This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

Here are the bare facts about the woman I married: —She’s crazy, as I might have mentioned. —She’s a recluse. —She’s apparently willing to pull a gun on anyone threatening to uncover her hiding place.

We could be friends.

The dashboard immediately starts up a hysterical bleeping, signaling that my wife needs to fasten her seat belt. I should warn you that she won’t. The bleeping and flashing will continue until we get to the road. It’s a bone of contention in our marriage: I think the hassle of fastening and unfastening the seat belt is outweighed by the cessation of that infernal noise; she disagrees.

Yes, this woman is me.

I am not one of those Irish Americans coshed by a sense of Eiresatz nostalgia, filled with backward-looking whimsy about a country that our great-grandparents were forced out of in order to survive.

That same feeling of dislocation between what you thought you were doing and what you actually did envelops me as I sit there, as I press my elbows into the surface of my desk. All along I’d thought my life had been one thing, but it now seems it might have been something else entirely.

To all appearances, I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a citizen, but when tilted toward the light I become a deserter, a sham, a killer, a thief. On the surface I am one thing, but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.

Niall had been enthralled by this system, struck by its beauty, the way there could be one main narrative and, right there, at the bottom of each page, additional helpful information on all the things you couldn’t understand. He decided there and then that his life needed footnotes and that he, Niall, should be the one to provide them.

There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.

She must, I see now, have come in here for a break from the Sturm und Drang going on in the apartment. Funny how you realize that only after you become a parent yourself. Here she was, a book open on her lap. And it was the book that seemed to me, in that moment, the essence of my frustration, its absolute cathexis.

in the cruelty and myopia of youth,

Rain hurls itself against the windshield in staccato gusts; the wipers flail back and forth, Sisyphean in their ineffectuality.

On the greenish glass in front of his face, his exhalations appear, then fade, appear, then fade, the unseen showing itself, over and over, the invisible making itself known.

But here I am, waiting and waiting, and I’m thinking about Nicola, my first love, and also, in the simultaneous way you can, especially when jet-lagged, as if the tired mind is a stovetop that can keep several burners chugging away, keep more than one pan boiling, I’m thinking how glad I am that Claudette, my current love, my hopefully permanent love, doesn’t go in for much makeup.

“So,” I hailed them as I got out of my car, “this must be the place.”

The sad residue of human lives, washed up here to be resold, rehomed.

The key to life with Claudette is knowing that her default setting is overreaction and outrage.

My relief at her touch verges on indescribable. I don’t think our language contains a word with sufficient largesse or capacity to express the euphoria I feel as I bury my face in her hair, as I dive inside her coat and press her form to mine.

What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another.

Am I living through the moment when all the tiny lights begin to be extinguished,

It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I’m told it’s perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.

this varnish, she sees, was a mistake for today, arterial crimson, the color of the dark insides of things—and,

Hundreds of miles southwest, in London,

SouthEAST. London is southeast of Donegal.

You are the synecdoche for what she ran away from.

The truck starts up and Rosalind feels a dart of excitement. She sits forward, gripping the seat in front. They are off! She feels as she had when the train that would whisk her off to boarding school had started: ahead of her was potential, was life, was, above all, release.

She wanted nothing more than to go somewhere that was like nowhere else she’d ever been:

A terrible crevasse has somehow opened up in the conversation. Rosalind can almost see it there in the truck as it speeds through scenery that isn’t yet spectacular, just generic South American plain—scrubby cacti, a few haughty-faced llamas,

what about her, Rosalind, his wife of forty-five years, what was she supposed to make of this information, what about doing the right thing by her, and what on earth would that right thing have been?

She thought, too, about how she’d read somewhere that the only language that had a word for existences, lives such as theirs, was Romany. Detlene, they called them. The wandering souls of miscarried or stillborn children. Those who had undeniably lived but only within their mother.

The cold outside is static, polar. There is no wind and the thinnest of frosts gilds the ground. The coin of a moon dangles low in a punctured, glittering sky. The sight of it arrests Rosalind on the threshold. She looks up and up. It is the biggest sky she has ever seen, dark lapis in color, so big that it feels almost possible to discern the curvature of the earth beneath it.

I have a theory,” she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, “that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is.”

“That,” she says, as the truck’s engine starts beneath them, “is another story.”

Awwww…. what? Tell me we get to see Rosalind again!

Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.

“I will always be sad about Phoebe,” I say, with an effort to keep my voice even, “and so will Niall. But what happens is that, after a few years, you slowly realize it’s OK to be happy too.”

We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.