The End of Always: A Novel (16 page)

The man at the table next to ours used a roll to wipe up the grease from the last of his sausages. He sipped his coffee and looked past me out into the street and squinted at the passing scene. He sat so quietly and with his attention directed so fully elsewhere that I knew he had been listening to everything we said. I wanted to scream at him to mind his own business. To stay out of this, for the things that passed between August and me were private and belonged to no one but us.

But I knew that was not true. If anything, nothing about this was private at all. My father and August, establishing the rules and measures and boundaries of their trade, working out the details, figuring their gains and losses, locked in their dance: these in fact marked out the world in definite and definable ways. And the man sitting next to us had clearly recognized the story. It might have been his story for all I knew, and if not his exactly, then similar to ones he knew well. Surely he had paid for something he coveted himself. Surely he had put cash in the bank.

“Do you want me to go?” I said.

“No, I do not want you to go,” August said. He took my hands in his and rolled the bones in my fingers until I bit my lips to keep from crying out. He let go of my hands. “I want you to stay forever,” he said in a wretched voice, the words coiling slowly out of him as if he could not bear to say them. “The way we said.”

When I did not reply, he stood up and came around the table and dropped to his knees. He wrapped his arms around my legs. He buried his face in my lap. His voice was muffled but he told me that he had loved me since the very first day he had set eyes on me. All he wanted was for me to be happy. All he wanted was to go to the courthouse and stand in front of a justice and get on with it. Then he said that if my happiness meant that I should leave him right then and there, he would not stop me. He would step back and let me go. He would never darken my doorway again.

He said all of this in a very dramatic way and I was embarrassed. I am not the kind of person who calls attention to herself in public. The man at the table next to ours cleared his throat and signaled to the woman at the stove that he wanted to pay. A man in grimy overalls opened the front door and after him came two older boys with jackets slung over their shoulders. They stepped into the tearoom and looked at me and looked at August on his knees with his face pressed into my lap and then stepped around him and took a table near the back. I felt the damp heat of August’s words when he breathed them through my skirt. He was new to me again and I wasn’t sure I liked this part of him. But then he began to stroke my calves under my skirt, his palms gently cupping the curve of my legs, his fingertips lightly brushing my stockings and then sliding between my knees, and I felt that same quiver run up my body that always ran up my body when August touched me. My muscles softened and I sagged a little. At that moment, he was August again and any doubt I might have had rippled away.

Outside, the street had filled with wagons and men in dark hats on horseback and women with parasols, as if they expected the sun to be bright and hot this early in spring. Inside our own world, August breathed warm air onto my thighs and steadily caressed my legs until I told him again that I would marry him. It did not take long.

By the time we walked down to the courthouse, horses were tied up at the long poles in front, their wagons and buggies angled behind them into the street. August pointed to the doorway that led to the jail where he had been locked up, but of course I already knew where it was, since it stood next to the police station, where in the late fall I had stood in the cold, trying to think of exactly the right words to say when I told the police that my father had murdered my mother. As we crossed the road, I thought I saw Edwin moving toward me. But when I looked again, the sidewalk was bare and sunny and there was only a wooden Indian in front of a cigar store.

We climbed the main steps and passed through the wooden doors into a dim lobby with a polished marble floor. When a man dropped his key ring, the sound came over me like a shot. Above, a huge marble staircase led to the second floor. August took my hand and led me up the broad steps and along a wide corridor until we stood in front of a door that was half opaque milk glass and lettered in black and gold with the words
Clerk of Court
.

He squeezed my hand. “Are you ready?”

I leaned into him. I breathed in the smell of him. I put aside everything I thought I knew, the deal he made with my father, the way our future seemed a little less clear than it had before. I did not care about any of it. I just cared about the pounding in my chest. August’s touch on my skin. The next thing that would happen, the idea of which shuddered through me, as if I had already seen August naked in the light of day, already felt him pierce me to my soul.

