Rubin Friedman

They lived in downtown Toronto, close to the restaurants, the night life and the culture they loved.  They counted in their circle of friends, poets, musicians, scholars, dancers, actors, artists, other graduate students and miscellaneous misfits.
 

They were very young and had married two days after graduating with their Bachelor degrees from the University of Toronto.   Both were uncertain about their future but certain they wanted to go forward into it with someone who could understand their particular angst and insecurities.  Both were not yet fully formed, although, of the two, she had the more certain and definite tastes.  He was more plastic and accommodating, less attentive to the present.
 

One of their favourite hobbies was folkdancing.   She had introduced him to it when they first became serious about each other.  They danced well together.  His adaptability helped him follow steps quickly.   Her systematic learning and attention to detail meant she always ended up learning the dance better, if a little slower, than he did. 
 

The folk dance group where they participated was an eclectic one, young married couples, singles, middle aged pairs, artists and dancers, engineers and businessmen, nurses and English teachers, students and professors.  They learned and performed dances from around the world.   They would mingle and mix in couple dances and line dances of various kinds, now leaping, now pausing, now moving slowly and gracefully.
 

Often the whole group would come back to their apartment after dancing, drink coffee and listen to folk music.  Folk music was not at all related to what they called folk dancing.  Folk dancing involved Greek, Macedonian, Serbian, Hungarian, Russian, Israeli, Armenian and other music.  Folk music involved the icons of the sixties strumming on acoustic guitars and singing old English ballads or latterly, electric guitars and instruments on self-written pieces.  Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Tim Hardin, Gord Lightfoot.  Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel.
 

They talked of the new era of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his just society with the mixture of cynicism and optimism typical of the young.  They talked of the Vietnam War, the need for the love and the fight against materialism.   They talked of personal projects and the future of folkdancing and their group.
 

At the end of each such evening they both felt drawn into a circle of friendship that would endure.  They felt embraced and comforted by people who were caring and compassionate and who could articulate their ideas about art, life and politics.  They looked to others in the group to set the tone to show what married life could be;
 

Jon and Sylvia were one such couple, handsome and athletic with two beautiful children.  He was in theatre, she was a dancer.  Jon and Sylvia were a match made in heaven.  Their beautiful daughters had come with them a few times.  Jon, the dark man with the features of the fallen angel and Sylvia the lithe blonde beauty, angelic in appearance.
 

 Together, they had danced perfectly and in couple dances, everyone else would leave the floor, except Bob and Louise and Shawna and Sid.   Only they could match the beauty and grace of Jon and Sylvia.  Bob and Louise had a mechanical perfection that was unrivaled while Shawna and Sid had a laconic, laid back, understated way of making every small movement count.  They already seemed like an old couple although they had only been married for a few years.
 

One day Jon showed up at the dance group without Sylvia.  He danced fervently but seemed somewhat distracted.   The younger women in the group flocked around him, a handsome mature man of thirty with a beard and mustache, granite like features and muscles.
 

He left with a number of them and Sylvia came late with an older balder man who obviously could not dance.  She was a blonde beauty with striking features and a well shaped body. 
 

Soon, Sylvia and her bald partner were no longer coming to our group but Jon struggled valiantly on and left each evening with a different young woman.  One evening, he left with Louise and Bob was left floundering awkwardly in the circle.
 

Coming back to their place for coffee, the group was subdued.  Only Shawna and Sid stayed long.  Sid asked them how long they had known each other before marrying.   “We went out together for almost two years before we got married.”
 

“Do you ever feel like you missed anything? Like you should have seen more, lived more, before getting married?” asked Shawna.
 

They looked at each other, each waiting for the other to reply.  “Not at all,”   he offered.  “We love learning new things together.”
 

“But what if those things change you and you grow in different directions?  What will you do?”
 

“That won’t happen,” she said.  “And if it does, we’ll just work at it.”
 

Shawna, ever the artist, said, “that can’t be.  Love can’t be work.  It has to be as natural as breathing.”
 

Sid reached out and took her hand and they looked at each other smiling.
 

The next week, Jon and Louise danced together and Louise molded perfectly to Jon’s steps.  Bob now danced with the young women who only two weeks before danced with Jon.  He also danced with everyone else including Shawna.
 

Shawna and Sid now came around to their place for coffee or for supper even during the week and on other occasions when there was no dancing.   Sid was effusive and told stories about how he had traveled throughout the Balkans collecting folkdances.  Shawna sat patiently smiling, keeping in the background.   Sid was older than Shawna by about ten years.   When he had come back to Toronto from the Balkans he had swept Shawna off her feet and married her straight out of art school.  He had established the folk dance group almost single handedly and had attracted excellent dancers.
 

Shawna finally commented, “you two are very young, you know.  Don’t you plan to travel, see the world, like Sid here?  Sometimes I wish he had taken me with him and married me when we came back.  I am very jealous of him.”  Sid and Shawna looked fondly at each other and they kissed. 
 

On another occasion, soon after, they were all together at another friend’s, a black poet and fellow student.  Older than all of them, he was tall and broad and had a huge head with a curly beard and mustache.  He had a deep bass voice with a deep, warm laugh.
 

They had known Abel Adams for a number of months.   They loved to hear the man’s voice and his poetry was exceptional.    Now Adams was sitting with them, with Shawna and Sid.  He was laughing as usual in his deep bass voice and offered to read his poetry.   They agreed and soon were all sitting enraptured by his words, and especially by the quality of his voice which reached out and caressed each syllable or snapped it with force.   They were in his hands and applauded him.
 

“You have a very powerful voice,” observed Shawna, and turned red as he smiled at her in return.
 

