After Natalia Ginzburg’s “He and I”
He likes working on the patio. I prefer cooking up a stew or pouring out cocktails. I do the grocery shopping, take the car to the mechanic, and ferry cardboard to the recycling centre. He keeps the house plants alive, launders the sheets and towels, and fills all our bird feeders so we can watch the brown song sparrows, the blood-red cardinals, and the shining summer goldfinches–fair-feathered friends whose songs, as they say, quieten mental noise.
Among the outdoor chores, my favourite is grilling. I don’t know why, but unlike me, he does not seem to especially enjoy being outside on a hot summer afternoon, breathing the smoke from roasting meat, cheese, and vegetables. When he has meat to sear in a frying pan, he calls me over saying, “You do this so well.” In fact, he cooks meat beautifully, but he becomes anxious when a frying pan smokes—afraid it will taste bad or set off the fire alarm.
For years he was a vegan and ate mostly rice and vegetables. That ended shortly after he met me: he jokes that dietary extravagance is the true slippery moral slope of gay marriage. I, on the other hand, grew up in one of the most meat- and dairy-loving nations on Earth, South Africa. When we are travelling, I insist on stopping at a gourmet supermarket to buy Bucheron cheese, aged goudas, jamon serrano, and beef round, the latter to make the seasoned dried meat snack known as biltong. He, on the other hand, will demand we stop at an Asian supermarket, where he will wax rhapsodic about a sesame oil or a rice vinegar. He quips he loves seitan, while I love cheeses.
But he lets me choose restaurants. I would love to believe this is because he admires my culinary judgment. However, what he talks about is my research skills, the way I balance a restaurant’s star rating against specific reviewer comments. To hear him tell it, I have an almost supernatural instinct for finding a comfortable Airbnb apartment or a hole-in-the-wall food joint. He tells others that this is what I do, to take a break from work: where others watch TikTok videos, I do Internet searches.
But although he would deny this, I believe the real reason he lets me pick meals and lodging is that he trusts me to not prioritize my own pleasure. Thus I routinely forego the churrasco and feijoada, which he would not appreciate, for miso soups and rich Thai curries, which he adores. Or I pick options we will both enjoy, like Vietnamese pho. It is not just that these are the compromises of marriage. It is that the missed opportunities are no loss at all, since when he smiles at my work, my whole chest opens up, like when we lift our apartment windows to let in air.
But if I make the arrangements, he packs the car. When I try, I get in only about half as much as he can. By the same token, he can reverse into a parking spot, with less than a foot of room front and back, on the first try. Even with ample room, I will have to zip in and out, zigzagging like a tango dancer, hitting the curb or angling the nose of our Honda. When I look at jars arranged in the fridge or cans in the pantry, their locations seem existentially necessary. I cannot imagine them fitting together differently, nor does it occur to me that there is any reason for them to do so. His mind spins Tupperware containers on their axes and restacks jam jars until an empty shelf appears.
For a long time, I imagined I had a visual processing disorder. Driving at night, I will imagine I am headed for a collision with oncoming headlights; navigating in snow, I will feel mildly vertiginous. Seeing me assemble bookshelves with their solid backs facing the bedroom rather than the wall, or chairs with their legs sticking out wrong, at first he agreed. But then the two of us began playing tennis together, and he noted that I had no apparent difficulties running for the ball. So the mystery remains; perhaps my inability to visualize interlocking shapes is just a failure of imagination.
Regarding tennis: when he first began to play, I would hit him with a drop shot, and I found it beautiful how he would watch it, mesmerized, the way he observes a grackle flutter earthwards. Now he is much better at anticipating balls.
I love summer; he adores winter. On frigid mornings when icicles form over the windows, he will call me, awestruck. “Look! Magic and beauty.” He also likes to quote the painter, Andrew Wyeth, that in the winter you can see the bones of the landscape, every ridge and ravine.
After the subtropics, temperate winters seem deathly to me, a sickly-weak sun hugging the horizon, colour bleached from the world. Moving here in my early twenties, I had to get used to the idea that fresh air could kill me. Today I have, on my desk, a daylight lamp, and for thirty minutes every morning during the gloomy months, I use it to remind myself that the cold and dark will not last forever, that daffodils and tulips will soon line sidewalks, and that, if I become truly desperate, I can always board a plane and surround myself with hibiscus.
