Country of a Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

  V

  They decided the next day, in the leaky aftermath of the storm, to take the two o’clock ferry back to the mainland. As he packed up his tent, Theo noted that the suspect branch had held, but carefully avoided any sign of smugness. It would have been short-lived anyway, because after the packing was done, the little girls disappeared. He panicked—they all did—and then the girls were discovered huddling together on yesterday’s beach, unwilling to leave. The two o’clock became the three o’clock. Clouds came and went. The whole island had an after-the-holiday feel, though most everyone else was staying on. From the little ferry, Theo waved; at no one, it turned out, since the Diamonds hadn’t come to see them off. “Good-bye, good-bye,” he said, and saw the hills rising on either side, and wished, for no reason he could name, that Bill had come.

  They drove through Vermont under a suggestive cloud cover. Everyone dreamed, though not communally. Anna lay with her head against the headrest, turned toward the window, perhaps sleeping. In glimpses, he saw the stretching of her neck muscles, a delicate mole poised against her throat. That she would die one day seemed the remotest of possibilities (though there had been days, in his woman’s bed, when he had wished for Anna’s death, if only to simplify things). Something in her reeked of life, in spite of her sadness, and he was glad, at least, of this. He watched the movement of her throat as she swallowed, the in-and-out of her diaphragm as she breathed, arranging herself in her half-sleep, unaware, it would seem, of her own bodily grace. How had it come to this, he wondered, from the days in the restaurant, the shots of Sambuca, her old, daunting self-confidence?

  “Anna,” he whispered. “Do we have enough money to stop somewhere?”

  He’d been struck by a vision, all of them in a restaurant, some cozy Vermont inn. He wanted to prolong this idyll, painful as it had been, put off for as long as possible the moment when they’d all get home, and lose themselves again in the familial routine.

  Anna murmured, then drowsily counted what was left in her wallet. There was enough. Theo pulled off the highway at what sounded like a promising town. “Greenpoint.” But Greenpoint, it seemed, was only rows of houses, sleepy behind overhanging trees, houses needing paint jobs, with empty tire swings and ancient, cracked moldings, and some of them, though they were far from the sea, with widows’ walks. When they reached the downtown, everything was shuttered; the town itself seemed to have been sandblasted free of commerce. Good choice, he congratulated himself, this “Greenpoint.” At the end of Main Street was a single light, a Pepsi sign. They pulled up beside it and saw it was a pizza restaurant. Andre’s Pizza. An empty cavernous place with fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  Leah’s face was pressed against the car window, studying this bleak hole to which her father had brought her.

  “It looks all right,” Anna said, unconvincingly.

  They went inside. Andre, it must have been, was behind the counter, rolling dough. He did not look up to greet them. He had a thick mustache and breathed heavily, encased in a solitude that commanded a certain respect. They chose a table from among the many empties, but tepidly, as if too bold an action would rouse Andre, he would bark out an order that they take not that one, but another. Anna put out napkins, a gesture instinctual to her, which softened the effect and made the place feel more like home. They sat under a blown-up picture of the Colosseum. Theo approached the counter.

  He cleared his throat, for attention, then felt stupid. Andre was aware of him. Still, the man did not regard them even when the pizza was ready, merely said, in the deepest, thickest of accents, “The pitz-a.” Theo went to get it. They ate stolidly, without communication, and it was nearly unbearable, as if the rest of life might be like this. What had he wanted from this idyll, this break from habit? His hope had been that the world would take care of them, buoy them up—remember the ferry ride, just two days ago? Now it seemed, inevitably, up to him. A man spent his life running from emotion and then reached the place—always barren, always self-chosen—where he understood that emotion was the only thing that could save him.

  Soon they were finished. He turned once to acknowledge Andre, to ask for the bill, but really to be acknowledged, seen from outside. Were they all right? Were they a family like other families? Andre named a figure; the man dispensed with receipts, apparently. Finally, they were outside, on the town’s sidewalk, under a deepening pink sky.

