The Amateur Marriage (29 page)

“You would never go to hell!”

She sat forward in her seat, planning to rise and give him a hug, but some slight motion he made warned her off. He was still looking toward the window. He said, “I worry I’ll get to heaven and your mother will say, ‘You! What are
you
doing here, after you were so hard on me?’”

“That is never going to happen,” Pauline said. “Never. I can promise. You know how it’s going to go?”

“How?” he asked, but distantly, as if he were not much interested.

She said, “There you are, climbing the stairs to heaven, and you look up and you’re surprised to see that the gates are already open and Mom is standing just inside waiting to greet you. She’s not old and sick; she’s the girl you first knew, and she’ll be all excited. She’ll be laughing and saying, ‘You’re here! You got here! Hurry up and come in!’ You’ll say, ‘Don’t I have to clear this with someone? Pass some kind of test?’ and she’ll say, ‘Oh, my, no.’ She’ll say, ‘You’ve already passed the hardest test there is,’ and she’ll take you by the hand and lead you through the gates. I promise.”

Her father was looking at her directly now. He said, “You’re a good woman, Pauline.”

For that moment, she believed him.

She fixed him a Sunday supper of raisin oatmeal—a Barclay family tradition—and after they had eaten he left, still apparently unaware that anything in her household was amiss. She walked him out to his car and stood waving as he backed almost imperceptibly into the street. Then she returned to the house.

The carton containing Michael’s belongings sat on the cobbler’s bench in the foyer. Now it seemed inhospitable to have it so close to the door, implying that he should just grab it and go. She moved it into the living room. Then she went out to the kitchen and cleaned up, humming as she worked. She was doing all right, she realized. She watered the plants on the windowsill. She draped the dishcloth over the faucet and turned off the kitchen light.

When the doorbell rang, she was just starting toward the living room. Was there anyone as pigheaded as Michael? He had a perfectly good key in his pocket. He was merely making a point. She took her time crossing the foyer and opening the door.

But only Pagan stood there, hugging his duffle bag. “Guess what!” he said. “Grandpa’s got a swimming pool!”

As he stepped inside, Pauline looked beyond him. Michael’s car was already gliding away, no more than a colorless hulk in the dusk.

“You climb up these extra stairs to the roof and there is this full-sized pool with a diving board and everything,” Pagan was saying. “If the weather’s still warm next weekend, I’m going to bring my swimsuit.”

She closed the door behind him.

“And there’s a TV in my bedroom. Grandpa let me watch one program after I went to bed.”

“That’s nice,” she said faintly.

“Have we got any ice cream?”

“Grandpa didn’t give you a gallon all your own at his place?”

“Huh?”

“Sure, we have ice cream,” she told him. “Don’t make a mess, though, hear?”

He dropped his duffle bag on the floor and set off for the kitchen, but instead of going with him, Pauline went into the living room. She didn’t turn on any lamps. She sat on the couch in the dark and pressed both hands to her cheeks and stared straight ahead.

Pictures passed through her mind, tiny but uncannily distinct. She saw Michael tugging on his plaid jacket the afternoon they met. She saw him shaving in the hotel bathroom the first morning of their marriage—that method he had of grabbing the tip of his nose and moving it aside while he was shaving the skin below it, which had made her laugh out loud. She saw him walking into her hospital room with flowers after Lindy was born, more flowers than she had ever seen and surely more than they could afford, a whole mountain of flowers that almost hid his shy, young, thin, eager face.

In her memory all these pictures were brightly sunlit, and they broke her heart. She didn’t cry, though. For once, the tears wouldn’t come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.

7. The World Won’t End

Originally, the plan had been for Pagan to go to sleep-away camp. He was plenty old enough, after all—thirteen and a half, an eighth-grader come September. He enjoyed most sports and could very well have attended, say, the soccer camp in Virginia where the boy next door always went. But no, he suddenly announced that he wanted to learn guitar instead. And since there was no sleep-away guitar camp—or none that anybody in the neighborhood had heard of—it was decided that he should sign up for the summer music program at the Maestro School for the Arts on Falls Road.