Beyond his potted herbs on the patio, he seems vaguely irritated by summer. The heat makes him uncomfortable. He would rather fill out a tax return than lie on a beach. He dislikes flies, gnats, and mosquitoes. If I twist his arm to stand under a waterfall, he will enjoy it well enough. But it is my soul that sings when I swim in shady rock pools: trees, sky, freedom, my body ready to soar up like an eagle.
He adores England. I have only seen London and the southeast, but based on that sample, I was underwhelmed. To me, London is like a baby New York, a play metropolis. More broadly, English culture reminds me of my own South African Anglo background, tea and scones in the front garden, trifles, sherry, and Dickens novels, minus everything we Afro-English have learned over a quarter century from our multicultural neighbours: how to take pleasure in chatting to strangers; how to make a barbecue run from noon till midnight.
He enjoys the dry English humour, the leftist communes and collectives, the gardening and cooking clubs, and above all, the famed British reticence. His other favourite countries are Sweden, which he has visited a dozen times, and Japan, which he idealizes but has never explored. In all the world he feels most at home in the city parks of Umea, Sweden, where hundreds will walk their dogs after work, and there is even a special phrase, trassliga koppel, tangled leashes, for the only circumstances under which it is polite to broach conversation.
That said, the two of us are both internationalists. I grew up on the other side of the world, in a land of thorn trees, Dutch Reformed churches, Venda rain queens, cattle grazing on the roadsides, and shamans living in tin roof cottages. He came of age in the Catskill Mountains, on a picture-perfect lake surrounded by pines and maples and with nearby summer boarding houses for Brooklyn Hasidim. What we shared was a kind of loneliness, an intuition of something wrong in either us or our surroundings. This in turn led us, I believe, to a restless wandering, as we grabbed greedily at different cultures to soothe our yearnings.
He became a born-again Christian for 17 years and tried to repress his homosexuality. He also went on long mission trips to Ecuador, Chile, and Zambia, fascinated by the strange ideas and flavours. In my late teens and early 20s I rejected my home culture, joining anti-apartheid activist groups, and gravitating towards Black African townships. Then, at age 23, I moved to New York, with only one friend there to speak of. Eventually, when I got my own job, community, and apartment, I used that city as a base for travelling to Western Europe, East Africa, and North America.
As a couple, we have journeyed to Mexico, Quebec, Iceland, Cuba, Ecuador, and the Philippines. Together, we now enjoy geographical change for its own sake, rather than as a potential existential remedy. Foreignness has graduated from a need to a more modest, grown-up want. What we still share, though, is the adventurousness of our younger selves, a willingness to jump on the back of two motorcycle taxis in the Philippines, with our suitcases balanced on their handlebars, or to get drenched for three hours in an open, motorized, Amazon canoe. On personality tests, both of us score highly on “openness to new experience.” Somehow these trips serve as team-building exercises, like Silicon Valley executives sailing cardboard boats together down the San Lorenzo. From his evangelical days, he likes to quote Ecclesiastes, “Two are better than one,” and in that spirit I happily navigate us to Uighur restaurants, while he weaves us through traffic.
Five months into our relationship, we rented a car together in Johannesburg. It seemed logical that I should be behind the wheel. But after I almost collided with a truck I hadn’t seen in my blind spot, and after he navigated us a quarter of the way to the Botswana border, I pulled off to the side of the road.
“Let’s try the other way round,” he said, and that is how we solved one of the first jigsaw pieces of our partnership.
He claims I remember everything, from how many people King Leopold killed in the Congo to the difference between a tropical kingbird and a kiskadee. He will share an idea with me, and he is amazed at how quickly I can perform the academic’s party trick of coming up with supporting and counter-arguments. But in truth, the brilliant mind belongs to him. I have maybe two or three talents: writing a smooth sentence; designing an interactive lesson plan; calculating how much we need to save for retirement. But he is an entrepreneur, filmmaker, playwright, actor, comedian, activist, and Bible scholar. He has filled auditoriums, from Cameroon to Kansas. When he became worried about the economy of our rustbelt town, he dreamed up a sandwich stroll that is now one of the region’s biggest culinary events. Just for fun, he tried out TikTok, where he ended up with 100,000 followers; random strangers at the Pretoria Farmers Market beg him to join their selfies. I watch his genius bubble, generative as a mountain spring, and I ask myself what he can see in a middle-aged man who can’t figure out how to hop between calls on a cellphone.
