The loneliness of marriage

Last summer, a friend of mine from boarding school came over for lunch.  I hadn’t seen him in two years, since his wedding.  He and his wife have produced a baby, whose career I’ve eagerly followed on Facebook; when my friend arrived, my children politely exclaimed over the (very cute, fuzzy-headed, grinning) pictures on his phone.  “I can’t believe your kids are so gigantic,” he said, once they’d wandered off to recommence making a shambles elsewhere in the house.  “How old are they now?”  Sixteen and ten, I said, and my friend and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.  We were both fourteen when we met. “But we were much more sophisticated and mature, really, I mean, there’s no comparison, is there?” I asked, and my friend shook his head vehemently.  Something has happened to the youth of today, we agreed–or at least to my youth of today, who can barely manage to butter his own toast.

We ate and drank and gossiped and caught up on each others’ news.  It’s awfully odd to look at someone and see your fourteen-year-old self reflected in his gaze.  It’s even odder to look at someone who’s now in his forties and see right down the years to his adolescent self.  His true self, I’d even wager (though if my goofy, innocent, clumsy sixteen-year-old son is fully self-actualized, then god help him.) What is it about friends from long ago?  I feel as if I know the people I went to high school and college with in some deep and irreversible way, in a way that transcends or even belies whatever they (or I) have done with our lives since.  The friends you make as a teenager imprint on your psyche, and you imprint on theirs.  This is why you hear so many stories about people who suddenly marry their tenth grade flame after attending a high-school reunion; it’s as if all the years between now and then don’t count, or don’t count as much.

My boarding school friend and I have a long history together.  His parents and my father used to live in the same city, so even after graduation (boarding school friends, like college friends, tend to scatter to the four corners of the earth whenever school’s out) we’d see each other during vacations.  He visited me at my college; I visited him at his.  The summer I was nineteen I worked as an au pair; my employers were awful, and after my friend (who was on his way to Italy) passed through Paris and saw how bad things were, he called me from a pay phone every day.  “Quit yet?” he’d ask. Not yet, I’d mumble. “Okay, I’ll check back tomorrow,” he’d say, and hang up.  Eventually I got fired (hooray!) and hopped the first train south to meet him.  We spent the next few weeks hitchhiking all over Tuscany, sleeping on the ground outside, washing up in public fountains, trying to spend about fifteen dollars each a day (it was almost feasible) since I had zero money and he had only budgeted for one person.

Several years later we both ended up in graduate school on the west coast.  By then I was living with my future husband, but his long hours at the lab meant that I was often at loose ends.  I spent a lot of time with my boarding school friend, who would pick me up and take me places he liked.  He’d surf while I read on the beach, or we’d hike, or eat a specifically chosen picnic in a place he’d carefully picked beforehand.  (Though we were boyfriend and girlfriend for a few weeks in eleventh grade, we were only ever friends thereafter.  Still, our outings felt the way I imagine dates with a motivated and ardent suitor might feel.  This friend is not the kind of person who ever shows up without a plan. I’ve probably had more adventures with him than with anyone else in the world besides my ex-husband.)

Once in college he drove six hours south in his ancient car to get me for the weekend.  The plan was for him to spend the night, and then we’d  drive back up to his school and see Ray Charles–we saw Ray Charles whenever we could–together.  On the way down he found out that if turned his car off it wouldn’t restart, so instead of spending the night with me and then driving up together the next morning, he left the engine running while I threw some things in a duffel bag, and we drove straight back that night.  We filled the tank with the motor on.  At one point–I was driving–a bunch of wires under the dashboard actually caught on fire.  We rolled down the windows and tried to wave the smoke out, laughing and choking, expecting the engine to explode at any moment.  We even got pulled over–by now it was three in the morning–and had to explain to the baffled policeman that we couldn’t turn off the ignition, because if we did we’d be stuck there all night.  (He let us off without even a warning.)  At five thirty we pulled into the driveway of my friend’s apartment building, killed the engine, which never started again, and went out to dinner.  (You can get a full dinner at five thirty in the morning in Montreal, which is where he went to college. I am still astonished by that fact.)

