The Forever Marriage (31 page)

“That being?” Olive tilted back in her chair, looking uncharacteristically off-balance. What was happening to the people in Carmen’s life? Danny becoming responsible, Olive giddy and disheveled.

“It was something the doctor said to me today about general patterns and randomness. Jobe spent his life on this problem: trying to prove that prime numbers get
generally
farther apart as the numbers go up, but there are exceptions—points where the primes contract—that are impossible to predict.”

There was a beat of pure silence. “I had no idea you knew so much about Jobe’s work,” Olive said. She sounded either young or tearful or drunken. Maybe all three.

“Neither did I, to be honest.” Carmen put her glass to her cheeks, one and then the other. Something had happened to her. She was pulsing with heat. “I thought it was all beyond me. I talked to him about it but only, you know, that way you do when you’re married. Listening because it was his life. Never really trying to decipher anything. Now, I wish I’d paid more attention.”

“What did the doctor say?”

Carmen shook her head. The scotch was in her mouth, reminding her of a night—another lifetime—back when everything had been truly random. Nothing was yet determined. Everything could change.
“Nothing, really. The chemo is going to get harder. I’m going to lose all my hair, get sicker, possibly anemic.” Carmen took another drink, the whisky’s resinous flavor almost erasing the aluminum she’d been tasting nonstop for weeks. “He’s doing this because I’m young and statistics show women under fifty have more recurrences. But I shouldn’t give up hope, because I’m an individual. A unique point.” She held up her forefinger, just as Dr. Woo had done, and stared at it, willing away the tears that rose. “I know, I know. I’m grasping at straws.”

“No, dear. I don’t believe you are,” came Olive’s prim voice. Carmen blinked. Her mother-in-law, too, had morphed back into that neat, patrician wedding planner from 1986. What was happening to the two of them? It was like time travel. “All signs tell me you’re grasping for exactly the right things.”

“What
signs
?”

“Luca!”

Carmen thought at first this was an answer. But Olive’s voice was full of the heedless warmth she reserved only for her grandchildren. Carmen turned to see Luca walking in to greet his grandmother. On the way, he swept his hand—the right, which he had used last to grasp Danny’s—along the rounded line of Carmen’s cheek.

Yes, signs
,
pay attention, Mom
, he seemed to say with his chortle. Then he bent to hug Olive who raised her arms and seemed to levitate up, out of her chair.

An image rose in Carmen’s head and for once she didn’t run away from it. Rather, she moved in and watched her earlier self half-reclining in a hospital bed on a winter day twenty-one years before. Pallid and spent, awash with shame and a sense of failure, young Carmen extended a blunt-faced infant to Olive. And her mother-in-law took an involuntary step back.

It was only a single moment, and Olive had recovered quickly. Then she’d taken Luca carefully in her hands and up into her arms. “Poor baby,” she’d said, swinging him gently, her grip on him appearing to grow stronger as she swayed from side to side. “Poor, poor baby.” But Luca had only stared and yawned at her, as if bored.

Then Jobe had walked into the room. So young! Carmen could see that now. Olive’s own least beautiful child, and secretly her favorite. “You’ll find a way to make this child happy,” Olive said to him. It was an order, more than a prediction. Jobe had nodded vigorously as if to say, “Of course,” though Carmen could see tears gathering in his eyes. And she’d wished, for one fleeting speck of time, that he was standing close enough for her to take his hand.

“I had this very strange dream today,” Olive said, once they were seated in the little Turkish restaurant that was Luca’s favorite. Lamps swung around them, twinkling light reflecting off the high cherry wood booths like stars in a forest.

“Was it about Dad?” Luca asked. The menu sat unopened under his folded hands. He had it memorized; there was no need to struggle through the printed words. “Did he tell you?”

“Yes, in fact, he did, dear,” Olive said. “So what do you feel like eating tonight?”

Carmen looked from one to the other, their faces—both—like cherubim in the rosy glow.

“Tell you what?” Carmen demanded. She didn’t believe any of this, yet she was panicked. If Jobe were watching, if he knew about Danny, if he were able to communicate with Olive and her children, there was no end to the damage that would be done. “What did Dad tell you?”

“He solved the puzzle.” Luca rested his chin flatly in the palm of his hand.

