The Amateur Marriage (33 page)

He would have introduced Anna, or reintroduced her, but just then the service started. A priest he’d never seen before stepped up to the altar and the organ changed its tone of voice, after which six weedy young boys wheeled a gleaming casket forward. These must be Mrs. Serge’s grandsons. Michael seemed to recall that Joey had had a whole swarm of children.

Anna sat just close enough for him to feel the warmth of her arm and the slight motion of her breathing. At some point, she placed her hand next to his and he took hold of it, gratefully, and folded his fingers around it. His thoughts wandered to an evening the week before when she was leaving his apartment and he had said, “Don’t go,” and she had said, “Stay?” and he had said, “Stay.” And for a moment it had seemed that she might, because she smiled at him so seriously. But then she’d leaned forward to kiss his cheek—not his lips but his cheek—and said good night and left. He wished now he hadn’t been so forward. He hoped he hadn’t ruined things.

At the end of the service, when Leo’s wife turned to resume their conversation, he had to resist the impulse to drop Anna’s hand like a hot potato. In this neighborhood he was still a guilty, furtive boy. And when Mrs. Brunek said, “Give my love to Pauline, hear? That poor, poor woman, having to raise her grandson all on her own,” he hunched his shoulders stoically and made no effort to defend himself.

It was barely past eleven o’clock; the service had been a short one. “Didn’t I promise you’d be back in plenty of time?” he asked Anna as they descended the steps. They weren’t going on to the cemetery. “We can have a bite to eat, even. Shall I take you out to lunch?”

“No, thanks, I’ll grab something at home,” she said. “There’s a lot I’d like to get done before I go to school.”

This was the kind of thing that kept him off balance. Didn’t
he
have a lot to get done? But he would gladly have postponed everything for Anna’s sake. Anna, evidently, didn’t feel the same way.

He was quiet on the drive to her house. Anna glanced at him from time to time, but she didn’t comment.

On the off ramp from I-83, merging onto Northern Parkway, they were crowded to one side by a speeding sports car. Michael had taken note of the car several minutes before. He already knew the driver was a maniac. So he slid over easily, without any sense of emergency. Anna, though, was less prepared. She flinched, and then she laughed at herself. “Sorry,” she told Michael.

“That’s okay,” he said.

They reached Falls Road and he turned left. He was replaying her reaction in his mind—her sharp intake of breath and her involuntary recoil. Always before she’d sat so calmly, the most relaxed and uninvolved passenger. She had never so much as pressed her brake foot to the floor.

He flicked his turn signal on and took another left at Wickridge Street, then a right into Anna’s driveway, where he came to a stop.

“Thank you, Michael,” she said. “Are we still meeting for dinner tomorrow?” She had a hand poised on the door handle.

“I think you like me,” Michael told her.

There was a brief, shocked pause. Even he was shocked.

Then she said, “I think I love you.”

They started spending their weeknights together, usually at her place because her place was cozier. Lying on his back in the dark, his left arm needles and pins from the weight of her head on his shoulder, Michael marveled at how natural this felt. They might have been an old married couple. In her sleep she had a way of grasping his free hand and flattening it against her stomach as if she owned it, which tickled him; awake, she was not so bold. She wore cotton pajamas to bed, always white. She woke up cheerful but quiet; she didn’t like to talk in the early morning. She was modest to a fault and turned away from him as she dressed.

They told each other their darkest secrets. Anna had fallen out of love with her husband some time before he died; Michael worried he was to blame for what had happened with Lindy. “I think I wasn’t a close enough father,” he said. “I remember how relieved I was when I found out she was a girl, because then less would be demanded of me.”

Anna always listened through a whole story before she commented. He appreciated that. Then she asked questions, sometimes unexpected ones. For instance: “What if Lindy wasn’t really Pagan’s mother?”

“What?”

“How can you be sure she wasn’t just watching him for a friend? You remember how it was in those days, all that communal living, those young people acting like one big extended family.”

“Well, in fact we
can
be sure,” Michael said. “We tracked down his birth certificate before he started school. Lindy was his mother, but his father wasn’t named.”

