Marry Me (3 page)

‘You’ll forget me.’

His laugh shocked her, she had meant this so seriously.

‘I don’t think in two days I’ll forget you.’

‘You think a night with me is nothing.’

He paused; she felt in the unreeling seconds that she was being given line. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think a night with you is almost everything. I’m hoping for a lifetime of them.’

‘Hoping’s a nice safe thing to do.’

‘I don’t want to fight with you. I never fight with women. I don’t think we should take any risks until we know what we’re going to do.’

She sighed. ‘You’re right. I say to myself, “Jerry’s right.” We mustn’t be reckless. There are too many other people involved.’

‘Hordes of them. I wish there weren’t. I wish the world was just you and me. Listen. You don’t want to come. The airlines are all messed up by this strike at Eastern. Right now I can see six four-star generals and two hundred guys in Dacron suits shoving towards Gate Seventeen. My plane must be about to board.’ He was in a phone booth at LaGuardia. The flight he had planned to take had been full; he had killed the time of delay by calling her. She thought, If he had gone on the right plane he wouldn’t have called me; and this casualness, the implied smallness of her place in his life, enlarged him, scooped wider with its insult the aching hollow of her love.

He was waiting for her to laugh or agree, she couldn’t remember which. ‘I love you so much,’ she said limply.

‘Hey how will you explain this on your phone bill? I wouldn’t have called collect if I’d known we’d talk so long.’

‘Oh, I’ll just say – I don’t know what I’ll say. He never listens to what I say anyway.’ Sally sometimes wondered
how many of her accusations of her husband were unfair. Her conversation was like a garden gone wild; surprising weeds sprang up in it every day.

‘They
are
boarding. Good-bye?’

‘Good-bye, darling.’

‘I’ll call you Wednesday morning.’

‘Very good.’

He heard a rebuke in her tone and asked, ‘Shall I call you from Washington? Tomorrow morning?’

‘No, you’ll have things to do. Be busy. Just think of me a little.’

He laughed. ‘How could I help but?’ He waited, said, ‘You’re the one,’ pecked a little flat kiss into the telephone, and hung up. She replaced the receiver quickly, as if stoppering a bottle from which Jerry might escape.

Her hair uncombed, her bathrobe flapping, Sally went outdoors and screeched at the edge of the woods, ‘Bo-oys! Bee-each!’

The woods screening the houses of the neighbourhood from one another smelled profoundly of summer, not the usual delicate Connecticut scent of thinned underwood and grass but a rich warm odour of layered leaf mould and mouldering logs – the way vacations had smelled when she was a child from Seattle summering in the Cascades. She went upstairs to change, and this nostalgic ferny fragrance, persisting through the bedroom window, intersected the faintly corrupt tang of salt water on her bathing suit. Sally bundled and pinned her hair. Alone in her bathroom, she conjured up Jerry; she gave the air his eyes. In making love his first motion was always to remove her
hairpins and in the daily details of her toilet she seemed to bend close to him, sharing with him his careful love of her body.

She mixed a thermos of lemonade, scolded the boys into their bathing suits, and got into the car. The Saab had lately developed a reluctance to start, so she parked it pointed downhill and used momentum to turn the engine over. Josie was laboriously pushing the baby carriage, with a bag of groceries propped at Theodora’s feet, up the driveway as Sally coasted down; she had reached the steep place where Sally let out the clutch. The women could exchange only frightened looks in the precarious moment as the spark ignited and the engine jerked into power. Sally felt that Josie had something to ask her, something about meals or naps, but Josie knew the routine as well as she – better, because she was less distracted, was middle-aged and past love.

Under the tranquillizing June sun the Sound was a smooth plane reflecting the command,
Don’t go.
She led Peter and Bobby well down the beach. Sally thought she spotted Ruth in the pack of mothers at the other end, and Bobby said, ‘I want to go play with Charlie Conant.’

