The Marriage Pact

by Pullen, M. J.

  For her part, Marci had always thought the film was one of the most amazing things she’d ever seen, so at least the people at NYU knew what they were talking about. She felt intensely proud of Jake, and shared his excitement, despite the fact that somewhere in the distance she could hear the very small sound of her heart breaking. Suzanne, on the other hand, expressed with vigor many sentiments Marci was holding in by grilling Jake aggressively. How long had he known this? Was he sure he had to go? Wasn’t the film program at Georgia just as good? What on earth were they supposed to do without him for the next two years?

  He endured the inquisition patiently, and by the rehearsed nature of some of his answers, Marci wondered whether Jake’s mother had asked the same questions. When Suzanne had finally decided that he could not be prevailed upon to stay in Athens and stopped ranting, he turned to Marci and looked at her for a minute without speaking. Her heart raced, and she felt that what was passing between them in the silence was something like this:

  I’m happy to go, but sad to leave you.

  I know. I’m devastated, but also so excited for you.

  If I were staying here, maybe...

  Yes, maybe.

  What Jake said aloud, however, was: “Are you going to be okay?”

  So much for imagined conversations. He said it with a tone of genuine concern, but Marci could not see past the fact that Jake thought she would not be okay without him. What about him? Was he going to be okay? Or was it so obvious that because he was handsome and funny and going to live his dream in New York that he would be fine, and that she was the one who’d be left behind in this little college town to pine away for him?

  “Of course I will,” she said, a little too brightly. “Truck will take care of me.”

  She regretted immediately bringing up Travis. Jake’s face fell and he murmured something that sounded like “Yeah, right.”

  Marci tried damage control. “I really am very excited for you,” she said, crossing the room to hug him tightly. “And we will miss you terribly. We’re just going to have to pack lots of fun into the next couple of weeks, okay?”

  He patted her back before releasing her. “Thanks,” he said. He seemed to mean it.

  Looking back, Marci remembered very little about the following two weeks. The reality of finishing the summer quarter, transferring schools, and preparing to move to New York meant that Jake was busy more or less all the time. When he did have time to meet the three girls out for a drink or dinner, they spent most of the time talking about NYU’s famous professors and their credits, classes he was struggling to decide between, and films he needed to see before the first day for some reason.

  They looked at maps of the city and pictures of the campus and lists of Broadway shows. They promised to visit before the end of his first year—spring break, perhaps—and he would show them the town. They listened to the catalog of film equipment he needed to buy, everything from cameras and filters to microphones and spotlights. They helped him load boxes into two trucks: one that he was driving north; the other going home with his dad because even his tiny space in the shared Athens apartment was more spacious than campus living at NYU. And he was gone.

  They saw him once at Thanksgiving and twice at Christmas, for cheap dinners out that provided relief from all the concentrated time with their families. He flew back to New York for New Year’s Eve in Times Square with his new friends, while Suzanne and Marci somehow got roped into helping chaperone Nicole and her high school friends, who had a fairly tame little party.

  Marci had somehow lingered in her sickly relationship with Travis until early December, having attempted to break up with him more than once, and discovering that for someone called Truck, he was more sensitive than one would expect. He’d become annoying and clingy in a way that was far from attractive, but she couldn’t bring herself to end it. Perhaps even the worst relationship was better than none for keeping her mind off Jake. Or maybe she held out hope that he would come out of his whiney funk and be the fun, slightly arrogant guy she’d met at the pizza parlor months before.

  Perhaps it was coincidence, then, that Marci finally ended it after their reunion dinner with Jake at Thanksgiving, or maybe his presence had reminded her that she could do better than Travis the Truck. In any case, Jake’s obvious disappointment that Travis was still in her life had been just the tiniest bit gratifying, ashamed as she was to admit it. Still, it was time to end it, and open herself up for worthier options.

