The Amateur Marriage (30 page)

He had laughed at himself for these notions. He had given a little huff of a laugh all alone in a room. But still, from time to time he had indulged in them.

Pagan began to practice a whole new style of speech. “Right on!” he would say, at every conceivable opportunity, and “Personally, no,” or “Personally, yes.”

“Would you like another ear of corn, Pagan?”

“Personally, no.”

Michael gathered that this was the way people talked at the Maestro School. Also, “Some of us do; some of us don’t.” Or “Some of us are; some of us aren’t.”

“Will you be spending this Sunday night at my place, Pagan?”

“Some of us will; some of us won’t.”

“What is
that
supposed to mean?” Michael exploded.

Pagan just raised one eyebrow—another recent development.

And his clothes; oh, Lord. Leather sandals with no socks—for a boy!—and baggy drawstring pants without a front fly, for heaven’s sake, and an influx of new T-shirts (though somehow they already looked old) advertising names like the Band and James Taylor. James Taylor was his hero. Pagan would sit on Michael’s couch, not on the seat but on the back of it with his bare feet tucked between the cushions, and languidly strum a few chords and sing in a nasal drawl about him and his guitar always in the same mood, or don’t let him be lonely tonight, or never been to Mexico but sure would like to go. He had a chrome-hinged black guitar case now (evidently it was considered gauche to carry an instrument naked, even if one’s sole form of transportation was a Buick Regal sedan), and this too looked old, in spite of its staggering cost, because he had plastered it with bumper stickers and might even (Michael suspected) have given it a few purposeful kicks and scuffs. From the looks of it, you would think he’d spent decades hitching around the country playing for free drinks in seamy bars.

Anna said he had talent. She said that Mr. Britt, Pagan’s teacher, had mentioned how quickly he caught on to things.

“Well, I don’t know where he gets it from,” Michael told her. “The Antons have never been musical.”

They were sitting on the front porch at the school. Michael had noticed her in the porch swing as he drove up into the yard and he’d told Pagan, “Guess I’ll go say hello to Mrs. Stuart”—referring to her in this formal style because both last week and the week before he had invented reasons to come inside when he dropped Pagan off, and he didn’t want Pagan getting any ideas. “Why don’t I meet this Mr. Britt of yours,” he’d said to Pagan the first time, and “Let’s have a look at your practice room” the second. On both occasions Anna had seemed pleased to see him, had greeted him graciously and appeared to have no trouble finding conversational topics. She’d inquired the first time about his old store, whether it still existed, and asked where he lived now and how he liked it and described her own living arrangements (a house just off Falls Road that she was renting with an option to buy). Their second encounter took place after she had learned that her daughter was coming for a visit, and that provided all kinds of material on the subject of children in general. “Of course, now, Lindy,” Michael had said, “our oldest . . .” and he had paused, not certain how much Anna knew.

Anna had said, “It must be hard not to have any idea of her whereabouts.”

“Yes,” he’d said. “You never do get used to it. It seems you ought to, but you don’t.”

She had nodded but asked no questions. She wasn’t a prying kind of person, he’d noticed.

Now Michael toed the porch swing back and forth as they watched the students arriving—long-haired teenagers wearing ragged shorts or those absurd drawstring pants, and the dancers (a separate species) all angles in their clingy black leggings that must have felt miserable in this heat. Anna herself wore what amounted to her uniform—a white cotton shirt, short-sleeved to show suntanned arms lightly dusted with freckles, and tailored slacks, gray today, and flat black oxfords. “Elizabeth gets here tomorrow,” she was saying, “and it didn’t occur to me till this morning that I’ll have to plan some kind of meatless meals. She’s a vegetarian.”

“We had one of those for a while,” Michael said. “Karen. Our youngest.”

“Did Karen eat seafood?”

“Nope. But she ate dairy.”

“Elizabeth eats seafood, at least. So it won’t be all that difficult. In fact I may just pick up some crabmeat tonight if I have time after work.”

“Why don’t I bring you some,” Michael said.

She hesitated.

“We’ve got great crabmeat at the store,” he said. “Trucked in fresh every day. I could pack a pound in crushed ice and deliver it to your house.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice of you, but—”

“And then maybe you could invite me in for a drink.”

