Acts of Love (6 page)

 

O
NE WEEKEND
, while Ted was in Hardison, they lay in a tangle on the worn sheets and stained gold comforter of the E-Z Rest Motel. Their lovemaking had been oddly silent, a tight-muscled grab for union that neither had words or sounds for. But in the ephemeral loose-limbed intimacy that followed, Ted spoke in a soft, gravelly voice that he had never entrusted to anyone before, of dreams, desires, of the plans he devised each week to construct his own life with all the certainty of a man with no other options. It was a lullaby to Ann, this voice, this hunger, this lack of doubt, and she burrowed into it and he wrapped his arm about her and continued; no one had ever truly listened to him before. There were even rare moments when he offered snapshots of his past.

“My stepfather used to sit across the breakfast table from me and say, ‘Do you know whose cereal you're eating? Mine. Do you know whose toilet paper you use every day? Mine. Do you know whose chair you're sitting on?' And if I didn't answer ‘yours,' he got out the belt. A couple of times, the neighbors found him chasing me around the yard and called the police.”

“How did you get through it?” Ann asked.

He smiled. “I used to go to my room and pin a towel to my shoulders and pretend I was Superman. I kept jumping off my bed, practicing how to fly.”

They heard an eighteen-wheeler pull into the motel parking lot.

“I was thinking, maybe you could come to my house for dinner tomorrow night,” she proffered haltingly. “Meet my parents.”

“Sure.”

The very offhandedness of his response made her shiver. She pulled the quilt up higher.

“They're not like other parents.”

“So you've said. Well, I don't have much to compare them to, do I?” He smiled and kissed her breast.

She left early the next morning while he slept on in that dense, thick-walled sleep of his that nothing could disturb. It was late spring and Sandy, home from college, was having a cup of coffee in the kitchen when Ann walked in and sighed, as if seeing for the first time the exigencies of the room. She picked up a sponge and scouring powder and began to clean. Sandy, who was never at her best in the morning, watched with curious detachment.

“I still don't understand why you want him to come here,” she said as she picked up her mug so that Ann could wipe beneath it. “Why give them the chance to ruin things for you?”

“They'll be good.”

“Jonathon and Estelle can sometimes,
sometimes,
pass, I'll grant you that. But they are never ‘good.' What exactly do you mean by ‘good,' anyway?”

“I wish you'd stop tormenting me with that semantics class you're taking. You know very well what I mean.”

“I know that you still seem to need their approbation. What I can't figure out is why.”

“And you only want to prove that you don't need it.”

Sandy put down her cup and looked at Ann evenly. “Do you love him?”

“Yes.”

Sandy nodded. “I don't think I'm the type to fall in love.”

“You'll find someone.”

“I don't think I want to,” she reflected. “Not if it means this,” she said, motioning to Ann's increasingly frantic cleaning. “And it always does for women, doesn't it? In one way or another, love always seems to entail a sponge and Ajax eventually. Except, of course, for Estelle. Good Lord, what a choice. No thank you.”

Ann looked at her closely. “You're going to behave tonight, aren't you?”

“Of course I'm going to behave. I'm the least of your worries.”

When she was done with the kitchen, Ann drove to the supermarket and bought a roasting chicken, green beans, baking potatoes, and ingredients for a lemon cake. She had recently taken to reading cookbooks late at night, when she could no longer absorb the texts on chemistry and molecular biology that seemed to have so little to do with what had first drawn her to nursing. There was something overwhelmingly soothing to her about the carefully prescribed cause-and-effect of cooking. She never varied ingredients from the instructions, always stirred for the precise amount of time indicated, and carried a timer with her even when she went to the bathroom.

In between steps, the sifting and the creaming and the baking, Ann peered around the corner into the living room, making sure that Estelle had not slipped through her grasp and gone back to bed, that Jonathon remained in a reasonably calm mood that would render him less likely to regale Ted with his wrath at post–World War II society, rants that could often run unabated for over two hours. In fact, the activity of waiting for a guest was so unusual that they all eyed each other suspiciously, speculating what synergy might bubble up into the evening. At the last moment, Sandy grabbed a pile of newspapers from the hallway floor and thrust them beneath her bed. “It'll be fine,” she whispered to Ann. “You look beautiful.”

 

T
ED SAT ON THE COUCH
, pushing aside a coil of solder and a broken radio beneath his feet.

“It used to be made of lead when I was a child,” Estelle said, studying the solder. “But now there's no lead to be found. Strange, isn't it, the way things disappear? I wonder where they go.” She had dressed for the evening in an orange-and-blue-striped shift, a black wool shawl, and gold-flecked stockings. Her round, full cheeks were washed with pink and her eyes were luminous as an oil slick. “This is such fun, isn't it? I always did like parties. I can't think why we stopped having them.” She looked away for an instant, lost, but, to Ann's relief, quickly returned. “I think we should do this more often. Yes, I really think we should.”

Ted smiled and said nothing. In the few social situations Ann had observed him in, she had learned that Ted was incapable of making small talk, of asking the inconsequential questions that put one at ease, of offering any kind of flutter that might pass for light discourse at all. Perhaps it was one of those things he hadn't had time for in his great haste to fend for himself.

Ann glanced at her watch. “I'm sure that chicken must be done by now. Why don't you all go to the table?”

While Ann served, Sandy leaned across the table and stared blatantly at the raised sinews of Ted's exposed arms. “Do you lift weights?”

“No, just tools.”

“How very masculine.”

“Sandy,” Ann warned, sitting down.

“It's okay,” Ted said, laughing.

“And do you plan on building castles in the air?”

“For princesses like you?”

She smiled, cocked her head.

