The Marriage of Sticks

by Jonathan Carroll

  I wasn’t afraid to be in the kitchen again. Opening the front door an hour before and stepping into the house, I had been, but it passed. I turned on all the lights and walked from room to room. Sometimes I said out loud, too loud, “Hello?” But that had only been to fill the space and the silence around me. When I had seen that every room was empty, I was okay. I was even able to walk into the kitchen and look out the window at the backyard again. Night had come and there was nothing to see out there.

  I turned on the radio and was pleased to hear the last part of Keith Jarrett’s Kцln Concert, one of my favorite pieces of music. Set the table and eat something so you have strength. I took a canary yellow place mat out of a drawer, and a large blue plate from the cupboard.

  The refrigerator was full of Hugh’s things—the Lavazza coffee he liked so much, the fiery Jamaican sauce he used to make jerk chicken, sesame oil, lime pickle. I saw them and knew each could break my heart if I started thinking about them. There were the cheese and apples, and now it was time to eat. Take them out. Close the door. Remember to clean out the refrigerator sometime soon so you don’t keep bumping into those things.

  When the Jarrett finished, some awful grating jazz replaced it. I switched the radio off. The silence around me was suddenly huge and rising like a tidal wave, so I quickly turned on the small television across the kitchen table. Hugh loved TV and made no excuses for watching infomercials, bowling, mindless situation comedies. Oddly, he usually watched standing up, even if it meant standing there for hours. At first having him standing two feet away while watching Friends made me uncomfortable, but gradually I grew to like it.

  Part of living with someone is growing to enjoy their eccentricities. Hugh Oakley sometimes slept in his socks. He wrote notes to himself on his index finger in green ink, was suspicious of microwave ovens, and watched television standing up.

  What do you do with your love for someone when they die? Or the memories they’ve left? Do you pack them up in moving boxes and write strange names for them across the top? Then where do you put them and the rest of a life you were supposed to share with a person who left without warning?

  Switching through the channels, I thought of Hugh’s box marked “Tarzan Hotel” and how he enjoyed not knowing what was inside. He’d once said, “Never try to avoid the rain by walking close to a building. You always get hit by the big drops falling from the roof.” Thoughts, pictures, memories of him flooded me.

  I would have been swept away if a high tweedly whistle from the television set hadn’t begun playing “Ring’s End Rose,” a happy Irish song about new love that was one of Hugh’s favorites. Before I focused on the TV to see why it was being played, I thought, This is what it’s going to be like now and maybe forever—everything will be Hugh Oakley. I’d better get used to it or it will drive sorrow and remembrance into me like a mallet driving a stake into soft earth.

  On the television screen, Hugh sat by the side of a swimming pool playing an Irish pennywhistle. In the pool, Charlotte and the now familiar little boy held hands and danced together to his music.

  Hugh looked ten years older—heavier and redder in the face, less hair, the kind of slow carefulness in his movements you see in aging people. He might have been in his late fifties. His great years had passed; he was at the age where you take what you can get. But his expression blazed happiness watching the two dancers, and it came through in the way he played.

  Charlotte looked gorgeous. Although she was a decade younger than Hugh, she too looked older than when I had last seen her. Her still lovely figure was accented by a simple black one-piece bathing suit that emphasized her high square shoulders and long neck. Her platinum hair was cut very short and smart. She wore minimal, chic steel-rim eyeglasses. The severe, scaled-down look suited her brilliantly. It said, Yes, I’m older, but I know exactly what to do with it: pare my beauty to its essence so that what’s left shows only the best.

  “Daddy, come in! You promised you’d come in.”

  “Daddy’s happy playing for us, honey. Come on, let’s you and me dance some more.”

  They did, and there was so much love around the three of them that I cringed. Hugh played “Foggy Dew.” Hugh was on television. Hugh ten years older, balder. Hugh still alive but with Charlotte again. And their son.

