Marry Me (7 page)

She laughed. ‘Is that what we’d do?’

He seemed hurt. ‘No? Doesn’t that make sense? I always want land after making love to you. This morning, stepping into the street with you on my arm, I saw a little plant in the window of a shop, and it was terribly vivid to me. Every leaf, every vein. It’s the way I saw things in art school. In Wyoming, I’d take up painting again, and draw toasters for an ad agency in Casper.’

‘Tell me about art school, Jerry.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. I went there, and met Ruth, and she painted quite well in a feminine way, and her father was a minister, and I married her. I’m not sorry. We had good years.’

‘You know, you’d miss her.’

‘In ways, perhaps. You’d miss Richard, oddly enough.’

‘Don’t say “oddly enough”, Jerry. Sometimes you make me feel it’s all my doing. You and Ruth were happy –’

‘No.’

‘– and along came this miserable woman pretending she wanted a lover when what she really wanted was you for a husband.’

‘No. Listen. I loved you for years. You know that. It didn’t take our sleeping together to tell me that I loved you; it was the way you
looked.
As to marriage, you weren’t the one who brought that up. You assumed it was impossible. It was I who thought it might be possible. It was bad of me to mention it before I was
sure, but even that, I did out of love for you; I wanted you to know – Oh, I talk too much. The word “love” is beginning to sound nonsensical.’

‘You’ve done one thing wrong, Jerry.’

‘What’s that? I’ve done everything wrong.’

‘In making me feel so loved you’ve convinced me being somebody’s mistress is too shabby for me.’

‘It is. You’re too nice, you’re too straight, really. You give too completely. I hate myself for accepting.’

‘Accept, Jerry. If you can’t take me as a wife, don’t spoil me as a mistress.’

‘But I don’t
want
you as a mistress; our lives just aren’t built for it. Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there’s no institution except marriage. Marriage and the Friday night basketball game. You can’t take this indefinitely; you think you can, but I know you can’t.’

‘I guess I know it too. It’s just that I’m so scared of trying for everything and losing what we have.’

‘What we have is love. But love must become fruitful, or it loses itself. I don’t mean having babies – God, we’ve all had too many of those – I mean just being relaxed, and right, and, you know, with a blessing. Does “blessing” seem silly to you?’

‘Can’t we give each other the blessing?’

‘In making me feel so loved you’ve convinced me being somebody’s mistress is too shabby for me.’

‘It is. You’re too nice, you’re too straight, really. You give too completely. I hate myself for accepting.’

‘Accept, Jerry. If you can’t take me as a wife, don’t spoil me as a mistress.’

‘But I don’t
want
you as a mistress; our lives just aren’t built for it. Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there’s no institution except marriage. Marriage and the Friday night basketball game. You can’t take this indefinitely; you think you can, but I know you can’t.’

‘I guess I know it too. It’s just that I’m so scared of trying for everything and losing what we have.’

‘What we have is love. But love must become fruitful, or it loses itself. I don’t mean having babies – God, we’ve all had too many of those – I mean just being relaxed, and right, and, you know, with a blessing. Does “blessing” seem silly to you?’

‘Can’t we give each other the blessing?’

‘No. For some reason it must come from above.’

Above them, in a sky still bright though the earth was ripening into shadow, an aeroplane hung cruciform, silver, soundless. He put his arm lightly around her shoulders and looked at her in a different mood; his face broke into its fatherly smile, forgiving, enveloping. He said, ‘Hey’ and looked at his knees. ‘You know, I can sit here with you and talk about loss, about my losing you,
and us losing our love, but I can do it only because you’re with me, so it doesn’t seem serious. When I
have
lost you, when you’re not there, it’s a fantastic ache. Just fantastic. And everything that keeps me from coming to you seems just words.’

‘But it’s not just words.’

‘No. Not quite, I guess. Maybe our trouble is that we live in the twilight of the old morality, and there’s just enough to torment us, and not enough to hold us in.’

The timbre of his voice, dipping towards some final shadow, chilled her. She moved forward, out from under his arm, stood up, inhaled, and let her mind expand into the landscape. ‘What a beautiful long day’ she said, trying to recapture their pleasure in discovering this place.

