A Separation(50)

I watched as they stepped, wobbling—Isabella reached out to steady herself on Mark’s arm—off the road, onto the verge. They suddenly looked much older, as if the place and not just Christopher’s death had aged them, and for a moment I could have believed that it was haunted, that a malignant spirit had drawn the life out of them, there were many such stories in Greece, it was part of their tradition. This was, I remembered, what had brought Christopher to Mani—regardless of what Isabella said, it would have been about a woman, Christopher never could keep his cock in his pants, the cult of death had drawn him here.

Almost as if he had come here to die. He was not suicidal, Christopher would never have killed himself. But he had come to Mani searching for signs of death, for its symbols and rituals, its obscure leavings, he had looked at this landscape and converted it into a pattern of rites for the dead and dying. How could his own end not have factored into his speculations about death in general, how could its possibility not have occurred to him? It was impossible to contemplate his final days without seeing the pall of death, even his philandering—an irrepressible habit formed over a lifetime—began to look like a vain protest against the end that was impending.

After a certain age, it is a question of mere decades, two or three if you are lucky, hardly any time at all. And feeling this presence of death, how would he have regarded the state of our marriage? Even if he did not regret the separation, he might have been susceptible to the feeling I now had, that we were old to be starting again. Christopher was eight years older than me. What had he seen, when he stood here, in those final moments? Perhaps nothing—perhaps it had only been an ordinary place, the circumstances entirely normal, until the blinding crack on the back of his head.

I looked around me. The feeling had passed, it did not seem like a place where someone we loved had died, it didn’t have that intimacy—the way the bed where someone we loved slept, the desk where someone we loved worked, the table where someone we loved ate their supper, had that intimacy, immediately and without effort—rather it was only a desolate stretch of road, desolate but not desolate enough, in the distance you could see the village, crossed with telephone wire, there was garbage in the burnt shrub, at our feet there were crushed beer cans and cigarette stubs.

I stared down at the stubs, all fairly new, their paper only a little yellowed, they were everywhere, they covered the ground. It was extraordinary that people could stand in the middle of this torched landscape and throw a cigarette—perhaps still burning, who knew—to the ground. Maybe they thought the landscape so much destroyed there was nothing to preserve, it was true that there was nothing here, in fact it was inexplicable that someone would have stood here long enough to smoke a cigarette, inexplicable that anyone would be standing on this road at all. Even us, our reason for being here—it became more indefinite by the minute.

I looked up at Christopher’s parents. I remembered meeting them for the first time, I had not met Isabella and Mark until Christopher and I were ourselves engaged to be married, by which late point I had already heard a great deal about them from Christopher, almost none of it good. He had spoken about them very little and then he suddenly had a great many things to say about them and their marriage, whether because he was now proposing to get married himself—he was not young when we married, he had managed to postpone it for some time—or simply because that particular box, that repository, Christopher’s feelings toward his parents and Isabella in particular, once opened, was difficult to close, it had to spill its contents at least a little bit.

And so I was apprehensive, even more than might be usual—and it is rarely classified as an easy encounter, meeting your future in-laws—although I expected it would not be as bad as Christopher said, he had himself declared, You will probably love them, they are very charming, as if it were a betrayal I had already committed. But I did not love them, and I did not find them especially charming, and that strain had showed in my relationship with them ever since. I remembered sitting across the table from them—one of many interminable dinners, once I was introduced to them it became a regular occurrence, the monthly dinner with Isabella and Mark, without discussion and almost without my noticing, something I never could have foreseen at the outset of our relationship—and thinking how much I hoped that our marriage, Christopher’s and mine, would not be like that.

I say hoped. In fact I was blithely confident, it seemed impossible that we could be like Isabella and Mark, I could not conceive of a future that would produce such a dire result. In the end, I had been right, we had not ended up like Mark and Isabella, although not for the reasons I thought then. At the time, I was like any young person looking at an old person—even if I was not that young, and nor was Christopher—and like any person who cannot believe that they will grow old, much less die, I could not believe that our marriage could become like their marriage, much less fall apart completely.

And yet it had, after five years. Five years—a fraction of the length of Isabella and Mark’s marriage, which continued, which was continuing now. They stood with one foot of air between them and their marriage accrued further hours, greater length, minute by minute. It might have been a terrible marriage, built on betrayal—although what was really meant by the word terrible, there were betrayals that looked unforgivable from the outside and that were nonetheless forgiven, and there were forms of intimacy that looked nothing like the name—but it was nonetheless a marriage.