3. Love Makes Us Zombies (aka Worst Marriage Ever)

The list of literary characters undone by marriage is long and illustrious. Listen to Madame Bovary hold forth. “Each smile hid a yawn of boredom,” she confides, “each joy a curse, each pleasure its own disgust; and the sweetest kisses only left on one’s lips a hopeless longing for a higher ecstasy.” Emma chases her longing through adultery and into suicide. This is to say nothing of the tribulations of the Archers (Isabel and Leland), the miserable Maples, the murderous Medea, the ill-fated Frank and April Wheeler.

The union of William and Edith Stoner appears relatively placid by comparison. And yet I can think of no other fictional pairing so devoid of affection, so animated by cruelty and manipulation. Their wreck of a marriage ranks as one of the novel’s central pleasures.

This may sound perverse, unless you yourself have been married, in which case you know that such relationships—even as they provide love and companionship—can induce two otherwise reasonable people to discover the monstrous within themselves.

For most of human history, of course, marriage had little to do with joy or fulfillment. It was (and still is in many precincts) an economic institution designed to fulfill obligations not desires. Marriage shores up alliances, produces children for labor or inheritance, provides women a dubious measure of security and men a domestic kingdom to rule. Only in the last century or so, in the developed world, has the notion of marriage as a form of romantic destiny migrated from the world of fairytales.

Stoner suggests something darker than any other novel I’ve read, which is that the liberty to choose our betrothed is the ultimate booby trap, that our unconscious wishes direct us toward lovers guaranteed to afflict us, that we will ignore any and all warning signs along the way, will twist ourselves into knots to keep the peace, and ultimately choose a doomed loyalty over the pleasures of liberation. Pretty sick, huh?

*

William Stoner is twenty-eight years old, a newly minted professor of English nervously milling an academic reception, when he spots an elegant young woman pouring tea in the next room.

“Stoner paused in the doorway,” Williams writes, “caught by his vision of the young woman.” Note the construction of this sentence. Stoner doesn’t notice a young woman. He is caught by his vision of her, as in trapped, ensnared, seized. And not by her. By his vision of her, which is something else entirely. Desire immobilizes him for several moments, after which he backs out of the room in confusion. He cannot bring himself to look at her, though he thinks he can feel “the gaze of the young woman brush warmly across his face.”

Stoner spots the host of the party and demands an introduction. The host is taken aback, along with the reader. To this point in the novel, we have seen no indication that Stoner harbors even a flicker of romantic want.

Edith Bostwick, he discovers, is twenty years old, the only child of a rich couple from St. Louis. She plays piano and has artistic inclinations fostered by her mother and plans to tour Europe in the spring. Stoner has no memory of learning these things. Their initial meeting is “blurred and formal” like the figured tapestry that hangs on a nearby wall. He is certain only of his own intentions; before Edith can leave the party, Stoner asks to call on her the next evening.

Edith opens the door and stands for several moments, as if she has not heard him. Cold air washes over Stoner’s hot face. Finally, she turns and looks at him and blinks several times. She agrees to let him call, but does not smile.

*

Stoner shows up the next night at the home of Edith’s aunt for an exceedingly awkward visit. At the end of the evening, Stoner asks to see her again. When she says nothing, he turns to go. At precisely this moment, Edith begins to speak in a “high shrill voice without inflection,” recounting the details of her childhood. She doesn’t appear to be talking to Stoner, though. Her eyes are fixed straight before her, as if she’s reciting from “an invisible book.”

Stoner wants to comfort her, to touch her even, but he remains paralyzed by puzzlement. He learns more about her from this abrupt soliloquy than he ever will again. “And when it was over,” Williams writes, “he felt they were strangers in a way he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.”

If this observation strikes you as somewhat askew, perhaps even bonkers, it is because romantic courtship generally involves the rapacious pursuit of intimacy, the desire to barge through the boundaries of selfhood, to imagine that we have known our beloved forever, which is to say: the opposite of a stranger.

