Marry Me (30 page)

‘Don’t be mean to me about them, I can’t possibly do them now. Mrs O is coming in fifteen minutes. You’ve already done one and it’s beautiful; do four more just like it. Don’t try to be original, it’ll take you five minutes. What else are you going to do today? Are you going to go over to her?’

‘I suppose I should.’

‘Just do the posters, I’ll never ask you to do another thing.’

‘“Keep in touch” – that unctuous son of a bitch telling my wife to keep in touch.’

‘Jerry, I
must
get dressed.’

As if he was detaining her. Was he? Though his hand was trembling and the floor under the cardboard rolled like the deck of a ship, he could not help trying to make each poster better than the one before – funnier, vivider, more invitingly rummagy. It took him longer than five minutes; Ruth showered and dressed and came down to find him still working. She was wearing the plain black dress he had always liked; its knit hugged her hips and its blackness dramatized the something pliant about her pale flesh. She kissed him good-bye. Because of the Sho-card colour on his fingers he could not touch her with his hands. He asked, ‘Is this what Richard told you ladies should wear to see their lawyers in?’

‘Does it seem right? I suppose I should wear a hat with a veil like for church but I don’t have any. I could borrow Linda’s again. Do you think he’ll want to talk money already?’

‘Probably. What does Richard think you should ask?’

‘He mentioned fifteen. That seems like a lot. I don’t think my father ever made that much in all his life.’

‘Well, get what you can. I’m sure Richard’s lawyer will have lots of good ideas.’

‘Are you mad? Isn’t this right? I mean, I have no choice any more, do I?’

‘Of course I’m not mad. I’m sad. I think you’re very spunky and look great. Give me another kiss.’ He leaned forward, handless. Her nose was cool and her tongue warm. The porch steps thumped. Mrs O had arrived. As Ruth left, she was searching her pocketbook and Jerry heard her saying, ‘Car keys, car keys,’ to herself.

He finished the posters while Mrs O fed Geoffrey a
second breakfast. Alone at last with a person perfectly kind, Geoffrey prattled. Jerry heard the murmur and realized there was a tone, a muffling amplification, that altered the voices of his children when he listened to them through the thought that he was going to leave them – as the eye would be disturbed by a drawing, meticulously carried out, where perspective nevertheless lapses on one semi-distant building, whose roof is impossibly awry, giving to the surface of the whole a vague churning, an unwanted resonance. All summer, from other rooms, across widths of asphalt and grass, Jerry had heard that sound, and it had joined as a species of discomfort the curious flatted impression made upon him when, awaking each morning from a sleep permeated with schemes and desires centred upon Sally, he would see, first thing, the lightly smiling self-portrait, executed with exquisitely true touches of colour but in line and drawing not really resembling her at all, given to him by Ruth, blushing, on his thirtieth birthday last winter. In this way, the way in which she could, she had given herself to him.

Only when the posters were finished, laid in a row on the sofa to dry, and brush washed and the paints put away in the playroom, did Jerry feel obliged to call Sally. Mrs O had taken Geoffrey for a walk to the candy store in the leaves; Jerry was alone in the house. It felt strange, dialling her number from his house. He misdialled a six for a seven, replaced the receiver as if hushing a mouth about to scream, and dialled again. ‘Hello’: her voice no longer lifted syllables upward into questions.

‘Hi there, you crazy Miss Mathias. It’s me. How are you?’

‘Fa-air.’ Her voice dragged the word into two syllables.

‘Richard there sleeping?’

‘No, he went out again, he’s terribly excited. Having anything to do with lawyers always makes him excited. How are you?’

‘Alone. Ruth’s gone to see your husband’s lawyer and the babysitter has taken Geoffrey for a walk.’

‘Have you told your children yet?’

‘Oh God, no. Everything’s been too confused. Richard’s been here, issuing ultimatums and giving advice all around.’

‘He said you seemed frightened.’

‘How funny. He was doing his bully-boy act.’

‘He’s been
so
hurt, Jerry.’

‘Hey Do you want me to come over?’

‘If you want to, I’d like it.’

‘Of course I want to. Why wouldn’t I?’ When she didn’t supply the answer, he added, ‘You sound bruised.’

‘Yes, I guess that’s what it is. Bruised.’

‘Well don’t bump into anything more, just stand in the middle of the room. I’ll be right there.’

‘I love you.’

