Marry Me (18 page)

‘For God’s sake, Jerry. Shape up.’

‘I’m trying, I’m trying. I really shouldn’t see her at all. I get this hangover.’

‘Well then let’s not go to volleyball.’

‘We have to, because of the children.’ The children were asleep, or lost in the rustle of television.

‘The children, my foot! My God, how you use them! We have to go so you and she can exchange sweet sad little looks under the net.’

‘Those aren’t sweet sad looks. Her eyes are very cold now.’

‘They always were.’

‘She hates me now. I’ve lost her love, which is fine. It’s what we wanted, it takes any decision from me, I don’t know why I should mind it. I apologize.’

‘Don’t be silly, you haven’t lost her love at all. She’s doing what you asked her to do, and I think she’s doing it very well.’

‘She’s doing what
you
asked her to do.’

‘Phooey. She doesn’t give a’ – the next word surprised her, it was so quaint, a favourite of her father’s –
‘hoot
about me and you don’t either. I’m
nothing
in this, it’s between her and the children, so don’t try to make me feel guilty. I can’t hold you here, get up and go to her.
Go.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jerry said, and he seemed so. ‘It’s just that a certain angle of her face this afternoon, when I spiked at her, snagged in my head; it’s such a humiliating position I’ve put her in.’

‘But she
asked
for it, sweetie. Women gamble; they know they can’t always win. I think she’s being pretty brave and straight about it, so why don’t you stop being a baby? You’re not doing her any favours by this performance every Sunday.’

He looked up, with wet cheeks, a cut knee, a hopeful smirk. ‘You really think she still loves me?’

‘She’d be a fool to,’ Ruth told him.

Usually on Sunday nights, stirred up, he would insist on making love, and she would accede, and fail to come, because she was not there: it was Sally under his hands. His touch fluttered over her as if conjuring her body to become another’s, and that in her which was his, wifely, would try to obey. In the dark twist of this effort of obedience she would lose all orientation. Finally he would force her as one forces a hopeless piece of machinery and, sighing from the effort, would fall away pleased. Her failure satisfied him, he desired her to fail, it confirmed his eventual escape. ‘You smoke too much,’ he told her. ‘It’s an anti-aphrodisiac.’

‘You’re
the anti-aphrodisiac.’

‘Am I so bad? Take a lover. Or go back to the one
you had. I know you could be great for somebody.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I mean it. You’re a beautiful woman. Even if your mouth does smell like a tobacco shed.’

‘Now you let up on me! You let up!’ Exclaiming this excited rather than relieved her fury; she hit at him and kicked with her knees: he seized her wrists, and pinned her body under his. His face was inches above hers, swollen in the dark, a Goya.

‘You dumb cunt,’ he said, and bounced her into the mattress again and again, ‘you get a fucking grip on yourself. You got what you wanted, didn’t you? This is it. Married bliss.’

She spat in his face,
ptuh
, like a cat, a jump ahead of thought; saliva sprayed back down upon her own face and as it were awakened her. She felt his body like iron on her; her eyes, seeing in the thin light, saw him blink and grin. His grip relaxed and his body slid from hers. As it slid, a flutter from between her legs seemed to rise in pursuit of his retreating weight. He turned his back, curling up tightly as if to protect himself against a renewal of fists. ‘Well, that was a new sensation,’ he said, of her spitting.

‘I did it without thinking. It must be pretty basic.’

‘It felt pretty basic.’

‘Well you were holding my arms. I had to express myself somehow.’

‘Don’t apologize. By all means express yourself.’

‘Did it offend you?’

‘No. I kind of liked it. It showed you care.’

‘Most of it came back into my own face.’

‘Spitting into the wind, it’s called.’

‘Jerry?’ She was reaching out to him, encircling him with her arm, his potency proved by the languor of her muscles.

‘Huh?’

‘Are we perverse, do you think?’

‘Normally perverse. Human, I’d say.’

‘You’re a nice man.’ She hugged him, having suppressed a declaration of love.

Wary, he wanted to sleep. ‘Good night, sweetie.’

‘Good night.’

Their sleep together had a strange sanity, as their waking life together had the drifting unreason of somnolence.