‘You can find him after we get settled,’ Sally said. She discovered herself crying again; she didn’t notice until her cheeks registered the wetness.
Don’t go.
Everything agreed on this – the grains of sand, the chorus of particles alive on the water, the wary glances of her sons, the distant splashes and shouts that came to her when she lay down and closed her eyes, like the smooth clatter of an ethereal sewing machine.
Don’t go, you can’t go, you are here.
The unanimity was wonderful. He didn’t
want her to go, he thought a night with her was nothing, he told her she was crucifying herself, he said it would not be as good as the first time. She grew furious with him. Her breathing felt oppressed under the tyranny of the sun; a rough touch gouged and abraded the skin of her exposed midriff, and she opened her eyes prepared to scream. Peter had brought her a crab claw, weathered and fragrant. ‘Don’t go, Mommy’ he pleaded, holding out close to her eyes his fragile dead gift. Her ears must be deceiving her.

‘It’s lovely, sweetie. Don’t put it in your mouth. Now go away and play with Bobby.’

‘Bobby hates me.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling, he likes you very much, he just doesn’t know how to show it. Now please go away and let Mommy think.’

Of course she shouldn’t go. As Jerry said, they had been lucky the first time. Richard had been on one of his trips. Jerry had waited for her at National Airport and they had taken a taxi into Washington. Their taxi driver, a solemn tea-coloured man who drove his cab with a proprietorial gentleness, had noticed the quality of their silence and asked if they wanted to go through the park, around the Tidal Basin, to see the cherry trees. Jerry told him yes. The trees were in blossom, pink, mauve, salmon, white; tremblingly Jerry’s fingers kept revolving Richard’s wedding ring on her finger. A black nurse was playing catch with some small boys in a shady clearing and the smallest of them held out his hands and the ball fell untouched at his feet. The hotel lobby was dark-carpeted and rich with Southern accents. With a lowering of his eyelashes the desk clerk accepted her
as Mrs Conant. Perhaps her face had been too radiant. Their room had white walls and framed flower prints, and looked out on an airshaft. Jerry shaved with a brush and soap bowl, which she would not have guessed. She thought all men used electric razors, because Richard did. Nor would she have guessed that the first evening, while she was painting her eyes in the bathroom and he was watching Arnold Palmer sink the winning putt on television, he would fall into a depression, and that for fifteen minutes she would have to hold him on the bed while he stared at the white wall and murmured about pain and sin, before he gathered the courage to button his shirt and put on his coat and take her to a restaurant. In an eye-whipping spring wind they walked block after block on the wide, diagonally intersecting streets, looking for a restaurant. Away from the illuminated monuments and façades, Washington seemed dark and secret, like the rear of a stage set. Limousines swished by with a liquid, lonely sound heard in Manhattan only very late at night. She felt the curse slowly lift from Jerry’s mind. He became manicky and leap-frogged a parking meter, and in the restaurant, a fancy-priced steakhouse catering to Texans, he impersonated a Congressman escorting the Queen of the Minnesota Dairyland.
Honeh, Ah could take a shaaan to you.
Their waiter, eavesdropping, had expected a huge tip, had been plainly disappointed. Strange, how fondly she remembered the awkwardnesses. In a narrow little gift shop, where Jerry had insisted on buying toys to take home to his children, the saleswoman kept turning to her as if she were their mother, tentatively, puzzled by her silence. On the last morning, by the elevator, on
their way to breakfast, she had been asked by the head chambermaid if the room might be cleaned, and she had said yes; this woman was the first person to treat her without a flicker of doubt as Jerry’s wife. When they returned at noon, the venetian blinds had been torn away from the window, their bed was stripped and shoved against the bureau, and a slouching Negro was lathering the carpet with a softly screaming machine. Jerry and Sally left the hotel in one taxi and took separate planes home and found that the coincidence of their absences had not been noticed. Their momentary marriage, a wedding ring overboard, sank greener and greener into the past and became irretrievable. No matter what happened, it would never happen again, never happen the same, in all of time. It would be silly – insane – to risk everything and go to him now. For now the venetian blinds of their affair were, if not quite torn off, at least set at a revealing tilt: Josie blushed and stiffly left the kitchen when Jerry’s usual ten o’clock call began ringing; Richard sat drinking the evenings away with a thoughtful dent in his upper lip; and the glimmering, watchful expression almost never left Peter’s face. Even the baby, who was learning to walk, seemed shy of her and preferred to lean on space. Perhaps this was a hallucination – at times Sally feared for her sanity.

She stood up. The seam of water and sky, marked by the thin beige line of the Island, seemed to exclude an immense possibility. Panic struck her. ‘Bo-oys,’ she called. ‘Time to go-o!’

