For years four married men, and I include myself, as I am as married as anyone (Sekhnet and I have been together twenty years now) would take a ferry ride to an island once a year and spend the day on the beach. It was an annual tradition that ensured we all got to spend some quality time with a friend who was living abroad and came to the US every summer for a harried, duty-packed visit. We’d have lunch in a small restaurant there and compare notes on what had happened from the previous year before heading to the beach. The boat ride there and back, across the sparkling water, was always a highlight of the day.
A few years ago I had a final falling out with a longtime friend named Andy, one of the four, and it became awkward after that to convene the annual meeting. It would have forced the two men into the conflict, made them choose between me and Andy, something they could not do. The day was celebrated the last couple of years as a two-some, the two old friends hopping the ferry, eating lunch at the restaurant, spending the day at the beach, catching up.
It must have been one of the last times the four of us were there that the subject of Andy’s wife, Hitler, came up. I immediately barked out my extreme distaste for her, protested that I was trying to eat and that this harshly opinionated angry little Russian Jew was not a fit subject for mealtime. Andy and I had an understanding that his noisome wife would not be discussed between us. We’d patched up a friendship Hitler had sundered a few years earlier and not discussing his wife was a condition of our reconciliation. I found it impossible to talk about her without disputing her proclaimed right to express the full measure of her ready rage whenever she wanted to.
But during the polite lunch discussion, Rob, the peacemaker, chided me for my vehemence, for the shorthand “Hitler” (which I stand behind, incidentally) and began defending this woman, Hitler. “If you really listen to her, and talk to her, she’s really, really smart and she makes a lot of sense”, Rob said. He noted that she has a great sense of humor. He said he actually has learned to appreciate her and he gets along great with her now, that he has actually come to like her and feel like she likes him too. Andy began to laugh an unpleasant, mirthless laugh.
“She fucking hates you, Rob!” Andy said with exaggerated disgust. He went on to flesh out that hatred a bit. He did this with a big, humorless smile on his face. A year or two later Andy’s sickening marriage to Hitler was heading toward a long-overdue divorce. Andy left her during the separation, moved out of the marital domicile and into a spacious wooden garden apartment that looked like the Zen dojo he’d begun hanging out in with the little sect he’d joined.
Andy, a very bright man who’d scored a perfect hole-in-one on his SATs back in high school, would be quick to point out that a “dojo” is a place where martial artists train and he’d tell me the right word for a place where Zen meditation is done. In response I’d point out that every place Andy practices anything is a forum for martial arts (and that the only difference between the words “martial” and “marital” is the placement of the I, how’s that for a koan?).
I recall these lunches in particular as a place where unhappily married men complained about and defended their bad marriages. Since I am not actually married, am not legally contracted to Sekhnet, I was somewhat exempt from this part of the conversation, though, obviously, not really. Everybody has some kind of issue, conflict or problem with virtually everybody else, it’s just one of the features of being human.
Life partnerships are certainly not exempt from this general rule, in fact, they are often more subject to conflict than less intimate relationships. The better friendships are the ones where affection causes us to give generous allowances for the foibles of the other, and the proverbial benefit of the doubt. We’re lucky, in this life, if we find a couple of people we can count on to truly have our best interests at heart and not fight with us too much, it seems, especially during these combative days as we wait for our home, the increasingly besieged earth, to become uninhabitable.
It struck me as a bit ironic that Rob the peacemaker, who defended Andy’s wife, Hitler, against my unfair, if not inaccurate, portrayal, probably also supported him 100% in his decision to divorce her. It would have been hard not to be supportive of the move. I am quite sure the divorce did not fix Andy’s somewhat broken life, but it was certainly a step in the right direction. Rob has been at war with his own wife since shortly after they married, many years ago. It is one of the most explosive and angry minefields of a marriage I know. There are periods of uneasy peace surrounded by devastation that has done damage to everybody in its orbit. I am a casualty, finally, of that toxic relationship.
There is a picture of Andy and me, dressed in misshapen suits, ties inexpertly knotted at our throats, standing on the front stoop of my parents’ house in Queens. Each of us has a bad haircut we probably hacked out ourselves. The snapshot was taken right before we headed to Rob’s wedding. I wonder where that photo is.
There were signs at Rob’s wedding, now that I think back, of the disaster that was about to unfold. A sense of uneasiness and mutual desperation hung over it all, though perhaps my memories are also colored by what has come to pass in the decades since.
ii
To explain why Rob’s marriage was probably doomed to be a war from the start it is necessary to describe my old friend a little. Rob is also the most important character in this little story as he was my connection to the other married men in the odd society of married men who spent a day at the beach every year. I’d met Andy through Rob (they’d been at an Ivy League college together) and later I met the émigré, the man for whose company we’d meet at the ferry terminal every summer. Keep that thought in mind, Rob as the nexus, and the oldest friend of each of us, since it may explain some things later.
