Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

So:

This was a geographically strange marriage. The Ted Wilsons had long lived in different countries, with no end in sight to their separation. That they opted for this arrangement does not diminish its strangeness. On the contrary, arguably. (It’s as if an owner of a pair of socks decided to keep one sock at home and its match in the country. (We all know what eventually happens to pairs of socks: one of them disappears, or gets a hole in it, and they are separated permanently. (Although in my case the retained sock will often live on alone, and be mismatched with a leftover sock from a different pair.)))

This, the above, puts the marital case in the category of the exceptional: there is no need to spell out the implications of a couple living apart, at least to anyone who believes that, unlike cats, most of us are not solitary creatures with no need for close companionship.

We are concerned, then, with the case of a married person’s inability to abide forever by promises whose presuppositions (of proximity and intimacy) have evaporated. If this inability is a flaw, very many of us are similarly flawed. It follows that the flaw is non-pathological.

Accordingly, one can hardly state with confidence, of either Mr or Mrs Ted Wilson, that it would have been maniacal or psychopathic of them, over the course of years of apartness, to seek from a third party the subject-matter of an abstracted marital monopoly, i.e., the humanly essential flesh-and-blood tenderness that comprehends, but is not exhausted or defined by, sexual pleasure. (It pains me to say it, and I’m not suggesting anything, but we have no information as to whether Mrs Ted Wilson did or didn’t herself take a lover or paramour, to use decorous language I associate with young ladies in the court of Louis XIV who’ve been entered into wedlock with a romantically unsuitable (much older) man in order to further extra-personal diplomatic/financial objectives, and who are deemed to be entitled to a discreet liaison with a younger, more personally compatible gentleman. (Interestingly, men are not typically said to ‘take a lover’, and I’m not aware that our language provides them with an equivalent euphemism. This may be another anachronistic disjuncture, especially as it’s no longer the case that a husband is permitted to sexually have his way with his wife whether or not she is agreeable. The spousal rapist no longer goes scot-free, in theory. (This may be the moment to mention what I think is an important prevalent confusion about the promise of fidelity, i.e., faithful monogamy. The essence of monogamy does not consist in abstention from third-party sexual relations but in the dedication of sexual activity to a single person. In other words, the wilfully sexually inactive spouse is not being monogamous: he/she is being celibate. Those who are in doubt as to the conjugal significance of celibacy are referred to its historic synonymity with the Latin source-word, caelibatus : ‘state of being unmarried’. Properly understood, then, the intentional celibate, in his/her contravention of the vow of fidelity, is in the same boat of transgression as the intentional adulterer. (Maybe this is all by way of a prologue to a confession: Jenn and I ‘cheated’ (word beloved by the online barbarians) on each other. What little sex we had was clearly a disturbance of a celibate status quo rather than an enactment of a monogamous one. The most erotic episode of our last few years came when, tweezers in hand, I carefully removed a wasp’s stinger from the sole of her foot and, in the weeks that followed, scratched the bite mark at her request. She practically swooned with toxical ecstasy. (Since I’m looking back, I have to rub my eyes and ask where we got the idea that it was somehow sensible and coherent and reasonably practicable to pay a woeful price of eternal intimate isolation in order to be ‘with’ each other. Likewise, who or what put it into the heads of the Wilsons that they could pull off an international union that wasn’t actually a union? What are they teaching in schools these days? Which planet are we all on? (Nowadays the more unremarkable or self-evident something is, the harder and longer I’ll be rubbing my eyes. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.))))))

OK, so Ted Wilson and Mrs Ted Wilson II (as she isn’t, yet) are having a non-maniacal adulterous relationship. Then, she gets accidentally pregnant (it happens to the best of us) and she decides to keep the baby (again, by no means an outlandish decision). This gives rise to a problem. This is Dubai, remember, where it’s illegal and unacceptable for an unmarried woman to be with child. So Wilson marries her — not for his sake but for her sake and the child’s. He falls on the sword of bigamy. How do we feel about Ted Wilson now? (I’m not saying tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. I’m just asking the question. (To be clear, we don’t know the facts. We’d need to see the certificates of marriage and birth and do the prurient math. But I’ll bet that my scenario isn’t far from what happened. It certainly cannot be ruled out.))