‘Almost the longest of the year,’ he said, rising with the pert little dignity he put on when he felt rebuffed. ‘I can’t remember if the days are drawing in now, or still opening up.’ He looked at her, imagined she didn’t understand, and explained, ‘The solstice.’ Both laughed, because he had explained the obvious.

They returned to the waiting room and found it still full. The five-fifteen had departed. The aroma of hot dogs had intensified; it was suppertime. The three young people behind the counters had grown bored with the indefatigable emergency. They passed wisecracks back and forth between them, shrugged a great deal, and did not so much answer as indulge the angry press of anxiety before them. The girl with white hair was sipping coffee from a mug displaying the airline insignia. Jerry asked her if the six o’clock section was ready yet.

‘We have not received word, sir.’

‘But you said an hour ago there would be one.’

‘It will be announced, sir, as soon as definite word is received.’

‘But we
have
to get home. Our – baby-sitter has to go to a dance.’ How like Jerry Sally thought, to lie, when he did lie, so badly. A dance on Tuesday night? She and the girl looked at each other, and Jerry, exposed between them, nakedly asked the girl, ‘Is there any hope?’

‘We have requested a section from the head office and are awaiting word,’ the girl said, and turned away to sip her coffee in privacy.

Jerry looked so grim that Sally told him, ‘I’m hungry’ hoping to elicit one of his rude friendly jokes about her appetite. But he accepted the statement simply, as a responsibility, and, heavily retrieving his suitcase from behind a plastic chair, led her back through the blue and cream corridor to the bar. All the tables were full. He put the suitcase by a metal post and had her sit on it while he went to ask if they had sandwiches. He returned with two thin dry ham-and-cheeses and two paper cups of coffee. Why not a real drink? Perhaps he thought it would be indecent, in their predicament, or that they needed to keep their wits. At home Richard right now would be bringing her a gin and tonic, or a Daiquiri, or even a rum Collins or a gin daisy. She had bought him a cocktail shaker for their first Christmas, and even in their bitterest times he would ceremoniously bring her a sweet drink. She imagined that Richard would have made an occasion, somehow, out of this wait – an occasion at least for bluster and indignation.
A burly man with imperfect vision, he loved to come to grips. He loved kitchens, he loved to make the refrigerator tremble. She could taste now the Daiquiri he would bring. So cold.

Jerry ate standing above her, and the pose revived the actor in him. If the area was a stage, they were on the very lip. A constant shuffle of people passed a few feet from them. ‘I’ve figured out the bind I’m in,’ he told her. ‘It’s between death and death. To live without you is death to me. On the other hand, to abandon my family is a sin; to do it I’d have to deny God, and by denying God I’d give up all claim to immortality.’

Sally felt weak; what could she say to such an accusation? She tried to fit herself into his frame of mind; she could hardly believe that minds still existed in that frame.

Having gobbled his sandwich, he squatted, and murmured to her. She turned her head aside in embarrassment, and caught a familiar-looking man gazing at them from over by the bar. He averted his gaze; his little moustache, profiled against a neon advertisement, made a dab of green light under his nose. Jerry was murmuring, ‘I look at your face, and imagine myself lying in bed dying, and ask myself, “Is this the face I want at my death-bed?” And I don’t know. I honestly don’t
know
, Sally.’

‘You’re not going to die for a long time, Jerry, and you’ll have many women between me and then.’

‘I will
not.
You are my only woman, you’re the only woman I want. You were given to me in Heaven, and Heaven won’t let me have you.’

She felt he enjoyed making things impossible by
carrying them into these absurd absolutes, and furthermore she felt he enjoyed it because it punished her. Punished her for loving him. And she knew that in his mind this punishing was a kindness; his conscience insisted that he keep abrading her on the edges of pain that bounded their love. Yet she knew also that he did it like a child who states the worst, hoping to be contradicted. ‘You’re not a woman, Jerry, so I think you exaggerate what your leaving would do to Ruth.’

‘Really? What would it do? Tell me.’ Ruth was the one earthly topic that never failed to interest him.

‘Well, she’d be stunned, and very lonely, but she’d have the children, and she’d have – this is hard to say, but I remember it from the times I’ve been alone – she’d have the satisfaction of getting through every day by herself. It’s something marriage doesn’t give you. And then, of course, she would remarry.’