Rob has always been a nervous person. He was a nervous boy when I met him in fourth grade when we became best friends, after he had skipped into my grade. The nervous boy grew into a nervous teenager and later a nervous man. A very smart kid and an intelligent, thoughtful man, I have rarely known him not to be nervous about something.
He comes by it honestly, I would say. Rob was raised by somewhat nervous parents, two people I knew quite well for decades. After Rob and I became friends our parents became close friends too. The families spent many holidays together. In some families (like Rob’s, actually) I would have called his parents Aunt and Uncle. The families were very close and I was familiar with Rob’s domineering maternal grandmother as well. Rob and I went in different directions in High School and fell out of touch for a number of years.
At one point Rob’s mother, Caroline, came across an envelope of James Bond trading cards Rob and I had pasted on to pages and written humorous captions for, many years earlier (Sean Connery was Bond on those cards). I’d found them in a closet and sent the collection to Rob, whom I hadn’t seen for a few years. On top of the pile I’d scrawled a note to the effect that “someday we’ll play guitars”. As I recall, Caroline framed that note, after weeping joyfully to my mother over the life-affirming optimism of an old friend reaching out that way to a friend he’d grown apart from.
We did play guitar a few years later, in San Francisco, where Rob was living at the time. The cover story for his sojourn in SF, as I recall, was that he was becoming a California resident to get in-state tuition for medical school. He was actually playing in a rock band, trying to be as close to a full-time musician as he could be. He had already abandoned the idea of medical school and was probably working on how to best break the news of his career change to his folks.
I plugged a guitar into a large amp in the concrete warehouse room where his band practiced. It was just Rob and me in the reverb-rich room. I loved the sound, played some bluesy line, sustaining a note against the wonderful acoustics of that big empty room and Rob’s jaw dropped as he told me how much I sounded like Clapton [1]. This may seem a silly image to include here, but it will be useful to recall later on.
Sometime later, back in New York, we had a remarkable jam session in the basement office of a pediatrician named Dr. Geller (who turned out to have been Sekhnet’s pediatrician, she recalled his enormous hands). Geller owned the house Rob’s parents rented, the home where Rob and his older sister were raised. I’d had many a holiday meal in that house, in the company of our two families. I’d spent massive amounts of time in that house over the years, but had never been down to Geller’s office before that night. It was a remarkable session, with Andy on synthesizer keyboard. It was the first time I’d played with Andy and there was a certain magic to the musical connection that first time.
But none of this explains why Rob was doomed to a combative marriage, so onward. He’d had a series of fairly longterm girlfriends over the years, but as far as I knew, for many years, none of them were Jewish. In his mind he could only marry a Jewish woman, so this easy out kept his sexual relationships limited in a certain crucial way. A way that eventually caused great pain, and sometimes anger, in his longterm partners. A psychiatrist finally pointed this pattern out to Rob, when he was in his early thirties. I remember Rob telling me about this breakthrough session when he realized, with the shrink’s help, that it was essential for him to date a Jewish girl and get married as soon as possible. He proceeded to do exactly that.
I liked the woman, though she seemed volatile. Her older brother (a guy Rob and I both knew in passing at Hebrew School), we soon learned, had opted out of the family, not contacting any of them for years. This happens in families, I figured, who knows what the whole story is? The haste with which they got engaged and married may not have been to my taste (I’m still not officially married, nor is Sekhnet planning to marry me) but it wasn’t my business, really. Yet there was still something a little unsettling about the lead up to the wedding and the wedding itself. An ominous foreshadowing, if you will.
There was a dinner party before the wedding, at a Mexican restaurant, maybe it was their engagement party. Hitler, Andy’s wife, insulted Rob’s oversensitive sister in a curt, particularly brutal manner. I remember feeling a tension at that dinner that I can only say felt tense.
The bachelor party for Rob was also memorable for something being off about it, even for a bachelor party. The main thing I recall is that the party was commandeered by the loud, overbearing, drunken asshole brother-in law of the bride, a boisterous clown named Eddie. My main memory is of Eddie loudly critiquing the body of a stripper in a bar he’d dragged us to. Perhaps her breasts or buttocks were not up to his exacting standards, although it could have been literally anything, or nothing, at that point. He was shit-faced and somehow in charge.
Eddie would not be Rob’s brother-in-law that much longer, he and Rob’s wife’s sister divorced not long after that idiotic display of alpha-maleness. I don’t disparage anyone for getting divorced from someone who mistreats them. I have been divorced myself several times over the years, even if not from a marriage. When all you are getting from a relationship is grief, harshness, abuse — time to hop on the bus, Gus. In fact, for that reason, a terrible relationship, Rob’s wife wrote off her younger sister a few years later. The sister, although seemingly pleasant enough, is apparently an unredeemable complete fucking bitch.
