Childish Loves by Benjamin Markovits Read Free Book Online

conversation, though he paid for my two beers and his own modest ginger ale. The popcorn came free. I kept eating and drinking, out of embarrassment. This was the first time someone from my father’s generation had opened up to me.
    No, what he wanted to talk about was something else. His second marriage was much happier, thank God, a fact that had a great deal to do with the character of his second wife, which he had recognized almost immediately. But it was also true that he had learned a few things from his first marriage, which might prove useful to me. By this point he knew I was leaving for London at the end of the year. ‘To become a writer,’ I had told him – though, of course, what I became first was a sponge and a part-time tutor; subsequently a book reviewer and assistant editor, and finally, etc. What upset him so much about the current round of stupid negotiations with his ex-wife was the fact that all he could think about, even while fighting his own corner, was, This is what I have done to you. You are the way you are because of me.
    â€˜Look, I’m not trying to beat myself up here with self-hatred. For some situations I got plenty of hatred to go around. And in this case, when I feel these things, partly what I feel is also, listen lady, when did you get to be so unreasonable, selfish, vain and deliberately hurtful? Because when I met this woman she was none of the above. This was a sophisticated, curious, warm-hearted, pleasure-seeking human being. Most of the first five years of our relationship she had to drag me along, intellectually, socially, emotionally, you name it. Sure, we fought a lot of that time, nobody likes being dragged, we fought like hell. But then we entered a patch of clear water, which lasted long enough that we both came to believe it was the new rules of the game. So we got married. And it was only after five or six years of marriage, after the kids were born and we had started to sleep again and return to some kind of acceptable human existence, that I realized why we had stopped fighting in the first place. It became clear to me that I had created an atmosphere, I don’t know what else to call it, in which all of the qualities I originally admired about this woman had become blighted. The sexual creature I had fallen in love with had more or less withered and died in front of my eyes. Partly because of childbirth; I take a healthy enough dose of self-loathing without blaming myself additionally for biological facts. Partly because of what’s required to keep two kids fed and clothed, to get them to sleep at night and out of bed in the morning, even to hand them over every day to the people you pay huge sums of money to in order to take such problems off your hands. But I’m convinced that what was essentially lovable about this woman – and let me be clear here, this is no longer a lovable woman – would have survived these traumas if I had not created an atmosphere around her that was basically poisonous to her best nature. Not deliberately, I won’t go as far as that, but out of some instinct for survival that has everything to do with who I am. I beat this woman down for ten years, with conversation, with argument, by insisting on certain pleasures and opinions and denying her others, and at the end of those ten years I looked at her and thought, Why don’t you get up, God damn it, why don’t you get up any more?’
    What should I have said to him? I was twenty-three years old. With two weeks left in the school year, the only thing on my mind was how to get through them. But I asked him dutifully why his second marriage had turned out better.
    â€˜Look,’ he said. ‘Before you get married you have to judge in cold blood two people you’re unaccustomed to treating with any detachment. It requires a cold-blooded decision. Maybe you think, one thing I know about myself is that I’m a bit of a social climber; and