The Story of a Marriage (6 page)

He said, “The streetcar had all its windows steamed up, it was like a greenhouse. You know they’re growing orchids in them now, right by the door.”

I laughed. “How practical.”

“And Venus flytraps. For ones who don’t pay fares.”

“Here’s to spring in San Francisco. You never know.”

I toasted him and again we drank.

“Holland tells me you still live in a bachelor apartment with one burner on the stove. Why don’t you move somewhere better?”

“So I could cook for myself instead of coming over here?”

“Well, I—”

“I went away traveling, I left it empty for a few years. Never got to improve it. Lived in worse in Istanbul, they still read by kerosene there. And I have a sentimental attachment to that burner, I’ll have you know.”

“Any family around?”

He looked into his drink as if the answer were at the bottom. “No, there’s nobody around. My father died last year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“And my mother has been gone a long time now,” he said, smiling sadly and taking another sip. “I was surprised to have to take over the business out here. It wasn’t something I’d ever planned on. I’m not the business type.”

“What had you planned on?”

A shrug, a nervous look at the door. “That’s what I had traveled to discover.”

“Did you discover it?”

He nodded. We downed our drinks again. I reached for my cigarettes and he put his hand on mine. Neither of us moved.

“Pearlie?”

He was so different. After two or three bolts of whiskey, he’d stopped playing the affable golden boy. He seemed a thousand years old, with the lights from the houses cutting him clean in half and deepening the sun lines on his face. The darkness drained everything of color, and so his bright blond hair had gone stark white. With his hand on mine, I could feel his heart racing.

“I hope you can help me,” he said, just as he had the day he’d first shown up at my door. Yet this time, he spoke in a kind of whisper I had never heard before. He moved his hand to my arm.

I was afraid of what he was going to say. “Buzz, it’s late.”

He tried to interrupt me but now I was setting down the ice bucket, throwing another chunk of ice to my hysterical dog, chattering: “Holland will be back tomorrow, you better run if you want to catch the streetcar—”

He said he knew Holland would be back tomorrow, and that was the point. He had not come to see Holland. He had come that night to talk to me.

I didn’t know what was happening; I didn’t know what I wanted to happen. His touch suddenly felt very warm on my arm.

“Listen to me,” he said, “I have to tell you something.”

“Buzz, I think—”

But his voice stopped me, and his hand moved to my shoulder:

“Pearlie, listen to me. Please listen to me.”

Something in me shifted; it was as if an alarm had sounded. Here was a plain, pale face stained with longing, and in that darkness he looked nothing like the man I had known for weeks, the confident old friend. I stood quiet and still, pressed against the wall.

And then he told me. With a soft country voice and his eyes gazing at a photograph on the wall. A careful man, touching my arm. I think he had never talked of love before. For you see he had not come all that way on the streetcar that night for Holland; he had come for me, Pearlie Cook. He had pieced that speech together over the years, practiced it over and over in his bachelor’s rooms downtown: a prisoner building a palace out of toothpicks; carefully, slowly, he gave me a masterpiece only a lonely man can make.

And when he was done, he let go of my arm. He took a step away from me, back into the shadow. I could hear Lyle cracking his ice like a nut. A tinker on his way back from his rounds broke out in song: “Grind your scissors! Grind your knives!” I stood with my cheek flat against the wall, looking out at our neighborhood and the shapes I knew so well, the light-rimmed borders of my world.

“You’re lying,” I said. “He’s just sickly. It’s his heart.”

Buzz said he wasn’t lying. His hand reached out again for my arm, but I flinched away.

“Don’t touch me,” I said, though I was barely able to breathe.

Then he told me something very true: “It’s time for you to think, Pearlie.”

He had not used the word “lovers.” No, Buzz said “together”—that he and Holland had been “together” for a long time before I reappeared. They were “together” in the hospital during the war, minds bound with gauze in the dayroom, sharing the view out on the ocean; “together” living on Buzz’s money and taking tentative steps in the new world. The one that had broken them, hateful of conchies and cowards and everyone who wasn’t square and true as a crossbeam; they had survived it “together.” A crooked romance, in that room with one burner. A love story. Until, one day, Holland got up from bed and said he was going to be married. A fight; a broken nose; shouts from a high window to a man running down the street. Without even knowing it, I had taken this man’s lover away and hidden him, safe from the world, in my vine-covered house. Now he had found him. He had come to me, to my front door, to break the curse I had not even known was on my life. He said it as if it were a beautiful thing. In his mind I’m sure it was.

“You must have known, Pearlie. A smart woman like you always knows.”

We heard the sound of a family walking by, their dog barking at the scent of Lyle inside, their children babbling meaninglessly and the adults laughing beyond my walls.

“I didn’t know, not precisely, I knew something was—”

“I can only say I’m sorry.”

“Is that why you came here?” I asked in a sudden rage. “Showed up at our door and … and sneaked into my life? Lord, my son’s life—”

“I know you don’t believe it yet, but we’re on the same side.”

“Don’t you—”

“We were born at a bad time,” he told me. “We made the choices we had to make. They were hard enough choices, and it was nice to think it all was over. But now there’s another one to be made.”