“Yes,” I said. He put his arm around me and hugged me tight. Then he opened the door and we went inside.

When Martha and I were little, we played dress-up. We riffled through my mother’s trunk and wrapped ourselves in old tablecloths and bits of lace left over from the curtains she’d made. We strapped our waists with lengths of ribbon and fought over who got to wear the white, for there were only two kinds of ribbon in the trunk, white and a sort of ugly navy, and we both knew that brides did not wear navy. We wanted to put on these clothes and feel wholly and completely in our bodies, as if we had traveled through time to the day when we would occupy the places we were meant to stand. We walked around the house with napkins on our heads. We stomped through the yard and sang a song without melody, pretending it was the Wedding March. We had no idea what the Wedding March might sound like or if something called the Wedding March even existed, but we had the idea that when you got married, you marched like a soldier into a land to which you otherwise did not belong. You needed a marching song if you were going to do that. You needed a good strong beat, like an anthem, to drive you forward.

I had no wedding dress, no flowers, no ring, no father to give me away, no sisters dressed in pretty gowns to precede me down the aisle, no mother to weep when I went into the arms of my husband. I did not care. I had August. It was springtime, when everything begins and begins and begins. I felt slightly sick with excitement. I wondered if I could be undone by happiness.

The justice of the peace told us that he tended to keep these things brief and to the point and he hoped we didn’t mind. If we did, we might want to wait and go and see a preacher. But August said that we were ready now. The judge picked up a New Testament from the top of his desk and flipped to a place marked with a purple satin ribbon. He read the declarations and the vows quickly and in a straightforward way, without inflection or interest, as if he were reading the directions to a kit. August said I do and I said I do and the justice said, “By the powers vested in me by the state of Wisconsin and the county of Waukesha, I now pronounce you man and wife.”

He closed the book and held it in front of his waist with his arms crossed before him. “She belongs to you now, son,” he said. “You can kiss her right here if you want to.”

August smiled and turned toward me. He cupped my chin in his hands and leaned down and kissed me, a bottomless, watery kiss that made me disappear into him again, my chest aching with pleasure, my hands held dumbly at my sides. When I reached up to hold him and his kiss deepened, the justice said, “That’s fine, now, that’s fine.” And so we stood looking into each other’s eyes. And then we began to laugh. We laughed until our breath was nearly gone. We laughed until we could not speak. We laughed until my ribs hurt, and August ran his wrists over his eyes, where tears had sprung up and now ran down his cheeks. We laughed with the justice of the peace looking on and we were still laughing when August threw his arms around me and yelled, “To hell with them! Right?”

When we finally broke apart, he took my hand and led me out of the judge’s chambers, racing through the hallway, clattering down the stairs, through the echoing hush of the courthouse lobby, and into the clear light of day. Just across the street stood a huge elm tree and under its spreading branches I saw Edwin. He stared at us and walked up and down and stared at us again and then stood in the shade, wringing his hands. I grinned and waved but Edwin did not wave back.

If just for a moment I thought of my mother, I did not think of her long. I pushed her memory away, the dark red of her wedding dress, the dress plastered by blood to her body on the last day of her life. I nursed my happiness like it was a bubble that could still expand. Much to my amazement, it did.

When the streetcar came along, I climbed the iron steps and made my way behind August, who came along the aisle until he found two seats side by side. He paid the conductor and the conductor dropped our fare into slots in the top of a machine he wore strapped to his waist.

I had never ridden the interurban before. When we pulled out, the hard jolt surprised me. Sparks poured down and we picked up speed and wind whipped in through the open windows. The wheels clattered and the racket inside the car was deafening. Whenever we hit a curve, we all leaned far to the right, or far to the left, until I thought we might tip over. But we did not. We just hurtled along as if we were racing into the future.

August put his mouth against my ear. “Two stops,” he said.

