The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  The next morning, I was awakened by a lion’s roar—the nearby zoo. I lay there a long time in my bed. Oh Lord, I thought. The light shifted on the ceiling like pages turning in a book, blank, unwritten pages. I think I was still dazed from the pill. Yet everything was as calm and clear as glass and I knew, somehow, that if I moved I would break it, that it would shatter all around me in bright shards. So I lay there as still as I could, in a kind of child’s game, waiting for the right moment to break the seal on my day.

  Oh Lord, I thought, in the drowsy misjudgment of morning. How could I have gotten it so wrong?

  I remember the window cast a bluish square of sun, a cage, in the corner of my room and I imagined it moving across the whole of the floor, the bed, the pillow, through the first day of my life alone. A stillness. As if all the dust from a life’s movement had settled years ago. Not a sound from anywhere; not a sound from that other room, which I imagined as empty of every tie and shoe I’d ever bought him. I pictured it, the mirror of my room: all white with sheets piled up in the corner and an ashtray left full after a night of packing and talking and loading a life into a car. Maybe he sat alone in there and wept. I can’t say. But how could you not weep? How could you not wish you’d done things a little better from the start?

  And out front, beyond the walls of the house, I imagined the space where a stain of oil was all that would be left of Buzz’s new car. I saw the car climbing a hill in the deep silent fog, and then turning onto Market Street, those two smoking a shared pack of cigarettes and one—probably my husband—asking if the other had a light. Then off across the bridge, the fog gradually lifting as they entered Oakland, and where would they be now? Tracy. Livermore. Altamont. Out in the farmlands with sunlight breaking on a lake top all at once, and green around them as far as they could see.

  A dog began barking. From outside came the clink of bottles on the step. The new seltzer boy. Now that war had crippled the old seltzer boy. It was enough.

  I sat up, put on my robe, and walked through the hall. My head was still clouded from the pill, packed in cotton. Holland’s door was open and I could see a slice of what I’d pictured: the bed neat and careful. His shade was up and the day lay bare before me. So they were gone.

  I went to my son’s room and found every bit of him hidden under blankets; I had a brief panic that, like a jailbreak in a movie, the bed was stuffed with pillows in the shape of a boy … then a bare foot jerked out of the covers, and I was calmed. I woke him the same as if it were any morning—“Good morning, gingerbread baby”—kissing each eye awake and he struggled, fists to his eyes like a boxer, as I lifted him out of the bed and onto his feet. I stroked Sonny’s weary forehead as I did every morning.

  I felt them gone. It was all so matter-of-fact: a light left on in the living room, a pillow on the floor for some reason, a glass of bourbon spilled then righted on the table. They must have left in a hurry, I thought to myself; I took a nearby towel (red-stained) and soaked up the booze until its cold touched my palm. I could almost smell coffee. Sonny made a sound in the bedroom and the birds made a sound in the yard. I brought up the shades—bright sunless day!—and vine fingers trailed down from the gutter, as if ready to lift the very roof off the house at my command.

  You had done it, I thought. You had left me. And despite everything I had been through and planned, all the walks on the foggy boardwalk, the pain I had worked to unknot and release, still—a shock—it felt like a rock thrown through my window, smashing everything to splinters, without even a note tied to it. Faithless man. Coward. I knew what I had said and done to force your decision. Though I was the one who revealed your war story, gave the plan for your seduction, plucked away the girl’s temptations, rehearsed this very morning, this moment, for hours every day, still the blame fell suddenly on you. Was it so desperate here with me? With Sonny? Was life so sad, Holland, hope so meager that some buried ember, some last spark, might not be dug up in the morning light to start a new fire? I was prepared for solitude—even for freedom—but I was not prepared for this: the abandonment. I had hidden that away in a room within me, the shade shut so I would never see it. Now it was out, and I wept. I knelt on the floor of my living room and wept. Not just for the parts I had been ready to lose, the years, not just for what I had done. But, in the end, for what you had done. We want to think we cling to people as they try to leave, attach to them like thorns, so that they stay. We must stay for each other, I thought, absurdly. We must. What else is all the talk, and love and kindness for?

