Marry or Burn (9 page)

Molly had never seen Mike flirt with anyone. Never. Was
there a world for each pair of eyes? Like a private screening for each person, and yours was tailored to you?

She tried to ask Alice about this, delicately. Maybe the woman was just a fling. Obviously his heart was still with his family. Was he a man who had flings? “No,” Alice told her. “No. That, he would never do. This was serious. He was in love. He thought we could separate, for God's sake. He was trying to figure it all out. Whether I could take it. That's probably the worst thing he said. ‘You can bear it, can't you, you're so strong.' He was in love. He could barely walk at that point, his counts were so low, and he was talking about
getting an apartment.
”

“Oh, Alice.”

“To be with her.”

“Oh, God.”

“I know. I know. But he didn't get to, did he?”

“No.”

“He never got to. And I have to think it was because of her, because she wouldn't. And I never knew who it was. It was a freak thing. Oh, he had his deal, with women. That was just his way. But you know him, Molly. You know how he was, about his family. But one day . . . he said he just looked up one day and there she was.”

“Oh, God.”

“It was love. He couldn't think about anything else. She was younger than we are, of course. But she broke up with him at one point. When she told him she wouldn't see him any more he said that was like what he sometimes felt in the morgue. He would tell me these things. If he saw something unbearable in the morgue, his legs started to hurt. So I knew I had to let him. Oh, first I said, ‘Maybe your legs hurt because of the lymphoma.'”

“Oh, Alice. His legs hurt. You thought it was me.”

“Only that one day. Unbelievable. Sorry. I used to ask myself whether it was this person or that person, how young she was—I never could ask him her exact age—was she some friend of the girls'—but she was too sad-sounding to be all that young, she wasn't so ruthless, was she, or wouldn't she have gone off with him? Or whether she was somebody I saw in the grocery store, or at church . . . he liked Catholic women, you know, they were the kind he really liked because of filling the time at Mass when he was a kid, lusting over all those kneeling legs. But of course he didn't go to Mass now so how would he have met them? Molly—” She gave Molly a wolfish glare. “You would tell me if you knew, wouldn't you?”

Jeff said the same thing to her. “You must have known who it was. Women always know.” He was angry at Mike; he wanted to have been told. He was Mike's best friend. “Think she came to the funeral?” But at the funeral, only Alice was watching. None of this was spoken of before he died.

Alice never apologized for saying “I'm surprised” to Molly, in her front hall. That one “Sorry” was for having even dreamed it could be her.

Molly got through the funeral. As a friend, she could be forgiven a choked sound when the priest said, “Receive our brother Michael.” Alice held herself together, though she gave a little laughing moan a couple of times when they were all eating and drinking afterwards, and let tears run down her cheeks without wiping them. But she didn't stutter or gasp or double over; she hugged her friends; when she wasn't doing that she kept her arm around whichever of their children was near, or held onto Molly.

And who was she, the one Mike chose? Who leans on the car door when the thought of him stabs her, who loses her cart in the grocery store? Who lets out a groan in the shower? Who
can't go into the part of the cemetery where he is buried, in case his family, his friends have come to visit the grave?

They would not despise her. Why will she not make herself known to them? Why won't she answer to them, Alice, and Jeff, and Molly?

A
WOMAN STANDS at the mirror in a train station bathroom. Next to her a dark-haired girl is blending the shadow on one eyelid with a fingertip, while the woman marvels at the black pressed-down lashes, thick as a pocket flap. When both lids are done the girl pulls down her lower lip with two dark nails, perfect ovals, and examines her teeth and gums. Now she's making an
O
of her lips to cream on red lipstick, furiously round and round, not pausing at the corners.
All right, all right
, thinks the woman,
you're a beauty but that's too much lipstick
. The girl goes on a little longer and then without blotting her lips drops the lipstick in a little velvet bag and roughly cinches it tight.

She grabs the handle of a black leather suitcase on scuffed wheels, with a strap around it, and drawing her black eyebrows together yanks it on one wheel through the door a fat girl coming in holds open for her.
Whoever's out there waiting for you
, the woman at the mirror thinks,
he's in for it
. Or maybe there's nobody. Maybe that's the problem.

Of course nobody paces outside the door waiting for her, either. What train would she board, to what destination would someone accompany her, a woman of fifty-some who has laid a big brown purse in a puddle on the counter and seems content to daydream in a public bathroom? Finally she takes her hands out from under the water and pulls down the groaning belt of towel. She looks at herself. Despite her open stare she didn't get a fraction of a glance from the girl. She isn't old. If she were, a quick smile might easily have passed both ways between them, a small bow across time. She is unsure, herself, about applying lipstick, which may in this light have the effect of a label stuck on an orange, but eventually she does it anyway.

Unlike the girl, whose big eyes were red-rimmed under the makeup, she is happy. Or very close. She sees the possibility.

GROUNDLESS NEAR HAPPINESS doesn't do anything for the Reader, if she comes across it on the page. She is looking for something with an edge.

The Reader is blond, healthily pretty in a laissez-faire way. At first glance her clothes look casual too, but they are carefully chosen. Two years in the city have taught her where to find clothes, which colors are hers, how to minimize her breasts. Intelligence and determination have won her the job she holds, not her first by any means, despite her youth. Having worked on publications for years, ever since high school, she has a long resume that belies her wide, crooked smile and her accent. Those in the ranks above her rely on her to hear a certain range of notes, in particular the notes struck by some of the newer writers, and convey it to them in the way of someone quickly
transposing a tune. Some of her enthusiasms make them scratch their heads. “Take a look at this,” they say. “What can I say, the Reader likes it.”

