The Forever Marriage (20 page)

“Time to get you back to your car,” he said but did not move.

“Don’t worry about it,” Carmen said. “I can find it myself.”

He peeked out from behind an elbow. “Really? I mean, that would be awesome. I’m beat. But are you sure you know where to go?”

“I’ll take a cab.” Carmen shoved Rory aside and scrabbled for her underwear, which had become tangled in the sheets. “Money’s not an issue.”

“Whoa,” he said sleepily. “You are like my dream come true.”

Outside, the streets were damp. It had rained while she was in Rory’s apartment and a fine mist continued, like cobwebs around her shoulders and in her hair. The night smelled faintly like motor grease—the way her dad often did when he came back from the plant. Carmen might have hailed a cab if she’d seen one. But her sense of direction had always been excellent and she figured out within a few blocks exactly where she was. The car was less than two miles from here and she deserved to walk.

“Help a guy out, miss?” A man suddenly blocked her way and Carmen shrank back until she saw what probably was his wife and baby huddled in a doorway nearby.

“Here.” She opened her wallet and took out all the bills, about eighteen dollars, and handed it to him.

“God bless,” he said, but Carmen only darted around him and walked on.

It was past three when she let herself into the house. Everything was quiet. Carmen placed her car keys in the bowl on the hall table, where she always did, and made her way up the wide stairs. As she neared the top, a voice came out of the darkness. “How’s your friend doing?”

Carmen took the remaining steps and faced Jobe, who appeared more a darkening of the air than solid flesh. “She’s better now. It was a bad night but I think she finally understands that she’s better off without the guy.”

His hand emerged from the dim to graze Carmen’s shoulder. “Must be awful. I don’t know what I’d do … without you.”

He did not draw her forward, which is what Carmen had been expecting. Instead, they stood linked only by his fingers on her shoulder and the long bridge of his arm. After a couple of minutes, it was she who stepped in to find his actual body—checking to be sure he was real, not made only of shadow. And he was. She slipped her arms around him and put her forehead against the framework of his chest and he held her this way for a long time.

There was a week when Carmen thought she might not graduate.

She needed a photo ID to apply for her degree and somehow she’d lost her driver’s license. She could not bear to explain this to Jobe, who had saved her from identity theft once before. Panicked, she looked everywhere. But just as she was about to confess the problem to Olive and beg her to bribe someone at the DMV, the card appeared as if by magic on the table beside Carmen’s bed. It was a sign, she
thought as she picked it up. If she could just quit being thoughtless and stupid—that girl who left her purse in the park with a stranger—everything would be fine.

There was a huge party planned to celebrate Carmen’s and Jobe’s graduations, hers with a B.A. in art history, his with a PhD in applied mathematics. This was like being an eighth grader feted alongside her older brother, the senior class valedictorian. But Olive ordered invitations inscribed with both sets of information and insisted that Carmen invite people. They resembled wedding invitations, only no one said so. And Jobe, as usual, seemed completely oblivious to the implications of what was going on.

He’d had offers from nine universities. Oxford wanted him back. Princeton had a postdoc they’d asked him to apply for. Johns Hopkins had offered him full professor status from day one. Meantime, Carmen was puzzled. She’d made some inquiries at museums and discovered that their curators—even junior staff—all had graduate degrees. Cincinnati offered her an unpaid internship but she would have to commit to a full year and move there at her own expense. For once, being an “adopted” Garrett was of no help. They had connections with arts organizations all over the East Coast, but no matter how Carmen hinted, Olive failed to make a single call.

It was unreasonable to ask for more, but these people had paid for Carmen’s last year in school and given her a place to stay. Surely they wanted her to do something with her degree. Carmen was on the brink of coming right out and asking but she couldn’t figure out how to start. “I need another favor” diminished the weight of what Olive had already done for her. But “You’ve already done so much” was too fawning. The rule, unspoken, was that they did not talk about money or influence. It was unacceptable; it created divisions between people. Only—and Carmen was more and more aware of this as the date of her graduation approached—natural, inevitable divisions remained.

