The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  The lights and the leaves made shadow-puppet patterns all around. As the female saxophonist began a long virile improvisation, I put my head against my husband’s chest and listened.

  Where had he hidden it? The thing that was killing him? Dancing and laughing and flirting with me so happily—well, he hid it where we all hide it; it must be some feature of human existence that we have learned the magic trick, which is to place the gleaming coin on the heartline of your hand, close it in a fist and—presto!—a moment later the fingers open on a barren palm; where has it gone? It’s there all along; through the whole marriage, it’s there. It’s a child’s trick; everyone learns it, and how sad that we never guess, and go and marry a girl or boy who shows us an empty palm, when of course it’s there in the crease of the thumb, the thing they want no one to see: the heart’s desire.

  “You’re wearing Rediviva,” he whispered.

  I said I was.

  “You never wear it.”

  I said I didn’t know why; I’d found the bottle and something nostalgic had crept up. I could hear his heart beating rapidly.

  He turned and looked at the band, breathing uneasily. “I think I’m going to have to sit this one out, I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  He leaned against a tree, and then a new song started, as slow as could be, with the sound of a million strings (really just two, multiplied by moonlight), and couples wandered the dance floor, trying to work out who was going to brave a slow dance after all those fast numbers. “He’s too damn short,” I heard a young girl whisper beside us, a fragrant gardenia in her hair, “He’ll lean right into my chest.” Holland had me dance with the soldier who had brought the drinks, so I smiled good-naturedly and let the young man lead me away. He took me in a slow, stiff circle beneath the long-limbed sycamores; he was one of those dancers who hums along to the music, and he did this as the band began, in a broken rhythm, to improvise on “Good As You Been to Me.”

  The particular shadows of the trees and the vibration of the young man humming, which carried along his arms and, faintly, onto my own body, called up something that was gone the instant I felt it. I clawed after it in my mind, and fell out of step, and had to smile and regroup myself, and tried to fall back into the rhythm, all the while focusing on this memory. It must have been a memory, but it was lost. We made another half circuit of the dance floor. Then he began to hum again, my partner, and it happened again—a kind of dazed sunlight fell over things—and this time I wouldn’t let go of it: a rip in a shade, a tree shadow, a humming young man … then gone again, this time forever. Just a little piece of my youth that my brain had stored and, randomly summoned by this young soldier, had broken open as if in an emergency. Fading, but still faintly detectable: young Holland, hidden in his room, humming in my ear as he lay beside me on the bed. I looked at my partner, who couldn’t have felt anything. I looked toward Holland, who was staring at me intently.

  Something had been tugging at me throughout the dance, and it turned out to be just myself, as a girl, with some piece of the past to show me. And I could see that something was happening to Holland, too. Could it be that he saw, in the same flitting shadows of the leaves and the lights, the same orchestra playing slightly behind the beat, simply by random chance, a faint tracing of the past? Maybe just a crinkling of paper (a girl behind him finishing a candy bar) became Buzz turning the pages of a newspaper, years ago. Everyday, just as my snip of memory was everyday. Who was I to guess my husband’s heart? I only know he looked so free from pain. We would be happy, each of us; this path I had taken, it was the right one. Life would continue on its proper course, filling the banks like a river undammed. No more doubt anymore. We kept each other’s stare a long time, for we had each done a startling thing, dodged time for an instant—which is the only definition of happiness I know.

  The music stopped. The singer in his silver tie said: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time!”

  My husband appeared beside me with more drinks, and from behind the bandstand, carefully monitored by Larkspur firemen, great jets of roaring sparks rose thirty feet into the air and we cheered, of course we yelled ourselves hoarse, why wouldn’t we? That shimmering curtain descending; that firefall; the hiss and the sparks and their power to transport us; of course it scattered all cares, and of course he kissed me, as a sort of grateful goodbye, there on the dance floor, my old husband, my old love.