  Again, my awakening thought: Had I missed it all? Everything you had tried to tell me. Was it all as upside down as a hall of mirrors? The look of fear when you stepped into that circle of light and saw me standing with Buzz Drumer, that relic perhaps of a love gone cold; the careful speech you prepared before the air-raid siren wailed; the night at the Rose Bowl when you danced as if to woo me; the look, that day in the hall, of peace, of a man who had made a decision. Perhaps I had not understood you, after all. What did you want? Did you ever really tell me?

  I had not fought for you, in all my dealings with Buzz. I had not known how and, in the end, I had given up the thought forever. And yet in the morning light as I lay motionless in bed, it had occurred to me—madly, foolishly—that you might not be gone. A reckless thought. That after everything, Holland, you might stay.

  You do not judge a man by what he says. You judge him by what he does. What did I weep for that morning? When the light was beautiful, and wealth and a new life spread before me, my son laughing from the kitchen? It was that fantasy, a foolish one: that even after the last bell rang, you finally had fought for me. I wept to know, once and for all, that you had not.

  I pulled myself together. I closed the door in my mind that led down that lonely hall; I would try it again later, alone. But that morning, I had a child to deal with, to explain things to, and a life to begin. I straightened the room as Lyle came back in and sniffed at the trail of old lovers: the pillow, the table, the towel. I blinked at the fog-bound sun, and the confused cherry trees down the sidewalk, always blooming at the wrong time. The window of a parked car, engine running, ruby lights glowing, revealed a brunette staring at me; a moment later she was gone. I heard Sonny, in the kitchen, asking for milk. I began to clean the room, picking up the towel and the glass.

  I walked down the hall and toward the kitchen. As I rounded the corner, Sonny looked at me brightly.

  “Hi Mama,” he said. “Lyle won’t come out.”

  I stood still for a moment. “Sweetheart?” He had a cup of milk in his hand.

  “Here, Lyle! He won’t come, Mama. He’s under the table.”

  “Where’d you get that, sweetheart?”

  He said that it was Daddy.

  “What do you mean?”

  My son looked at me quizzically, then turned away. I followed his eyes into the room and it stopped my heart. The sugar cube. For there I saw, above his morning coffee, bruised and broken, the cautious smile of my husband’s face.

  There are many worlds, they say, for our many choices. In one, my husband walked out from our house in darkness, stepped into that car, and was taken forever from his old life. A ride across the country in a DeSoto, with every new horizon forgetting, just a little, what he had left behind; forgiving me a little for what I had taken in exchange. One in which he found a flat in New York City, and lived with his lover with a view of a skyline like a lowered chandelier, where they banged the steam pipes for heat in winter and opened the windows for air in summer, with fights and reconciliations and trouble: a lifelong love. Letters and visits to his son, phone calls and photographs in the mail. One in which Pearlie Cook raised that son on five hundred acres north of San Francisco, sent him to Harvard, and traveled on a boat to all the places she had read about in books. One in which this is Buzz’s love story, somewhere out there.

  But I only know this world. The one in which I lived in my house, with my son and husband and our debts. In which a man came one n
ight and fought with my husband—fought to the point of fists—this time my husband’s broken nose, his blood on a towel, so that the man drove away and did not return. The world in which that summer night my husband fought and stayed, and not for fear or stubbornness or confusion, but for his one passion, despite everything. This is my story. In which he stayed for me.

  What is one to make of love?