When she has kicked off her shoes after work she stands on one foot with her knee on the painted tin cover of the radiator, leaning a shoulder on the glass. The sky narrows to a dark blue cone between buildings, with its tip in a river that can't be seen from here. But she relaxes. It is close by: a river. Full against its banks and then walled in, moving heavily alongside the streets with its own slow purpose.

The Reader grew up in a mining town with a river running the length of it. Until the age of twelve she lived in a house overlooking the river, which brought a shallow whitewater and a six-foot falls right into town. Two parents, three children, dogs, cats, trees, porch. Then her father died. After that she lived in several smaller houses, and finally, when her mother was getting into serious difficulties, an apartment above the café where her mother sometimes worked. No one called it a studio; it was one room, for just herself and her mother by then—her brothers were gone—and one cat. You couldn't see the river from the café but you could always hear it, hastening past the town where, with her mother, the Reader lived what she calls the sad part of her life. From time to time it rose out of its bed and flooded the town, drowning people's goats and pets and occasionally people themselves, sucking them through culverts, upending their trailers, and wallowing away with them before they could wade out to a rowboat—the peaceful golden brown river that gave them fish and black soil and green vegetable gardens.

Now she has made a second river her own, welcoming its tugs and barges, its measured progress into the heart of a city fit to be the destination of water.

Yet Nature has not been banished here, as people in her home
town would claim; it haunts the city, especially in this season. Wet leaves plaster the sidewalks, some as big as the pockets of the yellow slicker she wears in defiance of all the city black. She springs down onto the yellow carpet every morning thinking,
My wedding
. Should she have included a flower girl, one of her nieces, to give more of an aisle-feeling to the space?
The space
—that's what the hotel's wedding consultant calls the long airy room where the wedding will take place. The same was true when she was looking for an apartment: everything, even the closet, was a space.

She doesn't miss houses with rooms, or anything else about the town she came from. Too much was known there. Even her mother is gone from the town, no longer on her stool in the café lounge late with the regulars and the two floozies and an occasional girl in overalls from the highway crew. Too much was seen in that town, too much gone over in stores and church circles and on the telephone. A widow didn't go on and on in the sloppy condition permitted in the first weeks; a widow remarried or took an interest in the church or the lives of the next generation, or all three, ideally. To do otherwise, to let a bad habit get the better of you, to drink cheap wine for months on end, certainly to be picked up out of wet grass before dawn and have the snails pulled off you by your own child . . . to do these things was to imply that your loss had exceeded the losses of others. That your husband had been somehow superior. That you, yourself, had been uniquely struck down.

The daughter, the Reader, was another story. In all likelihood people in town still speak of her, persist in expecting her. There, homecoming queens are remembered for a generation. But no one she would want to run into is there. Her brothers left early and never went back.

She can call the brothers . . . or not call them. Her boyfriend
is on his way over. Her fiancé, now.
Husband
: sober word. But her boyfriend has nothing sober about him. He's like a dog, she tells her friends, a dog in a movie. Everyone on the set is making a movie, but the dog is at a picnic, sniffing, peeing on the grass, called back again and again to flop down, relax. Rewarded for it, for lying there panting. The dog thinks the picnic is real. And it is real. It's real when her boyfriend is around. That's partly because he's rich.
The story of Midas is wrong
, she thinks:
the rich touch things to life
.
They think what they're doing is real, and so it is. They don't get stuck in the wet mud of
was. Nothing had to be over, for people like her boyfriend, teased and admired for his appetites—too many green olives at the tapas bar, too much duck breast, too many girlfriends until she came along. True, new to the city, he had gotten himself involved with girls who were not as easygoing as he. But he meant no one harm, and his good nature always rescued him from these episodes, adventures on the way to her.

At the thought of him, and filled with the promise of blue, early evening, she does stretches at the window. All day she has read; taken notes; typed short, courteous letters that will go out under signatures other than her own. The stack she has left to read before the honeymoon is on the scarred steamer trunk where she props her bare feet when she sits on the couch. One panel of the old chest bears a Cunard White Star label.

It was a trunk she saw in an antique store, under a table. She knelt down, bumping her head, ran her hands over it, lifted the lid, and saw it was full of moldy magazines. She could hardly breathe. She bought it.

Just before that she had broken off with a man, a married man who had taken her with him to England on the
QE2
. He wasn't rich but he knew how to do things like that. He gave her books and jewelry, a big dinner ring and pearls that had been in his
family and should have gone to his daughters. She knows that, now, though at the time she took the heavy pearl brooch from his hand carelessly, like a piece of fruit. And the fact that the big pearls were pears, spilling from a basket of gold, didn't charm her. The intricate basketwork, the braided handle—she didn't want these things out of a drawer in his house. She wanted him. “I bet this was your mother's,” she said.

“It was. She had it from her grandmother.”

In a way she had won after all, shaken him to the point that although he had sworn not to, he still called her from time to time, a year and some months later, just to hear her voice. She talked to him. She could do that now. A man older than her own father would have been had he lived, tall and half bald like her handsome father.