The Story of a Marriage (23 page)

“He made me read two stories,” Holland said as he came back in, settling himself into the big armchair.

“Well he knew he could get away with it,” I said from the couch.

“What’s on the docket tonight?” he asked, as he always did.

“News, then Groucho, then bed I think.”

“After a drink, I hope.”

“Naturally,” I said.

It was eight o’clock. Holland touched the knob of the radio beside him and it came to life:
Morgan Beatty News
. For the first few moments, the fabric thrummed visibly against its wooden cage, as if Mr. Beatty sat inside, breathing against the burlap, and after it settled down I smothered an impulse to say, “You should fix that.” Holland lit a cigarette and listened peacefully. Mr. Beatty went on about the hundredth suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge, Mrs. Dian E. Black, revealed now to be a phony. As I saw it, if I’d asked Holland to “fix that,” he would have turned his solemn face to me and said there were three hours remaining of his life in this house. In which of them should he fix the radio? Instead, he sat in the sunset glow of the lamp, smoking his cigarette, listening to the fake note that Mrs. Black had left—“Sorry, but I had to go”—and staring at the masking-tape pot on the shelf. The time for all that was over. He picked a piece of tobacco from his lip.

“Another?” I asked, and he smiled.

“Oh, make it a double.” The old chuckle. “One for you, too.” I brought up another glass.

“There you go,” I said as I set his drink down and took a cigarette. It was nearly nine.

He automatically held a flame up to my face.
Goodbye
, I thought as the cigarette lit with a hiss. He flicked the lighter closed and smiled.

“I saw Mrs. Platt the other day,” I said. “William’s mother.”

He seemed a bit startled by this. “Did you?”

“Annabel’s opening a shop on Maiden Lane.”

“Downtown,” he mused, sipping from his drink. “People can afford the wildest things.”

“Her father must be helping her out. William’s taking over when the baby comes.”

He laughed, and I asked what was so funny. “Oh nothing,” he said. “Men helping women out with their businesses.”

“It’s a new world,” I said.

“It sure is.”

At nine thirty, Groucho came on the radio. My husband sat still, staring, like the portrait of a war hero. Then, for a second, the radio cut out and I could hear the clatter of the ice in his drink. I looked and his hand was shaking. I caught his careful glance, and in those eyes: a look of dazzling pain.

The awful strain he must have been under, that night. I’m sure in his delicate, transposed heart—a heart that in its way existed—he felt at last the weight of what he had done. For in a way we had not done it; he had done it. By being what everyone wanted him to be—being the husband, the flirt, the beautiful object, and the lover—by pleasing us all in giving us his gracious smile, he had tortured each of us when it did not turn our way. Beauty is forgiven everything except its absence from our lives, and the effort to return all loves at once must have broken him. As I saw it, he was choosing one love—the loudest love, the purest—and in choosing Buzz, he felt the others collapse around him. Mine, and Annabel’s, and everyone’s he met on the street. He could not have held them up forever. It was a childish notion to think he ever could, childishly cruel. And that was what I saw in his eyes; the look of a man forced, at last, to leave the possibilities of youth behind. To figure out the heart’s desire. I saw, from the look of pain there, how truly sorry he was.

What is it like for men? Even now I can’t tell you. To have to hold up the world and never show the strain. To pretend at every moment: pretend to be strong, and wise, and good, and faithful. But nobody is strong or wise or good or faithful, not really. It turns out everyone is faking it as best they can.

Groucho had ended, the applause drowned by a wave of static. Holland reached over to click off the radio.

“I guess it’s time for bed,” he whispered.

“I suppose so.”

“I’m beat. I really am,” he said, then turned to me: “Pearlie …?”

“What’s that?”

He held my gaze for a long time without saying anything—it was not in him to say those words—but I knew, from his expression, what he meant. It was what we had never discussed, what he probably had wanted to say the night of the air raid and had lost his chance; here was the last he would ever have: “Tell me now if this is what you want.”

I was still in my twenties. And here’s what I thought would be the worst: that no one else would ever know me young. I would always be this age or older, from now on, to any man I met. No one would ever sit back and remember how young and frail I was at his bedside, at eighteen, reading to him in that dark room with the piano playing downstairs, and again at twenty-one, how I held the flap of my coat against the wind and held my tongue when a handsome man called me by the wrong name. What I would miss—and it occurred to me only then, with his brown eyes on me—was the unchangeable, the irreplaceable. I would never meet another man who’d met my mother, who knew her untamable hair, her sharp Kentucky accent, cracked with fury. She was dead now, and no man could ever know her again. That would be missing. I’d never know anyone, anywhere, who’d watched me weeping with rage and lack of sleep in those first months after Sonny was born, or seen his first steps, or listened to him tell his nonsense stories. He was a boy now. No one could ever again know him as a baby. That would be missing, too. I wouldn’t just be alone in the present; I would be alone in my past as well, in my memories. Because they were part of him, of Holland, of my husband. And in an hour that part of me would be cut off like a tail. From that night on, I would be like a traveler from a distant country that no one had ever been to, nor ever heard of, an immigrant from that vanished land: my youth.

