An American Marriage: A Novel

by Tayari Jones

  On the day we got the news, I was aware that she didn’t belong to me. I don’t mean that, on paper at least, she was another man’s wife. If you knew her, you would know that she never belonged to him either. I’m not sure if she even realized it herself, but she’s the kind of woman who will never belong to anyone. This is the truth that you have to lean close to see. Picture a twenty-dollar bill. You think it’s green, but when you get up close you find that it’s beige linen with dark green ink. Now consider Celestial. Even while she wore his ring, she wasn’t his wife. She was merely a married woman.

  I’m not making excuses for myself. I know that there are men in this world, better men than me, who would cut these feelings off and burn the stump the day that Roy went to prison, especially with him being falsely convicted. His innocence is something that I have never doubted. None of us did. Mr. Davenport is disappointed in me, believing that I should have been a gentleman and left Celestial alone, letting her be a living monument to Roy’s struggle. But anyone who can’t understand doesn’t know what it means to have loved someone since you first figured out how to bend your tongue to talk, how to flex your feet to make steps.

  I was a witness at their wedding, you know. The day she married Roy, I signed my name, Andre Maurice Tucker, even though my right hand trembled so badly I had to steady it with my left. At the church, when the preacher asked if anyone could say why these two should not wed, I kept my own counsel there at the altar, cummerbund strapped around my waist and a sloppy fist beating in my chest. She meant what she said on that spring day, but now you have to consider all the days that came after as well as those stacked up before.

  Let me start again. Celestial and I grew up on the same narrow street in Southwest Atlanta. The street was Lynn Valley, off of Lynn Drive, which branched off of Lynhurst. The dead end was considered a plus because we could play in the road without getting run over. Sometimes I envy the children today with all their tae kwon do, psychotherapy, and language immersion, but at the same time, I appreciate that back then being little meant you really didn’t have to do anything but stay alive and have fun. We ran loose straight through the seventies, but we got stopped short when a serial killer terrorized the city. We tied a yellow ribbon around Old Hickey in memory of the twenty-nine missing and murdered. It was a rough couple of years, but the threat passed; the yellow ribbons frayed and fell like leaves and were burned like leaves. Celestial and I continued to live, love, learn, and grow.

  When I was seven, my parents tangled in a nasty divorce back when nice families didn’t split up. Once Carlos moved out—a grand performance involving his three brothers, an off-duty cop, and a U-Haul—Celestial volunteered her own father. I’ll never forget her pulling me by the hand down to the basement lab. Mr. Davenport wore a white coat, like a doctor; his goggles burrowed in his asymmetric afro. “Daddy,” she said. “Andre’s daddy ran off, so I said you could be his daddy, too, sometimes.” Mr. Davenport fired up a Bunsen burner, pulled down his goggles, and said, “I’m amenable to the proposition.” To this day, this remains the greatest gift that anyone has ever extended to me. Mr. Davenport and I never became like father and son; the chemistry wasn’t quite right. Still with that gesture of generosity, she lifted the covers, I crawled under, and we became a family.

  To lay it all on the table, we were not quite like brother and sister. We were more like kissing cousins. Our senior year in high school, we went to the Valentine’s Ball together, for lack of other options. She had her eye on a bass drummer, and I had my eye on this one majorette. As luck would have it, they had their sights on each other. I wasn’t surprised to be dateless. In a world that prized tall, dark, and handsome, I was little, light, and cute. After the prom, we kissed each other in the back of the limo from Witherspoon’s. Then, back at her house, we snuck down to the basement and made out on the little sofa her father crashed on when he needed a break from his work. The room smelled like rubbing alcohol, and the sofa cushions smelled like weed. Celestial glided over to a shiny file cabinet and produced a flask filled with something that might have been gin. We passed it back and forth until the courage kicked in.

