Marry Me (4 page)

‘Love you.’

He thinks it would be nice to hate me, she thought, and went out and caught a taxi. The driver asked her which Smithsonian she wanted, the old or the new, and she said the old. But at the door of the brownstone castle, she turned away. To her the past was a dingy pedestal erected so she could be alive in this moment. She turned away and walked along the Mall in the sunshine. The subsiding afternoon, the pavement dappled with shadows and seeds, the Popsicle hawkers, the tinted-windowed tourist buses stuffed with glaring Americans, the flocks of children, the fairy ring of fluttering red, white, and blue flags planted around the base of the great obelisk, the little Indian women wearing saris and Brahmin dots and nostril pearls and carrying both parasols and briefcases were for Sally all fragments of a fair; in the distance the Capitol dome, cleaner than its grey wings, had the glazed lustre of a piece of marzipan. The sunshine, imprinted everywhere with official images, seemed money to her as she walked past the Natural History Building, up Twelfth Street, through the dank arcades of the Post Office Department, along Pennsylvania Avenue to the fence of the White House. She felt airy, free. The federal buildings, fantastically carved and frosted, floated around her walk; their unreality and grandeur permeated her mood. Through the gaps between guards and greenery, she looked in at the White House; it was made of brilliant fake stuff, like meringue. She thought of the walleyed young Irishman who reigned here, wondered if he were good in bed, and didn’t see how he could be, he was President. She turned up Fourteenth Street, strolling to her fate.

Sally carried a toothbrush in her pocketbook, and that was her luggage; she had inherited from her father a love of travelling light. Free, cool in her black linen, she felt like an elegant young widow returning from her husband’s June funeral; he had been an old man, greedy and unkind. In truth, Richard, heavier than ten years ago, was still handsome enough, though his head seemed to weigh more on his shoulders and his quick gestures had been slowed and blurred by what he called, with a clipped, resentful intonation, his ‘responsibilities’. When their marriage was young, they had lived in Manhattan, and in their poverty had walked miles as amusement. She felt Richard’s ghost at her shoulder, remembered the novel rhythm of walking with, of
having
, a man. She had hated schools, prim places of Eastern exile. Richard had rescued her from Barnard and made her a woman. Where had it gone, her gratitude? Was she wicked? She couldn’t believe it, feeling still so full of sky from the aeroplane ride, sidewalk mica glinting under her, her nostrils pricked by the peppery odour of tar. The crosswalk stripes had been tugged and displaced by the melting summer heat. On the wide pavements her stride kept overtaking the saunter of Southerners. Church chimes, the chimes of lemon-yellow St John’s, sounded the hour. It was five. She walked west along I Street. Government clerks in flapping lightweight suits squinted through her, towards the wife and Martini waiting in Maryland. A multitude of women had been released. Like a rolling golden ornament the sun rode the glassy buildings on her left, and its rays warmed her face into self-awareness. She realized she was pouting as she searched the faces for Jerry’s face.

How he would grin! Despite his scruples and premonitions he would grin to see her; he always did, and she alone could bring out that smile in him. Though only a few months older than she, and remarkably innocent for a man of thirty, he made her feel like a daughter whose every defiance testified to a cherished vitality. Sally felt carved on her face a deep smile answering his imagined one.

Danger flicked from the other faces. She seemed to see a man she knew, about to turn the corner of the BOAC building, across from Farragut’s gesturing statue – a young Wall Street scion Richard had had to the house. His name was Wigglesworth, preceded by two initials she could not remember. His face, expressionless, rounded the corner and vanished. Surely she was mistaken; there are millions of men and only a few types, only a few men who aren’t types. But in fear of being recognized she lowered her gaze, so as Jerry had predicted, it was he who found her, though this was not Hell.

‘Sally!’ He was on the sunless side of I Street, hatless, his arm lifted as if for a taxi. In a business suit, he looked disconcertingly like everyone else, and as he waited at the intersection for the electric permission to walk, her stomach dipped as if she had been snapped awake two hundred miles from home. She asked herself, Who is this man? The sign said WALK. At the head of the pack, he trotted towards her; her heart thrashed. She hung helplessly on the curb while the distance between them diminished and her body, her whole hollowed body, remembered his twitchily posing hands, his hook nose that never took a tan but burned all summer long, his
sad eyes of no certain colour, his crooked jubilant teeth. He grinned proudly but nervously stood uncertain a moment, then touched her elbow and kissed her cheek. ‘God, you look great,’ he said, ‘rolling along with that farm-girl gait, your big feet wobbling away in heels.’

