We meet weekly for wine. At Alma, Erté, Heartland Wine Bar, Zander, jP American Bistro, and Barbette. Lesser known places, too. Once, when everything else was packed, we went to the Herkimer (this was a mistake) and once we drove an hour and a half for flights of Amarone at a rural wine bar called Fermentations, then spent another hour drinking coffee so we could drive back.
It was nine years ago that we stood in a parking lot talking after wine and suddenly she blurted out, "I got married on a whim. I’ve never loved my husband. I can’t live with him any longer. I don’t know what to do."
We both had families and houses and part-time jobs; each of us had a child with special needs. We were similar in age, education, and income. The difference was, I intended to stay married. She did not. It was her plan, she explained that night, to ask her husband for a divorce. Once their daughter was settled in an appropriate program, once they’d caught up on their bills, once she’d figured out what to say.
I moved out of state the following year, but we spoke several times a month. In fall, she called one evening to tell me her husband had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent cancer. He was rushed into surgery where tumors like sausages were cut out of his head. When he got out of the hospital, he’d need rehab, chemo, and round-the-clock care. "I can never leave him now," she said.
I, on the other hand, with my forever marriage? I was divorced within 18 months. I bounced around the country for a while, then came back to Minnesota. Our wine meetings resumed. Her husband went into an experimental drug program that sapped his energy and made him skeletal. He walked around their house in a tattered, knit hat. Their relationship grew more distant but whether this was due to her loss of feeling or his loss of spirit, it was impossible to tell.
The years went on. Both of our oldest children graduated from high school. Each of us changed jobs — several times. I remarried. And she kept on, through every subsequent surgery, staying with this man who had become increasingly forgetful and frail. Taking him to Mayo, sitting with him through doctor visits, mourning with him at his father’s funeral then visiting his elderly widowed mom. She’s cleaned his surgical wounds and monitored his medications and raised their children essentially on her own. Lately, since her own 90-year-old mother began to fail, my friend who has wanted nothing more for a decade than to be free — to go back to school or meet someone she might truly love — has been shuttling back and forth between the hospital, the nursing home, and parent-teacher conferences at school.
And me? I buy the wine. I’ve offered more: to sit with her during surgeries or visit her mother or at least pick up her daughter after work. But she tells me over and over that the best way to help is to listen, to be the one person who knows who she is and understands choices she’s made.
Few of us will ever face this sort of dilemma. It’s a pet subject of literature, however: Mr. Rochester, the dour hero of Jane Eyre, locked his crazy wife in the attic and beseeched Jane to understand that he’d never loved his island bride, even before she went insane. In The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, the 2002 novel by Ann Packer, a young woman decides to break up with her fiancé just moments before he hits the bottom of a lake with his head and is paralyzed from the waist down. In both cases, the disaffected parties do indeed abandon their unloved spouses: Rochester by sequestering her with a nurse; Clausen’s Pier’s Carrie Bell by fleeing to New York. Even in books, it is apparently too much to ask that someone forfeit his or her own happiness to stand by a commitment gone sour.
That someone I know has done so in real life literally fills me with awe.
At this point, my friend’s husband is small and terrified, reduced by years of radiation and toxic IV drips and stealthy, fast-growing cancer cells. He can no longer work, drive to the grocery store, or choose an entrée at the restaurant he’s been visiting for 15 years. His wife has become his nurse and keeper. What’s worse for her, however, is the dearth of understanding for exactly what she’s given up.
I alone knew that she was planning to leave this man. And for nearly a decade, I’ve said nothing. She has confided her moments of wicked ambivalence only in me. Friends and family members offer sympathy of the sort they would if she were a woman losing her lifelong lover and friend. Her responses, she tells me, are hollow. It’s likely they all assume she is stricken with grief. Instead, it’s the emptiness of knowing that while she doesn’t want this man to die, this is the only way she’ll ever escape. Twenty-three years of marriage to someone who has slept in a bedroom across the hall since year twelve.
We meet at The Peacock Lounge, the bar adjoining Erté. This is a perfect place for a quiet talk or an assignation. Double-high tin ceilings, marble fixtures, a long polished bar, and Van Morrison songs playing back to back.
"You’re hitting a wall," I tell her sternly. "You need help. Friends who understand what’s going on, hospice, estate counseling. It’s time."
"You’re right," she says. But all she wants, really, is quiet conversation and Spanish wine. We drink the Arbanta Rioja, a smooth, robust, slightly spicy Tempranillo that costs just six dollars a glass.
"Why don’t you ever write about this, about me?" she asks after her second.
"Because it’s not my story to tell," I answer in a righteous voice.
But of course, this is bullshit. We writers are like vampires, sucking the marrow out of others’ most personal and desperate tales. I’d take her story in a second, if I didn’t think it would do her damage. Or expose her husband to something he should never, ever know.
"He can’t read any more," she assures me. "Even if he could, he wouldn’t understand." She wants me to write about her life, she says, because it would help her make sense of the last lost decade. She needs to know — to see — that what she has done matters.
"It does," I insist. But here’s what I do not say, because I’m freakishly inarticulate in person for someone who’s fairly fluid on the page: It matters to ME. Not only is this woman one of my closest friends, she’s also proof of something I very much want to believe. That people in untenable situations routinely do extraordinary things.
There’s a Martin Luther King, Jr., quote that I pull out often and wave in front of my children. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. It is, I’ll admit, a cheap, motherly trick. But untested as I am in most ways — living a life that is 90 percent comfort and convenience — I like to think that at least I understand.
There is objective value in personal sacrifice, not just for one man but for all of us. A k
nitting together of society that occurs in the small moments and generic-seeming households and never-recognized acts. For the small bit of solace it offers, to help sustain the measure of this woman, it’s my privilege to buy the wine.
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