“Someone Spanish,” Anna said meditatively. “Considering his hair and those brown, brown eyes.”

Another time she asked why he and Pauline hadn’t gone to a marriage counselor. Michael said, “What for? What would we have said was wrong?”

“Just that you were unhappy, I guess.”

“I think you have to give them a better reason,” Michael said. “Like ‘She did this’ and ‘He did that.’ It doesn’t work if you’re simply not the right type for each other.”

“But you were the right types when you first met.”

“You know, I can’t even remember what I was thinking back then,” Michael said. “Maybe I just wanted a girlfriend. I was young and I wanted a girl and Pauline was the one who was there.”

Anna studied him. He could say anything to her. She never overreacted the way Pauline used to do. She didn’t take things personally; she didn’t say, for instance, “But I was
also
there!” although she certainly could have. And she never stored up his confessions to use against him later.

On weekends they spent their nights separately, because of Pagan. Michael agreed that this was the right thing to do, but he couldn’t help chafing against it as Saturday and Sunday dragged on. Pagan had reached the stage of life where friends were more important than family—a small crew of boys dating from his elementary-school days, and lately a few girls as well. Often he’d be out till ten or eleven at night, and there Michael sat, alone, and Anna sat alone at her place for no practical purpose. “This is ridiculous,” Michael told her on the phone. “I’m just a doorman! My only function is to let the kid in the door when his curfew rolls around.”

“That’s very noble of you,” she said teasingly, and then he had to laugh.

Pagan got along well with Anna face to face. At least, he was perfectly amiable when she showed up on weekends. In her absence, though, he campaigned against her. Or maybe not so much against her as in favor of Pauline. “I don’t understand why you and Grandma don’t get back together,” he would say. “It’s so silly! You’re married!”

“Well, actually we’re not,” Michael said.

“My friends don’t know where I am when they want to get in touch with me.”

“Oh, is
that
what the problem is,” Michael said.

Young people were amazingly self-centered. Even his grown children, not so young at all anymore, had sulked like two-year-olds when he filed for divorce. “This is not the normal order of things,” George had told him. “There are supposed to be two of you.”

“There
are
two,” Michael had pointed out.

“Two together. Two parents.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, George, you’re a parent yourself by now; what do you care? Besides, it’s not as if there was anything I could do about it. Your mother told me to leave, remember?”

“She’d been telling you to leave for years. That didn’t mean you had to go.”

Unreasonable, the lot of them. Next to them Anna was like cool, clear water.

Christmas that year was bare and brown, not a snowflake to be seen, but in January a good foot of snow fell during the course of one night. Michael woke unusually late on a Sunday morning to find his bedroom filled with an eerie white glow, and when he rose and looked out the window he saw that the trees had turned into white pipe-cleaners and the cars down in the parking lot were igloos.

He went to Pagan’s bedroom door and knocked and stuck his head in. Here the curtains were closed, so that the light was gloomy and the air smelled used and musty. Pagan was just a mound beneath the blankets, breathing snuffily. Michael said, “Hey. Guess what, it snowed.”

Pagan stirred and groaned.

“I’m going to have to go shovel Grandma’s walk,” Michael told him.

No response.

“So you’ll need to get your own self up and dressed in time for Anna’s. Do you remember we’re invited to Anna’s for waffles? I’ll expect you to be ready by the time I’m back, say at a quarter to ten.”

Pagan said, “Mmf.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Mmf.”

Michael hoped for the best and closed the door.

By the time he’d showered, shaved, dressed, and located his gloves and the boots he hadn’t worn since last winter, it was almost nine o’clock. The sidewalk at the rear of the building had been cleared but the parking lot was still buried, and he had to wade to his car laboriously and then kick away the drifts that were piled up against the door before he could get it open. First he started the engine and turned on the heater and defroster. Then he began scooping armloads of snow off the roof and windshield. His scraper would have been too puny; this was deep, billowing snow, but so fluffy that when he started driving it compacted easily beneath his wheels. He had no trouble reaching the street and traveling the short distance to Elmview Acres.

