A FOUR-SIDED BED
By Elizabeth Searle
Graywolf Press, 299 pages, $14.95 paper
Near the end of Elizabeth Searle’s debut novel, “A Four-Sided Bed,” JJ Wolfe tries to make sense of a complicated affair that has physically and emotionally entangled four people: “His fingers spread to indicate things too complex for words. . . . `There’s just . . . (s)o many different ways people can fit.’ “
That scene neatly defines the novel’s central concerns, which are framed in a story about a young marriage disrupted by the unexpected arrival of the husband’s first lovers and the return of old desires. Searle has written an unexpected variation of this familiar story, redefining gender, sex and marriage to reveal the boundless human passions and desires.
JJ and Alice have been married four years when a letter with an invitation to a wedding that very night arrives from Kin (JJ has told Alice that in his first year at college, he was a voluntary patient at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, where he met Kin, his one friend in the ward and his first lover). JJ keeps the invitation, but not the braid, to himself. The next evening, an invitation to dinner in celebration of the wedding he missed is left on the couple’s telephone answering machine. The message is from Kin, but in a man’s voice. Alice intercepts the message and goes, alone, to the restaurant. In a brief encounter with the bride, Alice begins to understand the nature of her husband’s first affair: There had been two Kins, a man and a woman (whose true name is Bird), and, with JJ, they had all been lovers together.
After this initial collision between present and past, the two couples are kept separated for most of the rest of the novel: Bird and Kin leave for an extended honeymoon, while Alice and JJ remain in New Haven, Conn. The situation is complicated when Alice becomes pregnant with the couple’s first child and JJ learns that Kin is dying of AIDS. The narrative alternates between scenes in New Haven and a sequence of letters from Bird in which she recounts her and Kin’s travels and remembers the affair that had bound her and Kin and JJ more closely and more permanently than they had realized years before.
Searle presents a devastating portrait of Alice and JJ, who struggle, separately, to accommodate newly recognized emotions and attachments and to negotiate a new place for their marriage. They seem unable to locate each other: Alice asks JJ for details about the affair. Telling her that it was “(a)nother life,” he resists her. Because JJ refuses to share the details of his affair with Bird and Kin, the reader (Alice, too) learns about it largely from Bird’s letters. Unlike JJ, she shares everything. “Whole weeks, whole years I plan to squeeze on these pages,” she writes.
The letters don’t start with the affair but with Bird’s childhood friendship with Kin, who took her away from an abusive stepfather in South Carolina to Boston. She recounts her first days at the mental health center with JJ: Full of vivid details that swell with desperate, powerful emotions, the letters flirt with JJ’s memory of their affair, slowly pulling him back toward them. “Let Kin, let us, in. Again.”
Although JJ is the pivotal character, in the middle sections the focus is on Alice and Bird. In their different ways, the women try to reconcile JJ’s past and present as well as confirm their claim on him. Searle interestingly juxtaposes the two relationships. For example, in describing Bird and JJ walking together, she notes, “They shared . . . that abrupt grace.” In contrast, Alice and JJ are said to move with “the coordination of a longtime couple.”
A small complaint: Is it necessary for Alice to be condemned for her comfortable, middle-class background, “As wholly undeserved, she thought, as all her life’s luck.”? The implication that her needs and desires don’t deserve the same attention (and certainly aren’t granted the allowances) given to the other characters’ unbalances the otherwise carefully considered narrative. If Searle’s depiction of Alice lacks a necessary wholeness, it is more than compensated for in the marvelously rendered portrait of Bird and Kin. Their unconventional union is an astonishingly intimate and affectionate marriage. As well as a remarkable accomplishment for Searle.
