Fated to Fail: Tales from a Marriage

Fated to Fail: Tales from a Marriage

A novel by Neil D. Isaacs

Copyright 2013 Neil D. Isaacs

Smashwords Edition

Author's note: this is a work of fiction. Resemblances to actual people, places, and incidents are coincidental. They are products of the process by which experience is transmuted, through imagination, into the stuff of narrative.

A version of Chapter XI, called Collared, was runner-up in the 2004 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter I: First Sight

Chapter II: The Bothered Bride

Chapter III: Runaway Mom

Chapter IV: TMI

Chapter V: The Summer of Beefeaters on the Rocks

Chapter VI: Sixth Sense

Chapter VII: The Dutiful Daughter

Chapter VIII: Summer Smiles and a Second Spring

Chapter IX: Hard Evidence

Chapter X: Cross Purposes

Chapter XI: Paradoxical Effect

Chapter XII: Mornings After

Chapter XIII: The Uses of Adversity

Epilogue

Dedication

To the many couples with whom I worked during

the twenty years of my therapy practice, whether in

negotiation and constructive engagement or through

toxic exchanges and bitterness, thanks for sharing

your experience. I extend my respectful gratitude to

you for all we learned together and from each other.

Prologue

Probably my most grievous flaw as a father is that I could never say no to my daughter. I remember once, when she was around four, my then mother-in-law saw the way I doted on the child and said to me in her broad Vermont accent, She'll break your haht.

I thought at the time it was a cold, heartless thing to say. Much later I came to understand that she was talking about what had happened with her own lovely child, pampered to a fare-thee-well, who began breaking her parents' hearts as a pre-teen and reenacted the emotional mayhem over and over again.

Now, twenty-two years after that unforgettable prediction, I can say that Molly has never broken my heart--and that I still can't say no to her. So when she came to me not many weeks ago and asked for a big favor, I reluctantly agreed to do what I always thought would be impossible.

You know, Dad, that Mark and I are talking about marriage and that we want to start a family.

I'm glad, Honey, and it seems like the right time. You're both mature, committed to each other, and getting along well in your chosen careers. I've never thought anyone would be good enough for you--and none of your earlier boyfriends were--but I believe you've found a keeper. But why the hesitation?

I've held back this long because of one thing. I want to know, hope to understand, what went wrong between you and Mom. I don't want to repeat whatever mistakes were made.

So you come to me, an academic expert on storytelling, and want a coherent narrative?

I'm not asking you to invent a family mythology, Dad. And as a therapist I know something about selective memory. But it all seems a jumble to me, an amorphous mass. I seem to remember an affectionate couple and then you were just not together. I'm asking you to give some form or structure, to shape it for me. I want to know what happened and, if possible, why

I'm not sure I can or if it's a good idea. But if you really want it, I can try.

I've never asked you for any of this before, and now I feel that I want to know it all. You know, I used to ask Mom a lot of curious questions, like 'What's going on?' and 'Where were you?' and 'Who was that?' And she'd always come back with questions that were non-answers: 'What do you think?' and 'Where do you think?' and 'Who do you think?' She never seemed to get annoyed at my asking, and finally I got so frustrated with her responses that I gave up. But if I'm blessed with children of my own, I want to be able to tell them the story of my own childhood.

I gave her my characteristically loving smile and the gesture that told her I was persuaded. Besides, she added, it would be good for you. Call it closure, a working out or working through--though I know you'd be re-working the story in your own way--but an effective kind of scriptotherapy.

I began making notes for an outline that very night, worked at it parts of almost every day for four months, until I believed I had got it right. Here's the way it turned out.

Chapter I: First Sight

I was smitten, from the first moment I set eyes on her and caught a glimpse of hers. It was every song-lyric cliché enacted in the immediacy of real time though it had the effect of a dream, a fantasy, a surreal experience. It was some enchanted evening, and when I saw her, a perfect stranger, across a crowded room, I knew even then that I had a quest to pursue, a conquest to dedicate myself to.

That’s all it took, just one look. (Doris Troy, right? —the authentic cover, not the Hollies or Ronstadt.) Even at the time I could hear a sound track rising up over my dumb-struck perceptions, and it was the voice of Billie Holiday singing, I fell in love with you the first time I looked at you with them there eyes.

Take a look at the garbled syntax of that lyric. The first-person speaker is seeing the object with his own eyes, but what he sees is the you who has the third-person eyes that get him hooked. So is it the eyes of the looker or the eyes attracting or reflecting the gaze that are them there ones? It’s both, isn’t it, the interactions of eyes that have it? There’s something to be said for meaningful ambiguity—Empson, Cleanth Brooks, and all that crowd—because it was her eyes that left the impression on mine that was the penetrating core of what became my obsession. Come to think of it, that was the way it worked with Chaucer’s Troilus, too, falling in love at first sight with Criseyde. What really nails him is not her comely form in widow’s weeds that he sees when his eyes pierce through a crowd to light on her, but his perception that Love lives in the subtle streams of her eyes.

