How to Make an American Quilt (37 page)

Marianna says, “It isn’t technically betrayal,” as they sit across the kitchen table from each other that night, “if no promises are made. We are not married. I did not promise to be sexually exclusive and I did not ask it of you.” She knows their agreement has been implicit; she knows she is killing him.

“But I
was
.” His eyes well up with tears that do not fall. To which she repeats, “I did not ask it.”

She takes a deep breath, hating the sound of her own voice. “I don’t believe in monogamy. In my love, I have always been true to you. Always.”

“I want to marry you,” he says miserably, not looking at her.

“I’ll still love you,” she tells him.

“What the hell does that mean?” He wipes his nose with a swipe of his hand. “If you don’t want me, then you could love me or hate me—the result would be the same.”

“Did I say I didn’t want you?” she demands.

“Yes,” he tells her, “that is exactly what you said.”

She is silent, thinking,
I am losing him and I cannot lose him
. Yet
she cannot stop thinking about or wanting Noe, who lies in his flat across town, wanting, she knows, to hear from her. There is no resolution. Everything in her life is at war with everything else: her mixed blood; her Americanism transplanted into French soil; her attraction to catastrophic love (she can love more than one person at a time); being a woman working a man’s job. She cannot be made whole, cannot be joined together with herself—or with someone else.

“Can we just go to sleep?” she asks.

In bed, Alec cannot touch her; he turns his back to her, cocooned in the covers. Once, during the night, his arm strikes out and hits her, but when she sits up in bed to scream at him, she discovers that he is fast asleep. This makes her cry, knowing that he could not slap her in his waking life but would hurt her in his dreams.

M
ARIANNA PACKED
her valise, told Alec she was leaving. Alec begged her to stay, told her that she would get over this other man, that he would be patient, help her as long as she gave them another chance. But Marianna shook her head. No, it could not be done. Because she had been longing for Noe, aching for him, and thought it was Noe whom she loved better. Loved more. Alec kicked the door shut behind her.

S
HE STAYED
with Noe a week, only to discover that she still loved Alec, missed his kisses in the small of her tired back. That she felt emptied out. Noe accused her of being unable to love a black man.

“Funny,” she said. “Alec said I was leaving because he was white.”

But Noe did not kick the door shut behind her. He gathered
her in his arms, held her so tightly Marianna thought he would break her, then, without kissing her, wished her luck. They even made a date for lunch that Marianna knew they would not keep, simply because there was no reason to.

After Alec and Noe came Jacques, then Giles, then Michel, then Benjamin, then Luciano. Again and again, Marianna fell in love, had affairs, then moved on with her life. There was something in her that spurned marriage; she did not know what it was. All she knew was that she was capable—no, destined—to love more than one man at a time, and that this could hardly be good for a marriage.

Sometimes the men she spent time with treated her badly because she refused to marry them. It was not simply her refusing to marry them as much as she would say, “I just don’t want to marry anyone.”

They would look at her with hurt, angry eyes (Jacques, Giles, Michel, Benjamin, and Luciano) and ask, “I could be ‘anyone’ to you?”

All the while, Alec continued writing her letters, which she seldom answered. His last letter said,
This makes the third letter I have sent without a reply. Don’t make me beg
.

Marianna eventually gave up on lovers altogether. She decided that she was too cold a woman to be a mistress and too stubborn to be a wife. She wanted things her way, and compromise held no charm for her; Marianna of the divided heart and soul.

She felt ready to go home. Anna had written her about the changes for the black man: There was Dr. King’s message of love and Malcolm X’s to use whatever means were necessary and its implication of force. He said, If you don’t answer Dr. King’s knock at your door, you’ll have to answer mine. There was President Johnson’s Great Society; marches and protests and violence and rage and the unmourned death of Jim Crow (
At last
, wrote Anna). And still this was not quite enough to lure her home.

What brought her back was missing her mother and the way her garnet necklace caught and refracted the light. And Marianna felt older, stronger, for her stay in France, which was not devoid of prejudice, but it took a different form.

She was done with grafting; she had grown tired of it. No matter how well she did it, it would always have to be done again to new plants. The roses simply could not be bred to stand alone; they would always require the hardier base. The fusion of the bushes can only give the illusion of oneness, but can never truly be one. Finally, when she recalled her many love affairs, she became convinced that they indicated a cold heart, one that will not allow closeness or for anyone to be close. This astonishes her, because she used to think that her many lovers were the sign of a great capacity to love, a capacity greater than any one of her lovers could match. Now she knows that it was an inability to love.

S
HE SAID GOOD-BYE
only to Alec, who seemed happy to see her arrive at the house and disappointed that she had come just to say farewell.

“Not Kern County, Marianna,” he said. “Don’t go back to Grasse. Go to San Francisco or New York. That’s where you should be.”

But she told him, “Grasse is my home. Let those who don’t like me move out. You know I dislike making adjustments for anyone.”

He smiled. “Yes,” he said, “I know that about you.”

W
HEN
M
ARIANNA ARRIVED
back in California, she discovered Constance’s rose garden. Constance would nod to Marianna as she passed by, Marianna occasionally pausing to dispense advice on pruning or soil or disposing of aphids. Constance knew that Marianna was Anna’s daughter, recently returned from France. She
remembered Anna mentioning her, showing her picture to the quilting circle. There was Marianna, sitting in a neglected garden of some friend’s house, drinking wine, barefoot in the tall grass.
She’s lovely
, thought Constance.