  Then I was such a mama’s boy that I confessed everything to Evie. The next morning. She had two things to say: (a) it was inevitable and (b) it was my duty to go next door, ring the bell, and ask Celestial to be my girlfriend. Like her daddy had said all those years ago, I was “amenable to the proposition,” but Celestial was not. “Dre, can we pretend like we didn’t do that? Can we just watch TV?” She was asking me a real question, wanting to know if it were possible for us to reverse the clock. Could we shift away from the memory of the night before, grow toward some other sun. I finally said that we could try. She broke my heart that afternoon, like how Ella Fitzgerald could shatter a glass with a song.

  I’m not telling this to say that I planted my flag way back in high school. All I want to get across is that there is real history between us, not just an accident of time and place.

  After high school, we went our separate ways, seeking our fortunes like the three little pigs. My seeking only took me seven miles up the road, to Morehouse College. I was a third-generation legacy, and this was enough for Carlos to pony up the tuition even though he hadn’t paid Evie half of what she asked for in child support. My first-choice school was Xavier University in New Orleans, but I had to go where Carlos was willing to send a check. I’m not complaining. Morehouse was a good fit, teaching me that there were dozens of ways to be a black man. I only had to choose which one was right for me.

  Celestial picked Howard University, although her mother voted for Smith in Massachusetts and her dad endorsed Spelman. But whatever Celestial wanted, Celestial got, so they bought her a gray Toyota Corolla she named Lucille, and she set out for the nation’s capital. I halfheartedly tried to meet up with her when Morehouse played Howard for homecoming. My girlfriend at the time wasn’t keen on meeting Celestial; even she could tell from the way I pronounced her name that my feelings were more than friendly.

  About three weeks after I didn’t see her in DC, she came back home, shattered. Her family kept her essentially sequestered for nearly six months. I visited twice and I would have come by every week, but her aunt Sylvia sent me away. Something shadowy and female happened between them, as mysterious and primal as witches’ brew.

  Come September, Celestial was ready to live again, but she didn’t go back to DC. Strings were pulled and she enrolled at Spelman College after all. Evie told me to keep an eye on her, and I did. Celestial was the same girl I had always known but with a little bit of risk about her, like she might cut you. Her sense of humor was ratcheted up a few notches, and she stood even taller.

  All that was a long time ago, when things were different. I know that nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but I can’t help recalling those days when we were underage and broke; she would sometimes come stay with me in my dorm room and we feasted upon wing-on-wheat, a chicken-and-bread combination that cost only two dollars and some change. After we ate, I would mess with her, asking why she never brought around any of her friends to meet me.

  “I notice that you never talk about me bringing anybody until after the food is all gone.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “Next time,” she said. “I promise.” But she was never going to bring anyone around and she would never tell me why not. On these evenings, near 1 a.m. or so, I always offered to escort her back to her own campus and she would say, “I want to stay here.” We slept in my twin bed—her under the covers and me beside her with a sheet between us, for modesty’s sake. I would be lying if I didn’t say sharing the bed with only a stretch of cotton separating our bodies didn’t rile me up from time to time. But looking back, I attribute that to my youth. Once she woke up before the sun and whispered, “Andre, sometimes I feel like I’m not all the way together.” That was the one time I joined her underneath the sheet, but it was only to quiet her trembling. “You’re good,” I told her. “You’re good.�
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  And if I may say another thing to color the record, they met through me. She had slept over and Roy came by at 8 a.m. trying to hustle up some quarters to do his laundry. He came busting in with no warning, like there was no way I could be doing anything private. In college, I was a hard guy to categorize. I wasn’t militant enough to be an Afrikan with a k, I wasn’t peculiar enough to be a nerd, and it goes without saying that I didn’t have the moves to be a Rico Suave. So I may not have had a natural female constituency, but I did well enough. Roy, as per usual, was drowning in attention. He was tallish, dark, and handsome but unpolished enough that it made him appear wholesome. Since our dorm rooms shared a wall, I knew that the clodhopper act was a technique. Not that he wasn’t country as sugar on grits, but he wasn’t stupid or harmless.

