Fantasy as meaning

As I mentioned in my post earlier this morning ... and as anybody could tell by a casual glance at the system dates on the page here ... it has been a while since I wrote anything on this blog. Partly it's because I have been busy at work; partly it's because I have been tired in the evenings. (One day I even took my lunch hour to go swimming, which would make the first time I've exercised since ... when exactly? A while ago, at any rate.)

But I have also been corresponding with Wife's friend D. This has given me another venue in which to discuss how things are going with Wife and me, and it may be part of why I haven't felt I could also take the time to blog.

Not that corresponding with D is anything like blogging. For one thing, blogging is a whole lot easier. The worst I got after neglecting this site for a week and a half was a sweet e-mail asking if everything was all right; if I let one of D's e-mails go too long without an answer, she broods that I have had second thoughts about discussing personal topics with her. She is also very quick to let me know when she sees things differently that I do. I mean, she is nice about it -- at one point she wrote "I would like your views...however contrary to mine. I care deeply for you, and have no desire to win any argument. Rather, I'd like to share the complexity of the situation with you." But that doesn't mean she is the least bit shy about telling me when she thinks I have fallen short in precisely the areas I tell her matter most to me. In principle this is a good thing -- that someone is willing to holler "Bullshit!" when I most need to hear it. I only wish that it didn't happen so often merely because she misunderstood what I was trying to say.

What is this thing with me and overly-intellectual Type A women, anyway?

The point of this long dreary story, however, is not just to gripe about D. Rather, she recently suggested to me a whole new way of looking at Wife's relationship with Boyfriend 5, one that honestly had never occurred to me before. I alluded to this a little the last time I wrote about my correspondence with D. But in her most recent e-mail she made the same point a lot more clearly:

[When I talk to Wife she tells me] this is a real relationship, not just an email relationship (translate-a fantasy). I understand from [Wife] that you have challenged her relationship with [Boyfriend 5] on just such grounds, and I might question the distinction anyway. As I've noted in [a previous letter], I think the storyline for [Boyfriend 5] is far more meaningful and significant than her real life, which is full of pain, sickness, loneliness, and shadowed by meaninglessness and death. Reality, [Hosea]? Your real life is surely far more agreeable and promising than hers. It's very powerful to find a companion who understands suffering and isolation without comfort or love while being trapped by circumstances beyond his control (and you of course realize that the life of a hunted terrorist is as trapped as any life you can imagine).

In other words, if I understand D correctly, it really doesn't matter whether the stories that Boyfriend 5 spins for Wife are true or not ... but it is totally understandable that she would believe them anyway, and want to live in the world that those stories paint for her; because in that world she loves someone who sees no faults in her, who loves her perfectly, and who leads a dangerous and exciting life fighting for freedom against terrible odds. What can her mundane life, here in the suburbs, where she suffers from chronic pain and terminal illnesses and where her big accomplishments are to help in the classroom or do the laundry -- I say, what can this life possibly offer her to compete with the glamor and romance and meaningfulness of that other life?

On D's understanding, it seems that the fact that this meaningful life is a complete fantasy -- is, in fact, provably a lie -- is beside the point.

I'm not quite sure what to do with this point of view. It is so important to me to know whether something is true that this idea doesn't fit very well into the existing shelves in my mind. Maybe that means it's crazy, or maybe that means it is time for me to do a little remodeling in there ... to put up some new shelves. I'm still puzzling over this.

Things are OK

I got a very sweet e-mail from Veni today asking if I was OK, since I haven't posted in ... gosh, I guess it has been a week and a half. So I thought I should at least put a note out here that the reason for my silence is very mundane. Nothing terrible has happened; I haven't had to go private or been abducted by space aliens. I've just had a lot of catching up to do at work lately (there goes one time slot for blogging), and I've been tired enough in the evenings not to want to stay up long into the night (there goes the other one). I hope to get something more substantive out here in the next day or two.

In the meantime, the concern was touching. Thank you.

