The Story of a Marriage (22 page)

“Dropping off something. Where had he been?” I asked, and then laughed at myself for thinking anyone could ever know.

My husband smiled. “I guess he was done with adventures. It looks like he had one or two.”

Was it just Lyle’s return I’d seen on his face? A lost dog running down the street might be enough for anybody. Fur flying everywhere in the sun, tongue hanging from his mouth, eyes bright in recognition of the family he loved, of the familiar smells sparking in his brain, and of his own great luck. Perhaps it was enough to leave my husband’s face as open as I’d seen it in the hallway. Or was there more? I believe that while I was in North Beach, Buzz had visited the house and taken his old lover on a long walk by the ocean. Perhaps at last he said,
Come back to me
, as I had done years before on the streetcar tracks. He had spoken the right words. Ones that urge our hearts to action, always the same:
Let me take care of you
.

Later, Buzz told me that the date was nearly set, that he would be leaving early one morning and Holland would come with him: “Pearlie, you have to get ready for the thought that soon you’ll be alone.” Not until he said that did I truly picture what we had been planning: as plain as Holland getting in a car. All the anguish and plotting came down to the slam of that door. But what I also understood, for the first time, was that I would be losing Buzz as well. It had all seemed an impossible fantasy, and now I heard Buzz saying: “I’ve told him what I want, how I never could forget him in all those years.” It was that show of passion that always moved my husband, had taken him from Buzz’s life into my own, and now would return him to his habitat. The passion of others. “He’s like a mirror that way,” Buzz told me. It was the truest thing he ever said about Holland Cook.

On the day of his return, gnawing gingerly at my son’s hand, Lyle lay on the floor, skinny and matted with burrs. Everything golden about him was tarnished, dirty; I assumed it never occurred to either male to give the dog a bath; he looked like a free animal, owned by nobody. Yet he had come home. Perhaps, like most of us, he was too domesticated in the end.

“You love us, don’t you?” Holland asked, teasingly, rubbing the dog’s belly, and Lyle closed his eyes in pure delight. “We forgive you, you crazy thing.”

If Lyle could have howled to the skies, I’m sure he would have.

The last time I saw Buzz alone, it was in an unloved park. Young poplars filtered the light, and nettles crowded the shadows where, like frightened birds beaten from the underbrush, a pair of lovers quickly emerged and hurried off to their parked car. We descended to the clearing, unkempt except around two stone plinths that marked the last duel in California. Hardly anybody visited the spot. I was the one who had found it on the map and suggested it; we had nearly run out of places to meet. We did not, however, need any more places.

“You have to tell me,” I said.

He paused and looked at me seriously. “Tomorrow.”

“You leave tomorrow? That’s too soon, you didn’t say—”

“It’s tomorrow, Pearlie,” he said. “That’s what you and I talked about, and it’s the best thing. I don’t want to delay; it’s all so delicate with him. The Chinese say to be happy, you must be swift.” I wondered if the Chinese really said that.

I examined his face carefully. “You’ve told him?”

He ran his hand through the leaves of a bush. “We had a long talk the other night.”

“You’ve told him everything.” He nodded. “You’ve told him about me.”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

He pulled off a leaf and spread it in his hand. “That I would take care of you and your son.”

“He knows I’m not abandoning him?”

“Nobody is abandoning anybody,” he said, looking up. “He knows. That you understand and this is what you want for Sonny.”

Birds were fussing in the trees. “That’s not quite how I would have said it.”

“Then I apologize. I did the best I could. I’ve been so anxious.”

I turned to him and asked, at last: “Doesn’t he love you?”

Buzz turned the leaf in his hands and stroked the small ridge of veins, smiling. He said, “He does. I know it for sure now.”

I thought of what I had seen the other day, in the hallway of our house: a man with his mind ajar. A face at last legible, a truce with something inside himself. “Yes,” I said for certain. “Somehow I needed to know that.”

He walked along in silence for a moment, taking the leaf apart bit by bit. “Thank you,” he said.

“What for?”

“You were kind to me.”

I leaned against the stone plinth, marked with the name of a duelist. “We are friends, you know,” I said. “Despite everything.”

“It doesn’t seem likely,” he said. “But I’m glad to hear you say it. Despite everything.”

The sound of a truck came rumbling by, somewhere beyond the trees, and a boy began shouting in a foreign language. I asked if he had mentioned Annabel and he shook his head.

“So he doesn’t know everything,” I said.

“Does he need to?” he asked, and I didn’t reply. We had done enough.

“So tomorrow.”

He threw the leaf into the grass as he walked along. “That’s right. I thought maybe Holland could put Sonny to bed.”

“But I’m the one who does that, it’ll seem—”

He stopped and looked at me. “That’ll be his time,” he said. “Holland’s time, you know … to say goodbye.”

A brief dread shot through me as I imagined Buzz and Holland coaxing a sleepy Sonny out of his bed, fists rubbing eyes, into a waiting car … but it was quickly replaced with my husband standing in my son’s dark room, nodding his head and turning away. He was a loving and attentive father. Buzz had promised his presence in my son’s life, letters and visits and, later, trips with Sonny; the duties of a father, which Holland would never truly abandon.

“And what then?”

Buzz kept walking, going through the evening. “Maybe you and Holland listen to the radio the way you always do.” That would be my time.

