Marry Me (34 page)

‘The sky’ he said. ‘Fantastic sky.’ All around them the palest of blues, powdery and demure, was boiling, boiling with thunderheads whose roots were translucent and whose crowns were a white so raw and pure their mass seemed emphasized by a fine black outline, etched by the eye. Though there was superabundant shape in these clouds there was no weight or burden of rain in them; Jerry felt that the slightest change in the air, the smallest alteration in its taste, would evaporate them utterly.

The west was rimmed with mountains, violet and
brushed with chalk or, most likely, snow; the clarity of the air brought these distant peaks near yet rendered them unreal, uninhabitable, like the jumpy visions, with compressed perspective, obtained from a telescope. In the tawny middle distance a single horse, apparently riderless, was running, and a line of trees, perhaps cottonwoods, declared the presence of water. The plain was overspread with a youthful, silvery, aristocratic green – sage, Jerry imagined. A constellation of far rocks became a herd of sheep. In the foreground, there were lakes, a golf course, a red fort. Immediately under them like a glaring black page lay the macadam of the airfield, printed with stripes and oil-splotches, numerals and arrows and multicoloured lids of buried tanks, symbols in a cumbersome language employed by a worldwide race of myopic giants. His feet on firm ground, Jerry lifted his eyes and said, ‘Hi?’

‘Hi,’ Sally said, behind him, beside him. ‘You feel free?’

‘Are we free?’

‘Of some things.’ Saying this, she flipped back her hair and took a long step. She was tired. Bobby and Theodora had both been airsick above the checkerboard of the heartland states. Because Bobby was most like his father, Jerry found himself playing to him, whether attempting to overcome an instinctive dislike, or appealing to that odious authority he had felt in Richard, he couldn’t decide. Now he asked the boy, ‘How goes it, skipper?’

‘My throat’s sore,’ Bobby said, hiding his face against his mother’s thigh.

‘You’re thirsty,’ Jerry told him. ‘We’ll get you a Coke in the airport.’

‘I want a grape soda,’ Bobby said.

‘Where’s a cowboy?’ Peter asked. Already he seemed to have taken upon himself, young as he was, the task of interceding between his brother and stepfather, distracting them from the deadly business never to be settled between them.

‘I’ve seen
twenty
cowboys,’ Bobby said contemptuously, and it was true, even the mechanics on the field had been wearing ten-gallon hats. Inside the terminal building, there were so many cowboys that it seemed a troupe of dancers, in theatrically taut Levi’s, creased boots, open vests, and string ties, were waiting for a flight back to New York. But, no, these were real men, cured and warped to fit their costumes, which in turn fitted the land. With eyes whittled by weather to a kind of cruel ennui, with uncanny irises from which the sky had scooped all colour, the cowboys studied Sally, her calico beauty. Jerry touched her waist, to show possession and deny impotence – for he felt it was evident that the three children were not his. Sally started at his touch, and with a blankness of fright in her eyes turned and said sharply, ‘I’ll take Theodora while you get the bags.’

‘You can get Bobby a Coke over at that machine. Maybe it has grape soda.’

‘If I get him one I’ll have to get three. He can drink water at the fountain. He’s been throwing up, is why his throat hurts.’

‘I promised the kid a Coke.’

‘You’ll
spoil
him, Jerry.’

He wondered if he was not, for some dark reason, trying to win this child away from his mother, who seemed harsh. He felt in his situation patterns he had
scarcely begun to explore; abruptly, managing all this, even claiming the luggage, which was undeniably theirs, seemed claustrophobically complex and, worse, improper, impious. He had presumed. To steer this ramifying mass of misplacements through the exits into the open appeared impossible.

Sally, sensing some of this, asked, ‘Glad you’re here?’

‘With you, yes.’

‘I’ll teach you to ride. You’ll look great on a horse.’

‘I’ll break my neck.’

‘Look, there are our bags. Theodora, don’t.’ The child, set down on her own legs on the floor, amid the hubbub of the loudspeaking system and the hurrying of the other passengers, had begun to cry. ‘Your new daddy will think you’re not a happy girl.’

‘Want Coke too,’ she said.

‘Here,’ Jerry told Sally. ‘Three dimes.’

