If You Lived Here (21 page)
His eyes grew wide and he tried to laugh. “You think you are?” he asked. “Well, if you think you are, you may be wrong.”
“No, I am. I’m in love with you.”
The waiter brought the coffee. Martin looked out the window. When the waiter walked away, Martin said, “I think you
think
you’re in love with me and I have no idea why.”
“I am. I am in love with you.”
His eyes rested on me again. “You’re still in college,” he said. “That has nothing to do with it.”
“Have you ever been in love before?” “No.”
“Have you ever thought you were in love before?” “Yes.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I know. Don’t be so condescending.”
He smiled. “Look,” he said. “I am twelve years older than you. You’re going to change a lot in your twenties. You have no idea.”
“So I’m too young for you to be interested in me?”
He gripped his coffee cup, staring down at it. “Well, sort of. It’s not you personally. I like you a lot. But you’re just a kid.”
“You think I’m unsophisticated.” “Well, yes.”
“You think I won’t ever grow up?” “No, you’ll grow up,” he admitted. “And you don’t find me attractive?”
He let out a breath of exasperation. “Of course you’re attractive,” he said. I waited a moment. Then I asked, “But you’re not attracted to me?” He rubbed his eyes, and when he looked at me he looked miserable.
“Of course I am,” he said.
I could have let those words hang in the air a bit longer, but he kept going. “Do you want me to be perfectly honest?” he asked. “Of course I’m attracted to you. Who wouldn’t be? You’re beautiful, smart, you like my kids. My kids like you. I’m terribly flattered that you would even sit down on the beach and talk to me. But whatever you’re feeling, I don’t believe it will last. You’re too young.”
“You don’t even know me.” I threw the words at him like rocks. “Exactly. What do I know about you? That the thing you want most is
to travel. How long would you last in Wilmington?”
I remembered the golden cities then and, to my surprise, I felt their pull as strongly as I had on the day that I first flew back from Scotland. I met his gaze across the table. I wanted to say, “Come with me,” but I didn’t. He’d told me already. He wasn’t going anywhere.
I spent my first few weeks back at Chapel Hill trying to forget Martin and failing. My future had once seemed so full of possibility. Now it came down to a single choice. Not: Go away or stay in Wilmington. Not even: Go away or be with him. But: Be with him or don’t be with him. And when I looked at it that way, I knew that, if he would have me, I’d be with him. My fantasies of New Delhi and Athens and Rio didn’t dim, but the need felt less pressing. I began to regard my trip in the same way that I’d felt
when my family scattered the ashes of my grandfather in the waters off Wrightsville Beach. I’d felt sadness, but also a sense of completion. I loved those dreams of adventure, but I believed I could let them go. Choosing one thing, I reminded myself, always meant eliminating something else.
Over the next semester, I wrote Martin a couple of letters, never mentioning my trip, or our dinner at the Pilot House, or the fact that I loved him. I made myself sound breezy. I sent comic books to his kids. He wrote back. His letters were breezy, too. At Thanksgiving, I brought Tar Heels baseball caps for the whole family. When I came home at Christmas break, the four of us sat in their living room playing Monopoly. Martin looked the same, and happy in a way that struck me as completely unrelated to my presence in the room. Absorbed by the task of helping both Abe and Theo take their turns, he hardly seemed to notice me. I wanted anything, even the anguish I’d seen on his face in the summer, but Martin talked to me like any visiting friend, and seemed to have forgotten that I loved him. At some point during the evening, he mentioned that the funeral home gardener had quit. I told him that I’d do some mulching and pruning for him over the break. When he said he couldn’t accept such a favor, I told him I’d charge an hourly rate. For the next two weeks, I gardened with deliberate slowness and he finally complained that I would bankrupt him to save his shrubs.
During that vacation, I managed to see him almost daily. But I only crossed the line once. For months, Lindi had suffered from a terrible crush on a local actor, Richard. Just after Halloween, in November, she finally got up the nerve to ask him out. They had their first date a few days later and moved in together a week after that. On New Year’s Eve, they invited me over for dinner. After three glasses of wine and another of champagne, I decided to spend the night. At three-thirty
A
.
M
., I picked up the phone and called Martin.
“Hello?” His voice was a mix of sleepiness and forced efficiency, which I took to be the result of regularly being woken by news of death.
“Happy New Year,” I said.
He was quiet for a second. Finally, he said, “Whenever the phone rings this late, I have to tell myself where my boys are.”
“They’re safe at home with you,” I told him.
“Happy New Year, Shelley,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
During the next semester, I wrote to Martin every week. My letters were still breezy, but more intimate, too. I made occasional confessions about myself. I worried about whether I had learned anything in college. I worried about money, my relationship with my mother, and that I would grow old and discover that life had no meaning. I even told him that I worried he’d find me trivial and immature. His letters were lighter, but he was never again condescending and he assured me that he didn’t find me trivial or immature. Week by week, I felt myself moving closer to him and I felt Martin allowing it. In all those letters, I never mentioned my dream of traveling and Martin never asked.
On May first, at three-thirty
A
.
M
., I called to wish him happy birthday. “Must you always call so early?” he asked.
“I wanted to be the first,” I said. “Happy birthday.” “Thank you,” he said.
“Good night.”
“Good night,” he said, then added, “No. Wait.”
We stayed on the phone for four hours. I told him about visiting Niagara Falls when I was a kid, and how I’d always been terrified, after that, of accidentally going over a waterfall in a barrel. Martin worried about the impact that his divorce had had on his kids, and he wondered if his constant fear that his sons would die was a negative effect of his profession. At one point, I began to cry, but he didn’t seem to know it. We didn’t say a word about our feelings. When we finally hung up, it was because I had to get out of bed to go to school.
