She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says, “It’s interesting,” and she seizes on his lack of enthusiasm for the splashy canvas he’s looking at, thinking “I could’ve done that,” and she says, “If you’d just take the time to learn something about art, you’d enjoy it more,” as if this is a personal failing on his part.
The guy majored in economics, he’s on track to become a vice president at Amalgamated Linguini, they vacation on the Cape, the kids are in private schools, and suddenly she wants him to be an art critic and talk about ambience, brushwork, and chiaroscuro? And she walks on to the next piece as he follows her like a dog on a leash.
I find this more interesting than anything on the walls, the competitive aspects of marriage. Women’s ace card is the eye roll; they learn this by the age of 14 and use it on their mothers, and then on the husbands.
Marriage is a game and two can play it