Marry Me (21 page)

‘Jerry you are sick. Why should you hate Richard?’

‘Because he’s an atheist like everybody else and you’re
all trying to put me in a coffin.’ Sally’s being far away had loosened his tongue unpleasantly; Ruth felt him hardening himself, for a desperate decision.

‘What is this trip to Florida supposed to prove?’ she asked. ‘Are you supposed to go after her?’

‘Gee, I never thought of that. I’ve never been to Florida.’

‘Don’t be funny.’

‘Is September when the orange blossoms come out?’

‘You’re not coming back into this house if you go.’

‘How could I go? Be reasonable. She’s there for a rest – from Richard, from me, from you, from the whole thing. She’s exhausted. This summer of waiting you asked for was the cruellest thing you could have done. We’re killing her, you and me and whatsisname. She’s been living on pills and she’s desperate.’

‘Pills, piffle. Any woman can work herself up into that kind of desperation when she wants something. She wants you to run off with her.’

He focused on this possibility, and his face took on the incisive set and sharpened lines – as if drawn by himself – that she remembered from the days when at their adjacent easels they were concentrating in parallel on the model. ‘I don’t think that’s the way to do it,’ he said now. ‘I think if it’s going to be done it has to be ground out with lawyers and trial separations and heartbroken parents and weeping kids and the works. How would our children feel if I just disappeared with Mrs Mathias and Bobby and Peter and teeny Theodora? Those awful children – they all look like Richard. They’re all ogres.’

‘Stop it,’ Ruth told him, ‘Don’t complain to me
because Sally had children with her husband instead of with you.’

‘That’s the great thing about you,’ he said, ‘everybody else has all the problems. You don’t have any, do you? Poor Sally and I spend all our time on the phone wondering what dear old Ruth will do when she’s abandoned with all her children and you just fucking well don’t have any fucking problems, do you? How do you do it, baby? You smash the car up to brighten a dull day and don’t get a scratch. Your world’s coming to an end and you lie down on the fucking beach all summer happy as a clam. That old One-in-One God of yours must be a real cucumber up there.’

‘I’m a Judaeo-Christian, just like you are,’ Ruth said.

The children, especially Charlie, were growing disturbed. Back from work, Jerry used to play catch with the boys in the back yard, or take all three for an evening swim at the Hornungs’ pool, but now he did nothing at home but sit and stare and drink gin-and-tonics and listen to his Ray Charles records and talk to Ruth, trying, by now wearily, to arrange their words and states of mind in the combination that would unlock his situation and free his heart. At meals his eyes kept going out of focus: he was seeing Sally. Days passed, became a week, then ten days, and neither Jerry nor Richard knew when she would return. A gaudy bird, outlandish in her plumage, she had flown to the tropics; from there, dwindled but unforgettable, she sang to them, and the busy signal at Jerry’s office was her song. In intermittances of rage and despair Ruth felt sorry for him, he looked so ‘torn’. His speckled irises looked ragged, and
outdoors he held his head at an odd angle, as if listening for a signal, or offering himself like Isaac to a blow from above. ‘Decide, please,’ Ruth pleaded. ‘We’ll all survive, just do what you want and stop caring about us.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘What I want is too tied up with how it affects everybody else. It’s like one of those equations with nothing but variables. I can’t solve it. I can’t solve it. She cries over the telephone. She doesn’t mean to cry. She’s quite funny and brave about it. She says it’s a hundred and ten and her sister-in-law walks around stark naked.’

‘When is she coming back?’

‘She’s afraid it has to be soon. She and the kids have filled the house and their welcome is wearing thinner and thinner.’

‘Has she told them why she’s there?’

‘Not really. She’s admitted being unhappy with Richard and her brother tells her to stop being silly and spoiled. Richard takes care of her and anyway her duty is to her children.’

‘Which is true.’

‘Why is it true? How does he take care of her? He sent her off with hardly enough money for the aeroplane tickets.’

‘Have you sent her money?’ It made Ruth weak, the thought that Jerry was pouring the children’s education away, that this expensive woman was haunting their bank account as well as their bed.

‘No, I think I’m supposed to send myself. And I can’t. I keep wanting to, but I never quite can, there’s always something, Joanna’s piano recital or having the Collinses to dinner or some damn dental appointment. God, it’s
awful. It’s awful talking to her. I wish you’d talk to her since you’re so interested.’

