The Forever Marriage (2 page)

It had happened entirely by accident, about a year ago. Jobe and Carmen had been at a Federal Hill restaurant with people from his department and she had leaned back during a long conversation about the mathematical constants of bridge building, letting her ears relax so that she stopped processing syllables and heard only the various notes and sounds. When she saw Danny walking behind the maître d’ with a blonde at least ten years younger than he, she was numbly unsurprised. Carmen tracked them as if they were characters on a movie screen: the woman especially, who looked like a superhero cartoon character, constructed in perfect proportion for a form-fitting zip-up rubber suit.

Danny was in a soft blue shirt that night and his long black hair hung in a braid down his back. The very same back that she, Carmen, had dug her nails into just that morning as she strained against him and came. It was surreal to see him now, devotedly living his other life. But there was also power in watching—in his being unaware of it—and Carmen basked for several seconds in an unfamiliar sense of control.

Then Danny turned his head, as if he’d felt her eyes on him. He registered her with two blinks and accommodated quickly. Carmen saw him lean toward the blonde and whisper something into her ear; she imagined his breath, laced with American Spirit cigarettes and the vapor of hazelnut-flavored coffee, which he drank at his desk all day. Then they were walking over. It was an interesting move—ballsy and unnecessary—that felt to her like the opening play in some sort of
high-stakes competition. It turned her on, not just to him but in a general way.

“Carmen, hi! I thought that was you.” Danny seemed proud, standing close enough that she could smell his cologne, which was leathery and sweet. “I’d like you to meet my wife, Mega.”

Danny and the superhero shook hands all around: Carmen, Jobe, plus the various other mathematicians who were sitting at the table, nodding and pushing their glasses up, ogling Mega’s tiny waist and perfect melon breasts.

“Jobe,” she said, as her lover’s hand reached out to meet her husband’s, “this is Danny. He works at Enoch Pratt.”

“Ah, the library,” Jobe said, nodding. And there was that interminable pause that always followed his pronouncements of the obvious, while everyone at the table struggled for a way to continue. Carmen breathed through the space, the way she’d learned to do.

“So what do you do, Jobe?” Danny finally asked, though he knew not only
what
but also the specifics of the Riemann hypothesis and had gone so far as to research “nontrivial zeros” one day when the library was slow. “I can usually wrap my head around any topic well enough to give you the high points, at least,” he’d told Carmen afterward. “But I’ve read about a dozen articles on this Riemann thing and whatever it is just evades me. Something about prime numbers, quantum mechanics, the meaning of life.” Danny had shrugged. “Your husband must be freakishly smart. Some kind of modern-day Gauss.”

Yet now Jobe answered, as he typically did, “I teach,” and let it go at that. Sometimes his modesty struck her as false, this two-word response somehow more pompous than the longer one:
I’m the Dwight Enright endowed professor of higher mathematics at Johns Hopkins
. On this night in the restaurant, however, she saw that it was in his view simply the most accurate and economical answer. Warmed by the combination of soft candlelight and wine—as well as the weirdly satisfying sense of being, literally, between these two men—she reached out and took Jobe’s hand.

“You make it sound as if you have a third-grade class somewhere,” she said, stroking his knuckles with her thumb. “Like you’re teaching simple division.”

Jobe looked startled. It was, possibly, the first time she’d touched him in weeks. He’d glanced at Carmen with gratitude—she remembered this now, at his funeral, how his eyes had suddenly been alight—before one of the other math guys broke in. “Might as well be,” he said gruffly. “Teaching the undergrads. All they care about is getting drunk and getting laid.”

“Sounds just like every third grader I know.” Danny flashed a quick “no-offense” grin and waved. “We’ll let you get back to your meal then,” he said, though there was no food left, all the plates had been cleared, and only Jobe was still drinking coffee.

This had happened during his remission: after the checkup where Jobe’s original cancer was pronounced “cured” but a few weeks before he would begin running a low fever, and bruises spread like ghostly crabgrass across his back and legs. That night when he was supposedly healthy they had made love, for the last time ever, even though she’d been slightly too full from the meal at the restaurant: fat homemade pasta, oily salad, and tiramisu for dessert.