Everyone knew. All their friends, as July slipped by, came to know. Ruth felt it at volleyball, she felt their knowledge touching her; whenever she leaped or laughed or fell she felt the fine net of knowing that enclosed her. Men began to touch her at parties. Through all their previous years in Greenwood only Richard had ever asked her to lunch; now in one week she received two invitations, one at a party and one by phone. She turned them both down, but discovered that the refusal was an effort. Why refuse? Jerry was begging her to help him, to betray him, to desert him. She refused to be panicked into another man. Men, she saw for the first time, would always be there for her. In her very emptiness, her serenity, she had value for them. They could wait.

The women, too, began to touch her; after one especially unhappy Sunday, she had confessed to Linda Collins over Monday coffee that she and Jerry were
passing through a ‘rough time’; after that, there was a fresh vivacity in the greetings from the group of mothers on the beach, and singly they would stand beside her making moments of silence, in case she wished to talk. She had been admitted to a secret sorority of suffering. Ruth wondered for how long this sorority had existed, and what lack or dullness in her had delayed her admission. Sally, she saw now, had always been a member. But now Sally was rarely on the beach, and when she was, two packs of mothers discreetly formed, one around each, this summer’s tragic queens. Imitating Sally in this role new to her, Ruth, after her vague confession to Linda, drew a mantle of reserve about herself, saying little, denying nothing.

Nor did she speak to her parents, though they visited from Poughkeepsie. The sight of her father’s bespectacled, benign, pontifical face reminded her of an old anger, at his impervious public goodness, and his absent-minded way, increasing as he aged, of turning his public face to private matters. She would
not
be counselled like a parishioner, like the Cuckolded Wife card from the deck of human troubles. She knew that in his deliberate way he would try to rise to her call and give her advice as good as anyone else’s (don’t panic, let things run their course, keep your dignity, think of the children); she felt guilty that, by denying him the opportunity to pontificate (outside of his family he was considered a shrewd counsellor, and at the time of Ruth’s engagement he had observed of Jerry, in mild warning, that ‘he seems even younger than he is’), she was denying him the one gift, a grown daughter’s trust,
that was hers still to give. But he had failed her, hurt her, in the dark hallways of their parsonages, by acutely preferring her mother, by leaning on her, which made him forever obtuse towards his daughters. In quaint deference to their femaleness he had changed clothes in closets, he had been a sacred presence, he had hid. He had bred into her the reflexes of failure, the instinctive expectation which, when Jerry swung his leg over her like a little boy mounting his unsteady bicycle, sealed a stubbornness in her blood. She sent the old man back to Poughkeepsie untroubled.

It never occurred to her to tell her mother. Her mother had been born to be a wife. She would have been horrified.

Ruth did think of turning to Richard. He, oddly, in his half-blind bluffing way, had not quite failed her. Or, rather, his deficiencies were in areas, of courage and clarity of vision, where she could easily compensate. But the other woman was his wife. Ruth could see, from the way he blinked and grinned and sweated royally at parties, even when Jerry and Sally were being most flagrant, that in the sea of knowing, Richard was islanded, lost. And there was no predicting how he would react, in his lurching way. The consequences might be dangerous to her too, and this checked her chronic impulse to take his familiar hand, under cover of a party’s confusion, and lead him to privacy. Also, she was protecting herself from an intuition that he would make a fool of himself or, worse, of Jerry.

So by default she would talk only to Jerry; her assassin was her only confidant. As she studied him, came to know him as another’s lover, possibilities that in the first
shocks she had suppressed acquired cool shape in her mind. It was possible that she did not love him, it was possible that she would soon lose him. Their sex together greatly improved.

‘Heaven,’ Jerry said one night, entering her as she crouched above him. Afterwards, he explained, ‘I had this very clear vision of the Bodily Ascension, of me going up and up into this incredibly soft, warm, boundless sky; you.’

‘Isn’t that blasphemous?’ She had acquired the courage to be curious about his ultimate intimacy, so opaque and hostile to her, his religion.

‘Because it makes my prick Christ? I wonder. They both have this quality, of being more important than they should be. As Christ relates to the universe, my prick relates to me.’

‘Then when I’m under you is that the descent into Hell?’