Two days before the party that would mark the end of her childhood, first as her parents’ daughter and then as an accidental beneficiary, Carmen wandered around the house with nothing to do. She’d
searched for weeks to find the part of the city where she’d met Rory: a crumbly, trendy little cross-section where Jobe and his parents would never go. But she was avoiding that area now. And the only other place she’d found was the library, Enoch Pratt, where she sat paging through art books and watching the people. Beautiful young black girls in sequined high heels. Middle-aged women carting baskets full of romance novels. Homeless men wearing all their clothes, shirts layered over shirts, looking for a place to sleep.

Now, however, it was five o’clock on a Friday; the library was closing. George was out of town and Olive was away on a party-planning mission: talking to the caterer and hiring a couple of men from the country club to park cars. Carmen had made only a few friends in the year she’d been in Baltimore—her life was so remote from campus, and too difficult to explain. Plus, these girls were with their own families, celebrating the end of the school year. No one else, it seemed, was bored.

She was relieved—excited, even—when Jobe pulled up. He never seemed at a loss for what to do. One could work every day throughout an entire lifetime and still not understand the distribution of prime numbers, Jobe told her once. There was always something new to consider. Nothing stopped because the university was issuing his degree.

It was something to admire, Carmen thought, as she watched him emerge from the car. Jobe always moved into sunlight hesitantly, as if it were a force that bore down. Now he rose into the golden air of afternoon, gazing upward. Who could tell whether he was seeing the sun’s rays, soaking them in, or contemplating how space expands? Carmen stood at the window in plain view, a fact he never registered as he neared the house. When he came through the door, she called out, “Hey,” and he startled. Turning toward her, he stopped and fixed her with a puzzled look.

“I thought you’d be out tonight,” he said. “Drinking to the end of college, all that.”

Carmen shrugged. She couldn’t admit, even to Jobe, that she had nothing to do. “Maybe I’m past all that,” she said and checked for a
reaction. He didn’t even crack a smile. “I don’t feel like it tonight, okay? How about a movie?”

“You mean, you and me?” Jobe took off his jacket, the one he wore though it was nearly 80 degrees. Underneath he had on a long-sleeved T-shirt. It was like he paid no attention to the elements, moving in his own separate, climate-controlled track through the world.

“Yes, you and me. A movie. It’s not like a major operation.” And yet, she was nervous.

Jobe squinted, which made him look even more bug-eyed than usual. Why was he being so difficult all of a sudden? Usually it was
he
who followed
her
, suggesting they do things. Take a walk, go shopping, eat at the little Indian place. Though since she arrived, last fall, they’d never been dancing again. They rarely stayed out past ten. They had made love perhaps a dozen times, when circumstances coalesced in just the right way: an evening when no one else was home and each had nothing else to do. Carmen could plot each encounter on a graph, not because the sex was memorable but by computing the factors that led directly to it. It was like being married, only without the security or social recognition. Perhaps Jobe, too, was finally tired of the tedium and ready to let her go.

She panicked but was careful not to show it, sauntering toward him. “Listen, this hot woman just asked you to go see a movie and you’re not even answering. You know that’s rude, don’t you?”

Finally, Jobe relaxed and grinned. “What movie?” His hands twitched at his sides.

“
Top Gun
.” This was more like it. Standing just two feet from him, she could feel the way Jobe wanted her. It was confusing him, making him anxious, and she was glad.

“That sounds awful.”

She grabbed his forearm, like a rebar inside his sleeve, and squeezed it. “Shut up. Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. You’re going to love it.”

“No.” Jobe’s face twisted, monkeylike. “
You’re
going to love it. I’m going to tolerate it.”

“Well, all right then.” Carmen let go and ran out of the room, climbing the stairs to get her purse and shoes. Turning, she called over her shoulder, “You’re going to need money, because you’re paying, too.”

Jobe, at the bottom of the stairs, gazed up. “Not unless you buy me ice cream after,” he said.

She stopped, looked down. His face was serious. This mattered. “It would be my privilege,” she said and fake curtsied, then continued up.

It was a six-forty movie on a sparkling, warm Friday afternoon, so they had the theater nearly to themselves. They sat through the previews without any contact, Carmen in a ruffled miniskirt with her legs primly crossed. But in the dark—as the jets roared across the screen, their terrible engine noises rattling through the speakers, noses driving through the sky—Carmen felt something unexpected. She wanted him to touch her. It was an ache in her throat, almost like what she’d felt with Rory that first time.