  Holland left early, feeling unwell, and those drinks must have gone to my head, because I agreed to stay at the dance if he would arrange for my ride home later. He kissed me goodbye, saying he’d be fine and I should enjoy myself. Men kept asking me to dance, which I did, but mostly I kept with my humming soldier, perhaps with the magic thought that he’d bring back other shards of memory as well; he didn’t. Instead, he performed the same fox-trot to every song, fancied up for fast numbers, softened for slow ones. Mostly what interested me was to be in a relaxed crowd, moving counterclockwise like skaters. For so long I had denied myself the feeling of being at home.

  The young man—his name was Shorty—had been entrusted to take me back, and a cab waited for us outside, glowing like a telephone booth. Within, the driver peered intently at a book until Shorty rapped on the window and we were off.

  “I saw how your husband kissed your hands when he said goodbye,” he said. Silver branches of an apple orchard blocked the moon, and as we passed, I looked over to see his face emerging from the darkness. He had very large eyes, a mustache, and wire-rim glasses that gleamed like an etching.

  “Oh, he’s always done that. Since we were kids.”

  “You known him that long?”

  “Well, long enough. I met him when I was sixteen, back in Kentucky.”

  “I’m from Alabama,” he said. “He must be a real kind man.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “You’re lucky,” he said, and added: “You know he’s real good-looking.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking out the window again. “Yes, he is good-looking.”

  In his voice, I seemed to hear a barely concealed desire: “He sure is.”

  So he was “one of them” as well. They were everywhere, these kinds of men, and I would forever be drawn to them. I sat back in my seat with a shudder, thinking of the changeling boys now being born, and the poor girls who someday would love them.

  “You must love him a whole lot,” he said softly.

  He sat very silently, staring at me.

  And I looked out the window, watching the moonlight hexing the mounds of the hills, the antlers of the trees, the shipless shore of the bay. The moon was rising quickly and had found a flock of clouds hidden in the sky and touched them all into vertebrated streaks of light. Everywhere the stars struggled to show themselves. And farmhouses passed, sheds, windmills, all shining from the moon like china things.

  Off in the distance a creature, perhaps a coyote, made a break for it across a hill, streaking like a comet in the moonlight.

  “Missus Cook?” It was the young man again.

  “Sorry, yes of course. He’s a fine man.”

  “A beautiful woman like you deserves one.”

  We hit another stone and my hand fell between us, brushing Shorty’s. I don’t know why I didn’t move it.

  The driver struck a match and we were briefly bathed in that warm light before he touched it, gently, to his cigarette and then, when that was lit, thermometer-shook the match to darkness, leaving only a smoky question mark. I stared out at a house as it went past, then turned to look at Shorty and he kissed me.

  That memory is as fresh as yesterday: the sensation of his arm around me and his hand moving down my collarbone to touch my breast in its corseletted cup; the smell of hair tonic in his curls as he leaned down to breathe erratically, somewhat desperately, saying: “You’re so beautiful, you’re so beautiful, Pearlie, I just want to …” Everything about the moment was young—the awkward frenzy of it, the gibberish he was talking, my own heart thrumming like a mad cricket, t
he rush and excitement of it all—but I don’t think of us as young. In my memory, for those ten or twenty minutes, up to the moment I collapsed in laughter against the door and broke the spell, we were simply alive.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked, trying to smile himself while coaxing me back with his hands.

  “Oh!” I said, but I couldn’t explain. Here was the future I planned for myself. The moon and stars, the friction of another body, a match in the night. Here it was; it had not yet occurred to me, as it never occurs to any accomplice what will become of them once the crime is finished; they are too attuned to their role, their duties. Here was my life alone. And the thought was so astonishing, so pleasant and free, that I started to laugh like a child and couldn’t stop, all the way back across the bridge. Shorty would take my hand and smile at me and try to kiss me, and once again I would convulse in laughter. Imagine that, with one of the most beautiful views in the world going by—that gemmy nighttime view of the city with great golden pillars of the bridge looming on either side and the magnificent fog billowing and glowing beneath—and all I could do was laugh. I had got everything wrong; he wasn’t “one of them” at all. He was a drunken young man grabbing a little joy while there was a moon and a paid driver and a woman he found beautiful. I could not guess what any man wanted; it was a tangle. And I forgave myself for laughing. There would be plenty of time when all of this was over, when I could breathe, and the inflamed, hopeful expression on Shorty’s face is an image I will never forget.