This was where Michael came in. The summer program started at ten o’clock every morning, but Pauline had to be in the office at nine. (She worked part-time as a receptionist for a group of cardiologists.) She telephoned Michael and asked if he could help with transportation. “I can pick him up afternoons,” she said, “but I’d need you to drive him there in the mornings. I would drop him off at your apartment on my way to work every day.”

“Or the store, would be better,” Michael told her. “I head over to the store around eight o’clock, generally.”

“Okay, the store. Thanks,” she said briskly. Then she got off the line.

Conversations with Pauline were like business dealings nowadays, very starchy and efficient. This was preferable to how it used to be, of course (the tears and recriminations, the clatter of slammed-down receiver), but it always left Michael feeling oddly rebuffed. He hung up himself but then stood there a moment, one hand still on the phone.

The summer program started on a Monday, which made things very easy. Pagan simply slept over at Michael’s on Sunday night, instead of going home as he usually did at the end of the weekend. In the morning Michael went to work, and at nine-thirty he walked back across the street to the parking lot behind his apartment building. Pagan was already waiting there, lounging against the passenger side of the car and plucking tentative chords on his brand-new, shiny, hopeful-looking guitar. He’d had a sudden growth spurt over the winter. He slouched as if he were trying to return to his former height, a shock of thick black hair screening most of his face, and when he caught sight of Michael he seemed to have to untangle his limbs from each other before he could straighten. “What ho,” he said—his new favorite greeting, picked up who-knows-where. His voice was in that in-between stage, grainy and unpredictable. He wore blue jeans and an oversized T-shirt, more holes than fabric. Michael hoped the Maestro School didn’t have a dress code.

The car was already too hot for comfort, smelling of sunbaked vinyl; so they rode with both front windows open and the air conditioner blowing full blast. Michael had to shout to be heard. “You know where, exactly, this place is located?”

“Nope.”

“Would I turn north on Falls Road, or south?”

Pagan shrugged and plinked out a guitar chord.

“Didn’t you go there to check it out? Take a tour or something?”

“Nope.”

“Well, how did you hear about it?”

“Some friend of Grandma’s, I think.”

Michael took a chance and turned north, heading past a cluster of worn stone buildings and then through leafy green woods.

Much sooner than he had expected, they passed a white sign lettered in crayon tones of red and blue and orange,
THE MAESTRO SCHOOL FOR THE ARTS,
it read,
GRADES
9-12.
EST
. 1974. “Damn,” Michael said, braking sharply. He took a left into a driveway, reversed, and cruised back toward the turnoff. It was no wonder he’d overlooked the place. All he could see was trees, no buildings whatsoever. But after several hundred feet of winding, rutted dirt driveway they came upon a huge old frame house with a placard reading
MAESTRO SCHOOL! WELCOME!
swinging from the porch eaves. Several cars and a pickup truck were parked in the packed-earth yard. A girl who seemed left over from the sixties sat in the porch swing piping on a flute. In spite of her studied pose—the curtain of straight blond hair cascading to one side, her filmy skirt flowing dramatically to the tips of her bare feet—Michael was affected by the sweet sound of her flute. When they had climbed the porch steps he refrained from asking her for directions, not wanting to interrupt the music. “We’ll just see if we can find somebody in charge,” he said to Pagan. He opened the screen door and stepped in, followed by Pagan, who carried his guitar between his thumb and two fingers.

In the front hall, dark and unfurnished, papered with cabbage roses and smelling of turpentine, they paused to take their bearings. A bearded man dressed all in black was leaning against the far wall whispering over a sheaf of papers. “Excuse me,” Michael said, and the man looked up. He was wearing a gold ring in one ear—something that could still take Michael aback. “Can you tell us where the music students should report to?” Michael asked.

“Just down the hall. The big room at the end.”

“Thanks.”

Michael couldn’t help glancing into doorways as they passed. He saw easels, a stack of two-by-fours, a little thicket of music stands. A woman in jogging shorts—another parent, he guessed—and a teenaged girl stood talking with an old lady who wore a vibrantly patterned dress with a South American look to it.

