23
Researchers looked at magnetic resonance images of the brains of people who described themselves as newly in love. They were shown a photograph of their beloveds while their brains were scanned for activity. The scan showed the same reward systems being activated as in the brains of addicts given a drug.
Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching!
For most married people, the standard pattern is a decrease of passionate love, but an increase in deep attachment. It is thought that this attachment response evolved in order to keep partners together long enough to have and raise children. Most mammals don’t raise their offspring together, but humans do.
There is nowhere to cry in this city. But the wife has an idea one day. There is a cemetery half a mile from their apartment. Perhaps one could wander through it sobbing without unnerving anyone. Perhaps one could flap one’s hands even.
In many tribal cultures children are considered self-sufficient at or near the age of six. For all practical purposes, this means if they were lost overnight in the wild they might not perish. Of course, in modern industrial societies, children tend to be protected much longer. But there’s evidence that the age six still resonates with men. Researchers say that many men have affairs around the time their oldest child turns six. Chances are their genes will still march on even without direct oversight.
Eat the black berries! Not the red! Daddy has to go away for a little while. And don’t talk to the bears!
“How is that even possible?” the philosopher says. “He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.”
She knows. She knows. So it begs the question, doesn’t it? Did she unkind and ungood and untrue him?
24
The wife goes to yoga now. Just to shut everyone up. She goes to it in a neighborhood where she does not live and has never lived. She takes the class meant for old and sick people but can still hardly do any of it. Sometimes she just stands and looks out the window where the people whose lives are intact enough not to have to take yoga live. Sometimes the wife cries as she is twisting her body into positions. There is a lot of crying in the class for the old and sick people so no one says anything.
But even the wife notices that her teacher is arrayed in light. The teacher takes pity on her and gives her private lessons. The wife tells her about the husband. About how he may or may not love someone else. About how she may or may not leave him. She tells her that they viciously whisper-fight at night when her daughter is in bed.
She does not say, Last night, I pulled his hair. Last night I tried to pull his hair out of his head.
It is so easy now for the wife to be patient and kind to the daughter. She will never love anyone or anything more. Never. It is official.
She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it.
Why would you ruin my best thing?
Her neighbor’s husband fell in love with a girl who served coffee to him every morning. She was twenty-three and wanted to be a dancer or a poet or a physical therapist. When he left his family, his wife said, “Does it matter to you how foolish you look? That all our friends find you ridiculous?” He stood in the doorway, his coat in his hand. “No,” he said. The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
Love is the word men use to paper over this.
Studies show that 110 % of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.
Darwin theorized that there was something left over after sexual attractiveness had served its purpose and compelled us to mate. This he called “beauty” and thought it might be what drives the human animal to make art.
Every single song has a message for the wife these days. Some are particularly moving and must be played on repeat over and over as she walks to the subway. For example: Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you? Tell me true.
No one gets the crack-up he expects. The wife was planning for the one with the headscarf and the dark jokes and the people speaking kindly of her at her funeral.
Oh wait, might still get that one.
We both felt really bad about it, the husband tells the wife. “Oh, the hand-wringing!” her best friend says. “Do they think they’re in a movie?”
Sometimes the husband and wife run into each other in the park across the street. He is there to smoke, she to stare at the trees. He buttons the three buttons of her coat. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, she thinks. Both have trouble working up the nerve to go into the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. They joke that they should just run off to Mexico together. Forget this whole stupid thing.
But in they go. It is the designated place for questions.
“Are you still e-mailing or calling her?”
“No,” he says.
“Are you still sending her music?”
“No,” he says slowly. “I’m not sending her music.”
“What? What are you sending her?”
“Just one video,” he says.
“Of what?”
“Of guinea pigs eating a watermelon.”
What Kant said: What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing.
What the Girl said: Hey, I really like you.
25
The wife thinks the old word is better. She says he is besotted. The shrink says he is infatuated. She doesn’t want to tell what the husband says.
Anyway, he takes it back a few days in.
I am not very observant, the wife thinks. Once her husband bought a dining room table and it wasn’t until dinnertime that she noticed it. By then he was angry.
These are the sorts of things they talk about in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.
But she does get irritated when her college sends around the memo at the end of the semester about how to recognize a suicidal student. She wants to send it back marked up in black letters. How about you look in their eyes?
People say, You must have known. How could you not know? To which she says, Nothing has ever surprised me more in my life.
You must have known, people say.
The wife did have theories about why he was acting gloomy. He was drinking too much, for example. But no, that turned out to be completely backwards; all the whiskey drinking was the result, not the cause, of the problem. Correlation IS NOT causation. She remembered that the almost astronaut always got very agitated about this mistake that nonscientists made.
Other theories she’d had about the husband’s gloominess:
He no longer has a piano.
He no longer has a garden.