The Forever Marriage (36 page)

Carmen pulled herself up straight and didn’t breathe. The room around her expanded, darkness unfolding in all directions. There was a moment’s pause so loud she thought it might make this whole conversation moot because her inadequate brain would simply explode.

Jobe eyed her from where he lay then sat up hurriedly, gathering his long legs in his hands and folding them. “Carmen, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“Really?” She ached to go back in time and make this true. But there was no way, ever, to erase what Jobe had said. And how it sounded. Woozy, she rose slowly, her hips sore. Her mind felt even more battered: squeezed and dented, like a car’s engine that had been crushed. Maybe Jobe was right: She had grown dumb in addition to everything else. That would explain how she’d walked straight into the wrong life.

“Please, Carmen. I’m worried about the baby and I drank …” He nudged the bottle and it careened demonstratively across the wood floor. “It’s just. No, don’t leave.” He caught her hand, his Venus fly-trap of a hand closing over hers, but she shook him off and backed toward the stairs.
Sleep
, that would make all this go away. “I’m just worried. About the baby. About you.”

“You’re worried that I’m just too stupid for a genius like you?” It made sense now that she considered it from his point of view. He was not in her league looks-wise. She was not in his when it came to brains. The joke about … who was it? George somebody—she didn’t even recognize the name, which only proved Jobe’s point—was mostly true.

He was staring at the floor. “No, I’m worried you’ll leave.”

Carmen stood, hands fisted at her sides, thinking but not saying
a dozen cruel things. Everything tilted nightmarishly. It felt as if she were on some lifelong carnival ride, strapped in to her seat no matter how desperately she wanted to get off.

“I know you don’t love me.” Jobe still sat with his head bowed, talking to the floor. “I’ve always known. Marrying you was the worst, really, the most idiotic thing I ever did in my life but I convinced myself that we were fated…. I thought over time, we’d have a baby together and make a home and eventually, you’d feel connected to me.” Jobe rolled to a stop and sighed drunkenly. “But I don’t know if that can happen now.”

“Because?” Carmen’s whole body was twitching, she was so tired.

“Because, honestly, I’m not sure you can fall in love with anyone who isn’t beautiful. It wasn’t you who was dumb about this, it was me. I was the one who expected this baby to have your looks and my brains. I was, in fact.” He hiccupped loudly and Carmen almost laughed. “Counting on it,” he finished. And the moment for laughter passed.

“So what happened to random events providing structure?”

“I believe that. But you …”

“I can’t really understand?” She waited, silently willing Jobe to rise and move toward her. Even if she were going to reject him—and she didn’t know if she would—Carmen was rooting for him to try. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Or that I don’t have it in me to love a retarded child? What?”

As if the baby heard, he kicked at precisely that moment and Carmen closed her hand over one tiny heel, holding on. “I’m sorry,” Jobe said, though what specifically he was referring to was not clear. Carmen thought about asking, sitting down next to him and touching his bony shoulder. But the thought of it—after all of this—remained unappetizing. It was the only word she could think of and again she nearly let loose a frantic, inappropriate laugh. Touching her own husband was like eating soggy eggplant; it was something she had to muster her will to do.

“I really need to go to bed,” Carmen said and meant it. Her legs were growing numb and she was in danger of toppling forward. She turned without another word, groped her way up the dark staircase, and got under the covers without removing her clothes or brushing her teeth. Hours later, she awoke in total darkness and a sense of being anchored. She had to pee, desperately, but something was pinning her. Bad thoughts she could not quite remember were swimming in her head.

She moved like a fish, thrashing. And Jobe made a sound. He was lying on top of the quilt, as far from her as he could on the queen-size bed. She recalled in a gauzy, vague montage leaving him in the living room. He’d been on the floor. Why? she wondered, as she lurched toward the bathroom. Her mouth tasted of wine, which was odd as well.

Sitting on the toilet, hunched over her body, her meeting with the doctor replayed and hit her with full force. Their baby: He had Down’s. She remembered that now. Weeping, she leaned even farther forward. There was no way out, no escape from this. She had made terrible mistakes and now both she and this baby would have to pay.