‘Do you think she would? Say yes.’

‘Of course she would. But – Jerry? Now don’t get mad.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘You ought to do it if you’re going to do it. I don’t know how much she guesses, or how much you tell her, but if you torture her the way you torture me –’

‘Do I torture you? God. I mean to do just the opposite.’

‘I know. But it – I… I don’t want to sell myself. I’ll come to you as long as I can, and you don’t have to marry me. But you mustn’t keep teasing me with the possibility. If it’s possible, and you want it, do it, Jerry; leave her, and let her make a new life. She’ll live.’

‘I wish I was sure of that. If only there was some
decent man who I know would marry her and take care of her – but every man we know, compared to me, is a clunk. Really. I’m not conceited, but that’s a fact.’

She wondered if that was why she loved him – that he could say something like that, and still look boyish, and expectant, and willing to be taught. ‘She won’t find another man until you leave her,’ Sally told him. ‘You can’t pick her new husband for her, Jerry; now that
is
conceited of you.’

Whenever she tried to puncture him, he seemed grateful.
Come on
, his grin seemed to say,
hurt me. Help me.
‘Well,’ he said, and put his coffee cup inside hers. ‘This has been very interesting. We’re just full of home truths.’

‘I guess we’re talked out,’ she said, trying to apologize.

‘It’s nice, isn’t it? It would be so nice for us to have said everything, and just be quiet together. But we’d better go back. Back to Pandemonium.’

Standing up, she said, ‘Thank you for the sandwich. It was very good.’

He told her, ‘You’re great. You’re a great blonde. When you get up, it’s like the flag being raised. I want to pledge allegiance.’ And in front of everyone he solemnly placed his hand over his heart.

The crowd had swelled; around the ticket counters it was impenetrable. The enormous hopelessness of their position broke upon her, and for the first time since noon Sally wanted to cry. Jerry turned to her and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get you home. What about renting a car?’

‘And driving all that way? Jerry, how
can
we?’

‘Well, don’t you feel we’ve had it, planewise?’

She nodded, and tears burned in her throat like a regurgitation. Jerry virtually ran; the skin of her heels seemed to be tearing loose as she chased him down the corridor. The automobile-rental booths were far away, three lonely islands side by side.

The Hertz girl wore yellow, the Avis girl red, the National girl green. Jerry had a Hertz credit card, and the girl in yellow said, ‘I’m sorry, all our cars have been taken. Everybody wants to go to New York.’

It was their destiny to be late. Everywhere they went, crowds had been there before them. Jerry protested ineffectually; indeed, he seemed relieved to have one more possibility closed, one more excuse for inaction provided. Richard would somehow have managed; nothing was too complicated for him to finagle, finagling was a sensuous pleasure for him. Richard’s shape, stocky but quick, moved in the corner of her eye; a man came up to them and said, ‘Did I hear you say New York? I’d be happy to share expenses with you.’ He was the man who had to be in Newark by seven o’clock. It was twenty of seven now.

The girl at Hertz called across the aisle to the girl at Avis, ‘Gina, do you have any more cars you can let go to New York?’

‘I doubt it but let me call the lot.’ Gina dialled, bracing the receiver between her shoulder and ear. Sally found herself wondering if Gina had ever been in love. She was a young girl, but with that sluggish facial expression, of satiety and discontent, that Italian girls got, Sally imagined, from being pressed too long against the breast of a sorrowing mother. Sally had run away from her
own sorrowing mother as soon as she could, fled into school and then marriage, and maybe that was why every sorrow came to her new, jagged and fresh and undreamed-of; she wondered, if every woman in the world carries this ache, how can it go on? How does anything in the world get done?

The tall green girl at the National desk asked, ‘Why does everybody want to go to New York. What’s in New York?’

‘The Liberty Bell,’ Jerry told her.

‘If I were you two,’ she said to him, ‘I’d take a cab back into the city and see a movie.’

Jerry asked her, ‘What’s good?’

The Hertz girl said, ‘My boyfriend liked
Last Year at Marienbad
but I thought it was terrible. The bushes didn’t have any shadows. “They call this art,” I said to him, and he said, “It
is
art.” ’