through that entire airport with everyone staring--did you know that? They fingerprinted me. They took away my wallet, they even took the ring you gave me. They took everything. They put me in jail and threw me out of your country. Thirty years of traveling, and I've never had a border closed to me before, and now I can't get into the United States of America--of all bloody places to get kicked out of! In the past I would've just said, 'The hell with it,' and moved on, but I
can't
--because America is where you want to live, and I want to be with you. So I have no choice. I have to put up with all this shit, and I have to turn my entire private life over to these bureaucrats and to your police, and it's humiliating. And we can't even get any information about when this is all going to be finished, because we don't even
matter
. We're just numbers on a civil servant's desk. Meanwhile, my business is dying and I'm going broke. So of
course
I'm miserable. And now you're dragging me all over goddamn Southeast Asia on these goddamn buses--"

"All I'm trying to do is keep you happy," I snapped back at him, pulling away my hand, stung and hurt. If there had been a cord on that bus to pull to signal the driver that a passenger wanted to get off, I swear to God I would have pulled it. I would have jumped off right there, left Felipe on that bus, taken my chances in the jungle by myself.

He inhaled sharply, as though he was going to say something hard but stopped himself. I could almost feel the tendons in his neck tightening, and my frustration escalated, too. Our setting didn't exactly help, by the way. The bus lurched along, loud and hot and chancy, whacking low-hanging branches, scattering pigs and chickens and children in the road before us, throwing up a stinking cloud of black exhaust, slamming every vertebra in my neck with each jolt. And there were still seven hours left to go.

We said nothing for a long time. I wanted to cry but held myself together, recognizing that crying might be unhelpful. Still, I was angry at him. Sorry for him, yes, of course--but mostly angry at him. And for what? For bad sportsmanship, maybe? For weakness? For caving in before I did? Yes, our situation was lousy, but it could have been infinitely lousier. At least we were
together
. At least I could afford to stay with him during this period of exile. There were thousands of couples in our exact situation who would have killed for the right to spend even one evening together during such a long period of enforced separation. At least we had
that
comfort. And at least we had the education to read the monstrously confusing immigration documents, and at least we had enough money to enlist a good lawyer to help us through the rest of the process. Anyhow, even if worse came to worst and the United States rejected Felipe from its shores forever, at least we had other options. My God, we could always move to Australia, for heaven's sake. Australia! A wonderful country! A nation of Canada-like sanity and prosperity! It wasn't as if we were going to be sent to exile in northern Afghanistan! Who else in our situation had so many advantages?

And why was I always the one who had to think in such upbeat terms anyhow, while Felipe, frankly, had done little over the last few weeks but sulk over circumstances that were largely out of our control? Why could he never bend to adverse situations with a little more grace? And would it have killed him, by the way, to show a
little
enthusiasm about the upcoming archeological site?

I very nearly said this--every word of it, the whole crapping rant of it--but I refrained. An overflow of emotions like this signifies what John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman call "flooding"--the point at which you get so tired or frustrated that your mind becomes deluged (and deluded) by anger. A surefire indication that flooding is imminent is when you start using the words "always" or "never" in your argument. The Gottmans call this "Going Universal" (as in: "You
always
let me down like this!" or "I can
never
count on you!"). Such language absolutely murders any chance of fair or intelligent discourse. Once you have Flooded, once you have Gone Universal on somebody's ass, all hell breaks loose. It's really best not to let that happen. As an old friend of mine once told me, you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

So I didn't speak, and Felipe didn't speak, and this heated silence went on for a long time until he finally reached for my hand and said, in an exhausted voice, "Let's be careful right now, okay?"

I slackened, knowing exactly what he meant. This was an old code of ours. It had come up for the first time on a road trip we'd taken once from Tennessee to Arizona early on in our relationship. I'd been teaching writing at the University of Tennessee, and we were living in that strange hotel room in Knoxville, and Felipe had found a gemstone show that he'd wanted to attend in Tucson. So we'd spontaneously driven out there together, trying to make the distance in one long push. It had been a fun trip for the most part. We had sung, and talked, and laughed. But you can only sing and talk and laugh so much, and there came a moment--about thirty hours into the drive--when both of us reached a point of utter exhaustion. We were running out of gas, literally and figuratively. There were no hotels around and we were hungry and weary. I seem to remember a stark difference of opinion between us about when and where we should stop next. We were still speaking in perfectly civil tones, but tension had begun to encircle the car like a light mist.

"Let's be careful," Felipe had said then, out of the blue.

"Of what?" I'd asked.

"Let's just be careful of what we say to each other for the next few hours," he'd gone on. "These are the times, when people get tired like this, that fights can happen. Let's just choose our words
very carefully
until we find a place to rest."

