Marry Me (22 page)

Ruth felt cheated. She had waited for defeat behind the weak and random defences she had thrown up, and been cheated of it by her own tears, and the tears of her son – in what right scale do a child’s tears weigh more than a man’s? Jerry devalued himself by not acting on the strength of his unhappiness. She found in his car a paperback called
Children of Divorce.
He was trying to estimate the cost of an incalculable action: if Joanna and Charlie and Geoffrey each cried a quart of tears, he would stay; if merely a pint, he would go. If the odds on her remarrying were seven out of ten, he would go; if they were worse than fifty-fifty, he would stay. It was humiliating; a man shouldn’t stay with a woman out of pity, or if he did he shouldn’t tell her. Jerry neither told her nor told her otherwise, or, rather, he told her both at various times. What he said lost all specific point; she hardly listened, gathering only from the churn of words that things were not yet settled, there had been no climax, he was not resigned, he was still in love, though Sally had been lost she lived within him more than ever, the thing was unfinished, Jerry was unsatisfied, his wife had failed him, in clumsily
refusing to die she had failed, it was all her fault, she would get no rest ever.

Each evening, coming home from work, he would hopefully ask, ‘Did anything happen?’

‘No.’

‘Nobody called or anything?’

‘Did you expect somebody to call?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then.’

He turned to the day’s mail.

She asked, ‘How do you feel?’

‘O.K. Fine.’

‘No, really.’

‘Tired.’

‘Physically tired?’

‘That’s the final effect, yes.’

‘Just from living with me?’

‘I wouldn’t put it that way.’

‘From living without her?’

‘Not really. I was never so sure I would have enjoyed living with her. She could be pretty pushy.’

‘Then what’s eating you? This suffering in silence is worse than anything yet. I think I’m losing my mind.’

‘Nonsense. You’re the sanest person I know.’

‘I
was
the sanest person you knew. “Did anything happen?” Every time you ask me that I want to pick up a plate and smash it, I want to put my fist through one of these windowpanes. What do you
expect
to happen?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. I suppose I’m expecting
her
to do something. But what can she do?’

Ruth moved across the room and took him by the arms as if to shake him, but instead gripped him weakly;
his arms felt so thin. ‘Don’t you understand? You’ve
had
it with her. You’ve
had
it.’

Jerry gazed over her head, through her hair. ‘That can’t be.’ He spoke with the heaviness of a sleepwalker. ‘You can’t go from so much to nothing so quickly.’

‘Please
focus,’
she said, trying to shake him now like a child and discovering him too big, so that in the effort it was she who was shaken. ‘Women are at the mercy of men. She loved you, but you failed her, and now she must hold on to Richard. She needs Richard. She’s had her children by Richard. You mustn’t interfere any more.’

‘She’ll try somebody else now, to get her out.’

‘All right, let her. You have no claim on her, Jerry.’

‘I had to fail somebody. I had to fail either her or you and the children.’

‘I know that. Don’t rub it in. I know if it had been between her and me alone you wouldn’t have hesitated.’

‘That’s not true. I would have hesitated.’

‘Very funny. Why do you
say
things like that? Why do you
bother
?’

‘I pay you the compliment,’ he said, ‘of trying to tell you the truth.’

‘Well
stop
it. It’s no longer a compliment. I don’t want the truth any more. What are you
doing
to me, Jerry?’

‘I’m doing nothing to you. I’m being your husband.’

‘You’ve stopped making love to me. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Why should I be pleased?’

‘I thought you didn’t like it.’

‘Of course I like it.’

‘You used to turn your back.’

‘Not always.’

‘We’ll make love tonight.’

‘No. It’ll be her. It’ll be her in your mind. It’s too degrading.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Stop thinking of her.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Then don’t let me
see
you thinking. Do it in New York. Do it at the beach. When you’re in my house, think of me. If you’re going to make love to me, make me think it’s
me.
Lie to me. Seduce me.’

‘You’re my wife. I shouldn’t have to seduce you.’

‘Make
me your wife. Hold me. Hold
me.’

She pressed herself against him but his arms remained limp. ‘Why Ruth,’ Jerry said. ‘Poor Ruth. You have me. I thought that would make you happy. Aren’t you happy?’

‘No, I’m frightened.’

