Phan Tai Duc – Anh 4

Two Open Marriages in One Small Room

A motorcycle accident brings together four lives that had been kept intentionally separate.

“I want to see the body,” said my 12-year-old son, Miles.

He and I were sitting in our minivan outside of the hospital. I texted my wife again: “We’re
waiting in the parking lot. Will you come down? Your burrito is getting cold.”

“Dad!”

We weren’t supposed to go inside. This was intended as a quick favor, bringing my wife
dinner so she wouldn’t have to eat more institutional food.

“Miles, it’s not ‘the body,’” I said. “You only say ‘the body’ when a person is dead. Eric’s
still Eric. He’s just had a terrible accident.”

I texted my wife again: “Honey? Please!”

“Then I want to see him,” Miles said. “Can’t we go inside? Just for a few minutes.”

“It’s private,” I said.

“Well, Mom is there.”

“Mom and Eric have a special relationship,” I said. “Eric is in an intensive care unit. They’re
cramped spaces full of sensitive equipment. We don’t want the room to be too crowded.”

“I think it’s just Mom there, and Eric,” Miles said. “Maybe Shelley.”

Here’s where it gets interesting. Shelley is Eric’s wife. My wife (and Miles’s mother) is
Eric’s girlfriend. We both have open marriages and respect each other’s privacy, but this
accident propelled us into a new reality.

I stared at my phone, hoping for the gray bubbles of a pending response. One of my wife’s
sweetest qualities is her focus, in real time, on the people she loves. I imagined her at Eric’s
bedside, holding his hand, talking even though he was not responding. It had been only three
days since a semi-truck cut off his motorcycle and sent him spinning, landing so forcefully
that his helmet split.

Her phone was probably buzzing in her purse, even though she knew we were coming and
that I didn’t want to come inside.

“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing the bag with the burrito from her favorite food cart and opening
the car door.

“Excellent!” Miles said, as if we were going on a macabre amusement ride.

Even though I am not good at mathematics, I found myself ruminating on the cruel geometry
of the accident: the driver of the long semi-truck swinging out at a wide angle that
unexpectedly narrows, blinding him to Eric’s presence; the rear of the truck breaking the
trajectory of the motorcycle’s path as it turned in its respective lane.

There were two impact points: the middle of the truck (his head) then the asphalt 30 feet
away (the left side of his body). A hypotenuse of flight. Smashed ribs. Traumatic brain
injury. A compound fracture of his left leg. A shattered left arm.

I didn’t want to see him broken.

“Which way to the acute care unit?” I asked the front desk attendant. We followed signs
along a circuitous route as my stomach roiled with dread. Visiting at such a vulnerable time,
his survival still uncertain, seemed wrong. Like it should be just family, which we weren’t
exactly. I didn’t know what my relationship to Eric was.

Like other couples we know in open arrangements, my wife and I compartmentalize, keeping
our dating relationships mostly off each other’s radar, a buffer against jealousy and
insecurity. To most people, we look like a conventional family: two parents who met in
college, three children each spaced two years apart, a pretty four-bedroom brick house.

Close friends and family know the deeper story, but otherwise we keep it to ourselves. I’m
careful about how I move in the world because people judge, or they are uncomfortable, or
they avoid. This situation — entering the hospital room of my wife’s lover — risked
exposing our oddness in a way that unnerved me.

“Elevator six, over there,” Miles said. “Step it up, Dad. The burrito will get cold.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s already cold, buddy.”

My wife and I have what psychologists call a “mixed orientation marriage.” I am bisexual
and always have been. When she and I fell in love, we both wanted to think we could work as
a monogamous, conventional couple.

We married, bought a house, had children and made a go of it, but ultimately our relationship
didn’t fit that particular script. After a lot of talk and therapy, and even a few moments of
nearly splitting up, we arrived at this creative arrangement: “Will and Grace” with children,
cats and a mortgage.

When we first settled into this platonic agreement, a shared life with permission to see other
people romantically, Miles was 5. Unlike his two older siblings, he didn’t understand open
marriage, despite our attempts to explain it in a way that (we hoped) would make sense
without overwhelming him.

It didn’t matter. Miles has always known his parents living under the same roof, each other’s
dearest mooring in the world. As the youngest, he has been the most comfortable with our
unconventional arrangement because he never knew anything different. He doesn’t know the
dissonance my wife and I have long struggled with, having married according to a traditional
template before creating this new one.
“This is it, Dad,” Miles said. “Level 1 Trauma Center. Wow, man.”

I wasn’t clear if we were allowed to be here, not being family.

“We’re here to see Eric,” I said to a nurse. “I’m bringing his friend some dinner. Can we stop
in briefly?”

“She’s the girlfriend?” the nurse said. Eric’s wife had confirmed with hospital staff that his
girlfriend would alternate sitting vigil with her.

“She is.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

My wife was sitting in a green chair beside a bed, her hair rumpled from a night of
uncomfortable sleep, her face drawn with worry and hunger. She had been there all day. She
missed her children and garden and home routines.

I couldn’t bring myself to look at the formless heap beside her. “Here’s your burrito,” I said.

When she rose, I gave her an everyday kiss before gathering her in a hug. She held on longer
than usual, then started to cry quietly. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

“Why isn’t Eric awake?” Miles said. “I want to hear about the accident.”

She sighed. “He has to remain in a coma for a while. He wouldn’t be able to tolerate the pain
of so many broken bones.”

After my wife had been seeing Eric for six months, I arranged to meet him for coffee. A
marital courtesy: I didn’t think we would be friends, but it seemed right not to be strangers.
Trim and athletic, gray-brown hair that was thinning on top, he was the same age as me. He
had one child to my three. We were both in health care: me a psychotherapist, he an
audiologist.

