Munchausen Marriage - Part V
I never stopped to think what married life would be like with Werner Forman. I really didn’t know my partner very well, and from the beginning I could sense that things were going to grow stranger and more confusing with each day.
THIS IS PART 5 of a TEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10
Werner sulking
Werner’s anger at me over my social life, such as it was, and the time I spent with friends became the bitter theme of our marriage. He simply couldn’t bear my paying attention to anyone else, and he would make me suffer for it by applying the silent treatment -- a kind of verbal shunning that could go on for days, leaving me miserable and unsure of myself.
I was a sitting duck for that. Instead of standing up for myself and the way I led my life, I felt guilty and was constantly making apologies and excuses, which of course caused everything to become much worse. We were two adversaries instead of a happily united couple. We would still have moments of sweet togetherness, but these were increasingly rare. On the up side, Werner was proud of me, non-judgmental and supportive; on the down side he was overly possessive and jealous. He had infinite faith in me as a writer and was always sending jobs my way. And if he got mad at me for my friendships, he had nothing pejorative to say about my drinking. In fact, he claimed people drove better with a little whisky in them, and when I once got stopped and briefly arrested for driving under the influence, Werner became furious at the police. (I had neglected to turn on my headlights, and was given a blood alcohol test that eventually proved me under the limit.) He never chewed me out about that, never said anything about my hangovers or drunken stupors. Instead he would surprise me by suggesting I write copy for his next book, whatever that happened to be. Up until then I hadn’t published very much, just some poems and a few short stories in small press, so no way was I ready to tackle a book about Islamic cities or the power of prophecy.
But the subject of prophecy fascinated me. I’d never been to a psychic before. When Werner started talking about doing a book on psychics, I practically ran to London’s Society for Psychical Research to sniff around their library. There I learned that whole families would make appointments with psychic mediums in order to contact loved ones who had passed on. I decided to make an appointment myself. I was assigned an older man with a BBC accent whom I’d never seen or met before.
He stared at my forehead, rubbed his hands together and told me four things: that I was a writer but it would take me years of hard work before I had success, that I was married to a photographer, that my husband had been involved with a blond woman, that my marriage would soon be coming to an end.
He told me these things without my asking a single question, and he was right about all of them.
Cover Image: Edvard Munch Lithograph