  He let me out at my home and I had hardly stepped out of the car before he put his hand on my arm. I was desperate for no one to see me out here with a young man. I leaned in and listened.

  “Pearlie, couldn’t you come back with me a minute?”

  “No, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Looks like your man’s asleep. Just a minute, so we can talk. Not overnight.”

  It had never occurred to me to be with a man overnight.

  “You gotta go,” I said, shaking my head. “You can’t just sit here.”

  He leaned back in the car and looked at me. Then, as he held out his hand, I found myself stepping back.

  “Good night, Shorty,” I said, signaling to the driver and spinning away. I swore I would not turn around; I swore I would not test the evening any further, but the thrill overtook me and I turned, briefly catching, from the speeding cab’s rear window, those glasses gleaming back at me. Then he was gone.

  The streetlamps cast elongated orbs of light through the fog. Only one house, its usually mown lawn neglected, had its lights on. The night had become warmer in the last few hours, like someone who has changed his mind a minute too late.

  Strange to enter the house and hear nobody. And, though I knew that Holland would be in his bed, I felt as if I were actually alone, without even the soft purr of radio static or the white blank noise of an open window. I walked through the hall and into the living room, undoing the top button of my cardigan and looking around at the still darkness, the lonely expectant objects in their darkness: the yarn cat, the broken mantel clock. Me and my son, this is what it would be like.

  A man was standing in the room with his back to me.

  Drink made my heart beat happily. I said his name and he turned.

  “Pearlie,” he said.

  “You’re back! You want something to drink? What are you doing in the dark?”

  He ignored my questions, looking at me intently. “Got back early. Finished everything. And Holland called me.”

  “Oh I see.”

  Buzz lowered his head. “He said he needed to say something to me, and when I got here—”

  I said, “We went out dancing, he said he was sick—” I thought of Holland’s dreaming stare that evening, the look of memory. “Well, good. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Pearlie.”

  I laughed; I was still throbbing with drink and the touch of Shorty’s lips on mine. “I think I don’t mind anymore.” I considered Buzz in the glow of the window, pale as bone and as beautiful as I suppose he’d ever be. I said, “I’ve never seen you in moonlight. You’d make a handsome ghost.”

  “Pearlie, something terrible has—”

  “I said I don’t mind,” I repeated, smiling.

  “There was an accident. With a gun.”

  “What do you mean? What gun?” He said it again. I told him I needed to sit down, and yet I just stood there. “Is he all right?”

  “Pearlie, I’ll get you a drink.”

  I said I didn’t want a drink; I wanted to know what he was talking about.

  In the war, a truck full of men used to drive around the Sunset with a bucket of brown paint and a ladder. They would climb up each streetlight and paint a dark hemisphere on the western half of the lamps so we couldn’t be spotted by Japanese planes. From the east, a blazing city; from the west, an outline dark as the ocean. And that is what I did that night with Buzz. I darkened half my heart so what he said couldn’t find me. I asked blankly: “Is he dead?”

  He came toward me, saying, “They didn’t tell anybody until the government men left, but once people saw them coming up the drive—”

  “Government men?”

  Buzz drank some of the brandy he had poured, and then said, “It was a drill, just a regular drill, and I guess something was wrong with his rifle—”

  I looked at him now: “Buzz … what the hell are you talking about? Tell me what’s happened to Holland?”

  I have never seen a man look at me with such pity. It was a horrible expression. Every part of his face bent down with gravity and he put his hand on my arm. From the window, the glow of headlights came into the room and left again as if it had not found what it was looking for.