‘I’d be happy to. Just put me on the line. I have lots to say to that woman suddenly.’

‘The reason she went to Florida was to stop hurting you. She hated your accident.’

‘I thought you said she went hoping you’d follow.’

‘I think both ideas were in her mind. She’s mixed up.’

‘Well she’s not the only one.’

While her waking life was consciously occupied by concern for her children and home, an unaccustomed ferocity entered Ruth’s dreams. Violence, amputation, and mad velocity hurled together scenes and faces from remote corners of her life. In one dream, she was riding along the road in Vermont that led to the summer place they used to rent. It seemed to be the stretch below the abandoned sawmill, where the ruts were deepest because the sun never broke through the overhanging branches to dry the mud. They were in a race. Up ahead, in a spindly black open buggy, her father, David Collins, and the little old lady in the Babar books were sitting in a prim-backed row; her father was driving, which frightened her, because he was so reckless, as ministers tend to be, and, lately, being deafer and deafer, oblivious to cars approaching from the side and behind. She and Geoffrey were following in a strange low cart without any visible means of propulsion. They were smoothly flying and yet their wheels were touching the rutted road. She felt her son’s anxiety as hers; his tears burned in her throat. Suddenly the buggy stopped, stopped like a frozen film. David and Daddy held on to the sides, but the old lady, between them, had nothing
to hold to, and instantly slipped out of sight. They all gathered around her. She lay on the side of the road, in the scruffy grass, a little withered heap of bones. The impact had foreshortened her body within her black dress, and her legs had been hideously broken, so they radiated from her body like the legs of a spider. Her face, yellow and matted in its flowing hair, was bent backwards, and as she opened her mouth her teeth, elongated dentures, slipped down like a drawgate. She was dying, crushed. She was trying to speak. Ruth bent down to listen, and the dream shifted to a watery realm, a realm of blue-green water tinted alkaline by a white bottom of coral sand, the water of the Caribbean, of St John’s, where she had once gone with Jerry, years ago, when she was pregnant with Geoffrey. Perhaps she had meant to dream of Florida.

Saturday Jerry said he had some errands to run downtown and an hour later called her on the telephone. ‘Ruth,’ he said, in a voice two tones lower than normal – she could imagine that open pay phone in the drugstore – ‘could I come back and talk to you?’

‘Sure.’ Her knees began to tremble.

‘How many children are home?’

‘Just Charlie. Joanna took Geoffrey to the Cantinellis’ garage sale.’

She went into the kitchen and filled an orange-juice glass with vermouth and drank it as if it were water, water tasting of fire. She was still in the kitchen when he came in the back door; the cry of cicadas, the dry football smell of summer’s end, followed him in.

‘I’ve talked to Sally’ he said, ‘and she must leave
Florida. Her children are miserable. School starts in a week.’

‘Yes. Well?’ He hung there, expecting something. She asked, ‘You said all this over that phone in the drugstore?’

‘I used the one at the back of the Texaco place. She wants to know if I’m coming to her now. The summer’s over.’

‘It’s not Labour Day yet.’

‘It’s September.’

The trembling had spread up her legs into Ruth’s belly; the dash of vermouth there felt like a knife plunged in so tightly she could not bleed around it.

Jerry blurted, ‘Please don’t look so pale.’ His own face was wrapped in the look of abstracted compassion with which he would remove a splinter or a thorn from her hand or one of the children’s feet.

She asked, wanting him to approve of her control, ‘Where would you go to meet her?’

He shrugged and laughed, conspiratorially ‘I don’t know. Washington? Wyoming? She’d have all the damn children of course. It’s awkward, but it could be managed. Other people do it.’

‘Not many.’

He gazed at their worn linoleum floor.

She asked him, ‘Do you want to go?’

‘I’m scared, but yes. I want to go, tell me to
go.’

She shrugged now, leaning against the sink counter, the little glass in her hand, with its tilting remnant of liquor. ‘Then go.’

‘Will you be all right? There’s over a thousand in the checking account and I think about eighty-five hundred
in the savings bank.’ He made as if to touch her, lifting his hands in unison; his body seemed to her a stiff machine determinedly set in motion while the helpless passenger screamed behind his eyes.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, drained the glass of its last sip, and in afterthought threw it to the floor. The fragments and drops flew in a stopped star across the marbled pattern of the old green linoleum.