“It goes with the rest of me,” he laughed.  “Any of you can come back to hear my poetry at any time.”   His voice was like a rope which he threw out to capture whoever he was addressing.
 

“Tell me more about yourself, Shawna,” he said.  “I know all about the other two and your husband told me about his trip to the Balkans before. But what about you?  What are your hopes and aspirations?” 
 

Shawna, usually reticent, smiled and said she was hoping to be able to sell more of her art but she would also like to see more of the world.  Sid looked quickly at her, an impatient glance.
 

“Why not come to Jamaica?”  Adams said, “I’d be pleased to show it to you, whatever your heart desires.”
 

“It must be unusual and so different from what one finds around here.”
“Oh, I don’t  know.  People are people everywhere, with all the same parts.  But Jamaicans do know how to live.”  He smiled again, almost mischievously.  Shawna smiled in return, again turning red.
 

“I really should not keep you,” he said and rose, looming over all of them.  Shawna stood and he took her hand firmly and gently and pressed it to his lips.   “It’s always a pleasure to meet a beautiful woman,” he said.  “I hope to see you again.” 
 

He looked at her with smiling eyes and held her hand and her gaze. 
 

“Why yes, of course,” she returned his frank gaze of admiration with one of her own.
 

“I hate to break this up,” Sid broke in abruptly and grabbed his wife’s arm, “but we do have to go.”
 

Adams shifted his attention to the others.  “Very good of you to come. See you two again.  Nice to meet you too Sid.”
 

As they left, Sid and Shawna did not speak.  On the street, as they said their goodbyes and walked away, they could hear Sid say, “I don’t want you going near that guy again.”   They did not hear Shawna’s answer.
 

A week later, Sid came to the dance group without Shawna.   When they asked what had happened, he turned to them and said, “I don’t hang around with sluts.  She went back to that Adams guy last night and came home late.   Thanks for introducing them.”  He turned away and did not speak to them again that evening. 
 

The following week, Sid danced with Donna, one of the young women in the group.  Shawna danced with Bob most of the evening.  Jon was with Louise.   Sylvia did not show up.
 

They were now unable to invite the group back to their apartment.  Too many did not speak to each other and Sid and Shawna, the backbone of the group were not together.  In the coming weeks, Sid moved in with Donna, Bob moved in with Shawna and Louise stayed with Jon.  Sylvia they lost touch with.
 

Later that month, when they visited each of Shawna and Sid with their new partners, there was still a little edge of bitterness in Sid’s voice.  He  owned and operated a paint store with Donna.  But he was completely uninterested in talking of the dance group.
 

Shawna seemed resigned to their split as if it had been inevitable.  Both agreed that she had always resented not going anywhere and feeling inferior to him as a cause of the split.   But her life with Bob was highly domestic.  They had his son from Louise and her daughter from Sid and she worked as an artist.  However, they never traveled or took vacation.   Yet when they saw her she was content and satisfied that this was the life she had chosen for herself.  The closest she ever came to traveling was her evening with Adams.
 

In a brief year their dance group had been transformed.   Jon still came occasionally with Louise.  Sid and Donna rarely made an appearance and Shawna came frequently but without Bob.  The young women came every week in hopes of finding the next Jon.
 

They were the only couple left in the group with their original partners.   Holding hands, they returned to their apartment to sit with each other listening to music, like Adam and Eve cast out together from the circle of perfection where they had lived until recently.  
 

Now they had coffee alone.   They began to argue over their differences.  Why did he not wash the dishes after using them ?  Why did she care as long as he did it eventually?  Yes but when would that be?  Why did he wait until the last minute to take out the garbage?   Why did it matter?  
 

The mutual resentments they had held back for months were now on open display.  One day, their usual argument spiraled into outright rage.  It started because he had not cleaned up the pots after cooking supper with a friend and she had come home late.  He was asleep on the couch, an open book on his lap and an almost empty cup of coffee slipping from his hand, the rest of the contents on the carpet.
 

That evening she threw a dish at his head putting a dent in the wall and a small cut on his left temple. She stormed into their bedroom and slammed the door.   He was stunned.   They were now the only couple left in the world; how would they survive?
 

He sat in the kitchen and drank another coffee, wide awake.  He felt he was standing on the edge of a knife blade.  Would her anger ever subside?   Was this the end?
 

She emerged from the room an hour later quietly and apologized for throwing the dish.   They kissed not passionately but like two acquaintances just meeting at a party.
 

In that moment, he knew that neither of them would ever change.   He had a vision that their arguments of when to do things and what constituted “cleaned up” would continue.  Their reconciliations would fail to resolve the basic differences in their characters.   But he sensed she would never leave him over that, either.  
 

She reached out and put her hand on his.  “Did we marry too young?” she asked.
 

He smiled and clasped her hand in both of his.
 

 “I don’t know but I think that ship has sailed.  For the rest of our lives we will be finding out whether we married too young or whether we should have married at all.    Are you game to learn?”
 

Her face reflected both inner peace and puzzlement, eagerness and hesitation.  Should she call it quits now?   Would he ever change?  Wasn’t he loveable?  Wasn’t he enraging?  She started to speak but the words never emerged.  He too did not speak but continued to look at her expectantly.
 

They hesitated before stepping together into the future where they would have to depend only on each other.   Were they adequate to the task?  Would they proceed where people they thought wiser than themselves had failed?
 

I look back on these younger versions of myself and my wife and I want to reach over those thirty-five years to whisper to them the true secret of happiness.
 

But no matter how I shout, they do not move.  They ignore what I say as if it were the quiet shushing of a passing breeze.  My words to them are in a strange tongue from the future and do not translate.