The Forever Marriage (11 page)

Carmen shoved her glass away. She should be ashamed of herself, drinking to the point of hearing things. (The nurse had been able to explain it that last time: the isolation chamber effect of the MRI.) “I think, eventually, I’ll be fine” she said, even though she didn’t quite believe it.

She looked around the table. Luca was staring at her, no longer elsewhere, his small eyes glittering with concern. Troy had taken Siena’s hand, which he held on top of the table, and her expression had softened. She was again that stubborn child, bewildered by her own immoderate emotions. Like mother like daughter, Carmen
thought. Like father like son. And the room began to recede until she could make out only what existed in their small island of light.

Carmen lay in bed weary, her body faded and grateful not to be holding itself up any longer, but unable to sleep. Something had changed inside her that day, like the small pointer on a radio being turned from On to Off. What was it? Her hope, her determination, her confidence—none of these was quite right. Reaching one hand out in a sweeping, stretching gesture, trying to find her place on the wide mattress, her fingers brushed Jobe’s pillow and she jackknifed up abruptly, aware in a way she hadn’t been before that he was truly gone.

It wasn’t
his
disappearance so much as anyone’s, the fact that it could occur so quietly and completely, that she herself could vanish that way. The wrong treatment, a few radical cells that broke off and decided to travel, one opportunistic disease, and she, too, might die. But instead of leaving a gaping hole, the world would close around her absence, the way it had already started to close around Jobe’s. The kids had resumed their lives, the department had figured out a replacement for his classes; Riemann might never be solved, but this was no different from the way it was before.

If she were honest, Carmen had to admit her presence would be even easier to erase than Jobe’s. Thousands of people could design banner ads and flyers. Siena and Troy might marry and heroically raise Michael. Danny would find someone else to sleep with and he’d probably tell her, occasionally, the sad, true story of Carmen’s early death. Thinking about this, her fists clenched. He might even woo other women this way, telling them tearfully about the one he’d seen through her husband’s gruesome end only to detect—
with his own hands
—the comet that would kill her. Carmen envisioned the sweet, pitying expression of a woman barely thirty who put her arm around Danny’s shoulders and drew him toward her pert, healthy breasts.

This was insane. Carmen checked the clock: a few minutes past midnight. It didn’t matter, really. She had called the HR director at
her agency to say she needed yet another week of leave and the man had granted it, sounding forcedly concerned and slightly irritated, as if he suspected Carmen of malingering, playing up her grief because she’d become entranced with shopping and daytime soaps.

“I have cancer now!” Carmen almost shouted but didn’t. She might decide to go back to her job if the biopsy proved this was nothing: a comet-shaped hallucination they’d all palpated and shared—she, Danny, the doctor. Perhaps it was an alien chip, intended to keep track of her, that had been implanted while she was sleeping. Maybe Jobe did it before he died.

Carmen stared into the murk outside the window: a foggy sky with a sharp white scythe of moon. “Did you?” she asked silently. “Did you plant this thing to teach me a lesson? Did you know how I felt about you when you were alive?” But there was nothing out there. No answer. Certainly not Jobe.

She shook her head and got out of bed. This was ridiculous: fear had turned her into an idiot. That’s what it was, she suddenly realized—that was exactly what had been lost. Her fearlessness. And she desperately wanted it back.

At least the weather had grown warm. It was the perfect temperature to be in bare feet and one of Jobe’s old T-shirts, so long that it covered her underwear sufficiently for her to walk around in front of the kids. She padded down the wooden stairs and into the kitchen where the remnants of Jana’s fudge bars sat wrapped on the counter. Carmen picked the plastic apart and stood, breaking off small pieces and eating them, gooey chocolate coating her teeth and the roof of her mouth.

