Marry Me (12 page)

Afterwards she would remember how they walked
down a buggy little path through swarms of midges revolving upon themselves in patches of sunlight. Hidden by some swamp maples from the fisherman, they kissed. Her feet grew cold as her tennis sneakers absorbed dampness from the turf. His bulk above her felt like some strange warm tree she was hugging because she was ‘it’ at hide-and-seek. Out of doors, in nature, the queerness of being kissed was clarified; it was something done to her, like the shampoos her mother used to give her at the kitchen sink with its long brass faucet, or like the boy at Gristede’s pressing, a half-hour ago, her change into her hand. Richard’s hands, rather sadly, stayed on the small of her back, not cupping her bottom as was his habit. ‘Please forgive me,’ she said.

‘We’ll never sleep together again? This is quitsies?’

She had to laugh at his phrasing, before pleading, ‘Let me go. I’m losing weight.’

He squeezed her waist testingly ‘Still lots left.’

They must have talked more, but what else they said remained hidden from Ruth behind the vibrating veils of midges, the chill in her feet, the image of the fisherman presiding above their parting from the far shore, his pole and its reflection like the two sides of a precarious arch. Though some idle mornings she wished for the phone to ring, she was grateful to Richard for taking her at her word, and for continuing to lurch up to her at parties as if she still had a secret to give him. On the whole she was well satisfied with her affair, and as she zipped up the children’s snowsuits, or closed a roast into the oven, thought of this adventure snug in her past with some complacence. She judged herself improved and deepened
in about the normal amount – she had dared danger and carried wisdom away, a more complete and tolerant woman. She had had boyfriends, a husband, a lover; it seemed she could rest.

She had not quite intended Jerry never to know. She had done it, her conviction grew in retrospect, less for herself than for him; her surrender to another man came to seem a kind of martyrdom, a martyrdom without an audience. While the affair was on she had pictured Jerry’s knowing as a thunderbolt, a burst of noise and revealing light, a cleansing destruction. Instead, her marriage had stood with the stupid solidity of an unattended church, and when she returned to it – guiltily scrubbing the floors, recovering the sofa with blue sailcloth, cooking with a newly bought rack of spices, studying the children’s school papers as if each were a fragment of Gospel – Jerry gave no sign of noticing she had been gone. Awareness of Richard, physical memory of him and physical anticipation of their next meeting, had filled every vein; trembling and transparent and brimming she had stood before the mirror of their marriage and was given back – nothing. The sensation was familiar. Her father had been absorbed by love of his fellow-man, and her mother by love for her father, and Ruth had grown up with the suspicion of being overlooked. She was a Unitarian, and what did this mean, except that her soul was one unit removed from not being there at all?

Her invisible restoration to fidelity was achieved in a world of evolving forms. Charlie entered the first grade of the Greenwood elementary school; Joanna became
a broad-browed, confident third-grader. This child would never be embarrassed by womanhood; the full brunt of her parents’ art-school love had fallen upon her, their first creation in flesh. Gradually Ruth regained the weight she had lost to a nervous stomach during the summer. Winter like a bandage was applied to the flaming fall. That year, the first of Kennedy’s presidency, the rivers and ponds froze early and black-smooth for beautiful skating. Skating, Ruth flew and, flying, she was free. She drove cars too fast, and drank too much, and skated upriver away from Jerry and the children – darting, swooping strides, between hushed walls of thin silver trees. This will to fly had come upon her since her failure with Richard – for it was a failure, any romance that does not end in marriage fails.

And Jerry’s religion crisis ebbed. By spring his shelf of theology stood neglected, scraps of torn paper marking where he had read enough in each volume. Dread had left him unchastened. He became crazy about the Twist, and at parties his contorted, rapt, perspiring figure seemed that of a mysterious son in whom she could take only an apprehensive pride, his energy so excessive. He gave up smoking, and took to buying popular records, which he would play to himself until he could mouth the words in unison: ‘Born to lose, I’ve lived my life in vain…’ It was grotesque and would have been pitiful, in a man of thirty, if he did not seem, in a frantic way, happy. A quality she remembered from their courtship, a skittering heedless momentum, had returned to him; she could not remember when she had last thought him handsome, but now an edge of good looks cut her when he turned. His colour seemed higher,
his green eyes foxy. His paralysis and fear had made her feel so helpless and guilty she rejoiced in this renewal of his liveliness, though it bore towards her a glitter of hostility of unpredictability. Hanging up his suit pants while he was having an evening game of catch with the children in the yard, she was surprised by the gentle, semi-musical patter of sand on the floor. It had fallen from his cuffs. Oh yes, he explained after supper, he had stopped off at the beach, not the Greenwood beach but the one with the Indian name, the other day when it was so warm, swung by on the way back from the station, having caught the earlier train. Why? Why, because it was a lovely May day – did there have to be another reason? What was she, a wife or a warden? Feeling the need to taste salt air, he had walked along the water and sat on a dune for a minute, there was hardly anybody else there, just a little sailboat in the Sound. It had been very beautiful.