  “Beautiful,” Theo said, but cursorily; he wanted to pack up the children and get moving. The stop had been a failure. But Anna halted on the sidewalk, Jacob resting against her hip, and stared down the street at the buildings, which received the last light as if being returned for an instant to the time of their glory. The sandstone edifices rose, the engraved lettering on each of them briefly restored by the late-burning sun. Anna’s gaze was deep and long. She was having a thought, he could tell, and he wanted to know it, it seemed to give her courage. “What?” he asked. She shook her head. “What, we’re going to live the rest of our lives in silence?” he asked aloud. She locked Jacob into his car seat, told Leah to put on her seat belt. “Nothing, Theo,” she said, and told him to drive.

  He did. She found a station on the radio that played jazz. “Not this,” Leah whined from the backseat. Anna settled in and listened and they drove under a sky that had gone from pink to pink-and-gray, with an astonishing gunmetal blue shadowing the clouds. Soon Jacob slept. What a good boy he’d been on this trip! The trees on either side of the road bent into one another, forming an arch, and as he drove he had the sense of a long tunnel they were passing through, a thing suggesting death but which still, somehow, protected them. What was wrong, after all? Briefly, their great battle disappeared from sight, and it was as though the stop had done its work, though not in the way he’d have wished for, or predicted.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened back there?” he asked Anna. He was remembering her on the sidewalk, her face looking as it had in their earlier, simpler days, the day she’d decided to go ahead with her pastry business, for instance: serious, and a little saddened by her own seriousness. “Are you going to tell me anything?”

  Anna lay back, with her eyes wide. He remembered now, what she had told him in the tent last night, the severity of her unspoken condemnation: how, at the deepest level, he had never really met her. The large and fulsome emotional life she had lived had not been his. She stared now, up at the trees, and it was as if he were seeing a woman in the process of making some broad adjustment, who had come at last to understand that she was alone, that life would have to be lived that way, under different rules. And for all that he would like to have battered down this truth, altered the reality of it, he understood that he could not, and that something in this awful adjustment of hers was good for him, would allow them to go on together. He hummed along with the jazz, then stopped. What if he had, from the beginning, been more willing to meet her, more there? He hunted for the reason why this had not been accomplished, and the sky darkened, and it was hopeless, he could not know. He saw the past, and all his chances to have made it different gone, and it was terrible, terrible to think that she was going to stop asking for what he’d never quite been able to give, but now might … well, perhaps. Perhaps. He couldn’t say. The only thing he could be certain of was that there had been, at least, a change, even if a small one. And within it, he found a single, equally small cause for hope: his life had ceased, on this strange journey, to hover around a secret, had opened instead into a territory encompassing terror and the constant threat of loss. And to maintain this hazardous position, he saw now, would be the effort of his remaining days.

  THE CHALLENGE OF THE POET

  Billy Hopkins is our poet. I know how that must sound, like we think of him as a kind of mascot, and that’s not what I mean. We’re a close group, and most of us happen to be in the health field, that’s all. Will Morgen teaches high school, and Joan Klapper gives piano lessons in her home. As
for the rest of us, it’s very basic: we consult on diet, or study X rays, or else listen, for an hour at a time, to the monologues of the bereft. Billy’s with us half the year.

  Usually, he arrives in January, after he’s spent the fall semester at some university or other. Billy was a Yale Younger Poet a dozen years ago; that seems to give him access to this life of his, where apparently the well never runs dry. I’m a nutritionist. I work part-time at a clinic a mile and a half from our house. My husband, Steve, is a radiologist associated with a hospital eleven miles down the turnpike. That’s our sphere, though I don’t want to make too little of it, and since you’ve probably already added up our combined salaries, it seems foolish to try to pull the wool over your eyes. There are the winter trips to the Caymans, there’s skiing in Vermont, and since we’re both from New York, there’s that whole side of it, too. But Steve and I have three kids and we’re settled. A lot of my life is spent in the driver’s seat of our minivan, shuttling the kids from place to place. Billy gets invitations every fall to go and teach somewhere, usually in the Midwest—Indiana, or Illinois, Oklahoma. In the summer, he’s a staple of the writers’ conferences. You see his name in the advertisements of literary magazines, and you know who he belongs to then. But from January through June, he’s ours.

