The narrator and Emily’s marriage and relationship

The narrator and Emily’s marriage and relationship persists less as a stable partnership than as a series of gestures the narrator tries to read as proof of closeness. While he is deployed in Iraq, a Valentine’s orchid, a football card taped inside his helmet, and a film about emperor penguins become small, portable tests of connection. Distance repeatedly unsettles his interpretations: Emily’s replies are sparse or painful, he suspects he is deceiving himself about their marriage, and the reunion he hopes for never arrives as a simple return to the life they imagined.

Marriage at a Distance

The narrator’s attachment to Emily is visible in the attention he gives to gifts and their possible meanings. He asks whether she received an orchid he sent and presses her about what she thought of it. Their exchange turns toward a Salinger book he had given her when they met, and the story of Seymour that he thought she had liked. Emily had said she enjoyed the book, but the narrator now wonders whether she had read it at all. His questions circle around a larger uncertainty: whether the objects he sends still create a shared language, or whether he is supplying meaning that Emily does not share.

A card from Emily offers a more playful, but still uneasy, form of intimacy. She writes that she had a childhood crush on Herman Thompson, then a Buffalo football player, and warns that if the narrator is killed she will sleep with Thompson. The narrator tapes the card inside his helmet as a reminder not to get killed. The joke binds domestic familiarity to the danger of deployment: the card makes Emily present in the equipment he wears into war, while its blunt warning turns his survival into the condition of their imagined future. Yet the relationship is also reduced to a costly gesture that fails to land as intended. The narrator says he paid $110 for an orchid on Valentine’s Day, only for Emily to give it to her grandmother.

Absence and Failed Communication

During a two-week mid-deployment leave, the narrator returns hoping to see Emily, but she is not around much. She explains that she cannot stay long in Cleveland because she has found a job connected with nature in Washington State and cannot pass up the opportunity. He notices that other women are available and attractive, but does not sleep with them because, in theory, he is married—even though he is not supposed to tell anyone. The concealed status of the marriage makes fidelity feel real to him while leaving its public and practical terms uncertain.

Back in Iraq, he often checks his email after returning from IED ambushes. Emily frequently does not reply; when she does, her messages are usually discouraging. She says she is ashamed of what he is doing, although he has never told her what that is and she knows no more about his actions than before he left. The gap is not simply a shortage of messages: it is a mismatch between the danger he is living through and the life he has allowed her to imagine. His effort to bridge that gap through a bootleg film about emperor penguins makes the mismatch tangible. He urges her to watch it, then orders her a copy through Amazon when he reasons that she cannot see it while living in the countryside. Her email calls the film and the penguins stupid. The narrator fixates on that response because he thinks she could at least have pretended to like something for his sake; even that modest act of kindness, as he understands it, is absent.

When Emily leaves Washington State and returns to Elba to attend college, the narrator can contact her again. Their calls have little to say beyond his assurance that he will be home soon. He refuses to admit that his return may not be welcome, though he says he has always known it. He pays her fall-term tuition after she asks for the money, and takes the request as evidence that things between them are all right. The payment thus becomes another object of interpretation: a concrete act of support that he converts into reassurance, although the conversations themselves offer little confirmation.

Betrayal, Divorce, and Continued Attachment

The narrator later learns that after their marriage Emily had been shaved and had a succession of lovers; what devastates him is realizing that he may have been about the hundredth person to see her shaved. His account does not present the betrayal as separate from his own absence. He acknowledges that he really had gone to Iraq and that their marriage had really been a lie. He allows that Emily may have thought he would be killed before he ever found out. The marriage is therefore described through both the intimacy he wanted and the circumstances that made it fragile: secrecy, deployment, and a relationship each could understand differently.

After completing his service, the narrator leaves the Army, returns to Ohio, and stops in Elba. Emily wants a divorce, and they divorce. The separation does not end his dependence on her. With some money and drugs, he hopes that getting high will help him manage and that something good will eventually happen. After taking a great deal of cocaine one night, he calls Emily and says he forgives her, needs her, and does not think he can hold on without her. The plea reverses the apparent finality of the divorce: he offers forgiveness not as evidence that the hurt has passed, but as a way of asking for the relationship back.

Reunion and an Unresolved Bond

Later, the narrator picks Emily up at a Greyhound station during her three-hour stop on the way to Elba. She has been living with her father in Florida and has started injecting drugs there. The narrator says he would never have imagined this. Her new drug use changes the terms of their shared history: addiction is no longer only part of his own life or something he associates with their past, but something Emily has begun in a different place and circumstance.

They kiss, and Emily kisses him back. The narrator says that he still loves her, but she does not agree to have sex with him. She first wants him to take an AIDS test before she returns. The exchange holds renewed affection and a firm limit together: the kiss shows that tenderness remains, while her condition makes clear that tenderness does not restore the marriage or erase the risks between them. The available account ends with that condition, leaving their future unsettled rather than turning the reunion into a reconciliation.