“Carmen? Are you alright?” Jobe appeared in relief against the murky bedroom, his body outlined like an Indonesian shadow puppet—all long neck and jointed torso and arms. She had been in such a hurry to reach the bathroom that she’d forgotten to shut the door.

There had been another bathroom door, in London, firmly shut. She thought of this now. What if she had never opened that door but had crawled out a window instead? Was there even a window in that long-ago WC?

Jobe hunched down and put one hand on her knee. This was the benefit of being married to someone you weren’t attracted to, Carmen told herself with a strange, internal motherly voice: You didn’t mind his finding you squatting and urinating because there was nothing to lose.

“Are you in pain?” he asked, and she saw that the real Jobe was back. Not the one from last night whom she could picture, fuzzily,
lolling on his back. This Jobe was upright and taciturn. Almost mournful, though she couldn’t recollect exactly about what.

“I’m fine.” She stood sniffling, dribbling everywhere. Pulled up her underpants without even wiping. It was like she was trying every way she could to turn off her husband. “I need to brush my teeth.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.” As if this, after the past few moments, was private. She took a long time with her toothbrush, reapplying the paste twice and scrubbing out every remnant of white wine. She was appalled that she could be so irresponsible, no matter what the doctor had said. This was her baby, as much as it was Jobe’s. And she needed to protect him.

“Better now?” Jobe helped her as she lowered herself backward into their bed.

She didn’t know the answer. Was she better now, or worse? But she simply said, “Yes.”

The descent was abrupt. Twenty-six hours after Carmen’s lunch with Danny at Domaine Thérèse she was huddled in bed, damp with fever, vomiting into a metal bowl.

For days, various people appeared at her side—Olive, Siena, Luca, Jana—each holding a glass of water. Their only mission, it seemed, was to get her to take a sip. Once she did so, whoever it was would fade backward, as if dematerializing in the air, and Carmen would be left alone until the next person arrived with a straw to insert into her scorched, tired mouth.

Twice she got up to use the bathroom and had to be helped. Luca could support her alone; he was four inches shorter than her but deceptively strong and as stable as a three-legged stool. The second time it was Olive who took her and they tilted against each other in a rickety way. Carmen tried not to lean but nearly fell on the way back and Olive had to catch her by the arms. For one perilous second, they stood locked together and swaying. It was Carmen’s only flash of real clarity: She saw her mother-in-law’s face, determined and beading with sweat. Both women mustered what force they had and somehow righted each other. After she had tucked Carmen
back into bed, Olive slumped in the chair alongside it, breathing in short gasps.

“I think,” she said between inhalations, “next time I may ask for help.”

But there was no next time. Because Carmen descended even further, into a soup of memories and dreams, tingling nerves, aching bones, and swimming head. Her body felt fragmented in the bed. She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover one of her arms lay separate from the rest of her. Her feet seemed miles and miles away.

There were flashes of her childhood: the smell of pot roast when she walked in the door from Girl Scouts, learning to drive her father’s enormous New Yorker, sleeping with her sister in some hotel room—where? she did not know—and feeling the soft curve of her leg.

Then Jobe appeared by her bed and sat straight in the chair, lit as if from a spotlight from below. It was night, that darkest part of it. His hands were enormous, moving and glowing like starfish. They were floating luminous above the arms.

She couldn’t keep her eyes away from them.

“You came,” she said. Or didn’t. It was hard to tell whether the words were spoken aloud or appearing like subtitles inside her head. “Did you solve it? Riemann? Is the answer in the box?”

It doesn’t matter
. These words clearly did not come from him—the man, or the ghost, or whatever he was—but unfurled in the space between her ears, which was very confusing. How was Carmen to know who had spoken, whether it was her dead husband or she herself?

“Of course it matters.” She was angry, and this was cleansing. A wash of pure emotion that dulled her nauseating pain. “Tell me.”

The answer is there. You will find it. You will understand
. His hands were on her head now, cradling its hot, egglike shape and soothing it, like a cap made of cool water that stilled the fires in her skull.