  All the real moments of my life took place in that vine-covered house. It was in that living room, only a year later, that our buzzing radio brought news of a desegregated South, colored folks refusing to ride the buses in Montgomery, people marching everywhere, sick and tired of it at last. It came through the lyre-shaped mouth as if from the lips of an oracle. It told of how Senator McCarthy had been humiliated in front of the Army Subcommittee, and later of his death. The world was changing, all around us, and out on the ocean we felt it as the farthest edge of a whip feels its movement. It was in that hallway, opening the mail, that I learned my son would go to college on a scholarship, far away in New York City; it was there I hugged him goodbye and then fell into my husband’s arms and wept. After his graduation, at that kitchen table, I pulled Sonny’s draft notice from its official envelope. I held it in my hands and wondered at the cycle of things. Boys not wanting to die, mothers not wanting to lose them. I took a rusty thumbtack and pinned it to the wall, then called my son and told him what to do.

  This is a story of men not going to war, a story of other battles. Sonny did not go to war, but he did fight. He fought on his campus; he fought hard, and tried to shout down the war, tried to burn it down. When a bomb went off it was blamed on his group, though I don’t believe he had anything to do with it; his “group” was never anything more than some kids convinced that it all had to come down, and one or two of them took it too far. He fled to Canada, where he stayed a long time, until Carter called all of the draft dodgers back, and Sonny—now Walter—came home bringing a tall, skinny Chinese girl with a high permed hairdo. She was pregnant. And so the fights with Holland began.

  “You and Mama don’t know what I been through!” my son said.

  Holland shook his head and would not look at him.

  “You never been through hard times! You never stood up and fought for nothing!”

  I said that was enough. I could not tell him the story of how, in six months of madness, his father had stood up and fought for me. I only said he’d been to war. That didn’t impress my son at all, and the skinny girl had nothing to say about any of it; she stood there with her hand on her belly, staring at the broken mantel clock. She disappeared, a week later, along with the grandchild I never saw.

  Sonny left for New York City, calling me every week or so, and it was in that house, on the chair that replaced the old worn telephone bench, I heard that he and his new girlfriend, Lucy, had married. I nervously told Holland and he chuckled, so I took it as a cue to laugh with him. At the divide that separated us from our son, at the impetuosity of young men, and women; at the eternal urge of love itself. I saw, out that front window, as faces in the neighborhood changed from Irish to Filipino and Chinese, and foreign music played from yards on warm nights, and foreign scents came over the old sand-scarred garden fences. It was in that hall I heard the shivering sound of the last milk bottle delivered to my doorstep. And it was there, on that table, I dropped my purse when I came home from the hospital, the night that Holland died.

  His kidneys had turned on him, hardening, refusing to work, like servants with drawn daggers. He spent his final days in the hospital, buoyed by morphine, and the doctors assured me he felt no pain. His face revealed a man at peace, looking around the last room of his life. No pain. Only once did we ever mention that night long ago, and then only briefly; those six months in a long marriage had become like a small figure in a wide mural. Sonny flew out from New York for the funeral, and he stayed in his father’s room, because his childhood room had been converted for sewing and storage. I think that affected him deeply, to sleep in his father’s old bed, with his shoes still standing in the closet. We spent a few days going through the boxes, and eventually I gave the whole task over to my son. A man came to have me sign some forms for organ donation. It was a such a strange thing to have to do, but apparently my husband had arranged it long before. Later they informed me Holland’s heart was a curiosity. A curiosity. Well aren’t they all?

  He was buried in a military funeral in Colma, and some old Sunset friends, like my neighbor Edith, paid their respects. Holland’s only relative to attend, besides Sonny, was Alice, the surviving aunt, sadly regal in her wheelchair and her wig, her left hand shaking like an aspen. I wonder what caused that private smile she wore. I wonder if she remembered telling me not to marry him. Despite their fights, Sonny mourned his father keenly, and I, holding his hand as the preacher spoke, could not hide my own desperate tears.

  It was many years later that my grandson’s voice came over the telephone in my new apartment. Decades had passed since the operator would come on first, announcing: “Long distance, please hold.” I was in my seventies by then; the first time I realized my age was when I tried on a scarf in San Francisco and said it was a little bright for an old woman like me, expecting the clerk to contradict me—“You’re not old!”—and when he didn’t, I saw myself at last for what I was. An old woman. I have to say I laughed out loud.