  They danced and splashed and sang along. Still playing, Hugh stood up and did a jig by the side of the pool. The boy jumped around and threw himself into Charlotte’s arms. Her glasses flew off but with the most beautifully precise gesture she snatched them out of the air before they hit the water.

  When he had finished playing, Hugh walked into the house. The boy grabbed onto the side of the pool and tried calling him back. Hugh only waved and kept going. He went through the kitchen, the living room, out to the front porch. Opening a mailbox there, he took out a handful of letters and magazines. Shuffling through, he didn’t stop until he uncovered an oversized postcard.

  On the front was a photograph of a picturesque port with whitewashed buildings set against a green hillside and the bluest sky. He turned the card over. The handwriting was instantly recognizable. Mine.

  Hugh,

  I’m on Samos and it’s nice. Traveling here has been good for me because the Greeks are in no hurry. It’s easy to follow their lead. I saw a man drive his motorbike right into a taverna, they give you a whole lemon to squeeze over your calamari, and the air smells of hot flowers.

  I often eat at a place called the Soapy Grill. They make a delicious gyro sandwich of pita bread, lamb, french fries, and tzatziki. It reminds me of the ones you used to make for us. What was that line? Even a single hair casts its shadow. In this case, it’s a single sandwich.

  When does it end, Hugh? When will I be able to go around a corner of my life and not run into you, your sandwiches, your ghost, my memories, what was?

  You once said, “everything flows.” But it doesn’t, Hugh. Too many things stop, and no matter how hard you try, they can’t be moved. Like memory. And love.

  Miranda

  He finished reading and clicking his tongue, shook his head. “Samos. Samos.” He said the word twice, as if trying it out on his tongue. The expression on his face was clear: relief. He wasn’t in the least sad I was gone.

  “Darling, did the mail come?” Charlotte walked into the room followed by a young dalmatian that was growling and pulling on a pink towel she held behind her. Hugh held out my postcard. She looked at it and, raising an eyebrow, asked, “Miranda?” He handed it over with no hesitation. Tipping her head in a way that indicated her glasses were too weak, she read it quickly and handed it back.

  “How long has it been since you last saw her? Eight years?”

  He bent the card in half. “Nine. A long time.”

  “But she’s been writing you ever since.” It was a statement, not a question.

  He lifted a hand and shrugged as if to say, What can I do?

  The dog put its front paws on him and stretched languorously. Hugh grabbed its head and kissed it.

  Charlotte patted the dog. “Isn’t it strange? Miranda’s the only one of your girlfriends who’s stayed true to you. All the trouble and pain you had with her at the end, but a decade later she’s still sending you postcards from her travels.”

  Tongue lolling out of its mouth like a long red belt, the dog started humping Hugh’s leg. They laughed. Hugh said, “Perfect timing,” and pushed him down.

  The boy rushed into the room. “Dad! It’s getting dark outside. The eclipse is starting! Come on!” He took his father’s hand and, finding him immovable, rushed back out of the room.

  Charlotte’s mouth tightened and she gestured toward the boy. “What if you had stayed with her? Then we’d never have had him.”

  Hugh reached out and touched his wife’s cheek. “But I didn’t stay with her. Don’t think about it, sweetheart.”

  “I think about it all the time. Thank God you stayed.”

  “You won, Char. Look at these postcards. She’s
pathetic.”

  She touched a finger to his lips. Be careful what you say.

  The television picture changed abruptly to a scene from Amarcord, Hugh’s favorite film. Above the TV noise, a sound rose behind me that was difficult to place. But then I knew it—toenails clicking across a wooden floor.

  I turned as the young dalmatian entered my kitchen. He plopped down on the floor and stared at me. His tail began to thump. The same dog that had been on television with Hugh’s family a moment ago was now here with me.

  “His name is Bob.”

  Nothing is more ineffable than a voice, yet a few remain recognizable as long as we live. Even if we lost them a lifetime ago. James Stillman stood in my doorway. But this was James the man I had never known, the face I had seen only once, in a photograph.