“But I never understood,” Carmen said petulantly. “That was the problem.”

Remember?
The golden Jobe leaned forward, but like a doll—all at once, tilting rather than hinging.
Seemingly random events provide the structure in any complex system
…. He was beginning to fade away.

“But why?” There was a question bubbling around on her brain, like something in boiling water that kept moving, rising, going under again. “Why did you?” She concentrated, hard, still watching his hovering, translucent spaceship hands. Finally, she grasped the idea by its tail. “Why
didn’t
you tell someone? Althea—that woman in Greece. You had time. You could have sent her the solution.” Jobe was disappearing, growing smaller and darker, disappearing the way a television screen used to into one center spot. “No, wait. Tell me why.”

Because the solution is yours
.
It’s up to you
. He was collapsing, contracting, becoming as tiny as Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole then smaller still. Carmen sobbed and reached out as her husband vanished. Then she, too, was falling, tumbling backward into a dark space.

Shutter glimpses appeared to her. Dr. Woo and an endless trail of zeros rising and falling like golden doughnuts behind him. Olive holding a wine glass and looking at the sky. Jana wearing Carmen’s rings, turning her hand to make the diamonds flash in the light. Siena and Troy walking with Michael as if they were his parents. Luca contemplating her room from the doorway (was this real?). Young Carmen lying on the table while the doctor ran his ultrasound wand over her belly. Pictures flashing from an unseen screen.

Carmen and Jobe, so young, sitting in a restaurant with scarves like billowing sails between the booths.

“At least no one will ever throw away my work,” he said. “I know you would never let that happen.”

“The same way you know you’re doing to die?” she asked.

“I was wrong,” he answered.

“No, you weren’t. You’re already dead.”

He placed his elbows on the table and leaned forward, looking
her straight in the eyes as he spoke. “Seemingly random events provide the structure in any complex system, mathematical or otherwise.”

“You’ve said that before. Or no. Wait.” She struggled. The plate before her was steaming with the strong scent of curry. “You’ll say that in the future.”

“Life isn’t a single path, Carmen. That’s only an illusion. I’ve proved it.”

And then there was nothing for a very long time.

She awoke in a tangled nest of bedclothes, her mind wiped free of dreams, thinking only of her thirst.

“Mom?” It was Michael next to her, his voice deeper than she remembered. He stood and put his hand—cool, long fingers—on her forehead, as if checking for fever. “Are you okay?”

She looked into his face and saw that he was frightened, then down at the pillow that was covered with fuzzy bits of hair.

“You’re bald,” Michael said.

“Totally?” Carmen reached up with two careful fingers and ran them across the moonlike bumps of her skull. She shivered. “This is not a great way to wake up,” she said and grinned at him. Michael made a sound in his throat and took a step back. Carmen focused and straightened and looked into the mirror opposite the bed; she was a wraith, white with stretched-looking skin and a jack-o’-lantern smile.

“Get me that,” she said, pointing, and Michael brought her the scarf that lay on a chair in the corner. Moving slowly—her muscles ached as if she had run a marathon—she wound it around her head. “How long have I been in here?” she asked. Judging from the weight she’d lost, it had to be a month.

“Four days,” he said, squinting. He was trying to compute her new face. “Grandma said one more day and you had to go to the hospital. Do you need to go to the hospital now?”

There was a hopeful lilt to his voice. What teenager needed
another parent lying around the house, waiting to die? Carmen hesitated then spoke gently. “Not right now,” she said. “But if I get sick again, I think I will.”

“Alright.” Michael sat back down. He was examining her in short stints, as if dipping himself into cold water, getting used to the temperature. “That guy was here. The one from the baseball game.”

Carmen blinked. There had been no baseball game in her dreams. She shifted—it was an effort—to review the actual time before her last chemotherapy session, before her lunch with …

“Danny!”

“Yeah, that guy. He came a couple days ago and talked to Grandma.”

“Really?” Carmen worked to contain her curiosity. Danny was just a family friend, right? Someone who had come out of concern, who took fatherless boys to baseball games and called housing inspectors and researched mathematical formulas in his spare time. “What did they talk about?”