Marry Me (17 page)

‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘You don’t? O.K. Tell me about you. How do you feel? Happy? Sad? Want a divorce?’

‘I’m not happy and I don’t want a divorce.’

‘You’re sad.’

‘Low. I’m into the vermouth. The talk I had with her is just beginning to hit me.’

‘Was it so unpleasant? Weren’t you amazed, how neat her house is? It’s that way no matter when you go there, day or night. And wasn’t she more sensitive than you expected?’

‘Less.’

‘Less?’

‘Much less. What time are you coming home?’

‘I don’t know. Normal time. A little later, maybe.’

‘You’re going to go see her.’

‘That O.K. with you?’

‘No.’

Jerry seemed surprised. ‘I think I better. She sounded pretty frantic.’

‘Seeing you will just make it worse for her.’

‘Why would it? She likes me. I always cheer her up.’

‘Richard might be there.’

‘We could meet at some beach.’

‘It’s clouding over.’

‘It always does at noon,’ Jerry told her.

‘I suppose you’ll make love,’ she blurted.

Jerry’s voice pulled back, became the receiver’s components of metal and crystal. ‘Don’t be grotesque,’ he said. ‘That’s gone. Thanks to you. Congratulations.’ He hung up.

She felt chastised; she had overstepped. There were
rules in this mystery, like stairways in a castle; she had mistakenly knocked on the door of the chamber where the lord and lady lay and made love. Before this door she felt small, appalled and ashamed, rebuked and fascinated: a child. Ruth noticed that while her left hand had been holding the receiver her right had been doodling, on the back of a windowed bill envelope, squares interlocking with squares. Their areas of overlap were shaded; light and dark were balanced, confused though she had been. She studied this abstraction, wondering if, abandoned, she might be revealed to herself as an artist after all.

The day was hot and the children clamoured to go to the beach. They did not understand the day she was giving them. Rats of fear seemed to skid through their noise. Ruth felt she must stay here, to be here when what happened next happened. She did not know what it would be, but imagined that Jerry would need her. This imagined need was a positive pull on her stomach. In time, Geoffrey slept, and the two older children dispersed into the neighbourhood. They were happy to leave her. She settled herself at the piano, but the music had no power; Bach’s baroque scrolls failed to interconnect. Ruth went to the phone and called Jerry’s office and was told he had left for the afternoon. It was after five when he came home; she happened to be upstairs, having come to check on Geoffrey. The length of his nap seemed unnatural; perhaps, she thought, being knocked down by the Mathiases’ awful dog, what was its name? –

The front door opened. Jerry’s voice called; his steps
struck the bottom stairs. She called, ‘Don’t come up!’ When she entered the living room, he was circling the furniture as if looking for something, and smoking. The lit cigarette looked dirty in his hand, though it had been only three months since he had quit. ‘Why are you smoking?’ she asked.

‘I bought a pack driving home,’ he said. ‘I gave it up so I could taste her. Now I’m hungry for cancer.’

‘What happened?’

He straightened a rug and aligned some books. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing much. She cried. I told her I couldn’t come to her again unless I was free, and she said, Yes, that’s what she expected. I said it was unfair any other way. She agreed, and thanked me for making her feel loved. I thanked her for making
me
feel loved. It was all very reasonable, until she cried.’ He took a deep, annoyingly dramatic drag on his cigarette, sucking it down as if never to let it out. ‘God,’ he said. ‘I’m not used to this. It makes me dizzy.’ He paused by an end table and set a lampshade straight. ‘She said she hadn’t expected me to give in to you so soon.’

‘And then I suppose you took her into your arms and told her it would just be a few days before you’d talked that old bag into giving you a divorce.’

‘No, not really. I didn’t say that. I wish you’d been there to think of it for me. I didn’t say much of anything. I was really quite stupid.’ He inhaled again, did a little staggering act, and sat down in the Danish armchair so hard its fragile frame cracked; next, with a surge that seemed to gather behind his head and knock it forward, so that Ruth thought he was about to cough, he started crying. His sobs were tangled with loud sighs like the
hissing of truck brakes and with the broken words of his attempt to keep talking.

‘She told me – almost the last thing she told me – was to be nice to you – not to torture you with her.’

‘But that’s what you’re doing.’

