On the Yard (34 page)

She turned to study the hall. “Somehow I never pictured you having a big wedding like this.”

“Anna Marie's family arranged it.” He smiled. “I paid the priest myself.”

“Well, that after all is traditional. The bride's parents pay for the wedding, and we must assume they have bought what they wanted.”

“I'm enjoying it.”

“Good.” She paused, studying him. “I hope you'll be happy, Paul. You deserve to be.”

He remembered that her lipstick had seemed like tinted grease. His brother-in-law, his wife's sister's husband, had drunk himself sick and vomited all over his rented dinner jacket. It was impossible to clean and had to be paid for. This furnished talk for a month.

When he and Anna Marie left the reception they went straight home to the apartment he had rented and undressed in the dark. He wore a new pair of shorts he had bought just for this moment. It never occurred to him that she might be even shyer than he was. Shy and frightened as well.

Her mother and an older aunt had taken her aside during the day for the purpose of sharing a woman's knowledge with her, and they had terrified her with their stories of a man's excesses. The aunt whispered, “Your uncle clawed me all along the sides. He was like a maniac. I carried the marks of his teeth for months.” The aunt sighed, her eyes fluttered. Her mother gave her a bottle of petroleum jelly. “This will make it a little easier,” she said.

Anna Marie never said a word, lying in the center of the swaying bed. The Vaseline was in her purse. He found her in the dark and pulled her to him. Rubbing her sides. She was so small. He was vaguely surprised to discover that her hidden skin was not as smooth as that of her arms. He put her on her back and tented himself over her on his knees and elbows. He pushed in gently, and even when this was done without difficulty he continued softly. It was all over quickly and he found he was still excited.

“May I ... again?” he asked.

And she said quietly there in the dark, “If you think you should.”

Later, as he was on the verge of sleep, she said, “I thought it was supposed to feel different than that.” And sketched one of the lines along which their future battles would be fought.

The next day, the sister and her husband came by, eager to see what they could glean, and the husband asked, “How many bullets did you shoot last night?”

Paul shrugged, declining to answer, but Anna Marie had squared around to challenge him, though at the time he didn't recognize it for what it was. “You were like a baby,” she said. “I had to hold you in my arms both times.” He nodded, thinking to please her.

And the sister said, “Look, he just nods.”

They acted as if he had convicted himself of something. What did it mean? That she took even the small consideration he had shown her for weakness, or only that she was willing to represent it to her family as weakness? Or was she punishing him because the night had been a disappointment to her? He didn't know. He still didn't know ... and was it worth all his anxious reappraisals? He knew it wasn't. A marriage had gone violently sour. Marriages were going sour all over. Still the first flecks of rot had seemed tragic, and even when the fruit was mush in both their hands, neither of them had been able to let go of it.

The truth, then—they had held nothing else in common.

He tried to see her as he had seen her first, carefully reconstructing her air of freshness and untouched passion, the bright, new, unopened container, and listening carefully to the inflection of her voice, studying the lulls in her expressive face, he was forced to realize he should have known better. He had superimposed a dream over her face. And the dream hadn't even been his own, but one he had borrowed. The fault remained his.

“You going to shave, Paul?” Manning asked.

He felt his cheeks. “No, not tonight.”

“I think I will.”

Now Juleson heard the heavy metal wheels of the water truck a few cells away, and watched Manning place their can at the bars. The water man came into sight, pulling his truck like an ox. He filled the can, using a frayed red rubber hose.

Manning shaved with face soap, they had nothing else, but with his light beard he found it less uncomfortable than Juleson did. He worked the soap into a stiff lather and patted it on his face. Through the mirror he saw Juleson's eyes over the edge of his book.

“No good?” Manning asked.

“It's all right. I just can't hold my mind on it. I suppose I should have taken up something like you have. Made some use of my time.”

Manning was sharpening a razor blade on the heel of his palm. “You have lots of time.” He smiled. “I don't mean to do. I mean in your life. For myself, I can't afford to waste anything.”

“You're not that old, Will.”

“No, but I don't have any real idea how old I am, because I don't know how long they'll keep me here. But even if they let me out tomorrow, I'd be much older in several ways than I was when I came in.” He turned back to the sink, fitting the blade into the razor. “You're young enough to make a fresh start. I'm not.”

“Still I could have put this time to better use. I don't know why I didn't. There were so many things I thought I wanted to learn when I didn't have the time, then when I had too much time—” He grinned wryly, indicating his book.

“Anything you learn is valuable.”

“No, this is an indulgence. The distant—in time or place —it's a trip. Unless you're a specialist of some kind. I might as well read shoot-'em-ups, for all the value I get from what I do read.”

Manning made no answer. He was guiding the razor down his cheek, his mild, temperate eyes following the stroke. A modest man. He had asked too little. And Juleson? He had asked too much.

“Do you think she'll come?”

Manning looked at him through the mirror. “Pat?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know what to think.”

“Do you want to see her?”

“Yes, I suppose I do, but I'm not sure it's a good idea. I keep asking myself what it is she wants.”

“What could it be?”

“There are a lot of legal things—title to the house, the car, insurance policies. She may want my power of attorney.”

“Maybe she's sorry she threw you to the police.”

“She had a right to do that.”

“Even so, she didn't have to exercise it. You weren't making a steady thing of the girl—you probably wouldn't have bothered her again.”

“I'm not sure of that.”

“Still in terms of all your lives, that might have been better than what has happened.”

Manning turned to stare at him. “It was grotesque.”

Juleson was embarrassed by the intensity of Manning's gaze. “I shouldn't talk about it. My interest is ... irresponsible.”

