Some things are merely secret; other things are mysteries that no one has the answers to. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton's book was released -- and we may at last find out which of these two catagories the Clinton marriage belongs to. The convenent of marriage is a secret one. Spouses, in many cases, cannot be compelled to testify against one another in court; and while it might be for other considerations, the respect society has for wedlock is probably the primary reason for this. Married couples, even if they share nothing else, all have secrets. Marriage can hold together two people who otherwise wouldn't want to spend much time in each other's company. Do they love each other? Are they getting bored? We ask questions about the people involved. Perhaps we like imagining the worst. Perhaps we're motivated by the insecurity we feel towards our own relationships. Maybe we're genuinely concerned for their happiness. Or, what's more likely, maybe we just can't stand to be confronted by unanswered questions.

Marriage is nothing if not secretive. The wedding ceremony is a ritualized example of that. Only a select group of people get to see the bride in her gown before the ceremony commences. Often, we only know if the couple chose to write their own vows after they've delivered them. After the reception, the bride and groom run off to enact the greatest (and most interesting, to the purient-minded) secret of them all: The honeymoon. The location and general activities might be well-known -- but the details remain tantalizingly out of reach. (Except for Pam and Tommy Lee. You know there's a tape out there somewhere of that.)

Not all secrets are sexual, of course. Which partner does the dishes? Who's going to experience the enevitable extistencial dread that emotional depenency creates, first? What do they argue about? Who usually wins? These things might be deduced, or told to a marriage counselor, but they're never explicity revealed to friends and family -- well, not everything, not to the same person. The onlookers are left to pool what little information that exists into a coherent storyline. We like coherent storylines, even if real life never has one.

The coherent thread we create in our minds of how other people's marriages work usually makes sense. This is fundamentally different from the other, less satisfying mystery that matrimony presents to us; secrets might ultimately be revealed, but some things escape understanding, even by the participants.

We can be fairly sure that the Clinton book will sell pretty well. Even if it doesn't deliver, we can hope that it will reveal some secret aspects of the most unusal political marriage in history -- secrets that us nosey Americans (what with our passions for unauthorized biographies and tabloids) want so deperately to know.

Even if, in the unlikely event, the book reveals every secret that lurks within the Clinton marriage we'll be no closer to understanding it. Certainly, it would give us more fodder for our suppositions, but the true mysteries will never be revealed simply because there are some things that no one knows.

If all the poets and philosophers of history have been unable to crack the meanings and usages of love, what chance does even a highly educated lawyer and senator have? We all know people who shouldn't be together; who in spite of our certainty on this point, irrevocably remain married. We can watch them on day time talk shows. The airwaves are populated by people like this, from folks who can't stand to look at each other yet stay together, to people who argue about the religion of their (as yet unborn) children, to serial adulterers; even cousins fall in love occasionally. The ultimate unknowable keeps these unlikely couples together, even when everyone else can see that they'd be much happier on opposite sides of the world. All this tells us is that love and happiness may not have much to do with one another. But the falseness of the love equals happiness equation leaves us with less to go on than we started with.

The Clintons aren't far removed from the trailer-park denizens who populate the talk-show circuit. Money eliminates the financial desperation so often found in these relationships, and the constant, baleful glare of the media sensitizes us to their most grotesque flaws. Most couples don't send out press-releases, or publish the occasional book, but the enigmas are the same. The thorniest of these mysteries are the emotions of the spouses involved. The question that looms largest is, of course, about love. Does it actually exist? we wonder. Is it hiding behind the forced smiles?

This then is the question that we hope Hillary's book will answer. Do the Clintons love each other? And if they do, why? It's an impossible question, to be sure, but that doesn't stop us from wanting to know the answer. We can bet that they would like to know it as well.

-B. C. Silvia