  By Christmas, however, Jake reported that he was seeing an art student named Renee, who he described as “Bohemian,” a word that meant nothing to Marci. When they visited Jake at spring break, they discovered that it meant she wore no makeup and cat-eye glasses, and talked through their dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant about Marxism and the oppression of the working class. She and Jake fed each other noodles with chopsticks while Suzanne and Marci rolled their eyes at each other and tried to focus on their dumplings and rice.

  Later that night, Marci piled couch cushions on her head and prayed for a fire alarm as she tried not to listen to the decidedly Bohemian noises coming from Jake’s tiny bedroom, where Renee had insisted on staying the night despite the presence of his out-of-town guests. “I guess that’s what he sees in her,” Suzanne hissed in the darkness beneath the moaning and panting, answering the silent question they had both been asking themselves all evening. Marci didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or throw up.

  Outside Renee’s presence, however, Jake was his usual affectionate and considerate self. Marci expected the next day to be awkward between them, but either Jake felt no such discomfort, or he was making a tremendous effort to block it out with flirty jokes and seamless conversation. It was so...normal. They might’ve been back in Athens, before their hook-up, or anything else. It didn’t take long for Marci to feel comfortable again in spite of her expectations. With no little effort, she closed Renee and the chopsticks and the sex noises into a tiny cavern in her brain and sealed the opening.

  This pattern continued over the decade that followed. They saw less of Jake during senior year because everyone was busy trying to graduate, and no one was surprised when he got a scholarship offer to stay on for graduate school. Meanwhile, Marci took her English degree straight back to her parents’ house and got a job in the lingerie department at a department store. Suzanne took her résumé and her high heels to every museum in town, eventually snagging a job as an assistant to the special events coordinator at the High Museum of Art.

  “It’s not related to art exactly,” she explained to Marci over their weekly Saturday coffee date, “but at least I get to work in the museum. It’s a foot in the door.”

  “Hey, at least you’re not spending your life looking at people in their underwear and trying to get bras back on those stupid plastic hangers,” Marci countered. “I don’t have my foot in any door except the dressing room.”

  A few months after graduation, a regular customer suggested that Marci try a temp agency if she wanted more regular hours with better pay. She jotted down the name of a friend who worked in staffing on the back of a receipt paper strip, and in a couple of weeks Marci had entered the world of answering phones, sorting files, and being referred to by nearly everyone as “the temp.” She learned to buy panty hose on sale and keep a bottle of clear nail polish in her purse for runs. She brought a tiny notebook with her to every assignment so she could write during the inevitable down times.

  She learned when to finish work quickly and ask for the next assignment and when to drag things out a little so the person in charge of her that day wouldn’t try to come up with something ridiculous “to make the most of you being here.” Some people knew how to manage staff: they used her time well, treated her respectfully, and allowed her to go home with a full day’s pay if she finished her job at 3:30 or 4:00. For others, bossing around the temp was a first tiny taste of power to be relished, and if you weren’t careful with them you’d end up at the end of a day sorting all the
items in a supply closet by color, or cleaning some unknown sticky mess out of a refrigerator.

  What she loved about temping was the constant change. She got to meet lots of people and experience various working environments up close and personal without commitment. Not being too invested in the work gave her freedom. She could leave at 5:00 and not think about work again until she returned the next morning. Social pressure to hang out with coworkers at lunch was minimal, so she would find a tree-lined spot to park her car, eat a sandwich, and write. At night, she went home to her parents’ house and sacked away savings for her secret dream...to move away from Atlanta and find her true self somewhere out West.

  She heard from Jake fairly often, usually by e-mail. He came home from New York once or twice a year and they would get together, typically with Suzanne and Rebecca, plus whomever anyone was dating at the moment. Suzanne always seemed to have someone different on her arm, and rarely bothered introducing them to Marci, much less bringing them to make stilted conversation with Jake on his visits. Rebecca, on the other hand, had been dating the same guy, Dennis, since her spring formal senior year. Apparently Greek life was paying off for Rebecca.