No, Holland, not what I wanted. Too late, now, to ask, if that was now what you were doing. I could not tell. What I wanted was you, but not you as I had always known you. Not the boy in the room, anymore; not the soldier on the beach, misremembering my name. It was not enough to live on. Not once the flood had come, to wipe it all away; it was not enough to replace things just as they were. You as you were. I had lived like a woman whose lonely house, it was rumored, had a treasure buried in its walls. It was enough to dream of it, but once those walls had been torn down, the rooms strewn with plaster, I could not live there. Not that I could regret the chance I took—what else is life for?—but I would not be a dreamer, a keeper, a hiding place. The world was about to change, and I could feel it. And I was still young. I would change with it.

I gave no answer. Instead, I cleaned up the glasses, put away the bourbon. I walked to my bedroom and then, without meaning to, I turned and said, “Goodbye.”

He stared as if he might have heard me wrong. I will never know what he thought I said, there in the doorway; I will never know because he is dead now, and I had only meant to say “Good night,” but at that moment it seemed possible our lives had gone unsaid for a minute too long. It seemed possible we were going to say all the things we had left unspoken. That he would stand there and say “Tonight I’m going to run away for love” and I would fold my arms over my breasts and say “Tomorrow I’m going to try it alone” and we would stare at each other, chalked by the hall light, and it seemed possible we would strike each other, wail and beat each other for what we had done, what we had taken without asking—the silent breakfasts and grinning dinners, the countless hours of each other’s lives—nothing more or less than a marriage.

But Holland did not speak. He reached for a pack of matches from his breast pocket, and then he looked at me with a curious expression. His eyes went large and his mouth collapsed at the edges, like something left in the rain, and despite everything I had the sudden urge to rush over and comfort him.

Had he heard me say it? I will never know. He just replied, softly, “Good night,” then smiled at me and went into his room. The door clicked shut; I heard the mechanism of the lock. I went into my own room, scented with spilled perfume, and watched as Lyle lay down on his sheepskin. Every light in the house went out. And then all was quiet.

It was ten fifteen when I took the doctor’s pill; it felled me like an ax.

When I was a girl, the Green River flooded our town. A line on the courthouse, engraved with the year 1935, marks where water rose above the heads of full-grown men. I remember how the tops of the apple trees broke the water all around us in green islands, their branches heavy with floating fruit. I remember how frightened my parents were. We waited as the water rushed by in the darkness. And I was young. I had no idea that it would ever end. I thought that maybe this was how we would live now.

That was the form my dream took, under the influence of that pill. I was back in that old house, with my parents, and the water rising up and lapping against the porch; the green apples drifting by like planets. But in my dream we stood there for some reason unsure of what to do. “Secure the windows!” I kept saying, and they looked at me very afraid, unmoving: old people. And the water kept rising higher, dark and viscous around our ankles. “What do we do?” they kept asking. “What do we do?” I knew it, someone told me once. How do you survive a flood? Do you leap in the water, on anything that will float? Each on his own box or table? Or do you huddle together in the attic? I could not remember. One was right, and one was terribly wrong. It was like a test, in school, on which everything hinges. And still the water was rising. “What do we do?” my mother begged. Then I remembered. I told her, and in that dream the moment I told her—her old face broadening in a rare smile—for some reason I heard myself saying, clear as anything, as if it were not even a dream: “How could I have gotten it so wrong?”

The next morning, I was awakened by a lion’s roar—the nearby zoo. I lay there a long time in my bed. Oh Lord, I thought. The light shifted on the ceiling like pages turning in a book, blank, unwritten pages. I think I was still dazed from the pill. Yet everything was as calm and clear as glass and I knew, somehow, that if I moved I would break it, that it would shatter all around me in bright shards. So I lay there as still as I could, in a kind of child’s game, waiting for the right moment to break the seal on my day.

Oh Lord, I thought, in the drowsy misjudgment of morning. How could I have gotten it so wrong?

I remember the window cast a bluish square of sun, a cage, in the corner of my room and I imagined it moving across the whole of the floor, the bed, the pillow, through the first day of my life alone. A stillness. As if all the dust from a life’s movement had settled years ago. Not a sound from anywhere; not a sound from that other room, which I imagined as empty of every tie and shoe I’d ever bought him. I pictured it, the mirror of my room: all white with sheets piled up in the corner and an ashtray left full after a night of packing and talking and loading a life into a car. Maybe he sat alone in there and wept. I can’t say. But how could you not weep? How could you not wish you’d done things a little better from the start?