Marry Me (8 page)

The Avis girl called over, ‘There’s a new Doris Day and Rock Hudson downtown that everybody likes.’

Jerry said, ‘I love Doris Day. Hollywood should let her sing more.’ It saddened Sally to see how easily he talked with women, any women.

Gina put down the phone and said, ‘Alice, they have one just came in they’ll let go.’

And Alice, sweet chinless Alice with her easily pleased boyfriend, smiled bucktoothed and said, ‘There you are, sir. She’ll take care of you.’

‘Don’t forget me,’ the man who had to go to Newark said.

Jerry turned to the man, blushed, and explained, ‘My wife and I, I guess, would prefer to drive alone.’

The man stepped forward and shook Jerry’s hand.
‘My name’s Fancher. I make my home in Elizabeth, New Jersey and I’m in the chemical additives line. I don’t want to pressure you one way or another, but it would be a great kindness to me if I could ride along.’

Jerry gracefully clapped his long hand to the top of his head and said, ‘Well, let’s think about it. Let me get the car first.’

He dropped his Hertz credit card on Gina’s desk and she explained that since this was an Avis car she would need a cash deposit of twenty-five dollars.

‘But we don’t have twenty-five dollars, do we?’ Jerry asked Sally.

‘The tickets,’ she said.

Fancher stepped forward. ‘You want twenty-five dollars?’

She and Jerry studied each other, and the romance of driving together alone under moonlight, towards midnight and their fate, hung between them like a painted screen. ‘I’ll cash in the tickets,’ he said, ‘I’ll turn that girl’s hair really grey.’ To Gina he said, ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ To Sally he said, ‘You wait here and guard the car.’ He winced apologetically in Fancher’s face and flew away.

Long minutes passed. Mr Fancher stayed with her silently, touching his moustache, guarding her while she guarded the phantom automobile. The three girls, in the lull that had settled over their islands, chatted back and forth, about boyfriends and bathing suits. Sally felt dizzy. The acid taste kept rising in her throat; she felt sick of love. Love, love was what had clogged the world, it was love that refused to let the planes leave, love that hid her children from her, love that made her husband
look senile in profile. Fancher hovered close to her; he was in the chemical additives line and should be in Newark, yet she had promised to love and obey this man till death did them part.
Dear God, let go.
She held herself very upright and quiet, wondering if she would throw up. The cement floor was littered with cigarette filters and heel marks. The green girl from National was saying that she didn’t think she had the right figure for a bikini, being so tall, but her boyfriend bought her one for a joke, and now she wouldn’t wear anything else, it felt so free.

Red-faced from running, Jerry came back, Jerry with his sun-burned nose and elusive eyes and his beautiful look of being a kite. ‘Forget it,’ he announced, making a triumphant V with his arms, and including all four women in his emblematic embrace. To Fancher he said, ‘You can have the car. Good luck in Newark.’ He touched Sally’s arm and told her, ‘The girl at United says there’s going to be a section and to see a name she gave me.’ He showed her a slip of paper on which a hasty female hand had scribbled the one word ‘Cardomon’.

‘Have you seen him yet?’

‘No, he wasn’t there at the moment. Let’s go back and find him.’

‘Jerry your suitcase.’

‘Oh. Right. God, you’re so competent, Sally.’

Fancher said, ‘You said there’s a section? Then I don’t want the car either.’ He knifed past them and, moving with a quickness surprising in a stout man, beat them back to the waiting room.

Here an instinct of movement seemed to have seized the human tides; almost all the people were moving
towards the boarding gates. Jerry and Sally, alarmed, followed them out of the doors and down the corridor. A crowd had accumulated. A strange chant was going up; it seemed to Sally to be ‘The bridesmaid, the bridesmaid.’ She thought it was another hallucination, but it proved to be exactly what they were shouting. At the centre of the crowd the Negro in blue sunglasses was conferring with a sandy-haired man wearing a company coat and carrying a clipboard. Beside them, a shinily dressed arc of the middle-aged was urging forward, with deep Dixie accents, a girl in a flowered hat and a shimmering dress of yellow silk. Sally understood: she was a bridesmaid, and had to be on the plane or miss a wedding; or had she come from a wedding? The chant deepened. Jerry joined in. ‘The bridesmaid, the bridesmaid!’ Indignation bit into Sally’s stomach, and the press of tears overwhelmed her eyes. What was so unfair, the girl was not even pretty. She had a strawberry birthmark beside her nose and a tense wrinkled simper. The sandy man nodded to the Negro, who flashed his deep ironic smile and took the bridesmaid’s ticket. A cheer went up. The girl passed through the door. The gate clanged shut. The seven-fifteen flight to New York had departed.

