Marry Me (32 page)

He rose stiffly, with the aimless thankfulness of an invalid. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘let’s. Maybe if I could get out of this house, I’d get some perspective.’

I love this house.

Love my house, love me.

You are the house, sort of. You care, is what your house says. You care about many little things.

I’ve a trivial mind.

No; you’re like a plant "with a short growing season that has to put out a lot of tiny roots.

That sounds tragic, Jerry.

I didn’t mean it tragically. We all have a season of some kind.

The clouds that Jerry had thought would bring a storm had instead thinned, were dispersing; it was one o’clock, and could have been late afternoon of a midsummer day. They drove, the four of them, not to the Greenwood beach, where Jerry and Sally might have been recognized, but to another, some miles away – an arc of sand between two congregations of great streaked rocks. A few sailboats, like clinging leaves, dotted the Sound. At one point, while they walked the half-mile to the far rocks and back, he exclaimed, ‘God. This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen!’ The waves, the whitecaps, the yellowish streaked rocks wore for him a religious brilliance; for as they walked they were deciding not to marry. Or, rather, Jerry was revealing that they would not.

Abruptly, after a flick of her head and some rapid wordless nodding, Sally laughed and offered, ‘Well I must say, Jerry, you let things go right down to the last flag!’ Being out of doors had put colour into her face.

‘I didn’t know before, I honestly didn’t,’ he said, and, ‘I was afraid of losing the only thing that ever made sense.’

‘Where did it all go, Jerry?’

‘Oh, it’s still there. Hiding. But there.’ Resenting her silence, he added, ‘Why don’t you fight?’

She shook her head, gazing down to where her bare
feet were treading ribs of rippled sand on the water side of a wavering line of sun-dried wrack, and told him, ‘No, Jerry, I won’t fight. It’s not my position to fight. It’s your position.’

Theodora was falling farther and farther behind and now sat down in the wet sand in despair. Having reached the rocks, the adults turned, and Jerry carried the child all the way back to the car. Terribly, their bodies were beginning to fit, and she gave her weight to his arms with growing trust. The parking lot was as empty as in May, and the high territory of dunes had regained its untenanted innocence. As they got into the car, Sally said, ‘Thank the nice man, children, for the ride to the beach.’

‘We didn’t stay,’ Peter complained.

‘I’ll bring you tomorrow,’ she told him.

Jerry drove them home and waited in the downstairs hall while Sally went upstairs and brought from her closet, from a hatbox far back on the shelf, the manila envelope containing the letters, the affectionate funny drawings, the bad little poems that had accumulated, like wrack, through the months of their affair and that she had carefully saved. ‘I think everything’s here,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been so scared Richard would find them.’

‘If he does decide to go through with the divorce –’

‘No. Don’t even say it. He won’t.’

‘Hey –’

‘Don’t cry. We knew it would end. I knew it would.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t quite leave you, I can’t quite come to the last moment. Now that you’re no longer mine, all my old love has come pouring back. You look glorious.’

‘Please go. I think you’ve decided. Be good to Ruth, don’t punish her for your decision.’

‘Will there be somebody else for you now?’

‘No.’ She gave him that rapidly. She touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. ‘Nobody else could make me so’ – she hesitated, searching for the word, and smiled, finding it – ‘pleased.’

‘I never have felt right,’ Jerry told her, ‘in my life, I can’t express it, except with you. I never was home except when I was with you.’

Her face took on the beginnings of the expression she assumed when she thought people were being what she called ‘melodramatic’. She said with a shrug, ‘I’m glad it was you.’

‘Could you call me, if you need me? To talk?’

‘I don’t think so, no. This must be the very end. Otherwise people will think we’re too crazy. Thank you, Jerry.’

He offered to kiss her, but she refused him.

Sally had turned in the hall before he had closed the door.

On the path outside, he met Richard. Richard glanced at his face, at the envelope in his hand, and said, ‘No guts, huh Jerry?’

Jerry imagined they would have to talk a long time, and he tightened his grip on the fat manila envelope. ‘It’s one thing,’ he said, ‘to have guts for yourself, and another to have guts for your children.’