Carmen edged closer, using the armrest more fully. She shifted as if uncomfortable and brushed his arm with the full right side of her breast. “Sorry,” she whispered. And Jobe cleared his throat but said nothing. She let a few minutes go by. The planes twirled, rising up, trailing smoke. Then they landed and the scene quieted and she leaned in to rest her cheek on Jobe’s shoulder. He was still but then—in a movement so slow and pained, she knew it cost him everything he had—he raised his arm and settled it around her. His deodorant smelled faintly of that night in the London hostel, and his hand reached all the way to her elbow. There was something primitive about this pose. Not sexual, but comforting. She was pleased that he didn’t try to kiss her but allowed her to watch the movie in peace.

The sky was pale, dove white, when they stepped out of the theater. And a sudden breeze had sailed in from the west, stirring the branches and fallen flowers on the sidewalk. Carmen shivered and thought that Jobe was, after all, smarter for having worn long pants and sleeves. Her knees were freezing by the time they’d walked two blocks.

“Cold?” he asked. “You probably should have brought a coat.”

She sighed and marched on. Nothing killed the mood faster than his pronouncements of the obvious. She was losing her desire to be with him, quickly. Time to pick up his ice cream and go home. She glanced at the bank clock as they passed—9:02—and sighed again. They were right on schedule.

Inside, the ice cream shop was tropical. Carmen leaned, relieved, against a huge freezer whose motor hummed and warmed her legs. The mirrors behind the long counters were streaked with steam, the scoopers in their billed hats sweating, people in line fanning themselves with discount coupons and cards. “Hot,” Jobe said, and Carmen nodded. She watched, satisfied, as he pulled up his sleeves. They ordered: blueberry yogurt in a cup for her, a plain chocolate cone for him. Carmen paid and then they stood on the threshold—the border between warm air and cool wind—looking out.

There was an old-fashioned porch outside the shop with a few wooden tables and a hanging swing. The couple in the swing got up, leaving crumpled napkins and colored smears behind. “Let’s grab it,” Jobe said and covered the distance in four steps. Carmen walked over more slowly and stood.

“It’s dirty,” she said, pointing.

“Uh, yeah.” Jobe considered this. “So you can sit on my lap. I don’t care if my jeans get ice cream on them.”

“But won’t that make the swing lopsided?”

He eyed the seat for a moment, then turned and backed into it. “Not if we sit right in the middle, see?”

“The whole world is a math problem, isn’t it?” she asked, but then she lowered herself onto his lap. It was like sitting on a wood fire that had not yet been lit: his legs and arms slender logs, his fingers and ribs sticks of kindling. The skin stretched over them seemed incidental.

He finished his cone but kept his hands off her, probably because they were sticky. Carmen grew tired of her yogurt and put the half-eaten cup aside. There was no reason to stay here now that they were
done, but she wished they could. A gleaming sliver of moon had come out. People were talking all around them, creating a gentle buzz. And Jobe gave off more heat than one might imagine. By shifting so different parts of her were against him she was able to stay mostly warm.

Tomorrow her father would arrive and the following day there would be a party, and the day after that she was expected to know what to do with her life. Carmen could not conceive of what that would be. She pictured herself back in Detroit, picking up her father’s socks and empty bottles and glasses, her sister stopping by periodically—babies hanging on her like monkeys—to nag Carmen. She’d fought so hard to get through college, even taking money from relative strangers, but what did it matter? She would still end up waiting tables or, at best, working in an art supply store.

“What are you thinking about?” Jobe’s question startled her. “You look so serious all of a sudden.” He had pushed back as far as he could against the swing, as if arching his body away from her. But this was Jobe. Carmen was almost certain he was only trying to get a better view of her face.

“Why do you even like me?” She hadn’t planned to ask him this. She hadn’t even been thinking it, consciously. But once the question was out of her mouth, Carmen was curious about the answer. She was moody and sometimes mean to Jobe. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say she wasn’t even half as smart. Without his family, she had no home and no future. The only thing she had to recommend her was that she was pretty, but Jobe didn’t seem like the kind of man who would be captivated by this—at least not for long.