Orfe (10 page)

“That's better than having him stick around getting uglier and uglier on account of his life being ruined and it all being my fault,” Grace Phildon answered.

“Better than being married,” Tommy echoed, his point proven.

“I sometimes wonder,” Raygrace said and then, “Oops, sorry,” as a piece of tofu fell onto the floor. He picked it up, still with chopsticks, and scuffed on his knees over to the wastebasket. He dropped it into the wastebasket and returned to the circle, still on his knees. He smiled around at everyone.

“Well? Wonder what? What is it you sometimes wonder?” Willie Grace demanded. “You started to say something.”

“Oh. Just that there are different kinds of love. Platonic love, romantic love, erotic love.”

“Can you add marital love to that? From Mars, god of offensive warfare,” Willie
Grace said. “A joke,” she explained. When she and Raygrace had combined households, he had brought a couple of boxes of books with him. She was reading away like crazy, she said; they couldn't afford a TV, and with her rehearsal schedule she couldn't manage a relationship, and he was studying all the time he wasn't playing music. So what else was there for her to do but read his books?

“Since it's power that women look for in a man,” Tommy said, “getting married young is dumb. Young men have no power, nothing real—not even star athletes, with futures in the professionals.” Tommy played football. “Everyone knows power's what women want. What turns them on.”

“And here I thought it was money I was after,” Grace Phildon laughed.

“Money's power,” Tommy said impatiently.

“Everybody's full of crap, as usual,” Willie Grace said, looking at me and Tommy. “You don't have any power, so why does she love you?”

“I don't,” I said. “You knew that,” I told him. He was looking tight around the mouth and harried around the eyes. I knew part of what was bothering him. He'd been looking forward to a once-only
evening, with rockers or punks or Deadheads; probably he'd hoped for an orgy. Something he could impress his friends with. “Nobody knows anything about love,” I decided.

“I do,” Raygrace said. When we stopped laughing at him, he kept on insisting, “I do. Love is when you really want to give to someone else, give feelings and thoughts, help, pleasure, all of it, everything you can,” he said. His round cheeks flushed, but he held his ground.

“What does that have to do with marriage?” Tommy demanded.

“Giving is as selfish as any other pleasure,” Willie Grace argued, ignoring Tommy's question. “You give to make yourself feel good. The point is that love is selfish, and if you don't know that, you don't know anything.”

“Everything gets easier when you love someone,” Grace Phildon said.

“No, everything gets harder, because you care so much,” Raygrace argued.

“That still doesn't prove what love has to do with marriage,” Tommy insisted.

“I want to marry Orfe,” Yuri said, “and that's what love has to do with marriage for me. It doesn't matter, though, if you don't want to,” he said to Orfe.

“No, I wouldn't mind, if you want to,” she said.

For a long second it was as if the rest of us were invisible, the way they looked at one another. I didn't know how I felt, watching that look; I felt uncomfortable, and I wanted to get away. It was too perfect to stay in the same room with, although also it was so perfect that I never wanted to have to leave.

“It'll be great,” Yuri said, drawing us all in with his smile. “It'll be the best time anyone has ever had, we'll invite everybody.”

“And we'll be the music,” Grace Phildon said.

“I'll sing,” Orfe said.

“No you won't, you'll be getting married,” Raygrace reminded her. “We'll walk you down the aisle with
Yuri's Dreams,
and back up the aisle with
Yuri's Dreams.”

“A church?” Orfe asked. “You didn't say a church. I was thinking the park.”

“It doesn't matter,” Yuri said.

“I just want to know what you want,” Orfe said.

“We're going,” Tommy said, and he looked at his watch. He waited for me to scramble up beside him. “Thanks for the dinner, Orfe, Yuri. Nice place you've got
here. Good luck with the wedding. Are you ready?” he asked me.

I put our plates and chopsticks and fork into the sink. We left the apartment.

Out on the street he reached for my hand. “You've got some wacko friends.”

I had both my hands in my pockets and walked along.

“I mean—that's no time to propose. A proposal's supposed to be private. Just for starters. And then it got so—Jesus, emotional—deep thought, that pseudophilosophy. It was all so sweet my teeth started to hurt.”

“You don't like emotions, do you? They make you squirm, don't they?”

“Don't get on my back just because you're jealous.”

