Well matched
Well-matched couples conversing in another room in a house is music. Words rise and fall between them as if birds singing and alighting branch to branch of a tree. The occasional word is discernable – love as in “my love” or glass as in “I probably didn’t need that last glass of wine” or feet as in “I think I need new running shoes, my feet hurt”. What is said is not what matters, it’s the dance between these two, this couple that has been a couple long enough to interrupt each other without recrimination, finish each other’s sentences, or simply ask “what was that?” after a monologue that they appeared to be listening to all along, their nose in the laundry hamper or eyes gazing through the window at the horizon.
I listen from the kitchen. I am not leaning in hard to hear, rather, I am listening as one would to the rumble of a train approaching from a great distance, or the hum of freeway traffic beyond my suburban neighborhood’s boundaries. I listen with appreciation, as if a small child is practicing at the piano or on a flute. Starting, stopping, repeating, catching a string of notes perfectly and then halting in despair. Starting bravely again.
Couples who endure have the patience and indifference and willingness to see past minor infractions or discomforts. The ring his coffee cup leaves on the kitchen table where he left it half full, cooling, when his cell phone rang. The way her blush drifts from its compact with the mirror and dusts the bathroom counter, like spring pollen. She wipes down the table and he brushes away the pink specks with his hand. It is absent movement, uncharged by irksome thinking; it’s just something that is noticed, and quickly forgotten.
I have known couples who were ill-matched, I have listened as they move about the house. The discord is evident in the silence, or in the sound of dresser drawers snapping closed. The occasional voice raised, clear enough to hear each word. Their voices do not caress or flow over each other. Words are nails, hammered in intervals, in spaces of silence, building a coffin. Without the music, you can smell the separation, the smoldering of discontent.
Well-matched couples in their own homes move as if in a choreographed dance. She waters the plants; he empties the dishwasher. They meet at the coffee pot, three minutes apart, where he has approached it first, at the sound indicating it is fully brewed. He hands her a full cup and pours his own second. They are comfortable sitting side by side, with no outline to the day, as the outline was filled in long ago, with all the things they do together, or apart, inside of it. Still, they can make the other laugh in surprise. This is what propels them both forward, the fact of their couple-ness a fluid, lovely splash in a warm pool. They come up from each dip into it with wet heads, fresh angles on all they have previously agreed upon – the life they are sharing, the journey and the end point.
When I see them together on vacation, they carry this forward, this delight in their compatibility. With or without each other they are unafraid. He wanders off to the art galleries. She pulls out her yoga mat and opens the veranda doors. They both ponder where they might eat dinner later, under the haze of streetlights amidst the other tourists wending their way through the kaleidoscope of colors and sounds which are all new and enticing.
Over the years they have forgotten how often they used to hold hands or climb on each other’s lap. It returns to them in those moments of surprise, when something new catches their eye, or something old returns to them in their dreams. She watches as a child’s head lolls against the neck of her parent, sound asleep in the warm night, encircled in movement and light. He sees a young couple seated at an open-air bar, her bare legs swinging, his shirt pressed, the sleeves rolled just so. She grabs his hand on the street, and he stops to kiss her. Their lips have known each other for eternity and move into each other like the nights they spent sleeping in a pup tent when they were young, campgrounds across Europe and Canada, their sleeping bags like inchworms softly entwined.