“And you started up your business.”
“Well, took over my father’s company,” Buzz answered. “Holland was my right-hand man. Then I traveled. Quite a bit, in fact. You have to stockpile a few beautiful vistas in your memory, Pearlie. In case we’re rationed again.” He glanced at me meaningfully.
I put two of the wooden pins in my mouth, and talking through them, I asked: “Did y’all have a falling out?”
He said nothing for a while. Finally, he said, “Well, I got this nose.”
I nodded. “It’s a beauty.”
“Thank you.”
“How did you get it?”
“Holland.”
The sun flashed across the billowing sheets. I blinked, turned toward Buzz, and saw him raising a hand to his face just as the sunlight stained him white all along his arm.
“Holland hit you?”
Buzz just cocked his head and watched me. Holland never raised his voice except at the radio, never hit a thing except the couch pillows before he sat down, grinning, with his cigarette. But once, of course, he’d been a different man, a man trained to shoot other men during the war, who drank, who sang with soldiers and hit a friend across the nose.
At last I asked, “Was it over a woman?”
He handed me a pair of trousers. “Yes.”
I pulled out the trouser dryer and began to stretch the pants onto it. “Tell me.”
“Pearlie,” he said. “We were born at a bad time.”
“I don’t know what you mean. It’s a fine time.”
I didn’t know what he meant by “we.” I couldn’t imagine what might bind me together with a man like Buzz, as likable as he was. I couldn’t draw any kind of line around the two of us.
“You’re proud of your house. You have a nice touch.”
“It belongs to Holland’s family.”
“It can’t be cheap,” he said to me. “I mean Sonny being sick and all.”
“Holland’s aunts help out. With the bills, the braces, it is a lot. It keeps me inside a good deal, I tell you, taking care of him,” I said without thinking. “Of course it’s no trouble,” I added hastily.
“Now what would you do if you had all the money you needed?”
I had no answer to that. It was a thoughtless question to ask a poor woman with a sick son, something only a rich man would ask. Like wondering aloud to a freshly brokenhearted girl: “What if it turns out he loved you after all?” It was something I had never allowed myself to think about. What would I have done? I’d have moved my family away from a house like that, with glaring neighbors, and stains on the basement walls from the ocean creeping in, with crickets sifting in under the doorsills with the sand… to Egypt, to Mali, to some fantasy destination I only knew from books. My God, I’d have flown to Mars with Holland and Sonny and never come back. That was the only answer I could think of. A woman like me, I couldn’t afford to name my real desires. I couldn’t even afford to know them.
All I said was, “I’ve got everything I need. I’m happy.”
“I know, but just imagine … where would you live?”
“This house is better than anything my parents had.”
“But just say … an apartment high above a city? A cliff over an ocean, with a view from your bed? Five hundred acres with a fence all around?”
“What would I do with five hundred acres?” I said without thinking.
Then he looked right at me, not a shy man at all, and I think for a moment I understood.
I stood there, staring at him, with the metal dryer contraption in my hand and the damp trousers over my arm. The sun came in full and lit the world from top to bottom; you could almost hear the jasmine reaching up for it. Then we heard the sound of Holland’s car returning and Buzz turned away.
In a moment, Holland shouted “Hey there!” from the house. I heard a bicycle bell, and Sonny heading down the hall in pursuit of love.
And Buzz said nothing else, touching his nose as if touching the memory of pain. He was half to the sun, and the shadow of his ruined hand fell across his long face in the form of another, younger hand cradling his cheek. The wind burrowed into his hair like a living creature. I didn’t say a word to him as he went inside, just continued stretching the trousers in the sun to dry. And down I went—into the green deep, flecked with gold and draped with waving plants, endless, bottomless—and forgot what I had glimpsed. I was a careful woman, a good gardener, and I pruned away the doubt.
But you know the heart: every night, it grows a thorn.
It happened when Holland left town. He was a traveling inspector for a fittings company, his area covering all of Northern California, and sometimes he had to stay the night in Redding or Yreka, by the misty sea or the misty mountains, in hotels named the Thunderbird or the Wigwam (like miniature Americas: garishly neon outside, prim and puritan inside). Of course he didn’t call; long distance in those days was only used when someone had died, or when you decided to tell someone, too late, that you loved them after all. My neighbor Edith Furstenberg had come to visit before supper, wearing her new aqua seven-way blouse from Macy’s—“Only three ways, really, if you think about it”; she wanted to gossip about the Sheng family who had been excluded from Southwood by community vote and how ashamed she was of our town, how ashamed after all the Chinese had suffered.
“It’s hard for the colored, too,” I said.
“But not here in San Francisco. Not here in the Sunset, thank God.”
We tried out her blouse in all seven ways, none of them appealing. “Don’t ever change!” she shouted at me, in that fashionable phrase, from some television show I’d never seen. I washed some delicates in something she’d loaned me called Re-Clean (“so safe you can smoke while using it”). Then Sonny and I were left alone with Sky King on the radio, and for half an hour my son stared into the carved-wood lyre of its mouth, surely understanding nothing but that he loved it. He fell asleep in my lap and I put him to bed.
