Marry Me (35 page)

Authors: John Updike

BOOK: Marry Me

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Jerry got off at St Croix. The tropical air, vivid and soft as a gust from an atomizer, that had greeted his face that dawn in San Juan, was drier here. His body felt light and his sensations were pleasantly scattered; he had slept two hours, in a night flight from Idlewild, taken impulsively, to escape constriction. The weight from his lungs had lifted. The terminal was newly built, without doors, so that shade alone marked the difference between within and without. A breeze flowed through, smelling of earth and flowers. Beyond the edge of shade, through the haze of a rhythmic sprinkler and the mesh of an airfield fence, the backwash from the props of the Carib-air plane that
had brought him raised a torrent of dust in which the black baggage-handlers hung legless. A low green hill, dull as if its colour had sunk into an unprimed canvas, supported a conical mass Jerry guessed was a ruined sugar mill. The land looked both exhausted and innocent. It seemed the right place for him to have come to.

At the taxi rank, a Negro with a cigarette behind each ear asked him where he wanted to go, Christiansted or Fredericksted. He had not expected there to be a choice. ‘Which do you recommend?’

The Negro shrugged delicately. ‘Your
decishun
, man. One’s that way and one’s’ – he rolled his eyes to indicate – ‘the other.’

‘So I can’t go to both?’ Jerry said, offering to joke.

Tranquil silence met his self-answering question; he breathed easy, sensing, and beginning to love, the tropical manner of outwaiting everything. He said, ‘All I want is a room and a beach.’ It was March, he had been told the hotels would be growing empty.

The Negro gazed over Jerry’s shoulder, then turned and tenderly opened the door of his taxi. ‘We’ll fix you up fine,’ he said. Jerry got in, and as he waited for the car to move, other Negroes, two and then one more, wandered from the shade of the airport terminal and climbed in with him – one in front with the driver, two in back with him. He was crowded into a corner of the seat. The Negroes, all adult men, giggled and chattered incomprehensively; they talked among themselves a family language of stabbing murmurs and incompleted allusions that was unintelligible, though English. The driver steered the taxi at high speed down the left side of a straight road walled on both sides by sugar cane;
another taxi shot towards them also on the wrong side and passed safely, like a miracle worked with mirrors. They passed stone shells showing slots for the axles of vanished millstones, and shacks of overlapping tin, and newer, somehow American houses of white stucco, with louvred windows, bougainvillea, and gutter-fed cisterns. At an intersection, a sign pointed to Upper Love; the taxi stopped, and one Negro got out. The driver asked aloud, in a different voice, meant for Jerry to understand, ‘Would you love to go by de moun
tens
?’

‘Sure,’ he said. Submit. Forget.

They climbed into a region of rough pastures and vast trees with bleached pods hanging stiffly down like the leaves of trees killed in midsummer. Higher and higher views of the turquoise ocean, mottled with lavender, opened and closed. Now a forest closed around them, where hairy vines dipped through clouds of hibiscus and mahogany roots twisting from the earth formed shrine-sized caves by the side of the road. A quicksilver shape darted under the wheel of the taxi, there was conversational excitement within it, and the driver said, in the voice intended for Jerry, ‘Mon
goose
.’ Rattling around a bend in the wretched, pitted road, they emerged from the forest into the sky and stopped. The pair of Negroes walked away from the car without looking back, towards a home unseen. Jerry realized that he would never see their homes. Moving to the other side of the empty back seat, he saw a ribbon of beach, a thread of highways, a scattering of red roofs from the altitude at which, a month before, he had seen the grey roofs of Queens, packed one against the other like cartons in a storage room.

The engines had roared in a graver key, black water lifted towards them, the children fell silent. Ruth squeezed his hand. The wheels smacked the runway, the great powder-blue body swayed and complained, the moment passed. They were home.

From the bedroom window of the house they had rented in Haut-de-Cagnes, Jerry, gasping from his bed as Ruth lay sleeping the sleep of the just, could see, across the sharp small valley where Modigliani had once lived with his mistress, the constellation Orion. The constellation seemed to be the companion of the sea, and its form, so long-limbed and masculine, constituted a sort of pledge the sight of which comforted him beyond reason, and eased his lungs. Restored to America, he found the constellation hard to find, obscured by the ubiquitous trees, overpowered by artificial lights, and subtly re-oriented in the stellar hemisphere. And when, from some open field, he did sight the solace of his exile, Orion had lost the friendly aura gathered perhaps from the proximate moon-clad body of his watery mistress the Mediterranean, above whose rustling sleep the slain hunter had seemed to watch, awake, propped on one elbow.

