Way back in the first decade of our marriage, before we had kids, Wife and I used to joke that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was “our play” (or “our movie”) … in the sense in which some couples have “our song”. Of course that’s a terrible thing to say: it’s a destructive play in which husband and wife savage each other for hours. We joked about it because, … well, … we argued a lot too, sometimes savagely, and yet we were both (back then) totally dedicated to keeping the marriage intact. We also liked the sheer artistry of the vituperation, and hoped that we could be that sharp and that witty while tearing slices of flesh off each other’s skeletons.
What just occurred to me is that maybe it was “our play” for more reasons than that. Consider the characters.
Martha is borderline crazy. She has a violent temper and is totally self-centered. She appraises other people entirely by how they serve her. She has high ambitions for her status in the community, and is deeply disappointed in how poorly her husband has achieved the script she wrote for him. She sleeps around casually, almost callously. Every other word out of her mouth expresses hatred and contempt for her husband. And yet she is deeply wounded, deeply scared, and depends on him totally for what little security she feels in life.
George has achieved modest things in life, no more, but he puts up with Martha. He doesn’t enjoy it, but he accepts it as a kind of duty. He absorbs all the shit she hurls at him, and still – by the end of the play – can hold her hand and comfort her.
The question is, why does he endure all this craziness? Once, when he is fighting bitterly with Martha, he complains about the abuse she heaps on him and she shoots back, “You married me for it!” That’s interesting … why? Did he think he deserved it? Was it punishment – self-inflicted – for some kind of crime that couldn’t be punished any other way?
One evening after we had seen the movie, Wife asked me whether I thought George had killed his family. At least twice he tells a story of a boy driving his family in the family car, swerving to avoid a porcupine in the road, and causing a crash from which he was the only survivor. Interesting story – why does it come back twice? Clearly it occupies a good bit of real estate in his mind. And it’s the kind of accident that no court would ever prosecute, but that could leave a boy with a lot of free-floating guilt … guilt that he might feel a need to expiate by marrying a harridan like Martha.
In many ways, Martha looks a lot like Wife, or like Wife way back then. (I emphatically do not mean that Wife was as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor, however!) And George has something in common with me, or with the man I was back then. But then did I marry her for it? Was I hoping to expiate some awful sin by punishing myself with Wife? And, if yes, … what was the crime?
It was only then that I remembered a conversation I had had years before with D, in which I had alluded to my culpability in a terrible crime ….
That story comes next.
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