Lessons in love

‘All in love is fair.’ A friend from college said to me when I visited her in Gent during varsity break sometime in 1982. She could have quoted the title of Stevie Wonder’s song. After she had broken up with her then boyfriend, she went off to Belgium to pursue her postgraduate studies in Ghent. Falling in love was easy as we were young and dreamy. Romantic love is illusive, you are drawn to each other and you think you have found someone with whom you could connect with, deep down you just want this someone to love you for who you are, all your unpredictable and capricious self. You get married when you do not even know what you want and who you are, so when that initial chemistry fizzles out, reality sets in as life happens, the eccentricities that you were first drawn to begin to bother you, as if the other person is part of you. Will you be able to endure and stay committed to each other because you gave your vows when you signed the marriage papers?

Marriage Story directed by Noah Baumbach tells a tender story about two people who love one another but they do not belong to each other. While going through a divorce, Charlie and Nicole played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson talk to the mediator about things they value in each other. As Charlie’s directorial career prospers in New York, Nicole feels that she has compromised her own acting ambition and she must free herself from Charlie who has been directing her life and is indifferent to her needs. It is a bittersweet story about how two people can come together and then lose the emotional connection that first drew them together. There are no winners in a divorce as one of Charlie’s lawyers says,’Divorce is like a death without a body.’

Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley is a domestic fiction that talks about two couples who have been friends since their early twenties in the eighties. Their lives have been intertwined for decades, from university student days to proper grown-up married and work lives. One evening, Alex and Christine receive a call from Lydia that Zachary is dead. Zachary is a wealthy man who owns a London art gallery.

‘One minute he was at his desk in the office at the gallery talking to Jane Ogden, perfectly fine, the next he keeled over, hit his head perhaps, everything went flying. Hannah tried CPR, the paramedics tried everything. Before they got him to the hospital, he was dead.’

Christine is married to broody Alex who is a poet and teaches at a primary school.The story takes us through the dynamics between the four characters and how they first knew one another. Christine and Lydia have been friends since school. During college, dreamy and sensuous Lydia had a crush on Alex who was their French teacher, married to Juliet at the time. Artistic and serious Christine briefly dated Zach who was Alex’s good friend. But young Zach seemed to be more taken with girlish Lydia. Despite marrying Lydia, he and Christine remained good friends as he continued to support Christine in her artistic pursuits. Alex subsequently married Christine after he had divorced his wife. As they mourn for Zach’s untimely passing, instead of their loss bringing them closer, love and sorrow bring out entanglements and unresolved resentments from the past. They cannot come back to what they were before. Alex has not thought much of Christine’s art and has not taken it seriously. He has always been an inflexible, opinionated and critical person.

‘She and Alex were so unlike, really:associated through some accident in their youth – the accident of his choosing her, because of what he thought she was. Since that beginning, they had both changed their skins so often. Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.’

Here is an excerpt of the exchange between Christine and Lydia:

Christine and Alex had a quarrel while holidaying in Venice in the company of their good friends. The next day, Christine apologized to Lydia and said that he could be so inexorable.Lydia said she wouldn’t mind him when he’s inexorable. She told Lydia that it’s easy to be nice to Zach. Lydia agreed.

‘ –That’s true.

–Isn’t it impossible , though, anyway, to love someone all the time? That’s why marriage is a contract. Those awful vows people invent for themselves now:’I promise to love the way you rub your nose’, or ‘I promise that your singing will always make me happy’. But sometimes the way he rubs his nose will make you want to kill him! You stay with him because it’s in your contract, it’s the deal you agreed.’In sickness and in health’. That gets you over the tough spot. He stays with you for the same reason. It is more decent.‘

Tessa Hadley is a very insightful and perceptive writer as her description of the conflicting human emotions and behaviour is so detailed and realistic.

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan is a novella, forty-seven pages long. In this short fiction set in Dublin, Keegan asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women. Friday, July 29 Cathal is supposed to wed Sabine, a woman whom he met at a conference in Toulouse two years ago. Sabine’s father was French and her mother was English. Cathal invited Sabine to Arklow and her response was lukewarm in the beginning and then at some point she began spending most of the weekends and ‘she didn’t seem to mind the expense, and bought freely: bread, organic fruit and vegetables, plaice and sole and mussels off the fish van‘ She ‘cooked with apparent light-handedness and ease‘. One day he said to her,’ Why don’t we marry?’

Cathal comes across as mean, calculating and possibly a misogynist.He gets upset by inconvenience and messiness. When Sabine accepts his invitation to move in, she brings her possessions, boxes of books,a desk, a chair, suitcases filled with clothes, shoes, pots and pans, photos, posters and things. He has a problem dealing with the situation.

Here is a snippet of the exchange between them:

‘“I just don’t know about this stuff, that’s all.”

“Which stuff? My stuff?”

“These things. All your things. All this.” He was looking around: at the blue throw, the two extra pillows, pairs of shoes and sandals, most of which he’d never seen her wearing, poking out from under his chest of drawers. 

He himself owned Nikes and just one pair of shoes. 

“Did you think I would come with nothing?”

“It’s just a lot.” He tried to explain. ‘

Cathal is such a disappointing character. He wanted Sabine’s companionship but he was incapable of giving.

Sabine asked Cathal:

“You know what is at the heart of misogyny?”

“It’s simply about not giving. … Whether it’s believing you should not give us the vote or not give help with the dishes.”

Sabine decides to return the diamond ring, leaving Cathal on the cusp of middle age to contemplate his behaviour and his father’s legacy. He recalls a scene from his young days how his father, his brother and him had laughed heartily when his almost sixty-year-old mother had fallen backwards, onto the floor as his brother had reached out and quickly pulled the chair from under her after she had served them dinner. It was a horrendous joke.

Claire Keegan‘s sentences are powerful. So Late in the Day is an exquisite compact little story that puts simply nuanced and complex dynamics between a man and a woman.