Marry Me (31 page)

He’s beautiful, Jerry, you’d love him, he’s a beautiful old guy I don’t know how old he is, he’s so young at heart.

He sounds pretty sexy.

He likes me. He calls me his daughter.

How nice. For him. And you.

Jerry had hated her flirtation, this summer of their affair, with the old painter, who taught winters in the city and who was what Jerry might have been: an artist, a free spirit. ‘How could I forget?’

‘It’s probably much too expensive for us. He fixed it up himself, did all the carpentry.’ She lowered her voice,
which had lifted in admiration. ‘It could be a place to put me until we’re ready to live together. He wouldn’t charge us much. The children wouldn’t have to change schools.’

‘How far is it from here?’

‘Only a mile.’

Jerry laughed. ‘Not very far on the way to Wyoming.’

Because Jerry’s Mercury had a noisy noxious broken muffler, they went in Sally’s grey Saab, whose starter had been fixed. Sally drove; Theodora sat uneasily in Jerry’s lap. The painter had built this high little house, a pagoda without dragons, on a slope of pines on the first of the hills behind Greenwood; rocks kicked loose from the road under the Saab’s wheels as it climbed. It was a cocky wood structure, three stories each smaller than the one beneath, as if a giant child had arranged them there. Jerry held Theodora uncomfortably in his arms; she was younger and lighter than Geoffrey, but holding her reminded Jerry of his own infant, and then he remembered how years before, in irrecoverable innocent days, Sally and Ruth swapped maternity clothes, their pregnancies tending to alternate, and he would come home to find Ruth in a russet wool dress, with pimento flecks, or a forest-green expandable skirt in which his eye expected Sally, whom he already, in an uncondensed undeclared way, did love.

The key was kept in a house a hundred yards down the road. As he and Theodora waited for Sally to return, the child leaned so far out from this strange man holding her that his shoulders began to ache with the pull, and he set her down on her own feet. She toddled onto the new lawn and made little footprints, at first accidentally,
then purposely. He thought of scolding her, but this seemed a betrayal of the children that were his to shape, and the rebuke stayed in his brain. Sally walking with her wide farm-girl gait uphill, arrived breathless, and let them in. The house was cold, colder than the outdoors.

‘He has electric heat,’ she said.

‘It’s not turned on.’

‘It’s turned low.’

Redwood beams and pine boards shellacked to an orange lustre clashed with elements of glass and flagstone; the space had the mystery of space enclosed within a tent. Between big windows set askew, rectilinear furniture had its angles under Oriental pillows. Wool throw-rugs tried to soften the flagstone floor. Pine branches just outside, shadows and reflections, entered the room like the spirits of animals, so the slats of the lean Danish furniture had the look of perches and ladders.

‘It’s a lovely house,’ he said, meaning it could not be lived in by him. It was the house of a man who had stripped his mind clean of everything but himself, his needs, his body, his pride.

‘The kitchen,’ Sally said, continuing the tour without inflection, a house agent persisting in a hopeless duty. ‘It’s small,’ she said, ‘but terribly workable. A typical man’s kitchen.’

‘He lives alone?’

‘With guests sometimes.’

‘Is he queer?’

‘Sometimes. He’s old, Jerry; he’s a philosopher. See all the bookshelves? There would be plenty of room for our books.’

‘I wouldn’t live with you here, would I?’

‘You could visit me. I think you
should
visit me, so the children would get used to you. Does that offend your scruples?’

‘Scruples? Do I have any?’

‘Please try not to be sad. Come. This is what I really want to show you.’ She led him up stairs that were polished boards hung in a spiral; she led him down a hall. Through doorways of untreated pine he saw beds of teak and airfoam, unmade. ‘The boys would have to double up,’ Sally explained. The hall ended at a bathroom whose fixtures were on a Roman scale. Beside the door a ladder had been fitted; Sally climbed it. Her bottom in its white pants sailed away above him like a balloon. ‘Come look,’ she called down.

