The Amateur Marriage (39 page)

Braking for a bus at North Charles, he glanced into his rearview mirror and happened to notice the Falcon just behind him. Its windshield was completely cleared, not scraped-looking but gleaming warmly from edge to edge; so he knew the car must have been running for some time. Maybe it had come from elsewhere to drop off a neighbor’s cleaning woman. By now the bus had lumbered on by. George focused forward again and took a right onto Charles Street.

His office was in Towson. He was a vice-president at Jennings, Jensen and had his own parking space, designated by a white wooden sign that read
RESERVED GEO. ANTON.
After he had locked his car he walked around to the trunk to retrieve his briefcase, and that was when he saw the Falcon backing out of the lot. Apparently it had turned in by mistake, because only members of his firm were allowed to park here. He watched it chug away toward York Road, its rear end unfashionably high off the ground. Then he forgot about it.

Several days passed before he saw the Falcon again. It was parked on Allegheny, a block and a half from his office. He noticed it as he stood saying goodbye to a client he’d had lunch with, and he faltered in mid-sentence when he caught sight of that distinctive rear end and the rust-freckled, crumpled trunk. A
CARTER/MONDALE
sticker hung in tatters from the bumper. Nobody sat inside, though. He collected himself and turned his attention back to his client.

Late the next Monday afternoon as he was driving home from work he saw the Falcon parked on Greenway, not far from his own street. This time it was occupied. He slowed and peered inside, but the car behind him honked and he was forced to drive on. Anyhow, he had seen enough to reassure him. The driver was a woman, mid-fortyish and nonthreatening and almost certainly a stranger, although he couldn’t swear to that in the half-light. Besides, she’d turned her face away when she saw him looking in. But that was only natural. Nobody likes to be spied on.

He parked in front of his house and locked up, took his briefcase from the trunk, and waved to Julia Matthews who was just slipping into her Buick two doors down. As he started up his front walk he heard another car brake and reverse, and something made him turn to look. It was the Falcon, maneuvering itself into the space behind his Eldorado. The space was more than big enough but the driver had to make three passes before she managed to fit in, and even so she ended up about two feet away from the curb. Throughout the whole process, George stood waiting, facing the Falcon squarely and holding his briefcase at his side.

The woman got out and shut her door and started toward him. She was colorless and shabby, one of those people who dress for cold weather by piling on disorganized layers—not a single, appropriate-weight coat but a series of thick sweaters in various competing lengths over a cotton print dress. Wool knee socks and felt clogs gave her a bohemian air. Her dark, straight hair hung to her shoulders (a witchlike style in older women, George had always thought), and her eyes were brown and small and noticeably bright, even at a distance.

She stopped a few feet away from him. She said, “George?”

He had a feeling there was something that he was avoiding knowing.

“George Anton?” she said.

He took a breath and said, “Lindy?”

“It
is
you!” she cried, but she seemed just as disbelieving as he was. She started to step closer but then appeared to change her mind.

He had pictured this moment a million times. Now that it was actually happening, he felt uncomfortably aware of his forty-five-year-old self. Lindy’s own aging he had imagined with each passing decade, at least in a vague, theoretical way, but somehow he had never envisioned himself standing before her in his wide beige camel-hair coat, a chunky, faded-blond businessman with a briefcase in his fist.

“I’ve been following you for days,” she told him. “I hope I didn’t spook you. I was trying to get my courage up.”

“Courage!” he said. “Why would you need courage for
me
?”

“I found your name in the phone book. You were the only one.”

She was clutching her purse with both hands—some sort of Native American-looking woven cloth pouch. Yes, she did seem nervous. “I looked for Mom and Dad,” she said, “for Karen . . . not a mention. Not even Anton’s Grocery. Where has everyone gone? What’s happened?”

It was he who stepped closer, finally. He thought of giving her a hug or kissing her cheek, but that seemed too intimate for a woman he no longer knew. Instead he took her arm and said, “Come inside, why don’t you.”