She studied him for a moment—long enough so that he felt the need to backpedal. “I mean, not that you’d be
obliged
to,” he said. “I would still bring you the crab even without the drink.”

“I’d be delighted to give you a drink,” she said, “but you’ll have to let me pay for the crab.”

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“Then I couldn’t possibly accept it.”

They looked at each other.

“How about this,” Michael said. “I don’t let you pay for the crab, but you would fix me dinner.”

Her smile deepened; it seemed to be concealing laughter.

“What,” he said.

“If I fix you dinner I’ll have to go grocery-shopping first,” she said. “So I might as well just pick up a pound of crabmeat while I’m there.”

“No, wait!” he said. “Okay, I take it back. How about
two
drinks? No supper, but two drinks. Three?”

Both of them were laughing now. “Three drinks!” she said. “How would you drive home? All right, you bring the crab, I won’t offer to pay, and I’ll send out for Chinese.”

“It’s a deal,” he said.

Behind them, the screen door opened and Pagan said, “You’re still here!”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” Michael asked.

“Some of us are; some of us aren’t,” Pagan said, and he let the screen door fall shut again.

Anna lived on a tiny street a mile or so south of the school. Her house was a plain white clapboard, the narrow, tall, peaked, rectangular shape of the hotels in a Monopoly game, with a patchy front yard and overgrown shrubs. When Michael rang the doorbell she appeared immediately, looking somehow more put together—freshened up in some way—although she wore the same shirt and slacks he’d seen her in that morning. “Crab man!” he said, singing it out like a street arab, and he held up the plastic bag with its knobby, ice-filled bottom.

She took it from him and said, “Why, thank you,” and then, peering down inside, “Jumbo lump! You didn’t have to do that.”

“None but the best for grown daughters,” he said.

But what he really felt was, none but the best for Anna.

He followed her through a living room furnished with decent but elderly furniture and into the kind of kitchen he hadn’t seen in years—an expanse of rubbed-down blue linoleum, a sink on porcelain legs, a round-cornered refrigerator, and a huge electric range that must have dated from the forties. A person could have roller-skated in that kitchen; it was so large and spare. “Nice,” he told Anna, who was putting the crab away.

She must have thought he was joking, because she laughed. He said, “No, I mean it. Look at that counter! No mixer, no blender, no toaster . . .”

“I’ve moved around so much,” she said, “I haven’t had a chance to accumulate many belongings.” She shut the refrigerator door and turned to face him. “What can I get you to drink?”

“A beer would be good, if you have it.”

“Of course,” she said, and she opened the fridge again. The beer she took out was imported, fancier than he was used to. He wondered if she kept it for herself or for someone else. Was there a man in her life? This past couple of weeks he had been picturing her alone, complete unto herself, but how likely would that be for a woman as attractive as Anna? She was pouring herself a sherry now, moving in a slow, fluid way that reminded him of the dance students at the Maestro School.

In the living room, they settled at either end of the couch and then she said, “Oh! I didn’t ask if you wanted a glass.”

“I’m just an old Polack, remember?” he said. “I drink my beer from the bottle.”

He never referred to himself as a Polack. It must have been the influence of this house—its comfortable air of not trying too hard, not needing to try, taking its own gentility for granted. His mother’s doilies and crucifixes and even Pauline’s “modern” furniture seemed so earnest by comparison. He took a sip of the beer, which had a denser taste than his usual brand. “Where is it you’ve moved around to?” he asked. “Just Baltimore? Or all over.”

“Mostly out west,” she told him. “When Paul died Elizabeth was only ten, and I knew I’d have to get a job, so I went to Idaho where my in-laws lived. Then I taught at a school in Cleveland until it closed, and then in Albuquerque. And now here I am! I feel lucky. Faculty positions in music aren’t easy to find.”

Michael cleared his throat. He said, “Was your husband’s death very sudden?”

“No, he had leukemia.”

This answered Michael’s question, all right, but now he realized it wasn’t what he’d wanted to know. What he’d meant was, had she loved her husband? Did she still miss him? He cleared his throat again and drew a line through the dew on his beer bottle.

