The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  When we first moved in, there were so many empty lots that sand always glittered in the air, and it could bury a vegetable garden overnight. Above the sound of the ocean, one could sometimes hear the early-morning roar of the lions in the nearby zoo. It was nothing like the rest of the city, no hills or views or bohemians, nothing Italian or Victorian to make you take a photograph. A new way to live, separated from downtown by more than just a mountain with one tunnel. It sat on the very edge of the continent, with fog so dense and silver you hardly ever saw a sunset in the Sunset; any glowing light was often just a streetcar emerging like a miner from that tunnel, making its satisfied way out to the ocean.

  It was a Saturday. It was 1953, and weeks before we had all watched on television as President Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were sworn in as the first government we could remember neither to be led nor haunted by FDR. We watched that inauguration, full of worries about the Korean War, race issues, the Rosenbergs, the Communists hidden everywhere around us, the Russian bombs being prepared and inscribed like voodoo charms with our names: Pearlie, Holland, Sonny. We watched. And told ourselves:

  Help is coming.

  People have an idea about the fifties. They talk about poodle skirts and bus strikes and Elvis; they talk about a young nation, an innocent nation. I don’t know why they have it so wrong; it must be the consolidation of memory, because all that came later, as the country changed. In 1953, nothing had changed. We were still so haunted by the war. Fluoridation seemed like a horrible new invention, and the Woolworth’s on Market a beautiful one. In those days, the firemen still wore leather helmets; William Platt the Seltzer Boy still left fizzing bottles on our doorstep, waking me with the ring of glass on concrete; the milkman still drove his old-fashioned wagon with gold script on the side—Spreckels Russell—and, impossible as it seems, the iceman still pulled blocks out with his medieval tongs like a dentist doing an extraction on a whale, making his rounds for those last households without a refrigerator. The rag man and the knife man, the fruit truck and the coal truck and the dry cleaners, the fish man and the Colonial Bread man and the egg lady—all came down the street with their echoing cries of “Rags bottles trash!” and “Grind your scissors! Grind your knives!”; a sound that’s gone forever. No one had ever heard anything wilder than a big band, or seen a man grow his hair longer than his ears. We were still trying to figure out how to live in a war after a war.

  It was a medieval time for mothers. When he was three, my boy, Sonny, was playing with his loving father in the backyard when I heard shouting. I came running to find my son collapsed in the bower vine. My husband picked him up, rocking him in his arms, hushing his frightened boy, telling me to call the doctor. In those days, they had no idea what caused polio or what to do. The doctor told me it was “brought on by summer”—a magical diagnosis for a city without a summer. His treatment was leg splints, bed rest, and hot towels, which I applied carefully, and our only other solace was church services where weeping mothers held up photographs of children. It wasn’t a time of freshness and freedom. It was a time of dread; the war was easy compared to this. It’s a wonder we didn’t run screaming into the streets and set fire to one another’s houses.

  Instead, we hid our fears. Just as my mother hid a lock of her dead brother’s hair in the throat of her high-collared Sunday dress, in a pocket she had sewn there. You cannot go around in grief and panic every day; people will not let you, they will coax you with tea and tell you to move on, bake cakes and paint walls. You can hardly blame them; after all, we learned long ago that the world would fall apart and the cities would be left to the animals and the clambering vines if grief, like a mad king, were allowed to ascend the throne. So what you do is you let them coax you. You bake the cake and paint the wall and smile; you buy a new freezer as if you now had a plan for the future. And secretly—in the early morning—you sew a pocket in your skin. At the hollow of your throat. So that every time you smile, or nod your head at a teacher meeting, or bend over to pick up a fallen spoon, it presses and pricks and stings and you know you’ve not moved on. You never even planned to.

  “It is equal to living in a tragic land,” a poet once wrote, “to live in tragic times.”