Bobby’s body twisted and dropped to the sand in a tantrum. He shouted, ‘We just came, you nut!’

‘Don’t you ever call people that,’ she told him. ‘If
you’re rude, people won’t know what a nice little boy you are.’ It was one of Jerry’s theories that if you often enough told someone he was nice he would become nice. In a way it did work. Peter came to her, and Bobby afraid of being left alone, sulkily followed to the Saab.

Don’t go.
No. Yet the command had no weight, no weight whatsoever, and though she read it in a dozen obstructive omens that bristled about her as she dressed and lied her way out of the house and drove to the airport and paid her way onto the aeroplane, it remained a weightless sentence, afloat on the deep certainty that she should go, that going was the only possible thing to do, and absolutely right. A righteous tide lifted her over the snag of Josie’s surprise, carried past the children’s upturned faces, pushed her through the choked hurry of dressing and the ominous clogging of the Saab’s starter, urged her down the swerving allées of the Merritt Parkway and the metal-strewn boulevards of Queens, and sustained her nerve during the wait at LaGuardia while United found her a seat on a Washington flight. Then Sally flew; she became a bird, a heroine. She took the sky on her back, levelled out on the cloudless prairie above the clouds – boiling, radiant, motionless – and held her breath for twenty pages of Camus while the air-conditioner nozzle whispered into her hair. The plane canted above a continent of loamy farms where dot-like horses galloped. Acres of pastel houses in curved rows swung into view, and then a city composed of diagonal avenues and miniature monuments. Washington’s shaft was momentarily aligned down a breadth of Mall with the Capitol dome. The plane skimmed water, thumped, reversed its
engines, shuddered, and with a stately swaying waddled to a stop. A departed shower had left the runway damp in patches. The afternoon sun struck from the cement a humid warmth more tropical than the warmth she had left on the beach. It was three o’clock. Within the terminal, people were rapidly threading their way through the interwoven aromas of floor wax and hot dogs. She found the empty phone booth. Her hand fumbled inserting its dime. The quick of her index fingernail hurt as she dialled the necessary numerals.

Jerry was a designer and animator of television commercials, and the State Department had hired his company to create a series of thirty-second spots plugging freedom in underdeveloped countries, and he was the intermediary for the project. From their first trip Sally remembered the section of the State Department that could find him. ‘He’s not a regular employee,’ she explained. ‘He’s just in town for two days.’

‘We’ve found him, Miss. Who shall I say is calling, please?’

‘Sally Mathias.’

‘Miss Sally Mathias, Mr Conant.’

Some electric noises shuffled. His voice laughed harshly. ‘Hi there, you crazy Miss Mathias.’

‘Am I crazy? I think I am. Sometimes I look at myself and think, very calmly,
You nut.’

‘Where are you, at home?’

‘Sweetie, can’t you tell? I’m here. I’m at the airport.’

‘My God, you really did come, didn’t you? This is wild.’

‘You’re mad at me.’

He laughed, postponing reassuring her. And when he spoke, it was all in questions. ‘How can I be mad at you when I love you? What are your plans?’

‘Should I have come? I’ll do whatever you want me to. Do you want me to go back?’

She felt him calculating. She saw a Puerto Rican child Peter’s age standing apparently abandoned on the waxed floor outside the phone booth. The child’s dark eyes rolled, his little pointed chin buckled, he began to cry. ‘Can you kill some time?’ Jerry asked at last. ‘I’ll call the hotel and say my wife has decided to come down with me. Take a taxi in, go to the Smithsonian or something for a couple of hours, and I’ll meet you along Fourteenth Street, at New York Avenue, around five-thirty.’ The door of the booth beside Sally’s opened, and a brown man in a flowered shirt angrily led the child away.

‘Suppose we miss each other?’

‘Listen. I’d know you in Hell.’ It frightened her that when Jerry said ‘Hell’ he meant a real place. ‘If you feel lost, go into Lafayette Square – you know, the park behind the White House. Stand under the horse’s front hoofs.’

‘Hey? Jerry? Don’t hate me.’

‘Oh, God. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could? Just tell me what you’re wearing.’

‘A black linen suit.’

‘The one you wore at the Collinses’ party? Great. There are some terrific old trains on the ground floor. Don’t miss Lindbergh’s plane. See you five-thirtyish.’

‘Jerry? I love you.’