The town slid by. People looked up at us as we passed and the gray river came suddenly into view and just as suddenly slipped away. August pulled the cord and the bell rang. We came to a stop in front of a dry-goods store. We climbed down and August took my hand as the streetcar pulled away. We walked two blocks to a tall yellow house, where we turned up a gravel drive and came along past the raw frame of a building that someone had started at the bottom of the yard. On either side, houses with white cotton curtains blowing out of the open windows so close you could nearly reach out and touch them.

I looked over my shoulder when August climbed the steps to unlock our door, but I did not see my father pounding up the street. I did not see Martha hovering in her irritating, painful way, her gaunt face reproachful, as if my behavior forced her to suffer endless regret. I did not see Hattie, although this left me with some sadness, for I would have liked to have had Hattie at my wedding. I would have liked to have seen her dance down the aisle the way she had danced in the rain.

But too late now. I had really done it. I had left them all behind. A strange feeling of relief juddered through me, down my arms to the ends of my fingertips, down my legs to the soles of my feet.

The rooms were nearly empty but they were clean. In the sitting room, into which we stepped from the porch, a tiny spindly couch with torn blue upholstery stood against the wall. Two wooden chairs and a worn painted table with a scalloped apron had been placed under a window. Beyond that was a room someone had set up to be the kitchen. It had a large window that looked out on the driveway and a very small stove and an old icebox. A rusty sink. Sunlight vivid on the floor. The door to the bedroom opened off of the kitchen and I followed August as he set my valise on the bed. Someone had made it up with a faded green quilt and two flat pillows naked of their pillow slips. There was a washstand with a cracked pitcher and bowl and a small mirror and a wardrobe with one door hanging open and a bare window that looked out over the empty side yard.

August looked at me and then looked around. “It is not much now,” he said. “But you can fix it as you would like.”

“No,” I said. “I like it.”

He smiled and crossed the floor and put his arms around me and dropped his face into my hair. I felt his heart beating in his chest. “What do you think?” he said softly. “Are you tired?” And I shook my head no even though I had never been more tired in my life. I felt his hands slide to my waist. He leaned back and began to unbutton my blouse, each button, one by one. He unfastened my skirt and pulled my blouse from my shoulders and let my skirt and blouse fall to the floor, a pile of green, black ribbons that matched the black ribbons banding my green skirt, like shadows in the forest. I felt his hands on my buttons, my snaps, my hooks and strings, all the trappings that kept me laced and bound and tightened down. He put his hands on my shoulders and very slowly slid them down my chemise, over my breasts, over my ribs, over my stomach, until he could slide a hand between my thighs. He let his hand rest there, still as a stick, and I breathed harder and still he did not move and I breathed harder still and squirmed against his palm, yearning. Looking into his eyes. Breathing harder. Only then did he push me back onto the bed, where my valise fell to the floor. I sat up and pulled my chemise over my head and leaned back on my elbows and watched him. He took his shirt off first and then his trousers and then his drawers. I had never seen him before, but only knew him as a shadow in the darker shadow of the night. Now he stood before me in the slow float of differing light, daylight now and no longer dark, and nothing that was quite his, nothing quite mine, but only a desire that was our whole, then, desire and freedom. I felt light-headed and urgent, restored to myself and new at the same time. He smiled boldly and stood over me, his body light and golden and strong. He lay down next to me and did nothing at first, just looked at me, looked at my skin, my body, my shivering limbs. Then he kissed me and I sank into his kiss. He pulled away and smiled at me and reached down and moved his fingers against me and I cried out and then I was nothing but trembling flooded with blurred light. Only then did he move over me, part my legs with his hands, move me the way he wanted me, move into me. I arched my back and opened to him and then my eyes filled with tears and he kept on and kept on and I had as with a vision the thought that even our dust would be mingled together forever. Each stroke was a seal, a promise, and I moved under him as if against my own will, crying out, and then his voice washed over me, a great jerking groan and I felt him quaking inside me.