‘Yeah, sure, Jerry boy – you should have thought of that a little earlier. I’m going to make you pay, friend. I’ve been taking it cold turkey, and in our society people must pay for the pain they inflict.’

‘What are you going to do to
her
?’

Richard lit a cigarette, and studied the invisible chessboard
whereupon his opponent, daringly, had castled. ‘I don’t know, Jerry,’ he said, exhaling from the side of his mouth, one eye – the good or the bad – closed against the sting of smoke. ‘I haven’t slept, I’m not thinking clearly.’

‘She’s your wife,’ Jerry said to him. ‘I’ve been with her these hours and she’s felt like your wife. They’re your children, it’s your house.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Richard said.
‘Mucho gracias, señor.’
He threw down his cigarette, scarcely smoked, and ground it into the grass, and went into his house, the door banging. Jerry listened, standing there motionless like a burglar. The house was silent, their reunion was silent, there was no sound but that of Caesar’s claws rasping the driveway stones as the dog returned from some idle hunt in the woods to his accustomed lair inside the garage.

In his Mercury convertible, top down, Jerry drove home, free. The leaves in the trees above his speed were red and gold leaping out of green and rolling backwards against the sky. The ominous Nature his childhood had known seemed reborn; the air had the aftertaste of humiliation and disgrace, which is also, strangely, the taste of eternal life. He found Geoffrey and the little Cantinelli boy in the back yard trying to play baseball with a bent plastic bat and a whiffle ball, and he threw his son a few pitches before going into the house; these little boys, versions of a discarded self of his own, were his bodyguards. He wished never to move from this safe moment, on this firm autumnal lawn, among small dirty faces clean of accusation, his son’s face charged with
love and dependence, the neighbour boy’s with, more confirming still, simple respect for his superior age and size. But he could not stay; he must flee, he must hide; he had work to do. He told Mrs O. She nodded and produced out of her bosom a cooing that signified resignation, and hope of Ruth’s eventual return, and assurance of the children’s continued well-being. Jerry went upstairs and put on the suit whose pants he had put on this morning. In the kitchen he wrote, in crayon, on the back of a milk bill, all is off. be mine. He signed himself X X. He drove to New York City quickly, against the tide of afternoon traffic.

Oh Jerry, there’s no rush, take all the time you need, because I know, I know every time I see you, that it’s you, it has to be you, and it will be. It doesn’t matter so much what you decide, or if you decide at all, we’re not that important, I mean us as people, it’s our love that’s important, what we feel for each other, that’s what we must protect, what we must never let the world take from us.

I want to climb to you.

Come if you can. I’m here. Just loving you makes me happy, even when you don’t come to me.

You say that, but it won’t always be true.

Why do you never believe me?

In his office he was told that, without him, his ideas and the animation roughs he had promised, the dog food conference had bombed. He sat down at his desk as the secretaries filled the hall with the chatter and shuffle of their departures, and tried to sketch dogs that walked upright and talked. The telephone on his steel desk rang.

‘Darley what happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ he told Ruth. ‘Not enough happened. Do you want me back? Or would you rather not? I can stay in the cottage a while.’

‘Of course I want you. Do you want me?’

‘Apparently I could hardly focus on poor Sally I was so obsessed by the way you put on your cocktail party dress and walked out of my life.’

‘Was she upset?’

‘No, she was terribly calm and resigned. I felt it was what she wanted too. She was obsessed with Richard. All of a sudden the two of us had nothing.’

‘Was Richard there?’

‘In and out. I saw him at the end and he told me I had no guts.’

There was a pause, then Ruth said, ‘How mean.’

He asked, ‘How was the lawyer?’

‘Oh, he was charming. Jewish, about my father’s age, very courtly and charming. We just talked in general terms; he doesn’t think Alabama is the place to go, but he didn’t think from what Richard told him it would come to that.’

‘He didn’t.’ It was frightening, degrading, to think that his move had been foreseen.

His wife offered to distract him. ‘You should have seen me driving to Cannonport, I was so slow it was agony. People kept honking and passing, and I kept thinking,
Those children have only me now
, and driving slower than ever. It’s a wonder I wasn’t creamed from behind.’