Movie meme

For the last several weeks, a meme has been spreading its way across the community: whom would you cast in the movie of your life? I haven't been properly tagged, and as a result I think there are rules to the meme that I am likely not following. But it is an interesting question, and I've been mulling it slowly for a while. What follows is kind of a mixed bag. For the most part I have selected actors, not for any physical resemblance, but for a character resemblance -- or a resemblance between the person and the kind of character that actor most often plays. Sometimes the similarity that I see is with a character in one specific movie; in those cases I say so. One thing I learned from this exercise is that I don't watch enough movies, because the exercise was not that easy. Maybe later I'll change my mind about some of them, but for now ....

Hosea: Jimmy Stewart

OK, so I'm flattering myself. It's my blog and I can be a flaming egotist if I want to. But there are a few aspects of the Jimmy Stewart persona that work well for me, I think. The earnestness, the slight social cluelessness ... these are pretty close. Nobody would ever think to associate Jimmy Stewart with romance or intrigue, and that too is a good match. Besides which, I think from time to time of George Bailey's triumphant line, "Hooray! I'm going to jail!" and I realize that in the grand scheme of things my own troubles don't amount to much.

Wife (until this last year): Bette Davis

Wife spent so many years (even before I ever met her) accused of being a hard-boiled bitch that she finally decided she relished the role. And God, was she good at it. She could be "high-maintenance" in a hundred ways, by turns frustrating, maddening, and terrifying. And yet she carried it all off with a style that was invigorating to watch. She personally has always been a big fan of Katharine Hepburn, but Hepburn would be absolutely the wrong choice to portray Wife. For Wife as I always think of her -- as she was when I married her and for a good two decades after -- only Bette Davis combines the panache and the brazen cojones to do her justice.

"Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Wife (just this last year): Allison Janney as Barbara Fitts, in "American Beauty"

I'm not thinking of the obsessive housecleaner; more of the catatonic wallflower. That's an exaggeration, of course, but I don't know how else to characterize what seems to be happening with Wife these days. This deserves a post of its own. For now, I have identified a character.

Son 1: Mickey Rooney

If ever there were a kid anywhere in this country who deserved to be characterized as an "all-American boy" it would be Son 1. Sometimes Wife swears that she gave birth to Tom Sawyer without realizing it.

Son 2: Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker in "The Phantom Menace"

Son 2 is a lot more complicated than Son 1, but I think the very young Anakin Skywalker is a good fit. His compassion seems boundless; his gifts ... unusual in a child his age. In fact it is frequently hard to remember how old he is -- he can play with a silliness that makes him look younger than his years, and then he expresses opinions or insights that make him sound far older. He also has a deep, deep emotional bond with his mother (Wife); that, too, makes him resemble Anakin. I just hope this resemblance isn't a bad omen ....

Boyfriend 5: Leonardo diCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr., in "Catch Me If You Can"

Young, dashing, romantic, a complete fraud, and a dangerous con man all wrapped into one. How could I possibly choose better?

Boyfriend 4: Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in "Iron Man"

The flip attitude, the perfect sarcastic timing, the degenerate lifestyle, and the incongruous idealism all fit together to make this a very good match. There is even a very vague physical resemblance. Boyfriend 4's addiction to alcohol adds another nice point of comparison.

Boyfriend 3: Burt Lancaster as "Elmer Gantry"

Boyfriend 3 was tall, handsome, and a facile talker. He had a strong jaw, an obtrusively fundamentalist religiosity, and an unexpectedly seedy personal life. Sounds like a good fit to me.

Boyfriend 2: George "Buck" Flower

George "Buck" Flower played characters who were perpetually unkempt and unemployed, and he is one character actor whose name I didn't know before starting to think about this meme. But I remembered the role he played in "Butterfly" and a little research proved that he played similar characters throughout his career. Not a bad fit, really.

Girlfriend 1: the young Elizabeth Taylor

The hair is wrong, the skin is wrong, the nose is wrong ... comparing photographs you could never mistake Girlfriend 1 for Elizabeth Taylor. Not that Girlfriend 1 wasn't radiantly beautiful -- she was! -- but the details were all different. Notwithstanding that, the radiance itself was similar, as was the sense you got from Girlfriend 1 that she was going places. Of all Wife's affairs, she was the only one you could truly believe had "boundless possibilities."