  Marci dated sporadically, usually men she met at her assignments: a young lawyer who somehow also played semi-pro tennis, a human resource manager who didn’t call her until her assignment ended to avoid sexual harassment charges, even a car salesman she’d met while filling in for the dealership’s receptionist while out on maternity leave. She never saw anyone for more than a few weeks, though. She had a plan to run away from home, and a desire to be free to do it in the way that suited her, not full of compromises with someone else.

  Jake didn’t talk much about his love life after Renee, who had left New York after senior year for graduate school in Wisconsin. He didn’t seem terribly upset about the loss, but Marci didn’t probe, either. Maybe a better friend would have encouraged him to talk about his feelings, but there were some things she just didn’t want to know. Despite his silence on the subject of dating, Marci guessed that he was seeing people periodically, based on the timing and content of his e-mails or rather, what he left out of e-mails. She wondered whether perhaps her discomfort about Renee had shown, and that Jake was sparing her feelings by keeping quiet.

  A year and a half after graduation, over the audible protests of Suzanne and her parents, Marci loaded up her car and moved to San Francisco. She leased a tiny apartment in the sketchy but affordable Tenderloin area, sight unseen, and took four months’ worth of rent and utilities with her. She felt very Jack Kerouac, ready to become the next great American writer.

  And she managed to stay for nearly two years. One boyfriend, seventeen temp assignments, four magazine articles, and three bounced rent checks later, she packed the car again and headed to Austin, the city that seemed a perfect compromise between San Francisco and Atlanta, geographically and culturally.

  In the meantime, Jake had moved home to Atlanta and was working for a small production company that made commercials for local businesses. In his spare time he freelanced on a few music videos for little punk bands and shot game footage for some local club teams. Now it was Marci coming home for holidays, and little crowds of friends appearing at restaurants to welcome her home when she did. It was nice and fun and made her homesick all at once.

  She and Jake developed a kind of unspoken agreement between them over the years. Neither of them talked about people they were dating or brought them around the other, unless it was unavoidable or had become somewhat serious. Because she lived out of state, it was easier for Marci to appear alone, even when she was dating someone. Often Jake appeared at parties or reunions with whoever he’d been seeing at the time, because he’d been unable to explain why she was not invited without eliciting an immediate fight. He’d come to whatever restaurant or house where they were gathered, kiss Marci on the cheek, and then introduce his date politely before mouthing, “Sorry!” behind her back.

  During these meetings, she was always struck by the fact that Jake didn’t seem to have a type. He dated quiet, artsy girls with black fingernails and perky blondes with big tits. Her favorite had been a robust black woman, less than five feet tall and nearly as wide. She chewed up and spit out the waiter at a Mexican restaurant for getting her order wrong, seconds before placing a solicitous hand on Marci’s and saying, “Now, tell me all about you, sweetie.”

  The girl after that was a mousy little thing with big teeth who giggled at everything Jake said. Then there was a Brazilian accountant with flawless skin who moonlighted as a DJ in a Latino dance club. A redheaded swimmer with broad shoulders and tiny hips whom Suzanne referred to unkindly as “The Triangle.” At one point, she teased Jake that he was dating a Benetton ad, one piece at a time.

  Typically, Marci met these women once, made polite conversation, picked them apart with Suzanne the next day, and never saw them again. Jake almost always managed to get some time alone with Marci, or at least to whittle the crowd down to Marci, Suzanne, and possibly Beth and Rebecca. This was her comfort zone, and his, too, she suspected. The sacred and lasting space of friendship.

  Only once over the last ten years had anything happened to remind Marci of their encounter in Athens that summer. For the New Year’s Eve at the end of 1999, the whole group had paid a ridiculous cover charge to get into a bar they probably would’ve passed up on any other night as too sleazy and smoky. The place was festive enough, though, and while certainly filled to the brim with partygoers, it was the only place within a five-mile radius that didn’t have a line out the door a mile long.

