Marry Me (2 page)

‘Yeah, I don’t have a corkscrew, either. In fact, lady, I don’t know what I
do
have.’

‘You have you. That’s more than I have.’

‘No, no, you have me.’ He became nervous and active; he walked on his knees to where he had folded his clothes and pulled the bottle from the paper bag. The wine was a rosé. ‘Now I got to find a place to break it.’

‘There’s a rock over there.’

‘You think? Suppose the whole thing goes smash in my hand, like?’ On the excuse of a sudden shyness, the hipster had taken over.

‘Be careful,’ she said.

He tapped the neck of the bottle on the little ledge of striped tan rock and nothing happened. He tapped
again, harder; it clinked solidly and he felt himself blush. ‘C’mon, man,’ he pleaded, ‘break your neck.’

He swung firmly; a spatter of splinters glinted in his eyes before he heard the sound of broken glass; he plunged his startled gaze down through a jagged glinting mouth into a small deep cylindrical sea of swaying wine. She had waded on her knees to his side and exclaimed, ‘Mm,’ like him subtly shocked to see wine this way, so much of it naked in the violated bottle. She added, ‘Looks great.’

‘Where are the cups?’

‘Let’s forget the cups.’ She took the bottle from him and expertly fitted the jagged glass to her small face and tipped her head back and drank. His heart tripped as if at some danger but when she lowered the bottle her face was pleased and unharmed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t taste of paper this way. It just tastes of itself.’

‘Too bad it’s warm,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Warm wine is good.’

‘Better than none, I suppose.’

‘I said it’s
good,
Jerry. Why don’t you ever believe me?’

‘Listen. I believe you all the time.’ He took the bottle and imitated her; when he tipped his head back, the redness of the sun and of the wine mixed.

She cried, ‘You’ll cut your nose!’

He lowered the bottle and squinted at her. He said of the wine, ‘It kind of swings.’

She smiled and said, ‘You did.’ She touched the bridge of his nose and showed him a pink blot of blood on her white fingertip. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘when I see you normally, I’ll see the little cut on your nose, and only I will know how you got it.’

They moved back to the blanket and drank from the paper cups. Then they drank the wine from each other’s mouth; he spilled a little into her navel and lapped it up. In time he shyly asked, ‘Want me inside you?’

‘Yes? So much? All the time?’ Her voice was lifting everything into questions again.

‘There’s nobody around, we’re really quite hidden.’

‘Let’s hurry?’

As he kneeled at her feet to pull off the lower of the two pieces of her yellow bathing suit, he was reminded, unexpectedly, of shoe salesmen; as a child he had worried about these men who had made a career of kneeling and tugging at other people’s feet, and had wondered why they did not appear to feel demeaned by it.

Though Sally had been married ten years, and furthermore had had lovers before Jerry, her lovemaking was wonderfully virginal, simple, and quick. With his own wife he had a corrupt sensation, often, of convolution and inventive effort, but with Sally there was always, for all the times she had endured this before, a priceless sense of her being, yet once again, innocently amazed. Her face, freckled, rapt, the upper lip perspiring in the sun and lifted so her front teeth glinted, seemed a mirror held inches below his own face, a misted mirror more than another person. He asked himself who this was and then remembered,
Why, it’s Sally!
He closed his eyes and fitted his breathing into her soft exclamatory sighing. When this had ebbed into regular breathing, he said, ‘It’s better outdoors, isn’t it? You get more oxygen.’

He felt her rapid little nodding flutter on his shoulder.

‘Now leave me?’ she said.

Lying beside her as she wriggled back into her bathing suit pants, he betrayed her by wishing for a cigarette. It would have gone so well with the plenitude, the gratitude, the wide sky, the scent of sea. Ashamed of slipping back into a polluted old self, he poured the last of the wine into their cups, and rooted the empty bottle like a monument, mouth up, in the sand.

She looked down into the empty parking lot and asked, ‘Jerry how can I live without you?’

‘The same way I live without you. By not living most of the time.’

‘Let’s not talk about it. Let’s not spoil our day.’

‘O.K.’ He took up the novel she had been reading and asked, ‘You dig this guy?’

‘Yes. You don’t.’