We have answered, in the negative, the charge that Ted Wilson, insofar as he had relations of a worldly and criminally matrimonial nature with a woman other than Mrs Ted Wilson, must necessarily have been a ‘two-timing maniac ’. I want to quickly go back to the question of two-timing . An overlooked feature of the case against Wilson is the absence of any suggestion that he took action that was wrong as such. So far as one is aware, he led two ‘good’ lives — one with Mrs Ted Wilson, one with Mrs Ted Wilson II. (Debatably, until it all fell apart, he was twice as virtuous as the next guy, seeing as he was discharging the responsibilities and producing the good outcomes associated with meeting the needs of two women. (I’m just dipping my toe in water, here. I’m also asking if, as someone who is currently neither betraying anyone nor providing for anyone, i.e., as a zero-timer, I’m not actually worse than Ted Wilson.)) Wilson’s wrongdoing lay in the simultaneity of his two lives. Again, no value judgment. I’m just putting out there that we begin to see a link between morality and chronology. The link becomes clearer if we remember that serial romantic involvement is not generally deplored, so that if Wilson had taken up with Mrs TW2 after his relationship with Mrs TW had ended, all would have been OK. The accusation of ‘two-timing’ is therefore more apt than the Wall accuser knew: Wilson’s crime was essentially temporal. His timing was bad. (The rebutter will impatiently say: No, no, no, his crime was his dishonesty: he acted with wrongful secrecy, in breach of trust. The rebuttal has great force. I wonder, though, if it’s dispositive. What if both the Mrs Ted Wilsons had expressly consented to their mutual husband having concurrent relationships in Dubai and Chicago: would this arrangement have met with general approval? I doubt it. Leaving aside the disapprobation excited by polygamy (which I can attest to, having heard the nasty comments made about Emirati families), it seems to me that the very doubleness of Wilson’s life would be outrageous. Hold on — he gets two bites at the cherry? Correction — he gets two cherries ? We’re stuck with one life and he gets two? Unfair! We’re stuck with the tyranny of the linear and he isn’t? He gets a double helping and we don’t? He gets to take both forks in the road and we’re stuck with the path not taken and the false consolation that alternativity is a spiritual splendour? Not on my watch, buddy. Not if I have anything to do with it. (As it happens, I see things differently. I think two lives would be unendurable and unnatural. Oneness may be hard — but twoness? It has a diabolical dimension, to my mind. How would you split yourself? How would you do justice to both your selves and to both your others? (Then again, there’s Ollie’s revolutionary conjecture: love makes time. (It certainly seems true that lovelessness shrinks time. Jenn and I always seemed squeezed. Always we were in agreement that certain practical things needed to be done right away. Always it was first things first. Always we were in the hurry that postpones the second thing, the good stuff, whatever that was supposed to be. (I now see that our idea of the good stuff wasn’t having a good time together, or a good that was stuff-like, but having a good situation, i.e., the circumstance, rather than the substance, was the good, and vital to the good was the displacement of time and its replacement by activity. This was a category error, but what did we know? It was all new to us, every second of it. (There’s your problem with experience, right there: it’s inapplicable, going forward.)))))) (On one view, which I share, I was guilty too, and above all, of causing the most serious chronological damage: I failed to tell Jenn that I didn’t want to have a baby with her earlier , so as to give her a reasonable period of time in which to mate with someone else. (I’m aware that I have a defence open to me, namely that Jenn specifically asserted that she didn’t want a child. The defence doesn’t hold up. There was always the chance she’d change her mind, and there was nothing to stop me from telling her that come what may I would not have a child with her because our quasi-marriage was a living death for me — surely a pretty significant piece of information that is absolutely one’s obligation to communicate to one’s partner in a timely fashion. Jenn, I’m so sorry.))