‘I don’t mean to. Listen. I don’t want our lousy marriage to get better because she taught me how to make love and taught you – that I was worth loving.’

‘I’ve never said you weren’t worth loving.’

‘You’ve never had to – I’ve always felt it. You married me because – I could draw. I’d make the outlines – and you’d put in the – colours.’

‘That’s absurd. Look, Jerry, I don’t want you if you’re going to go on this way in front of me. For that female. I’m sorry, I can’t stand it. I can’t take it seriously.’

‘Then tell me – to go. Tell me now.’

When Jerry had his asthmatic attacks, he would wake in the night and find his breathing shallow. He would go to the bathroom for a drink of water or the ease of moving about and come back to the bed, where she had usually awakened, with his back bent. He described it as a wall in his lungs, or a floor that kept rising, so that he could not take enough air in; and the harder he tried, the tighter the wall became, so that he would break into a sweat, and cry out this was death, and ask her why she was smothering him, why she had had so many children, why she couldn’t keep the house dusted, why she refused to believe in Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Lazarus, the immortality of the soul – there was no limit to the height of his accusations against her, and she submitted to them because she knew as long as he could find breath to voice them he
was not asphyxiating. At last, after an hour or more, he would tire of abusing her, and God beyond her, and relax, and fall asleep, snoring trustingly as beside him she stared into the dark. She could not understand how he, knowing that only his fright and panicked constriction separated his lungs from the abundance of oxygen, could not will himself free from his attacks; but now, reaching into herself, Ruth found something akin to his strange inner wall, for her imagination could not quite grasp the need to let him go. She saw that he was determined to punish her if she did not, and that her dignity lay with the immediate sacrifice of their marriage. Such sacrifice would be simple, bold, pure, aesthetic. It would remove her from these demeaning people, these Greenwood adulterers. She even sensed, behind the wall within her, a volume of freedom and dream. But she could not break through to it. In good conscience she could not. An innocent man and a greedy woman had fornicated and Ruth could not endorse the illusions that made it seem more than that. They were exaggerators, both of them, and though she could see that beauty was a province of exaggeration, someone must stand by truth. The truth was that Sally and Jerry were probably better married to Richard and her than they would be to each other.

‘I’d do it,’ she told Jerry, ‘I’d see the lawyer tomorrow, if it was a woman I respected.’

‘A woman you respected,’ Jerry responded quickly, ‘would be a carbon copy of yourself.’ He had stopped crying.

‘That’s not true. I have no great admiration for myself. But Sally – she’s
silly
, Jerry.’

‘So am I.’

‘Not that silly. You’d hate her within a year.’

‘You think?’ He was interested.

‘I’m sure. I’ve seen the two of you together at parties – you’re nervous together.’

‘We’re not.’

‘You both act frantic.’

‘I can’t tell you what I love about her –’

‘Oh, do. She comes when you come.’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘I guessed.’

‘It’s true. She hasn’t made a religion out of sex, the way you have. She thinks it’s fun.’

‘How have I made a religion of it?’

‘Everything has to be perfect. Once a month you’re marvellous, but I don’t have that much patience. I’m running out of
time.
I’m dying, Ruth.’

‘Stop it. Don’t you see, it’s a problem any woman has, when she’s a wife; there are no obstacles. So she has to make them. I’ve felt that thing, of serving the penis, of existing to serve it, it’s wonderful. But only as a mistress. Sally is your mistress –’

‘No. She is, but I’m sure she makes love to Richard just the way she does to me. Anyway, it’s more than what happens in bed. Whenever I’m with her, no matter where, just standing with her on a street corner waiting for the light to change, I know I’m never going to die. Or if I know it, I don’t mind it, somehow.’

‘And with me?’

‘You?’ He was speaking to her as if to an audience he had ceased to see. ‘You’re death. Very calm, very pure, very remote. Nothing I can do will really change
you. Or even amuse you, much. I’m married to my death.’

‘Shit.’ How could he sit there so complacently, so expectantly even, having said she was death? He spoke of her Unitarian smugness but
he
was smug, smug in his grief, in his hopeless love, in all his easy absolutes. ‘You owe us a lot of hard thought and you’re just letting your tongue run on. Suppose you did marry Sally? Would you be faithful to her?’