Stoner and Edith are painfully shy, unversed in emotional discourse, and constrained by custom. But the behaviors they exhibit throughout courtship go beyond inhibition. They behave like zombies. I mean this literally. They address one another, but never seem to be in conversation. They march through dates as if programmed. Edith barely looks at Stoner. He reacts to her indifference and obvious psychic instability in the same manner a bull reacts to the matador’s cape. Before she can depart for her planned tour of Europe, mere weeks after their meeting, Stoner proposes. Edith feigns shock.

“You must have known I loved you,” Stoner declares.

“I didn’t,” she replies. “I don’t know anything about that.”

She’s telling him the truth. But he won’t hear it.

And so they stagger on. He meets her parents, who humiliate him for a few hours before offering a contemptuous blessing. The wedding is not an emotional event so much as a series of required actions, none of them remotely romantic, not even the marital buss (“her lips were as dry as his own”). Some of this disassociation is surely panic, the overloaded systems of two people unprepared for the commitment they are making to one another.

But that doesn’t explain the fact that Edith ghosts Stoner at their reception, choosing instead to huddle with her family, who behave as if the occasion is a funeral—the death of the family’s good name. When the groom catches sight of his bride across the room, he sees “a mask, expressionless and white.” Not until they’re on the train headed to St. Louis for the honeymoon does Stoner realize that it’s all over, and that he has a wife.

*

The description of this honeymoon spans six excruciating pages. We know from the jump that Stoner’s abject desire will be met by dread, because the narrator tells us so. And yet these scenes are among the most heart-rending of the entire book, because Williams does just what most writers lack the courage to do: he slows down where his characters are the most exposed and helpless.

Both newlyweds are virginal and inexperienced. But Stoner, who grew up on a farm, views the natural processes of life as unremarkable. Edith, by contrast, finds them “profoundly mysterious and unexpected. She knew nothing of them, and there was something within her which did not wish to know of them.” The groom thus spends his wedding night obediently contorted on the sofa.

The next night, they share some champagne. Stoner walks up behind his wife and places his hands on her shoulders. She stiffens beneath his touch, her neck rigid, “the cords vibrant in their tensity.” He urges her toward the bedroom and feels the resistance of her body and the “willed putting away” of this resistance.

Edith understands that she will be required to consummate the marriage. At this point, a lesser writer would hit fast forward to the act itself. Williams describes the bruising ballet that precedes the act, forcing us to witness the psychological and emotional violence of the encounter.

Stoner is dispatched to the bathroom by his bride. He emerges to find Edith in bed, the covers pulled to her chin, eyes closed, a thin frown creasing her forehead. She answers his entreaties with silence, and so he lays alone with his desire. Williams continues: “He moved his hand upon her; she did not stir; her frown deepened. Again he spoke, saying her name to silence; then he moved his body upon her, gentle in his clumsiness. When he touched the softness of her thighs she turned her head sharply away and lifted her arm to cover her eyes. She made no sound.” Note the rhythm of the sentences here, the discrete precision of each independent clauses. Williams deploys syntax and grammar as emotional tools.

Afterwards, Stoner speaks to his wife affectionately. She responds by fleeing to the bathroom. He sees a light go on and hears her retch “loudly and agonizingly.”

*

What’s most ominous in all this is the simple fact that the Stoners have no way to communicate with one another. He recognizes his marriage as a failure within a month, and stops hoping it will improve soon after. “If he spoke to her or touched her in tenderness, she turned away from him within herself and became wordless.” Silence becomes the default setting of their marriage.

Stoner knows his wife is unhappy, but lacks the courage to address her unhappiness. He takes her on picnics and buys her gifts. She merely withdraws further. They continue to have relations, an act Stoner completes as quickly as he can, while Edith buries her face in a pillow. Occasionally, she’s drowsy enough that he can pretend her acquiescence is consent. When Edith does express emotion, it is in a veiled and hysterical manner. At their inaugural dinner party, she drinks too much and has a breakdown, berating Stoner and the other guests.