“What puzzle?” They were looking at her as if she was missing something obvious. “You mean Riemann? That puzzle?”

Both heads bobbed up and down—Luca’s and Olive’s—moving in and out of the light.

“I suspect it’s somewhere in those papers you were looking at earlier,” Olive said as she studied the menu. “I was so delighted when I got to the house and saw you already had them. Though Jobe
seemed sure you’d take care of it somehow.” Then she turned to Luca. “Will you eat some spanakopita if I get it? The piece they serve is always too big for me.”

Carmen was envisioning herself stirring Jobe’s documents, holding glasses full of liquid precariously over them, dropping the page that held his one, crucial, victorious formula and letting it slide under the table. She saw herself walking through the dining room later, spotting the dirty, walked-on piece of paper, bending and crumpling it. Throwing it away.

She blinked rapidly. Clearly, the spirit of Riemann’s cleaning woman was haunting her. Carmen wondered what retribution had been like in the 1860s. Had that woman been mutilated and pumped full of poisons for her sins, too?

A waitress in a long white apron and pinned-on scrap of veil hat appeared. “Can I get you something to start?” she asked.

Carmen had never noticed before how two hundred years ago this place was. Looking around at the dark tables, chained lanterns, and hunched diners’ backs, she counted forward: thirty-eight hours until her next chemo session. Time expanded and contracted. Centuries of research, twenty-one years of marriage, four meals, another drink. She’d paused too long since the question; everyone was staring.

“Give us a flask of the house red and some stuffed grape leaves,” she said too brusquely, but Olive nodded. “Luca, how about you?”

“Seltzer,” he said, struggling visibly to form first the t and then the z.

Once the waitress had gone, Carmen turned back to her son. “So your dad came to you in a dream and told you he’d solved Riemann? And to you, too?” She glanced at Olive, a well-dressed, upright woman gazing into the distance. What was happening? Her mother-in-law had turned into a less crone-y version of Nancy Reagan. She herself was having some kind of Ebenezer Scrooge moment, seeing ghosts of mathematicians past. Her son was talking to his dead father. Siena was right. Their entire family had gone nuts.

“He didn’t
tell
me,” Luca said. “He
showed
me.”

“So could you solve it now if I gave you a paper and pen?” She actually began reaching for her purse, but Luca simply rolled his eyes.

“It’s not like that, Mom.”

“How is it, then?” she asked gently.

Luca fell silent—this was more than he usually spoke in two days—and looked at Olive, whose eyes were shining like a child’s.

“I thought …” Olive began, then stopped and started again. “You know me, dear. I’m not like this. Some guilt-ridden old woman so destroyed by her son’s death she begins imagining things. That’s what I told myself at first.”

“Guilt-ridden?”

Olive breathed deeply through her nose and scanned Luca from his shoes to the top of his head. It was as if she was doing an inventory, and when she was done, she turned full-on to Carmen. “For lying to my son and pushing your marriage forward, even after that young man came to the door with your driver’s license. That very handsome”—Olive shifted her eyes but only slightly, so she was gazing at an empty spot in the air—“very … confident young man.”

Carmen felt squirmy inside, and as cornered as she had that night long ago when Olive caught her coming out of Jobe’s room. No, more. She looked pointedly at Luca, wondering what had made Olive decide to have this conversation now, in this place, in front of him. But Olive ignored her.

“What was his name?” she asked, not unpleasantly but with the air of an old lady simply trying to grasp a memory. “Robert? Oren … ?”

Carmen relented. “Rory,” she said. And as she did, she could see him standing on the Garretts’ wide brick porch, holding the little, plastic card, smiling down at the well-formed middle-aged woman who answered the door. Carmen wouldn’t have been surprised if Rory had made a pass at Olive. At the very least, he’d have turned on the charm, made her understand what kind of man he was.

“So he returned my driver’s license, and you put it on my bedside table without saying a thing. Why?” Carmen stared directly at her
mother-in-law now. It was time. To her right, Luca seemed to preside—a benevolent presence neither disturbed by the conversation, nor judgmental about it. Only witnessing.

“Because.” Slowly, Olive refocused and held up her end of the stare. “I didn’t want to know anything. Oh, not that I would have said so at the time. I think, back then, I just convinced myself that it was nothing. That what the boy said was true.”