  “I’m Roy Hamilton,” he said, staring at Celestial like he was hungry.

  “Roy Othaniel Hamilton, from what I hear through the wall.”

  Now Roy looked at me like I had shared classified information. I held my hands up. Then he turned his eyes to Celestial again and kept them there. At first, I think it was the challenge of it all. He couldn’t believe that she had less than no interest in him. Even I was confused.

  That’s when I realized that her transformation was permanent. This was the new Celestial, straight ahead and direct, the by-product of all that time she spent recuperating with her aunt. Six months in Sylvia’s care taught her two things: how to sew dolls from socks and how to tell immediately when a man was coming at her from the wrong side of the street.

  Roy came to my room three or four times to ask after her. “Ain’t nothing up with y’all, right?”

  “Nothing at all,” I said. “I been knowing her since we were little.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then give me some intel.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I knew, would I be asking you?”

  There was insight I could have given him, no doubt. However, I wasn’t going to give Roy the map to the core of her. He was a cool dude; even back then I liked him. He and I were almost frat bothers. Part One of my father’s conditions in sending me to school was that I pledge—in his mind, only his first-born son could keep the legacy going. When I showed up for the “informational meeting,” Roy was there, too. Being first-generation everything, he didn’t have too much to write on the index cards, whereas the rest of us were busy inking our bona fides. I was sitting right next to him, so I saw a little blemish of panic bloom on his face. When the brothers came around and asked for his card, he handed it back as blank as the moon. “I didn’t feel those questions could tell you who I am.” He didn’t put the bass in his voice when he said it, but there was a little something there. The Big Brother snorted at him and said, “Fool, fill out the card.” Yet he won a little ground for himself there. Roy glanced over at my card on which I block-lettered my dad’s whole entire family tree.

  “It’s in your blood,” Roy said.

  I waved the card and said, “Ask me how many times I have seen these people in the last ten years.”

  Roy shrugged. “It’s your family.”

  I handed my card in and sat beside him again. Things got silly. I won’t go into detail because secrets are secrets, but let’s just say there was ceremonial garb but no sacrificial chickens or other livestock.

  “We should break up out of here.” Roy poked me with his elbow, testing the waters.

  And when I think back on it, I wish we had headed for the door, escaping with our dignity intact. Flash forward: short version—neither of us made line. Slightly more detailed version—they kicked our asses for three weeks straight and we still didn’t make line. Super-secret version—when we didn’t make line, I was privately relieved, but Roy wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

  He and I were friendly, if not friends, but I wasn’t going to present Celestial on a silver platter. Evie raised me better than that. It took another three or four years for them to find each other on their own, and then the time was right. Was Roy the kind of guy you want your sister to marry? The truth is that you never want your sister to marry at all. But they were good together, Celestial and Roy. He took care of her, and to my knowledge, when he promised to have and to hold, he was sincere. Even Evie approved, to the point that she played piano at the wedding. It was an uplifting story: boy chases girl until she catches him and all of that. At the wedding reception, I sat at the head table, wishing them the best. When I raised my glass to their happiness, my words were heartfelt. Anyone who would say different is a liar.

  All this is a true story. But life happens. Trouble happens, and good luck, too. I’m not trying to sound all que será about it, but how can I apologize for the nearly three years Celestial and I have spent as partners in life? And besides, if I was going to start apologizing, to whom would I make amends? Would I go to Roy repentant and red-handed? Maybe in his mind it would seem appropriate, but Celestial isn’t something you can steal like a wallet or even a bright idea. She is a living, breathing, beautiful human being. Obviously, there are more sides to this story than just mine and hers, but what can’t be questioned is this: I love her and she loves me. She is the first thing I think about in the morning whether I wake up beside her or wake up by myself in my own pitiful bed.