Boyfriend 1: Smurf

I have to ask your indulgence here. He was so long ago that I don't remember him very well. Of course you have every right to assume I was prejudiced against him: but I never thought he was terribly handsome, he was emotionally weak, he had a high squeaky voice ... I'm not sure what more to say.

Counselor: James Garner

This one was hard for me. (Maybe, as noted, I just don't watch enough movies.) I tried to think of physical matches, and I am even sure I have seen actors who look like Counselor ... but I can't for the life of me think of who they are. I finally picked James Garner for the overall unflappability of his characters ... a relaxed unflappability which Counselor certainly shares. I have trouble imagining Counselor as quite so much of a rogue as Garner usually plays; on the other hand, his first career was in advertising so maybe I am not so far off after all ....

I can think of plenty of things wrong with each of these picks, but it has taken me two weeks to come up with them so I'm sticking with what I've got. I'm looking forward to something similar from anybody that hasn't done it yet.

Could she really believe that?

A couple of days ago -- wait, was it only yesterday? -- I posted a dialog between me and Wife's good friend D in which I mentioned (among other things) Boyfriend 5's claim that he can teleport. Apollo Unchained commented on this posting, reasonably enough, as follows:

Whew!
Teleported from the Old Country to North America?!
Could she really believe that? Surely she knows it's bullshit. Hosea, can you allow her to act on such a belief? Consider her physical safety ...

I was going to add just a short reply, and then I thought maybe the question deserved a little bit more time and thought.

In the first place, this isn't the first time the topic has come up. For veteran readers, if any :-) I mentioned it briefly way back in June, in a trio of connected posts. I set up the situation here, and then continued the reference here and finally here. And it has figured in discussions between me and Wife since then, on and off. Of course it is obvious to me that the claim is bullshit, and that Boyfriend 5 is a con artist or -- at the very least -- a very imaginative liar. But she doesn't see it that way, which was a large part of my lament to D a couple days ago.

Back when the subject first came up, I told Wife what I thought of the idea ... and I added that at the very least I was profoundly skeptical because anybody who claims something so outrageous has to face a monumental burden of proof. Wife passed these remarks along to Boyfriend 5, who proceeded to get outrageously "angry" and "hurt" at being challenged and interrogated and distrusted in this way. To me it was obvious that an over-reaction like this is a classic manipulation: if you can't refute an accusation, make the accuser feel guilty for ever mentioning it. But Wife nearly went to pieces that she had "wounded" her darling so badly. It took a lot of damage control on her part to get Boyfriend 5 to calm down, and she only succeeded by petting his ego and telling him, in effect, "There, there, it'll be all right. It's not that Hosea doesn't believe you or doesn't trust you or anything like that. It's just basic scientific curiosity on his part ... he has never seen anybody teleport before and so he is genuinely curious how you do it." [Insert gagging sound coming from Hosea.] And Boyfriend 5, finally mollified, allowed as how maybe someday he would show me. Sweet guy, huh?

Anyway, ever since then Wife has been unwilling to question the veracity of Boyfriend 5's claim to teleport. I will add that he has told Wife several times he will teleport to our house one day while the children are in school, so that they can meet in person and finally fuck. He has even said he can take her back to the Old Country that way, in which case I am not quite sure why she is fussing about with Frequent Flyer Miles from D's sister. But he has never followed up on any of these offers. That doesn't seem to faze Wife.

I seem to have addressed the question whether she can possibly believe this. The question how she can believe it has, I think, two different kinds of answers.

The first answer is a dismissive one: she wants to believe it, and human beings can believe almost anything if they want to badly enough. The second answer is that Wife has had a number of experiences at different times in the past that have seemed somehow paranormal to her. None of them, so far as I know, have violated basic laws of physics -- most typically these experiences have involved some kind of premonition that later turned out true. But the consequence is that she is not inclined to dismiss tales of unusual abilities out of hand. To me it seems obvious that even if there is something real behind some paranormal experiences, teleportation is never going to be one of them. On the other hand, it's not like this is the first difference of opinion we have ever had.

