 snoring. I spit out the toothpaste
and rinse my mouth. Suddenly it comes over me: happiness. And the realization:
we're married. Well, I'm married, anyway.
When I turn out the light I kiss Henry goodnight. He smells of alcohol sweat
and Helen's perfume. Goodnight, goodnight, don't let the bedbugs bite. And I fall
asleep, dreamless and happy.
Monday, October 25, 1993 (Henry is 30, Clare is 22)
Henry: The Monday after the wedding Clare and I are at Chicago City Hall, being
married by a judge. Gomez and Charisse are the witnesses. Afterward we all go
out for dinner at Charlie Trotter's, a restaurant so expensive that the decor
resembles the first-class section of an airplane or a minimalist sculpture.
Fortunately, although the food looks like art, it tastes great. Charisse takes
photographs of each course as it appears in front of us.
"How's it feel, being married?" asks Charisse.
"I feel very married," Clare says.
"You could keep going," says Gomez. "Try out all the different ceremonies,
Buddhist, nudist..."
"I wonder if I'm a bigamist?" Clare is eating something pistachio-colored that
has several large shrimp poised over it as though they are nearsighted old men
reading a newspaper.
"I think you're allowed to marry the same person as many times as you want,"
Charisse says.
"Are you the same person?" Gomez asks me. The thing I'm eating is covered
with thin slices of raw tuna that melt on my tongue. I take a moment to
appreciate them before I answer:
"Yes, but more so."
Gomez is disgruntled and mutters something about Zen koans, but Clare
smiles at me and raises her glass. I tap hers with mine: a delicate crystal note
rings out and falls away in the hum of the restaurant.
And so, we are married.
II
A DROP OF BLOOD
IN A BOWL OF MILK
"What is it? My dear?"
"Ah, how can we bear it?"
"Bear what?"
"This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?"
"We can be quiet together, and pretend-since it is only the beginning-that we
have all the time in the world."
"And every day we shall have less. And then none."
"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"
"No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And
when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran,
before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we
are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."
-A. S. Byatt, Possession
MARRIED LIFE
March, 1994 (Clare is 22, Henry is 30)
Clare: And so we are married. At first we live in a two-bedroom apartment in a
two-flat in Ravenswood. It's sunny, with butter-colored hardwood floors and a
kitchen full of antique cabinets and antiquated appliances. We buy things, spend
Sunday afternoons in Crate & Barrel exchanging wedding presents, order a sofa
that can't fit through the doors of the apartment and has to be sent back. The
apartment is a laboratory in which we conduct experiments, perform research on
each other. We discover that Henry hates it when I absentmindedly click my
spoon against my teeth while reading the paper at breakfast. We agree that it is
okay for me to listen to Joni Mitchell and it is okay for Henry to listen to The
Shags as long as the other person isn't around. We figure out that Henry should
do all the cooking and I should be in charge of laundry and neither of us is
willing to vacuum so We hire a cleaning service.
We fall into a routine. Henry works Tuesdays through Saturdays at the
Newberry. He gets up at 7:30 and starts the coffee, then throws on his running
clothes and goes for a run. When he gets back he showers and dresses, and I
stagger out of bed and chat with him while he fixes breakfast. After we eat, he
brushes his teeth and speeds out the door to catch the El, and I go back to bed
and doze for an hour or so.
When I get up again the apartment is quiet. I take a bath and comb my hair
and put on my work clothes. I pour myself another cup of coffee, and I walk into
the back bedroom which is my studio, and I close the door.
I am having a hard time, in my tiny back bedroom studio, in the beginning of
my married life. The space that I can call mine, that isn't full of Henry, is so small
that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all
around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths
fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny
space. I make maquettes, tiny sculptures that are rehearsals for huge sculptures.
Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve
them and stunt their growth. At night I dream about color, about submerging my
arms into vats of paper fiber. I dream about miniature gardens I can't set foot in
because I am a giantess.
The compelling thing about making art-or making anything, I suppose-is the
moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a
substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old
sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men
into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed armies: ah,
look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art. The
magic I can make is small magic now, deferred magic. Every day I work, but
nothing ever materializes. I feel like Penelope, weaving and unweaving.
And what of Henry, my Odysseus? Henry is an artist of another sort, a
disappearing artist. Our life together in this too-small apartment is punctuated
by Henry's small absences. Sometimes he disappears unobtrusively;
I might be walking from the kitchen into the hall and find a pile of clothing on
the floor. I might get out of bed in the morning and find the shower running and
no one in it. Sometimes it's frightening. I am working in my studio one afternoon
when I hear someone moaning outside my door; when I open it I find Henry on
his hands and knees, naked, in the hall, bleeding heavily from his head. He
opens his eyes, sees me, and vanishes. Sometimes I wake up in the night and
Henry is gone. In the morning he will tell me where he's been, the way other
husbands might tell their wives a dream they had: "I was in the Selzer Library in
the dark, in 1989." Or: "I was chased by a German sheperd across somebody's
backyard and had to climb a tree." Or: "I was standing in the rain near my
parents' apartment, listening to my mother sing." I am waiting for Henry to tell
me that he has seen me as a child, but so far this hasn't happened. When I was a
child I looked forward to seeing Henry. Every visit was an event. Now every
absence is a nonevent, a subtraction, an adventure I will hear about when my
adventurer materializes at my feet, bleeding or whistling, smiling or shaking.
Now I am afraid when he is gone.
Henry: When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I
have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain before you can say
"Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper
before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that
I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for
dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were
invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses. (How can Clare
listen to Cheap Trick? Why does she like The Eagles? I'll never know, because
she gets all defensive when I ask her. How can it be that the woman I love doesn't
want to listen to Musique du Garrot et de la Farraille?) The hardest lesson is Clare's
solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I've
interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreamy silence of her day.
Sometimes I see an expression on Clare's face that is like a closed door. She has
gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I've
discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she
is always relieved to see me.
When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise. Clare has
turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and
drawings pinned up on every inch of wall space. There are coils of wire and rolls
of paper tucked into shelves and drawers. The sculptures remind me of kites, or
model airplanes. I say this to Clare one evening, standing in the doorway of her
studio in my suit and tie, home from work, about to begin making dinner, and
she throws one at me; it flies surprisingly well, and soon we are standing at
opposite ends of the hall, tossing tiny sculptures at each other, testing their
aerodynamics. The next day I come home to find that Clare has created a flock of
paper and wire birds, which are hanging from the ceiling in the living room. A
week later our bedroom windows are full of abstract blue translucent shapes that
the sun throws across the room onto the walls, making a sky for the bird shapes
Clare has painted there. It's beautiful.
The next evening I'm standing in the doorway of Clare's studio, watching her
finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see
Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she's trying
to say something, and I know what I have to do.
Wednesday, April 13, 1994 (Clare is 22, Henry is 30)
Clare: I hear Henry's key in the front door and I come out of the studio as he
walks in. To my surprise he's carrying a television set. We don't own a TV
because Henry can't watch it and I can't be bothered to watch by myself. The TV
is an old, small, dusty black and white set with a broken antennae.
"Hi, honey, I'm home," says Henry, setting the TV on the dining room table.
"Ugh, it's filthy" I say. "Did you find it in the alley?"
Henry looks offended. "I bought it at the Uniqu