We talked about the challenges of running a practice. He offered to connect me to the woman
who handled his billing. I knew we liked the same music and poetry because my wife
accompanied him to concerts and readings that I wished I could attend too. Sometimes it
seemed that she had simply found a more heterosexual version of me.

“And just so you know,” Eric said as we were parting. “I respect your marriage. I don’t want
her seeing me to pose any threat.”

His words surprised and reassured me, even if that’s what he was supposed to say. He and his
wife had been in an open marriage for longer than us. He knew the map of this strange
terrain. I thought he was a mensch, and we were lucky she had found him.

Still avoiding looking at Eric’s bed, I stepped over to the window.

Miles’s voice had a new solemnity, as if this was something other than an interesting
adventure story he wanted to hear. “Dad,” he said. “This should never have happened.”
“You’re right, buddy,” I said.

Sometimes a child’s innocence supplies the soundest etiquette in an uncertain situation.

“Dad,” Miles said. “You need to look.”

So I turned my gaze to Eric, though I was ashamed to, as if looking at him while he was
comatose was a violation of something tender. As if the compartments of our lives, our
everyday, still applied in this sanitized room that didn’t belong to anyone. A chorus of
machines surrounded his body, beeping and blinking yellow, green, blue.

Eric’s face was puffy and unrecognizable — purple, red, swollen, stubbled. Gauze bandages
covered his head and neck. His left arm and leg were enshrouded in casts. It seemed as if
every piece of him had been bandaged and stapled and pushed into place. If the bend of cruel
geometry that landed Eric here, comatose and broken, came from not being seen, we now
needed to give him our attention — generously, unflinchingly.

Months later, Eric would come through all of this — ambulatory and healed, if altered. But
that evening, looking at him, I felt a fluttering in my gut, a stir of mortal awareness, as if
holding him in our gaze was the only thing tethering him to the earth.

II/ Summary
This is the story of two married couples agreeing on an open marriage (a type of marriage where the
husband and wife can have other romantic affairs as they want without the opposition from his/her
partner) but depicts the double intersections of four fates kept separate intentionally. The story was
built up basing on the view of a young bisexual man – the “Dad” character, as there was the accident
of Eric, another man who has a rather romantic relationship with Mom (Dad’s wife), as a normal or
even mundane part of an open marriage. Dad through this accident had really and thoroughly
observed a crucial reality in the relationships of four people when he saw such unreasonable
dedication of his “official wife” to a man other than her husband, which is the distance and the
ambiguity between him and the other three. In the end Dad understood the separation in such a kind of
marriage and saw that ultimately there was no real love, because he could not see eye to eye to the lost
of expected commitment from his supposedly “partner”. All in all, we can see that , In this scenario,
it is much more likely that someone in the core couple will stumble across a soulmate in a
secondary partner. Not only meet, but become intimate with, and fall in love. Eventually,
they realize they don’t need their 70% core partner because they now have a 99% secondary.
That or they want the core and the secondary to switch places. Now the core spouse is left
adrift in a supplemental role while their partner is in love with someone else. Destroy the core
couple, and the open marriage goes into the trash heap as well.

III/ New words

1 Institutional (Adj) relating to an institution
2 Cramped (Adj) not having enough space or time
3 Propel (V) to push or move something somewhere, often with a lot of force
4 Propel sb into sth to cause someone to do an activity or be in a situation
5 Pending (Adj) about to happen or waiting to happen
6 Macabre (Adj) used to describe something that is very strange and unpleasant
because it is connected with death or violence
7 Ruminate (V) to think carefully and for a long period about something
8 Asphalt (N) a black, sticky substance, often mixed with small stones or sand,
that forms a strong surface when it becomes hard
9 Hypotenuse (N) the longest side of any triangle that has one angle of 90°
10 Acute (Adj) If a bad situation/injury is acute, it causes severe problems or
damage
11 Circuitous (Adj) not straight or direct
12 Roil (V) to (cause to) move quickly in a twisting circular movement
13 Compartmentalize (V) to separate something into parts and not allow those parts to mix
together
14 Buffer (N) (against) something or someone that helps protect from harm
15 Monogamous (Adj) having a sexual relationship or marriage with only one person at a
time
16 Will and Grace (Phr) a phrase one might use to describe a gay male and his female best
friend
17 Platonic(Adj) a platonic relationship or emotion is loving but not sexual
18 Mooring (N) a place to tie a boat
19 Vigil (N) an act of staying awake, especially at night, in order to be with a
person who is very ill or dying, or to make a protest, or to pray
20 Rumple (V) to make something become creased (= not smooth) or untidy
21 Courtesy (N) polite behaviour, or a polite action or remark
22 Audiologist (N) a person with specialized training in the science and medicine of
hearing and balance
23 Heterosexual (Adj/N) a person who is sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex
24 Terrain (N) an area of land, when considering its natural features
25 Solemnity (N) an attitude with full seriousness and no humor
26 Sound (Adj) used to say that you like, agree with, or approve of someone or
something
27 Enshroud (V) to cover something so that it cannot be seen clearly
28 Cast (N) If a part of your body is in a cast, it has a plaster cast around it to
protect it while a broken bone repairs itself
29 Unflinchingly (Adv) in a way that shows someone is not frightened or is not trying to
avoid something
30 Ambulatory relating to or describing people being treated for an injury or
illness who are able to walk, and who, when treated in a hospital,
are usually not staying for the night
31 Flutter (V) to make a series of quick delicate movements up and down or
from side to side, or to cause something to do this
32 Tether (V) to tie something, especially an animal to a post or other fixed
place, with a rope or chain