  He was thinner, hair fashionably short, the beginning of a few concentric wrinkles framing the corners of his mouth. But his eyes were the same. Eyes I had once memorized—a rascal’s eyes, the eyes of a guy who’s got tricks up his sleeve or a great joke to tell. He leaned easily against the door frame, hands deep in his pockets, one leg crossed nonchalantly in front of the other. He did it all unconsciously. His mother used to call it his Gary Grant pose. I smelled his cologne. I smelled the Zizanie cologne and somehow that was the most shocking thing of all. It made it all the more real. Dreams don’t smell.

  The dog jumped up on him and scrabbled furiously for his attention. James picked him up. Bob went nuts. He wiggled and licked and twisted all at the same time. It was too much, and James put him down again but continued to scratch his frantic head.

  “I remember your dog, Miranda. What was its name?”

  “Oscar.”

  He grinned. “Oscar! That’s right. Loudest dog I ever knew. Remember how he snored? And farted?”

  “James—”

  He held up a hand to stop me. “Not yet. Let me get used to you again.” He crossed the kitchen and came close. My God, that too-sweet cologne. His trademark. The first man I ever knew who used cologne every day. He used to steal the beautiful silver bottles from Grieb’s pharmacy. I hadn’t smelled it in years but the memory was like a flashbulb going off in my face.

  Hands still in his pockets, he leaned forward until we were inches apart. What I wanted to know, had to know, was, how much was he here? If I reached out and touched him would he be skin and bones, real, or a ghost, a shade, my imagination gone screaming?

  He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Don’t do it. You don’t want to know.”

  I shivered and pulled back. “You know what I’m thinking?”

  “No, but it’s in your eyes.”

  I put my face in my hands and lowered it to the table. The wood was cold. My skin was hot. I no longer understood anything.

  There was a deep, abiding silence.

  Slowly I began to hear noises. The volume rose. Higher. Together, they were familiar. Years-ago familiar.

  Rushing, the slamming of metal, everything loud, jarring. Many voices, laughter, scuffling feet, and movement. A clanging bell. School? The bell that rang eight times a day in my high school when class was over and you had three minutes to get to the next?

  These sounds were so recognizable. I lifted my head and saw. It was all familiar, blood familiar, but because it was impossible, it still took time to understand, to register. I was back in school. I was back in high school!

  Faces from so many years ago swirled and streamed around me. Joe del Tuto, Niklas Bahn, Ryder Pierce. A football whizzed through the air and was caught with a two-hand slap by Owen King.

  “Mr. King, give me that ball.”

  Miss Cheryl Jeans, the algebra teacher, stood in the doorway to her classroom. Tall, thin as a pencil, she gestured for Owen to hand over the ball. She was so beautiful and good-natured that she was one of the most popular teachers in school.

  “Come on, Miss Jeans. We won’t do it again.”

  “Get it after school, Owen. Right now it’s mine. Hand it over.”

  He gave her the ball and kept staring at her even after she turned and walked back into her room.

  School. I stood in the hall of my high school surrounded by many of the same people I had seen at the reunion months before. But there they had been adults, what they would turn into years after leaving this place and going out into life. Here they were teenagers again with the bad haircuts, braces on their teeth, and unfashionable clothes that had been so cool and necessary to us fifteen years earlier.

  I stood transfixed. Kids I’d known, hated, loved, dismissed, worshipped, pushed by on their way to class, the toilet, out the back door to sneak cigarettes. Tony Gioe. Brandon Brind.

  And then I walked out of a classroom with Zoe. Eighteen-year-old Zoe Holland and Miranda Romanac passed within two feet of where I stood. Both smiled conspiratorially, as if something funny and secret had just happened and they were savoring it between them. To prove it was real, I was blasted with the smell of strong perfume. Jungle Gardenia—that cheap stuff I wore every day to high school. The two girls continued down the hall and I followed. They didn’t notice. I walked parallel with them and neither noticed.