Perhaps it is because he overestimates my intelligence that he is bewildered by my ignorance. He finds it almost impossible to understand, for example, that I have so little ear for music. He will play me James Blake, whom the critics have all apparently—and how would I ever know such things, given I pay no attention?—pronounced a master innovator of the contemporary ballad. I will try, with all my soul, to hear what he does, the delicately developing textual harmonies, the brooding synth and guitar riffs. But all my dull ears are capable of detecting is an undifferentiated moaning.
“That’s not bad,” I’ll say. “I mean, I can sort of see what everyone is going on about.” He knows me too well to be fooled, and his face will sink into disappointment.
On the flip side I will discover a song that so explodes with infectious melody that I want to sing it all day, and I will proudly share it with him, and he will again shake his head. It is not just different tastes. Rather, I simply cannot hear well. The harsh truth is that if my life depended on my being able to distinguish, say, a Beethoven sonata from a Prokofiev one, I would have to bow graciously and, like Socrates, accept my fate.
Nor can he comprehend my relationship with fashion. When he first met me, I think he took my lack of dress sense as white middle-class arrogance. But then he noticed me wearing my rainbow tie-dye T-shirts and embroidered guayaberas with my bright red denims, and something clicked. It is not that I don’t care. Rather, like the jars in the pantry, I simply struggle to visualize things together. Now he always accompanies me when I buy clothes, and in the mornings, before I go to work, I will find him to kiss goodbye, first, to express affection, but second, so he can warn me if I look garish.
He jokes I am the goodlooking one, whereas he is the kind member of the couple. There is some truth, at least, to the latter half of this formulation. He is much more sensitive. He is the one who will, say, spot a dress at a flea market and say, “Our friend Karla would look so good in that.” He can be devastated for days by a single harsh word about one of his plays, whereas I treat ill-considered criticism as free entertainment.
But if he is much cleverer and also more handsome than he gives himself credit for, then I am also less grouchy than he says. It is true I can be blunt. I will sometimes offend a student by saying, “Your observations here are fine, but also blindingly obvious.”
But I am not uncaring. For our shared friends, I am likely to be the one who calls when too much time has gone by. We both donate money and time to disaster relief; to developing-world education; to climate activism. More to the point, I do not know if he understands how much I feel his emotions. When he seems glum, I kiss the back of his neck. When he loses his appetite, I drop a cube of watermelon in his mouth. He is five years older than me, so it is likely he will die first, but the thought of losing him to death, divorce, or sadness tightens an icy belt of dread around my kidneys.
As with most queer couples, neither of us are particularly jealous about sexual or emotional attractions. Nevertheless, the closest I have come to ending, or at least radically transforming, our relationship is when he seemed to be planning numerous trips to spend time with an acquaintance in a foreign city. A switch flipped in my brain, and Shakespeare’s green-eyed monster emerged. In the end my illogic went something like this: I so much love our companionship that if I have to accept a reduction in it, then I would rather control the size of that loss by moving out. At some level I was willing to lose absolutely everything, so long as it was on my terms.
Missing from that train of thought was any memory of my life before him. I spent two decades involved with various men who turned out to be incompatible. By far the likeliest result of my moving out would have been more of my old life: brunch, friends, books, tennis, and the occasional unsatisfying dalliance.
“Oh, but then I’ll cancel the trip,” he said, visibly shaken. If it hurts me, it isn’t worth it. Was he also, at that moment, the one more in touch with reality? That he, too, spent more than a decade in frustrating relationships before meeting me. That after seventeen years together, our lives are like two intertwined trunks.
He likes apricot jam. I prefer tangy, bittersweet marmalade.
He likes aged Scotch malt whiskies, and pretty much any cocktail involving gin. I enjoy dry craft ciders.
I gravitate toward sad, epic films that give the feeling of real life, especially war and struggle. He lives for light, witty comedies.