“I plan on building whatever I please,” he said.

“That doesn't sound like a very promising business strategy to me.”

“Watch and learn,” Ted answered. “Watch and learn.”

“I might just do that,” Sandy replied.

Ann took a mouthful of beans so that she would not have to attempt this alien banter. She felt suddenly leaden, heavy and clumsy, her own sincere plodding more foolish than ever. Estelle hummed while she ate.

“You know,” Sandy went on, “this is quite an event for us, your gracing us with your presence. I suppose Ann has told you that we are something of the town outcasts?”

Estelle looked up, baffled. “Why would you say that? You girls are very popular, just like I was at your age.”

“She's going to use the word ‘beaus,' I just know she is,” Sandy muttered. She turned to Estelle. “People don't have ‘beaus' anymore. It's like lead. One of those things that just disappeared. Don't you think, Ted?”

Ted emitted a brief laugh and turned to Jonathon. “Ann tells me you teach music.”

“I do not teach music,” Jonathon answered fiercely. “What I teach has nothing to do with music. Music is unknowable, unteachable. I teach children how to read black dots on paper and how to make an approximation of sound that will fool their mothers into paying me. It has nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, to do with music.”

Ted smiled and took another roll. It was as if he thought they were sitcom characters. Wacky. He didn't seem to realize how dangerous they were.

Still, that night, when Ann walked him to his car, he turned to her before getting in and said, “I think we'd better get married.” Just like that. And she agreed.

She kissed him goodnight and went back inside to clean up.

 

A
NN AND
T
ED WERE MARRIED
three weeks later in the registrar's office in New York City. She didn't tell Jonathon and Estelle of her plans before she left, fearful not that they might interfere in any substantive way, for she knew they were incapable of that, but that her own will might splinter. She could not imagine how her parents would fix their meals, pay the telephone and electric bills on time (another of the household tasks Ann had assumed, after both utilities had been shut off numerous times), take out the garbage on their own. She feared that they might literally suffocate beneath their mountains of accumulation. She left them a brief note telling them of her plans.

When Ann and Ted went to get their license, the Marriage Bureau was in the process of renovation and had been temporarily relocated to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The previous signs were still evident—Complaints, Violations, Refunds—in the cavernous, dimly lit room. Ahead of them, a woman in a sweat-stained linen suit sat joking loudly with her fiancé as they tallied up the number of divorces they had between them to fill in on the requisite forms. Like most of the other couples, bunched together on folding chairs, heads down, playing with the edges of their papers, Ted and Ann hardly spoke until their names were called.

Afterward, they stopped at a jewelry store a block away and tried on gold rings. Ann favored a plain, thin band, but Ted, who had initially been hesitant at the very idea of wearing a ring himself, chose a wide, shiny one. “If you don't like it, get the one you want and I'll get this one,” he suggested. But the thought of such unmatched rings seemed ominous to Ann, and she opted for the sister of his. She stashed them both in her woven straw purse until the actual ceremony the following morning.

When friends asked her later what her wedding had been like, Ann often made up details, dresses, witnesses, toasts, an amalgam of thirteen-year-old girls' fantasies, before love has anything to do with necessity. In fact, what she remembered most about that sultry city morning was dropping the ring just as the ceremony began and having to chase after it as it rolled away. The official read with ill-concealed boredom the words he repeated dozens of times a day, licking his chapped, cracking, thin white lips until the words themselves, “Do you promise to…” became lost to her and she could think only of his tongue darting out and disappearing, three, four, five times.

They left the building dazed, as if the lack of relatives, friends, even casual acquaintances had relegated the ceremony to playacting, and they tried to cover this sense of rootlessness with laughter as they embraced at the top of the stone steps across from the tiny park filling with government workers on their lunch break. The air was thick, murky with humidity, and their bodies stuck to each other's. “Let's go back to the room,” Ted said, smiling, “and celebrate.”

For the next three days they visited tourist sights throughout the city, the Statue of Liberty; the top of the Empire State Building, where the wind, released from the sodden streets below, whipped about them in circles; Chinatown, where the gurgling streets were lined with slabs of fish and bloodied ducks hanging by their scrawny necks, Oriental
Playboys
in brown paper wrappers on the newsstands, and flat-shoed women bargaining madly for vegetables; up past the Bowery, beyond the lighting stores, with every sort of illumination crammed into their flashing windows, glaring constellations of petal-shaped lights, fish-shaped lights, harsh minimalist halogen lights. Ann had never been to New York before, and she was swayed most by the floods of people moving with such velocity toward an infinity of destinations, parting and re-forming about them, oblivious. She had always pictured herself as springing toward and away from a single black pinpoint—the small gray house on Rafferty Street—and now, with that dot so irrevocably out of sight, covered up by this city, by Ted, by that odd, short ceremony, she felt strangely vertiginous, in danger of tipping over at any moment.

Only in their room at the Hotel de Madrid, with its faded reproduction of
View from Toledo
and its creaking bed, did her pores seem to open, and she went to Ted with a force that surprised them both, as if the newly sanctioned union granted her the freedom to vent a vehemence and desire that she had not known existed.

“You have to be careful of those quiet ones,” Ted joked, and she rolled away, embarrassed. What she wanted had nothing to do with words.

On their last night, as they strolled through the neon-and-panhandler splatter of Times Square, Ted put his hand on the small of her back to lead her quickly across the street as the light blinked red and the cars revved their engines. That movement, his hand on the small of her back, guiding her, protecting her, stayed with her for years, tattooed deep beneath her skin. It remained for her the very definition of love—his hand on the small of her back—and long after that same instinct of his to guide had become burdensome, she still found herself aching for that one moment when she had first felt truly treasured.