Marry Me (11 page)

She grew used to him, as winter yielded to spring.

Under his corpulent weight, his shoulders filling her vision with soft black hairs, Ruth felt herself responding matter-of-factly to the thick, careful pounding of Richard’s carnal attack. It was all matter-of-fact, controlled, satisfactory; under this alien man there was time, time in which to make the trip to the edge and fall, fall and arrive where she had begun, pressed to the earth as if safe. The earth was her bed, hers and Jerry’s. The light of early afternoon opened around her. Geoffrey was having his nap at the other end of the upstairs. Curiously Ruth touched the little arc of
purplish marks in the fat of Richard’s shoulder, teeth-marks left there, it seemed, by a third person. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Sweet pain, as they say.’

He had a phrase for everything. Unwilling to test herself against his eyes, she studied his lips. There was a disturbing elderly jut to the lower one, and lovemaking had left them liquid with saliva. ‘It’s so unlike me,’ she said.

His lips hardly moved when he talked. ‘It’s part of the act. Mistresses bite. Wives don’t.’

‘Don’t.’ She wriggled to shift his weight, which was beginning to crush. ‘Don’t poke fun.’

His breath, sourly crested with whiskey, though he had come in the back door at noon and they had gone straight to bed, was still scattered, panting. ‘Poke fun, my ass,’ he said. ‘I’m drunk. I’m fucked out.’

She turned her eyes down, to where the skin of their chests melted together, her breasts half-clothed in the fur that made him feel in her embrace like unevenly woolly bear. Jerry by comparison felt smooth as a snake.

Richard asked, clairvoyant, ‘Do I seem freaky to you?’

‘I seem that way to myself.’

‘Why have you let me in, Ruthie babes?’

‘Because you asked.’

‘Nobody ever asked before?’

‘Not that I noticed.’

Richard’s heavy breath gathered for an effort; he pushed himself up from her chest; sadly she felt him receding into the perspective of their lives. ‘I don’t know why’ he said, ‘you and Jerry don’t work in bed. You throw a great piece.’

She lifted her knees and cradled him in her thighs and rocked him back and forth, a touch impatiently, as if he were a baby refusing its nap. He had been naughty to mention Jerry; it threatened to spoil it. The house shuddered, and a moment later a jet breaking the sound barrier boomed above them, in the blue that stood unbroken at the windows. On the other side of the house Geoffrey began to fret in his crib. Richard must go; she must use him while he was with her. She must learn. ‘Is that really a phrase?’ she asked. ‘Throw a piece?’ The words sounded so strange in her voice that she blushed, though naked.

Richard looked down; his rather boneless hand stroked her hair and his good eye tried to feed on her face, which was afraid. She brought her eyes to his; she owed him that much. ‘No one’s ever told you,’ he said, stroking, ‘how cunty you are.’

He had this conception of himself as a teacher, a teacher of worldliness. In that spring and summer of 1961, they met more often to talk than to make love. Ruth, knowing Jerry’s contempt for Richard and his proud passion for himself, felt most faithless when she disclosed, not her body, which seemed hers to share, but the private terror Jerry shared only with her. ‘He says he sees death everywhere – in the newspapers, in the grass. He looks at the children and says they’re sucking the life out of him. He says there’re too many.’

‘Has he ever seen a psychiatrist?’ Richard pinched a slice of water chestnut between his chopsticks and carried it to his mouth. They had reached the Chinese restaurant, on a brilliant July day. The curtains of the restaurant were all drawn, making a kind of amber evening out of noon.

‘He despises psychiatry. He hates it if I suggest there’s anything abnormal about his state. When I say
I’m
not afraid of death, he tells me I’m a spiritual cripple. He says I’m not afraid because I have no imagination. No soul, I think is what he means.’

Richard sipped his Martini, his third, and rubbed his mouth with a knuckle. ‘I’d never appreciated how neurotic this guy is. I would have written him off as a simple manic depressive, but his death-wish sounds pretty psychotic. Has it affected his work?’

‘He says he can still do it, though it takes him twice as long. A lot of what he does now is conferences and thinking up ideas for other people to execute. He never draws at home any more; I miss it. Even when everything would come back in the mail it was nice to see him work. He always drew to the radio; he said it helped loosen up the inking in.’

‘He never was any Al Capp, though.’

‘He was never trying to be.’