  “Pearlie, it’s not Holland,” he said very firmly, his face white and grim, his gold hair shining in the light. “It’s William. In boot camp. William Platt, a gun went off in his hand yesterday morning—”

  “William Platt?” I said loudly.

  “Yes, in a training exercise, running uphill—”

  “I thought … you said ‘he’ and I … William Platt …” and then I mumbled something before I burst into tears.

  Buzz came up to me in the doorway, his hands out to comfort me, but I turned away, shaking and gasping, weeping helplessly, leaning against the windowsill. He was talking to me, but I didn’t hear anything else. I could only feel the warmth as he took me in his arms and held me, whispering things I do not recall. In my mind, William Platt marched gun-first up that Virginia hill into a great white mist, a quiet contentment becalming his face, young William Platt who once called me a nigger, and despite everything, when Buzz had said that poor boy’s name, all I could think of was my husband.

  For I am a wife. And what I’d mumbled was: “Thank God.”

  IV

  america, you give a lovely death.

  That same summer, Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted. The last time she saw her husband was minutes before he was taken to the chair, in a room where a screen separated the traitors so they could not touch. They were left alone; no one knows what they said to each other. But when the warden entered the room and separated the couple, leading Julius away, it is said he found the screen blotted with blood. They had tried to reach each other through the mesh; in a moment we can only imagine, they had pressed their fingers together with such passion that blood flowed down their hands.

  “Be comforted then,” she wrote her sons that day, “that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding, that civilization had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life.” Julius died in stantly in the electric chair, and when they cleared his body away and led Ethel in, she was so small that the electrodes couldn’t properly fit her head. When I read that it took two electric shocks to kill her, I sat down at my kitchen table and cried.

  Why, Ethel, didn’t you confess after Julius died? He was gone; there was no good to be done. I’ll ne
ver know why you didn’t pull the matron close to you and say anything to save your life, save your sons. Say anything they wanted to hear. You must know some secret I can’t guess.

  What is a wife? If they take away her children, her husband, her house and belongings; if they send down a destroying angel to this female Job and tear one son from her arms and another from the schoolhouse so his textbook falls to the floor with a thud, send agents to drag her husband from his home; if they take away the telephone table in the hall; the geraniums wilting in the flower box and the greens that have to be used before they go bad and the new hat that she hasn’t yet figured out how to wear? If they take away the dog? If they take away her favorite wooden spoon? Her brother? Her ring? What is the smallest atom of a wife that cannot be split apart? Only you could ever say, Ethel, and you died silent.

  Peace negotiations took place in a city in southern Korea, reestablishing the old borders; no treaty was ever signed, but the war was over. We did not win it, not in the way some wanted; we did not chase the Communists back into China and unlock that country for democracy, and men wrote to their local papers in disgust at our cowardice. But we were sick to death of war, and we had held the enemy back, so we left. Just one week after I heard about William Platt. The harm we inflicted—it was all for nothing.

  William Platt did not die.

  Only in my imagination did he fall down in that Virginia mud and never rise again. The loss of blood nearly took his life, but luck was always with William. After twenty-four hours his young heart beat regularly again; his eyes opened to the image of a lovely nurse arranging flowers from his family. The doctors came and he smiled, giving a thumbs-up with his remaining hand.

  I watched my husband carefully. I might catch him listening to the radio, his eyes wandering from one object in the room to the next. I wondered what each sacrifice cost him. I wondered what Buzz’s arrival, Annabel’s temptation, William’s draft and injury cost him, in the end, because even a man who reads a censored paper sees the blanks and knows exactly how much has been cut to ease his mind. He must have known—the way a child knows—that all the strange events in his life were done for want of him, for possession of him. You couldn’t see it, of course, as he leaned and listened to the radio, elbows on his knees. He seemed merely the handsomest man for a mile. But I knew the panic hung inside him, somewhere; a bat trapped in the rafters, folded and quiet all day while the rest of us were stirring, but night would come eventually. It would claw its way out; it had to.