The last question is the most important, but it is in some ways the hardest to answer in a satisfying way. How can I let her plan a trip to the Old Country under circumstances like this? What about her physical safety? Don't I have a moral obligation to intevene?

Well of course I would like to intervene, but unfortunately it doesn't look that simple. In the first place, as I replied to Marianne when she left a similar comment on one of my posts last July, it's not clear how I could intervene. Wife is a grown woman with credit cards; no airline is going to refuse a reservation from her, and it's not like I want to invite a charge of kidnapping by duct-taping her to the bed. If it came down to that kind of contest, I don't think there is any legal way I could stop her.

This doesn't mean that I am blind to the possibilities. I can think of several, in fact:

• She could get to the Old Country and meet Boyfriend 5 as planned, and spend a rapturous week with him. (I think this is the least likely option.)
• She could get to the Old Country and nobody meets her at the airport. (I think this is the most likely option.) After waiting at the airport for a long time -- two hours, four hours, six hours -- she calls me long-distance to ask in a tone of helpless panic, "Hosea, what do I do now? I'm alone in a strange city, and they are trying to close the airport and want me to leave, and it is the middle of the night, and nobody has come here to pick me up, and I don't know where to go or how to get there, and I have no idea where to turn or what to do next ... and I need you to fix it for me right away!"
• She could get to the Old Country and nobody meets her at the airport ... so she takes a taxi to the address she has for Boyfriend 5. Either the address exists ... and it's a business, or a vacant lot, or a residential home where nobody has ever heard of her (or even speaks English); or else the address doesn't exist and the cabbie drives around aimlessly for a while, runs up a big bill, and deposits her ... somewhere. We have all heard about countries where you have to be careful about your choice of taxi, because there are criminals disguised as cabbies who will drive their passengers to remote places far from help, loot all their goods, and then rape or kill them. I don't know for sure if this is a problem in the Old Country, but I sure hope Wife never has a chance to find out. Still, I can't rule it out.
• She could get to the Old Country and nobody meets her at the airport ... so she asks an airport official how to get where she is going. The airport official inquires the name of the family she is trying to find, and quickly realizes she is looking for a family of noted terrorists (a family whose patriarch is legally forbidden to enter the United States, for starters). The official asks her a few questions about her business with this family, and her answers are completely outlandish (because Boyfriend 5 has been feeding her a load of crap). So the official concludes that she is a particularly stupid terrorist who can't remember her cover story but who is a contact between this family and sympathizers in the USA; he turns her over to the immigration authorities or the police, and she lands in jail in some part of the world that has never been troubled with details like habeas corpus or due process of law. This is marginally better than the previous option, because her American passport will probably prevent her from being out-and-out killed by public officials. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to bet good money on how long it would take her to get home again.
• And of course there are countless variations on these themes ....

So if these are the possibilities, and if my gut tells me that the first one is the least likely, then what am I morally obligated to do? What, for that matter, can I do?

• I can't physically stop her from going.
• I can try to persuade her not to go, but my attempts to persuade in this arena have been particularly ineffective to date.
• Or I can simply let her go if and when she wants, not blind to the possibilities but resigned to them. This means telling myself, as she gets on the plane, that I might never see her again; and it means preparing myself for a phone call which confirms exactly that. And you know, in a sense we should all tell ourselves the same thing when a loved one boards a plane. For all that flying is the safest form of travel per mile travelled, some planes do crash. And you just never know.

I wish I had a better answer than that. This answer breaks my heart, but I just don't see a better one.

Counseling 11

This week's session with Counselor seems to have covered some useful ground.

We started by explaining a problem we had had over the weekend. The details are too trivial to go into at the moment; but the gist is that we were out in public somewhere and the boys were being rambunctious and in the way. (What a surprise ....) I told them, "Boys, get up out of the way in case I need to blah blah blah ...." In my mind, I was just asking them to show some manners. In Wife's mind, I was implicitly telling her that if anybody needed to [blah, blah, blah] it would be me and not her because I was in charge and she wasn't up to it. Of course I didn't get this at the time ... all I saw was her face flashing a really unhappy expression. So when we got home I asked her what was going on. She explained what she thought I had meant, and I explained what I really meant. But instead of telling her she was crazy for thinking what she did, I said, "Wow, it never ever occurred to me that you might hear it that way. But now that you explain it, I can see how you could have -- and that must have made you feel like shit. Gosh, I'm really sorry for hurting your feelings because I never meant anything of the kind." And we all lived happily ever after.