If it had been Danny, she would have avoided sex because she felt flabby and possibly flatulent. But this was her husband. He had pulled at her nightgown, tugging at the hem like a child, the way he had for more than twenty years. And she had lifted it over her head without embarrassment. They hardly kissed any more; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d encountered his tongue. But that night she’d tried, a drunken experiment, and his beard felt stiff and foreign against her cheeks. Within minutes, Jobe was inside her and his long, bony body was against hers, like a pencil indenting a soft eraser. He moved in and out, pistons working. She couldn’t have reached his mouth again if she had wanted to—he was rigid and had drawn back for thrusting, so his face was too far above her head—but this only added to the alchemy. Alone beneath Jobe, Carmen entered a dreamy place where divisions disappeared.

Nearing orgasm, she pictured the moment when Danny and Jobe shook hands: palms pressed together, the two men had mingled. Minute dustings of each one left on the other. And this—having each of them inside her within the space of less than a day—felt not like a betrayal but like a gift: She was bringing together two completely disparate men to make a whole. The next morning, she’d been mortified by all this mental blather, even though only she knew how ridiculous she’d been.

Now she watched the priest drape Jobe’s coffin with an embroidered, white cloth and imagined his gaunt, still body inside. His cells, finally, had stopped reproducing their mutant selves. The factory of ducts and tubes that had produced his half of their children was silent. The hand that had once touched Danny’s was beginning already to decay.

The man who’d been present at the births of their children. The one she’d once promised to love until they were parted by death. The boy who had saved her twice when she was broke and offered her shelter and given her a family and to whom she owed a lifelong debt. So much for all that.

Carmen shivered. All morning she’d been numb, but now there was a big, empty space opening inside her, like a pool filled with ice into which she might fall. When Luca returned to the pew, she reached out and pulled him toward her, standing behind him, placing her chin on top of his squarish blond head. He patted her arm with stubby fingers and radiated a rosy glow that she could feel like sunlight warming her skin. Throughout the rest of the service he propped her up. But also, he was the only thing holding her firmly to the ground.

Their house was quiet in the days that followed. Carmen was expected to stay home.

The owner of the ad agency where she worked had come to the funeral and the luncheon afterward. Fred Lang was a tall, silver-haired man who did things the way they were supposed to be done: His tie was charcoal gray, his shoes polished but not shiny as befitted the
occasion. He kissed Carmen, Olive’s mustardy potato salad on his breath, and told her to take as much time as she needed.

“Such a tragedy. Jobe gone at forty-seven, his children still so young.” Fred shook his handsome head gravely. “Please. Call if there’s anything I can do.…” So many people said that. But what needed doing, Carmen thought, had finally been done.

Danny attended for only a few minutes, long enough to eat a few cookies and hug Carmen. No one noticed; everyone who came through the door was reaching for her. She clung to him for a good minute and breathed in his scent, then watched a little lost as he walked back out through the door. Olive, too, left early, supported on either side by her remaining two sons.

Her friend, Jana, had provided most of the food but had to leave midafternoon to attend to some refrigeration crisis at the café she owned. So a number of other people stayed on to clean up, chattering cheerfully and prolonging the task, it seemed, much longer than was necessary. Oddly, they were the ones Carmen knew least well—friends of friends or secretaries from the math department whom she’d never had the chance to meet—and none of them seemed to know the others. Yet they moved like a team and appeared to be having great fun.

Loudly, they devised an assembly line for washing the serving dishes and stowed them all over Carmen’s kitchen so she knew that she would be opening cupboards for months to find stray platters and creamers and big, metal spoons. But it was easier to let this happen, simpler than figuring out a way to say, “Please get out, I’ve been waiting for twenty years to have this home to myself. Just go.”

Finally, they did—all in a group that Carmen imagined would stay intact for years: They would start meeting for coffee once a month to discuss the sad event that brought them together, move on to trading book suggestions, form a club. And then, suddenly, she was alone in a house that felt as if it were breathing. She was in the living room, having just ushered the last of the do-gooders out onto the porch where she could hear them cluster and trade phone numbers and talk on. When she turned, she saw the outline of Jobe as if he’d
been drawn in white chalk against the empty air, ducking his head so as not to hit it on the ceiling as he came down the front stairs.