‘Not much. I mean, it’s not untrue, but’ – he waggled the book and tossed it aside – ‘is this really what has to be said?’

‘I think he’s good.’

‘You think a lot of things are good, don’t you? You think Moravia is good, you think warm wine is good, you think love-making is good.’

She looked at him now, quickly. ‘Do you mind that?’

‘I love that.’

‘No, you don’t believe me sometimes. You don’t believe I’m so simple. I am simple. I’m just like’ – similes were hard for her, she so instinctively saw things as themselves – ‘that broken bottle. I have no secrets.’

‘It’s such a beautiful bottle. Look how the curves of
broken glass take the sun. It’s like a tiny roller coaster, around and around.’ He wished again for a cigarette, to gesture with.

Whenever a distance between them seemed about to grow, she would call, ‘Hey?’

‘Hi,’ he’d answer gravely.

‘Hi,’ she answered back.

‘Sweetie, why did you marry him in the first place?’

And she told him, told him at unprecedented length, hugging her knees and sipping wine, told him so charmingly, in her delicate, careless voice, the twentieth-century story of her marriage, that he kept laughing and kissing the small of her naked bent back. ‘So I kept taking riding lessons and miscarried
that
one, too. So he sends me into analysis and this goddamn analyst, Jerry – you would have liked him, he was like you in being very ethical – tells me – I don’t know what the matter with me is but I always try to do what men tell me to do, it’s my terrible weakness – he tells me, “You’re going to have this one.” So O.K., I had it. I was so confused I probably thought it was the analyst’s baby I was having. But it wasn’t. It was Richard’s. And then once I’d had one it seemed I had to have some more to make the first one right. But it doesn’t work that way.’

‘You know why
I’ve
had all
my
babies?’ he said. ‘I never really understood until the other night, something Ruth said. You know she’s this great believer in natural childbirth. Well Joanna was really quite painful for her so now it turns out we had to have two more so she could perfect her technique.’

He had hoped Sally would laugh at this, and she did,
and in a sudden mutual gush they cashed into the silver of laughter all the sad secrets they could find in their pockets. She had more secrets than he. The inequality of their exchange grieved him, and as the dunes looped longer shadows into their small valley he kissed her wrists and confessed, in a desperate attempt to balance their plights. ‘I did a very bad thing in marrying Ruth. Much worse, really, than if I’d married for money. I married her because I knew she’d make a good wife. And that’s what she’s done. God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Sally.’

‘Don’t be sad. I love you.’

‘I know, I know, and I love you. How can I
not
be sad? What can we
do
?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Go on like this a little more?’

‘It won’t stand still.’ He gestured upwards and stared as if to blind himself. ‘The fucking sun won’t stand still.’

‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ she said.

Both on their knees, they began to gather up their equipment and to revolve in their minds the fragile lies they must deliver to their homes. She looked so calm and docile, his Sally, in the sandy light, her pale hair falling as she bowed into some tiny simplicity of this, their only housekeeping, that he angrily embraced her, for the last time this day. All their embraces felt to be the last. Almost lazily, she kneeled against him and flattened her body to his and encircled his back with her arms. Her shoulder tasted warm; his lips moved on her skin. ‘Baby I can’t swing it,’ he said, and the flutter of her nodding made their bodies vibrate together.
I know. I know.

‘Hey? Jerry? Over your shoulder I can see the Sound, and there’s a little sailboat, and some town far off, and the waves are coming in to the rocks, and it’s so sunny, and just so beautiful? No. Don’t turn your head. Believe me.’

2
The Wait

‘Good-bye?’

‘Don’t say that word to me, Jerry Please don’t say it.’ Sally’s wrist ached from holding the receiver so long, and now her whole forearm began to tremble. She pinched the receiver between her shoulder and her ear and used her freed hands to button one of Peter’s straps; in the last few months he had learned to dress himself, all except for the buttons, and she had hardly found it in her scattered wits to praise him. Poor child, he had been standing there for ten minutes waiting for his mother to get through talking; waiting and listening, waiting and watching with that wary glimmering expression on his face – she began to cry. It came upon her like a gentle fit of retching; with clenched teeth she tried to keep her sobs from carrying into the telephone.