Once the baggage had been collected, and the porter bribed, and a taxi secured, the spirit of adventure – the command to gamble that the parables enjoin upon us – united them again. Bobby sat up with the driver, Jerry and Sally and the two younger children occupied the rear. The taxi was a deep old Pontiac driven by an Indian. His voice, when he inquired after their destination, was deep and careful, as if each word were unearthed, or mentally translated from a language older than English. Bobby stared, frankly fascinated, at the greasy black hair and leathery cheek and the beadwork fetishes hanging from the rearview mirror, and Jerry relaxed, having for the moment appeased this intimidating child, his new conscience. The road, which upon leaving the airport had moved through treeless suburbs with slow-down
bumps at the intersections, headed into the plain, and Jerry’s first impression, of benevolent spaciousness, was restored to him. He guessed, from the guidebooks he had read, at buffalo grass, at shooting stars and bluebells; there were peaceful spaces between the clumps of sagebrush where nothing offered to grow. Rather than greet so much joy alone he eased an arm behind the children’s backs and interlaced his fingers with Sally’s. She had been staring, dazed, at the monotonous land. Her touch was bony and tense, with that texture of having done work that he loved. Though she returned his timid pressure, which offered to shelter her, the corner of her mouth crimped with a fractional regret, as if acknowledging that she could no longer give freely what, through earning it, he had imposed on her as a duty. It was as if a chemical had been dropped. The air changed, slightly, but enough to tip the precarious balance of their mutual illusion. The smell of sage intensified; their speed had increased; pale green growths scudded by so quickly their tint became blue. The Indian’s head jutted impassively against the light. The children’s heads, finely outlined in black, appeared frozen; Jerry called ‘Hey?’ and Sally didn’t answer; the desert around them, and they with it, evaporated, vanished, never had been.

Jerry and Ruth descended at Nice. As the plane banked, the glittering Mediterranean leaped upward at them; the pilot had made a fatal mistake. At the last moment, like a card dealt from the bottom of the deck, land was flipped under them; the wheels touched down with a strut-cracking shudder; everything swayed, the engines
reversed furiously; and they were down. Charlie laughed. The little tile-roofed houses of the Côte d’Azur were pulled slowly past like a string of boxcars as they taxied to a stop. The attachez vos ceintures sign flicked off, then the defense de fumer. They grappled with their coats and stood, and in the murmur of voices around them Jerry heard that the interior of the plane, so plasticized and powder-blue and American at Idlewild, had been annexed to France. Everyone was speaking French, which he could not understand.
‘Au revoir,’
the stewardess said, and they went down the metal steps. The air was soft, clear, and somehow fractionated, Cubistically portioned and dislocated by the diagonal rays of a tepid sun. There were worlds to see here, but Jerry’s eyes were mute; loss had dulled them; his children and his wife carried his senses tottering across a width of coded concrete, through a series of broken impressions. In the patter surrounding the relinquishment of their passports he heard, because it was repeated, with an irritated note of surprise from the blue-uniformed official,
‘Trois enfants.’
Jerry heard his wife talking French to this man and wondered what strange woman this was by his side, who could keep an entire language locked within her. And within the terminal there stood, amid this dreamlike shuffle alien to him, Marlene Dietrich, wearing chamois slacks and high-heeled boots and smoking a cigarette in a long pearl holder. His children, ecstatic at being safe and free, rushed under her gaze, and this ghost, this construct of light and shadow from his own childhood, contemplated them with a frank interest and benevolence unexpected from an apparition.

Marlene Dietrich looked young, behind her battlement of luggage. Jerry saw in her proof of the truth that travel is a forestallment, a method of buying life with miles. He was travelling because Richard’s lawyer had suggested he go away for a while. He had taken a leave from the agency and was going to paint. He and Ruth were going to paint side by side again. He passed through glass into the open, where a rank of taxis, incongruously labelled taxis, waited.

‘
A Nice?’
a driver asked, dressed in a coat of a blue Jerry had only seen in paintings.

‘Oui, à Nice, s’il vons plaît,’
Ruth said, blushing as she named the hotel, as if their travel agent might have betrayed them.
‘Votre voiture, est-ce que c’est assez grand pour trois enfants?’

‘Oui, oui, ςα va, madame, les enfants sont petits.’

Charlie got in the front with the driver; the four others got into the rear. Geoffrey whimpered that they were squishing him. ‘We’re
all
being squished,’ Jerry told him, fighting to fend the congregation in his lungs, which had become morbidly responsive to his nerves.