We borrowed someone else’s car to go to the concert, and I went to a day or two of my friend’s classes, and we rode together on one bike (he pedaled; I balanced) up Mount Royal and down. Then I got the flu and languished in his apartment for another week before flying home.  It was just another visit as far as we were concerned.  Somehow, this kind of thing seemed to happen to us all the time.

On and on, our friendship has persisted.  He knows my mother and my siblings and at least a couple of my stepfathers.  He knows my father and my stepmother and my brother and sisters on that side of the family. He knows my ex-husband, my ex-husband’s family, my friends from graduate school, my friends from college.  He knows my kids.  And I know his parents and stepparents and brothers and sisters and so forth  (his family tree is as luxuriantly grafted due to divorce and remarriage as mine), as well as his former girlfriends, friends from college, graduate school, friends from work and friends from all the different places he has lived over the years.

At one of the darkest points in our marriage, my husband and I drove down to stay in a hotel–a rare extravagance–in the city my boarding school friend lives in.  It was our wedding anniversary, the last one, and the only one we ever made a fuss over.  We both knew we were going to get divorced.  My husband was taciturn and miserable the whole time, while I overcompensated by talking too much.  My friend, whom I’d briefed in advance, was as kind and accommodating as could be.  By now he’d switched from journalism to urban planning, and he drove us to see a couple of the projects he was working on.  He took us to lunch.  He told us where to eat dinner.  He told story after story–he’s the master of the shaggy-dog tale–pretending not to notice that my husband was on another planet altogether, staring morosely into space, sunk in our private misery.  At the end of the weekend, he patted me on the shoulder and shook hands with my husband and drove away.  I fought the urge to run after his car.

A year later he married his beautiful girlfriend.  By then I was separated, and I went to the wedding alone.

It’s odd to be the unique example of marital failure among your old friends, and even odder to show up, like a malevolent witch, at someone’s wedding.  However, there was also something lovely about being with friends who knew me even before I knew my husband, and everyone was kind.  I was still actutely self-conscious about being alone.  I shared a hotel room, in order to save money, with a friend of the bride whom I’d never met, and she came back to the room long after I did the night of the reception, drunk and weeping, and woke me up to tell me how worried she was that no man would ever love her the way my friend seemed to love his brand new wife, and that she’d never get married or have children.  I didn’t know what to say; I hardly knew her.  In the end I think the fact that I had been married (but seemed to have fucked it all up somehow) infuriated her;  next morning, I packed quietly while she slept off her hangover, left her a bland note of farewell, and slipped out of the room.  My old friends and I all had breakfast together, and then  I drove home to collect my children from their father’s house.

And the lunch we had last summer was the first time I’d seen my friend since his wedding. Since he got married, he more or less dropped off the planet.

This is the case more often than not, am I right? Married people do not socialize with the unmarried. Married people socialize two-by-two, in lockstep. The exception is (and I have always hated the whole idea of this, not just the condescending appellation) a sanctioned “girls night out” during which married women drink and gossip about their husbands. (I said I hated it. I didn’t say I never did it.) But married people do not, in general, stay close to friends of the opposite sex, whether the friend in question is married or single, it seems to me. (I imagine a divorced woman, or a single one, is more threatening in the abstract than a married one, but even when I was still emphatically wed I lost male friends the minute they tied the knot.)

My marriage, then, seems to have been a rare thing. I was permitted to stay friends with my male friends, even if they were single, even if they were old boyfriends.

Note that I am not saying this is necessarily a recipe for happiness. (We all know how my marriage ended, after all.) However, I do find it vexing. I’m tempted to call my friend from boarding school, whom I miss, and say, Hey, fuckwit, I was friends with you when I was married and you weren’t,  remember? How come everything’s different now that you’re the married one?

However,  I won’t. For one thing, like my other married friends, he only calls me when his wife is out of town or when he’s alone in the car. This makes me think  I probably shouldn’t just randomly ring him up. But I’ll be in his city later this month. I’d like to see him. I wonder how it can be arranged without the appearance of impropriety, or any sneakiness on his part. I like his wife, for what it’s worth. I like the wives of all my married male former friends.

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