“Which was? What did he say?”

“That you’d stopped in to his office to talk about rental properties. He was checking your credit. You’d left it behind.” Olive’s voice was robotic.

“So?” Carmen challenged her, senselessly. Suddenly, without knowing why, she’d switched sides. “You thought I was trying to leave Jobe and move out on my own. Get an apartment without him.”

“Yes, I thought you were considering it. Or rather …” There was a flash of pain on Olive’s face and Carmen felt remorse. But before she could reach out, Luca’s hand crept somehow more quickly than hers to touch his grandmother’s hand. “I told myself this was what had happened: You were uncertain—scared—that you thought briefly about leaving then realized how much you loved my son. Only … there was a part of me …” She shook her head. “That Rory was a very handsome young man,” she repeated after several seconds had passed. “Exactly the sort of boy I could imagine you dating, going to parties with, dancing with….” Here, thankfully, she stopped. But the next logical item on the list hung silently in the air.

Olive fixed her eyes on Carmen now, but gently. She was asking.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Luca muttered and rose, stumbling a little in his haste to get away from the table. It was exactly the sort of self-conscious thing any young man would do if his mother and grandmother began discussing an old affair. And Carmen had never loved him more than she did at this very moment.

“Did you?” Olive asked once Luca was out of earshot.

“Did I what? Date him? I don’t think you could call it that.
Dance with him? Not that I recall. Sleep with him? Yes, once.” She was looking down at the table. Some time during her response the waitress had come, set down the drinks and grape leaves, then departed again without taking their dinner order. Carmen didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, the entire restaurant could hear. The only thing that mattered was what Olive thought. And—if he was truly eavesdropping on them from some dust beam—Jobe, as well.

“Then why did you marry my son?” Olive’s voice was stiff and cold, exactly as Carmen had been afraid it would be on the day she found out the truth. “Why didn’t you just fornicate with the cute, young real estate agent and leave Jobe alone?”

It was like being slapped. But Carmen deserved it; she’d deserved it for more than two decades. “Because Rory wasn’t nice to me,” she said softly. “Jobe was.”

“Even though he knew.”

Luca had emerged from the men’s room and was making his way across the restaurant. Carmen didn’t have much time. “What do you mean by that?” She picked up the wine flask and filled their glasses, leaning closer to hiss at Olive. “Are you saying Jobe knew about Rory?”

Olive nodded regally. “He told me you were seeing someone else, that you didn’t love him, and I …” She picked up her glass and stared at it, Carmen watching and recalling the night they first met: this woman holding a glass of wine while ambivalence, like two opposing weather fronts, rose inside her. She had been living perpetually with this feeling, Carmen noted, ever since that day.

“I lied,” Olive continued without taking a drink. “I told my son that he was wrong. I knew what it was like to be a young woman in love, and the things you were doing were normal. Your affection for him would grow as you became more confident. I told him”—Luca was, at most, two tables away now—“to be patient, believe in himself, go ahead with the marriage. Because he deserved a wife like you.”

Luca pulled out his chair, sat, picked up a grape leaf.

“We always want what’s best for our children,” Olive said. Her tone had changed, becoming airy for Luca’s sake. “We’re just not always clear on what the best thing is.”

The next day, Carmen walked into a discount salon and asked for a haircut. She had never been in one before: It was bright white with colored curtains hanging between the chairs. Packed with people. She had to wait twenty-five minutes before someone called her name, but at least here the magazines were plentiful and up to date.

“I’m Lori,” said the girl who led her back across a floor strewn with hair clippings in every color. “So what are you thinking about today?”

“I want it all cut off,” Carmen said. She put her purse on the floor and settled into the chair, her increasingly bony backside painful even against the cushioned seat. “Leave about a quarter-inch all the way around.”

“Are you sure?” The girl squinted in the mirror. She was about twenty-three, with bright butterfly tattoos peaking out of her cleavage. So, some women put needles into their breasts on purpose. What a luxury to have that choice. “I mean, you have really nice hair and it’s flattering with your face shape.” The girl began using the edge of a comb and her long fingernails alternately, trying different arrangements, causing Carmen’s scalp to tingle. “I could just layer it a little, give you a whole new look, without—”