‘You’re never frightened.’

‘I’m sick.’

‘Physically?’

‘Not yet.’

‘How then?’

‘Let me confess something. The other Saturday when you went to get a haircut without telling me and it took all afternoon I kept looking out the window – I remember how the elm looked so clearly – and around five-thirty I thought, “He’s gone. He’s left me.” And it was a
relief.’

He hugged her at last, and there was warmth in the pressure of their bodies, but she could not yield altogether
to it, for she felt his pull a malevolence like that of gravity; he was pleased because she was falling, her mind was letting go.

She had ceased to understand herself; the distinction between what she saw and what she was had ceased to be clear. As September wore thin, the heating man came and reactivated the furnace, and in the cooling nights it switched itself on and off. Lying awake, Ruth was troubled by the unaccustomed murmur, and uncertain if it were real and, if it were, whether it came from the furnace beneath her, an aeroplane overhead, or the transformers on the pole outside the bedroom window. Somewhere in the spaces of her life an engine was running, but where? Jerry and Sally, she was sure, had wounded each other beyond the possibility of collaboration, but Ruth felt a fate working, a pattern of external events generated by the dark shapes within her mind. The world is composed of what we think it is; what we expect tends to happen; and what we expect is really what we desire. As a negative wills a print, she had willed Sally. Why else the impatience with which she viewed the imperfections in Sally’s beauty – the bitter crimp in one corner of her mouth, the virtual fattiness of her hips? She wanted her to be perfect, as she wanted Jerry to be decisive. Ruth disliked, religiously, the satisfaction he took in being divided, confirming thereby the split between body and soul that alone can save men from extinction. It was all too religious, phantasmal. The beast of his love had been too easily led by the motions of Ruth’s mind. It had halted three months at her merely asking by moonlight, and had altogether vanished in another weak
wave of her hand, at the sparkle of Charlie’s tears. Too easy, too strange. Ruth suspected some residue of momentum in the summer that, now that the nights had drawn equal to the days in length, must be discharged by some last act of her will. She was a prisoner; the crack between her mind and the world, bridged by a thousand stitches of perception, had quite closed, leaving her embedded, as the white unicorn is a prisoner in the tapestry.

The last Friday of the month, the Collinses persuaded them to come Greek dancing in Cannonport. Old Cannonport, clinging to the sea with its creaking docks and weeping gulls. The dance was in the basement of a VF.W. Hall, a big clapboard building with a square belfry, on the side of a hill of shingled four-storey tenements. Salt water showed black at the foot of the street. The frosted basement windows of the hall were aglow with a milky fire, of a tumultuous cavern within; music penetrated the walls. Jerry and Ruth and David and Linda descended the concrete steps of a side entrance; a man so shinily bald the sutures of his skull declared their pattern sold them scarlet tickets. Inside, there was light and heat and noise, and people packed solid, sitting, standing, drinking beer, dancing in crammed sinuous lines, their faces glazed, foolish, devilish. The Mathiases were here. They were with the Hornungs. ‘I mentioned it to them but didn’t think they’d come,’ Linda said quickly to Ruth, as Richard came forward, Sally following.

Richard looked drunk and sheepish; Ruth saw he was having an affair, or about to have one, with Janet
Hornung. Sally was wearing an orange dress, its colour both dramatic and flattering. Ruth’s temples began to ache. Richard took her hand and they joined the dance line winding past them, dragging her away, merging her into the mass.

The orange of Sally’s dress kept cutting into the corners of her vision as she danced. At moments they would be opposite in the spiralling lines, Sally’s face downcast, her figure seeming intact with those around her, so that she seemed secure in a section of a frieze; whereas Ruth felt pinned, pulled, contrary, and clumsy. Hands copulated with hers. Richard’s boneless fingers kept flipping to renew his grip. An unknown man, a hopping, jerking man with hair bubbling from his sleeves, seized her wrist and flashed a snaggled, meaningful grin. Some hands felt thick as buns, some limp as dough. For some moments Ruth danced beside a squat Greek matron in black, her nose hooked and her eyes hooded, and the woman’s hand was a little flat bird, trembling with a terrible, inhumanly rapid pulse. The dance over, Ruth released the hand and stared with wonder at the woman’s ordinarily weary and stupid face. With the same wonder she looked at Sally and imagined that she had often come to meet Jerry in that dress, that Jerry had often removed it to make love. The bouzouki and the clarinet slashed into another tune; Ruth’s headache sharpened. Jerry came and took her hand. His touch was so gentle it kept breaking; she groped for his hand and her feet groped for the steps. Kick with the left foot, left behind right, step, reverse, yes, feet together, rest on the heels one beat. Kick. Orange flickered at the right edge of her vision and,
moments later, on her left. Jerry’s hand slipped from hers, Richard smirked going by, the percussion increased the tempo, Jerry took her hand again. The music halted. The ceiling of the hall was a network of pipes painted a poisonous green; it was lowering upon her.