He had to do things quickly, or he would sink. Jerry put on sneakers but neglected to tie them and rushed into his back yard with the laces bouncing and flipping. He mistakenly pulled out the choke of the Mercury as if it were winter, and, half-flooded, it was reluctant to start. He made the engine roar and drove past mailboxes, garages with gaping doors, heaps of leaves smouldering untended, empty yards. The entire town felt vacated; he imagined that atomic war had been declared, and glanced at the sky for a telltale change of appearance. But the
clouds there only mirrored the desolation of the uneventful. The Mathiases’ house silhouetted on its hill seemed a ruin, a stark unturning windmill. Caesar lumbered from the woods and barked, but without heart; by the kitchen doorway the asters swallowed by darkness last night showed russet shades. Inside the door, Sally came shyly into his arms. She was his. Her body startled him by being so real, so solid, so big and stiff; she rested her forehead woodenly on the side of his neck and the heat of her face felt dry. He held her tightly to him; it was expected. Theodora toddled into the hall and stared at them. Her eyebrows, like Sally’s, were shaped – high-arched, and darkening towards the bridge of the nose – so that their natural expression was, if not anger, the alertness of a wild and perpetually threatened animal. The lower half of the child’s face held Richard’s thin, birdy mouth. Her gaze, great-eyed and steady, reflected the vivid transparence all around them; they were exposed, he and Sally, in this high house. He asked, ‘Hey?’

For answer she tightened her arms at his back and involved him deeper in her stricken rigidity. She wore her amber-striped jersey and white St Tropez pants, her playful sailor costume.

He asked her, ‘Don’t you feel like we’re two children caught with our hands in the cookie jar?’

She pulled back and looked at him humourlessly ‘No. Is that what you feel like?’

He shrugged. ‘Sort of. A little. I’m sure it will pass.’

She returned the weight of her face to his neck and asked, ‘Would you like anything?’

Was she offering, incredibly, to make love, here, with all the world watching? Over her shoulder, he asked the
child, to remind Sally that she was there, ‘No nap, Theodora?’

‘She won’t take her morning nap any more,’ Sally said. Trying, what had never before been an effort, to find the stance that fit his body, she backed off slightly, letting a little air between them, but keeping her head bowed, as if frightened to show him her face. Looking down, she laughed. ‘You forgot to tie your sneakers.’

‘Yeah, and I forgot my cigarettes.’

She decided to back off from him completely. ‘I think Richard left some in the living room. Where do you want to sit?’

‘Anywhere.’

Where?

We could meet for coffee sometime, if you’d like. Somewhere outside of Greenwood. Would that be wrong?

No. Well, yes. Wrong but right. When? When, dear Sally? Don’t tease me.

It’s you who tease me, Jerry.

‘How many cups of coffee have you had this morning?’ Sally smiled in complicity.

‘Not so many. Two,’ he said, irritated to think that he had betrayed her by not having more. She had not slept, she had drowned in coffee while he had been swimming in his wife’s warmth and colouring on the floor like a child.

He sat in her bright kitchen, the glitter of its knives and counter edges and pâté moulds at intervals dulled as clouds swallowed the sun, and talked of Richard and Ruth; they found it difficult to talk of themselves. Their love, their affair, had become a great awkward shape, jagged, fallen between them. Jerry was ashamed of his desire not
to touch her; he wanted to explain that it was not a change in her, but a change in the world. Richard’s knowing had swept through things and left them bare; the trees were stripped, the house was polished and sterile like a shop-window, the hills dangled as skeletons of stones, so that lying embraced even in the earth Jerry and Sally would be seen. His modesty made her repulsive, nothing else; but to plead this, as excuse for not touching her, that same modesty forbade. He was bewildered to be locked with her in a relation demanding tact. She stood; he stood; they seemed, the two of them, bombarded by light perilously. He wanted to hush her brilliance, for it cried out, declared, through the miraculous transparence around them, their position, when they most needed to hide.

They did not hear Richard’s car come up the drive. He found them standing in the kitchen, as if they had just touched. His lips were pinched in like the lips of the elderly. ‘Here, here,’ he said. ‘This is too much.’

Jerry, to make himself smaller, sat down on a hard kitchen chair. Sally remained standing and said, ‘We have to talk. Where can we go?’