Counselor really liked this story, because he took it as positive progress: instead of falling into automatic postures of reciprocal defensiveness (where each person's defense looks like an attack to the other), we found some common ground and deactivated the problem. And as we discussed the situation in more detail, Wife explained that this touched on a real hot button for her, because she often feels like I make her decisions for her. In this case it was the decision that I would be the one to [blah, blah, blah]; but at other times -- and she proceeded to itemize several in the last few weeks -- it has been other things. She even conceded that I probably thought I was doing her a favor in these cases, by taking on some task or other that (because of her illnesses) she really couldn't handle. But whenever I made the choice unilaterally, she felt disrespected or infantilized -- treated as less than a full peer because she had no voice in the decisions. And when (today, in Counselor's office) I urged her simply to speak up in such cases, she said she "no longer" bothers to speak up because her experience has been that if I want to do A and she wants to do B, then I just steamroller over her and we end up doing A.

You remember that one of her big complaints about me is that she feels I don't respect her, right? This looks like it may be part of the picture.

Before we got as far as trying to solve the problem of my steamrollering over her, Wife made another comment that I thought was remarkably interesting. She said, "When you do that, I get so angry that I just want to get in the car and drive as far away as I can." Really? This is anger? I would have assumed that fleeing the scene of conflict would be a sign of fear, not anger. So I asked, somewhat jokingly, "It makes you want to drive away? Why doesn't it make you want to kill me?" Her immediate answer was, "Because I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail for your sorry ass." (Wife and I may not be able to communicate worth a damn, but the timing of our mutual repartee is split-second perfect. Maybe we should give up trying to keep up a household and just do stand-up comedy together. We could put on a show in the barn! Mom could make the costumes ...!)

What I found interesting about her reply was the centrality of flight as a theme in her emotional life. I mean, flight is a normal response to fear. But to flee also out of anger -- rather than fighting -- looks significant. At one level, it explains why Wife never pushes back, even if she dislikes or disagrees with what I am doing: never pushes back, but resents the hell out of it and stores up the anger for years. At another level, it may explain why she kicks against me so hard and so often, why divorce has been a running theme through her mind for so many years. At a third level, it could help explain the affairs.

But I digress.

From there, we discussed how we could make this cycle better. Counselor pointed out that much of the problem is cased by how automatic our responses are: when we start into a cycle like this one, we could be all the way through it before even realizing what just happened. So we agreed on a verbal formula that Wife should use when she feels like she is being railroaded, something like "This is one of those cases that Counselor talked about and I am feeling run-over." That will then be my cue to slow down, stop trying to insist on doing things my way, and listen to what is going on for her.

Wife then said something that I could have taken to be very insulting, but I chose instead to see it as a sign of hope. She said that she would try hard to use this formula as a way of speaking up when she felt unheard ... and that, although it would be hard, she would definitely try to follow through. And she added that a few years ago she would never even have tried that much, because she would have feared my yelling at her or flying off the handle ... what she characterized to Counselor as "verbal or physical intimidation."

I remember those years a little differently, but it doesn't matter. I have also said before that I don't think it is my job in this blog to flatter myself, so let's assume that she is literally right. The fact remains, as she made a point of saying, that she no longer fears I would do any such thing.

Wife concluded by saying that -- in this respect, at least -- things have gotten better between us over the years. She no longer feels like I am always shouting at her or threatening her. And because these things have gotten better, she went on, that proves to her that things can get better. And this gives her hope that we can fix other things in our marriage, too. I think this is good news.

So all in all, I think I would characterize this as a fairly constructive session with Counselor.

An airport is as good as a cave

I know I have promised to write a couple of different posts, and I still will, but this is just in. Yesterday I e-mailed D, Wife's best friend, to tell her some of my concerns about the situation between Wife and Boyfriend 5, and her reply shed a whole new light on it. I will have to think about this for a while, actually, because she points out that this romance may be meeting needs for Wife that I never guessed at. Both e-mails are long, so I will try to edit them a bit.

