Marry or Burn (8 page)

“I was,” Molly said. “But not any more.” They all laughed, Jeff threw his arm in front of her to restrain her, and for a moment she was safe inside the tent of marriage.

In the ninth grade, at a retreat in honor of the Blessed Virgin, Mike had handed Alice a joint and she had taken a deep drag.

“That did it,” he said. “I was in love.”

“In love,” Alice said with a sigh. “I was the one. I was the proverbial slave. I had a lot of penance to do. They had me pray for him. Wasn't that smart?”

“And then the families got involved,” Mike said. “I was too good for her.”

Mike had not gone off to college when Alice did; he had skipped up a ladder of city jobs into the police department, where his way with witnesses and his regard for details worked their way into his file and landed him in Homicide. But he lost heart for the work. He knew something about crime, and because he could write, they took him on at the newspaper. You could do that then, hire on with promises instead of credentials.

Even though eventually he wrote a syndicated column on crime and appeared every so often on TV, few people in town
would have recognized Mike or known where to find him if they had something to say about a crime. He wasn't at the paper, he was out and around, in courtrooms and jails and morgues. And bars, of course; he had a lot of drinking to do in the course of a day.

Molly had seen the danger in liking Alice too much, but it was too late for that; in no time she and Alice were in and out of each other's houses and Molly was reading through the youngest girl's poems because she, Molly, had once published poems in magazines—though sometimes the four of them did not get together for months. As couples, they had the kind of friendship in which regularity and obligation were kept at bay. Jeff was always saying what good friends that made them.

“That may be what men look for in friendship,” Alice said. “Us girls want a commitment: call me every day or else.” How could anyone harm Alice?

 

ONE NIGHT MIKE mentioned in passing that he was being treated for a disease. He had a lymphoma, a mild one. Hardly breathing, Molly looked at Alice. “They think it's the kind that can be relatively benign,” Alice said after she took a drink of her beer. But if it was that kind, Jeff said when they got home, it didn't sound as if it was taking a benign course in Mike's case.

Five years went by. In some of them Molly was able to put Mike out of her mind for days at a time. In others it seemed she stood for half the year with her hand on its way to the phone.
It's Molly. I have something to tell you.
Of course he would answer sometimes, when she called Alice. At those times her own voice surprised her, greeting him with normal concern, asking questions about the chemo, the steroids, the possible dietary measures. Of course she saw him. He was getting sicker. She began to let her thoughts of him take her where they would. As for
dreams, she no longer hoped for them. She would have kept him out of them if she could, because as often as not the man finally drawing her to him was breathless and thin, the chest like an egg carton when she finally lay against it.

In real life he was not yet that bad. This condition of his did not appear to worry him. Early in chemo his hair fell out. His daughters gave him a cashmere ski cap, which he wore a time or two until they went back to school. “Half the men we know are bald,” Alice said. Nevertheless, Molly had a recurring dream of holding him, comforting him, enclosing his scalp in her hands.

His eyebrows and lashes did not fall out. Gradually his cheeks sank in an unpleasant way, though, high up under the cheekbone where it didn't look like the normal hollowing you might acquire in middle age if you went on a diet, but like an excavation, as if tissue might have been siphoned out. Molly knew his face so well by then that she knew where every cell belonged, and she was seeing them change, shift, vanish. She wanted to ask Alice how she could stand it. Of course Alice was watching. Then he was on steroids, and when his cheeks filled out the strange little hollows were still there, like thumbprints in dough.

