The Remarriage Blueprint by Maggie Scarf

Author:Maggie Scarf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

A TIME OF DESPERATE LONELINESS

When asked to describe the first of his two prior marriages, Greg cleared his throat and said, “Well, okay, my first marriage could be described as—a—uh—a mistake.”

Caroline giggled. Greg’s response was ridiculous on the face of it.

“What kind of a mistake?” I asked, as if his response had been a serious one.

“We had no real connection with one another, a fact that she was quicker to perceive than I was. When we met, I was in my third year of medical school. My parents were in the process of divorcing after twenty-seven years of an excruciating, terrible marriage. My younger sister was in a psychiatric hospital; she was suffering from schizophrenia and had been for several years. It was an illness that was to culminate in her suicide.”

He stopped. I stared at him. “Awful,” I said feelingly. I paused, thinking that this successful physician had grown up as the small, dependent witness to a harrowing example of what being in an intimate relationship is like.

I asked him how old he had been when his sister died.

“Twenty-three,” he said. I scribbled a few lines on my notepad. One was the record of his age at the time of his sister’s death, and the other was the observation that mental illness had been a potent issue in both Greg and Caroline’s lives.

“I’m giving you this background because I was hit hard by all of these things and at sea in a way I scarcely comprehended while it was happening,” Greg went on. “I felt so alone with it, desperately lonely. I was in my third year of medical school, hating it and feeling out of place there. I was just lost. Then I met this very striking Dutch woman who had come over on a year’s exchange to work in a laboratory. Her name was Gaby Mertens, and I somehow persuaded myself that I was smitten by this very beguiling Netherlander who spoke only moderately good English, but in a very charming way. She was my life raft, and I talked her into getting married to me—which we did after knowing each other only three months.”

His tone of voice had become sarcastic, a dig directed against his earlier self.

I asked how long the marriage had lasted. Nine years, he replied. They had become the parents of a daughter, now forty-seven, and a son, forty-five. “Their names are Sallie and Daniel. Sallie had a very atypical development. She has what is now known as Asperger’s syndrome, which is a less severe form of autism. Fortunately, she’s had a fairly benign course and now has a significant other and a good job mapping natural resources with a computer company. Apparently she’s remarkably good at it,” Greg said proudly.

His son Dan had emigrated to Denmark and married a Danish woman, an anthropologist. He’d lived there ever since, supporting himself by teaching English and translating.

Caroline smiled and said, “Dan and his wife are both a little nuts, but they are adorable, and we have a wonderful time when we see them.

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