we don't live here anymore

Rent the movie, people, rent the movie.

I'm reading the book--which is three novellas--right now. It's the kind of book that you want to savor. I try to read it only for a few minutes a day because the language makes me want to cry. I don't want it to ever end. It is gorgeous pain.

In a marriage there are all sorts of lies whose malignancy slowly kills everything, and that day I was running the gamut from the outright lie of adultery to the careful selectivity which comes when there are things that two people can no longer talk about. It is hard to say which kills faster but I would guess selectivity, becuase it is a surrender: you avoid touching wounds and therefore avoid touching the heart. If I told the story, she would see it as a devious way of getting at her: the man's cooking would be the part she smothered; Hank's buying the seafood platter would be my rebellion. And she would be right. So I treated our disease with aspirins, I weaved my conversation around us, and all the time I knew with a taste of despair that I was stuck forever with this easy, lying pose; that with the decay of years I had slipped gradually into it, as into death, and that now at the end of those years and the beginning of all the years to come I had lost the dedication to honesty between us. Yet sometimes when I was alone and away from the house, always for this to happen I had to be away from the house, driving perhaps on a day of sunlight and green trees and rolling meadows, I would hear a song from another time and I could weep (but did not) for the time when I loved her every day and came up the walk in the afternoons happy to see her, days when I never had to think before I spoke. As we ate lobsters and drank wine we listened to the ball game. (39-40)

This is just one of my many obsessions: marriage. It was Andre Dubus' primary obsession. Soaking it up slowly....