 

ONE DAY THE doorbell rang. When she opened the door, with the chime still hanging in the air, there he was. “Come in,” she said after a second. He walked in unsteadily—nobody knew any more which caused the gait, illness or liquor—and sat down at the kitchen table. He asked if Jeff was there, but of course Jeff was at work, it was daytime. Like many people who work on their own, like Molly, in fact, even without alcohol Mike often forgot whether it was the weekend or not and where people were who did go to the office. It wasn't that he didn't work hard. He was always on the track of somebody who could put him on the track of something before his deadline, and his big eyes, too big
for a man really, almost in a class with Peter Lorre's eyes, were always searching down a street or around a room or over the planes of a face. If it was your face, those eyes were a snare. They were the famished, dreaming organs you see on posters of ragged children. They had down-sweeping lashes, black and thick, that acted on Molly the way the forest in a cartoon draws the scared kids in on tiptoe. Her body followed her eyes, her mind swayed, she stepped closer. Even a man—Jeff, for example, ordinarily a man of few words—would talk more freely, and in a more fervent way, with Mike as his listener.

“You've never had a friend like this,” Molly said to him.

“He comes down there, he finds me,” Jeff said humbly. Jeff was well liked, but nobody much hung out in the Path lab or saw a lot of him. But Mike would get him out of the basement and make him eat lunch. “Drinks his lunch,” Jeff said. “I keep warning him. But you can't tell him. He drinks because of the things he deals with.” Molly had never heard Jeff, who kept at a remove the worst of life that he himself dealt with, plated out on glass and magnified, make a psychological assessment of another man.

“Why deal with those things?” she said, clinging shamelessly to the subject.

Jeff said, “Fate. Fate put him there. Look at the guy. His whole life. What's he going to do? No money for school, smart.” Another first for Jeff, generalizing about another's life. Usually he stuck with facts. In that way he resembled Alice, who read every page of the newspaper and knew what was happening in the world without any wish to remake it in her own words. “The guy should be teaching. When he's done with chemo I'm getting him in to talk to the students. Why not? They all watch TV, they all want to do forensics. Smartest guy I know.” People said that all the time, because Mike had not gone to college.

Jeff could say that.

Molly could say, “Did you see his column today?” And so on. Nothing more. She couldn't say, What is it? What has happened to me?

Not for years could she ask anybody for confirmation of Mike's effect. Finally she brought it up with her friend Rita, who had known him. Even then Molly couldn't say anything about how she had felt. And what Rita said . . . but that came later.

On the day he came to her house Mike said, “Are you really busy?” Molly had been working at the computer but she said no. She said it several times. He said, “I've just seen something terrible. I don't even want to think about it.”

She knew this must be the child everybody had been looking for. A six-year-old boy. They already had the man who had been seen with him. It had been in the paper for days, as helicopters circled above the woods of Seward Park.

Mike closed his eyes and made a tent over his forehead with his hands, as if he and Molly were sitting in the sun, and for a minute the eyelashes slept on the skin of his cheeks and drove all thought of what he might have seen from her mind. She supposed if he had been her husband she would have gotten used to the sight and maybe even been mildly irritated by it, as we sometimes are by a thing that once bewitched us.

Right away she thought he must have come from the morgue. Alice had told her his visits to the morgue figured in his drinking.

“I wish I could talk to Jeff,” he said as Molly poured coffee. His eyes had opened. He shook himself like a dog.

She could have said, Why didn't you go to the lab if you want to talk to Jeff?

He and Jeff had a little contest as to which one had seen worse sights, though by then Jeff was out of the county hospital where gruesome events from the newspaper drew to a close in
the cold rooms of Pathology; he was back at the university and spending most of his time looking at slides.

“Do you want to call him from here?”

“No . . . no.” He swirled his coffee. “This was a kid. I can't mention this to Alice.”

Oh? How come you can mention it to me?
But she leaned forward sympathetically and cupped her mug in her hands. His attention swiveled down to her hands. She saw it. His mind would narrow like that.

In a low, despairing voice he said, “Your hands . . . they're nice, they're . . .” She set the mug down. He took hold of her hands. He folded the fingers in to make fists and raised the fists to his face and ground them into his eyes. A solemn shock ran through her, as if a comb had been dragged through her body.

