“The Marriage Bed” | The Joys and Difficulties of Loving One Another

One Small Spike

It starts on an ordinary day.  Asa Flowers comes home from work, cheerfully expecting to find his wife, dinner around the corner.  After 25 years of marriage, their two children away at college, Asa’s life seems, if not perfect, good.  And he does find his wife waiting.  But Betsy has something to tell him: “I’ve found myself attracted to someone else.”

This single sentence drives a slender spike into the granite façade that is Asa’s life. Betsy and Asa will talk about it in the morning.  But wait.  That night, sleeping in separate rooms, Betsy is killed when a dead tree falls across her.  Under Hays’s propulsive storytelling, the spikes keep coming, chapter after chapter, fracturing Asa’s life, the cracks widening and shattering.  Over the following week, with children and family arriving to console one another and to prepare for Betsy’s funeral, these widening fractures shatter each of those closest to Asa and Betsy, each fracture revealing both secrets and silences.  

Suddenly Asa must face what he has spent a lifetime not facing: “He winced, remembering his behavior with his children…He was a failure as a father.  As a matter of fact, failure didn’t begin to cover what a failure he was.”

No Explanations, Rather Revelations

Braided through the days that follow Betsy’s death are chapters that recount how Asa and Betsy met, the births and youths of their children, life after the children have left for college.  What might seem at first like traditional backstory, offering explanations of how these people arrived at this critical moment, is anything but traditional.  What we find as we trace their lives is that there is no deep scandal, neither is there any major dysfunction—no alcoholism, no abuse, no previous infidelities, no poverty.  There is simply the life that was lived, and like all lives, there are confusions and complexities.  

Hays is most interested in the truth of these lives rather than the melodrama that so often weighs down novels.  We see the timid and daring courtship that brought Asa and Betsy together.  We see the difficulties of their children’s lives, but also the most tender associations; Asa and his son, most notably, have a halting though not distant relationship, yet one that is close to breaking after Betsy’s death.   We feel, as we ought in good novels, the effect of time on characters, and this passage of time allows us the distance to include all the vagaries of human love.  

At one point, disappointed by a cabin they’ve rented, Betsy says, “’I know it’s not very nice,’ she said.  ‘But can’t we just make the best of it?’”

These characters, like many of us, are trying to make the best of it.

The Comic Touch

Hays understands that to portray the whole of this world, he cannot dwell simply in the loss, the grief, the darkness.  A nimble and clear-eyed writer, Hays has a keen eye for the comic.  Throughout The Marriage Bed, Hays allows his characters to ponder, and skewer, New Age veterinary medicine, Airbnb rentals, tardy contractors, and others.  Asa Flowers is a college English teacher, and Hays is at his most acerbic on these matters.  

Then off Charles went, becoming far more animated, using the polysyllabic wordage Asa himself had used in his own scholarly papers and books over the years—the numbing language of tenure.  He’d lost his tolerance for the big words and small-mindedness of his profession…

Our lives are tragic; our lives are hilarious.

Grief Open and Unresolved

While each character in The Marriage Bed has their own journey, one that leans more toward understanding than revelation, this is Asa’s novel, his coming to terms with the shocks he feels he’s suffered.  Asa is a good person, a good teacher, and a good husband, but he’s limited, he now sees; previously he’s wanted only stability.  Rather than try to understand, at first, his wife’s predicament, that she may be falling in love with someone else, Asa sees himself as unfairly rejected.  Rather than bring his family together in their mourning, he lashes out at them.  

While his life and his family’s life now seem only shattered fragments of what had been, there arises from this rubble, what despair often brings, a new way forward: “…the pain in Asa’s chest faded, opening to a deeper devastation, a devastation he and his family would have no choice but to somehow live with.”

The Marriage Bed is both powerful and quiet at once, a novel of immense insight into the difficulties and joys of how we try to love one another. 

~ Lewis Buzbee