He and Pagan seemed headed toward an assembly room of some sort, if the rows of folding chairs he glimpsed through the double doors were any indication. Just before they reached it, though, they passed a little room in which a piano was playing. The tune was gentle and measured, as delicate as a trickle of water, so that Michael found himself hushing his footsteps in order to catch each note as it fell precisely into place. He stopped, finally. Pagan kept walking. Through the door to his left Michael saw a woman sitting at an upright piano with her back held perfectly straight, not the slightest curve to it, and her hands placed absolutely level on the keys. He couldn’t see her face; just her hair, smooth brown hair descending to her white collar where it turned under evenly all around in what he believed was called a pageboy.

“Pageboy.” The word startled a memory out of him—a picture of a young woman pressing a handkerchief to Pauline’s forehead—and he said, “Anna?”

She stopped playing and turned and then smiled, unsurprised. “Hello, Michael,” she said.

“Anna, what are
you
doing here?”

She laughed. She let her hands drop away from the keys. He could see now that she was older, but she was one of those women who look basically the same as they age, adding only a faint line here, a gray hair there without changing in any fundamental way. “I’m the piano teacher,” she said.

“Well, what a coincidence!”

“Not so much as all that,” she said. “Who do you think told Pauline about our summer program?”

“She never mentioned it,” Michael said. “Gosh, I . . . what a shock! I thought you lived in Colorado or someplace.”

“Arizona,” Anna said. “But I left there after my husband died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“And I’m sorry about your divorce,” Anna said.

“Oh, that’s okay. I mean . . . Well! It’s good to see you!”

“You, too. I hope your grandson will like it here.”

“I’m sure he will,” Michael said. “So. Well. Okay, goodbye!”

She sat there smiling at him, her posture faultless, hands crossed palms-upward in her lap, while he waved and backed out of the room and stumbled down the hall to find Pagan.

Anna Grant. Well, she wouldn’t be Grant anymore, of course. He didn’t know the name of the man she’d married—had never even met him, and couldn’t remember hearing of his death, although surely Pauline must have mentioned it. Pauline’s friendship with Anna had dwindled into one of those distant, annual-Christmas-card arrangements, and whenever she said something like, “Oh! This is from Anna! Look at how big her daughter’s grown!” Michael would just grunt and go on opening bills.

And yet . . .

And yet, in some part of his mind, Anna had always stood for the way things might have been if he had chosen differently. Not that he could literally have chosen Anna. She had never given him a glance; he scarcely knew her; they had exchanged maybe half a dozen sentences in their lives. But more than once during his marriage, on those occasions when Pauline had been at her most exasperating, Anna was the woman he had envisioned as her alternative. Anna would never smash a coffee cup in a temper! Anna wouldn’t rip up his newspaper when she thought he wasn’t listening to her! Or burst into tears in public, or spend his money on frippery, or wake him from a sound sleep to ask him if he loved her!

Sometimes he fantasized that at the very end of his life, he would be shown a sort of home movie of all the roads he had not taken and where they would have led. Suppose, for instance, he had listened to Sister Ursula in ninth-grade science class and decided to be a doctor. If somehow he’d found the money, won a college scholarship . . . and then the movie would show that during his second year of medical school he had volunteered for a drug experiment in order to help with expenses, and the experiment had backfired and he had died at twenty-four. Or had not volunteered, and gone on to discover a cure for cancer. Or had joined a medical mission to deepest Africa, where . . . Oh, all these forks, forking again and yet again!

Suppose that on that day in 1941 when the three girls brought Pauline into the store, he had fallen not for Pauline but for Anna. Suppose he had been smart enough, wise enough, to prefer the quieter, calmer, less exciting girl, and they had started an intelligent conversation about the war, the state of the world . . .

In which case, he might not even have enlisted. It was Pauline who had led him to enlist, with her patriotic enthusiasm that he now recalled as unbecoming fervor. Well, no doubt he would have been drafted anyhow, sooner or later. But he and Anna would have had a mature and considered courtship, and they would have married in a dignified ceremony and produced children who were . . . oh, more
related
to him, somehow.