The alarm I felt was not just the shock of his words, as startling as someone jerking back the curtain in a dark room, blinding me with painful sunlight. It was that I had not known my husband at all. We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don’t, it is heartbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening—that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth—it was a fearful loneliness.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Stop it. Stop it, stop saying that.” I felt naked and ashamed. It was as if every new revelation, every fresh thought in my head, were like a scalpel, revealing things that should not ever be seen. What about his fragile transposed heart? Another fiction of mine, another lie to keep my life serene.

And yet—beneath all the jolts of surprise and grief, I could feel a small, growing surge of relief. He made sense, my husband, at last. The storm-cloud expressions, and separate bedrooms, and “illness” as his aunts had put it; the inconsistencies that I had blamed myself for, the imperfect wife, my own failure to save him. At least I was not insane. For here it was: what I had prepared myself for. I had known his allure; I’d seen the longing in others’ eyes. I had always thought it would be another woman. That was the usual way of things. Here was the awful thing, unexpectedly: a man.

It was more than two years, apparently. That was what Buzz told me that evening. My mind scrambled to catch hold of it all—years together, years of a romance I did not want to imagine, and, not long after Holland came to pick me up at the boardinghouse, a scene when he told Buzz to go to hell and never come back. A broken nose, a shout from a high window. A whisper in my ear: “I need you to marry me.” He might have said: “I need you to hide me.” Like a protected witness, a life in our little house, calm as can be: a boy, a wife, a barkless dog. Some love in there, for all of us. Some happiness for him. But the old love story was not yet over.

I could feel Lyle jumping against my dress, begging for more.

“Pearlie.”

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“I need your help.” From the bucket came a sigh, the melting ice collapsing on itself. “I’m leaving soon. I’m going to travel again, and I am taking Holland with me.”

I said that was not going to happen.

“Yes, it will, Pearlie. You know you can’t keep living this way.”

“Let us be,” I said. “Why did you come here?”

“To talk to you. To set you free.”

“Damn you. Don’t pretend you’re helping me—”

“We have to help each other.”

“What does Holland say?”

Buzz didn’t move. Headlights of a car going by lit up his hair, shining like a cap of silver cloth; he was handsome again in that light, terribly in love, heartbroken, a jilted lover trying to hold back any sign of it from me.

“I see,” I said.

“Yes. It’s complicated.”

“Holland doesn’t want to leave us, does he?”

“There is something holding him back—” he began.

I shook my head to keep from hearing him. Holland and I had talked about our friends and our childhoods and movies and books and politics—we had agreed and disagreed and had our fights and merry moments over a beer—but I think it’s fair to say we had never spoken honestly in all our lives. And, in my peculiar way, I had thought that I was happy. At the time, my sense was that marriage was like a hotel shower: you get the temperature right and someone just beyond the wall turns on his shower and you are stung with ice water, you adjust the heat only to hear him yelp from pain, he adjusts his, and so on until you reach a tepid compromise that both of you can endure.

“Let us be. I can’t help you.”

“I know you will. You must.”

“But he’s my husband, I love him.”

“Now you know you’re not the only one,” he said. It was a different voice, not the one he’d practiced over the years. The fractured voice of a man who traveled the world to escape a broken heart, who returned to an empty apartment, with all the old photos, nothing changed. Who lay awake wondering how he lost all he ever cherished.

Not the only one. As if all claims were equal claims, and marriage and children and years of life meant nothing; as if his love were as dense and bright as a star, outweighing any others. Mine, my son’s. The world went not to the meek but to the heart-wrung, the starving, the passionate. The rest barely counted as living. The world went to men like Buzz.

It had been a long time since I’d seen straight through a man. I had spent my days caring for my little boy, and for my husband, and for my house; it was simpler not to notice other people. Other people hide themselves, after all; they work so hard to do it. But a writer once said that pain reveals things. I think that was true of Buzz, when the light came in and I glimpsed the suffering that had brought him to this.

I watched a car’s headlights reach through the window and draw a line across the poor man’s broken nose. It stilled me, and for a moment I believed him. There was the proof of the suffering he was willing to endure. There it was, smashed into his face so he could never for an instant forget it.

“You won’t be abandoned, I promise you that. I’ve thought it all over.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“I can take care of you, Pearlie,” he told me.

I threw Lyle more ice and he caught it, taking it out into the hall where he could fracture it in privacy. “I can’t listen to this.”

“I can help you if you help me.”

He said it very plainly then. For a long time, in that living room, he explained what he had in mind, and I said nothing at all as he described how he would give me his fortune if I would help him. You could say he was bargaining for my husband. “I can take care of you. Think of Sonny, and sending him to college. Life isn’t set, life isn’t done. Think of what you want.”

I said he couldn’t be serious, and he said nothing.

“Help you how?” I took him by the arm but couldn’t look at his face. Instead my eyes searched the room, that old living room of mine, that old witness to the events of my life. The wind blew around the house, and there, through the bottom of the door, a little sand began to make its way in. Off somewhere, a car radio started playing “Kiss of Fire.”

“There is someone in the way,” he said, smiling a little.

I would have lived in the Outside Lands forever, clipping my newspaper by the ocean, vines creeping over the house as in a fairy tale—Sleeping Duty—aunts numbing me from time to time with gifts and stories, kissing my husband every night before I went to bed; I would have borne it. But he came to my house, like a wave at high tide, and ruined the little castle I had built. I could not believe what I was hearing; I knew it was bad for all of us, and what he told me felt like an unearned punishment. Like an electrocution.

“Don’t ever come back here,” I said.