Yesterday, I sent the following e-mail to D:

Dear [D],

I have wanted to reply to your e-mail below for ... well, I guess it has been over a month since you sent it ... but I have never been quite sure how to get under way. I keep being sure I am going to go off the rails somewhere. But let me give it a try.

I'm glad to know we agree about the transforming power of truth, .... In this spirit, I have recommended "Speaker for the Dead" to [Wife] ... partly because it is a fine book in its own right, and partly because the question of honesty and truthfulness is one that she and I have struggled with for twenty years or more.

During that time, I have tried to communicate ... [all the stuff that I say in “On lying”].

In practical terms, [Wife] does not appear to agree with me. I don't know if she agrees at a theoretical level. But the blunt fact is that she doesn't live as if she agreed....

I've been thinking about the issue lately because of [Wife]'s ongoing (long-distance) love affair with [Boyfriend 5]....

What bugs me about the romance with [Boyfriend 5] is that ... I have strong reasons to believe that [Boyfriend 5] is lying to her.... And I think that at some level [Wife] even recognizes this fact and doesn't want to know it.... I fear that she may be walling herself into a fantasy world that has less and less connection to reality. But to her ears, this sounds like I am being jealous and controlling and interfering. And so it just drives her farther away....

Just as a point of reference, [Boyfriend 5] is the same fellow who asked her for money last summer. Do you remember when you were visiting us, that we had a long conversation over the advisability of paying other people's bills for them? This is the same guy. That wasn't the first thing that made my ears perk up, but it was a big one.

Since then, I have accumulated a certain amount of data that makes it look clear to me he has lied to her about living in [the Old Country]. I can almost prove that he lives in [the Midwest]. Now he has told [Wife] that he frequently travels to [the Midwest] on business, but that's not what I mean. I believe -- and can almost prove -- that he out-and-out lives there. That would mean, in turn, that the whole story about [the Old Country] is nothing but a story. And if something that basic turns out to be false, I would ask how she can trust anything else that he says, period.

I might be wrong.... For this reason, when [Wife] talked tentatively several months ago about maybe flying to [the Old Country] to visit [Boyfriend 5], I didn't object.... After all, that would be one way to prove conclusively that he really exists, and that he really lives there....

The only caution from my side was that I didn't want to pay for the ticket (or spend my Frequent Flyer Miles on it). Here is my line of thought:

• If [Boyfriend 5] is who he says, and if he really lives in [the Old Country], and if he really loves [Wife] to the ends of the earth (like he says), then he would be willing to pay for her trip if it were at all possible.
• If [Boyfriend 5] is NOT who he says, and if he really lives in [the Midwest], he might play along with the idea of a trip but he will try to discourage her when the time comes (because a trip to [the Old Country] would prove him a liar).
• If [Boyfriend 5] is NOT who he says, and if he really lives in [the Midwest], AND IF [Wife] insists on making the trip anyway, he might play along and even let her fly out there ... but then she would just be stranded at the [Foreign City] airport with nobody to meet her. And he might be willing to let that happen. But I assume that he would NOT be willing to do that if he also paid for the ticket.
• Therefore, if [Boyfriend 5] paid for her ticket to [the Old Country], I would have a strong reason to believe he was genuine ... and, of course, that would be confirmed when [Wife] met him in person. If he refuses to pay for the ticket, it might mean just that he cannot possibly scrape together the money ... but it also encourages my suspicions that he is a charlatan or a shyster, and that he is playing with [Wife]'s affections either for his own amusement or so that he can use her.

Of course I am not happy that she so obviously prefers him to me; nobody would be. But I really, really hope I am wrong about him. I would far rather that [Boyfriend 5] be a rival or even a threat -- but genuine! -- than that he be a shyster who is just using [Wife] or toying with her. But so far I have not seen any evidence to prove that I am wrong. And this disturbs me.