It had been an unseasonably hot day, followed by a humid night. Just before sunset, it had briefly rained, and the last of the warm sun turned the air to steam that shimmered down to the ocean. The German and Irish families were out grilling, walking the streets, standing at corners and laughing as the men threw cans of beer to one another and the children wrestled in the still-wet grass. It was so delightfully warm that I opened the drapes and windows, but, unsettled by the idea of neighbors peering in, I turned out all the lights and sat in the kitchen, satisfied: water in the kettle, Lyle at my feet.
The singing kettle filled the air with noise for some time before I reached it. The stove’s red eye was all that lit the room. I took the kettle off the flame, and as it calmed and fell to silence, I heard the knocking that must have begun while the kettle was sounding its alarm. A tapping at the windowpane. I turned and I was reminded of an image that always haunted me: after the war, I’d heard that Berliners replaced their blown-out window glass with doctors’ X-rays—before my eyes adjusted, all I saw was a broad white hand spread on a black windowpane.
“Buzz,” I said, unlatching the door.
His eyes looked around the dim kitchen. “When no one answered the front door, I thought you might be having an affair.” He laughed. He was in a dark suit and a dark, shiny tie, and when he stepped over the doorsill he removed his hat, as always. And then he said, “Pearlie, what are you doing alone in the dark—”
“Don’t,” I said quickly, because his hand was reaching for the switch. I found that I’d put my hand on his; it was as smooth as touching a glove. He didn’t ask why. He merely stood there, handsome Buzz, with a hat in his hand. He looked like he wanted to sell me something. I laughed, which caused a baffled smile to flicker on his face.
“Is Holland around?”
“He’s out of town, and Sonny’s sleeping—”
“Oh, of course,” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot he’s traveling, how stupid of me. And selfish.”
“No, no.”
�
��He’s up in Yreka, right? So I’m wrecking your night alone.” A wry smile.
“Not at all,” I said.
“Yreka Bakery,” he murmured to himself, smiling.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s a silly joke. It’s a mirror name, you can read it backward and forward. I wonder if there really is a bakery there. If there isn’t, we should start one.”
I laughed. “I never heard of that! I have to tell Holland.”
“Too hot to hoot,” he said. “That’s another.”
I said that was a good one.
“Oh, it’s foolishness from my childhood.”
Once again, we were alone in my silent house.
“You came all this way,” I said at last. “Want some tea? Or no, maybe a whiskey. I feel like a whiskey, don’t you?”
“I could hardly turn one down,” he said with a kind of relief. I poured out two glasses and we both downed them in a second; that was how you did it in those days. I poured us another round and went to the freezer to get the ice. Lyle jumped around beneath me, hoping to get a piece; for some unknown reason, his silence came with a love of chewing ice.
“What a strange, warm night,” I said.
“Ain’t it?”
“Too hot to hoot!”
I opened the freezer (a lion’s roar) and pulled out the ice trays, sliding the little metal levers and releasing the ice into a bucket. I threw one into the air and Lyle caught it like a dolphin. Loudly, he began to crack the cold little thing with delight.
He said, “The streetcar had all its windows steamed up, it was like a greenhouse. You know they’re growing orchids in them now, right by the door.”
I laughed. “How practical.”
“And Venus flytraps. For ones who don’t pay fares.”
“Here’s to spring in San Francisco. You never know.”
I toasted him and again we drank.
“Holland tells me you still live in a bachelor apartment with one burner on the stove. Why don’t you move somewhere better?”
“So I could cook for myself instead of coming over here?”
“Well, I—”
“I went away traveling, I left it empty for a few years. Never got to improve it. Lived in worse in Istanbul, they still read by kerosene there. And I have a sentimental attachment to that burner, I’ll have you know.”
“Any family around?”
He looked into his drink as if the answer were at the bottom. “No, there’s nobody around. My father died last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And my mother has been gone a long time now,” he said, smiling sadly and taking another sip. “I was surprised to have to take over the business out here. It wasn’t something I’d ever planned on. I’m not the business type.”
“What had you planned on?”
A shrug, a nervous look at the door. “That’s what I had traveled to discover.”
“Did you discover it?”
He nodded. We downed our drinks again. I reached for my cigarettes and he put his hand on mine. Neither of us moved.
“Pearlie?”
He was so different. After two or three bolts of whiskey, he’d stopped playing the affable golden boy. He seemed a thousand years old, with the lights from the houses cutting him clean in half and deepening the sun lines on his face. The darkness drained everything of color, and so his bright blond hair had gone stark white. With his hand on mine, I could feel his heart racing.
“I hope you can help me,” he said, just as he had the day he’d first shown up at my door. Yet this time, he spoke in a kind of whisper I had never heard before. He moved his hand to my arm.
I was afraid of what he was going to say. “Buzz, it’s late.”
He tried to interrupt me but now I was setting down the ice bucket, throwing another chunk of ice to my hysterical dog, chattering: “Holland will be back tomorrow, you better run if you want to catch the streetcar—”
He said he knew Holland would be back tomorrow, and that was the point. He had not come to see Holland. He had come that night to talk to me.