I am so tall I frequently knock my head on doorways. In airplanes, I have to curl up my knees.
He felt like the tall one in his family. But in joint photographs, he barely crests my shoulders.
He gets annoyed at how I forget to clean the drain in the kitchen sink. I get irritated at his breakfast dishes, left on the counter “just for a moment,” which can drag to half a day.
He remembers his dreams and frequently insists on summarizing them. I, on the other hand, will recall nothing.
“You jerked and whimpered last night,” he will say, but I can offer him nothing.
Yet in our dreamiest real-life moments, our fantasies intersect. The first time we went hiking together, before we’d held hands or touched, we leaned forward and kissed.
At the beginning, it was almost embarrassing how quickly we decided we were destined for each other. Both of us are Quakers, and we met at a Friends conference where he was a keynote performer. True to form, I got into verbal tussles within 24 hours of my arrival, the most memorable of which involved my telling an olfactory sensitivities activist that I doubted her scent allergy truly prophesied the imminent destruction of the earth. He, on the other hand, could not walk a hundred yards across campus without being showered with adoration.
Among the many things that drew me to him, I think this was one of them: the way he could talk to twenty different people and appear to take delight in each individual. He did that with me, too, with nods, smiles, and watching brown eyes. It was as though he were spiritually drinking me up. For his part, he says he first thought he might fall in love with me when I stated, baldly, in a conversation about politics, “Oh no, I don’t agree.” Many people hero-worship him because of his gifts, but he can trust I will express my thoughts.
One thing I do remember, and which he seems to have forgotten, is the first time we talked on the phone. I recall I was sitting out in the courtyard of the university residence where I occupied a faculty apartment. It was still summer break. I was alone except for the squirrels. The two of us talked about the men we’d recently dated, the Scotsman who’d alienated him with extreme possessiveness, the Harrisburg antique collector who’d been unable to talk to me about emotions.
“Maybe we should just date each other,” I told him, slightly incredulous at my own chutzpah.
“Maybe so,” he replied, so equally nonchalant that it was hard for me to tell whether he was being serious.
A month later, he came to visit me. As he always puts it, “We went on that hike”–the one with the kiss– ”as platonic friends, and we came back as a couple.”
How, I wonder now, could we have ever doubted anything? We sat writing together, in the living room of that university apartment. We swam laps in the pool. We got excited about the same peaches at the Amish market and raved together about Quaker silent worship.
Yet how the two of us played our slow, polite game, for our own benefit and that of our friends. How we carefully handed each other bowls of breakfast muesli: honey or sugar? How scrupulously we checked on each other’s happiness. Should we open the car windows, or run the air conditioning? As if a single misjudged word might sever a shared life.
We dated long-distance for two and a half years, before buying a house together, a rambling old Victorian in a run-down rustbelt town.
We got married, by our count, three times: once, when we signed a domestic partnership agreement to accompany the house purchase. A second time, in 2012, in our local Quaker meeting, after a year of congregational debates about same-sex marriage. And a third time, in 2013, in a state willing to recognize our legal union. That eventually allowed us to share my employer’s health insurance, inherit each other’s property without being taxed like strangers, and know that in an emergency we had the right to be in each other’s hospital rooms.
As young men, neither of us dreamed we might end up like this, taking turns to cook dinner and wash the dishes, driving each other to medical appointments, deciding which herbs to plant, fantasizing about retirement houses.
Marriage was always heterosexual: Natalia and Leone Ginzburg. Anthony and Cleopatra. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
For ourselves, we imagined the AIDS ward, or the razor in the bathtub, or the celibate religious life, or the studio apartment in the gay ghetto: drinks at Woody’s. Rocky Horror singalongs at the Ritz Landmark.
Never: what do you feel like watching? Should we make love tonight? Would you like a cup of chamomile tea?
Some philosophers theorize that even more than loving and being loved, the fundamental human longing is simply to be selected; seen. If so, that is something the two of us have given each other: plucked the other out of the crowds of strangers; gotten to know each other’s beauty, quirks, and foibles, the way they claim God knows every human psyche, even in the womb.
Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood won a Lambda Literary Award and was selected as an Africa Book Club Book of 2011. He teaches at Susquehanna University and writes literary journalism for, among others, the South African Daily Maverick.