‘I like your loyalty,’ Richard said: there was an intense dead selfishness in Richard’s tone – the note the Mathiases shared.

She looked at her plate with caught breath, suspended miles above the possibility that she was making a dreadful mistake. ‘Not loyal enough,’ she said. ‘Now I have the feeling that you and I have filtered into his brain and made him worse. He says I’m not there.’

‘Not where?’

‘Not
there.
Anywhere. With him. You know.’

‘You mean you feel you’re my woman now instead of his?’

She wished to shield Richard from how repulsive this
idea and his terminology were to her. She said, ‘I’m not sure I’m anybody’s woman. Maybe that’s my trouble.’

A grain of rice clung to his lower lip like a maggot. ‘Try to describe,’ he said, ‘this business of not being there. You mean in bed?’

‘I’m better in bed. Thanks. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The other night after we’d done it he woke me around three in the morning and asked me why I didn’t love him. Apparently he’d been running around the house reading the Bible and looking at a horror show on television. He has these fits where he can’t breathe lying down. You have some rice on your lip.’

He brushed it off, with a deliberation that struck her as comic. ‘How long has he had trouble breathing?’ he asked.

‘Since before I began with you. But it hasn’t gotten better. I guess I thought it would. Don’t ask me why.’

‘So. I’ve been screwing you just to cure Jerry’s asthma.’ Richard’s bitter laugh was one of his less persuasive effects.

‘Don’t twist what I mean.’

‘I’m not. It’s perfectly clear what you mean. You mean I’m a special type of patsy. Don’t apologize. I’ve been Sally’s patsy all these years, I might as well be yours too.’

He was begging her to tell him she loved him. She couldn’t form the words. She had always known she and Richard had no future; until now she hadn’t realized how short their present was. His head in the amber light seemed enormous – a false, defective head put on over a real head, whose words sounded hollow. ‘I’m sick,’ she told him suddenly. ‘I’m not built for affairs. I’ve had
intestinal upsets all summer and I get terribly depressed after I’ve seen you. He doesn’t even listen to my lies. I keep wondering, if he knew, would he divorce me?’

Impatiently Richard set down his chopsticks with a click on his clean plate. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘He’ll never divorce you, you’re his mother. People don’t divorce their mothers, for Chrissake.’ It sounded so hopeless she wanted to cry; he must have sensed this, for his voice softened. ‘How’d you like the grub? The chow mein tasted like it came from a can.’

‘I thought it was all good,’ Ruth said resolutely.

He put his hand on hers. Their hands, it struck her, looked too much alike, his too small for his size and hers too big. ‘You’re very tough,’ he said. It seemed part compliment, part farewell.

She broke it off finally in September. Jerry had frightened her by overhearing the tag end of a phone conversation with Richard. She had thought he was raking in the back yard. Emerging from the kitchen, he asked her, ‘Who was that?’

She panicked. ‘Oh, somebody. Some woman from the Sunday school asking if we were going to enrol Joanna and Charlie.’

‘They’re becoming offensively efficient over there. What did you say?’

‘I said of course.’

‘But I heard you saying No.’

Richard had asked if she would have lunch with him next week. ‘She asked if we were going to send Geoffrey as well.’

‘Of course not,’ Jerry said, ‘he’s not even three,’ and
sat down and flipped through the Saturday paper. He always opened it first to the comic page, as if expecting to find himself there. ‘Somehow,’ he said, not looking up, ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Why not? What did you hear?’

‘Nothing. It was your tone of voice.’

‘Really? How?’ She wanted to giggle.

He stared off into space as if at an aesthetic problem. He looked tired and young and thin. His haircut was too short. ‘It was different,’ he said. ‘Warmer. It was a woman’s voice.’

‘I am a woman.’

‘Your voice with me,’ he said, ‘is quite girlish.’

She giggled and waited for him to strike deeper. But he had returned his attention to the comics page. She wanted to hug him in his ignorance. ‘Quite clear and cool and virginal,’ he added. Her impulse passed.

One day the following week she was shopping in Greenwood’s little downtown. The windows were full of back-to-school clothes and Gristede’s smelled keenly of apples. The air above the telephone wires seemed to have been laundered and changed. The policemen were back in long sleeves. The drugstore had taken down its awning. As she crossed to her Falcon, her arms hugging two paper bags of groceries, she saw Richard’s Mercedes parked in front of the barber shop. She hesitated by the open door, where the odours of hair oil spilled onto the pavement, and saw him, sitting bulkily in his lumberjack shirt in the row of waiting chairs. Her heart went out to him; she didn’t want him to get a haircut. Richard saw her, put down his
True
, left his place in line, and came out.