There was a small portable CD player on the counter nearer the wall. It had been Jobe’s: He used it when he worked around the house, carrying it with him from room to room. Carmen loosened the cord that had been wrapped around it, no doubt by her husband in the weeks before he died. She pressed the button to open the round compartment and found a CD of violin concertos played by Itzhak Perlman. The itchy discontented feeling returned for a few seconds: She
would have preferred Blondie or Prince or even an old Beatles album. But Jobe had listened to those only as a concession to her. It was classical music he loved because it was mathematical and helped him think. He’d also enjoyed disco, Carmen recalled, grinning into the night. Sister Sledge. The Bee Gees. It made no sense unless you listened to the rhythms and counted; dance music tended to be as metrical as Beethoven or Bach. But her husband hadn’t been the least bit self-conscious; he kept his Earth, Wind & Fire collection filed between Dvorák and Grieg, just where it belonged in his world.

She picked up the little boom box, stopped at the sink for a glass of water, and headed up two flights of stairs. The attic was stuffy. Carmen opened two opposing windows and stood limply between them, letting the breeze sift through her legs. She plugged in the CD player and pressed play; long, sweet, crickety notes began and she sank to the old sectional couch, pulling off her shirt, scratching her back on the nubbly fabric like a bear, finally comfortable, even pulling a fleece over her bare skin.

She raised her hand to touch the comet, feeling its jagged outline like some miniature planet. Maybe this was like
Horton Hears a Who
and an entire other world was lodged in her breast. “We are here, we are here, we are here,” she heard the Whos chant.
Horton
had been Luca’s favorite book when he was six years old; she probably could still quote long passages if she tried.

Lying back against the cushions, Carmen listened to the golden sounds of the violin mixing with amber cello notes. This wasn’t so bad. Her hand moved in widening circles and grazed her nipple and it was suddenly hard. So her breast still worked! Even after all the prodding and squashing that day, the chemicals that had been pumped into her to light up flawed spots. “Use it,” said a new voice that was more like an idea quietly floating through her head. “Why not?” And she raised her other hand to rub the right nipple as well. There was a sense of excitement so low and gathering it was almost an ache. Then the dilemma a woman always faces if she’s alone: She had only two hands. Moving the right, more dexterous hand down and slipping it
inside the waistband of her panties, she darted the left back and forth, fluttering against each of her breasts equally as she found her clitoris and ran her fingers over it and back, slipping them inside only long enough to get them wet and running them back out and up.

The music changed, becoming a soaring symphonic rush—an early ancestor of the Moody Blues—for which she was grateful. Carmen was breathing raggedly now, pressing down harder and arching her back to rub her nipples against the coarse blanket, which she held taut with one hand. Her eyes were closed but dots of gold light appeared behind them, larger and larger in succession. Her shoulders were opening like wings, her whole body thrashing and about to break into waves, when she felt suddenly that she was being watched.

Carmen stopped abruptly, her hands bearing down firmly on her body as if to quiet it. This was a familiar pose. Over the years, after they had quit making love regularly but before they slept apart, Carmen sometimes touched herself late at night while lying next to Jobe in their bed. She always waited until he’d given some sign of sleep: steady breathing, or a single adenoidal snore. Once in a while, though, she would have a sense that he was lying too still to be truly sleeping and was, instead, listening. With Danny, she’d learned to masturbate for a man, and to watch with leering pleasure while he stroked himself in front of her. But it felt weird and unseemly to be doing this in front of her husband, and at least half a dozen times Carmen had simply ceased and turned over, acting as if she’d only been restless, keeping her hand—as it was now—pressed between her legs.

She opened her eyes and looked around the attic, which was lit only by the sliver of moon outside. Could it be possible one of the children had awakened and wandered upstairs?

The dark was thick, almost palpable, and it hung like fabric unfurled from ceiling to floor. Nothing moved. “Hey?” Carmen called out in a brusque whisper. But there was no answer, and after a few moments she was satisfied and settled back and started the process all over again. This could be better, actually: pushing herself almost to climax and stopping just short, then starting again and feeling her
body accelerate ten times as quickly as before, becoming wet and open in a matter of seconds with that near–roller coaster sensation building in her throat.

As her orgasm started to take hold, Carmen untensed the way one yoga instructor had advised her years ago. She’d been an older woman, tiny and freakishly flexible, who’d thrown out life advice at the most unlikely times. “Relax your pelvic floor for this pose,” she’d told a class that included a dozen women and three men. “Breathe. Slowly. Ladies, you might try this during sex. It will make your climax much higher.”