Rob and his wife finally reached the conclusion that they were better off apart. They could not find a way out of their eternal war. A year or two ago they sat their two sons down and informed them of their plan to split up, to divorce. Then, miraculously, they unaccountably reconciled when their younger son moved across the country for college. It was like a rebirth for their relationship, a beautiful new springtime, though it was not very long before catastrophic sky-blackening storms swept back in.
Now this here, what I am doing now, this is what I always do. I write about things that are nobody’s business, betray people left and right, simply for the sake of an “interesting” story, even if I don’t use their full names, or any names. They know it’s them I’m writing about, and that’s the unspeakable thing, that I am publicly probing into things they don’t want probed into, particularly, and most unforgivably, in the public space of the internet. I eventually write about ticklish, chafing details that make people who used to be my friends angry, defensive, sometimes vindictive. My beloved Sekhnet, on reading part one of this piece, had a related reaction and a one word review: “flush!”
In other words, down the drain with this whole nasty subject, done with the eternal bad feelings it engenders, these sad and distasteful details of disappointing, doomed disputes with desperate people. “Flush!” she said again when I began trying to explain why these lived materials from my life are so useful to me.
She listened as I went on about the personal experiences and lessons of one’s life being the most important things to ponder and learn from, the richest things to write clearly about, the best tools for attaining insights and for personal growth. Plus, I pointed out, there is a great punchline to this particular story, if I can manage to tell it correctly, more than one punchline, actually. She eventually agreed not to say “flush!” again, for this particular tale, at least.
So onward, but not today, my allotted writing time is at an end. Part three will put the final pieces in place and hopefully provide a satisfying, if mildly merciless, punchline.
iii
In the end, the real trouble between men is not a wife like Hitler who forbids her husband to have someone as a friend. It is the individual who must act with integrity, or not. Looking around it doesn’t take long to see that integrity is in short supply in our relentlessly competitive world. It is not our fault, strictly speaking, as violence is often the rule — faced with superior force we are often stopped in our tracks. Maybe homo sapiens are doomed to eternal compromise with the killers who are always among us and some of that compromise is soul-crushing.
I do the only thing I can imagine doing from one day to the next, try to make sense of seemingly incoherent things. I know it makes me appear to be a smugly superior asshole to some people, but it’s the best way I’ve found to deal with things that perplex me.
Much of the conflict in the world is the result of incoherent narratives, things we believe based purely on feelings. Armies march for reasons that make absolutely no sense, though a rousing excuse is always given for the slaughter, no matter how otherwise empty and incoherent the war slogans might be. The twitching man with the loaded gun does not need a rational explanation when he tells you to lie on the fucking floor so he can blow your head off. How the west was won, how slavery was maintained for centuries, how great tracts of land have always changed hands, how fortunes have always been made. Thus it has always been among we who are made of flesh.
At the table on that holiday island we always spoke of long-time intractable problems that sometimes were better and sometimes were worse. There was rarely a perceptible change from year to year in the larger picture of this circle of problematically married men. This is the lot of virtually everyone, this ebbing and flowing of good and bad fortune and the moods that accompany these changes. I try not to be judgmental, though I do not always succeed in this.
I got a text from Rob that he needed to see me immediately. I called and got a text not to use the phone, just to text him a time and place to meet. I asked what it was about, but he couldn’t say anything but that it was urgent that we talk face to face.
When he showed up in his car he was extremely nervous, even for him. I probed, after a session of small-talk, and learned why his eyelid was twitching. He was there to confront me, to accuse me of deliberately, or thoughtlessly, trying to destroy his marriage. I was probably out of their lives, he said, with no way to redeem myself, because what I’d done was so destructive and unforgivable. But he was going to give me a chance to save our friendship by talking my way out of my death sentence.
What had I done that marked me this way? Made a remark to his wife, in passing, that she, weeks later, weaponized and used to whip him bloody in front of their marriage counselor. The therapist agreed that I was a malicious force in their marriage who needed to be dealt with immediately.
I walked Rob and myself through everything I could remember about the remark, which was essentially that the wife’s ten minute story about an embittering encounter between the wife and Andy made a lot more sense than Rob’s harried one minute version of the same story about a month earlier. Rob’s story made little sense, but as I have no use for Andy, except perhaps to throw him on the ground and kick him, I didn’t probe for details and we went on to other subjects. Rob immediately expressed regret for telling me anything about his wife’s run-in with Andy. The wife’s story was much more detailed and I understood things I had not when I first heard a rushed, regretted version from Rob that I asked not a single clarifying question about.