“We met during the war,” she told him. “I guess shortly after you and Pauline got married. I remember you two couldn’t come to the wedding because Pauline was too pregnant to travel.”

“Oh, right,” Michael said, although he had no recollection of that.

“Are you and Pauline still close, at all?”

The question was so like the question he’d wished he could ask her that he felt a little flicker of hope. He sat forward and collected his thoughts. “No, we’re not,” he told her. “Of course, we’re in touch. We have to be. We have our children and their various, you know, events; not to mention Pagan. But I look at her sometimes and I think, Imagine! Once this woman and I were married. It seems so odd, as if . . . oh, as if I’d been another person back then. I’d been this distant acquaintance I’d heard of who married a woman named Pauline a long, long time ago.”

What he was saying was the truth, as accurate as he could deliver. So why, all at once, did another thought occur to him? He thought of a day last spring when he had dropped by Pauline’s office—something about a check or a signature that she’d needed in a hurry. There she’d been, behind her little window in the waiting room, conversing cozily with two other receptionists as she sorted a stack of folders. “If that is not just like you!” she’d been saying, with a chuckle beneath her words, and in the instant before she’d raised her head and caught sight of him, he had had time to wonder how it could be that he’d once felt that he would suffocate if he couldn’t get away from this woman. She wasn’t evil, after all. She hadn’t cheated on him, abused their children, drunk too much or gambled. In fact she was better than he was, in some ways—kinder and more open, the one who had friends. Had their troubles been solely
his
troubles?

As if she had read his mind, Anna said, “I always did admire Pauline.”

He considered that word, “admire,” reflecting on its possible undertones.

She said, “I didn’t actually know her that well, though we went to the same high school. She belonged to a different crowd. But I liked her peppy spirit, and she never snubbed the rest of us the way some in her group did.”

“You were with her the day she and I met, though,” Michael reminded her.

“Oh, yes, on account of Pearl Harbor. Wasn’t that a time? We were all in it together, seems like; all caught up in it. What we didn’t know yet! I lost my brother in that war.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I don’t think I ever heard that.”

She gazed down into her sherry glass. Her face was a series of ovals, Michael noticed—an oval itself containing long brown oval eyes and an oval mouth without that central notch in the upper lip that most people had; and then there was the smooth oval of her head with the hair turned under so neatly all around. He had never before considered what a restful shape an oval was.

Anna said, “Pauline, and Wanda Bryk, and . . . who was the other girl that day?”

“Katie Vilna.”

“Katie. Yes. She and Wanda stopped to help after Pauline cut her forehead.”

“They’re still around,” Michael told her. “I think Pauline still gets together with them every so often.”

“And how about you?” Anna asked.

“Me?”

“Do you keep up with your old neighbors?”

“Oh, not so much. I see something of my friend Leo, and from time to time I check on Mrs. Serge, who used to live next door to us. I’m not really very sociable, though.”

“Me neither,” Anna said.

“You’re not?”

“You’re my first guest since I’ve moved here.”

“Is that a fact,” he said. He glanced around the room. He thought now he should have paid it some compliment. “You’ve done a fine job settling in,” he said. “I’ve lived in my place six years and I don’t even have any pictures up.”

“Do you not want any pictures?”

“Oh, yes. It’s just that I don’t know what I would hang.”

She tilted her head and looked at him, and he felt he could guess what she was thinking. She was thinking that
she
would know what to hang. Pauline, in the same situation, would have stated as much; Pauline was always so sure that she could set other people’s lives straight. But Anna kept her own counsel. It was Michael who said, finally, “Maybe you could advise me?”

“Well,” she said. “Maybe.”

And then, a moment later, “I’m not sure if it would work, though.”

She probably had no idea why he smiled at her so warmly.

The next Saturday afternoon, when her daughter’s visit was over, Anna came to Michael’s apartment and they walked through it together counting up the number of walls in need of pictures. Then they went to a shop in Towson that sold inexpensive framed reproductions. Pagan went too, since this was one of the days he stayed at Michael’s. He didn’t seem to find it odd that a member of the Maestro music faculty was helping his grandfather buy artwork. Anna said, “What about you, Pagan? What would you like in your bedroom?”