All the blood had run out of her brain and into the skin and muscles of her hands, which were like invalids given up to a drug, and at the same time she had a marvelous clarity of thought, of almost disinterested pity for him. But that was quickly replaced by the familiar dazed longing. It seemed to her that he must know, having forced her hands to be the envoys of the secret, and yet something told her not to move, because assuredly he did not know, and would not want to know. When he stopped grinding her knuckles into his eyes and let go of her hands, it would shock him, she knew, if she spread them on either side of his head and pulled him across the table to her. No, he was like an animal that had come up to her in the wild, trustingly, and she had to be still.

“That's not really what I came about. There's something else I need to talk to you about,” he said, still in the despairing voice. “Because of Alice.” What was coming? She had to steady herself, try not to let her chest display the speed and shallowness of her breathing.

What is love? What is it? What is it? How can it be what it
seems to be, nothing? A vacancy, an invisibility, a configuration of the mind. But with a weight, perceptible to the body. And a married woman with a husband she loved and liked, caught under the weight, unable to breathe? And it wasn't even a
person
for whom she felt this nothing, this love, not a personality, a self, a man who drank too much and wrote for the newspaper and had five kids, but the face and eyes of a
being
of some kind who lived in the body and looked out of the eyes of Mike O'Meara. A being from an earlier life trapped in the layers of this one. Or a primitive version of a human being, say a Pleistocene man off the northern grassy plain, looking for the first time into the eyes of a rough creature on the same plain, herself.

It wasn't even that she wanted all that intensely to go to bed with him. Or it wasn't primarily that—though she knew a lot of people would have said so. “Lust,” Alice herself would have said in a minute, hearing of these symptoms.

She wanted to see him. Just that. Year after year she had remembered and rehearsed and desired the sight of Mike O'Meara more than the sight of Jeff or her children or her dead mother or anyone else. She had wanted to know she would see him and for as long as possible each time and with some promise that he would come back so that she could see him again. It was a primitive feeling without very much of herself in it, like the wish to get warmer when you're cold.

She had other friends, who, if she had called them and wailed out what was happening to her, would have kindly said, “You pity him. He's dying.”

“Tell me,” Molly said to him. But again the doorbell rang.

It was Alice, at the door. “Hello, Molly,” she said. Her voice was that of a school principal who stands up by degrees and comes out from behind a desk. “I'm surprised.” She walked in. “I'm surprised.”

Mike was coming out of the kitchen. “Hi,” he said to Alice with a benign tiredness.

“Hi, I saw the car,” Alice said, looking no different from the way she always looked, with her rosy cheeks and thick half-combed hair and her chin tucked into her neck in a motherly way. She had on her red necklace; her fingers were touching it. She didn't look angry. “I just didn't know
where
you'd be.
Who
.”

“Don't tell me you think I'm here with Molly.” Mike sat down heavily on the bench in Molly's hall. Alice didn't answer, she just stood there. Molly can still hear what he said next. “Don't tell me you think that,” he said. “It's not Molly.”

“Sorry,” Alice said, without looking at Molly. It was not like Alice to leave off the
I'm
.

It wasn't very long after that that Mike began to go downhill fast. He had to go for outpatient transfusions. Molly was one of those Alice invited to drive him and sit with him while the blood dripped in.

 

AFTER THE FUNERAL there was a long period when Molly contrived to have his name come up. Her friend Rita, who was a reporter at the paper, said, “O'Meara. Jeez, the poor guy. Something about him. He had that way. He never acted on it. Whoa, don't get me wrong. But he was always kinda playing. Those eyes. I know a couple of women who—”

“Oh, don't tell me that. Don't tell me that, Rita.”

“Don't speak ill of the dead?”

“I don't mean that. I just don't want to know who. Who?”

“I think Marian. Yeah. She taught their kids. And Cathy Daley at the paper. They were always flirting around. She actually tried to get him to meet her someplace. He didn't, of course. He never would have.”