T A B L E++T A L K

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A L S O++T O D A Y

M is for the many ways she lost it ...
The mother of all drama queens

R E C E N T L Y

Drowning in fairness
By Liz Gardner
Does holding back valid criticism create more confident children or praise junkies?
(05/19/98)

Where the gals are
By Laura Miller
From Ally McBeal to Bridget Jones: Neurotic pals for lonely gals
(05/18/98)

Young, black and too white
By Karen Grigsby Bates
Social clubs for black children are making a comeback among middle-class parents who fear their kids are losing their roots
(05/15/98)

Death comes for the bishop
By Sallie Tisdale
Does the murder of a leading Guatemalan human rights activist no longer qualify as news in the United States?
(05/14/98)

Raging hormones
By Polly Shulman
Honest, respectful books that tell kids what they really want to know about sex
(05/13/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHER'S WHO THINKARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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UXORIOUS | PAGE 2 OF 2
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I can think of other literary instances when uxorious would have been the perfect word, had anyone thought to use it. Michael Ondaatje's character Geoffrey Clifton, the husband of Katharine in "The English Patient," was uxorious, even to the point of fitting the distinction "irrationally fond": Upon meeting the Geographical Society's expedition in Cairo, Clifton can't stop himself from braying his boring adoration for his new wife, her beautiful arms, her thin ankles, blah blah blah. We all know what happens to him: In the movie version, Katharine and Ralph Fiennes (as the English patient) have just ravaged each other during a Christmas party when Clifton bounces up in a Santa suit and, snuggling Katharine, wonders, "What's that you smell of? You smell of ..." -- Kristin Scott Thomas' wide eyes widen, everyone in the audience tenses -- "... marzipan. That's it. You smell of marzipan." (Here, again, uxorious raises the question, what defines a wife? Who crawls out of the plane-crashed desert of Gilf Kebir, dirty and hurt and crazed, muttering to the English soldiers, "My wife ... my wife ... you must help me get back to my wife"? It wasn't Geoffrey Clifton.)

Another indelible literary example of the uxorious takes place at the end of "A Moveable Feast," Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his early years in Paris when he was, by his own account, young and poor and happy and married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson. After the birth of their son, nicknamed Bumby, they wintered in Schruns, a small mill town in the Austrian alps. After Hemingway has just spent the last chapter of his book scrambling for someone to blame ("the rich") for screwing up his life (having an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, the Paris Vogue editor who soon became the second Mrs. Hemingway), his memory of Hadley meeting him at the Schruns train station both breaks your heart and infuriates you:

"When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr. Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy."

Why is it that whenever there's an opening for the uxorious, betrayal and heartache hang heavy in the air like the stale smoke from that illicit cigarette you hotboxed in your kitchen during the party? Years and wives later, the sadder and wiser Hemingway was still writing letters to Hadley -- herself remarried -- confiding his fears, reminding her that she was the one who really knew him.

Searching my own life for the uxorious, I come up blank -- perhaps because what I look for is some kind of endless stretch of unself-conscious adoration. "I'll never smile again until I smile at you," sang the young Frank Sinatra, "I'll never thrill again to somebody new" -- until when? He was married, what, four times? Maybe uxorious as an unboundaried state of mind doesn't exist, at least not when it would be best appreciated and most useful. Like youth, it may be something wasted on the young.

Some years ago, I saw for the first time the view from the lake on the other side of this stormy apple orchard. It was summer and I lay on my stomach wrapped in a damp towel elbow to elbow with a man who I had no idea might someday be my husband. From that distance he was casually taking photographs of my face, my elbow; I wondered, just as casually, what he saw from the other side of the lens. The undeveloped film from that day disappeared. The camera, too, a year or two later -- stolen from a beach in Brazil along with everything else except for an engagement ring in an ersatz velvet bag, which the same man realized he was still carrying deep in the pocket of his shorts as he was being held up for the second time in a day in Rio de Janeiro. I have that ring now in my jewelry box; it needs a repair.

Would I have recognized, during that moment at the lake, what was happening if it had been spelled out to me? U-X-O-R-I-O-U-S. Would I have wanted to know, stripping the moment of its mystery? What I know now is that the apples on the trees were hard, heavy knots, and cat tails were blowing their starry filaments over the water. The towel around me was sienna-colored. You take your uxory where you can find it.

"Married" is the title of a poem by Jack Gilbert, its narrator mourning the death of his wife, Michiko. "I came back from the funeral and crawled/around the apartment, crying hard,/searching for my wife's hair." Ondaatje captures another fleeting glimpse of the uxorious in his description of the thief Caravaggio, who, though worlds and thousands of miles away from his wife, whom he has for all practical purposes abandoned, "knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weight of her wrist on his heart during the night."

It would be convenient for me if the rain stopped and the sun broke through while I was looking through the dictionary on the afternoon of Mother's Day, but it wasn't that miraculous. The rain did stop, but it always stops, and around the time when the baby woke up crabby and I put my books down, my husband escaped the cabin for a solitary walk through the dripping trees. I was making lunch with the children, cobbling together a makeshift "pinkink" on the floor with a tablecloth and paper plates while distractedly organizing things to be packed up and put in the car for the drive home, when my husband came back. He was carrying a small, lacy bird's nest made of brittle twigs the diameter of pine needles. "How do they hold it together, Dad?" our little boy asked.

"With spit," he said.

"Love, we say," says Jack Gilbert, "God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words/get it wrong." After lunch, we took the nest home with us, along with a few long branches cut from the trees. They're blooming now.
SALON | May 20, 1998