Back in the waiting room, Jerry left Sally and went to look for Mr Cardomon. As she stood alone by the tired blue wall, a tall man came up to her and said gently, ‘Aren’t you Sally Mathias?’

It was Two Initials Wigglesworth. The two initials abruptly came to her: A.D. He asked, ‘Are you here with Dick?’ He spoke with a velvet smoothness; he was well shaped and very combed, and so wealthy that Richard
had fairly danced the few times he had come to the house.

‘No, I’m here by myself,’ she said. ‘I do this every so often. My mother lives in Georgetown. Are you trying to get to New York?’

‘No, I’m en route to St Louis. My flight leaves in half an hour. Could I get you a drink?’

‘That would be lovely,’ Sally said, ‘but I’m a standby and I think I’d better stay here. We’re waiting for a section.’ She adjusted the pronoun. ‘I’ve been here since three o’clock. It’s a grotesque mess.’

‘I do think you could use a drink.’ He smiled like a great brushed cat purring; he was perfectly handsome and perfectly repulsive, and beneath all his grooming he knew it.

‘I think I could too,’ she said, glancing around for Jerry. He wasn’t anywhere.

Wigglesworth interpreted her glancing around as acquiescence, and took her arm. She snapped it away. She hadn’t realized how tense she was. ‘I’m sorry’ she said. ‘I’m honestly on the verge of tears; Richard expected me back by supper.’

‘It makes one rather miss the dear old trains, doesn’t it?’ he said soothingly, offended.

‘What are you going to do in St Louis?’ she asked. She felt the tight mask of charm fitting across her face; felt herself, unstoppably beginning to flirt.

‘Oh, very dreary. Banking business, a rail merger. A desperation move. I loathe the Midwest.’

‘Do you?’

‘Tell me, how did Dick do with his Canadian oil issue? I was fascinated, but I couldn’t interest Father.’

‘I never heard about it. He never tells me anything. How is Bea?’ She had been groping for his wife’s name, remembering only the woman’s waxen ballerina’s face and that her name, too, was some sort of initial.

‘Very
well. We have two children now.’

‘Do you? That’s wonderful. Another girl?’

‘Another boy. Are you sure you wouldn’t like that drink?’

‘It’s tempting,’ Sally said.

‘Have you heard about Jamie Babson? He’s married again – a spectacular Indonesian girl. She does simultaneous translation at the U.N.’

‘Yes. He would like that.’

Wigglesworth laughed; his teeth were immaculate, but small for his face. ‘And Bink Hubbard – I know Richard has met him – has disappeared in Florida; the rumour has it he’s shipped out on a Liberian freighter again.’

‘I don’t think I know him.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. He’s one of those men other men rather envy.’

‘Yes, there is that kind of man.’ Sally sounded mechanical to herself. Push, pull, push, pull: a real whore.

Wigglesworth gazed over her head and asked, ‘Isn’t that Jerry Conant?’

‘Where? Do you know Jerry?’

‘Of course. Doesn’t he live rather near you out there?’

He glanced down, his immaculate eyebrows (did he pluck between them?) lifted at the intensity of her concern. ‘Through Ruth,’ he explained. ‘My parents went to her father’s church. She was considered quite a beauty.’

‘She still is.’

‘Nobody ever understood quite why she married Jerry.’

And there he was. She felt him in the side of her vision when he was still far away coming back from the counters. She felt him hesitate, then decide to approach. His voice, close to her ear, harshly announced, ‘Anno Domini Wigglesworth, the Rock of Ages himself.’

‘Jerry Are you stranded here too?’

‘Apparently I’ve been looking for a mythical man called Cardomon who’s supposed to unstrand us.’

‘You and Mrs Mathias?’

‘Yes, Mrs Mathias and I seem to be caught in the same pickle.’ He looked down at his hand, which held two tickets. He held them up. ‘I’ve taken over negotiations for her. Do you have a reservation?’

‘Yes.’

‘How would you feel about giving it to Sally?’

‘Splendid – but I’m going to St Louis.’

Jerry turned to Sally and said, ‘Maybe we should go to St Louis. We could get on a raft and float down the Mississippi.’

She laughed, shocked. How dare he tease her, right in the teeth of disaster!

Wigglesworth’s smile had become fixed, and from the heightened composure of both men’s faces she knew she had become an object, a body, between them. ‘I was just telling Sally,’ Wigglesworth said, ‘that Jamie Babson has married an Indonesian.’