  Yet I have to admit I loved our house. I had chosen it, after all; in defiance of the aunts, I had pressed Holland to take that old Sunset property, and at first it was the fulfillment of our dreams. A house with a yard; a bedroom my son didn’t have to share; carpets and folding blinds and even a place behind the bathroom mirror for Holland to drop his razor blades. It was a miracle: a house that had thought of everything before me. You could never have convinced me, back when I was young, that all the real moments of my life would happen in that vine-covered house, just as a telephone installer can’t tell a young couple that their happiest and saddest news will come through that polished phone. It’s hard to think, even now, that the sweet ebony milkmaid that Holland’s aunts gave us in the first year of our marriage and that sat on the bookshelf would watch with its painted eyes every vital decision I ever made. So too the bamboo coffee table. And the “broken pot” that Sonny had made from a drinking glass, masking tape, and shellac. The yarn cat, the broken mantel clock. They watched the whole six months of that affair, and in the hour of my judgment they will surely be called together to account for things.

  As for what Holland’s aunt told me on that afternoon of tea and popovers, I had decided long before to forget it. Marriage was all that cluttered my mind, and the new house, and the care of my child. I could not pay attention to the memory of an old woman shouting, in her muffled voice:

  “Don’t do it! Don’t marry him!”

  It was 1953. It was a Saturday.

  Four years of happy marriage had passed, and the aunts were still in our lives. They’d grown stouter over time, and somehow their sharp-chinned heads seemed huger than ever, Duchesses from Alice in Wonderland, fussing with their enormous hats as they sat telling me a story at our kitchen table. Beneath it, hidden by the apple-red oilcloth, lay my little boy.

  “Oh Pearlie, we forgot to tell you about the murder!” said Alice.

  Beatrice was in the act of putting on her hat, pin in hand like a harpooner. “That terrible murder!”

  “Yes,” said her sister. “You ain’t heard?” asked Beatrice with a worried expression. “Up north?”

  I shook my head and picked up the newspaper, holding my scissors aloft. Sunlight came in through the kitchen window, blurred by my son’s fingerprints. It was two o’clock and a bicycle bell was still ringing in my ears.

  “It was a murder, Pearlie—” Alice tried to interrupt.

  “A woman trying to get a divorce—”

  “This was up in Santa Rosa—”

  Beatrice threw her hands up in air, hatpin whirling like a dragonfly, settling for a second, then darting away with her words. “Oh it happens all the time. She wanted a divorce from her two-timing husband. It isn’t easy, as you know. She was up with one of those lawyers, up at their cabin where they knew the husband was hiding … with his… well you know…”

  Her sister filled in the blank: “With his little bit on the side.”

  “His mistress, Pearlie, his mistress,” announced Beatrice, not to be outdone.

  Beatrice smiled at where my son hid under the table. He had been there for an hour, without a toy, without the dog (who lay at my feet); it was a wonderful mystery to me. My child who could be happy under a tablecloth. I remember thinking: When the dishwasher’s done, he’ll come out. The machine was an extravagance, a gift from the aunts. As they chatted, I stood and listened to it turning and murmuring beside me like a dream from which we would awaken.

  I asked if it was a colored woman.

  “A what? No, the wife was white and so was the mistress. I don’t know why you’d think—”

  “Anyhow,” continued the elder twin, leaning in with the deliciousness of the story. She waved her hands and pointed down the hall to the front window, as if the scene ha
d happened right here in this very house. “Anyhow, she and the detective and the photographer, they snuck up there to that cabin to take a photo. For divorce grounds, you see, she needed evidence of… of adultery… for divorce grounds. She needed a photo of the man and his—”

  “And they broke in!” shouted Alice. “Camera flashing! And what do you know—”

  “The man had a gun. He thought they were robbers.” Now they were telling it together.

  “Oh yes. Of course he did!”

  “Who else would be breaking into his house?”

  “Who else?”

  “And then,” Beatrice said as she set the straw hat on her head, “and then he shot his wife dead.” She looked straight into my eyes. “Shot her dead!”

  The pin went crik into the hat.

  Said her sister: “Happens all the time!”