“Jealous? Of you?”

“How dumb do you think I am, Enny? It's her you're jealous of. Orfe. Because of him. Yuri. Oh, I've seen you, the way you sometimes look at him. You want him for yourself.”

I stopped, lamplight on my face and on Tommy's face. It didn't matter that he was about a foot taller than I was. I felt as if I could punch him senseless and as if I were about to do that. Starting with his cute little nose. “You call that jealous?”

“Come off it.” He laughed, more confident now that the odds were even or weighted in his favor.

I said what I said next more bluntly than I might have, because I was disappointed, in myself more than in him.
“You
come off it,” I said. “I think I'll say goodbye here.”

He wasn't so thick as not to know what I meant. He thought for a minute, anger and chagrin mixing with the embarrassment on his face. “Just because I told you the truth about yourself? Just because I saw through you?”

“Because you saw into me and thought you were seeing through me,” I said.

Which was the end of that. I turned around and walked away, back to the apartment. When I opened the door they were busy talking about the wedding, when and where, what kind of ceremony, what to eat. I took my plate and chopsticks out of the sink and sat down to join in.

*  *  *  *  *

When Orfe was grieving over Yuri, she reminded me of that evening. “I always meant to say how glad I was when you broke up with Tommy,” she said. “I like Michael,” she told me. “I'd like it if you fell in love with Michael.”

I already had.

“I think,” Orfe said, “that love is like being alive, in this respect, or peace too. Yeah, all three of them have the quality of—you never feel as if there has been enough. You never say, okay, that's my fair share, that's good enough for me. You always say, More. More, please. I want more, I need—there's never enough, that's what I mean, that's what I think. You get to the end, I—”

Here Orfe stopped speaking for a minute, lowered her face, and then raised it to look out with sorrow like tears but without them, and the worse for that.

“I got to the end and I don't feel like it's been enough. Love. Even though I know it's fair, that love for any amount of time, however little time—to be deeply loved ever is more than any of us has a right to. I know that. But I feel like I could use more, need—”

And she was gone, following her music, her head bent over the guitar.

It's not that I can remember so clearly. I only remember shreds, shards, patches. But what I
can
do is re-create, from these fragments, the memory; and the re-creation becomes memory itself.

On the morning of the day Orfe and Yuri got married, sunlight filled the air. Even the asphalt paths that criss-crossed the park sparkled under the sunlight or shone under shade. Celebrants in their wedding-guest finery brought forward platters and bowls of food, set them on the table, and stepped back to become a crowd. Brightly colored skirts—red, blue, yellow—and brightly colored shirts—purple, green, orange—milled about.

I can see how it looked, see the Graces all in a cluster, turning and waving and
smiling. I can see Orfe in the dress we found after hours of searching the used clothing stores, a long-sleeved, long white dress with a broad lacy collar. A crown of white flowers floated in the cloud of her red hair. I can see Yuri in a slightly oversize tuxedo jacket, also found in a used clothing store but requiring fewer hours of searching, and the pleated shirt underneath, stiff with starch, white with bluing. I can see his black broad-brimmed felt hat, with the high curved feather rising from its band. I can almost see myself, leading the wedding pair forward into the center of the circle.

Until I remember how the sounds ceased when Yuri turned to Orfe and Orfe turned to Yuri, I don't remember the sounds. But they were there, conversations and laughter, the wash of wine pouring into paper cups, the clink of fruit punch being served out of a glass punch bowl. Some of the guests were uninvited. They were strangers caught up into the occasion as they were sitting around or walking by; some of those were glad to have the adventure added to their day or grateful for the hour's distraction; a few waited patiently to eat, their eyes not on the wedding couple but on the table of
food. It seemed as if everybody must be talking—voices pitched loud and louder, soft velvet voices, gruff, rough voices, piercing nasal voices, high and low voices, musical or flat, pompous or serene, eager, laughing, sarcastic, flirtatious, intent—a babble of sounds that ceased when Orfe turned to Yuri and Yuri turned to Orfe, at the center of the circle.

“I promise myself to you,” Orfe said to Yuri, “my heart and all the works of my hands.” “I promise myself to you,” Yuri said to Orfe, “my heart and all the works of my hands.” Orfe held out her hand, and Yuri put a ring onto her finger. Yuri held out his hand, and Orfe put a ring onto his finger. They were married.

