Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (29 page)

"Sure," I'd said. "We can stay here for a few more days if you want."

"No, I mean let's
move
here. Let's forget about me immigrating to America. It's too much trouble! This is a wonderful town. I like the feeling of it. It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago. It wouldn't take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or a shop here, rent an apartment, settle in . . ."

In reaction, I had only blanched.

He was serious. He would just
do
that. He would just up and move to northern Laos indefinitely and build a new life there. But I can't. What Felipe was proposing was travel at a level I could not reach--travel that wasn't even really travel anymore, but rather a willingness to be ingested indefinitely by an unfamiliar place. I wasn't up for it. My traveling, as I understood then for the first time, was far more dilettantish than I had ever realized. As much as I love snacking on the world, when it comes time to settle down--to
really
settle down--I wanted to live at home
,
in my own country, in my own language, near my own family, and in the company of people who think and believe the same things that I think and believe. This basically limits me to a small region of Planet Earth consisting of southern New York State, the more rural sections of central New Jersey, northwestern Connecticut, and bits of eastern Pennsylvania. Quite the scanty habitat for a bird who claims to be migratory. Felipe, on the other hand--my flying fish--has no such domestic limitations. A small bucket of water anywhere in the world will do him just fine.

Realizing all this also helped me put Felipe's recent irritability in better perspective. He was going through all this trouble--all the uncertainty and humiliation of the American immigration process--purely on my behalf, enduring a completely invasive legal proceeding when he'd just as soon be setting up a newer and much easier life in a freshly rented little apartment in Luang Prabang. Moreover, in the meantime, he was tolerating all this jittery traveling from place to place--a process he does not remotely enjoy--because he sensed that I wanted it. Why was I putting him through this? Why would I not let the man rest,
anywhere
?

So I changed the plan.

"Why don't we just go somewhere for a few months and stay there until you get called back to Australia for your immigration interview," I suggested. "Let's just go to Bangkok."

"No," he said. "Not Bangkok. We'll lose our minds living in Bangkok."

"No," I said. "We won't
settle
in Bangkok; we'll just head in that direction because it's a hub. Let's go to Bangkok for a week or so, stay in a nice hotel, rest up, and see if we can find a cheap plane ticket from there to Bali. Once we get back to Bali, let's see if we can rent a little house. Then we'll just stay there in Bali and wait until this whole thing blows over."

I could see by the look on Felipe's face that the idea was working for him.

"You would do that?" he asked.

Suddenly I had another inspiration. "Wait--let's see if we can get your old Bali house back! Maybe we can rent it from the new owner. And then we'll just stay there, in Bali, till we get your visa back to America. How does that sound?"

It took Felipe a moment to respond, but--honest to God--when he finally did, I thought the man might weep with relief.

So that's what we did. We headed back to Bangkok. We found a hotel with a pool and a well-stocked bar. We called the new owner of Felipe's old house to see if it was available to rent. Marvelously, it was, at a comfortable four hundred dollars a month--a surreal but perfectly fine price to pay for a house that had once been yours. We reserved a flight back to Bali, leaving in a week's time. Instantly, Felipe was happy again. Happy and patient and kindhearted, as I had always known him to be.

But as for me . . .

Something nagged.

Something pulled at me. I could see that Felipe was relaxing, sitting by the nice swimming pool with a detective novel in one hand and a beer in the other, but now I was the agitated one. I am never going to be the person who wants to sit by a hotel pool with a cold beer and a detective novel. My thoughts kept turning to Cambodia,
which was so tantalizingly close
, which was just over the border from Thailand . . . I had always wanted to see the temple ruins at Angkor Wat but had never quite made it there in my past travels. We had a week to kill, and this would be a perfect time to go. But I couldn't imagine dragging Felipe over to Cambodia with me right now. In fact, I couldn't imagine anything Felipe would want to do less than get on a plane to Cambodia to visit crumbling temple ruins in the searing heat.

What if I went to Cambodia alone, then, just for a few days? What if I left Felipe here in Bangkok sitting happily by the pool? For the last five months, we'd spent nearly every single minute of the day in each other's company, and often in challenging surroundings. It was a miracle that our recent spat on the bus had been the only serious conflict so far. Couldn't we each benefit from a short spell of separation?

That said, the tenuousness of our situation made me concerned about leaving him for even a few days. This was no time to be messing around. What if something happened to me while I was in Cambodia? What if something happened to him? What if there was an earthquake, a tsunami, a riot, a plane crash, a bad case of food poisoning, a kidnapping? What if Felipe wandered out one day in Bangkok while I was gone and got hit by a car and suffered a serious head injury and ended up in a mysterious hospital somewhere with nobody knowing who he was, and what if I could never find him again? Our existence in the world was in critical flux right now and everything was so delicate. We'd been floating across the planet for five months in a single lifeboat, bobbing together uncertainly. Our union was our only strength for the time being. Why risk separation at such a precarious moment?

On the other hand, maybe it was time to ease up a bit on the fanatical hovering. There was no sane reason to assume that things would not ultimately work out just fine for Felipe and me. Surely our strange period of exile would eventually pass; surely Felipe would be granted his American visa; surely we would get married; surely we would find a stable home in the United States; surely we would have many years to spend together in the future. That being the case, I should probably take a quick trip alone right now, if only to set a solid precedent for the future. Because here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia.