The wife seized on my “oh, that makes much more sense than the story Rob told me,” as proof that Rob’s oldest friend also says you’re a fucking liar, Rob, a fucking liar! The therapist was hard-pressed to disagree. You need to confront this person, she’d told him. His wife told them he was afraid of me. He rushed to confront me.
Another man might have reacted to the accusation differently than I did, maybe just punched him in the face, like in a western, just to make it stop. I wasn’t raised that way, so I went through everything I could remember, a process I repeat whenever I sit down to write. I suppose it’s part of my nature to muse over puzzles, and this was one of the more piquant puzzles that my nose has ever been shoved into. Rob seemed satisfied by the end that I had not intended his marriage fatal harm, intentionally or unconsciously. Still, he raised other issues with me, had other suspicions and accusations. He seemed intent on keeping me on the defensive. I have to say, I hate that kind of shit.
Here I will give you a little additional information about the odd society of married men who used to assemble around a table once a year at that restaurant on Fire Island. Rob is Jewish, as am I, so his particular psychological type is familiar to me. Having grown up in the same cultural milieu I get the whole set-up, learned the same formulation of moral values that are supposed to be taken seriously and all the rest. Culturally, the other two problematically married men were always a bit more mysterious to me in some ways.
Andy is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon version of the classic jovial passive-aggressive, from stock that one writer (Dennis Potter) referred to as “a pinched and whining breed.” Andy’s personal mix is finished with a cringing grandiosity tinged with self-hatred. If you don’t actually hate yourself, at least a little, you will never understand it. I confess, I truly don’t understand the sick fuck. As for the émigré, you’d have to ask him yourself, he is no longer talking to me, for reasons he need not specify.
I could not simply flush this whole matter of the death of my oldest friendship, as Sekhnet urged me to do. Andy proved himself exceedingly flushable in the end, my life enriched by his subtraction from it, as Rob also turned out to be, in the end, but the part about the émigré continued to bug me. I knew why I couldn’t be friends with Rob, it was his constant provocation and his infernal, convoluted denials about it. What was his gripe against me, exactly?
I reached out to Rob, assuming that he’d cried piteously to his old friend about my heartlessness and that had affected his friend to cut ties with me. It took weeks after my phone calls, and the formulation of precise questions which I emailed to him at his texted request, and a good deal of diligence and forbearance on my part, but eventually Rob gave me the three unforgivable things I had done to him. He told me he had not talked to the émigré about our falling out, in any detail, at least until I’d asked about it in one of the three emailed questions.
His wife told him I’d worn a fucking wire on him the last time we spoke, on what he admitted had been “a bad day.” Wore a fucking wire like a fucking fuck. An unforgivable betrayal, under any circumstances.
His wife told him I’d said I’d been mad enough at him, at one point in our maddening chat, to want to punch him, throw him on the ground and kick him to make him shut the fuck up. Unforgivable, no matter what the provocation supposedly was, no matter if I’d acted on it or not.
His wife told him I’d called him a pussy. Unforgivable!
This last bit was a slight distortion of what I’d said. I had a revelation while she and I were speaking (she’d called to offer the choice of unconditional acceptance of a blanket apology for whatever I thought Rob might have done to me, or fucking myself– something I already periodically do). I realized toward the end of the conversation why Rob was always so competitive with me. It was only tangentially related to that Clapton sound I could get on a guitar.
The real conflict, it came to me in a flash, was that Rob’s father had never stood up to his wife, and that Rob felt that he was unable to stand up to his wife, or to anybody, really, but that he feels I somehow hold my own in these situations, always seem able to take care of myself, somehow.
So Rob feels, on some level, like he’s a pussy, I told her, and he feels, for whatever reason, that I am not a pussy, and it makes him angry and so he provokes me and he can’t help himself or stop doing it.
“You are definitely not a pussy,” she said. (The jury is still out on this, I think it’s safe to say).
Then she told her husband that anybody who could be friends with somebody who thinks he’s a pussy is a fucking pussy, end of story. That’s all she wrote.
[1] I don’t want to get bogged down in this Clapton business right now. I love his tone, Eric’s vibrato is up there in a class almost by itself, the touch and the microtones are beautiful and subtle, etc. but he is an extremely limited guitarist. Great singer, excellent musician, can do that one thing beautifully on guitar, plus the nice acoustic blues picking, but truly, I don’t get why he is not a better and more versatile guitarist by now. It’s like a failure of imagination, a dull incuriousness, an insane commitment to “brand,” or just an indication of a kind of rigidity, or something. His autobiography reveals him as something of a shallow jackass, maybe that explains it. Anyway, Clapton’s vibrato is beautiful, I’ve always loved it and I did indeed strive to master it, to the extent I ever did.
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