She was standing in an octagonal room, the southern sides windowless, but the other sides open, to the tops of the pines and the sky, whose northern light was gathered by a tilted array of leaded panes that suggested, to Jerry, a man tipping a bowl to drain it, while others stood by thirsty. Clouds moved rapidly across these fixed panes. A large easel stood beneath them, vacant and new; only one season’s worth of palette scrapings smeared the sill. The absent painter was a tidy man, fond of good equipment – glass shelves, a drawing board of frosted Plexiglas, swivelling drafting lamps of German or Swedish manufacture. Jerry imagined the man’s paintings as abstract, lavish of canvas, hard-edged in the newest mode. He thought of a drawing board from his childhood; the pencil kept poking through the paper because he and a playmate had used it as a dart-board and as a workbench, and the hammered nails had left holes.

‘You hate it, don’t you?’ Sally asked.

‘No, of course I don’t. I admire it. When I was a kid I dreamed of having a place like this.’

Sally waited for him to go on, then said, ‘Well, it’s much too expensive for us. He wants two-twenty a month, and the heating bill would be awful.’

‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘It – it almost seems too nice for us. Right now.’

He watched her anxiously, to see if she understood. She nodded rapidly,
yes yes
, like an absent-minded machine. Sally said, ‘We must go back. Peter will be home from kindergarten and I must make lunch. Do you want to have lunch with us?’

‘Sure,’ Jerry said. ‘We – I have a baby-sitter.’

Peter was not yet back. Ruth drove this same car pool Thursdays. It seemed another belt of time altogether in which Jerry had seen Ruth, in her soft black dress, smile and disappear, saying ‘Car keys, car keys’ comically to herself. Sally was saying, as she set four places at the heavy walnut kitchen table, ‘I asked the boys this morning if they would like to have Mr Conant come live with them, and they thought for a while and then Bobby said,
“Charlie
Conant.” They love Charlie, everybody does.’

‘Except poor Geoffrey.’

‘It’s because you don’t
dis
cipline them, Jerry. Bobby tries to pick on Peter but I just won’t have it. I will not stand for it, and I tell him why. I think it’s very important, that children be told the
why
of everything.’

‘How shall I tell mine why I’m leaving them?’

She took it as a serious question. ‘Just tell them, you and Mommy like each other very much but think you’d be happier living apart. That you love them very much
and will see them often and give them all the security you can.’

‘Security. That’s sort of your operational word, isn’t it?’

She looked up with darkened eyes. ‘Is it?’

‘I don’t mean it unkindly. Everybody has to have a word. Mine is faith. Or is it fear? Ruth’s, in a funny way, is freedom. Going off this morning, she seemed happy. She was getting a divorce from everything.’

‘You’ve given her a pretty bad time,’ Sally said.

‘I did it for you.’

‘No. I don’t think so. You did it because you like doing it. You’ve given me a pretty bad time, too.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

She smiled, wryly, then widely. ‘Don’t look so sad, man. We expect it.’ She was tearing leaves of lettuce from the head for sandwiches. He found himself irritated by her wasteful way of cutting out the heart first. She was full of faintly ruthless kitchen tricks like that. Everything in her kitchen glittered, glinted; whereas his kitchen at home was dim and cool even in summer.

Sally handed Theodora a slice of buttered bread and asked, ‘What’s Richard’s word?’

Jerry felt relieved, to have Richard named, to have him brought back into the house this way. ‘Richard? Does he have a word? I was struck last night by how responsible he is. I mean, he saw everything instantly in its social context – lawyers, schools for the children.’

‘I don’t think you know him very well,’ Sally said.

‘What would he do – never mind.’

‘Ask it.’

‘What would he do to you if I backed out?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘No, he wouldn’t do anything, Jerry. Maybe he’d sulk and make me crawl for a few weeks, but he wouldn’t do anything, and it’s not because of any love of family either. It’s just a divorce would cost him money and he doesn’t like to spend money. So don’t let that stop you.’

‘Stop me? Am I going somewhere?’

‘I feel so, yes,’ Sally said, turning off the soup, which had begun to boil.

Peter came home; Janet Hornung was driving the car pool, and Jerry, though exposed by the presence of his car in the driveway, hid in the kitchen while Sally called brightly to Janet by the door where asters were still in bloom. Peter raced into the kitchen, stopped, and stared at Jerry solemnly. Of Sally’s three children he had least of Richard in him. Jerry found this the opposite of reassuring; for Peter might be the child he and Sally would have created, obliterating the others and demanding for himself the total sum of love now scattered and diffuse. Peter’s fine little features – covered, even the ears and nose, with a translucent fuzz visible in the sunlight – brought Sally’s tensely spun beauty into a male face, where it posed too sharp a question. Jerry missed that hint of weight, of obtuse toughness, that Richard’s other children had inherited. ‘Hello, Peter,’ Jerry said. ‘It’s just me. How was school?’