‘Is that your business?’

‘Of course it is, I’m being asked to give way to your wonderful love. How wonderful is it? You’ve discovered a fascinating thing about yourself – women like you.’

‘They do?’

‘Stop it. Be serious. Think. How much are you going to Sally, and how much leaving me? How much are you using her as a way out of marriage? Out of the children, out of the job?’

‘Do I want out of all that?’

‘I don’t know. I just can’t feel that Sally is my real rival. I think my rival is some idea of freedom you have. I’ll tell you this, as a wife Sally would be damn possessive.’

‘I know that. She knows that.’ Jerry lifted his hand, she thought to wipe his eyes; but he scratched his head instead. This conversation was drying him out. ‘In a way’ he said, ‘it does seem reckless to rush from one monogamy into another.’

‘Reckless, and expensive.’

‘I suppose.’

‘And if you did slip up, how long would it be before she paid you back in kind?’

‘Not long.’

‘That’s right. Now you let her alone for a while and think about what you’re really after – that one big-bottomed blonde, or –’

‘Or?’

‘Or many women.’

Jerry smiled. ‘You’re offering me many women?’

‘Not exactly. Not at all. I’m describing what the realities are.’

‘One nice thing about being a Unitarian, it doesn’t saddle you with too much bourgeois morality.’

‘Being a Lutheran doesn’t seem to either.’

‘It’s not supposed to. We live by faith alone.’

‘Anyway I’d expect a few men in return.’

This surprised him. ‘Which ones?’

‘I’ll let you know.’ She moved a few steps, unconsciously mocking the beginning of a dance, and the gold-framed mirror between the two windows gave her back an unexpected rectangle of herself – hip out-thrust, elbow cocked, lips pursed as if having bitten a fruit too succulent. While she was transfixed by this glimpse, Jerry came up behind her and enclosed her breasts in his hands.

‘I suppose you think,’ he said, ‘corruption becomes you.’

His embrace disgusted her; pity for the abandoned woman made Ruth dislike her own success. She pulled away from him and said, ‘I must go to the beach. I’ve been promising the children all afternoon. You want to come along, or’re you going to leave us?’

‘No. I’ll come. I have nowhere to go.’

‘Your suit is outdoors on the line.’

∗

The young marrieds of Greenwood, in what had grown to be, as the women had ceased to bear new babies, a ritual need to keep in touch, had arranged constant excuses for congregating. The beach, dances, tennis, committee meetings – to these had been added a Sunday afternoon volleyball game. In all this mingling it was inevitable that the Conants and the Mathiases should meet. Sally, who wore pale colours all summer, white slacks and ivory armless jerseys and a bathing suit whose yellow had sun-faded to the colour of lemonade, seemed to Ruth to have frozen, to have become precariously brittle, and to regard Jerry with an inflexible dread and fascination. Ruth was curious about her husband’s potency, that it could produce such an effect. The wind that had broken this woman like a tree in an ice storm passed through her sometimes without stirring a leaf, and Ruth naturally wondered if she were alive at all. From an anxious depth within her there reawakened the suspicion that the people around her – mother, father, sister – were engaged in a conspiracy, a conspiracy called life, from which she had been excluded. In the night, lying beside Jerry, she considered running away, taking another lover, getting a job, winning back Richard, attempting suicide: all were methods of hurling herself against the unseen resistance and demonstrating, by the soft explosion, the flower of pain, that she existed. She found herself in the impossible position of needing to will belief; somehow she could not quite believe in Jerry and he, feeling this inability, nurtured it, widened it, for it was the opening by which he would escape. He encouraged her illusion that there was a world into which she had never been born.

On Sunday evenings, when the game was over, the home the Conants returned to seemed all unravelled, all confusion and unmade beds and broken toys and dirty cushions askew. He would sit in a chair and exude grief. His volleyball style involved flinging himself around and diving and falling, and the Collinses’ lawn, as feet wore the grass away, yielded bits of old rubbish, bottle caps, and shards of broken bottles, so he often cut himself; he sat there in his sawed-off khaki shorts with a bloody knee like a boy fallen from a bicycle, and as she watched his downcast face a drop of water appeared on his nose, fell, and was replaced by another. She could not take him seriously.