Richard still wore his coat and tight tie, as if he had become, through intense consultation, himself a lawyer. ‘Of course, of course,’ he conceded. His saying things twice had taken on an air of legal force. ‘You have to talk, to hash things over. Forgive me, we may not always be rational, but we shall try, we shall try. I came back to get some papers – bankbooks and insurance policies; Sally, you know the folder. Do I have your permission to go upstairs to what used to be our bedroom?’

‘We were talking very sadly,’ Sally offered him, ‘about
you.’

‘That’s very kind of you both, I’m sure. You are both, I am sure, very concerned about my welfare.’

‘Oh Richard, relax,’ Sally said. ‘We’re all still people.’

‘I appreciate that. I appreciate that. I have never denied, so far as I know, that the parties involved in this negotiation are people. Jerry, are those your cigarettes you’re smoking, or mine?’

‘Yours.’

‘So I thought.’

‘Here, I’ll give you twenty-eight cents.’

‘Keep your money, you’ll need it. Make yourself at home, Jerry boy. Sally-O, see that Jerry here gets a good lunch, will you? I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to join you, though I know you’re begging me to.’

Jerry stood, saying, ‘I’ll leave.’

‘Don’t,’ Sally commanded.

‘It’s not my house,’ Jerry told her. ‘It’s his. He’s right. I shouldn’t be here.’

Richard stepped over to him and put his arm around him bearishly and hugged; his breath, close, smelled of whiskey, a heavy, helpless, sepia smell. ‘Of course you should, Jerry. Jesus Christ, of course you should. Forgive me, huh? I had an irrational moment when I walked in, but I’m O.K. now. What’s mine is yours, eh? You really put it into her, didn’t you?’ His hug tightened, and Jerry fought a vivid delusion of himself as infantile, small enough to be crushed, lifted, and tossed. His palms began to tingle, his mouth felt dry. Richard was urging him, ‘Enjoy your meal. That’s one thing about Sally, I can’t take it from her, she’s a good cook. She’s given me one hell of a time, boy, but she’s kept those meals coming, three times a day, boy, bang bang bang. She’s
a good kid, Jerry, you lucky son of a bitch; you really had it into her, didn’t you? I can’t get over it, I know it’s irrational as hell, I know it’s a defence mechanism of some kind, but I can’t get it into my thick head.’

Jerry said, ‘She never stopped being fond of you.’ Jerry’s heart was pounding, he was trying to make an ascent, up into Richard’s approval, his forgiveness. ‘I didn’t realize,’ he went on, ‘until last night, how fond of you she is.’

‘Horseshit,’ Richard said.
‘Merde. Caca.
Take her out of my sight, the sight of her makes me sick, frankly. Good luck, buddy. I give you two butchers three years at the outside.’

‘Leave him alone,’ Sally told Richard. ‘Can’t you see he’s in hell over his children?’

‘I feel sorry for his kids myself,’ Richard said. ‘I feel sorry for mine, too. I feel sorry for everybody except you, Sally-O. You’ve got it made.’

‘Jerry can go any time,’ Sally said, her chin proudly tilted. ‘I have no claims on him. I want a man to
want
me.’

But Richard had turned and gone upstairs, three steps at a time. He shouted down, ‘Where’s my fucking bathrobe?’

Sally went to the foot of the stairs and screamed as fiercely, ‘Stay out of my closet!’

Richard’s heavy steps dragged this way and that above them and soon he came down carrying a suitcase; he barged into the open air without a sideways glance in their direction, though they had gone into the hall like servants to receive his orders.

Sally smoothed her long hair back from her ears and sighed. ‘Everybody’s getting so melodramatic.’

‘You shouldn’t stay here,’ Jerry said. ‘I can’t visit you, Richard will keep coming in and out. He told me he’s going to live here.’

‘It’s as much my house as his,’ Sally said.

‘Not really, since it’s you and not Richard who wants the divorce.’

She stared; her eyes went wide in mock innocence. ‘Just me! I thought we
all
wanted it.’

‘Well, some more than others.’

‘Perhaps I misunderstood last night,’ Sally persisted. ‘I thought I heard you say you wanted to marry me.’

‘I did. And I don’t like you here. I feel you’re in danger.’

‘Oh, Richard,’ she said, mildly, brushing back her hair again. ‘I can manage
him.’
And in the emphasis of
him
strange territories unfolded for Jerry. There was something he could almost glimpse, if Sally would cease setting herself and her solid concerns, her desperate practicality, in the path of his vision. She said, ‘Want to go look at the painter’s house? Remember, I mentioned him?’