  The women in our group are tight—it may be our way of surviving these lives in which, let’s face it, not a lot happens. In other societies, women meet by the river and beat their soiled clothes against rocks; we, on the other hand, have the telephone, and an agreement to keep no secrets from one another. When he’s here, we talk about Billy. He’s our mystery, the only one of the men we don’t really know about. I mean, after you’ve heard all about Paul Kaufman’s low sperm count and Will Morgen’s bisexual angst, there isn’t a whole lot left to wonder about these guys. Not that sex is the whole thing, but sex is—I won’t kid you—a large part of it. Sex and emotion and the fights and the silly, complicated money battles; nobody’s domestic scenes are left undescribed. Billy, on the other hand, has no wife to tell us about him. He was Paul Kaufman’s roommate in college, and Paul says he was vague and moony and pretty much a loner back then. After that, there’s no reliable scribe to fill us in. Of course we’ve wondered from time to time if maybe he’s gay, then decided he’s not. Something tells us he’s not. There are the poems, too, which we’ve read, though maybe not as deeply as we could have. Oblique as they are, we’ve all detected the occasional female presence in them. Mickey Kaufman says he has a long-standing crush on me, and that’s why he keeps coming here, six months a year, every year. I say it’s the basketball and the fact that we let him baby-sit. I also say, more seriously, that when Mickey Kaufman says something like “He has a crush,” we’re revealing too much of ourselves, and it embarrasses me a little. I tell her then that we can’t really understand Billy, and it would probably be better for us if we didn’t try. I mean something in this, but I don’t tell her what I mean. It might be the only secret I hold back.

  My name is Ellen Conlon, and I’m thirty-nine years old. This year is the big one for me—I turn forty in June—and Steve’s threatening to take me to Paris to celebrate. I laugh and tell him what a great idea (I’m still not certain if he’s serious) but inside I’m thinking, Why bother? We’ll get off the plane and there it’ll be, the City of Lights, and there we’ll be, two middle-aged American health professionals with crow’s-feet around our eyes. I’m sure he’ll have found out from his colleagues at the hospital where the best restaurants are, and after we’ve eaten he’ll take me back to the hotel and try to make love to me like a twenty-year-old. Steve is very much one for marking the occasion, and it’ll be sweet, but all the time I’ll be thinking, What are the children doing? and my whole desire will be for the time when we can get back to making love in our habitual, sleepy, undemanding way.

  When I talk like this, my friends accuse me of having given up on something. It’s how I’m known in our group, Ellen of the Low Expectations. I have a gravelly voice and a way of scowling sometimes that helps this image along, I suppose. That, together with the fact that I keep my hair clipped short and refuse to do anything about the encroaching gray. When someone’s in a mess, largely of her own making, it’s my instinct to state the obvious: just do this, I’ll say, and your problems will be over. There’s nothing deliberate about this persona of mine, but Billy has a way of boring in on it, as if he recognizes its falseness.

  A few weeks ago, we had the group over to our house on a Friday night, for dinner and then a movie. Will Morgen had rented Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and with the dishes still on the table, we all lay on our huge sectional and watched it. I knew there was still the cleaning up ahead, and I was already tired from preparing the dinner, but I lay there and got into it, especially since Will kept pointing things out that made us laugh. I think sometimes this might be how the gay side of him comes out, the way we absorb it, even help him along with it, by indulging his passion for trashy romantic movies. Anyway, I stuck with it to the end, I listened to William Holden’s final message from beyond the grave, and then, while everyone else was sitting around talking, I started clearing the dinner dishes. Billy came into the kitchen, and he must have caught the exhausted look on my face—that, and my annoyance that no one else had come in to help—because he gave me one of those concerned glances of his. Sympathy would have been nice—sympathy and a hand—but you don’t get those things from Billy unless you ask. He sat at the counter and put a toothpick in his mouth and said, “Ellen, you look like you want somebody to take you away from all this.”

