Love in vain

The marriage between my parents dissolved after 13 years. Love in vain? Love misunderstood? Love become intolerance? No doubt all three played a role, though I never could pin down just which melody fell out of tune.

Neither side ever remarried. There was no divorce, only separation. My father died a sad man seven years after the breakup. My mother, far younger, lived on for 23 productive years until disease claimed her at the now-young age of 67.

What most intrigued me about their parting was the simplicity of a key component, one that both sides would tell me of later, their perspectives obviously very different. What they said would haunt my own relationships for decades, its too-painful simplicity marring my own view of the delicate give-and-take any bond demands.

When I asked my father to explain the why of the collapse he would invariably harp on two themes: his loyal providing for his wife and sex. He was the older man, he would say (21 years older to be precise), and he had systematically supported his wife in every way, or so he thought. Sensing her wish to be a glamorous hostess, he had taken a job in Spain that assured she would be treated as a princess might be, with servants and the possibility to construct elaborate cocktail parties whose guests included ambassadors and high society. When that job ended, he had moved back to Washington, D.C., a small boy in tow (me), and tried with his limited funds to ensure she would be her own boss, purchasing four properties she could manage and rent.

In his view he had been a faithful and loving husband who had tried his best to do his best.

When I turned to her later to give me her side, she disputed none of this.

He had in fact done all that he said and honored her person in the most dutiful of ways.

But.

“Your father,” she said evenly, “was a deeply depressed man, and depressed most of the time.” He was moody, at times angry for no reason, and these factors led her gradually to lose interest in his sexual essence. He had called her frigid. She, displaying a taut smile, replied that the more he pushed — and he did, hard — the less she wished to give in to his desire, since to her they came from a reservoir of rage, not love. She lost the ability to relax in his presence. Worse, he had twice compelled her to get abortions when she fell pregnant after my birth, telling her he lacked the funds to raise three children. She complied, but the bitterness cut deep.

She might have found the strength to overcome these forced losses had it not been for a single, overarching truth. My father, she said, while in fact good with the “big” things was lost before the little ones.

What she most needed from time to time was a simple “I love you” or a caress that said as much, and these gestures were not in my father’s repertoire.

Since I chose to stay with him after my mother departed, I came to understand this myself. He never patted me on the arm or head. He never expressed affection, instead showing it through his acts, his deeds. He never once used the word love.

It was as if this emotional vocabulary vexed him, a man otherwise given to verbal brilliance and loquaciousness. His love, he seemed to say, should be obvious.

And yet.

Though my father had been, before my mother, a man of many women, his loving was above all physical, large, and thus seemingly short on tenderness.

As in Otis Redding soulfully singing “Try a Little Tenderness.”

Thus, a small version of a large failure.

A man who knew all about the big but refused to acquaint himself with the small. A woman who, while appreciating the large, craved the small to make a difficult path worth walking on.

Right and wrong? I would not dare to say, let alone speculate on.

I can say that as a man I tried and often failed with both big and small, attempting to balance the two. That I never truly married or chose family life attests to doubts bred into me as a child. Perhaps I knew too much.

Perhaps, too, I needed, as my mother did, a woman adroit in handing out the small, with kindness aforethought. Someone good with the word Darling.

And because of this, mimicking my father’s depressive, self-destructive streak, I chose women largely ill at ease with the likes of Darling.

It is often said that we become our mothers, or our fathers, the becoming depending on gender. In my case I very likely became my parents together, stuck between the big and the small, always pedaling uphill, with the beautiful crest of the mountain always in sight but finally unreachable.