My 8:00
A
.
M
. class ended at 9:10. I walked home, got into my car, and drove to Wilmington. He didn’t even look surprised to see me. We got married two years later.
Clearly, I have a lot on my plate. I’m facing divorce, motherhood, homelessness, and job loss all at the same time, not to mention, in all likelihood,
depression. Over the next two days, I work. I file the death certificates for four new cases, gather the forms together for Albert to deliver to the registrar of deeds, make plans with the cemetery for two burials and one cli-ent’s purchase of a plot. I have a phone conference with Helen Abernathy from sales at Marsellus about the new casket models for our display. I order fifteen sets of burial clothes—six blue dresses, six red ones, three gray suits—for the deceased who had been ill or aging for so many years that they didn’t own anything nice enough to be buried in. I e-mail the updated schedules to my staff. I oversee the memorial service for Marina Eleosoros, a funeral at Freedom Baptist for the former director of the Red Cross, two gravesides, and an early evening visitation. I get the plumber in to fix two leaks. Through all of this, Martin and I communicate primarily through e-mail. We make the adjustment quite smoothly, really, because even during normal times, we would spend our days typing our thoughts into cyberspace and letting them bounce back to the other person’s office, five feet away. But now, the tone of these messages has changed. We used to use words like “sweetheart” and “love.” We used to use words like “I” and “you.” We seldom do that anymore.
Before: Dear One,
What time can you get the cars back from the McMillan graveside? Can I have Albert for Gonzalez and Peterson? I’m going to run out at three to pick up my mom’s birthday present and get back in time for the five o’clock viewing. I’m starving! What should we have for dinner?
xo,
S.
Now:
Where are the records from the Horace Brown cremation last year? It was sometime in March. Thanks.
His answers? Well, they’re about the same. But I can’t complain about the e-mail. Without it, we would have to talk.
On Thursday morning, Rita comes on the speakerphone. “Shelley? You there, darling?”
“Rita, I’m so busy. Can you just take a message?”
“I think you’re going to want to take this call.” She pauses long enough to drive me crazy, then adds, “It’s that adoption lady.”
I grab the phone. “This is Shelley.”
“Hi, Mrs. Marino? It’s Carolyn Burns from Southeastern Adoptions.” “Oh, hey.” I try to sound normal. Whose turn is it to talk?
Finally, she says, “Mrs. Marino, we’ve got a date.” “A date?”
“For the giving and receiving ceremony. In Hanoi. It’s scheduled for June tenth. I hope you’re all set because you’ve got to work quickly to get there on time. We’re only talking about a week.”
I glance at my wall calendar, but it takes a while before I can make heads or tails of it. “Ten days,” I finally say.
“Yes. Ten days.” She starts to laugh. I didn’t know she had it in her. Now, like two giddy pals, we chat about itineraries and airline tickets, my documentation, Mr. Phung Van Luan of the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, whom I plan to mention in my will.
By the time I hang up the phone, an hour has passed. I’m inside Martin’s office before I remember that he no longer loves me.
He’s at the computer, his back to me. The hair around his neck looks two weeks late for a trim, unruly and soft, long enough to curl around my finger.
“Hey,” I say.
He swivels the chair to face me. He smiles grimly. “How was Washington?” he asks. It’s been three days since I came back.
“Okay.” I’m leaning inside the door, but I keep my hand on the knob. If necessary, I could exit quickly. “Actually, it went really well, I guess. I wanted to tell you I just got the call.”
Martin’s voice sounds almost sarcastic. “The call?”
“About the baby. I got a date for the G and R.” I seem to be crying. I wipe my nose with the back of my hand.
He blinks. His chin goes up, then falls toward his chest: a failed nod.
After a while, he says, “Any other news?”
“I’ll have to go in about ten days. Will you be okay—here in the office?”
He shrugs one shoulder. “Sure,” he says, as if such issues are not my problem anymore.
“We could call Carl to come in,” I say. It’s a recent idea. After the debacle over Sonya, I arranged with our former mortician to step in, on occasion, from retirement.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
“Well.” I look at him uncertainly but, really, we have nothing more to say to each other. I should leave him alone, but I am full of joy and sadness and can’t seem to move. Is it true, after all, that he no longer loves me? I can’t tell. In his face at this moment, I see nothing but defeat. Martin squints at me as if I’m in a hot-air balloon, floating away from him, up toward the clouds.
e fly in
from the east, and Vietnam reaches out to us. I have never seen my country from the air before. At least, not from
so far above. Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, our teachers led the class on a hike up Ba Vi Mountain. We were Hanoi children living in the countryside to avoid the bombs falling on the city. Whenever our parents had a chance, they would bicycle out to the village to visit. Most of the time, though, we were on our own, supervised by anxious teachers who couldn’t keep track of so many charges. The expedition to Ba Vi must have taken place during a cease-fire, because it’s the only time I can remember leaving the village. The hike was long and steep and, even in midwinter, I sweated. At the top of the mountain, we ate a picnic of boiled manioc, dried fish, and jackfruit picked from a tree. From where we stood, our teachers pointed out the bomb craters that ripped a zigzag line across the earth. “See, the American government is cruel,” Teacher Lam shouted. “Dropping bombs on children and farmers. But they won’t ever win this war!” We children chanted and cheered. From the top of Ba Vi, we could just make out the scattered clusters of simple homes, the