The Story of a Marriage (18 page)

“Oh yeah, baby!” I said, lifting him out and laughing with him. “Yeah, baby, you won!”

While my son stared at Hank’s car, I handed each freckled boy a dollar. But the rest I saved against our future, mine and Sonny’s, no matter what happened. I could not give him their childhood, but I could give him this.

Usually, on a Saturday, Holland and I would drop by the Furstenbergs to watch shows like
The Plainclothesman
and
Cavalcade of
Stars
until we were too tired to see, and then we’d dream in a flicker of guns and singing Swedes. I was willing to keep our schedule, as I was willing to make his dinners and accept his kisses when he came home from work; my life was just a wait for this to end. So it surprised me, after dinner, when my husband suggested we go dancing.

“The Rose Bowl,” he said.

“What made you think of that, after all this time?”

“It’s Negro Night.”

“I know.” I took his plate, leaning toward the sink. “But that’s so far …”

He looked up at me with his old grin. “Ain’t you got a new dress to wear?”

There wasn’t anyplace like the Rose Bowl—a dance floor built among the trees, their trunks rising through cutouts in the floor, their leaves loosely veiling the stars—no other place where a stinko soldier could lead his date smack into a sycamore and have to make up for it all night long. It lay across the bay, in Larkspur, and forty years earlier, young dancers used to take a ferry hung with sparkling lights, drinking from flasks, laughing as the boat dipped on the choppy water, tipsy as they were. The ferry was gone by 1953—the bridges had been put up—but when you drove out there you still felt part of something, and you would smile to see a car pull off at Larkspur, knowing it was some young man and his date. Sometimes they held a special night, like Cal Night or Veteran’s Night, for white folks only. So on Negro Night we all came, old and young, out on that dance floor under the strings of fog-haloed lights, and the leaves falling down on you, and a huge paper moon someone had painted in our grandparents’ day, winking at us like the very devil.

On the drive there, I realized how much time had passed since I’d been alone with Holland. I felt as an emigrant must, looking around the country she knows she must leave. We drove along and listened to the radio and he told me a story he’d heard at work: about a car accident, a blind woman whose dog was hit but who didn’t realize her loss until a bystander told her. Then she leaned down and wept on the street. The kind of upsetting story I had always clipped from his papers.

“You think Sonny misses us?” I asked.

“I’m sure he does.”

It was when he glanced over and grinned that I thought of what would soon be gone. The little hiccup that came and went in his conversations. His habit of easing his tired eyes by closing them tight and rolling them against his lids. Those silver-hat cuff links.

“You all right?” he asked me.

I said I was fine, and we should turn left at the light.

A handsome young man at the door took our money; beyond him, you could see the band, resting between sets and smoking cigarettes, joshing each other while a serious female saxophonist polished her instrument. The crowd was in a state of excitement as if a major dance number had just ended and they could have wept from joy; there was general chattering and laughing and a few young men kept dancing with their partners even without the music, eyes closed, unable to let go of a mood we’d arrived too late to catch. My husband yelled something at me I couldn’t hear, then waved across the dance floor to a neatly mustached young soldier. They communicated in a wild semaphore, like mating birds, while I looked around the floor and saw the barkless tree trunks, polished by wallflowers’ stroking hands, the clear sky pitted with stars above the garlands of lights that one young man was jokily reaching up to unscrew as his date beat him happily with her purse. The soldier arrived with glasses and a bottle, and I realized this was what Holland had been doing: getting us booze. He poured me one and I drank it down quick, then had another. The soldier offered us each a cigarette and in his smile I saw the crooked teeth of a boy born poor.

Holland introduced me to the young man (a former stock boy, now a private on leave) as “Mrs. Cook, who came here with me before we were married.”

The young man brightened politely and asked if it had changed; as if it were so long ago.

“We only came here a few times,” I said, not quite an answer.

“Hey, it’s a good one!” Holland shouted and downed one drink, then another; he took our glasses and set them on a little stand, then grabbed me and began to spin me counterclockwise into the throng of couples.

Oh he could dance, my Holland Cook; he had excelled as a boy and now, without having been taught a thing, could look around and pick up steps, and my great talent was to follow. It’s a trick young women these days can’t possibly know: how to follow. One hand at your waist, the middle finger pressing, the other hand clutching yours, communicating in little spasms of delight, none of them rehearsed, some of them so unexpected you come out of a twirl and laugh—because there he is, grinning at you sideways in some move he’s just filched from across the dance floor. He hadn’t talent, exactly; like any dilettante, he invented nothing, perfected nothing. But he danced the only way a young man should: as if he wanted to woo me.

The lights and the leaves made shadow-puppet patterns all around. As the female saxophonist began a long virile improvisation, I put my head against my husband’s chest and listened.

Where had he hidden it? The thing that was killing him? Dancing and laughing and flirting with me so happily—well, he hid it where we all hide it; it must be some feature of human existence that we have learned the magic trick, which is to place the gleaming coin on the heartline of your hand, close it in a fist and—presto!—a moment later the fingers open on a barren palm; where has it gone? It’s there all along; through the whole marriage, it’s there. It’s a child’s trick; everyone learns it, and how sad that we never guess, and go and marry a girl or boy who shows us an empty palm, when of course it’s there in the crease of the thumb, the thing they want no one to see: the heart’s desire.