His interest was more complicated than it was easy for him to admit. In a sense he envied Manning his crime, and he couldn't help contrasting the other man's impulse to his own. Sexual aggression, even the most brutal, could be seen to stem from some basic hopefulness, and his own sterile violence appeared inhuman by contrast. He was able to concede that his view might be naïve, lacking in sophisticated insight, or more reasonably faltering in the profusion of such insights acquired at second and third hand, but he resisted fiercely any tendency he sensed in himself to slip off the hook through a manipulation of standard values. Those values he had carried out of childhood, and no matter how he might have come to dilute them with qualifications, he still didn't want them reversed. He didn't want to be told, with the weight of a conviction exceeding the suspect charm of novelty, that violence might be a mask of love. Such tenets would form the foundation and ridgepole of an existence too baffling to cope with. In preference he accepted guilt. Almost, he seemed greedy for it. Still he continued to go back over the ground.

It had been a picture wedding. When the photographs were delivered they could easily have been assembled for the pages of
Bride
, a mock ceremony staged with a close eye to classic detail. Running from the church in a cloud of rice and candied almonds. Cutting the cake, their hands enfolded on the knife. Anna Marie throwing her bouquet. Anna Marie throwing her garter. Anna Marie posed with her parents. Paul with his ushers, all of them in rented dinner jackets. White jackets and maroon ties like dusty moths. He did look tired. His mouth was styled in a vivid smile, but his eyes were exhausted, and the effect was to make them appear years older than the rest of his face.

The photographs were full of a marvelous and emblematic significance as if the wedding had been purified of everything but its symbolic value, and Paul sought his own image in print after print, not to compare, but to see it there in permanent relation to those others. The orphan had stolen a family.

But if he had planned in his orphan dreams how he would use marriage as a beachhead for his assault on some community, Anna Marie had rehearsed for life in movie houses and in front of the television set. She rendered the episodes of their life together into the stock situations common to romantic films and responded according to the models she had studied. She knew her lines. This was how life was magnified and salvaged from the commonplace, but Paul could seldom be sure whether he was dealing with Anna Marie or with Lana Turner. And most of the time he refused to recognize that there was a difference. Still something had aged the eyes in those photographs.

The times when she moved beneath him with the heat of her own blood in her face were very rare, and often he saw the shallow glaze of impersonation.

Shortly after they were married she began to devise testing situations—propositions beginning with, “If you loved me ...” At first he was agonized. She was constantly pretending to throw their life away to see if he would retrieve it, and even when repetition had dulled his anxiety he was still heartsore to discover that she could conduct such exercises. Far more than he didn't want to endure the trauma of their obscure quarrels, he didn't want her to be capable of the devices she employed. He continued to hope for magical solutions, but each mechanical recapitulation of their courtship was shabbier than the preceding. Still there was something between them.

Four years passed. She refused to have a child because she was afraid he wouldn't love her while she was fat. She formed an addiction, at least psychological, to a diet pill that dulled her appetite and prevented her from sleeping. She inhabited the house at night like a hamster, nibbling on Fig Newtons and Snow Balls. Often he would find her in the morning propped up in front of the television, asleep, the screen blank, or already into the morning testing patterns, the room blanketed with the even electronic hum that seemed loud in the quiet house and somehow shameful with its implications of waste and disorder. They made few friends. Instead of a botanist he became a landscape gardener. She was a nut. The lovely girl was a nut.

But it was as just to say the handsome boy was a nut. He beat her periodically, and thus squandered the emotional energy he would have needed to leave her. He knew it was necessary, if either of them were to realize anything from their lives, but he couldn't leave her. He couldn't force himself to make the break.

And that was it, he thought, closing the history of Iceland and laying the book aside. He needed a smoke. Had there been tobacco in the cell he would have broken his resolution without hesitation. He couldn't leave her even after he understood that it was their mismatch—she had recognized it earlier, and understood it better—which was driving Anna Marie wild. The fresh young faces in the wedding pictures had been a terrible fraud.

“What time is it?” he asked Manning.

“I don't know. Close to lights out.”

Juleson got up to wash and undress. He brushed his teeth and folded his clothes over the end of the bed. Then he got under the blankets and opened his second book. It was a stock mystery by an author he sometimes enjoyed, but after several chapters he found he could read no more. He leaned half out of bed to drop the second book to the floor.

“Remind me to take that back to the library, will you?”

“All right.”

Manning was gathering and folding his circuit diagrams. “You're going to be ready, aren't you, Will?”

Manning paused to consider. “No, I think I'll need additional instruction on the more complex units, but I will have a head start.”

“That's what I meant.”

“It may not come to anything.”

Juleson continued to watch Manning, and from his raised position he noticed, as he had before, that Manning was beginning to go bald through the crown. The course of nature, cruelly accelerated by imprisonment, continued to rob Manning, still he made every preparation he was able to make to continue living profitably. His vital energies didn't seem to be necessarily linked to his hopefulness.

The lights went out, and Juleson turned to his pillow. He envied Manning. When Juleson had first come to prison his most significant act had been to pick up a nail in the lower yard. The nail was old and had probably been lying where he found it for several years, because it had formed a clot of rust which gave it roughly the shape of an arrowhead. He thought nothing of it when he stooped to pry it out of the hard earth—he could have picked up any of a dozen other objects—and he carried it in his hand for the rest of the day. Rubbing it with his thumb, bouncing it on his palm. Then rather than throw it away he had put it in his pocket. Without ever acknowledging to himself that he was keeping the nail he changed it from one pair of pants to another as automatically as he transferred his comb each time he took a shower and changed clothes. Often during the days he would find himself holding the nail, rubbing it with his thumb. He carried it for over two months, and when finally he threw it away, it took great effort not to pick it up again. It was only afterwards that he was willing to admit that the nail had become a charm. Then when he realized it was a charm, he wondered why he had thrown it away.