Charlie ran into the kitchen at the noise; Ruth had forgotten he was in the house. He was fine and small for his age, with an eager fine face and Jerry’s uncombable cowlick. ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked, smiling in readiness to be told it was a joke. He was the most logical of their children, and without a theory of ‘jokes’ grown-ups would not have fitted into his universe at all. He stood waiting, small and smiling. He was seven. He wore khaki shorts, and his bare chest bore a summer’s tan.

Ruth burst: she felt salt water spring from her eyes like spray. She told the child, ‘Because Daddy wants to leave us and go live with Mrs Mathias!’

With the silent quickness of a whipped cat Charlie fled the kitchen; Jerry chased him, and Ruth saw them together in the living room, framed by a doorway as in one of the domestic Dutch masters, the boy sitting on the wing chair, his bare feet sticking out straight, his head stubborn and radiant, his father in his Saturday Levi’s and sneakers kneeling and trying to embrace him. Charlie was not making himself easy to hold. Ruth’s elm added to the scene a window of yellow and green.

‘Don’t cry,’ Jerry pleaded. ‘Why are you crying?’

‘Mommy said – Mommy said you want to live’ – a suppressed sob made his bony chest heave – ‘with those children.’

‘No I don’t. I want to live with you.’

She couldn’t watch. Carefully for her own feet were bare, Ruth swept up the broken glass. The shards, some of them fine as powder, chimed from the pan into the wastebasket.
Dust to dust.
When she was done, Charlie padded to her across the clean floor and said, ‘Daddy went out. He said he’d be back.’ He delivered the message full of dignity, as if he were ambassador to an enemy.

Jerry returned while Ruth was putting the toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch into the oven. He looked breathless, weightless, scarecrowlike, staring. A car squealed out on the road. ‘I called Sally again.’

She closed the oven door, checked the setting, and said, ‘And?’

‘I told her I can’t come to her. I described the incident with Charlie and said I just couldn’t do it. She’s flying back to Richard tomorrow. She said she wasn’t too surprised. She was pretty sore at you for using the children but I told her you hadn’t meant to. She got pretty shrill, I thought.’

‘Well in her circumstances who could blame her?’

‘I could,’ Jerry said. ‘I loved that woman, and she shouldn’t have pushed.’ His mouth was small and his voice cold, tired of passion as the summer was tired of sun. Ruth wondered if she dared mourn for Sally; together they had inhabited this man, and banishment of this other seemed too arbitrary and too harsh. Ruth wanted to know more, to hear every word Sally said,
to hear her shrieks; but Jerry clamped shut his treasure. Joanna brought Geoffrey back from the sale – they had bought an ashtray shaped like a chicken – and there was no more talking.

Sally came to volleyball next day. It was a September Sunday of light grey clouds, not so much cool as draughty, as if a door had been left open somewhere in the weather. Sally, who in July would come wearing her yellow bathing suit under one of Richard’s shirts, the tails knotted at her belly, had reverted to the white slacks and boatneck jersey she had worn at summer’s outset. The skin of her face appeared stiff; the Florida tan had placed tiny white wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She was greeted on all sides, as if her return were a spectacular self-rescue. Richard, in tartan Bermudas, looked softer than the day he had breezed into the police station. Ruth wondered what he and Sally had done to each other, to make him so amiably dazed. With no depth perception, he kept playing easy shots into the net and lurching into people. Once he bumped into Ruth and, in the jarring, she smelled gin. Once Jerry shouted, ‘Sally!’, for a save, when a ball he had hit badly sailed in her direction; she stretched, attempting to leap, but the ball fell untouched between her body and the net. His shout, a plea to be rescued, hung in the air a long time, untouched by the silence of the others. What had been between them had vanished beneath the surface of the game, leaving stranded Jerry’s disjointed, desperate style of play. Leaping, diving, dropping again into the dirt and broken glass to make impossible saves, he seemed a
madman detached from reality, a fish out of water. It was all for Sally’s benefit, but the woman’s sun-stiffened heart-shaped face was dead towards him. For the last time, Jerry poisoned a Sunday evening with the sorrow that followed a volleyball game; the next day was Labor Day. Volleyball, the summer, the affair were over. The children went back to school; the casual gatherings on the grass or by the water on the excuse of the children ceased. Weeks passed without the Conants and the Mathiases meeting.