An insightful observation of modern marriage

Those who are familiar with Anne Taylor Fleming from her work as a media commentator have had the chance to note her gift for sensitive observations expressed in well-wrought sentences. But sometimes, listening to one or another of her distinctive on-camera essays for “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer,” one sensed a certain strained quality: not because Fleming seemed to lack for ideas, but because she seemed to have more to say than the format allowed.

Now, in her first work of fiction (she’s already written a nonfiction book, “Motherhood Deferred”), Fleming takes advantage of the opportunity to spread her imaginative and literary wings. Drawing on her knack for cultural observation, she goes into greater depth, fleshing out her social commentary by creating characters and stories that show us something about the way we live now. Liberated by the freedom of fiction, she also allows herself to write about her characters’ sex lives with a remarkable degree of explicitness.

Fleming’s fictional debut demonstrates a fine sense of literary form. “Marriage: A Duet” comprises two novellas: contrapuntal variations on a theme, each branching out in a different direction. The theme in each instance is the damage done by adultery. The setting, in both cases, is late 1990s Los Angeles, more specifically, its affluent Westside: a superficially sophisticated world in which adultery and divorce are as ordinary and unremarkable as bottled water and second mortgages. Both stories unfold from the vantage point of the injured party: In the first novella, “A Married Woman,” it’s the wronged wife; in the second, “A Married Man,” it’s the cuckolded husband.

In “A Married Woman,” we meet Caroline Betts, a woman in her 60s who is keeping watch at the bedside of her husband, William, who has suffered a stroke that’s left him comatose. The Bettses’ adult children -- articulate, aggressive lawyer Katie and quiet, good-natured Steve, a chef -- are taken aback, indeed mystified, on discovering their usually dignified mother, who has never before dyed her hair, doing just that in the bathroom of their father’s hospital room.

Caroline’s children are bemused because they do not know the whole story of their parents’ marriage. The reader, however, soon finds out, as Fleming makes us privy to Caroline’s troubled thoughts, emotions and memories. After being happily married for more than two decades, Caroline felt the bottom fall out from under her when her until-then devoted husband fell in love with a younger woman: a law-school friend of their daughter’s.

Knowing her husband to be the kind of man who would never indulge in a mere fling, Caroline was tormented by the thought that he and this young woman were sharing the kind of love that she once had with him: “And if you were married the way she was, right to the nerve endings, you lived ... in particular peril. That was the joke. Mediocre marriages weren’t in jeopardy -- not in the same way. They rolled along absorbing insults because the expectations were lower. Or they fell apart. But the good ones -- they were the ones that got damaged.” Although, as we recognize from the outset, this marriage was repaired, what we -- and Caroline -- learn in the course of the novella is why it was never quite the same again.

Shortly after returning to his wife, William brought home a bestseller, “Getting Over Adultery,” by Dr. Lou Grossman, a therapist, “who had, the back jacket blurb cheerfully informed even the most cursory reader in bold letters, CHEATED ON HIS WIFE ... and not only lived to tell the tale but -- quite clearly -- to get rich off his repentance.... [Caroline] read one page of [the] uplifting take on infidelity -- how it could actually ‘strengthen a marriage’ -- and threw it away.” The ebullient Dr. Grossman is a character we encounter at greater length in the second novella, “A Married Man,” when the errant wife, picture-perfect, hyper-efficient Marcia Sanderson, drags her unwilling, deeply embittered husband, David, to take part in counseling sessions with the mellifluous-voiced therapist.

Fleming deftly develops the parallels and contrasts between the situations in the two novellas. Both couples have had exceptionally happy marriages; neither had been marred by unfaithfulness up until the incidents in question. The Sandersons are a generation younger than the Bettses, more driven and status conscious. In the Bettses’ case, what hurts Caroline most is realizing the depth of her husband’s feelings for another woman.

For David Sanderson, however, the pain comes from the casualness of his wife’s defection: from realizing that the woman he thought so special, so exclusive, could be capable of succumbing to a romantic moment with a casual acquaintance. If Caroline responds with dignity and forbearance, masking her wounds, David Sanderson does everything possible to make it impossible for his wife to make it up to him.

Fleming’s portrait of Caroline, the “Married Woman,” is subtle, poignant and convincing. More problematic, perhaps, is David, the “Married Man.” Yet at the same time, what Fleming does in his case is quite fascinating. One feels she has gone out on a limb here, not merely in writing this story from the male viewpoint but alos in imagining the mind-set of this particular man, a financial consultant with doubts about his manliness: self-centered, romantic, misogynistic and resentful. We may well feel sorry for his wife, who tries so hard to do everything right. Yet Fleming also makes us feel why her by-the-book approach only makes her husband angrier.

“Are you,” he mockingly demands of Dr. Grossman at their first therapy session, “a really proactive facilitator or someone content to sit back and let us try to do the lion’s share of interfacing ourselves?” In David’s view, his wife’s betrayal is the stuff of tragedy, yet in the culture they inhabit, it is treated more like material for a sitcom. Offered Prozac, he replies, “I’m not depressed. I’m heartbroken.” Fleming’s gift for satire, her ability to delineate character, her insight, her empathy and her instinctive feel for the fictional form she has chosen make “Marriage: A Duet” a truly noteworthy debut -- and a book that will speak to anyone who’s ever been (or thought of being) part of a couple.