  While they were telling their gruesome story, I sat in a coatdress under a long window fringed from trailing vines; that was where I sat every day and censored my husband’s paper. I had to finish before he got home from working overtime, had to leave him a paper with nothing but good news. It was one of the many things I took pride in doing for Holland’s health; for his heart. It’s easy to laugh at the aunts, but at that luncheon years before, when the younger one had become so upset—“Don’t marry him!”—I believed they were trying to help me.

  In my stubborn way, though, I had decided to defy those poor dears and do my best to keep Holland safe. They could not know what he meant to me, those women who had never had a husband. And so my imagination, that incautious artist, created from her words of warning—“bad blood, a crooked heart”—the image of a transposed organ. I came to believe that was his illness. I pictured it like a slide shown in a darkened medical classroom: poor Holland, born with a defect, his heart hanging over on his right side like a cherry. I imagined a cutaway Holland with his insides fitting like a puzzle, a lecturer tapping on his rib cage: “Only one in ten thousand show the right-sided gene.” It was a beautiful image to form my life around. I was proud of my extraordinary husband, and my extraordinary duties as a wife: to keep him safe and, even better, unaware of danger. Health is only enjoyed in the blithe ignorance that you will lose it. In that way it is like youth.

  I took those duties seriously. With Holland’s unspoken approval, I created an elaborate system meant to save his heart. First of all, I made the house a cloister of quiet; the telephone had a peculiar purr instead of a ring, and the front door hummed instead of clanging (you will hear it in a moment); I bought him an alarm clock that produced an erotic series of vibrations in the morning—I even went so far as to find a barkless dog. I read about the breed in the papers, and went to some lengths to find one. Sitting at my feet on the kitchen floor, eyes closed in pleasure at my mere presence, mute freckled Lyle. There was no need to keep our Sonny quiet; he was born quiet, as if he were the antidote to my husband’s heart, and it was only me I had to keep in check; I never raised my voice. I knew instinctively that it would shake my husband, that it would go against everything I was sworn to in our marriage, and so I silenced everything in myself that wasn’t mild and good.

  So my task that Saturday was to pick up the day’s paper and read over it before Holland might read something too violent, too shocking, that might break his tender transposed heart.

  “To murder your own wife—” the eldest began again.

  “Oh don’t talk about it anymore, Beatrice. Not today. Not in front of the boy.”

  A wicked smile cut from the old lady. “I’m not sure I don’t blame the wife!”

  “Beatrice!”

  The sound of the streetcar came from down the street and both ladies automatically looked at their watches.

  “We’ve got to run!” she answered. “We can’t wait for Holland. I don’t know why you let him give that DeLawn girl a ride. It’s only trouble.” At the mention of her name, I thought of that bicycle bell again.

  “All our love, Pearlie,” her sister said, adjusting her girdle.

  “And you keep an eye on our Holland.”

  I asked Sonny to come out and say goodbye, but they shushed me and said it didn’t matter; boys were just that way.

  “Goodbye, darling,” each said as she kissed me.

  Two minutes and two kisses later we were left alone. Ten minutes after that, our own doorbell would ring—or coo, I should say, coo like a mourning dove—and our dog, Lyle, would leap into the air and I would open the door and there he would stand, the stranger: “Hello, ma’am, I hope you can help me.” With those ordinary words, everything would change.

  But for the moment, the world was still and quiet. All I could see of my son, under the table, were his shoes as motionless as brass things. I’m sure it was beautiful down there. Deep brown Marmoleum flooring shining like frozen mud, split in a few places where it met the cabinetry, beginning to wear right under the sink where he had watched me stand for countless hours before the rolling dishwasher (a monster) arrived, watched me stand in my seamed stockings. In those days I wore stockings with gold diamonds at the ankle with a P (for Pearlie), and that was all he could see of me, just those gold diamonds, which are among the few memories he has kept of me from his childhood.