  “I don’t believe it! Miranda, you’re telling the truth? You absolutely swear to God?” Zoe’s eyes were alive with curiosity. Miranda’s face stayed blank and emotionless, but then she couldn’t hold it anymore and burst out laughing. “We did it.”

  Zoe brought her books to her face and stomped her feet. “Oh God! Come in here!” She pushed Miranda down the hall and into the girls’ bathroom. They went to the mirrors and rested their books on adjoining sinks. “And?”

  Miranda looked in the mirror and made a moue. “And what?”

  Taking her shoulder, Zoe turned her around hard. “Don’t fool around, Miranda. Tell everything.”

  “When he picked me up last night he said we were going on an adventure. I went, ‘Uh-oh,’ because you know what James means when he says that. He drove to Leslie Swid’s house and parked down the block. It was dark inside the house because the Swids are out of town, right? James said we were going to break in.”

  Zoe looked at the heavens. “Oh my God! And you did? You broke into their house with him? You’re a criminal!” She giggled.

  “He promised not to do anything—we’d just go in and look. So we snuck around the back of the house. Naturally I was so scared the police were going to come that I had seven heart attacks. But James tried all the windows and found one he could open with this tool he had—this car tool thing. So he opened the window and we climbed in. It was scary, but exciting too. We went around the house just looking. When we got to her parents’ bedroom, he took me and pushed me down on the bed and… it happened.”

  “Was it good? Was it great?”

  “First it hurt, then it was nice. I was just basically scared, Zoe. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  I had never slept with James Stillman in high school. I had never slept with anyone in high school. Why was I lying to my best friend?

  Something touched my shoulder. Adult James Stillman stood directly behind me.

  “Come. I need to show you something.”

  Although I didn’t want to leave, I followed him.

  James hurried down the school hallway through swarms of kids and clamor. Through fifteen– and sixteen-year-old lives hurtling along toward anything that looked interesting, glowed, or blinked brightly, anything enormous or tempting or even dangerous, up to a point. Following him was like swimming in a sea of ghosts from a time of my life that was suddenly furiously there again.

  None of the kids noticed us. Perhaps because we were adults moving through their world—which meant we were invisible. What we did was of no concern to them.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Outside.”

  We walked down the hall to the back door and out to the school parking lot. It smelled of dust and fresh asphalt. It was a hot, still day. The weather would probably change later, because everything felt too thick and heavy.
Insects chirred around us. The mid-afternoon sun glinted off a hundred car windshields. James stopped to get his bearings, then started off again. I had questions, but he clearly had a destination in mind, so I held my tongue and followed silently. We wove in and out of the cars and motorcycles. Here and there I recognized one from so long ago. Mel Parker’s beige VW. Al Kaplan’s Pinto with all the bumper stickers on it. One read:

  Never Trust Anyone over Thirty.

  James walked to the other side of the lot and only then did I see where he was going. The old green Saab his parents gave him when he got his driver’s license was parked near the exit to the street. How could I forget? He always parked his car there so we could make a quick getaway after school. I saw two people sitting inside.

  James was sitting inside. Eighteen-year-old James, and a policeman. Although it was very hot, the car windows were rolled halfway up, but I could hear what they were saying. The policeman was talking. His voice was slow and genuinely sorrowful.

  “There were two of you up there at the Swid house last night, James. You and a girl. So don’t keep denying it because then you’re insultin’ my intelligence. People saw you two and wrote down your license plate number. Are you going to tell me who she is? It’ll make it easier on you.”

  “I was there alone, really!” James’s voice was respectful, eager to tell the truth.

  The cop sighed. “Son, it’s going to be very hard on you this time. We’ve let you get away with a lot of crap over the years, but not this time. You broke into a rich man’s house and people saw you. You’re definitely going to have to do some hard time for it. Maybe if you tell me who the girl was, I can talk to the judge—”

  “Honest to God, it was just me. I don’t know why they saw me with anybody.”