The Progress of Love

trivial burdens. I believed that all the attention these mothers paid, their need to be burdened, was the cause of colic, bed-wetting, asthma. I favored another approach—the mock desperation, the inflated irony of the professional mothers who wrote for magazines. In those magazine pieces, the children were splendidly self-willed, hard-edged, perverse, indomitable. So were the mothers, through their wit, indomitable. The real-life mothers I warmed to were the sort who would phone up and say, “Is my embryo Hitler by any chance over at your house?” They cackled clear above the milky fog.
    We saw a dead deer strapped across the front of a pickup truck.
    “Somebody shot it,” Cynthia said. “Hunters shoot the deer.”
    “It’s not hunting season yet,” Andrew said. “They may have hit it on the road. See the sign for deer crossing?”
    “I would cry if we hit one,” Cynthia said sternly.
    I had made peanut-butter-and-marmalade sandwiches for the children and salmon-and-mayonnaise for us. But I had not put any lettuce in, and Andrew was disappointed.
    “I didn’t have any,” I said.
    “Couldn’t you have got some?”
    “I’d have had to buy a whole head of lettuce just to get enough for sandwiches, and I decided it wasn’t worth it.”
    This was a lie. I had forgotten.
    “They’re a lot better with lettuce.”
    “I didn’t think it made that much difference.” After a silence, I said, “Don’t be mad.”
    “I’m not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.”
    “I just didn’t think it mattered that much.”
    “How would it be if I didn’t bother to fill up the gas tank?”
    “That’s not the same thing.”
    “Sing a song,” said Cynthia. She started to sing:
“Five little ducks went out one day ,
Over the hills and far away .
One little duck went
‘Quack-quack-quack.’
Four little ducks came swimming back.”
    Andrew squeezed my hand and said, “Let’s not fight.”
    “You’re right. I should have got lettuce.”
    “It doesn’t matter that much.”
    I wished that I could get my feelings about Andrew to come together into a serviceable and dependable feeling. I had even tried writing two lists, one of things I liked about him, one of things I disliked—in the cauldron of intimate life, things I loved and things I hated—as if I hoped by this to prove something, to come to a conclusion one way or the other. But I gave it up when I saw that all it proved was what I already knew—that I had violent contradictions. Sometimes the very sound of his footsteps seemed to me tyrannical, the set of his mouth smug and mean, his hard, straight body a barrier interposed—quite consciously, even dutifully, and with a nasty pleasure in its masculine authority—between me and whatever joy or lightness I could get in life. Then, with not much warning, he became my good friend and most essential companion. I felt the sweetness of his light bones and serious ideas, the vulnerability of his love, which I imagined to be much purer and more straightforward than my own. I could be greatly moved by an inflexibility, a harsh propriety, that at other times I scorned. I would think how humble he was, really, taking on such a ready-made role of husband, father, breadwinner, and how I myself in comparison was really a secret monster of egotism. Not so secret, either—not from him.
    At the bottom of our fights, we served up what we thoughtwere the ugliest truths. “I know there is something basically selfish and basically untrustworthy about you,” Andrew once said. “I’ve always known it. I also know that that is why I fell in love with you.”
    “Yes,” I said, feeling sorrowful but complacent.
    “I know that I’d be better off without you.”
    “Yes. You would.”
    “You’d be happier without me.”
    “Yes.”
    And finally—finally—racked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leapfrogged over them. We declared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to give a party.
    I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.
    We stayed the night in Wenatchee, Washington, where it hadn’t rained for weeks. We ate dinner in a restaurant built about a tree—not a sapling in a tub but a tall, sturdy cottonwood. In the early-morning light, we climbed out of