‘The children might have enjoyed going with you.’

‘You have all afternoon to take them.’

As he looked at her, his eyes very green in their boldness and his expression rakishly accented by a tiny cut on the bridge of his nose, the reason for his insolence came to her: he knew. He had learned. How? Richard must have gossiped. Did everybody know? Let them. Jerry was the one that mattered, and that he knew without releasing a thunderbolt was a relief. All evening, as the children and the dishes and Jerry’s face rotated, she composed confessions and explanations in her head. What was the explanation? The best she could say was she had done it to become a better woman and therefore a better wife. And the affair had
been kept under control. And had made rather little impression on her. These truths, and the prospect of speaking them, frightened her, and she fell asleep to escape the fright, while Jerry rattled the pages of
Art News
and said nothing. Again, the mirror had looked through her.

Outside their bedroom windows, beside the road, stood a giant elm, one of the few surviving in Greenwood. New leaves were curled in the moment after the bud unfolds, their colour sallow, a dusting, a veil not yet dense enough to conceal the anatomy of branches. The branches were sinuous, stately, constant: an inexhaustible comfort to her eyes. Of all things accessible to Ruth’s vision the elm most nearly persuaded her of a cosmic benevolence. If asked to picture God, she would have pictured this tree. On the breadth of the lower crotches pigeons walked like citizens on the floor of a cathedral; in the open air above the road vinelike twigs hung down, languidly greedy, drinking the light, idle as fingers trailed from a canoe. Ruth realized it would not be such a drastic thing, to die. She lay beneath a quilted puff, hoping to have a nap.

Energetic footsteps marched through the downstairs, searching, and came upstairs. Uninvited, Jerry got under her puff. She hoped, guessing it was too much to hope, that he wouldn’t try to make love. He laid his arm across her waist and asked, ‘Are you happy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you tired?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s go to sleep.’

‘You didn’t come up to pester me?’

‘Never. I came up because you’re so sad lately.’

The wandering curves of the tree, solid as rock and random as wind, seemed far away, like a whispered word. ‘I’m not sad,’ she said.

Jerry snuggled deeper under the puff and rested his open mouth on her naked shoulder. When he talked, his tongue fluttered. ‘Tell me who you like,’ he said.

‘I like you,’ she said, ‘and all the pigeons in that tree, and all the dogs in town except the ones that tip over our garbage cans, and all the cats except the one that got Lulu pregnant. And I like the lifeguards at the beach, and the policemen downtown except the one who bawled me out for my U-turn, and I like some of our awful friends, especially when I’m drunk…’

‘How do you like Dick Mathias?’

‘I don’t mind him.’

‘I know you don’t. I think that’s fascinating of you. He’s such a fathead. Literally. His head is literally fat. And that eye. Doesn’t it give you the creeps?’

Ruth felt she owed it to her dignity, to the dignity of her secret, not to say anything, to let Jerry name it. Insulated by depression, she waited. He raised himself up on one elbow; she closed her eyes and pictured a knife in his hand. Hot weather brought on pain in her legs since she had carried Geoffrey. Jerry’s presence intensified the pain. She took a deep breath.

What he said was nothing like what she expected, though it seemed to be the point of the conversation. ‘How do you feel about Sally? Tell me about Sally.’

Ruth laughed, as if touched in an unguarded place. ‘Sally?’

‘Do you love her?’

She laughed again. ‘Of course not.’

‘Do you like her?’

‘Not much.’

‘Baby you must at least
like
her. She likes you.’

