Not Forgetting, Displacing

Listening in puzzled silence, I sat across the table as an old acquaintance justified his “special friendship” with another man’s wife as the way “these things happen.”

He interrupted himself in the middle of a bland enumeration of the reasons he thought his friend should leave her husband, break up her family, and marry him, to recount how his wife had left him fifteen years earlier for another man, a person she chose because he was more compatible with her interests and temperament.

He mentioned his ex-wife without a flicker of emotional pain in his words or on his face. “Here, finally, is someone who has moved on successfully,” I thought.

He saw in his “special friend” a person more compatible with himself than his first wife. He said he was more compatible with his friend than her own husband was. He began to enumerate their compatibilities, but shifted into a catalog of incompatibilities between him and his ex-wife. From that list, he began itemizing the similarities between his ex-wife and his friend’s husband. On that subject, his tone moved from tepid to luke-warm. The inventory of characteristics shared by his ex and his friend’s husband grew. His tally concluded with the assertion people like he and his friend could never be happy married to people like that. He assured me he was grateful his ex-wife had helped him realize this.

As he went through his catalog of similarities and differences, compatibilities and incompatibilities, I had to remind myself his wife had left him years earlier for yet another man and not for his friend’s husband. I became lost in the tangled morass through which he was leading me, wandering like a dull docent, directing his hundredth tour, a bland off-hand reference to the exemplary qualities of his friend, then, displaying an ever-so-slightly more spirited affect, recounting the shared traits of his ex and his friend’s husband.

At a loss for words, I managed to say, “These things do happen, but I think it’s not the best way or the only way.”

“No it’s not the best way, but it is the way,” his eyes shifted down, he nodded briefly, “Besides, we can’t help it; it’s just the way. . .,” his voice drifted up into a tentative query, “. . .these things happen.”