  Those shoes, the left larger than the right. They had been a gift from his “shoe buddy” in Montana. The March of Dimes worked very hard to help us, and found a boy with polio whose mismatched feet were exactly the opposites of Sonny’s. Whenever we went shopping, we always bought two pairs of shoes, keeping the smaller left and the larger right, and sending the others off to little John Garfield from Montana. We always enclosed a letter, and John’s mother always wrote back sending shoes she had bought for her son. It was a neat arrangement. In fact, John and my son were “shoe buddies” until they were teenagers, fully recovered, and by the time they were grown the draft doctors could hardly tell they had ever been stricken, and, remarkable as it seems, approved them both for the army. War changes so many young men. My son fled up to Canada, and we later heard that poor patriotic John went off and died in Vietnam, far away from his beloved Rocky Mountains.

  From the street-side window came a throat-clearing sound. Lyle belatedly leaped up from his coil on the floor and jerked his head around like a windup thing. His mute little mouth opened an inch, with that hopeful look that dogs get, little supplicants in fur, and I reached down and scratched his ears.

  We all sat still as statues. From the window drifted sweet music: a child’s first piano-lesson plunkings of a church song. A mayfly on the window stroked the glass as if it were putting a baby to sleep. Then, at last, the dishwasher moaned and released its load of gray water into the sink.

  Now he’ll come out, I thought.

  And out he came, my little boy: three feet tall and nothing but denim slacks and a terry T-shirt with WALTER WALTER WALTER stitched all over it, a gift from the aunts, his favorite shirt though we never called him “Walter,” never called him anything but Sonny; bright eyes in a bright face, his tongue stained by the berries he’d been eating—some wonderful creature sent to live with me. I called his name and he smiled. I would do anything for him.

  Whirr went the doorbell. The dog leaped into the air.

  I took off my apron and followed Lyle into the hall, where I could see—partly eclipsing the door’s round window—the blurry peak of a man’s hat. I winked as I looked back at my son. I gave him one last wave before I opened the door.

  He was the most unlikely caller. We had no regular visitors, certainly none this neatly and elegantly dressed, from the shine of the wet-combed hair showing from under his hat to the shine of his wing-tip shoes. As I opened the door, his head was bowed, as if listening for something, and I had time to examine the twin peaks of his high forehead, slightly damp with sweat, the curves of his Scottish cheekbones, and it was only when he heard my greeting and raised his head that I noticed the break in his nose. Right there, like a boxer’s, giving him the exciting air of someone who had touched danger. H
is eyes, however, were very calm and friendly. Perfectly sapphirine.

  The stranger looked up at me as if he were surprised to see me, yet pleased. He smiled and said he hoped I could help him.

  I said I hoped so, too. He was holding two small presents.

  “I wonder … I seem to be lost,” he said.

  I asked if he was visiting town.

  “That’s the funny part. In a foreign city, I’m never lost. Something about the survival instinct.” A wide, chuckling grin. “But here in my own town …”

  I leaned my body against the doorframe. I smiled and said nothing. I noticed the DeLawn girl’s pink bicycle fallen where she always left it, lying on the lawn as if it had been wounded in battle.

  He removed his hat. I wasn’t very used to men like him removing their hats in my presence. His hair was gold. I asked the name of the street he was looking for.

  “It’s a Spanish name. Maybe I should pretend I’m in Spain, that might help.”

  I said he might not be lost after all.

  “Is this Noriega?” he asked.

  In a soft voice, I said, “Yes.”

  “Is it? Then I’m not doing half bad. I’ve never been to this neighborhood before. I didn’t know people lived so close to the ocean. Like a South American beach town.”

  “They used to call it the Outside Lands,” I said.

  He smiled. “The Outside Lands.” He seemed familiar, something in the way he dressed and held himself, but perhaps it was just the touch of the South in his voice, so far from home. What I remember more clearly than any of the rest was how he stared right at me the whole time he talked with me. It wasn’t something I was used to, in my neighborhood, where even the seltzer boy could barely meet my eye. Right at me, with those startling eyes. As if he had finally found the person who would listen.