Her heart relaxed. No one else saw her this way. She came from Seattle and this made her in Jerry’s eyes a farm-girl. It was true, she had always felt uneasy in the East. There was a kind of Eastern woman, Ruth for example, who never bothered with make-up or conspicuously flirted and beside whom Sally felt clumsy. Richard noticed this and tried to analyse her insecurity. Jerry noticed and called her his girl in calico. Not since before her father died, on a trip to San Francisco, had she felt, what she supposed all children are supposed to feel, that it was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.

‘How on earth did you get away?’

‘I just said good-bye and got in the Saab and drove to the airport.’

‘You know, it’s marvellous to meet a woman who can really
use
the twentieth century.’ This was another fancy of his, that there was something comic and inappropriate in their living now, in this century. While making love he sometimes called her his squaw. He took pleasure, she felt, in delicately emphasizing, in never letting her forget, the incongruities that hemmed them in. His tenderness itself proclaimed that their love was illicit and doomed.

‘Hey’ he said, calling to her across the silence. ‘I don’t want you to take risks for me. I want to take them for you.’

But you won’t
, she thought, looping her arm through his arm and bowing her head in concentration on his walking rhythm. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’

He said nothing.

‘You’re mad at me. I shouldn’t have come.’

‘I’m never mad with you. But how did you manage?’

‘I managed.’

His body was mainly big bones and nerves; she felt she was holding on to a corner of a kite that was struggling to get high into the wind.

He tugged her along. He asked, ‘Is Richard going to be away tonight?’

‘No.’

He halted.

‘Jesus, Sally. What happened? Did you just break out? Can you get back?’

His voice rose sharply, asking this last question. Her answer sounded in her own ears scratchy and faint. ‘Don’t worry about it, darling. I’m here with you, and everything else seems very far away.’

‘Talk to me. Don’t try to shame me. Tell me what happened.’

She told him, reliving it all, frightening herself: the beach, her panic, the children, Josie, the aeroplane, her walk, her plan to call home in an hour saying she was in Manhattan and that the Saab had broken down, refusing to start, and the Fitches had invited her to stay the night, since the art-appreciation course she was taking at the Metropolitan Museum met tomorrow morning.

‘Sweetie, it won’t swing,’ he told her. ‘Let’s try to be
sane. If I put you on a plane now, you can still get back by eight.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘No. You know I want you with me always.’

And, for all the evidence to the contrary she felt this as true. She was his wife. This strange fact, unknown to the world but known to them, made whatever looked wrong right, whatever seemed foolish wise. She, Sally, was Jerry’s woman, and what had been precious in the first illicit trip was that in those two days she had felt this truth growing, had felt him relax. The first night, he had not slept. Several times she had been twitched awake by his body sliding from the bed, getting a drink of water, adjusting the air conditioner, rummaging in his suitcase.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘My pyjamas.’

‘Are you cold?’

‘A little. Go to sleep.’

‘I can’t. You’re unhappy.’

‘I’m very happy. I love you.’

‘But I don’t keep you warm.’

‘You
are
a little cooler than Ruth, somehow.’

‘Really?’

Her voice must have shown that this unexpected comparison had hurt her, for he tried to retract. ‘No, I don’t know. Forget it. Please go to sleep.’

‘I’ll go back tomorrow. I won’t stay tomorrow night if I give you insomnia.’

‘Don’t be so touchy. You don’t give me insomnia. The Lord gives me insomnia.’

‘Because you’re sleeping with me.’

‘Listen. I love insomnia. It’s a proof that I’m alive.’