‘Hey? Don’t.’ Jerry laughed in embarrassment, faintly and far away. ‘It’s just for two days.’

‘Don’t
say
it, damn you. I don’t care what you mean, don’t
say
it.’ I’m crazy, she thought; I’m a crazy woman and he’ll start to hate me. At the thought of his hating her after she had given so much of herself to him, she became indignant. ‘If all you can do is laugh at me maybe we should say good-bye for good.’

‘Oh, Christ. I’m not laughing at you. I love you. I hate it that I can’t be there to comfort you.’

Peter nudged closer, to have the other strap buttoned, and she smelled a Life Saver on his breath. ‘Where did you get that candy?’ she asked. ‘We mustn’t eat candy in the morning.’

Jerry asked, ‘Who’s there?’

‘Nobody Just Peter.’

‘Bobby gave me,’ Peter said, and now his glimmering expression seemed about to resolve into fear.

‘You go find Bobby and tell him I want to talk to him. Go, sweetie. Go find Bobby and tell him. Mommy will be off the phone in just a minute.’

‘Poor Peter,’ Jerry said in her ear. ‘Don’t send him away.’

How could he say this, he who had robbed her of all joy in her children? Yet of course it was just that he
could
say it that enlarged her love so helplessly; he refused to remain fixed in the role of her lover as she imagined it should be played. A needless kindness kept shattering his shell. Tears burned her cheeks; she held silent to keep her soaked voice from him. Her abdomen and arms physically ached. God, could he be doing it on purpose?

‘Hey? Hi?’

‘Hi,’ she answered.

‘You O.K.?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can go to the Garden Club while I’m away, and take the children to the beach, and read Moravia –’

‘I’m reading Camus now.’

‘You’re so intelligent.’

‘Won’t you miss your plane?’

‘Take Peter to the beach, and play with the baby, and lie in the sun, and be nice to Richard…’

‘I can’t. I can’t be nice to Richard. You’ve ruined him for me.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘I know, I know.’ Jerry’s fault as a lover, his cruel fault, was that he acted like a husband. She had never had a husband before. It seemed to Sally now in the light of Jerry that she had been married ten years to a man who wanted only to be her lover, keeping between them the distance that lovers must cross. Richard was always criticizing her, analysing her. When she was young it had been flattering; now it just seemed mean. Out of bed he must always try to strip her down to some twisted core, some mistaken motive. Whereas Jerry kept trying to dress her, flinging her sad little scarves of comfort and advice. He saw her as pathetically exposed.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I love you. I wish you could come to Washington with me. But it can’t be. We were very lucky to get away with it once. Richard knows something. Ruth knows.’

‘She does?’

‘Her glands do.’

‘Do what?’

‘Know.
Now don’t worry about it. It wouldn’t have been so lovely the second time anyway. I’ll miss you constantly and won’t sleep at all in the bed by myself. The air conditioner going
whoosh, whoosh.’

‘You’ll miss Ruth too.’

‘Not so much.’

‘No? Hey I love you for saying, “Not so much.” A real lover would have said, “Not at all.” ’

He laughed. ‘That’s what I am. An unreal lover.’

‘Then why can’t I shut you out? Jerry I
hurt,
physically
hurt.
Even Richard feels sorry for me and gives me sleeping pills from his own prescription.’

‘Greater love hath no man than to give sleeping pills from his own prescription.’

‘I could call Josie this evening and say I’m in the city and the Saab has broken down. It’s been acting funny lately I know they’d believe me.’

‘Oh, sweetie. You’re so gallant. It would never swing. They’d find out and he wouldn’t let you have the children.’

‘I don’t want the children, I want you.’

‘Don’t say that. You love your children very much. Just looking at Peter made you cry.’

‘It was you who made me cry.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

She didn’t know how to answer this; she could never tell him that you were responsible for things you didn’t mean to do as well as things you did. He believed in God, and that inhibited her from giving him instruction on anything. Through the kitchen window she saw Peter finding Bobby. Peter had forgotten the message she had given him, and his older brother led him out of sight into the woods.

She asked, ‘Will you be at the State Department all afternoon? Could I call you there if I come?’

‘Sally don’t come. You’ll just crucify yourself for nothing. We’d only be there one night.’