I didn’t know what was happening; I didn’t know what I wanted to happen. His touch suddenly felt very warm on my arm.
“Listen to me,” he said, “I have to tell you something.”
“Buzz, I think—”
But his voice stopped me, and his hand moved to my shoulder:
“Pearlie, listen to me. Please listen to me.”
Something in me shifted; it was as if an alarm had sounded. Here was a plain, pale face stained with longing, and in that darkness he looked nothing like the man I had known for weeks, the confident old friend. I stood quiet and still, pressed against the wall.
And then he told me. With a soft country voice and his eyes gazing at a photograph on the wall. A careful man, touching my arm. I think he had never talked of love before. For you see he had not come all that way on the streetcar that night for Holland; he had come for me, Pearlie Cook. He had pieced that speech together over the years, practiced it over and over in his bachelor’s rooms downtown: a prisoner building a palace out of toothpicks; carefully, slowly, he gave me a masterpiece only a lonely man can make.
And when he was done, he let go of my arm. He took a step away from me, back into the shadow. I could hear Lyle cracking his ice like a nut. A tinker on his way back from his rounds broke out in song: “Grind your scissors! Grind your knives!” I stood with my cheek flat against the wall, looking out at our neighborhood and the shapes I knew so well, the light-rimmed borders of my world.
“You’re lying,” I said. “He’s just sickly. It’s his heart.”
Buzz said he wasn’t lying. His hand reached out again for my arm, but I flinched away.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, though I was barely able to breathe.
Then he told me something very true: “It’s time for you to think, Pearlie.”
He had not used the word “lovers.” No, Buzz said “together”—that he and Holland had been “together” for a long time before I reappeared. They were “together” in the hospital during the war, minds bound with gauze in the dayroom, sharing the view out on the ocean; “together” living on Buzz’s money and taking tentative steps in the new world. The one that had broken them, hateful of conchies and cowards and everyone who wasn’t square and true as a crossbeam; they had survived it “together.” A crooked romance, in that room with one burner. A love story. Until, one day, Holland got up from bed and said he was going to be married. A fight; a broken nose; shouts from a high window to a man running down the street. Without even knowing it, I had taken this man’s lover away and hidden him, safe from the world, in my vine-covered house. Now he had found him. He had come to me, to my front door, to break the curse I had not even known was on my life. He said it as if it were a beautiful thing. In his mind I’m sure it was.
“You must have known, Pearlie. A smart woman like you always knows.”
We heard the sound of a family walking by, their dog barking at the scent of Lyle inside, their children babbling meaninglessly and the adults laughing beyond my walls.
“I didn’t know, not precisely, I knew something was—”
“I can only say I’m sorry.”
“Is that why you came here?” I asked in a sudden rage. “Showed up at our door and … and sneaked into my life? Lord, my son’s life—”
“I know you don’t believe it yet, but we’re on the same side.”
“Don’t you—”
“We were born at a bad time,” he told me. “We made the choices we had to make. They were hard enough choices, and it was nice to think it all was over. But now there’s another one to be made.”
The alarm I felt was not just the shock of his words, as startling as someone jerking back the curtain in a dark room, blinding me with painful sunlight. It was that I had not known my husband at all. We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don’t, it is hear
tbreak nonetheless. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies. The sensation I felt that evening—that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth—it was a fearful loneliness.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Stop it. Stop it, stop saying that.” I felt naked and ashamed. It was as if every new revelation, every fresh thought in my head, were like a scalpel, revealing things that should not ever be seen. What about his fragile transposed heart? Another fiction of mine, another lie to keep my life serene.
And yet—beneath all the jolts of surprise and grief, I could feel a small, growing surge of relief. He made sense, my husband, at last. The storm-cloud expressions, and separate bedrooms, and “illness” as his aunts had put it; the inconsistencies that I had blamed myself for, the imperfect wife, my own failure to save him. At least I was not insane. For here it was: what I had prepared myself for. I had known his allure; I’d seen the longing in others’ eyes. I had always thought it would be another woman. That was the usual way of things. Here was the awful thing, unexpectedly: a man.
It was more than two years, apparently. That was what Buzz told me that evening. My mind scrambled to catch hold of it all—years together, years of a romance I did not want to imagine, and, not long after Holland came to pick me up at the boardinghouse, a scene when he told Buzz to go to hell and never come back. A broken nose, a shout from a high window. A whisper in my ear: “I need you to marry me.” He might have said: “I need you to hide me.” Like a protected witness, a life in our little house, calm as can be: a boy, a wife, a barkless dog. Some love in there, for all of us. Some happiness for him. But the old love story was not yet over.
I could feel Lyle jumping against my dress, begging for more.
“Pearlie.”
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“I need your help.” From the bucket came a sigh, the melting ice collapsing on itself. “I’m leaving soon. I’m going to travel again, and I am taking Holland with me.”
The Story of a Marriage Page 4