  They’d been drinking cocktails all evening, dancing to Prince’s “1999” about once an hour. At 11:45, they switched to the cheap-tasting but free champagne being passed out. It had an aftertaste reminiscent of SweeTarts mixed with diet soda. Drunken toasts to their friendship were made repeatedly. Beth and Ray were enjoying a night out without the kids by overindulging and making out on the dance floor. Rebecca had brought Rick, a boorish guy prepared to demonstrate his manhood to any hot girl, offensive guy, or inconvenient wall that crossed his path. She had lured him to the dance floor after talking him out of a fight with the bouncer, which had come close to ruining their whole evening.

  Suzanne was at the bar, talking to the bartender, leaning over in a way that ostensibly allowed her to hear him better, but not coincidentally highlighted her ample cleavage and low-cut shirt. She’d been there for more than two hours, coming back to their table for little spurts of time with her bounty of free drinks. As midnight drew near, she actually hopped up on the bar and swung her legs over it with the bartender’s assistance, ready for a well-earned kiss at the stroke of midnight and probably violating several laws about alcohol service in the process.

  As the crowd counted down to the New Year, Marci smacked Jake on the chest and pointed at the spectacle of Suzanne behind the bar, laughing. When she turned to him, however, he did not laugh, but pulled her close and kissed her deeply. She felt awkward that she had failed to mention a guy she’d been seeing for a few weeks, but decided that it was a harmless New Year’s Eve kiss, and what Burt the math teacher didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. “Happy New Year,” Jake murmured in her ear. “I love you.”

  She remembered gaping at him, trying to figure what to say or how to say it, but Beth and Ray had invaded their table with an exuberant but off-key version of “Auld Lang Syne” and broken the spell. The evening drew to a close as they piled into cabs and Marci returned to Suzanne’s for the evening, and then on a plane back to Austin the next afternoon. By the time she and Jake had seen each other next, some occasion or other in late spring that same year, it seemed too late to mention it. Marci had pretty much dismissed it as friendly indiscretion, attributable to bad champagne and the threat of the Y2K Apocalypse.

  That was four years ago. Since then, nothing beyond friendship had happened between them, until the e-mail with the napkin and the kiss in the bar after Nicole and Ravi’s bachelor party. Another kis
s in a bar. It occurred to Marci as she followed the U-Haul off an exit ramp for gas, how many significant moments in her relationship with Jake had occurred in bars.

  Maybe that’s all there was to it. Maybe they were friends who occasionally got drunk and stuck their tongues down each other’s throats, or promised to marry each other later, or whatever. Maybe all of Jake’s suggestions about the two of them had been spurred by, if not owed completely to, the influence of alcohol. It certainly explained the lack of discussion afterward, and why Jake had not bothered to ask her about the mysterious calls on the cell phone. How did she know the birthday e-mail wasn’t a silly joke he’d thought of after sharing a bottle or two of wine with a large-breasted debutant?

  As she pulled her car up to a gas pump and waved to Jake on the other side of the parking lot, she told herself that this was entirely plausible. And that there was no use in thinking about it right now anyway. Her heart had just been broken by a guy four states away and the last thing she needed to worry about was whether this friend was just a friend. But only part of her was convinced.

  Chapter 15

  “What happened to you?” he asked when she emerged from the pump to head to the restroom. The mud had dried on her clothes in a bright red-brown smear.

  She’d been thinking about how to answer this question for the last two hundred miles and come up with nothing. “I slipped.”

  “Where?”

  “By the river. I—I had something I needed to do.”

  He looked nonplussed for a minute; she could see questions lingering in his expression. But he decided against asking, apparently, and settled for wiping her cheek with his thumb. “It’s dried here. You’d better check the mirror inside,” he said. He added with a grin, “You’re such a klutz.”