They turned around, facing away from each other, standing back to back, and opened their arms out. The circle moved around them.

It was a song and everyone was singing. The Graces had gone to their instruments. Music filled the sunlit air. We sang the song through and then unclasped hands, to clap in applause for the occasion and the wedding couple and ourselves. Orfe laughed and curtsied low, almost sweeping the ground with her arm. Yuri laughed and swept his hat from
his head to bow to the four points of the compass.

The bowls and platters were uncovered. The guests, invited and uninvited, helped themselves to cakes and little cookies, to paper cups of wine or fruit punch.

*  *  *  *  *

They came in a parade, holding a square metal cake pan overhead, as if it were the platform with the god riding on it. These were the people from the house, and they were too late for the exchange of vows, the ceremony itself, if they had ever intended to be in time for it. Yuri and Orfe had signed the back of the marriage certificate, and the Graces and I had witnessed the signatures, before the little parade ever entered the park and came toward the wedding—cake tin held high, garlands of honeysuckle and ivy hung over their shoulders.

I was with Michael. He and I were serving drinks when they arrived. I ladled out fruit punch and he poured red or white wine. We listened to the music, Orfe and the Graces, and watched the dancers, Yuri with various partners. I had danced with Yuri once myself that day, he danced with every woman there, sometimes just one,
sometimes gathering two or three or four around him for the dance. Michael and I watched and sometimes commented. The music wasn't amplified and neither were the voices.

Watching Yuri dance, Michael said, “If I were the jealous type, I'd be jealous of him.”

“But you're not.”

“Nope. I'm the scientist type. The weedy scientist type. So I'm only almost jealous.”

“Not over me, I hope,” I said.

“No. Although I could be—”

“If you were the type.”

“If I were the type. This is just sort of a general jealousy. I don't even know what it is that he has. Do you?”

“Sort of.”

“It's not the usual attraction he has, except for his good looks. I'm not putting him down as unmasculine or anything,” Michael said. “Just observing.”

“I've never heard you put anybody down.”

“What's the point?” Michael asked me. Then, “Who's that? Looks like—I don't know what it looks like. Look.”

The people from the house, in a procession, came up to the music. They had
long hair and many had bare feet. They wore ragged jeans and belts with studs, black T-shirts, denim vests with studs. Their colors were black and silver or black and steel—like the night sky with safety pins and zippers and studs for their stars. Their eyes were dark and shadowed. Their parti-color hair looked dark, whether it was hennaed, bleached, or blackened, or arose in a crest of green or orange spikes. Twisted vines lay across their shoulders, trailed down their chests and backs, swayed with the dance.

They danced up to Yuri and cut him out from among the women. He became the center of their circling dance. It was a dance of giving, the presentation of the cake they carried, which three women held out to him, then drew back, then offered again, as if it were some ceremony of its own. Among all the milling guests, invited and uninvited, strangers and friends, I don't know if Orfe saw Yuri among the people from the house. I saw them dancing, saw them move gradually to the side, saw a silver knife blade flash, saw a square of cake in Yuri's hands, saw him eating, as they watched, saw him licking the frosting from his fingers and taking the pan into his hands, to become the
leader of their procession. The people from the house, with Yuri at their head, moved through the crowd in a long sinewy line, toward where Orfe and the Graces played.

But Yuri turned away and the others followed. They wound among the dancers up to the table behind which Michael and I stood. Yuri meant to set the cake down on the table, I thought, but he misjudged where the edge was and it fell, upside down, onto the grass. I moved to pick it up, but Yuri was faster than I. Only he was clumsy, and the cake was left on the ground, its naked chocolate back exposed. Yuri straightened up and looked at me, and his eyes were darker than I'd ever noticed them because the pupils had expanded; he looked helpless, like a baby, with those darkened eyes. He had a tender lift to the corners of his mouth, and he was looking into my eyes, and I thought he might kiss me—thought it with an eager swelling of the heart, a longing upward—just for a second, before I was afraid he would kiss me, and his eyes filled with water, with tears, and he moved away, along a line of music, and the people from the house followed him. The cake was trampled under their feet, but they
didn't notice. I stood holding the empty cake tin and didn't hear it when Michael said my name. Yuri's hat moved into and among the crowd, the bright feather curved and waving.