  When I was growing up, Grandmamma used to say, “The Lord works in mysterious ways” or “He might not be there when you want Him, but He’s always right on time.” Evie used to say, “God will do to you what He feels like needs to be done to you.” Then Grandmamma would tell Evie to hush and remind her that getting left by a man was not the worst thing that ever happened to somebody. And Evie would say, “It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me.” She said it so much that she came down with lupus. “God wanted me to see what misery really was,” Evie said. I didn’t like all this God talk, like He was up there toying with us. I preferred more of the tenderness and acceptance my grandmother promised in her hymns. I told this to Evie when I was a little boy and she said, “You got to work with the god you were given.”

  You also have to work with the love you are given, with all of the complications clanging behind it like tin cans tied to a bridal sedan. We didn’t forget Roy. Celestial and I both sent money to his account every month, but it was like sending thirty-five cents a day to feed an orphan in Ethiopia, something and nothing at the same time. Still, he was always there, a shimmering apparition in the corner of the bedroom.

  On the fourth Wednesday in November, I came home from work to find Celestial in my kitchen, wearing her sewing smock and drinking red wine from a bubble glass. I knew she was agitated from the sharp click of her nails against the tabletop.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?” I asked, taking off my coat.

  She shook her head and offered a sigh I couldn’t interpret.

  I sat next to her and took a sip from the glass. This was a thing with us, sharing a single drink.

  Celestial ran her hands over her hair, buzzed short since we first got together. The close cut made her older, and not in a negative way. It was the difference between a young lady and a grown woman.

  “You okay?” I said.

  With the hand not holding the wine to her lips, she produced a letter from her pocket. Before I unfolded the lined paper, I knew exactly what it was, knew exactly what it said, as though the meaning bypassed language and found its way into my blood, uncut.

  “Uncle Banks worked a miracle,” she said, rubbing her hands over her naked head. “Roy’s getting out.”

  She rose from the table as I got up and went to the cupboard and got my own bubble glass and sloshed it half full of cabernet, wishing for something a little bit stronger. I raised my glass. “To Banks. He said he wouldn’t give up.”

  “Yeah,” Celestial said. “Finally. It’s been five years.”

  “I’m happy for Roy. He was my friend.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know you don’t wish anything bad on him.”

  We stood before the kitchen sink gazing out
the window at the brown grass covered with fallen leaves. Against the far wall at the edge of the property grew a fig tree that Carlos planted to celebrate my birth. Not to be outdone, Mr. Davenport set out a jungle of rosebushes for Celestial’s first birthday, and to this day, they creep up a dozen trellises each summer, fragrant and undisciplined.

  “You think he wants to come back here?” Celestial asked. “In his letter he doesn’t mention any plans.”

  “How could he have plans?” I said. “He has to start over.”

  “Maybe he could come here,” she said. “You and I could stay in my house and we could set him up in your house. . . .”

  “No man is going to go for that.”

  “He might?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “But you are glad he’s out,” she said. “You don’t begrudge him that?”

  “Celestial,” I said. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

  Of course, I was happy to hear that he was being set free. Nothing would change the fact that my chest filled with gratitude on behalf of Roy Hamilton, my friend, my Morehouse brother. Still, there were things that Celestial and I needed to discuss. Yes, last month she finally agreed to talk to Banks about divorce papers, and yesterday I went to the jeweler and selected a ring, something my mama had been predicting since I was three years old. My idea was to wake her with it tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day. The stone wouldn’t put your eye out; Celestial had already been down that yellow brick road. I didn’t even go for a diamond at all, choosing instead a dark oval-cut ruby, shot through with fire, mounted on a plain gold band. It was as though her singing voice had been solidified into a jewel.

  To buy it, I walked out on faith, because Celestial says she doesn’t believe in marriage anymore. “Till death do us part” is unreasonable, a recipe for failure. I asked her, “So what do you believe in?” She said, “I believe in communion.” As for me, I’m modern and traditional at the same time. I, too, believe in intimacy—who doesn’t? But I also believe in commitment. Marriage is, as she says, “a peculiar institution.” My parents’ divorce made it clear what kinds of raw deals are brokered at the altar. But right now, in America, marriage is the closest thing to what I want.