She could have pursued her questions, but she didn’t. Maybe she feared the answers. To cover the awkward silence, George made more of the walk to the house than he needed to, at one point steering her elaborately around a minuscule unevenness where a tree root had lifted a flagstone. Her clogs made a padding sound, like paws. Something she wore jingled. She would be the type to favor heavy, non-precious jewelry whose purchase benefited some disadvantaged tribal craftsmen.

He was relieved to hear the burglar alarm beep when he opened the door. Sally and Samantha must be out. Just for now, he would prefer this to be a two-person conversation. He set his keys on the credenza and crossed the hall to punch in the code. “Come on in,” he said, removing his coat. “May I take some of your . . . wraps?”

She didn’t answer. She was gazing around the room at the tapestry he and Sally had brought back from Florence, the little arched leaded-glass window, the French doors leading to the rest of the house. A crystal chandelier directly above her lit the top of her head, pointing out tiny flyaway wires of gray hair that gave her a hectic look. Her face had gone slightly soft, developed a sort of extra layer, and all her sharp angles seemed blunted. (As if she’d been wrapped in a sheet of fondant, George fancied.) But her voice still had the unmodulated, don’t-care-how-I-sound quality that he remembered from their childhood. “This is quite a place,” she said, and the squawking tone she gave “place” was eerily familiar.

He said, “Let’s go sit where it’s comfortable.”

He walked ahead of her, turning on lights, and Lindy followed. In the living room, she plopped herself on the sofa. George sat in the wing chair across from her, a low, glass-topped table between them. He was conscious of keeping his shoulders back, holding his stomach in.

Even so, she said, “You look a lot different.”

“Yes, well, I’ve been meaning to go on a—”

“Are you the last one left?” she asked him. “Tell me. I have to know.”

He said, “No, of course not.”

“In the phone book—”

“Oh, the phone book,” he said. “Karen changed back to Antonczyk; that’s why you wouldn’t have found her. And Dad: after he and Mom divorced—”

“Divorced!” Lindy cried.

“After they divorced, he remarried and moved to his wife’s house and so the telephone listing—”

“But what about Pagan?” Lindy broke in.

“Pagan’s fine.”

It wasn’t till she sank back against the sofa cushions that George realized how tensely she had been sitting. She said, “He grew up okay? He’s happy? He’s all right?”

“He’s fine, I told you. But as I was starting to say—”

“Was it Mom and Dad who raised him? They stayed together long enough?”

“Oh, yes. Or, no . . . I mean, they didn’t stay together long enough but they shared the care of him; so it all worked out. But anyhow, Dad’s listed under Anna’s name, Anna Stuart, and—”

“Anna
Grant
Stuart? Mom’s high-school friend?”

“I didn’t realize you knew her.”

“She came to see us once, when we were still on St. Cassian Street. She brought us a box of chocolate turtles.”

“I have no memory of that,” George said.

“Was Anna the reason for the divorce?”

“No, no. Good Lord, no; the divorce was, what, six or seven years earlier,” George said. He paused to remind himself where he was heading. “So, as far as Anton’s Grocery, well, first Dad moved it out to the county and changed its name, and then he sold it to World O’Food, must have been a couple of years ago now . . .”

“Dad hated World O’Food! He said chains would be the ruin of us!”

“. . . and that’s why you wouldn’t have found Anton’s Grocery in the phone book,” George plowed on. “Now, as for Mom, well . . .”

He swallowed.

“Mom, urn, in fact, she . . . died,” he said.

He felt a kind of jagged break in the air between them. He wished that he had thought of some less shocking term, maybe some ambiguous term that Lindy would misunderstand for a moment.

“She had a wreck,” he said. “Driving the wrong way on an exit ramp. Back in ’87, March of ’87.”

Lindy said, “Mom
died?
”

Her eyes seemed all pupil.

“The police thought first she must have been drinking,” George said, “or high on drugs, or unconscious. They couldn’t believe that somebody in her right mind could have made such a mistake, till we explained to them that that was just how she drove.”

He attempted a light chuckle. Lindy failed to join in.

“But Pagan,” she whispered, finally. “Pagan’s all right, you say.”

“Pagan’s fine, Lindy.”

The shade of impatience in his tone surprised even him. She sent him a quick, sharp glance, and he ducked his head and mumbled, almost apologetically, “Though it does seem a bit late for you to be concerned.”