It was, indeed, a crowded football weekend party in my senior year. She was there with a friend of an acquaintance, and the way she matched any idealized image of the girl I’d ever had was enough to shock me into instant sobriety. I started following her from room to room in the fraternity house, drinking in the fathomless darkness of her eyes and the glowing brightness of her face and being. I had no idea who she was. We did not speak.

So vivid was my photographic memory of the scene that in the next days I was able to track down everyone I knew who had been in close proximity to her, quizzing each one, getting the Agnes and her college with ease but unable to track her last name until Wednesday night. Meanwhile, I had been talking to every guy I knew on campus who dated a girl from her school, trying to pick up any slight detail about her. Thursday I spent most of the day composing my first letter to her. I lied, saying we had met Saturday night, referring to those researched details to persuade her that we had had a conversation and planting the notion that I had promised to write her. Well, I had, but the promise was to myself.

That letter was pure fabrication, an intellectual exercise of epistolary courtship, and the more I enjoyed putting it together the surer I was that it would not be answered, could not be because there was no basis for a response. I had already begun planning the next letter before I mailed the first one, focusing on the heartbreak of her silence. When the fourth letter elicited an answer, it was the most generically neutral and barely friendly kind of acknowledgment of her awareness of my existence, but it was what I needed to prompt the next step, the first phone call.

If I had been a cleverly inventive and hyperbolically flattering courtier on paper, I was a casual, self-deprecating jokester on the phone. She refused to express surprise that I had called and accepted my offhand pretext for the call. I knew she wasn’t ready to go out with me, I said, but I hoped we could see each other somehow, for a few minutes at least, to reaffirm that we had in fact a personal relationship, however tenuous. What was she doing next weekend, where would she be, what were her Thanksgiving plans? We traveled the same circuit, I said, and it wouldn’t be too much of a coincidence if we showed up in the same venue.

Cannily disingenuous, I was able to chart her itinerary for weeks to come, and when I showed up in her home town the day after Thanksgiving I was able to persuade her to meet me at the art museum for an hour to enjoy the Impressionist exhibit together. Meanwhile, my letter-writing onslaught had proceeded unabated, though getting no more than a pair of bland notes in response. The hour at the museum stretched to three, and though I deliberately avoided mentioning it I sensed that an invitation to an actual date would not be automatically rejected.

The ardent swain presented in the mail, passionate love letters in effect though intellectual exercises in practice, was the self who was persistent with invitations. On the phone, in what became frequent conversations, I was different, casual if interested and attentive, but not aggressive or exigent. In other words, I was establishing myself as a presence without exerting pressure—except in the letters (which I soon learned third-hand were regularly passed around her dorm for the entertainment, admiration, or ridicule of the girls). And when I contrived to show up at places when I had ferreted out the likelihood that she’d be there, it was the joking mask I wore, not the cape of the ardent suitor.

Nothing about her or from her put me off during those months. I acquired extensive superficial knowledge of her style, lifestyle, and tastes, but she remained, essentially, a mystery wrapped under enigmatic cover. All of this led me on, my obsession with her guiding my hand as I wrote those letters, though I was not unaware that I was creating an image or an idea of her in my own mind. She wasn’t leading me on so much as I was being driven by my own fanciful creation. And yet my perception of her beauty—her slender and graceful form, that face, those eyes, them there eyes—was the objective measure of her attractiveness and my obsessive preoccupation.

You have to understand that this pursuit was not my whole life at the time, though it tended to structure other aspects of my life. Because I had wasted most of my undergraduate education, sliding by on my verbal facility, my quick and retentive memory, and the prodigious reading I’d done before college, my grades were not likely to get me into a good graduate program despite an anticipated high performance on the GREs. So throughout my senior year I genuinely worked hard in my major course work, wrote a senior thesis that actually became the basis of research I’d later pursue in grad school, and impressed two of my professors enough for them to endorse my applications with glowing praise for my intellectual development as a late bloomer (for which they implicitly, separately, took credit).

Nor was I absolutely set on grad school anyway. My only clear goal was wooing and winning the elusive Agnes. At the same time that I was waiting news of grad school admissions, I was also pursuing one other option. I had taken it into my head that I wanted to be a carrier-based fighter pilot, and I had applied for the Naval Air Cadet training program. My appointment to take the qualifying exams was in mid-March at the Bainbridge Naval Air station.

Meanwhile, my campaign for your mother had realized its first successes. I use the word campaign advisedly. The letters were part of a conscious strategy; they were more about saturation bombing than about establishing a beachhead. On the other front, my persistent presence had gained more than a foothold. By early February, we were officially dating, roughly every other weekend. She had my exclusive attention; I did not have hers. It was understood that she was seeing others, but I was not troubled by that.

That would be overcome in time, I believed, and meanwhile I could get lots of other things done—a rationalization that was put to good if self-deceptive use