  “Nana?”

  “Perry, did you get over your cold?”

  “Olive has it now,” he announced to me, meaning his stuffed bear who was as real to him as his mother or me. Or else as imaginary. “It’s bad.”

  We talked a little while about his bear and about his mother before there was a fumble on the line and my son came on:

  “I’m going to be in town, Mama, next week for a conference of NGOs and donors.” He was the president now of a large non profit in New York.

  “Are you bringing Lucy and Perry?”

  “No, it’s too much trouble.”

  “I’ve got to clean up the guest room—” I began. I had long since moved out of the Cook house in the Sunset into a part of town where everything was delivered. Just like the old bread wagon, the egg lady, the milkman, and the seltzer boy. Strange how the past returns in different clothes, pretending to be a stranger.

  “Oh,” he said and I heard him pause. “They’ve got a room for me at the hotel. All the meetings are going on there, Mama.”

  “Of course.” I bristled at the duty that “Mama” implied.

  “Why don’t you come and see me there? We could have breakfast on the twelfth.”

  “I’d love that.”

  “The St. Francis.”

  “I’d better air out my good dress,” I said and he laughed. Lucy came on for a moment to tell me about something she had read in the news and thought would infuriate me, which it did, and we chatted for a moment in self-righteous agreement. She was a white girl, and merciless when it came to the failings of her race. I liked her very much.

  I took the early streetcar downtown, because I never went there anymore, and stood across the street from the St. Francis, looking around Union Square. The tall buildings surrounded it cozily, brightened by the signs of shops that had come from New York or Europe to claim a view on the square. One of the last remaining cable cars clanged by, headed uphill. People sat on steps drinking coffee or eating pastries from bags, watching a street performer: a boy who had painted himself in gold. Nothing remained of the former square except the single pillar in the middle, the bronze woman atop it, celebrating Dewey’s triumph in the Pacific. From that angle, I could see the old luncheon spot and, in the window, I imagined myself viewed through a fracture in time, being advised by two older women about my forthcoming marriage: “Don’t marry him!” The cycle of things. For surely that young woman, taking a popover from the waiter, would nod her head and smile. And go and marry him anyway.

  Sonny was shyly ironic about being in his hometown, dressed so handsomely in a suit and tie, seated before a glass of champ
agne with his mother. “You wouldn’t know I’d blown up a post office,” he joked. I said he never blew up anything, and he shrugged. We were in the hotel restaurant, which sat slightly above the lobby, separated only by some palms and a brief set of stairs. Beyond the lobby’s elevators and groupings of leather chairs, we could see the hotel’s main entrance, and behind us another glass door led from the restaurant onto the street, where city life passed by in bright sunlight. I told the waitress that my son was an important man here for a conference, and he hid his face in his napkin. To hide the joy at his own success. He knew how proud I was.

  Almost as soon as the waitress left, he leaned forward and asked: “Mama, who is Charles Drumer?”

  I straightened in my chair and fiddled with my napkin, trying to calm the wave of warmth rising in me. I took in a long deep breath. A woman sitting across from us began to laugh. “That’s right,” I said. “His name was Charles. You don’t remember him?”

  “A white man visiting our house? I’m sure I’d remember that.”

  “Well.”

  “Is he a secret from your past?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” I was trying to hold myself perfectly still.

  “I bet you don’t! I was at a reception last week for this event, I spoke for a bit about housing, and a man came up to me and asked if I was the son of Holland and Pearlie Cook. He didn’t explain anything about himself. I said I was, and he handed me an envelope. He must have written it when I was talking. Here it is.” He produced a piece of cream stationery, with my name printed in shaky handwriting. “I found out later he’s a major donor, so I was glad I was polite.”

  “Of course you were polite,” I said, picking up the envelope.

  “I read it,” Sonny admitted, smiling. “It just says to meet him here in the lobby.”