The Forever Marriage (12 page)

“Hmm, what do you think will happen?” Jobe asked, sounding exactly like the professor he wanted to become.

Carmen didn’t mind the blandness of his question. Any one of her friends would have made a joke about how at least now she could get high in the house and no one would notice. She found herself appreciating Jobe’s earnest quality, feeling for once listened to, thinking about the tent he’d made with his arms that first night when she was achy and scared.

“I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “I’m not even sure I’ll be able to finish college. I keep asking him, but I don’t think there’s any money left.”

What she didn’t tell Jobe was how her father had changed. Once swarthy and handsome with sharp brown eyes and dark hair—a second-generation Italian who had married his European twin: a shy, beautiful Spanish girl—he had become hunched and slightly flaccid and gray looking. He no longer noticed when Carmen came or went, though he’d always taken great pride in her. She, the younger daughter who was both prettier and more clever than her sister, Esme, had been the one he doted on. He’d told everyone they knew the story of how Carmen had started kindergarten as a precocious four-year-old. The day she went to her junior prom, he’d taken about a hundred pictures; when she graduated with honors, he’d thrown a party for three hundred people with an open bar.

The only problem he’d ever had with Carmen was when she mouthed off to her mother, a sweet, timid, chronically frail woman who was easily hurt. And though he’d never finished high school, he’d risen swiftly at GM, from line worker to shift supervisor to management. He had the confidence of a working-class man who had succeeded entirely based on merit, making more money in a year at thirty-five than
his
father had ever made in a decade. They lived in a five-bedroom house with a pool in the backyard. And nothing Carmen asked for was too much: Throughout high school she’d had a credit card she could use at will that drew directly from her father’s account. If he kept track of what she spent, he never said.

But things changed just before her trip to Europe. It had been planned the year before, back when doctors were still telling her
mother the cancer was contained—a simple procedure to remove it and she’d live a long, healthy life. By the time Carmen was due to board the plane, her mother was freshly dead, her father stunned and angry. He was pursuing a lawsuit against the hospital because they’d assured him his wife was going home less than thirty-six hours before she expired. And he was drinking significantly more than the three or four glasses of bourbon he’d typically had when he came home in the evening. These days he just kept the bottle at his side.

Even worse was Carmen’s sister, who had suddenly become their father’s keeper. Married to a sturdy but boring guy who managed a bank and seven months pregnant, Esme had somehow displaced Carmen entirely while she was out of the country. She came over several times a week in her frilly maternity tops—looking more beautiful than she ever had before, her body giving in to its natural plumpness, her plain face glowing—and fussed over their father.

“You could help out a little,” she said to Carmen one day as she stooped precariously to pick up the plates and glasses he’d left on the floor near his favorite chair. “Daddy’s taken care of you for twenty years. Is it too much to ask for you to wash a dish?”

But then she’d marched to the kitchen with the armload and washed them herself, making the question rhetorical so far as Carmen was concerned. Sometimes, when Esme was not due to come for a couple of days—because Carmen would
not
give her sister the satisfaction—she vacuumed and straightened and tried to coax her father into setting his alarm before he went comatose in his chair at night. But he came home, one of the few times he actually made it to work in July, with a pink slip. It was the very same day that her tuition bill from the University of Michigan arrived. Because of nonpayment in spring, the letter said, she would have to settle her account and prepay for the fall semester in order to continue. She could call the number for the financial aid office if her circumstances had changed. Carmen was about to do this when Jobe phoned for the second time.

He was back home in Baltimore and said casually that it might
be nice for her to come out for a visit; he had several thousand frequent flyer miles racked up and he’d be happy to use them to fly her out.

“Wouldn’t your parents mind?” she asked, looking around her own kitchen and seeing that it was grease stained and filthy, which was made all the worse by the fact that it was enormous and modern with a six-burner stove she probably should clean. “I mean, technically I’d be using
their
free ticket, right?”

“My parents,” Jobe said, “have no idea frequent flyer miles even exist.”

