We’d chosen the Washington’s Birthday weekend for our wedding party, so that our friends from out of town could comfortably attend. Besides Nola, Anabel still had three reasonably good friends, one from Wichita, two from Brown. (She would terminate two of these friendships within months of our marrying; the third would remain on probation until a baby put an end to it.) Since she was inviting no one from her family to the party, and since my mother didn’t even like her, Anabel thought it was unfair to invite my own family, but I made the case that Cynthia did like her and that I was my mother’s only child.
Then one evening Anabel brought me a letter from our mailbox.
“It’s interesting,” she said, “that your mother still writes just to you, not to both of us.”
I opened the letter and scanned it: Dearest Tom … house seems so empty with you gone from it … Dr. Van Schyllingerhout … higher dose of … I tried to say nothing but every nerve in my body … to compare her childhood of inherited privilege and luxury to my childhood in Jena … unspeakable carnage of the War with modern farming methods … deeply offended … no choice but to speak my heart freely to you … You are making a TERRIBLE MISTAKE … quite attractive and very alluring to an inexperienced young man … you ARE very inexperienced … see nothing but unhappiness in your future with a pampered, demanding, EXTREME person raised in extreme wealth and privilege … already so skinny and pale from the kooky diet she has you … when a person is not experienced sometimes the sex instinct clouds their judgment … I beg you to think hard and realistically about your future … want nothing more than for you to find a loving, sensible, mature, REALISTIC person to make a happy life with …
With suddenly cold hands, I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope.
“What does she say?” Anabel asked.
“Nothing. Her colon’s flared up again, it’s really bad.”
“Can I read the letter?”
“It’s just her being her.”
“So we’re getting married in six weeks, and I can’t read a letter from your mother.”
“I think the steroids make her a little crazy. You don’t want to read it.”
Anabel gave me one of her frightening looks. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “We’re either full partners or we’re nothing. There is no letter that anyone could send me that I wouldn’t want you to read. None. Ever.”
She was preparing to rage or to cry, and I couldn’t stand either, and so I handed her the letter and retreated to the bedroom. My life had become a nightmare of exactly the female reproach I’d dedicated it to avoiding. To avoid it from my mother was to invite it from Anabel, and vice versa; there was no way out. I was sitting on the bed, kneading my hands, when Anabel appeared in the doorway. She didn’t look hurt, just coldly angry.
“I’m going to use this word once in my life,” she said. “Exactly once.”
“What word?”
“Cunt.” She clapped her hands to her mouth. “No, that’s a terrible word, even for her. I’m sorry I said it.”
“I’m so sorry about the letter,” I said. “She’s really not well.”
“But you understand I’m not going to see her again. I’m not going to buy her little Christmas presents. She’s not coming to our wedding party. If we ever have a family, she’s not going to see my children. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes,” I said eagerly, in my relief that Anabel hadn’t turned against me.
She knelt at my feet and took my hands. “People have strong reactions to me,” she said, more gently. “It hurts me, but I’m used to it. What I can’t stand is what her letter says about you. She has no respect for your taste or your judgment or your feelings. She thinks she still owns you and can tell you what to do. And that makes me very angry. She refuses to see who you are.”
“I really do think she’s miserable because she’s sick.”
“Her feelings make her sick. You’ve said it yourself.”
“She was polite to you in Denver. This has to be the steroids talking…”
“I’m not saying you can never see her again. You’re a loving person. But I can’t see her anymore. Ever. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“We were both half orphaned on the same day,” she said. “And now we’ll be full orphans together. Will you do that with me?”
The next day, I wrote a very formal letter to my mother, retracting her invitation to the wedding party.
We were married on Valentine’s Day, with two ladies from the clerk’s office as witnesses. We had dinner at home, spaghetti with spinach and garlic and olive oil, to symbolize the thrift that we intended to embrace, but Anabel had once mentioned that she liked Mumm champagne, and I’d bought her a bottle to mark the occasion with some small luxury. After dinner, she gave me my present, a new Olivetti portable typewriter. I was immediately aware of a more troubling symbolism: both of our gifts had to do with my work, not hers. But my novella had taken an unexpected turn — the young woman in Jena came from the town’s richest family, and her father was a brute — and I believed that Anabel would be able to recognize it as a loving tribute to her. So I bravely handed over a manila envelope to which I’d glued a white bow.
She opened it with a puzzled frown. “What is this?”
“The first half of a novella. I wanted to surprise you.”
She took out the manuscript, read some of the first page, and then simply stared at it without reading; and I saw that I’d made a terrible mistake.
“You’re writing fiction,” she said dully.
“I want to be with you in everything,” I said. “I don’t want to be a journalist, I want to be with you. Partners—”
I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“I think I need to be alone now,” she said.
“The novella is a tribute to you. To the two of us.”
She stood up and headed toward the bedroom. “I really just need to be alone right now.”
I heard her close the bedroom door behind her. Our marriage, four hours old, couldn’t have been going worse, and I felt entirely to blame. I hated my novella for having done this to her. And yet I’d been happy working on it, had been markedly less depressed in the six weeks since I’d abandoned her plan for me, The Complicater. I sat for an hour at the kitchen table, in a deepening cold fog of depression, and waited to see if Anabel might come out of the bedroom. She didn’t. Instead I began to hear the sharp gasps of her unsuccessfully resisting tears. Full of pity for her, I went into the bedroom and found it dark. She was crumpled up on the bare floor by the windows.
“What have I done?” I cried.
Her answer came out slowly, in fragments punctuated by my apologies and her tears: I’d lied to her. I’d kept secrets from her. Both of our wedding presents were about me. I’d broken my promises to her. I’d promised that she was the artist and I was the critic. I’d promised that I wouldn’t steal her story, but she could tell from one paragraph that I’d stolen it. I’d promised that we wouldn’t compete, and I was competing with her. I’d deceived her and ruined our wedding day …
Each reproach landed like acid on my brain. I’d heard it said that there is no pain worse than mental torture, and now I believed it. Even the worst of our premarital scenes had been nothing like this; it had always been fundamentally OK me dealing with temperamental Anabel. Now I was experiencing her psychic pain directly as my own. The heaven of soul-merging was a hell. Clutching my head, I ran away from her and threw myself on the living-room sofa and lay there for some hours, experiencing mental torture, while Anabel did the same in the bedroom. I kept thinking, this is our wedding night, this is our wedding night.