One thought is that it might be simpler for me just to show her the data I have about where he actually lives, .... But I can't rule out the possibility that the facts could be stretched in such a way that they look like they mean something else .... [And in general, Wife will extend the most outrageous benefit of the doubt to a boyfriend because she wants so badly to believe him.]

An example: one day [Wife] was IM-ing with [Boyfriend 5], and he mentioned being in [the Old Country]. About an hour or two later, he let it casually drop that he was in [the Midwest]. [Wife] picked up on the discrepancy immediately and asked him to explain it. After all, even if he had business reasons to travel to [the Midwest], no aircraft travels that fast. [Boyfriend 5]'s answer was that he and his father are accomplished magicians, and so he teleported.

Can I PROVE this is false? No, strictly speaking I suppose that I can't.... [But] I think any reasonable listener who heard that explanation would guffaw, .... And [Wife] accepts it.... As near as I can tell, the logic goes like this:

1. It makes sense that [Boyfriend 5] can teleport, because after all he is a powerful magician.
2. I know that [Boyfriend 5] is a powerful magician because he tells me he can teleport.

[D], I remember when [Wife] would have poured bitter scorn on an argument as feeble as that. So do you. And it breaks my heart to see her taking it seriously now. The only way I can explain it is to conclude that [Wife] has been devoting a lot of energy to telling herself that this makes sense, because she wants so badly for it to be true. But that means she is lying to herself. Or maybe it is just that the constant effort to keep up a facade for my benefit means that she can no longer tell the difference between what is plausible and what is absurd.

So at one level, I hope "Speaker for the Dead" will be a salutary corrective, encouraging her to start telling the truth to HERSELF and therefore to those around her. Then I look at where she seems to be with [Boyfriend 5], and I wonder if it is already too late. I hope and pray that it is not....

I love [Wife] deeply and always have; but at this point I am very concerned for her.

Love as always,

[Hosea]

Late the same evening, D replied to me as follows:

Dearest [Hosea],

I can only imagine the courage it took you to confide in me, .... I hope I can be the friend you trust me to be. I will start by being honest...not always the same as being true, but you have forced me to make the uncomfortable distinction....

[Hosea], I offered [Wife] my sister's frequent flyer miles to go see [Boyfriend 5] in [the Old Country] if she thought it best. She does not know, of course, that I have now told you, and I will not tell her. I would ask that you let her tell you about her proposed trip ... [which] she has not yet firmly scheduled. I asked her today if she had told you of her plans; she sighed and said she had not. She promises me that she will return to America, but acknowledges that it will be difficult. I already know that, as do you. I will not deny her love for [Boyfriend 5], although for very different reasons, I find the drama in his life more fictional than believable. Is he a terrorist living in [the Old Country] and visiting condemned prisoners for eighteen hours during a prison riot? I have no evidence either way, but my experience, however limited ... suggests that such a situation is highly unlikely. I cannot know for sure, but I am not without resources and reason.

Reason will not serve me now...and my deepest fear is that you will not understand that everything I say below is said with love and support for you. But [Hosea], I have long felt that [Wife] does not know you. And perhaps honesty, the honesty Card writes about and you crave, is not possible without genuine knowledge, without love. It is not a matter of [Wife] superficially knowing what you have done or left undone or said or not said, it is something far deeper and perhaps beyond words. It is that sense you get when you are at exactly the right place to glimpse what a person truly can be, the laughter and song and sheer energy that lies at the core of a person and reveals who they really are when everything false has been stripped away. That -completely unexpected- view of you came to me several years ago one morning when you were discussing the Greeks, and I suddenly saw you...as though I had never seen you before. I was frankly astonished. I have known [Wife] for nearly twenty years, and I certainly know about her relationships...but not about /you/. I should hasten to remind you that I am well aware of your complexity and struggles; there were some dark times. [J], my son, remembers your anger and fury during the long days of isolation and unemployment. Yet when I saw you this summer, it was clear that you have tasted happiness somewhere ....