It was during this class, actually, that Carmen had realized she could not continue having sex only with her husband. Jobe was not yet sick, but the way he touched her—and avoided her for long periods of time—already had begun to make her feel wooden. While in downward-facing dog, looking between her legs at her own reflection in the mirror, Carmen decided she had to do something. She would find a lover. That was the only way to get through until the kids were grown.

Like a movie, it all played in front of her as she came. There were flashes of her home life with Jobe and the strange, old-fashioned doctor’s office where he’d been told about his cancer; moments with Mike, the man from her office; and then random glimpses of the forty or so times she and Danny had been together, his blunt hand on her side, the curtains of the hotel room falling at a slant.

There were flashes of the funeral, of her black-clothed children walking neatly in a line, of the café with Jana and of the mammography equipment, of she herself sitting at the dinner table across from her son and daughter—as if Carmen had stepped outside of her body completely and could watch her own life. These images swirled but not one of them was disturbing. Calmly, even as her body kept rippling, she saw them tinged with the light from behind her eyes. She felt held, not just her forehead and neck this time but her entire being, and this sense remained even as the waves finally receded.

When it was over, her hands fell away from herself and, effortlessly, she slept.

Carmen landed in Baltimore for the first time on a day so torrid that the city seemed to shimmer when she walked out of the airport with a bag slung over each shoulder and began immediately to sweat.

Someone honked, and she saw Jobe wave from behind the wheel of a dark green BMW. Her father would be furious if he were here; he’d order her not to get in the car. If these people wanted to go to Europe for their automobiles, they weren’t loyal Americans. She should have nothing to do with them. This, more than the sight of Jobe himself—with a freshly trimmed beard that only made the angles of his face slightly more monsterish—made Carmen run to open the passenger door and jump in.

“Hey,” she said, tossing the larger bag in the back seat. “Thanks for coming to pick me up.”

“Sorry.” Jobe turned red, as if she’d said something to embarrass him already. “I would have gotten out to help you, but I was afraid they’d ticket me or I’d lose my place in line.”

“Always the rule follower, aren’t we?” There, now she actually
had
said something to embarrass him. And she’d been in his car, what? Thirty-five seconds? Carmen sighed and resolved for the hundredth
time to be considerate and behave herself. This was not one of her hardened high school girlfriends; Jobe never seemed to be anything but decent and nice.

She settled back and breathed. There was an odor: not a new-car smell but something better. Leathery and outdoorsy, though nothing could have been further from the truth. Inside the car, the temperature was a perfect and transparent 72 degrees; it said so in blue numbers that glowed from the dashboard. It also posted the outside temperature in red: 102.

“Jesus, is it always this hot here? I’m, like, melting.” She stripped her overshirt off, leaving her in only a white tank top and bra. Luckily, she’d thought to shave under her arms that morning. She’d debated, but it had seemed the right thing to do if refined East Coast people were going to let you stay with them for a week.

Jobe darted glances at her as he drove and it was clear he was looking at her breasts. She could not figure this guy out. She’d slept in his bed for two nights (well, one and a half, technically) and he’d never even tried to have sex with her, despite the fact that he’d had an erection three-quarters of the time. Then he’d called her from Oxford once she got home, which must have cost a fortune, just to find out how things were going. Everything was terrible, Carmen told him, figuring she might as well spill her guts to this guy she probably would never see in person again.

Her father had picked up his drinking while she was away, the house had gone to hell, and the housekeeper who’d come twice a week for as long as she could remember had disappeared. It seemed her dad’s job at GM was on the line: They’d given him six months slack after his wife’s death, but he’d reached the end and his boss was offering alcohol treatment or a voluntary layoff.

“‘I’m no fuckin’ drunk,’” Carmen made her voice gruff and mimicked her father over the hollow telephone line. “‘I’m an asshole, maybe, but so far as I know there’s not a treatment program for that.’”