‘No. You’re Heaven in every direction, except sideways it sometimes hurts.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘It’s not so bad. I love you.’

Her reaction was fear. He had taken care, recently, not to say this. ‘You do?’

‘It seems so. I said it.’

‘Then you don’t want to leave me?’

‘No, I do, I do. In the morning I’ll be furious because you’re making me betray Sally by being so sweetly whorish.’

‘Am I more whorish,’ she asked, ‘than Sally?’

‘Oh, much. She’s very demure. With you, it’s a roll in the mud. Mother Mud. With her’ – she felt his body
beneath her gather into itself, thinking – ‘it’s a butterfly alighting on a little flower.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘The stem bends, a single drop of dew falls to the ground.
Blip.’

‘I don’t believe you at all. I think you say to me just the opposite of what you mean. Why do you insult me just after I’ve made such good love to you?’

‘Clearly because it’s confusing. Anyway, Ruth, why
was
it good? What’s the matter with you lately?’

‘I don’t know; I figure, why not. I have nothing to lose. Each time, I think it may be the last time, and it’s my aesthetic duty to really enjoy it.’

‘That makes me sad. Are you so sure I’m going to leave?’

She felt him wanting to be sure, and thereby to place his decision behind them, in the realm of the inevitable. ‘No, I’m not sure. I think it would be silly for you to go now that I’m getting better in bed.’

‘Maybe I feel I shouldn’t leave you until you have enough confidence in bed to catch the next man.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage.’

‘But how? I can’t picture it. Who could you possibly marry, after me?’

‘Oh – some idiot.’

‘Exactly He would be an idiot. He wouldn’t be good enough for you.’

‘Then don’t leave me.’

‘But Richard’s not good enough for Sally.’

‘He’s ideal. They’re made for each other. Let them alone.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I thought you were.’

‘In my mind. It’s a terrible responsibility being the only man who’s good enough for anybody.’

‘It must be.’

‘Hey? Make yourself into Heaven again for me.’

‘No.’

August. The days dwindled minute by minute as each twilight came earlier; the growing chill of the nights deadened the heat of the sun at noon, made it seem bland and stale. Gazing from the kitchen windows onto the lawn where her children’s feet had worn wide swathes of grass down to dust, Ruth felt the time in which she was immersed as foreshortened, seen from a vague time when Jerry had long since left. The earth, to the dead, is flat; and the moments of her life even as she lived them felt buried within a crushing retrospect. She was in quicksand. As she proved her point – that in the realm of the real she was better his wife than the other – Jerry’s heart streamed away from her, towards the impossible woman. Often, calling him at work, Ruth got a busy signal. The bleating seemed a wall that was moving closer. Once, she dialled Sally’s number and got the same signal: the wall was continuous.

That evening she told him, ‘I called her number too and it was also busy.’

He did a little dance step sideways. ‘Well why not? She has friends. A few. Maybe she’s taken another lover.’

‘Tell me the truth. This is too serious.’

Frighteningly he collapsed, shrugging, ‘Sure. I talk to her.’

‘You don’t.’

‘You want the truth or not?’

‘Who calls who?’

‘It varies.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

He did the little dance step backwards, as if putting something spilled back into a bottle. ‘Not long. She looked so miserable a couple Sundays ago I called to find out how she was doing.’

‘You’ve betrayed our bargain.’

‘Your bargain. And not really. I don’t hold out any hope to her. Look, she and I were close, she was my
friend
, and I feel some responsibility towards her. If it had gone the other way, I’d wonder how
you
were.’

‘And I’d take it as a sign you were still interested. Well, how
is
she?’

He seemed pleased to tell her, to pour on more quicksand, ‘Not so hot. She’s talking about running away from all of us.’

‘Why would she leave Richard?’

‘He beats her up now and then. He’s angry because she doesn’t fuck him enough. She says she can’t because she still loves me. She feels very guilty about what she’s doing to him, and doesn’t want to hurt you any more, so she thinks the best thing would be to dispose of herself. Short of suicide, I mean. She doesn’t have your death-wish.’

‘Don’t tell me any more, I don’t want to hear it. Don’t you see, she’s trying to panic you? She could perfectly well make love to Richard if she wanted to, she’s been doing it for ten years.’