Back in Greenwood there was no glimpse of Sally, though Richard, driving a new car, a white Porsche convertible, could be seen around town weekends; once indeed, in the dusk of an unseasonably mild day in March, on a relatively little-travelled road, Jerry saw Richard and Janet Hornung riding together with the top down, looking like children surprised in the bathtub.

The driver took a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it; they were descending towards the beach and the
town. A congregation of rocks on a hillside became sheep. There were houses, but no people.

Hey, Sally?

Yes, Jerry?

How was it? Was it so bad?

At times. But you were right, I knew that. You were very clever that day to know what I really wanted, I thought I wanted the opposite.

I wish I hadn’t been so clever. I wish you had really wanted me.

I did, I do. I do have you, like the sea has Orion.

But they’re gods, and we were very simple, as you once said. We were caught at being human. It was a matter of children, mostly.

No, I’d like to think that, it’s kind of you to lie to me. But if it hadn’t been the children it would have been something else. It would have been Ruth. And if Ruth hadn’t reacted like she did you would have found another way. You wanted to keep me pure.

That’s it, isn’t it? You’ll always be pure for me now.

Not always, darling – you don’t like me to call you ‘darling’, do you? You never did, you thought it was phony. I never knew what to call you, and when you used to fill me I wanted so much to have the right name for you that I said nothing.

You should have said something. Anything.

I felt shy.

You?

Yes.

And now, how do you feel? I feel dead.

I’m still very shaken, but it’s less bad. I’m not yours any more. You should know that. After a while I’ll probably get
bitter about you and hate you because you humiliated me, and then that will go too, and I won’t care either way very much. You’ll be my ex-lover and we might even be friends.

Sounds awful. Awful.

Women try to be like men, Jerry, and imagine things, but in the end we’re all practical, we have to be. You must go on alone.

No. I don’t believe you. I loved you because you believed what I believed. There was a place I went to with you.

Any woman in bed will take you there. There’s no place, darling, but right here, here and now, with Richard and Ruth. Love Ruth, Jerry. Now I must stop talking to you, because people will say I’m a whore.

His imagined conversation, between himself and the Sally he carried inside him, ended with words she really had said. It had been at the Collinses’ party before the Heart Fund dance, in February. Entering the crowded room, he had seen her, and had the sensation of clasping her to his eyes, of fitting her to the matrix his entire life, including the months in France, had prepared. They had returned from France because the children were homesick and needed school. Linda Collins had written that Richard wouldn’t care, Sally had pacified him. The painting had not gone well; the weather had been slightly too cold for an easel outdoors, and once it had even snowed, trimming the cacti in their yard with snow. So though his leave from the commercials firm had been for six months, they stayed in France less than three. He drew cartoons at home, and enjoyed it, though the cartoons all came back. As he had come back. But after a brief exchange, through the smoke of his cigarette, about health, and skiing, and children, Sally had said,
‘Now I must stop talking to you, because people will say I’m a whore,’ and had turned away. In the hotel in Washington, she had turned her back and slept, while he had insomnia. While he roamed the party grieving, she stayed close by Richard’s side. Richard had grown fatter, puffed up with maturity, and his hair had gone so long uncut it was curling on his neck, and perhaps to make an impression at the party he was wearing a black patch over the blind eye. He looked heroic and huge. From the safety of his side Sally’s voice rang shrilly into every corner of the party. Ruth came to Jerry’s side and whispered that Sally seemed her old self. He agreed, yes, and wondered if he had attempted, wrongly, to tear her from her true self.

‘Is you comin’ to St Croix for a rest?’

‘For a change.’

They were coming into a town. Sun-bleached wooden houses, lacy with old jigsawing, were surrealistically spaced along a straight blank street. A Negro without a shadow lopsidedly loped across their path. On the right the milky green sea quivered and sparkled, and a smoke-grey freighter rode at anchor. At the end of the street stood a fort with sloping walls painted red as a valentine. ‘Where am I?’ Jerry asked.

‘Frederick
sted
,’ the driver answered.

‘Am I east or west?’

‘West, mon. The end of the islond. Did you want east?’

‘No, this is good. This is great. Can we find a place for me?’

‘We’re almost there this minute now. Don’t lose your pay-
shunce
.’

Jerry had rolled down his window, in his impatience to be free, to mix himself up with the spaced houses, the drab and patient shops, the Lutheran church left by the Danes, the fort – all of it lying in the tranquil pink shadow cast by the high green sea. He inhaled the air. This was the place, it tasted right. He had always told her there was a place, and now he had found it, made good his promise, and brought them here. He was intensely, passingly happy. The existence of this place satisfied him that there was a dimension in which he did go, as was right, at that party, or the next, and stand, timid and exultant, above the downcast eyes of her gracious, sorrowing face, and say to Sally,
Marry me.