“You’re wearing Rediviva,” he whispered.

I said I was.

“You never wear it.”

I said I didn’t know why; I’d found the bottle and something nostalgic had crept up. I could hear his heart beating rapidly.

He turned and looked at the band, breathing uneasily. “I think I’m going to have to sit this one out, I don’t know what’s come over me.”

He leaned against a tree, and then a new song started, as slow as could be, with the sound of a million strings (really just two, multiplied by moonlight), and couples wandered the dance floor, trying to work out who was going to brave a slow dance after all those fast numbers. “He’s too damn short,” I heard a young girl whisper beside us, a fragrant gardenia in her hair, “He’ll lean right into my chest.” Holland had me dance with the soldier who had brought the drinks, so I smiled good-naturedly and let the young man lead me away. He took me in a slow, stiff circle beneath the long-limbed sycamores; he was one of those dancers who hums along to the music, and he did this as the band began, in a broken rhythm, to improvise on “Good As You Been to Me.”

The particular shadows of the trees and the vibration of the young man humming, which carried along his arms and, faintly, onto my own body, called up something that was gone the instant I felt it. I clawed after it in my mind, and fell out of step, and had to smile and regroup myself, and tried to fall back into the rhythm, all the while focusing on this memory. It must have been a memory, but it was lost. We made another half circuit of the dance floor. Then he began to hum again, my partner, and it happened again—a kind of dazed sunlight fell over things—and this time I wouldn’t let go of it: a rip in a shade, a tree shadow, a humming young man … then gone again, this time forever. Just a little piece of my youth that my brain had stored and, randomly summoned by this young soldier, had broken open as if in an emergency. Fading, but still faintly detectable: young Holland, hidden in his room, humming in my ear as he lay beside me on the bed. I looked at my partner, who couldn’t have felt anything. I looked toward Holland, who was staring at me intently.

Something had been tugging at me throughout the dance, and it turned out to be just myself, as a girl, with some piece of the past to show me. And I could see that something was happening to Holland, too. Could it be that he saw, in the same flitting shadows of the leaves and the lights, the same orchestra playing slightly behind the beat, simply by random chance, a faint tracing of the past? Maybe just a crinkling of paper (a girl behind him finishing a candy bar) became Buzz turning the pages of a newspaper, years ago. Everyday, just as my snip of memory was everyday. Who was I to guess my husband’s heart? I only know he looked so free from pain. We would be happy, each of us; this path I had taken, it was the right one. Life would continue on its proper course, filling the banks like a river undammed. No more doubt anymore. We kept each other’s stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instant—which is the only definition of happiness I know.

The music stopped. The singer in his silver tie said: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time!”

My husband appeared beside me with more drinks, and from behind the bandstand, carefully monitored by Larkspur firemen, great jets of roaring sparks rose thirty feet into the air and we cheered, of course we yelled ourselves hoarse, why wouldn’t we? That shimmering curtain descending; that firefall; the hiss and the sparks and their power to transport us; of course it scattered all cares, and of course he kissed me, as a sort of grateful goodbye, there on the dance floor, my old husband, my old love.

Holland left early, feeling unwell, and those drinks must have gone to my head, because I agreed to stay at the dance if he would arrange for my ride home later. He kissed me goodbye, saying he’d be fine and I should enjoy myself. Men kept asking me to dance, which I did, but mostly I kept with my humming soldier, perhaps with the magic thought that he’d bring back other shards of memory as well; he didn’t. Instead, he performed the same fox-trot to every song, fancied up for fast numbers, softened for slow ones. Mostly what interested me was to be in a relaxed crowd, moving counterclockwise like skaters. For so long I had denied myself the feeling of being at home.

The young man—his name was Shorty—had been entrusted to take me back, and a cab waited for us outside, glowing like a telephone booth. Within, the driver peered intently at a book until Shorty rapped on the window and we were off.

“I saw how your husband kissed your hands when he said goodbye,” he said. Silver branches of an apple orchard blocked the moon, and as we passed, I looked over to see his face emerging from the darkness. He had very large eyes, a mustache, and wire-rim glasses that gleamed like an etching.

“Oh, he’s always done that. Since we were kids.”

“You known him that long?”

“Well, long enough. I met him when I was sixteen, back in Kentucky.”

“I’m from Alabama,” he said. “He must be a real kind man.”

“Yes, he is.”

“You’re lucky,” he said, and added: “You know he’s real good-looking.”

“Oh,” I said, looking out the window again. “Yes, he is good-looking.”

In his voice, I seemed to hear a barely concealed desire: “He sure is.”

So he was “one of them” as well. They were everywhere, these kinds of men, and I would forever be drawn to them. I sat back in my seat with a shudder, thinking of the changeling boys now being born, and the poor girls who someday would love them.

“You must love him a whole lot,” he said softly.

He sat very silently, staring at me.

And I looked out the window, watching the moonlight hexing the mounds of the hills, the antlers of the trees, the shipless shore of the bay. The moon was rising quickly and had found a flock of clouds hidden in the sky and touched them all into vertebrated streaks of light. Everywhere the stars struggled to show themselves. And farmhouses passed, sheds, windmills, all shining from the moon like china things.