How to Make an American Quilt (36 page)

M
ARIANNA REMEMBERS
being told that she will know she is in love because she will feel elation in his presence. Or perhaps it was
something that she read. In any case, that is her definition of love: elation in one another’s presence. She likes that idea; waits to experience it.

A
FTER FIVE YEARS
in France, Marianna finds herself living with one man and having a warm love affair with another. At night she comes home to Alec, who, like herself, is an American. He rubs her shoulders, which are strong and defined from the years of grafting; he traces his tongue along the small of her tired back. Alec never fails to make her heart quicken. He reads to her late at night, in bed, sometimes after sex, allowing her the luxury of drifting off to the sound of his wondrous voice. Occasionally, they argue, exchange unforgivable, angry words, but this is rare; they recover. That is, it does not undermine them.

Alec and Marianna live outside Antibes. The house is like an accidental structure in the center of a turbulent garden of flowers and grass. It quite takes Marianna’s breath away, the uncivilized landscape, with its scents and varieties of color and form. The weathered brick house has an enormous wraparound porch, but it all looks to be on its way to being an abandoned dwelling, the garden soon to reclaim the land.

The first day they lived there, Alec came into the garden carrying two bottles of red wine. “Italian,” he said of the wine, then dropped to his knees in the tall, unkempt grass and began working the cork with the corkscrew.

Marianna felt awkward standing as this man struggled at her feet, and she soon sat down beside him, feeling unexpected pleasure at the heat of the early evening and the caress of the dry grass on her bare legs. “I could grow to like this,” she said, smiling at Alec.

“It is like heaven,” he agreed, passing her the open bottle,
watching her take a long swallow of wine. Her throat smoothly arched, eyes closed.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
in her life, Marianna knew the luxury of love. She basked in Alec’s affection and grew more beautiful as a result. She was convinced that this was what she had always been waiting for and saw her life sharply divided between her life before Alec and her life since knowing Alec. She wondered how it was that her mother could live her life without someone to adore her and to be adored.

Then Marianna met Noe, who was nothing like Alec, but to whom she felt drawn in any case. He was transferred to her section and she knew him only casually at first. They talked about work, about gardening, about France and America. They argued different points; Noe sometimes hurting her with his violent perspective on things. They would eat lunch together on the ugly wood benches behind the main greenhouse or he brought lunch and drove them both down to the ocean, where they sat close to each other on the seawall, lamenting the idea of having to return to the nursery to finish the work day. Their conversations unobtrusively moved from the general topics of work and politics, and pressed into the personal; Marianna noticing and not noticing this quiet shift; Marianna both startled and charmed.

She told herself that she loved Alec, could love only one man at a time; loved Alec because he was good to her and, besides, they were both Americans, giving them a deeper understanding of each other. But Alec was white, too.

Noe, on the other hand, was black, understood that about her, but he was also French, and had numerous misguided notions about the United States to which he vigorously and emphatically held, regardless of what she said.

Noe brushed her loosely curled hair (“Your father’s side, I guess?” he said, having seen a photograph of Anna), lifted it above her neck, lay kisses on the line of her spine. He said to her, “Leave your lover and live with me,” as they dressed in the afternoon, having skipped lunch, choosing to spend their time in his flat.

Marianna did not know what to say, so she said nothing. Pretended that he had not spoken to her at all. She was wrestling with this new discovery about herself: that she could still deeply love Alec while feeling desire for Noe. Did she love Noe? This made her ill, this involvement with two men; it wrenched what she had with Alec, confused what she felt for Noe; told herself what she had thought was the Real Thing never was, that nothing was real.

She became irritable at home. Critical and restless. When Alec tried to touch her she would swat his hand away saying, “Leave me alone. Stop crowding me all the time.”

Marianna noticed every annoying thing Alec did, things a lover would never see, and as she rode her belly board up and down the furrows at work, she found herself thinking about leaving Alec. She thought about breaking it off with Noe. As she lay prone, wrapping the white rubber around the stem, protecting the newly joined split from infection, she discovered that she was in the untenable position of loving two men when she had previously thought she could love only one.

I
N THE MIDST
of her tumultuous love life, Marianna considered returning home. It was becoming more difficult for people to determine her background. She knew she could “pass” if she so desired, that she could be taken for white and not black; she resembled her father as well as her mother, though she had inherited Anna’s cool walking grace and her kinship with the moon.

But she refused to deny her African-American heritage, for to
do so would deny Anna, and that she would not do; act as if her mother had never existed! She considered Anna’s blood the proudest part of herself, not something to be falsified. It would betray that languorous walk.

It was so odd, really, this anglicizing of her features as her face matured, as if her white history would not be ignored, either, and her body was some sort of quiet battleground, with her father’s side slowly but surely assuming more and more territory. It was frightening to see in herself the man she never knew; become someone she did not know. Marianna began to feel the most profound need to be back with her mother. To steady herself.

A
LEC LEARNED
of her sexual betrayal.