She went on looking at him.

“In
my
opinion,” he added after a moment.

She opened her Native American pouch and started rummaging through it. A warped leather billfold emerged, and a set of keys strung on red yarn, and a newspaper clipping folded to the size of a credit card.

I am sitting in my living room with Lindy, George was thinking. The actual Lindy, in person, after all these years. She’s wearing ordinary tan suede clogs with a brown leaf stuck to one sole. She drives a sixty-something Ford Falcon, and one of her sweater buttons is hanging by a thread.

Lindy unfolded the newspaper clipping and examined it. A peculiar, airy, buzzing sensation surrounded George’s ears.

“Here,” Lindy said. She handed him the clipping.

George found a grainy black-and-white photo of two men—one elderly and mustached, one young. It took him a second to realize that the younger man was Pagan. He could have been almost anyone, with his shock of black hair and generic gray cable-knit sweater. Underneath, a caption read:

Dr. William Gamble, developmental psychologist, and Pagan Anton, longtime child and family advocate, discuss the merits and drawbacks of the proposed legislation.

“Did you notice the wording?” Lindy asked.

“The wording,” George said.

Lindy nodded, smiling encouragingly, inviting him to share her amusement at something.

“Well,” he said, “yes, I suppose . . . considering that Pagan is only twenty-five . . .”

“I mean the way they broke the lines up. Or maybe there should have been a hyphen, because it looks as if they’re saying Pagan is a longtime child, doesn’t it?”

She gave a rough-edged giggle and reached for the clipping. George hadn’t quite finished studying it, but he could tell she felt some urgency about getting it back and so he released it.

“I found it lying on a desk,” she said. “Isn’t the world amazing? All these years I’ve been thinking about him, trying
not
to think about him, trying to keep him out of my head . . . Well, not at first, of course. Not when I was so wrecked and bad off. Back then I couldn’t think about anything. But, you know, after I married and all . . . I married a guy with two children. We met when I was still in the commune. You wouldn’t have heard about the commune, but that’s where I cleaned up my act. And Henry came to lead this poetry workshop; he was a high-school English teacher in Berkeley at the time, except now we live in Loudoun County—”

“Loudoun County,
Virginia
?” George asked.

Lindy nodded. “We moved there last year,” she said. “Oh, I realize how it looks! It looks as if I planned it; plotted to inch closer. But honest, it was coincidence. Just a coincidental job offer, and now that Henry’s children are grown . . . But I was going to say, so I married him and he had these two kids, aged six and nine. And first they were just, you know, baggage, but bit by bit I got fond of them. I started, let’s say, loving them. And here’s what’s funny: as soon as that happened, as soon as I felt attached to these kids who were no relation to me, why, all at once I found myself thinking more and more about Pagan. I missed him to death! I thought I would die of it! It’s like those kids were a constant reminder. Well, I knew I had no right. By then he was settled; he’d moved on in life. I vowed I would keep away from him. But then . . .”

She turned her head sharply and gazed toward a porcelain lamp on her left. For a moment George assumed that something had caught her eye, till he realized she was blinking back tears. After a long, painful silence she turned back to him and said, “Then I found that clipping.”

George said, “I see.”

“I was clearing off Henry’s desk so I could play a game of solitaire, and there was this stack of articles about educational issues. And I swept them together and started to put them in the drawer, and that’s when I saw his name. Pagan Anton.”

She spoke the name lingeringly, giving each syllable its full share of attention. George cleared his throat.

“For one split second I thought I’d made it up. I thought I was hallucinating. But when I looked at the photo, I knew it had to be
my
Pagan—that Mexican hair like his father’s. I asked Henry, ‘Where’d you get this? What newspaper is it from?’ He didn’t know. The principal had just handed him a file folder, he said. And there weren’t any clues in the clipping itself. On the back was an ad for mail-order steaks. I said, ‘But he’s a child and family advocate! Couldn’t there be, I don’t know, a heading for that in the Yellow Pages?’ Because already, some time back, I’d tried to look him up in the Baltimore phone book. I was like a stalker or something. I was like someone demented. But all I found was you. Not Karen, not Mom or Dad . . .”