“So tell me about these people,” Carmen said now, sitting in the purring BMW, sucking in the icy air as if it were oxygen. “Your parents. What are they like? And how much do they know about me?”

“The young lady from Detroit?” Jobe grinned. “I think they have some vague idea you’re the daughter of the chairman of Ford.”

“And they got that vague idea … how?”

Jobe shrugged. “Most of what I told them was that I met you in London and helped you out when someone stole your purse. My mother was robbed once in Greece, so she felt an immediate bond.”

“And their names?”

“George and Olive. But you should call them Mr. and Mrs. Garrett.”

“Seriously? I mean, my friends’ parents told me to use their first names when I was in, like, sixth grade.” She thought back to summers in Elise Jacobs’s house: playing jacks on the hardwood floor, making fortune-tellers out of folded paper, rifling through her dad’s old
Playboy
s then having him come home and tickle them both on the couch until they nearly wet their pants.

“My parents are …” Jobe concentrated, furrowing only one eyebrow, and for an instant Carmen caught sight of the cute boy she’d glimpsed in Kensington Park. “They’re kind of hard to describe. Do you read much Somerset Maugham?”

Carmen shook her head. “You read, too? I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius math geek.”

“Yeah, well.” Jobe turned into a driveway that Carmen couldn’t see the end of; it had to be a quarter-mile long. “Sometimes we read.”

Carmen had her own room—an irregularly shaped space on the third floor with a double bed, a dresser, a desk, and a small easy chair with a reading lamp, all in shades of plum—and her own bathroom with a shower but no tub.

“Where’s your bedroom?” she asked as he showed her around, flipping on light switches and pointing things out like a bellman.

He reddened. “It’s down a level. My parents are kind of conservative when it comes to these things.”

“What ‘things?’” She could feel herself blushing, too, which was rare. Why did this guy have such an odd effect on her? “I didn’t say I wanted to have
sex
, I was just asking where your bedroom was.” She looked over her shoulder at Jobe, who was standing with his hands in his pockets, and wondered if she actually
did
want to. The truth was, she had no idea why she was here in this strange city with this boy she barely knew. It was clear he was interested in her and she didn’t want to lead him on, but her feelings were—for one of the only times in her life—completely unclear.

One minute she’d be aggravated by his accommodating her moods, wishing he’d stand up to her the way her high school boyfriend had, calling her out and saying, “Stop being a bitch, Car,” whenever she got snotty or demanding. The next, Jobe would tug at her with a quiet insistence; she would remember falling asleep next to him in London and feeling safe for the first time since her mother died. Also, she’d discovered that cute, brawny boyfriend from high school—her first—was secretly sleeping with other girls, and the worst part was that she later figured out it was he who had leaked the information so she’d find out and break up with him. A dirty, cowardly trick.

She’d always had high standards, dating at her “level” or sometimes even above. Few girls could pull this off, but Carmen had discovered early on that sheer moxie often bought her entry into social
groups—and relationships with men—that seemed out of her league. So she became, by sixteen, the girl most likely to sing onstage or play strip poker. She painted seriously, setting up a studio in a corner of the basement at home, stretching her canvases herself. Don’t do anything half-assed and forget what other people think; these rules were, she would have told anyone who asked, the secret to a successful life.

Only lately, the formula hadn’t been working. The situation with her father was not her fault, but other things seemed to be directly related to the choices she’d made. Her friends from high school all had drifted out of her life. Her last relationship had been with a philosophy T.A. at Michigan, a thirty-two-year-old post-doctoral student who had a wife and a six-month-old at home. He’d been serious, with small, round, John Lennon glasses and thick, silky hair. They got together mostly in his office after hours and drank vodka from Styrofoam cups before having sex. Then one day she showed up and he announced loudly that he could no longer tutor her privately and firmly shut the door.

It was time to do something different, and Jobe certainly was that. But being pursued so diligently, the object of someone else’s hopeful reaching from a lower social caste, made her cringe. She knew now exactly how her high school boyfriend had felt: looking at her from time to time, gauging whether she was quite good enough to be seen with, feeling as if he had to peel her off him like a too-tight sweater.