‘Please come back to bed, Jerry.’ She had held on to his body, trying to drag the kite down from the sky, and herself fell asleep suspended between the earth and the dawn growing in the brick airshaft beyond their blinds. The second night, though still twitchy he slept better, and on this, the third night, three months later, when spring had relaxed into summer, his breathing slowed and became mechanical while her heart was still lightly racing. She thought herself flattered by his trust. But early in the morning, having slept on a vague sense of loss, she awoke to a sharp deserted feeling. The room was different from the first one. The walls, though it was the same hotel, were yellow instead of white, and instead of the flowered prints there were two pallid Holbein portraits. It was brightening enough beyond the blinds to see the faces, so dim they seemed real presences – small-mouthed, fastidious. How many adulterous and drunken couplings had they been compelled to witness? A street-sweeper passed swishing on the avenue below. Their first room had given on an airshaft; this one overlooked, from five stories up, a square. Somewhere below them in the maze of the capital a collection truck whined and a trash can clattered. She thought of her milkman crossing her porch to set his bottles, clinking, inside an abandoned house. Jerry lay diagonally, the sheet bunched around his throat, his feet exposed. She nudged him awake and made him passionate. In the heart of intimacy, he drowsily called her ‘Ruth’. It took him a second to realize his mistake. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t seem to know who you are.’

‘I’m Miss Sally Mathias, a crazy woman.’

‘Of course you are. And you’re very beautiful.’

‘But a little cool, comparatively.’

‘You’ve never forgotten that, have you?’

‘No.’ It fascinated her; at home, stepping into a bath, she would quickly lay fingers on her skin as if to surprise there the tepidity he had mentioned, and once, shaking Ruth’s hand goodbye after a dinner party, she had held on curiously, trying to grasp the subtle caloric advantage this cool-looking woman had over her. She had noticed how Jerry’s skinny body often seemed feverish. When they first began to make love, she had felt through his motions the habitual responses his wife must make; while locked in this strange man’s embrace she struggled jealously against the outline of the other woman. On her part she bore the impress of Richard’s sexual style, so that in the beginning four contending persons seemed involved on the sofa or in the sand, and a confused, half-Lesbian excitement would enclose her. Now these blurs were burned away. On the brightening edge of the long June day that followed the third night they had ever spent together, Jerry and Sally made love lucidly, like Adam and Eve when the human world was of two halves purely. She watched his face, and involuntarily cried out, pierced by the discovery, ‘Jerry your eyes are so sad!’

The crooked teeth of his grin seemed Satanic. ‘How can they be sad when I’m so happy?’

‘They’re
so
sad, Jerry.’

‘You shouldn’t watch people’s eyes when they make love.’

‘I always do.’

‘Then I’ll close mine.’

Oh Sally, my lost only Sally, let me say now, now before we both forget, while the spark still glitters on the waterfall, that I loved you, that the sight of you shamed my eyes. You were a territory where I went on tip-toe to steal a magic mirror. You were a princess married to an ogre. I would go to meet you as a knight, to rescue you, and would become instead the dragon, and ravish you. You weighed me out in jewels, though ashes were what I could afford. Do you remember how, in our first room, on the second night, I gave you a bath and scrubbed your face and hands and long arms with the same methodical motions I used on my children? I was trying to tell you then. I was a father. Our love of children implies our loss of them. What a lazy lovely naked child you were, my mistress and momentary wife; your lids were lowered, your cheek rested on the steaming sheet of bathwater. Can I forget, forget though I live forever in Heaven among the chariots whose wheels are all eyes giving God the glory, how I saw you step from a tub, your body abruptly a waterfall? Like a man you tucked a towel about your woman’s hips, and had me enter the water your flesh had charmed to a silvery opacity. I became your child. With a drenched blinding cloth that searched out even the hollows of my ears, you, my mother, my slave, dissolved me in tender abrasions. I forgot, sank. And we dried each other’s beaded back, and went to the bed as if to sleep instantly, two obedient children dreaming in a low tent drumming with the excluded rain.

Jerry closed his eyes and it hurt her. She loved to watch love, to witness the nibbling, the mixing of ivory and fur, the solemn softening of the eyes. Was she corrupt? In Paris on her honeymoon with Richard, her shock at the mirrors in their room had subsided to a level interest.
This was what people did; this was what they were. She was proud, a little, of having taught Jerry how simple it was. Somehow Ruth had not taught him that. But the sadness of his eyes had penetrated her and for the rest of the day that unfolded Sally was laid open to a vivid and frightening sense of her existence in other people’s eyes. The puffy-lidded news vendor in the perfumed lobby saw her as a spoiled young matron. The waitress who served them breakfast at the counter cheerfully took her for a fucked secretary. When Sally relinquished Jerry to a taxi and became alone, she felt herself reflected in every glance and glass entryway To the Japanese souvenir-store attendants she was big. To the Negro doorman she was white. To everybody she was nobody.