‘Excellent,’ Jerry said. ‘Miscegenation is the only permanent solvent for world tensions. Kennedy knows it, too.’

‘Come, Jerry,’ the other man said. ‘When did you get religion? I thought you were stooging for the State Department.’

They were fighting over her. Sally’s sick dread returned, a desire to sleep; she thought of Richard’s sitting alone, puzzled, worried for her, sipping his second Martini, and she yearned to faint, to sink down into the trafficked, dirty floor, into the spaces between the cigarette filters, and awake at his feet. The men talked on, bantering angrily through her daze, until Wigglesworth, routed by Jerry’s superior rudeness, said, ‘I believe it’s time for me to board. Good luck to both of you.’ And in his farewell, in the way he bowed from his rigid height, there was something genuinely gracious, almost a blessing. Only a stuffed shirt could have brought it off.

Jerry was sulky and opaque. Had it come, his hating her? She asked him, ‘You didn’t find Cardomon?’

‘No. He doesn’t exist. Do you think it’s a code? Cardomon spelled backwards is Nom-o-drac.’ The eight o’clock flight to St Louis was announced and Wigglesworth, staring straight ahead, chin high, was carried out of the waiting room on a river of briefcases. Jerry took Sally’s hands. ‘You’re trembling.’

‘A little. That upset me.’

‘Does he see Richard often?’

‘Almost never. He snubs Richard.’

‘He won’t say anything. There’d be no percentage in it for him. He’ll save this on the chance he can use it with you.’

‘He’s right, isn’t he? I mean, what he saw me as, I am.’

‘What did he see you as?’

‘Don’t make me say it, Jerry.’

Jerry mulled this refusal. ‘Actually’ he said, ‘you’d be much better off with him than with me. He’d get you on a Goddamn plane, I know that.’

‘Jerry.’

‘Mm?’

‘Don’t blame yourself. You told me not to come.’

‘But I wanted you to come. You know that. That’s why you came.’

‘I came for myself, too.’

He sighed. ‘Oh, Sally’ he said. ‘You’re so kind to me.’ He looked at the tickets in his hand and put them into his side coat pocket and looked up at her wearily. A little smile of regret brightened his face. ‘Hey?’

‘Hi.’

‘Let’s get married.’

‘Please, Jerry.’

‘No, let’s. The hell with this. We can’t get back. God has spoken.’

‘I don’t think you mean it.’

His voice was listless. ‘No. I do. You act like a wife to me. You look like Mrs Conant to me.’

‘But I’m not, Jerry. I’d like to be.’

‘O.K., then. Proposal accepted. I don’t see any other way but to go back to the hotel and call up Ruth and Richard and eventually get married. It’s the only thing I can think of. I’m tired right now, but I think I’ll be very happy.’

‘I’ll try to make you happy.’

‘I think we can get your children. The courts don’t really care who commits the adultery any more.’

‘Are you sure it’s what you want?’

‘Of course. I didn’t think it would come quite this way, but I’m glad it’s come.’ Still he didn’t move. She waited there beside him, her heart a perfect blank. Joy and sorrow, fear and hope – all the things that had been crowding upon her had dispersed. There was even an empty space of floor around them. People were clamouring and gesturing, but she heard only silence. She became aware that she was thirsty and that the blisters on her heels hurt. She could take off her shoes in the hotel room. Later, they could get a drink in the bar.

The girl with unnaturally white hair advanced into the empty space around them. ‘Mr and Mrs Conant? I’ve found Mr Cardomon.’ She was followed by a sandy man wearing an airlines jacket and carrying a clipboard. Sally had seen him before; when?

Jerry lurched explosively away from her. He pulled out his tickets. They were tattered and looked worthless. He explained, stammering, ‘We’ve been trying to get on a New York plane since three this afternoon and turned down a car rental because we were told there was going to be a section.’

Mr Cardomon asked, ‘Could I have your numbered standby passes?’ While he examined them, he rubbed the underside of his nose with a knuckle. Then he examined both their faces, constantly returning his fingers to the itch on his nose. Sally felt that she and the white-haired girl were standing on tip-toe. A tender, very distant scent of sweat came to her from Jerry’s neck. Mr Cardomon wrote on the clipboard, saying to himself, ‘Conant, two.’ Then he lifted up his youthful head of sandy curly hair and showed Sally that his eyes were
grey, the colour of aluminium. He knew. He told Jerry, ‘Miss March will staple boarding passes to your tickets.’