The possibility that [Boyfriend 5] lives in [the Midwest] is surprising, but after the financial discussion we had at dinner and your careful investigation, I have every reason to believe you may be right. And yet, perhaps the truth is besides the point. You may want to solve the mystery, but mystery and intrigue are exactly what [Wife] desires. You cannot tell her what is real because that would be unbearable. Surely you realize that her escapism, her belief in magic, stem from her desire to somehow defeat her despair and fear of a premature and painful demise that daily haunt her. You cannot break that spell or in any way soften or postpone her eventual reckoning with death. If you cannot do it by love, surely you know that honesty, however well meant, will not resolve the problem. You are right when you assert that lies do not simply distort and damage those who listen to false words and experience deception, but they also deeply wound the innermost being. In addition, Scripture says that lies and deceit also transform our relationship with God and with the natural world. Such a fall from grace is beyond your ability to prevent or remedy. Sometimes I think that all we can do is stay awake and watch with compassion and understanding, deeply feeling the personal rejection and confusion without turning away or leaving when those we love act in ways that are clearly destructive. My guess is that you knew, on some level, how hurt and betrayed [Wife] has been since earliest childhood when you married her, and you decided to defy the odds. That ... [might be] admirable, but it doesn't promise success. I have always seen a large measure of Greek tragedy in your relationship with your wife, and with all the sound and fury....what is truly valuable, of course, is the still, small voice. A [Foreign City] airport is as good as a cave, and I have to believe-and do believe- that she is not as alone as she fears.

I have to get up at 2:00am and write lessons. Energy, fortunately, is still abundant, although I would love to be clever enough to truly do my job well and allow my students the success they want. I will write again soon. Please forgive me if I have said anything hurtful or unkind; I would do almost anything to avoid either. My love for you is constant, my compassion and support yours forever. Take care; Godspeed.

Love,
[D]

I have to admit that D raised points I had not thought about. I have been prepared to believe that Wife wants romance, that we have communication problems, that she feels unappreciated or belittled (although I don't mean her to), and so on. In the past, when she has been involved in a physical romance with somebody, I have been prepared to believe that it was about the fucking. But that she would actively seek "mystery and intrigue" -- regardless of whether any of it was even true! -- as a medication for her physical pain and relentless depression ... this honestly had never occurred to me. I am going to have to think about it a lot more.

And I owe D a reply.

I.O.U.

I think that everything I have written in this blog till now has given a more or less one-sided account of my marriage, because on the whole I have been most prolix when I have been angry or upset. While I have tried to offer a little balance by indicating reasons Wife has for being upset with me, that just adds to the mistaken impression that our life is one of unending conflict. I have not written much about what is good in our home.

I suspect I am too tired to do the subject justice right now, and it should be thought out to be done right. Therefore this post is an IOU for other posts, to be written soon. One of them, in the spirit of recent posts by Melted Candy and Coquette [I'm sure I've seen others but can't find them at the moment], will be a post describing the good things about Wife: the things that made me fall in love with her in the first place, the things that have kept me loving her all these years, the things on whose account I have always found her to be the most remarkable woman I have ever known. Even when I longed to deck her out of frustration.

Another will be a post that characterizes somehow what life is like around here day by day. I get comments to my posts saying that I "put up with a lot" -- but you know, it's really not a war zone. We're a home and a family. We have our problems, but who doesn't? So I think I should give a picture of the day-by-day, as a corrective to the other stuff I have said.

I might write a third post, too, but I don't really know what I would say in it or where it would go. In the last year or so, Wife has gone through a lot of changes. She has lost a lot of weight fairly quickly; she sleeps 12 hours a day; she moves slower; she talks slower. Her voice has changed: for years she had, as she herself put it, "the world's bitchiest voice" [too true!]; now it is low and husky. Her balance is no longer good; nor is her short-term memory. The weight loss has left so much loose skin that, at age 46, she looks 66; she looks frail, for God's sake -- frail for the first time in the quarter century we've been together, frail for the first time since bloody Fifth Grade! (I've seen pictures of her girlhood.) I don't know what this means. It seems like she is changing into somebody else, somebody different from the woman I have always known, right before my eyes. And I don't understand it. So this third post, if I write it, will describe the before-and-after as exactly as I can, and maybe try to come to some kind of understanding about it. I hope I can.

Meanwhile all I can give you is an IOU.