Pauline’s front walk was an untouched stretch of white. It was a pity he couldn’t start shoveling inward from the curb, because his boots left corrugated prints that would be harder to remove. Taking as few steps as possible, he made his way to the door and pressed the bell. Pauline appeared at once wearing a red ski jacket and a white knit hat with a pompom. “I just phoned you!” she said. “No one answered.”

“Shoot, that means Pagan must have gone back to sleep.”

“I thought I was going to have to shovel the walk myself!”

Other women did that all the time, but Michael didn’t say so. In a way, he sort of enjoyed performing these duties—the husbandly tasks that she still expected of him, married or not. It made him feel responsible and accomplished. He was aware of an added swagger in his stride when he set off toward the carport where she kept the shovel.

The snow was almost weightless, and shoveling it was like shoveling clouds. He dug swiftly from the house to the curb, and then he worked toward the driveway where he cleared a path for Pauline’s car. Pauline followed with a broom, sweeping the last thin haze of white that he left on the concrete. “Wasn’t this a shock!” she called. “I woke up and looked out the window and I couldn’t believe my eyes!” Her voice rang bell-like in the clear air, and her face was bright-pink and cheery. Evidently the snow had made her forget her resentment. Michael forgot it too; he stood smiling at her when he’d finished, watching as she whisk-whisked her way toward him. She was wearing red mittens, and her knit cap concealed her sculpted, middle-aged hairdo. Only a few ruffles of blond poked out around the edges, reminding him of how she had looked as a girl.

“What about your pipes?” he asked her. “Are you remembering to leave the basement faucet trickling?”

“Well, not up till now, but I guess I ought to start.”

“At least for tonight you should,” he said. “Keep an eye on the thermometer. I’d say anytime it falls into the teens, you ought to leave that tap on.”

“Would you like some coffee, Michael? I’ve just made up a fresh pot. I’ve decided I’m skipping church today.”

“Oh!” He fumbled his jacket cuff away from his watch. “No, thanks. I’d better be going,” he told her. He walked back to the carport and set the shovel in the corner. Other tools were clumped there in a tangle—a hoe, a rake, an edger—and he realigned them against the side of the house before he returned to the driveway. “I have to collect Pagan,” he said.

“I’ll bet he’s thrilled with the snow,” Pauline said.

“He would be, if he’d wake up.”

“He’s like George at that age. Remember? George would sleep till it got dark again, if we’d let him.”

“Must be something adolescent,” Michael said.

He was walking toward the curb now, with Pauline close behind. When he reached his car he turned, and she stopped and looked up at him, hugging herself against the cold. “Thank you, Michael, for coming,” she said. “I don’t know how I would cope if I had to handle all this myself—the snow, the pipes . . .”

“That’s okay.”

As he drove off he saw her in his rearview mirror, waving one fat red mitten like a child.

It was ten till ten when he got back to the apartment, but Pagan wasn’t even awake, let alone ready to leave for Anna’s. Michael said, “Hey! What happened here?” and he yanked the curtains open. Now the stuffy smell depressed him, and the swamp of cast-off clothes littering the floor. “Pagan? Hear me? Up and at ‘em! Anna’s waiting for us!”

Pagan stirred and groaned and sat up. One cheek was creased from his pillowcase, and his eyes were slits. “Did you know it snowed?” Michael asked.

“Mmf.”

“Look out the window!”

Pagan looked but then flopped backward onto his bed.

“Anna’s fixing waffles, Pagan. We should have left five minutes ago.”

“Do I have to come?”

“Yes, you do,” Michael told him firmly. Then he went out to the living room to phone Anna and say they’d be late. Her line was busy, though. He supposed she was talking to her daughter. Sunday was their usual telephone time.

Once Pagan was up and dressed, he showed more interest in the snow. “This is great!” he told Michael as they walked toward the car. “You think they’ll close the schools tomorrow?”

“Who knows?” Michael said. “They might.”

“Darn, I don’t have my sled! Let’s drop by Grandma’s and get it.”

“We’re late as it is, Pagan. We’ll pick it up after Anna’s.”