Why One Marriage Is Never Enough - Romantic Trial And Error Ending Up In The Same Unlikely Place

Bob Porter was 'on his third' as he liked to tell his cronies over beer and poker at the 19th hole, this time a keeper, he said, a young woman from Seattle on her second, lawyer, mother of twins, partner, a sure thing in bed and boardroom. 

 

Bob's first marriage had been his first romance, a Thousand and One Nights at the Taft Hotel, a sweet glimpse of what life would be like. They married in a proper wedding, white dress, floral bouquets, ushers and bridesmaids, Bach's airs for organ and chorus, champagne and caviar, and a honeymoon on St. Bart's. 

The marriage went bad because they were too young and too ambitious. After the first year Bob was on the Staten Island Ferry with his wife's cousin and she, an apple falling not far from the tree of her sexually liberated, feminist mother, had every man in Cold Spring Harbor.

It might have been youth, but more likely two people who never should have been together, two spatially distant beings, farther apart in sexual inclinations, personal ambitions, and social aspirations than Neptune and The Sun. 

Bob wandered for a while after a Mexican divorce - no children, few assets, no contention - and found the single life exhilarating, for a while at least until women, despite their infinite variety, all began to lose distinction, difference. Janey, for all her curls and optimism was very little different from Laura, hopeful, desirous, and  clingy, both of whom were still floundering in the roiled seas of 'who am I as a woman?' 

Antoinette was different, or so Bob thought.  A girl from an aristocratic New Bedford family, legatee to the fortunes of shipbuilders, slave traders, transatlantic entrepreneurs and a Wall Street wunderkind, she combined sophistication with adventure.  Some of that old Barbary Pirate blood ran in her veins. 

But that was not enough to anneal the ring. She hewed towards Beacon Hill, Nantucket, and Gstaad while he was still sowing seeds in Shawnee Mission and Napa Valley - two not dissimilar experiences given their certain wealthy, well-to-do common cadre, but different enough to cause friction.

They married anyway, this now his second and her third, a bit off-putting at first being behind in sexual experience. The wedding was another gala event, chic enough to make the New York Times. 'The bride, daughter of etc. etc. granddaughter of Edson Parfry Herrington, niece of Harford Margate, CEO and founding partner of....and...' with scant mention of Bob's family tree, full and productive as it had been.  

They married for...here neither one of them could put their finger on the actual reason, and both lapsed into a kind of love sonnet reverie, but the moth holes in the quilt began to show soon after marriage.  Those Pilkingtons again? Bob snapped at his wife as she wrote out the catering list and gave the maid her orders. His wife took it personally that her husband could find fault with Honor Pilkington of the New York Farnsworths, who were the bloody founders of the New York Stock Exchange. 

Now, Bob was no rube. On the contrary, he had a more than decent pedigree and storied family history, and was put out and put off by his wife's insinuations.  Why had they married in the first place, he wondered? Yes, she was far more beautiful than his first wife, and considerably more intelligent, and without a doubt more wealthy, but still....what was he thinking?

Again, no children, no compromises, just far more wealth to divide, but since by now both Bob and his wife were both legally savvy and personally protective of their accounts, the divorce never went to court. 

So, Bob was again on his own, now much older, close to fifty, but still an attractive, desirable man, eager for Casanova pursuits and Petrarchan romance, his bed was never empty.  Yet the same itchy, scratchy wondering about longevity kept him awake at nights. Life was a far too uncertain and upsetting place to go through alone, so better to settle for third best than risk can-heated soup in a cold flat. 

 

By this time women of his age were hardened and as determined to secure their future as he was, but heirs to oppressive patriarchy they knew that they had better feather their nests; and so, made up, jeweled, and furred, upped the ante.

The game had changed and so had the rules, but he was up for it, and so he fell for Nancy Ames, a good girl on a string of bad luck, deaths and responsibilities. She, like him had married early, still loved her first husband, but had resigned herself to a kind of self-imposed sexual penury. 

They married - he swore, without a great deal of conviction, that this would be his last - and moved to an old Victorian house in Indianola, Mississippi, the ancestral home of his wife’s antebellum plantation forbears who had chosen to live in town rather than on the cotton fields and there had led the good life, the Cavalier life, the cultured life of manners and grace.  

Bob and his wife both had enough income, both private and earned, but the patrician life of a Southern grandee did not suit him, and he grew restless with the bass boats and squirrel hunting good ol' boys on one hand and the descendants of the fifth generation Caradines, Harpers, and Forests on the other. He taught a course at Oxford, resuscitated his interest in Choctaw pottery, but languished without sexual adventure or anything resembling social class. 

His wife, thrilled to be back in her native place took to it all with great enthusiasm. She became matron par excellence of Delta society, and never gave a second thought to returning North or to accommodating her husband who was clearly unhappy.

Now close to sixty, Bob found himself thinking more about existential things; but tethered as he was to his wife who had no such preoccupations, he was convinced that this marriage was there to stay.  One needed a caretaker.

At the same time he knew that his wealth, well-protected in off-shore accounts and private securities, would attract any number of younger, ambitious women.  A December-May marriage could and perhaps should be in the offing,  'Granted, she is not my first love', says  aging Coleman Silk in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain;’and granted, she's not my best love, but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

 

'Why not?', he asked himself when a pretty young thing from Chillicothe sat next to him at Happy Hour at McCormick's Bar and told him of her internship and its promises.  

And so he gave in. Like the Roth character, love was to be taken whenever and wherever it popped up.  Dotage is not pretty but the sweet young thing, Bob's fourth, decided not long after the wedding to leave and not empty handed, and so left for Aspen and her young lover well endowed. 

As for Bob?  He died not long afterwards.  His obituary, written by his sister, avoided reference to his serial marriages and focused on his achievements; but on his deathbed, reflecting on his life and particularly his women, he muttered something like, 'Aren't they wonderful'. No one had a clue to what he meant.