‘You can write a booklet, “How I Became a Safe Driver”, by Ruth Conant.’

‘Why are you in New York?’

‘Beats me. I can’t afford to lose my job on top of everything else. I feel safe here.’

‘Are you waiting for her to call?’

‘No, God, that’s just what I’m
not
waiting for. Can you manage for a couple hours?’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘Feed the kids, I’ll be home for supper around eight. I love you.’

‘Well, gee. This is all so sudden. I feel swept off my feet.’

He laughed, and asked, ‘Why are women so funny? She kept making jokes too.’

‘Jerry?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t do anything drastic.’

He laughed again. ‘Like slit my wrists? You should all be so lucky.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense.’

‘You were nice,’ Jerry told her, ‘to hang on this summer.’

‘I can’t believe it’s over,’ Ruth said. ‘I’ve thought it was over so many times, and it never was.’

‘It’s over. Please relax and be yourself again.’

‘How? Who am I?’

‘You know.’

She hung up, but he found he couldn’t draw. His hand shook; the lights outside his window were multiplying, as the city sank into night like a vast, twinkling, gently foundering ship. It was after six; he had no business being here. He took the sketchpad and walked to the parking lot, beside a giant excavation; as he drove to Greenwood, through the perilous patchwork of headlights and
signals, the terrible conversation on the beach seeped back to him. Her chin and cheeks and eyelids rosy from the salt breeze, Sally had asked, not quite believing his drift,
Can’t we make it right?

Never.

Do you know what you’re saying to me?

I’m saying we will never be right. But then none of us will ever be right after this, not me and Ruth, not you and Richard.

Is it my children? Is it my children you can’t stand?

I like them. The only thing I have against them is that they remind me of mine.

You should have let me go when I wanted to, and when I had the strength.

I loved you. Still do. If you want me, you can have me. Here I am, tied and delivered, courtesy of Richard Mathias.

I don’t want you if you’re going to be like this. You’re no use to me unhappy.

Oh, I’ll become happy again. Once I get in the painter’s little fairy house.

No. It’s gone. I can feel it.

Can you? I can’t feel anything.

Peter, stop pestering Mr Conant. He doesn’t want to play.

He’s trying to show me a shell. It’s neat, Peter. Do you have a safe pocket?

Should we wait for Theodora?

She walks like you, don’t you think?

I never noticed.

Want to go past the rocks, see what’s there?

You’d like to get back.

I can wait.

Jerry –

Say it.

I’m sorry I’ve been stupid, I’m sorry I couldn’t talk last night and can’t seem to do the right thing today –

You’ve been fine. You’re you.

No, I know I’ve felt wrong to you today; but I wouldn’t always. I know we’re all right together.

I know it too. It’s not you, Sally It’s things. We can’t lift them. You can’t lift them for me. I can’t lift them for you. I’d love to, but I can’t.

O.K., man. If you can’t, you can’t.

Are you sure I can’t?

It’s you who are sure.

God. This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen!

His headlights gathered in the Greenwood exit sign. He remembered that he was carrying, on the back seat, the bulky envelope Sally had given him, the corpse of their affair. He stopped the Mercury at the side of the turnoff road and opened the trunk with the key; deep inside, with the greasy lug wrench and a flap of plastic lining that had come unglued and some bailing rope left over from a Cub Scout paper drive Charlie had been active in, there was a cave that would do for now. The envelope was so bulky with tokens of romantic love that as he handled it the little clasp let go and the contents spilled, exposing like edges of broken glass glimpses of his agitated handwriting, on pieces of paper already beginning to yellow. A few fell to the road; the rest slid loose upon the rubber floor of the trunk. Headlights swept over him, again and again; he was afraid someone he knew would stop, seeing him on his knees in the road, pulling a love letter from beneath a tyre. With jerking, slippery hands he stuffed the letters back into the envelope; they had expanded; they would not go in,
without crumpling. Between two letters in his handwriting were some strands of hair. He tried to examine them in the red glow of his tail lights, and couldn’t be certain of the colour. But they were too short to be hers. And he remembered that sometimes in her house she would comb his hair afterwards. She had saved the combings.