Nothing had happened yet, but Felipe was floating the idea that there are, perhaps, moments when a couple must practice preemptive conflict resolution, arresting an argument before it can even begin. So this had become a code phrase of ours, a signpost to mind the gap and beware of falling rocks. It was a tool that we pulled out every now and again in particularly tense moments. It had always worked well for us in the past. Then again, in the past we had never gone through anything quite so tense as this indeterminate period of exile in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, maybe the tension of travel only meant that we needed the yellow flag now more than ever.

I always remember a story my friends Julie and Dennis told me about a horrible fight they'd had on a trip to Africa together, early in their marriage. Whatever the original dispute may have been, they can't even remember to this day, but here's how it ended up: One afternoon in Nairobi, the two of them became so enraged at each other that they had to walk on opposite sides of the street toward their mutual destination because they could no longer physically tolerate each other's proximity. After a long while of this ridiculous parallel marching along, with four defensive lanes of Nairobian traffic between them, Dennis finally stopped. He opened his arms and motioned for Julie to cross the street and join him. It seemed to be a gesture of conciliation, so she conceded. She walked over to her husband, softening along the way, fully expecting to receive something like an apology. Instead, once she got within speaking distance, Dennis leaned forward and gently said, "Hey, Jules? Go fuck yourself."

In response, she stomped off to the airport and immediately tried to sell her husband's plane ticket back home to a perfect stranger.

They worked it out in the end, happily. Decades later, this makes for an amusing dinner-party anecdote, but it's a cautionary tale, too: You kind of don't want to let things get to that point. So I gave Felipe's hand a small squeeze and said, "
Quando casar passa
," which is a sweet Brazilian expression meaning "When you get married, this will pass." This is a phrase Felipe's mother used to say to him as a child whenever he fell down and scraped his knee. It's a small, silly, maternal murmur of comfort. Felipe and I had been saying this phrase to each other a lot lately. In our case, it was largely true: When we finally got married, a lot of these troubles
would
pass.

He put his arm around me and pulled me close. I relaxed into his chest. Or as much as I possibly could relax, given the slamming momentum of the bus.

He was a good man, in the end.

He was
basically
a good man anyhow.

No, he was good. He is good.

"What should we do in the meanwhile?" he asked.

Prior to this conversation, my instinct had been to keep us moving at a fast clip from one new place to another with the hope that fresh vistas would distract us from our legal troubles. This sort of strategy had always worked for me in the past anyhow. Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep only in a moving car, I have always been comforted by the tempo of travel. I'd always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle, since he is the most widely traveled person I've ever met. But he didn't seem to be enjoying any of this drifting.

For one thing--though I often forget it--the man
is
seventeen years older than I am. So we must excuse him if he was feeling moderately less excited than I was about the notion of living out of a small backpack for an indeterminate period of time, carrying only one change of clothing and sleeping in eighteen-dollar hotel rooms. It was clearly taking a toll on him. Also, he'd already seen the world. He'd already seen great huge swaths of the damn thing and had been traveling through Asia on third-class trains back when I was in the second grade. Why was I making him do it again?

What's more, the last few months had brought to my attention an important incompatibility between us--one that I'd never noticed before. For a pair of lifelong travelers, Felipe and I actually travel very differently. The reality about Felipe, as I was gradually realizing, is that he's both the best traveler I've ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds--all of which pretty much define the act of traveling
.
Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume the man is not fit to be a traveler at all. But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe's traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself
anyplace
, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he's capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but
live
. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local. It had taken Felipe less than a week of living with me in Knoxville, for instance, to locate his favorite breakfast cafe, his favorite bartender, and his favorite place for lunch. ("Darling!" he'd said one day, terribly excited after a solo foray into downtown Knoxville. "Did you know that they have the most wonderful and inexpensive fish restaurant here called John Long Slivers?") He would've happily stayed in Knoxville indefinitely if I'd wanted us to. He had no trouble with the idea of living in that hotel room for many years to come--as long as we could just stay in one place.

All of which reminds me of a story that Felipe told me once about his childhood. When he was a small boy in Brazil, he used to get scared sometimes in the middle of the night by some nightmare or imagined monster, and each time he would scamper across the room and climb into the bed of his wonderful sister Lily--who was ten years older, and therefore embodied all human wisdom and security. He would tap on Lily's shoulder and whisper, "
Me da um cantinho
"--"Give me a little corner." Sleepily, never protesting, she would move over and open up a warm spot on the bed for him. It wasn't much to ask for; just one little warm corner. For all the years that I have known this man, I have never heard him ask for much more than that.

I'm not like that, though.

Whereas Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can't. I'm much more restless than he is. My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can
go
anywhere on the planet--that's not a problem. The problem is that I just can't
live
anywhere on the planet. I'd realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, "Darling, let's stay here."