This is all happening in 1928, in a world of repressed, middle-class respectability. Divorce is never mentioned. Nor mental health. Instead, Edith decides—without warning—that she wants a child.

Her approach to the copulative events that this ambition requires can only be described as succubal. When Stoner returns from work one evening, he finds Edith lying naked on the bed, issuing odd little sounds. As Stoner approaches in alarm, these sounds become louder and her hands reach for him “like claws” tearing at his clothing. “Her mouth came up to him, gaping and hot … and all the time her eyes were wide and staring and untroubled, as if they belonged to somebody else and saw nothing.” Edith’s behavior isn’t just animalistic, it’s depersonalized; for the next two months she becomes a sex zombie. The moment she conceives, her carnal abandon pivots to disgust. Stoner, too, comes to regard this era of feral passion “as if it were a dream that had nothing to do with either of them.”

Edith takes to her bed during her pregnancy, and becomes a full-time invalid after the birth of her daughter, Grace, saddling Stoner with all domestic and parental duties. She wants nothing to do with the baby and demands that her husband buy her a house so she doesn’t have to smell the soiled diapers.

By now, the fever of his desire has broken for good. Stoner is content to stay out of Edith’s way, and to bond with his daughter. He even sets up at a tiny desk for her in his study. One evening, the two of them are in his office. Stoner makes a whimsical comment and the two of them begin to laugh. At precisely this moment, the door swings open and Edith stands outlined in the “hard light” from the next room. She announces that Stoner is trying to work and orders Grace out of the room.

“Don’t you realize how unhappy she’s been?” Edith snaps. She’s confessing to her own sadness here, of course. But as anybody who has been married can tell you, projection is the last refuge of the cornered spouse. Edith knows Stoner and Grace have found refuge in each other—refuge from her—and she goes for the jugular:

After her abrupt and almost brutal entrance into his study that night, an entrance which in retrospect seemed to him a surprise attack, Edith’s strategy became more indirect, more quiet and contained. It was a strategy that disguised itself as love and concern, and thus one against which he was helpless.

Edith portrays her abduction as a product of Stoner’s negligence, telling a visitor that Grace adores her father, but that he has no time for her. As Stoner overhears this declaration, his hands begin to shake. He confronts his wife, demanding that she stop using the child to punish him. Edith calmly calls his bluff. “All you could do is leave me, and you’d never do that. We both know it.” When he returns from work that evening, Stoner discovers that Edith has removed all of his belongings from his study and piled them in a corner of the living room. She informs him that she will now be using his study as an art studio.

*

The Stoner marriage often plays as the drama of a pathological woman acting out, a situation I’ll explore in the next chapter. But Williams also captures the quiet moments when one partner must confront the loss of esteem that undoes marriage. One evening, Stoner arrives home to find Edith asleep, her body “lax and wanton in its naked sprawl” and aglow like “pale gold.” Her mouth, slightly opened, appears to be issuing cries of passion. He gazes at his wife for a long time, passing through a range of emotions that ends with “a weary sadness, for he knew that no longer could the sight of her bring upon him the agony of desire that he had once known.”

What Williams is able to dramatize here, in a manner rarely achieved, is the profound confusion of marriage, the way we must bear so many conflicted feelings toward the same person. This is a moment of mourning for Stoner, the twilight of his passion; he no longer loves his wife in the way he once did. But alongside that revelation live other feelings—distant pity, reluctant friendship, familiar respect—which he cannot disavow.

The Stoner marriage is haunting, too, because it dramatizes a kind of isolation particular to modern matrimony. I don’t want to idealize marriage in earlier eras, because it was most often a license for patriarchal abuse. But I do think that marriage used to take place within a much more cohesive familial and cultural framework. Couples could count on receiving support from kin, friends, and usually a religious community. The gender roles were far more constrictive. But there were a lot of people around to relieve the pressures on the bride and groom.