‘Want to go for a teeny ride?’ The ‘teeny’ she heard as a reproach. She had been evading him. He appeared, blinking there in the sunshine, exposed, uncertain of his next move – a phantom left stranded by a dissolved dream. How strange, it seemed to Ruth, that we can sleep with a person, and have him still be a person, no more. She pitied him and consented, settling her shopping bags into his front seat as cumbersome, rustling chaperones. The interior of his car smelled familiarly of German leather and American candy and spilled wine; great gasps of this aroma had once filled her when, making love, the obscene awkwardness and the pain of the door handle on her shoulder blade had tripped her into a climax while he was still drunkenly labouring. Richard drove out of the town’s centre, past the Connecticut houses tucked into deeper and more concealing blankets of green, to a nature preserve of ragged woods, on the edge of the town away from the water. ‘I miss you,’ he said.

Ruth felt forced to say, ‘I miss you too.’

‘Then what’s up? What’s not up, I mean. What have I done wrong?’

Here and there, Ruth noticed as they bumped down the unrepaired road that led to the pond where in winter children ice-skated, a few of the trees, the dry and the dying, were beginning to turn. ‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘It’s nothing I’ve planned, it’s just things are busier, summer is over. All the little animals are going back into their burrows.’

Patches of yellow scudded past the shaggy black cloud of his head. ‘You know,’ Richard said, ‘I could make things tough for you.’

‘How?’

‘Tell Jerry.’

‘Why would you bother?’

‘I want your ass.’

‘I don’t think that would get it for you.’

‘I know you, Ruthie babes. I could hurt you with what I know.’

‘But you wouldn’t. Anyway isn’t it about time you moved on, to another lady?’ He had told her about the affair that had precipitated his separation from Sally; and about other affairs. Ruth had been silently offended; they sounded like common women, and Richard spoke of them slightingly.

He turned up the dirt road, two tracks in the grass, that led to the pond. There was a barrier chain; he parked. The bags of groceries on the front seat stood between them. Across the pond a single fisherman communed with his reflection. It was morning; the children who congregated here all summer were in school; she had left Geoffrey in the care of the man scraping the living-room wallpaper, promising to return in half an hour. All this went through her as she waited for Richard to make a move. He asked her, ‘Is there somebody else?’

‘Besides Jerry? Another affair? Don’t be repulsive. If you knew me at all you wouldn’t even ask.’

‘Maybe I
don’t
know you. You fight being known.’

If he thought her a fighter, then she would fight. ‘Richard,’ she said, ‘I must ask you not to call me at the house any more. Jerry overheard a bit of your last phone call and said some very scary things.’

His face, turning to favour the good eye, showed
alarm; it surprised Ruth, how distinctly this pleased her. ‘What sort of things?’

‘Nothing definite. Nothing about you. But I think he knows.’

‘Tell me exactly what he said.’

‘No. It doesn’t matter. It’s none of your business exactly what he said.’ It had become none of his business a moment ago, when he had seemed alarmed at Jerry’s knowing. Had he loved her, he would have been glad, anxious to come forward and fight.

Richard fingered a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. ‘Well.’ He put the cigarette, a bit bent, into his mouth, lit it, and exhaled towards the car roof an extensive upward steam. His lower lip jutted like the lip of a spout. He was hollow. She felt him searching himself for a response that would not embarrass him. ‘Want to thank me,’ he asked at last, ‘for a very nice ride?’

‘Don’t you think it’s best?’

The distant fisherman twitched his pole and birds in the trees around them released a shower of commentary. The grocery bags by her elbow rustled – the ice cream melting, the cans of frozen orange juice thawing. Affairs, Ruth saw, like everything else, ask too much. We all want a fancy price, just for existing. In the corner of her abstracted vision, Richard lunged; she flinched, expecting to be hit. He angrily, mock-decisively stubbed out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray.

‘Come on, Ruth babes,’ he sighed. ‘This isn’t us. Let’s take a walk. Don’t look like that, I won’t strangle you.’ He did have a clairvoyant streak; the thought had crossed her mind.