  “Are you offering?” I asked, because that’s our joke.

  “Yes” is always his reply, and then he raises his blond eyebrows and neither of us entertains the proposition for even half a second.

  “What I really could use,” I said, “is somebody to help me with the dishes.”

  Billy can be a sport, once he’s reminded of the rules other people live by. He picked up a dish towel and started drying what was left of the overload, all the stuff I couldn’t fit into the dishwasher. I stood there a moment and watched him. His book jacket photo makes Billy look like a movie star, a pudgier Robert Redford, and he’s got this very avid look in that photograph that makes you think he’s only paused to write these poems in between a series of breakneck physical engagements. What that picture leaves out is the odd, fussy side to him that manifests itself in the tiniest things, the prissy way his mouth sets, for instance, as he dries a dish. Sometimes, I can’t help it, I imagine how Billy would be after sex, wanting to slip away, to be in his own bed, things arranged neatly. It makes me sad for him, the impossibility of imagining him in a simple moment of intimacy. But then he broke my reverie by doing the thing he always does, the thing that cuts into my empathy and makes me frightened of him.

  He was running a glass under water—apparently I hadn’t gotten it clean enough for him—when he turned slightly toward me and, smiling in that way of his that lets me know what he’s about to say has some special meaning, repeated William Holden’s words from the end of the movie. “We did not miss, my darling,” Billy said in an undertone, “we did not miss that many-splendored thing.”

  He began to dry the glass he’d been rinsing. There wasn’t a whole lot to this interchange. There rarely is. It’s the way he operates. We both even laughed, I think. The line was sort of corny. But Billy had said it in such a way that an accusation cut through the irony, and our little scene in the kitchen was altered by it. Billy sees it as his task to remind me—he cannot let it go—that the big emotions of life, its dark and necessary underbelly, are the ones I am eluding in my daily existence. He knows, too, that I know this about myself. It’s not the sort of thing, for instance, that he would ever say to Mickey Kaufman. But there are times I wish he would let it go, allow things to be simple. It may well be that I have missed that many-splendored thing, but is it really any of Billy’s business?

  I’ve gotten this far and I realize I haven’t
told you anything. Steve and I met in college. Those medical school years are a blur to me, mostly. Sex late at night and the apartment in Buffalo and my last years of undergraduate classes (I was two years behind Steve), where I didn’t have a lot of friends because I’d transferred to be with him. What I remember best is an endless series of walks by myself, in the cold, where I think I warmed myself by constructing the details of a life that I was certain we were moving toward. It’s pretty much the life we have now. I suppose you could say I am the woman whose dreams came true.

  When you are married to a doctor, there is a moment in which he emerges. Those early years were like me walking on the ice and Steve swimming beneath it, so that as I walked, I followed his blurry, moving figure below me. And then, for a little while, we’d each pause and blow against the ice, try to make a hole where we could reach each other. And we would. Then he’d go back down again.

  He surprised me by telling me, after his residency was done, that he wanted to take a year off and travel. His father had died and there was money. We did England, Holland, Scandinavia, skipped France and Italy. In those days, in those sorts of adventures, I don’t think you ask yourself very often whether you’re in love. You accept this other person—his body, mostly, and the feelings that go along with it—and you say, Here it is, my life. I remember sitting in the Tivoli Gardens with Steve, one evening, toward the end, when we knew we were going back, we’d even begun to talk about having a child; sitting there, in the quiet, with all those lights of Tivoli around us, and feeling pregnant already—not with a child but with everything that was about to happen to us. This feeling was of course for Steve—at least, it included him—but maybe not for Steve himself. He was going to make my life happen. He was twenty-nine years old then, ready to be a doctor. When I think of him that way now, I think: God, and I miss him terribly.