‘I don’t think she likes me especially. I mean, she likes me as one more local female she can outshine –’

‘She doesn’t outshine you. She doesn’t think she does. She thinks you’re beautiful.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m O.K., if the light’s right and I’m feeling undepressed. But she’s almost great.’

‘Tell me about the “almost”. I agree. She’s spectacular, but something misses. What is it?’

Ruth found it difficult to focus on Sally, who kept blurring into the conjoined image of Richard. The affair, she realized, had empowered her to dismiss his wife, though when they first came to Greenwood she had been struck by her – her blonde hair hanging down her wide back, her mannish walk and startled stare, her eager grin crimped at one corner. ‘I don’t think,’ Ruth said, ‘Sally’s ever been very happy. She and Dick aren’t right for each other, in all ways. They have the public things, but maybe aren’t supportive’ – she wanted to go on, ‘like we are,’ but shyness held her back.

Jerry was off on his favourite tangent. ‘Well my God, who
would
be right for Richard? He’s a monster.’

‘He’s not. And you know it. Lots of women would be right for him. A lazy sexy woman who wasn’t ambitious –’

‘Sally’s ambitious?’

‘Very.’

‘For what?’

‘For whatever she can get. For life. Just like you.’

‘And yet not sexy?’

Ruth remembered Richard on the subject of Sally. In answering Jerry she must not sound like him. ‘My impression is,’ she said, ‘she’s not very warm or compassionate. She doesn’t let herself feel anything to the point where it would depress her. But I wouldn’t know how her sex is. What
is
this burst of interest, anyway?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Love of one’s neighbour, that’s all.’ He wormed closer to her, snuggling deeper under the puff, so that only the top of his head showed; his hair contained a sudden amount of grey. He began, a trick of his, to purr; a vibration deep in his throat reached her ears. It was a signal for her to turn to him, if she wished; she stayed on her back, though he had chased all sleepiness from her and all sacred magic from the elm. ‘It seems to me,’ his voice ventured from beneath the puff, ‘you and Sally have more in common than you think. Have
you
ever been very happy either?’

‘Of course I have. I’m happy most of the time, that’s my trouble. Everybody expects me to be calm and contented and, damn it, I am. I don’t know what my trouble is today.’

‘You think you’re pregnant?’ He accused: ‘You’ve been seeing the same tomcat Lulu has.’

‘I
know
I’m not.’

‘Then that’s it. You have the curse.’

‘I do feel,’ she volunteered, ‘pro
tec
tive of Sally now and then, really quite fond. She
is
shallow and selfish and I know if I ever got in her way she’d walk right over me, but then there’s something generous about all
her showing-off, something she’s trying to give the world. Up at skiing, when she puts on the ridiculous tasselled hat and starts to flirt with the ski instructor, I have moments of just wanting to
hug
her, she’s making such a sweet fool of herself. And the time we went musselling, she seemed lovely. But I
don’t
feel this fondness when you and she are doing the Twist together, if that’s what you’re asking.’

He had began to nibble her breast through her slip and after his imitation of a cat it felt uncomfortably close to being eaten. She pushed him off and took the puff away from his face and asked,
‘Is
that what you’re asking?’

He hid his face against her shoulder, his big nose cold, and shut his eyes. He seemed about to take the nap he had robbed her of. A broadening smile tickled the skin of her arm. ‘I love you,’ he sighed. ‘You see everything so clearly.’

Later she wondered how she could have been so blind, and blind so long. The signs were abundant: the sand, his eccentric comings and goings, his giving up smoking, his triumphant exuberance whenever Sally was at the same party, the tender wifely touch (this glimpse had stung at the time, to endure in Ruth’s memory) with which Sally on one occasion had picked up Jerry’s wrist, inviting him to dance. Jerry’s obsession with death the spring before had seemed to her so irrational, so unreachable, that she dismissed as also mysterious his new behaviour: his new timbre and strut, his fits of ill temper with the children, his fits of affection with her, the hungry introspective tone he brought to their private
conversations, his insomnia, the easing of his physical demands on her, and a new cool authority in bed, so that at moments it seemed she was with Richard again. How could she have been so blind? At first she thought that, having gazed so long at her own guilt, she mistook for an after-image what was in truth a fresh development. She admitted to herself, then, what she could never admit to Jerry, that she did not think him capable of it.