Copyright deccanchronicle
It’s a simple tale but the meaning of the title hits you only towards the end. Tom Layward discovered, when his son was 12 years old, that his wife Amy was having an affair. Soon after, Amy told him of it: it lasted only three months, and ended in an early miscarriage. Amy is guilt-ridden, and, as the author puts it, “Amy… couldn’t help being mad at whoever she felt guilty toward.” They agreed that they should stay together until their younger child, a daughter, Miriam, left the nest. Throughout the conversation, the thought stayed in Tom’s mind: when Miriam leaves, I am free to do the same. That thought sustains him in the years that follow. Tom narrates in the beginning how Amy shaped his life. When he first saw her, she was a friend’s girlfriend, and the most beautiful woman in the gathering. After meeting her, he found himself deciding to make himself worthy of her, and that meant making a certain amount of money, and he reshaped his future career to take care of that. The years pass, and the time comes for Miriam, six at the time of the affair, now turned eighteen, to get ready to go to university at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. Tom’s life has changed. The pandemic has touched him: his present illness, his doctor says, is long Covid. Symptoms include a swollen face in the morning, a blotch on the chest, and blackouts if he rises too fast. Miriam’s brother, Michael, is in his twenties. He’s independent, studying and financing himself with job, and has an older girlfriend Tom and Amy have never met. Michael decides to come visiting for a three-day family reunion before Miriam flies out of the nest. There Michael sees his father’s swollen morning face and tries to get Tom to see a doctor, which Tom refuses. Michael relents. Amy and Miriam have never been really at peace with each other. The day before Tom and Amy plan to leave Miriam at her dormitory, mother and daughter fight. So it’s going to be just Tom and Miriam driving seven hours to Pittsburgh. In Tom’s mind, there is the question: Do I come back? He ends up at his son Michael’s place, where he meets the older girlfriend, Betje, aka Betty. He stays over, and what happens the day after is the crux of the story. Markovits’ writing brings out best of all the narrator’s character. He seems cold because he keeps his inner turbulence to himself. He’s never loud, rarely aggressive — except at baseball — and only occasionally excited. The telling is peppered with bits of quiet workaday wisdom: “...if you stay married it’s because you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you.” It’s a terrific read, but there are two cautions: First, there are too many in-laws, and, second, few incidents that paint Tom in a poor light. The Rest of Our Lives By Benjamin Markovits Faber pp. 239; Rs 1,324