Buzz continued: “And then at ten he’ll say it’s time for bed—”

“After Groucho.”

“After that,” he said, pulling aside an overhanging branch. “He’ll say it’s time for bed and you’ll kiss him good night or whatever you do, just whatever you normally do. You might take a sleeping pill.”

I asked him why I’d need one of those.

“It might be easier on you.”

“Easier on you,” I said. “If I just sleep through it.”

“I have some if you want to borrow them,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He had planned it out so far as to bring a potion for me.

“No, I have some.”

He looked intrigued—that I was still, at the last moment, so full of surprises—then walked on. “Then you and Lyle go to sleep and that’s it,” he said, caressing the old wound on his hand, squinting as the sun came through the leaves and flashed for a moment. “I’ll leave you some money on the table. And then more later.”

I watched as he crossed the grass before me. “You’ll be there? Tomorrow night?” Somehow this hadn’t occurred to me. “When?” I asked Buzz. “I want to know.”

He said he would come at around eleven o’clock, by the back door. “We’ll load his bags in the car and some other things. I hope you don’t mind, we may take the radio and some of his favorite books.”

It felt, all of a sudden, like the strangest thing that could ever happen to me. I said, “You’re telling me I’ll wake up and find things missing and be all alone with my son.”

He saw my expression. “Pearlie … we’ve talked about all this—”

“I just hadn’t realized—”

His face convulsed in sympathy and confusion. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

I laughed. Because he’d never asked either of us what we wanted. Not me or my husband, not really. He would have said he’d tried to, that he’d shown us vistas and options, the variety of possibilities, and we had stood mute before them. So he said what he wanted and asked if we’d go along. I don’t blame him. You cannot sit around and wait for other people to figure themselves out. You would wait forever. Half of life is knowing what you want.

He said, “I don’t understand …”

What I wanted, now that we had come to it, was so far from what he had shown me. More than the freedom of solitude, of five hundred acres with a fence all around. I wanted to have been born in a different time, in a different part of the world, so I could one day know the sensation that Buzz took for granted—that of naming your desire and feeling the right to possess it.

“Buzz Drumer,” I said. “What’s going to become of you?”

I remember his smile as I approached. I am not likely to forget that face, though I last saw it so long ago. I still see it, like a rubbing made from a church engraving, which believers can admire years after the church has burned down. He watched me quietly the entire time I came to him across the grass.

I put the bird of my gloved hand over his ruined one.

Buzz looked into my eyes and then he kissed me. It seemed like a very natural thing to do: kissing a boy before he leaves for war. A flicker of grief and desire. I never thought I’d miss him, on our last day. I was too busy preparing for a new life, a new world for my son. But I would miss the sound of that voice, the broken nose, the hat left on the seawall. Fainter and fainter as the years went on, until just those separate parts of him remained. A faded fresco in my mind. It’s the loss we don’t speak of, losing a friend forever. We call it life; we call it time passing. But it is a kind of heartbreak, like any other.

“What’s going to become of you, Pearlie Cook?”

“Give us time,” I said.

Buzz looked at his watch and said the words “ten o’clock.” He gave a quick wave of his hand and walked away from me down the path. I watched his hat move through the leaves until it disappeared in the greenness of the grove. I waited for ten minutes or so before I started home. Tomorrow. Ten o’clock and I would take the pill. Eleven and he would come as I slept. By midnight, they would be gone.

I’m sure that day was no different from any other for Sonny. I awoke him whispering “Good morning, sweet boy” and Lyle came in to bother him until he stood up, grumbling; he drank his milk and ate his toast, cut with a measuring cup into a moon. We visited the park, which was mercifully free of other children. Back home, he took his nap with his odd hand puppets. He slept for twenty minutes while I stared at the clock, and after who knows what dreams, Sonny woke grumpier than before, so I spent a difficult hour coaxing him onto the sofa with a picture book. For the fortieth time I read aloud about a bunny that went inside a hill, and as Sonny gradually fell under its hypnosis, my mind began to wander. Two hours, now. Holland would be home in two hours, and then dinner, and then bedtime, and then the radio.

Suddenly, of all things, we watched through the picture window as a bird flew straight into the glass with a bang.

You’d never guess what grown-up Sonny remembers from his childhood. Not the aunts bustling around our house; not his best friend Lyle, who lived just two more years. Not Buzz Drumer. “I remember your stockings had gold diamonds on them with a
P
,” he tells me when he comes to visit. “And you losing a ring behind the dresser. And I remember a bird flying into the window and how it scared me.”

Who can fathom a boy’s life?

A noise from the street—whirr, up and around went Lyle like a top! Sonny’s father was home. His hat came off, a warm smile came on, and boy and dog raced to greet him. Sonny told him all about the bird at the window and his father listened patiently and accepted the whiskey I handed him. Noodles for dinner, eating while gabbing away at his father, Lyle waiting below for some dropped macaroni. Then a bath, more solemn than usual, asking, “Mommy, will I go down the drain?” He tried the white rubber duck; it did not fit. Then the cold shiver before the towel, and the naked race through the house—caught at last by his father. “Why don’t you tuck him in tonight?” “Well … sure if you like.”

His father tucked him into warm sheets, and read him the bunny story and the duck one again, and then, as Sonny struggled against sleep at this miracle of his father’s presence, Holland began to speak in a low, serious voice.