And yet. When they were at her apartment for the evening and had been reading for a while, and Peter raised his eyes from his laptop and looked at her, that action did not release the spring of delight that he hoped for. He could look at certain paintings over and over again, or certain views or buildings or other people or children, and he would always feel an aesthetic and emotional shiver. Looking at Charlotte after a half hour of reading, he had a rather dull reaction. He had known women who, strictly speaking, were less good-looking than she but whose faces charmed him. The nose might be wrong, but there was some alluring interplay between the eyes and the lips; or everything was too small, but taken together with that big smile that came out of nowhere, it made you swoon. He did not swoon when he looked at Charlotte.
In truth he never had. They had met two years earlier at a party given by married friends, the kind who see matches everywhere. It was more or less a setup. They talked about how terrible the Dutch side of St. Martin was, especially as compared with the French side. They talked, inevitably, about France. They talked about their friends. They got along pretty well. Charlotte liked him, Peter could tell. He liked her, and as he got to know her better, something about her moved him. She had a good heart, and beneath her determination lay a touching vulnerability.
So they got along, there was some kind of emotional connection, and, also, they made sense together. In this day and age, when marriages were no longer arranged and no father would dare forbid his daughter to marry anyone, the notion of suitable matches was supposedly archaic. Yet even when there were no overt social conventions to keep lovers apart (and to inspire novels), it struck Peter how often people still married within a fairly narrow social range. Within that range, there were further delimitations; the mates tended to come out with the same overall score on a gender-adjusted index of talent, money, expectations, polish, personality, intellect. The process of weighting and calculation was far less cynical than that employed by mothers during the London Season of the nineteenth century, but it seemed to Peter that it bore a resemblance. There were still rules, and lots of people still married the people they were supposed to marry, despite all this talk of marrying for love that one has heard for the last several hundred years or so.
Peter was an attractive fellow with a good job and a suitable background. He was presentable. Charlotte, meanwhile, was also attractive. She had the kind of job that the kind of woman whom Peter would marry would have. She had the kind of parents and friends that a woman whom Peter would marry would have. They got along. They were good, decent people. The numbers went into their supercomputers time and again, and time and again the results came out: marriage. He knew he was not in love with Charlotte, and he accepted that. But this was not because he was indifferent to love. Indeed, the opposite was the case. The reason he accepted his lack of passionate love for Charlotte was not that he did not feel love strongly but rather that he felt love much too strongly. He was capable of being deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. Indeed, at this very moment he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love with someone. That person just didn’t happen to be Charlotte. And that person was unavailable to him. So he had given up on love altogether.
It had taken him some time to come to that position. Peter happened to be in love with Jonathan’s wife. Before Jonathan and she were married, Peter watched intently, looking for any break. Yet day by day, month by month, year by year, they moved steadily closer. Had there ever been a sign of trouble? Had Jonathan failed to call? But Jonathan had never been the type who failed to call, and his wife had never been the type to be upset if he had. Had Jonathan offended her family? No. Had the magic simply disappeared? No.
Jonathan’s wife was very pretty, she was kind, she was smart, she was funny, and she was much too good for Jonathan, who was a fairly despicable character. She and Peter particularly liked each other. That had been true before she married Jonathan, but there were rules about how you conduct yourself around your best friend’s protowife. If they broke up and a decent interval passed, you could then make an approach. But the honorable friend would do nothing to drive the two apart. Really, honor alone had not inhibited him. So had the fear of rejection, and he considered the odds of rejection high. Whatever affection Jonathan’s wife may have felt for him back then, and felt for him now, he knew that, romantically, it meant nothing—to the contrary. They had established the kind of fraternal relationship, perhaps a bit closer than the typical one, that often arises between a man’s girlfriend or wife and his best friend. She took an interest in Peter and in his love life in the way married women, or virtually married women, do with the single friends of their mates, the ones they like. Their “intimacy” had been possible for the very reason that it had no sexual or romantic overtones. If Peter tried to convert intimacy of this type into sexual currency, he knew, he would be met with shock, disgust, pity, laughter, and derision. He would lose his friend, his friendship with his friend’s wife, and his pride. He would have to kill himself.
Peter had been the best man at the wedding, and after that he had given up on ever marrying someone with whom he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love. Then he met Charlotte. They got along. Over time he became attached to her. She moved him. Charlotte was attractive to him, periodically. Charlotte was the kind of person a person like him married, and she wanted to marry him. Love—come on. How many people are really in love when they get married? And if they are at that moment, how many remain so two years later?
Having allowed matters to proceed as far as he had, Peter would have found it very difficult to break things off. Charlotte had something in her, that fearful look in her eye, that made it hard, very hard, for Peter to hurt her. True, her panic about getting married may have been premature, but in her circle, there seemed to be an unstated agreement that if you let your early thirties go by without settling on someone, then it was a very fast shoot to forty, when you really would be desperate. Peter did not think so well of himself or so little of Charlotte to assume that if he didn’t marry her, she would never be able to find any happiness. Still, she was counting on him. Charlotte had wanted to get married so badly. Steadily applying herself and moving at a pace that was faster than what was natural, she had begun to treat him more and more like a presumptive husband, taking him to events with her family or friends or related to her work to which one would take only one’s fiancé or spouse or the person one had been living with for ages. She would ask him to perform spousal tasks, like picking her mother up at the airport. She used the first-person plural pronoun. Soon enough, Peter found himself in a different country without the right papers to get back over the border. Then, too, like all young people nowadays, they had had a conversation initiated by the woman about whether their relationship was moving forward; they had been seeing each other for about a year at that point, and they’d agreed that it was.
Over and over and over, Peter asked himself if it was really fair for him to marry Charlotte if he wasn’t truly in love with her. An advice columnist would say it was not, without question, and he sometimes wished he could agree. But this was the real world. Of course the chances of Charlotte’s being happy were better if Peter married her. Or maybe this argument was just a rationalization for his cowardice. But no, it was surely the more loving thing to marry Charlotte. And as for Peter himself? Married to Charlotte or not, he was out of luck. He was due to marry, and he and Charlotte had a pretty good chance of being pretty happy. It would be fine.
And Charlotte, why did she want to marry Peter? She liked to present herself as being very worldly, always collecting interesting people,