“Marital advice?” I asked, repeating Quinn’s words more out of shock than premature deafness.
Next to me at the dinner table, Quinn shifted uneasily in his Chippendale chair. Elbows went off the table then on again, and suddenly he was acting as though he’d grown too big for the small dining room.
Okay, this was serious. Quinn had never before acted this awkward around me. The man was cooler than arctic ice — and his tall, broad-shouldered form usually moved with the intense ease and confidence of an Alaskan wolf.
I tried to guess what was coming, but didn’t dare. Over the last few months, we mostly spoke about his work, or New York trivia, or the coffeehouse. Occasionally, he’d bring up his children — Molly, a six-year-old girl, and Jeremy, an eight-year-old boy — both of whom he always talked about in glowing terms. His wife he seldom mentioned, and whenever I’d open the topic of his spouse, he’d close it fast, usually with a negative quip along the lines of (on a good day) “they say marriage is a challenge, but I’m fairly sure ascending Everest would have been less effort,” and (on a bad day) “let’s just say my wife is an entrée that seemed promising on the menu but came to the table cold.”
“Maybe that didn’t come out right,” said Quinn, rubbing the back of his neck. “What I’m trying to say is…or rather ask is…when did you know it was time to…give up?”
“Whoa…” This was a little more than I’d expected to deal with tonight. I took a deep breath, reached for my wine glass, and considered it a notable accomplishment to have stopped myself from chugalugging the entire bottle of Pinot.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m putting you on the spot — ”
“No, no. It’s fine…I was about to tell you, ‘I know what you’re going through,’ but the truth is, I don’t. Have you ever heard John Bradshaw talk about how every happy family is happy in the same way — but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way?”
“No.”
“Well, he’s the dysfunctional family expert — and I believe that idea applies to marriage, too.”
“I’m not sure I follow…”
“Every couple’s marriage plays out very similar chords, but it’s own unique discords. You see?”
Quinn shook his head. “I’m not sure.”
“Well…take my own marriage. Matteo and I hadn’t stopped loving each other. We just needed to stop hurting each other. It might be the same for you — or it might be something else entirely. That’s why I’m not sure if my experience is even valid. Do you want to tell me more about your own marriage?”
“No,” he said flatly. “Not really.”
“Oh.”
Quinn raised an eyebrow. “You follow pro football?”
“Not since Terry Bradshaw was a Steelers quarterback,” I said. (I’d followed football back then primarily because dear old Dad ran a bookie operation in the rear of my grandmother’s grocery back in western Pennsylvania.) “But if you don’t want to talk about your marriage problems, now that you’ve told me you have them…” I shrugged. “It’s pro teams, the weather…or I could give you the culinary history of penne alla vodka. What do you think?”
Quinn sighed and smiled. He actually smiled. “Sorry,” he said. “Shutting down is a knee-jerk reaction of mine, in case you haven’t noticed…”
“I don’t want to be rude, Clare. Especially to you.”
I shook my head. “It’s okay. We really don’t have to talk about it if you’ve changed your mind. It’s your business.”
“I’m just not good at this.”
“At…what…exactly?”
Quinn began fidgeting again, this time like a teenage boy, playing with this silverware, then awkwardly scratching his square, freshly shaved jaw. “At asking for personal advice…”
“It’s okay. I understand.”
“Do you?”
“When Matteo was cheating on me…” I began. Then I stopped, stared, and took another sip of wine — a long one.
All of a sudden, I felt a little more forgiving of Quinn’s reluctance to talk. When you spend most of your adult waking hours trying to look dependable, responsible, and together, the last thing you want to do is admit to anyone, let alone yourself, that your personal life had once gone totally to shit.
I put down the wine glass. “When I found out he was sleeping around,” I continued, “I was so ashamed. I couldn’t tell anyone. For a long time, I just pretended it wasn’t happening. At first, I blamed the work, all the traveling that went with his job…and then I blamed the cocaine. I tried to tell myself he wasn’t really himself…he wasn’t really responsible. The thing is…I loved him so much, and I knew he loved me. And there was Joy to consider.”
“Yeah, that’s my main concern…Molly and Jeremy.”
“I know.”
“So…” said Quinn slowly. “What made you finally decide to…?”
“To give up?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Well…” I began. “It wasn’t easy. I didn’t just love Matt, you know? I was in love with him. So much in love, I even thought for a little while that I should try to make it work the way he wanted. An open marriage — at least for him because I could never cheat and live with myself…but then, a little at a time, I shut myself down emotionally. And the more I shut down, the more he turned away, until finally I decided I couldn’t live that way anymore.”
“Was there any one thing that happened or did you just…?” Quinn shrugged.
“One morning I was preparing an urn of our Breakfast Blend, and I just broke down. It sounds silly, but I was grinding this beautiful freshly roasted batch, and it just hit me that my marriage was doing to me what that grinder was doing to those beans. On the outside I held it together, but on the inside, I was being ground up into unrecognizable pieces.” I shrugged. “That’s when I realized the truth.”
“You wanted a divorce?”
“No…that it was impossible for me to fit myself in a filter, pour steaming water over myself, and serve myself in cups to customers.”
Quinn stared at me for a second.
“It’s a joke,” I said.
We both burst out laughing.
It was good to hear him laugh.
Quinn exhaled, and the tension he’d carried since he’d arrived seemed to leave his entire body. (And here I had thought he’d been uptight because of his caseload.)
Then his eyes met mine, and he stopped laughing.
“She’s had affairs for years, Clare.” His voice was eerily cold. Unemotional. Dead. “With men. And, lately, with a woman. She’s shredded our marriage vows into worthless rags. Lied to me more times than I can count.”
I took a deep breath. “Then the real question is whether you’ve come to the point where you can live without her.”