The children were watching TV in the den with the volume turned down so low they couldn’t possibly hear it. Siena was talking as if she couldn’t stop and the boys would answer her, Michael’s voice high and Luca’s thick and low. Carmen knew she should go in and say something to them but she simply didn’t know what that thing was. While she tried to figure it out, she walked through the rooms of the house, touching items. It seemed odd to her that Jobe was gone but his clunky black watch still lay on the kitchen counter, casually, as if it were something he’d meant to take with him but had accidentally left behind.

Around nine o’clock, she stood in the doorway looking at her three children on the couch. The program was changing, going from flashy half-hour comedies to an hour-long drama, something with lawyers.

“I just wanted to check…” Carmen began. The children turned to her, Michael and Siena with faces not frightened but flat and lifeless. Carmen’s heart beat fast. Could the death of a father be communicable, she wondered? Maybe his children were in danger of tripping off the earth after him. She would have to keep watch.

“You seem glad that he’s dead,” Siena said abruptly, and Carmen caught her breath. Her mind raced: Siena knew! She’d been living with the fact that her mother did not really love her father. That when she, Carmen, grabbed her gym bag at 6:00 a.m. and claimed to be taking an early morning spinning class, she actually was leaving to fuck a long-haired librarian at a hotel with a low, last-minute Price-line rate. In that moment, Carmen’s carefully constructed world seemed to be made of wet paper.

She thought about turning and leaving. Then she looked at Siena and saw there was none of this: no sneering or disapproval. This wasn’t about her or Danny, their infidelity; it was about Jobe. “I’m happy for
him
,” she said, at least half honest. “For your father. I’m very glad he’s no longer in pain.”

Siena nodded and Carmen breathed. This was the right answer. “And none of us has to worry about him anymore. You included. It’ll get easier. You’ll go to school and it will feel better, not having to think about your father here, lying in bed so miserable, wondering if he’s”—she swallowed only slightly before saying what came next—“died yet. Now, you know.”

“But I
don’t
know. At least, before, I could picture where he was. Now, he’s just … gone.” Something washed across Siena’s face and Carmen recognized it immediately as nausea. Years of mothering kicked in. She considered, briefly, grabbing Siena’s arm and whisking her into the bathroom rather than let her make a mess on the rug. Then the moment passed.

“Dad’s fine. He’s happy now.” Luca would have sounded matter-of-fact except that he couldn’t, the way his teeth hugged his fat tongue and the words came out like they were wrapped in cloth.

“You don’t know that,” Siena hissed, turning. And Carmen watched as she always did, the way these two wavered and danced, taking turns being the older child. Luca’s placidity and three extra years of life meant the title was his. But he couldn’t add a column of numbers or summarize a newspaper article. Siena, who was taking AP pre-calc this year and had her first boyfriend—an eerily polite kid named Troy who’d attended the funeral with his mother and held Siena’s hand when they stood beside the grave—enjoyed every advantage. Sometimes, like now, Carmen resented her daughter for this.

“Yes, I do.”
Yeth, ah doo
. “Dad told me.”

“When?” Carmen asked. “When did he tell you?”

“The night he died.”
Daahd
.

Carmen leaned her head against the doorway. “How did he tell you?”

Michael’s gaze switched back and forth between his mother and his brother, like someone monitoring a debate.

“This is bullshit! I’m not listening to this.” Siena stood, her face even whiter than before. Carmen put two fingers on her daughter’s arm as she flew by. It wasn’t much, but enough to make contact, to
say:
I’m here. I’m staying. I’m not as good a person as your father, maybe, but I’m going to stick around
.

“You probably had a dream, honey.” Michael’s frightened face floated in the periphery and Carmen was aware that she had two parenting jobs to do at once. It came as a sharp surprise that what she needed—what she wanted in that moment—was Jobe. He could talk to Luca while she took Michael into the kitchen and comforted him. She pictured them with their heads together: Jobe would be grave, serious about Luca’s claims. There were infinities too small to calculate, she could imagine him saying to their older son. Particles that couldn’t be seen even under the most powerful microscope. Who’s to say there weren’t also spirits made up of all the tiny, incalculable bits that humans left behind?