The Stoners have none of this. They live on what my wife and I sometimes call “the island of marriage.” Because of their own particular histories, they cannot rely on their families for emotional or domestic support. Stoner has exactly one friend in the world, in whom he cannot confide. Edith has no one. They have to be everything to one another, though they have nothing in common, no way of understanding each other, and no basis of trust upon which they might build a true intimacy.

This is why Williams portrays them as zombies, I think: to suggest that they have no conscious capacity to choose one another. Stoner is dumbstruck at the sight of Edith and decides that he must marry her. She accedes to his ardor. They operate at the level of glandular instinct and social programming.

*

It’s an extreme portrait, but anyone who has been in a long-term monogamy, especially a marriage, will recognize the outlines. Romantic love always begins with a dream, one designed to liberate us from the burdens of the past but inexorably bound to them. Erin and I dreamed of building a family impervious to the bullying and anxiety we’d experienced growing up, though our relationship was fraught with elements of both.

I’ve often portrayed our romance as a tale of heroic self-determination, in which we boldly hurtled from long-distance lovers to rookie parents in a few exuberant months. But I was consistently controlling during our courtship, and Erin too often silenced her doubts and resentments, for fear I would abandon her. Like William Stoner, I fell in love with an idea and charged ahead, ignoring the woman I claimed to adore.

Let us take as Exhibit A my insistence that we elope. Erin flew out for a long weekend. We snagged a vintage dress from a thrift store and made the two-minute drive to Somerville City Hall. Our honeymoon consisted of a couple’s massage and takeout Indian. We were a couple of rebels who’d sidestepped family hassles and stuck it to the wedding industry; that was how I saw it. But to Erin, our DIY ceremony fit into a larger and more degrading pattern, in which I treated our love as something to be minimized, even concealed, rather than celebrated.

And the truth is, I remember almost nothing of the event itself, not the vows we uttered, nor the kiss, nor the emotions I felt. What I do remember—that my bride was besieged by morning sickness, that one of our two witnesses had a broken leg—speaks not to the glory of consummation but to the sense of injury around the event.

*

A dozen years into our marriage, I’m pleased to report that Erin and I remain happily betrothed. Even as we contend with three rambunctious kids, we’re learning how to support one another as artists and parents. We laugh a lot. Our unofficial motto, invoked during moments of peak exasperation, is No one gets out of this marriage alive! Which speaks to a genuine desire that we will grow old together.

But our harmony has been hard won. The pain I inflicted on Erin during our courtship never went away. Nor did the mistrust and inhibitions bred into us by our families. We carried all that baggage with us over the threshold. And our marriage—like every marriage—has unpacked that baggage and hurled it around the room.

Without meaning to, Erin and I have reopened wounds inflicted long before we met. We’ve fought and frozen each other out. We’ve stormed out of restaurants and slept on couches. We’ve felt entrapped and typecast, and, in our worst moments, crushingly alone. This is why a significant and carefully silent part of myself feels actual relief when friends confide their marital woes. It’s petty and despicable, especially the part where I return home and talk to Erin, pretending at grave concern when what I feel is a kind of brittle superiority.

We may not be rivals on par with Edith and William Stoner, but Erin and I (like all spouses) compete for time and space and regard. We withhold love when we feel deprived. We depend on each other and rage against our dependence. We expose the worst of ourselves and must therefore contend with shame on top of our disappointment.

I say this as someone who once smashed a bowl to bits on the floor of our kitchen, terrifying Erin, our two-year-old daughter, and myself. At vile moments such as this, I am no longer in control of my words or thoughts, no longer acting and reacting in the present. The neediness for love, the masculine doubt, the murderous aggression—it all takes over. I become a zombie.

This is why I cling to Stoner as such a powerful cautionary tale. It’s not just about a brutally unhappy marriage. It’s about the brutal ways in which marriage reveals all of us. And it’s about what happens when a couple lacks the capacity to communicate and evolve. All that’s left is the hurt. Erin and I have not stopped hurting one another. But we’ve developed a common language of trust, one that allows us (more often than not) to speak the truth without shame. We’re learning to reflect and apologize. Day by day, we’re unzombiefying our love.