Ruth said, ‘Everybody look out my window, it’s just like a painting.’ On the side of the road away from the sea, a young terrain supported an ancient agriculture; miserly care had partitioned into fields and terraces steep green mountains that, compared to the worn knolls of Connecticut, had just sprung into shape; towns climbed these hills in medieval perspective. Europe was pellucid in colour and in drawing crowded. The tint of grey-green on the near hills, like the nearly colourless shimmer that whips through a woman’s hair as she combs it, must be olive trees. On the other side, the
scurvy width of drab sand, scarcely wider than the highway, ribbed with sea-wrack and studded with concrete obstructions, was nothing like what Jerry called a beach, and needed another name. A green sign gave it:
PLAGE
.

Joanna, squeezed between him and the window, said in a voice of stately detachment, ‘All the road signs have little pictures on.’ He felt she was addressing less her own parents than the ideal parents in grade-school readers – raceless and happy and mechanically fascinated by the workings of reality.

Wanting to be what she wanted, Jerry told her, ‘That’s so dummies like us won’t get lost.’ Everywhere, when you travel, there are clues, signs, instructions. Only at home are there none.

Joanna asked, ‘Why are there so many of those glass places?’

‘Greenhouses?’

‘I guess so.’

‘They’re growing flowers for the perfume industry.’

‘Really?’

‘I’m just guessing.’

A blonde woman, her hair loose to the wind, passed them on a motorscooter. She wore white St Tropez pants and a striped jersey of some sort; Jerry pressed his foot to the floor, to accelerate and overtake her and see her face. His heart raced but the taxi’s speed remained the same. Ruth had turned to watch his face, and what she saw there, rebounding to her own and rebounding back, like the multiplication between two mirrors, filled the small space of the car with a sickening hush and tension. He offered to her weakly, ‘Uncanny.’

Ruth said, ‘You didn’t see her as soon as I did. There was very little resemblance.’

‘Too bad,’ he said. She turned her face away; he felt her spirits sink, and a proportionate exultation lifted his. He took Geoffrey onto his lap, squeezed him, and asked, ‘How goes it, skipper?’

‘Fine.’ The child always said it sadly, with a dragged diphthong, ‘oi’.

‘Still feel squished?’

‘Not so much.’

Charlie, who had been staring fascinated at the taxi driver, turned, his freckled face bright with mischief, and said, ‘He always complains because he’s a baby.’

Geoffrey’s lower lip trembled and his belly billowed beneath his father’s fingers as he took in a breath to cry. Jerry said quickly, ‘Look! We’re coming into a city that says it’s
nice!’

They entered Nice; it was like entering a prism. High white hotels basked their façades in a sun that from cornices and canopies struck blue shadows at a precise angle of forty-five degrees. Underneath palm trees, ladies and gentlemen sat in overcoats at round glass tables. Along La Promenade des Anglais strollers were divided exactly into halves of shadow and light, like calendar moons. Jerry glimpsed, actually, a monocle. He saw a woman in a chinchilla jacket buying a dense bouquet of mountain violets in a cone of newspaper as a pair of grey poodles symmetrically entwined her legs in their leashes. Beyond the green railing of the promenade a beach curved into a distance where what appeared to be a fort of a fragile pink overhung the glistening steel of the sea; the beach was entirely of pebbles,
loose washed pebbles in whose minuscule caves and crevices the ocean musically sighed as through the gills of an organ. On the shore of this music hovered sun, sparkle, colours, umbrellas. He told Ruth, to tell someone, ‘I love it. I might like it here.’

She took the remark as an aesthetic appraisal and checked it by gazing through her window. ‘Isn’t this where all the kings in exile come?’ she asked.

The taxi turned off this, the Quai des États-Unis, and up a side street past the rusted shed of a flower market and a
MAGASIN
with filigreed iron balconies.
‘Nous sommes arrivés, mes enfants,’
the driver announced, and turned to include all in the gappy, tobaccoish teeth of a joke. ‘Ve – is – ’ere!’ From the hotel the concierge and two assistants emerged to greet them, greedily, gaily, for at this time of year guests were scarce. It was early November. They followed their baggage in, Ruth leading; they climbed, endlessly, towards a wedding-cake façade, cool stairs of greyish-green marble.