Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.
A woman across the table from me remembered very well when she knew she would marry her husband.
"We were young, in our mid-twenties," she recalled in a light, sing-song voice over a glass of wine in the heat of a summer afternoon. "We had been dating for six or seven months, and I was about to go off on a trip. He wrote to me and, at the bottom of the letter, he signed off with, 'Take care of yourself until I can take care of you.'" Her eyes shone. "That was it," she said.
It was a sweet memory. She and her husband have been happily married for over 25 years. But if their marital history had been less blissful, I wonder if the anecdote that presented itself would have been so lovely.
I sometimes think of memory as a spiteful chef: inconsistent and petty. I imagine her to have a mean look on her creased, sweaty brow. She is capable of serving up comforting meals of fluffy, tender love and unforgettable feasts of spicy, raw lust. But other times - especially when a relationship ends - from memory's overheated kitchen come only miserly, burnt offerings.
N.B: Memory should never be hired in a fancy restaurant.
"She gave me an ultimatum," a divorced man once told me about his decision to marry. "She told me if I didn't propose, she was going back to a former boyfriend. So I asked her." He shook his head. Sighed. He and his wife had divorced after 20 years. He then told me that his ex-wife had recently reminded him that after his proposal, he curled up in a ball on the sofa, practically catatonic, while she made the excited call to inform her parents.
There had been happy times, he said later on, when prompted, but those scenes weren't what readily appeared on his plate now that they were no longer together.
I'm not sure why one memory has priority over others. Maybe some of it is about self mythology, creating a script for our lives we can believe in - or want to, anyway. In the wake of my own divorce, I have remembered scenes early on that signalled the unhealthy dynamic at play, but that I had long suppressed. Now I can see what I did not want to see then. And maybe I buried them for so long because I wanted to believe in the fairy tale of my marriage. So I remembered what supported that dream.
I let memory dupe me.
Among books about marriages, Adele Mailer's 1997 memoir, The Last Party, Scenes from my Life with Norman Mailer, is exemplary on the matter of what's remembered. She recalls the way he looked when they met in 1951 ("The boy wonder was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and dungarees, baggy under his slender frame"), the nature of his eyes (blue, soft, melancholy), the sound of his voice ("deep, slightly nasal, sexy, but a bit artificial") and where they were (at a party in New York). But for the majority of the book, bitter memories win out over tender ones.
He had a thing about the "degree of doneness" of his scrambled eggs. One time she undercooked them, and he dumped them on the floor. The last chapter ends with their break-up scene. They drank. They argued. They hurled expletives at each other. Their last exchange was a dark inverse of their first encounter. "He narrowed his eyes, reddened from the pot he'd been smoking, slipping into that schizophrenic Southern accent he used when he was drunk."
Years ago, I spoke to Ernest Hillen, Canadian author of the memoir The Way of a Boy and its sequel Small Mercies, about the challenge of remembering well and accurately. He told me that when he was working on these accounts of his life as a boy following World War II, he had to transport himself back in time, and once he regressed in his mind, it was as if he were standing in the room of that former life. He could smell what was cooking. He could hear the slow breathing of his mother. He could see what was on the table, at his feet, out the window.
The past doesn't fade, he seemed to be saying. It just gets buried. And we have to tunnel back in time, drop down the well of experience, in order to recover who we were.
Recently, Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, wrote in a British newspaper about her summer-of-1975 love affair with Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. She was 36, he was 55. She recalled how he was transfixed by her when she arrived on set to act in his movie, Casanova. It was hot. It was Rome. She wore a flimsy dress that stuck to her body. And she recalled the scene of seduction. He turned up unannounced at her lodgings. There were his pajamas - brown silk with cream piping. There was his driver - dispensed until morning. There was a bat that flew into the room at night.
Ms. Greer's memories had a gentle, affectionate equanimity to them. "The relationship was self-limiting," she wrote in conclusion about why they eventually went their separate ways. "I wasn't always available … Sexual athletes are tuppence a dozen. Fellini was a many-sided genius."
There are a thousand possible metaphors for memory, I figure. It's a train that carries you back to a forgotten place as scenes, some dark, some light, flash by the window. It's a tunnel you must clear of dirt to reach the buried platform far below. But I prefer the sour-faced chef. And knowing her now, I invite myself into her kitchen - I barge in, sometimes - and insist on helping her prepare a nutritious meal that leaves me feeling satisfied to know that life is never one thing or the other, but a blend of flavours. I want to serve myself a balanced gift of reminiscence.
Sarah Hampson's memoir about mid-life post-divorce, Happily Ever After Marriage, There's Nothing Like Divorce to Clear the Mind, is in bookstores now.