The child smiled. ‘O.K.’

‘What did you learn?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Your mommy says you can button your own buttons now.’

Peter nodded, strangely made sad and apprehensive again. ‘I can’t tie my shoes.’ He spoke quite distinctly with an artificial poise, like Sally when, in Washington, she had spoken to hotel staff and the people at the airport.

‘It’s hard,’ Jerry said. ‘It’s hard to tie your shoes. And after you learn that, you have to learn how to tie a necktie and how to shave.’

The child nodded, fascinated and wary, perhaps sensing that here, in this not unknown talking man puzzlingly present in broad daylight without his own children, he was meeting the source of the unhappiness that had come from somewhere and filled his house. To show he meant no harm, Jerry sat down on a kitchen chair. Theodora arrived from the hall and with her mouth shiny from the buttered bread tried to climb into Jerry’s lap. Not attuned to her movements and expectations, he was slow to help her up; she felt awkward and hurtful in his lap, bonier than Geoffrey. Sally came in from having seen her fellow-mother safely down the drive, and her first thought was to separate him from the children. She settled Theodora and Peter around the table (a deep shadow swept across its grained surface) with milk and chicken soup, and served Jerry a sandwich and wine in the living room (where the sun came out again, making the tile surface of the coffee table too bright to look at). The wine was not last night’s wine, but a dry Bordeaux, so pale it glimmered green, as if with the ghost of the grape leaf, in the two frail-stemmed glasses. The sandwich, salami and lettuce, filled his mouth like a plea, a leafy, peppery blend of apology and promise. He had little appetite but tried to chew.

You’re so big for me, Jerry. Too big.

Not really. Am I?

Oh, yes. Yes. You fill me all up. It’s alarming.

It is? How nice of you to say so.

I mean it. Ow.

Sally Bless you.

He sat in Richard’s dirty old leather chair, leaving her all of the white sofa. She did not sit, or eat, but prowled along the windows, holding her glass by its stem, her white pants taking long soundless strides, her hair almost floating behind her.

‘How nice all this is,’ he said.

‘Why are you frightening me?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t you come out and say it?’

‘Say what?’

‘Ask me why I told him so much. Tell me that I pushed you.’

‘You had a right to push me, a little. You’d earned the right. It was I who had no right, no right to want you – it was all right to love you, but I shouldn’t have wanted you. It’s wrong to want somebody in the same way you’d want a – lovely thing. Or an expensive house, or a high piece of land.’

‘I suppose,’ she said carelessly, as if her thoughts were with her children in the kitchen, or with the aeroplane rumbling distantly overhead.

‘There’s this odd blackness within me,’ he felt he must explain, ‘that keeps bubbling up and taking the taste out of the wine.’

She quickly came close to him, potentially wild; in a rough gesture she gathered all her loose hair from the sides of her face and pulled it back in a fist and held it
at the nape of her neck. She looked down at him and asked in urgent accusation, ‘Can’t you stop being so depressed?’

He looked up at her and imagined himself on his death-bed and asked himself,
Is this the face I want to see?

Asking it was the answer: her face pressed upon his eyes like a shield, he saw no depth of sympathy in Sally’s face, no help in making this passage, only an egoistic fear, fear so intense her few faint freckles looked pricked, in her skin pulled taut by the hand clamped at the back of her head.

He embraced her upwards clumsily, her body resisting bending, her arm refusing to let go of her hair. As he closed his eyes, the darkness between them reddened and warmed, and continued to widen, beyond them both, so in his mind’s eye he saw them from a great height, clasped on a raft in the midst of an unbounded blood-red ocean. The aeroplane rattled the sky, receding.

The children came in, fed: Jerry quickly whispered, ‘I’ve lost my nerve.’

Sally stood erect, glanced down, and released her hair from her fist so it fell, relaxing slowly, like a parted rope, down her back. ‘Let’s go for a ride,’ she said. ‘It’s too nice a day to waste.’