At least Carmen wasn’t mean. She had no desire to do this to someone. The truth was she’d never before given much thought to people like Jobe, those knobby math club boys with strange faces and bodies like wire hangers who seemed to exist only at school. You never saw them at parties, or at the mall, or even in the library. Occasionally, you might help out one who was stammering through a presentation or struggling to connect with a volleyball in gym. One moment’s kindness, a quick, warm smile. That was all it took.

But now she was faced, hours at a time, with a real grown-up version of those prepubescent seventeen-year-olds she’d once passed
blithely in the halls. And he was doggedly helpful, making it very difficult for her to keep from taking advantage.

She wished there were someone she could talk to. But Carmen was between girlfriends and her sister was not a possibility. Her mother was dead and her father had his own problems. Finally, she was ready to listen to advice but there was no one who could tell her what to do.

“So what’s our plan? We hang out here with George and Olive … oh, excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Garrett … all week?”

Jobe scratched his beard and it made a foraging-animal sound. “Ah, tonight for dinner, yeah, that’s the plan. They want us to be ready by seven, if that’s okay. After that?” He shrugged. “You hungry now?”

Carmen hadn’t realized until that moment that she was. “Starving. What do you have?”

Again, he shrugged. “There’s always something. Want me to help you unpack and then we’ll go look?”

Carmen remembered his helping her throw her things into a knapsack in that soiled London hovel she’d been renting. “Sure. You can fold my underwear.”

She hadn’t really meant it. Yet when she turned around, Jobe was in fact placing her panties in a neat stack in a top drawer of the dresser, and arranging her bras like octopi with arms hugging themselves, setting these alongside.

“Can I ask you a question?” She was hanging her shirts in the closet, something she rarely did at home. “Why do you still live here with your parents? Aren’t you, like, twenty-five or something?”

For the third time, he shrugged. This seemed to be his major method of communication. “I don’t, really. I was away at Princeton for four years and I only came back summers.”

“To work?”

Jobe shook his head. “Not in the way I think you mean. I did a lot of work in mathematics but I didn’t have a summer job.”

“So your parents paid your way?” She tried to keep the jealousy out of her voice.

But again, he twitched his head quickly, left to right. “No. I had
a Churchill fellowship. They paid my tuition and gave me more money than I could ever imagine needing for expenses. I still have a lot of it, in the bank.”

Inside Carmen’s head, she added this fact to the others she knew and suddenly an idea blossomed. “You didn’t have any frequent flyer miles, did you?” she nearly shouted. “You paid for my ticket yourself. Oh my God!”

Jobe had his back to her. He was unloading her makeup-smeared cosmetics bag, placing the brush and black mascara and eyeshadow with sparkles on the dresser’s top. “Okay, yeah, I did. So what? It was no big deal.”

She sat on the bed, her stomach itching in random places, as if there were a moth trapped inside. “It
is
kind of a big deal. To me. I mean, I need to know why.” He turned, looking frightened, and Carmen suddenly felt so sorry for him she almost stood and opened her arms to give him a hug. But that would have sent exactly the wrong message, so instead she stayed still.

“Like I told you in London, I like the way you just
do
stuff.” He crossed his arms. “You don’t think things all the way through and figure out the safest way to go.”

Carmen snorted. “That’s for sure. And just look where it’s gotten me.” She spread her arms wide and the seventeen silver bracelets she wore clattered one into the next with an appropriately calamitous sound. “I’m begging total strangers to take care of me because my own life is so fucked up.”

“Or.” Jobe took a few steps toward her, appearing to build confidence as he moved. “You’re here for a while to make our lives more interesting.” He sat on the bed next to her—here they were again, she thought—only this time he stayed a full foot away. “You know I told you about Bernard Riemann?”

She thought hard. “Sorry …”

“The Riemann hypothesis, it’s the hardest problem in math, you know, the distribution of prime numbers, zeros, and curves over finite fields. We talked about all this in London.”