Jerry said to her, ‘Come on, get with it. You dance like there’s a stone in your shoe.’

‘I have a headache.’

‘You’re thinking too hard. I’ll get you a drink.’

But the bourbon only made her dizzy, and now, whether she was dancing or standing, the room spun, and Sally’s bright shape with its mocking shadow of energy cut at her from one side and then another, whittling her smaller and smaller; she became a lump, a lump of pain. The light sickened her. The leader of the band rose up with an electric guitar and yipped and launched a Twist. The noise seemed to Ruth something solid the band was stuffing into the far corners of the hall, into the dusty mysterious spaces between the pipes and the ceiling. Jerry was leading Sally into the dance area. Ruth was not surprised. She noticed how, as they moved to the centre of the floor, Jerry and Sally took everyone’s eye; there was something striking about them as a couple, something adolescent and tall, vaguely comic and dramatically demanding, as actors are demanding of their audience. Not touching, they faced each other and dropped their angular bodies into the dance; a ring of people formed around them and hid them from Ruth’s view. David Collins came up to her, looked at her face, and moved away; she felt he was frightened. She felt she was contagious, foul, cursed,
and about to give birth, through the pain in front of her head, to a monster like herself. When the Twist at last ended, she went up to Jerry and said, ‘Please take me home. I hate this.’

His hectic face made eyes of surprise.

‘Please.’

Jerry looked over her head towards Sally and asked her, ‘Can you fit the Collinses into your car? Evidently we have to leave.’

‘Sure. I’m sorry, Ruth, you don’t feel well.’ It was Sally’s voice at its most toney a delicate drawl beyond reproach.

Ruth turned. ‘You lied to me,’ she said, determined to be distinct, though panic and nausea were tumbling inside her.

The muscles in Sally’s face stiffened, and her eyes darkened so that their sockets seemed deep. But in reply she repeated, ‘I’m sorry, Ruth,’ as if she had heard nothing.

Nothing. The dream was moving on without her now. Jerry drove back to Greenwood furiously fast; both could have been killed, and Ruth dared not lift her voice, lest he veer. Yet the danger bound them together, almost comfortably; Jerry was challenging his death, and their speed served to remove Ruth’s headache. She felt pain flying in sparks and clumps from the top of her skull like snow in winter from a car’s heaped roof. They didn’t speak, but his asthmatic breathing was loud. It was midnight when they got home, and later still when he got back from taking Mrs O home. Ruth had changed into her nightie and terrycloth robe and restored herself with a glass of milk. He came in the
kitchen door gesturing. His wet shoes tracked dead leaves in. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, flinging down his hands, palms up, ‘I must leave you. She’s too lovely. I can’t let her go.’

‘Don’t use your hands in that affected way and keep your voice down. I can hear you.’

He spoke in jerky gusts, striding back and forth on the linoleum. ‘I saw it tonight, very clearly. A revelation. I’ve been waiting for one, and there it was. I must go to her. I must go to that orange dress and dive in and disappear. I don’t care if it kills me, I don’t care if it kills you. Anything that gets in the way – the children, the money, our parents, Richard – none of it matters. It’s just stuff, bad stuff. Tough stuff. It needs faith. I’ve just lacked faith, in a funny way faith in you. I didn’t think you were a person, apart from me. But you are. God, Ruth, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. It’ll be more awful than I imagine, I know. But I
am
sure. Quite sure. It’s a great relief to be sure. I’m very thankful. I’m numb and scared, but glad. Be glad too. Please? I was just nibbling you to death this other way.’