Just for a few days!

And maybe he could use a break from me, too. Watching as Felipe and I had become more irritable with each other over the last few weeks, and now feeling so strongly that I wanted some space away from him, I started thinking about my parents' garden--which is as good a metaphor as any for how two married people must learn to adapt to each other and to sometimes simply clear out of each other's path in order to avoid conflict.

My mother was originally the family gardener, but my father has become more interested in home agriculture over the years, maneuvering his way deep into this realm of hers. But just as Felipe and I travel differently, my mother and father garden differently, and often this has led to strife. Over the years, then, they have divided their garden in order to keep some civility out there amid the vegetables. In fact, they have divided the garden in such a complicated manner that, by this point in its history, you would practically need a United Nations peacekeeping force to understand my parents' carefully partitioned spheres of horticultural influence. The lettuce, broccoli, herbs, beets, and raspberries are all still under my mother's domain, for instance, because my father has not yet figured out a way to wrest control of that produce from her. But the carrots, leeks, and asparagus are completely my father's province. And as for the blueberries? Dad chases Mom out of his blueberry patch as though she were a foraging bird. My mother is not allowed anywhere near the blueberries: not to trim them, not to harvest them, not even to water them. My father has laid claim to the blueberry patch, and he
defends
it.

Where the garden gets really complicated, though, is with the question of tomatoes and corn. Like the West Bank, like Taiwan, like Kashmir, the tomatoes and the corn are still contested territories. My mother plants the tomatoes, but my father is in charge of staking the tomatoes, but then my mother harvests the tomatoes. Don't ask me why! Those are just the rules of engagement. (Or at least they were the rules of engagement last summer. The tomato situation is still evolving.) On the other hand, there is corn. My father plants the corn and my mother harvests the corn, but my father insists on personally mulching the corn once the harvest is done.

And so they toil on, together but separate.

Garden without end, amen.

The peculiar truce of my parents' garden brings to mind a book that a friend of mine, a psychologist named Deborah Luepnitz, published several years ago called
Schopenhauer's Porcupines
. The operative metaphor of Deborah's book was a story that the pre-Freudian philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer told about the essential dilemma of modern human intimacy. Schopenhauer believed that humans, in their love relationships, were like porcupines out on a cold winter night. In order to keep from freezing, the animals huddle close together. But as soon as they are near enough to provide critical warmth, they get poked by each other's quills. Reflexively, to stop the pain and irritation of too much closeness, the porcupines separate. But once they separate, they become cold again. The chill sends them back toward each other once more, only to be impaled all over again by each other's quills. So they retreat again. And then approach again. Endlessly.

"And the cycle repeats," Deborah wrote, "as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing."

Dividing and subdividing their control over such consequential matters as money and children, but also over such seemingly inconsequential matters as beets and blueberries, my parents weave their own version of the porcupine dance, advancing and retreating on each other's territory, still negotiating, still recalibrating, still working after all these years to find the correct distance between autonomy and cooperation--seeking a subtle and elusive balance that will somehow keep this strange plot of intimacy growing. They compromise a lot in the process--sometimes compromising away precious time and energy that they might have preferred to spend doing different things, separate things, if only the other person wasn't in the way. Felipe and I will have to do the same thing when it comes to our own spheres of cultivation--and certainly we would need to learn our own steps of the porcupine dance around the subject of travel.

Still, when it came time to discuss with Felipe my idea of going off to Cambodia without him for a spell, I broached the topic with a degree of skittishness that surprised me. For a few days, I could not seem to find the right approach. I didn't want to feel as though I were asking his permission to go, since that placed him in the role of a master or a parent--and that wouldn't be fair to me. Nor, though, could I imagine sitting down with this nice, considerate man and bluntly informing him that I was heading off alone whether he liked it or not. This would place me in the role of a willful tyrant, which was obviously unfair to him.

The fact was, I was out of practice for this kind of thing. I had been on my own for a while before I'd met Felipe, and I had grown accustomed to shaping my own agenda without having to take account of somebody else's wishes. What's more, up until this point in our love story, our externally mandated travel restrictions (as well as our lives led on separate continents) had always ensured that the two of us had plenty of time alone. But with marriage, everything would now change. We would be together all the time now, and that togetherness would bring trying new limits, because marriage is a binding thing, a taming thing, by its very nature. Marriage has a bonsai energy: It's a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-climbing vine.

The Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written exquisitely about this subject. He believes that modern couples have been sold a bill of goods when they're told that they can and should have it both ways--that we should all have equal parts intimacy and autonomy in our lives. Somehow, Bauman suggests, we have mistakenly come to believe in our culture that if only we manage our emotional lives correctly we should each be able to experience all the reassuring constancy of marriage without ever once feeling remotely confined or limited. The magic word here--the almost fetishized word here--is "balance," and just about everybody I know these days seems to be seeking that balance with a near-desperate urgency. We are all trying, as Bauman writes, to force our marriages to "empower without disempowering, enable without disabling, fulfill without burdening."