An American Marriage: A Novel

by Tayari Jones

  “Look at me,” I said to Celestial, and she shifted, showing on her open face the places where her features give her away. She bit the left corner of her bottom lip. If I pressed my lips up against her neck, I would feel her pulse pounding against her skin.

  “Dre,” she said, turning her eyes back to the yard strewn with leaves. “What are we going to do?”

  In response, I positioned myself behind her and circled my arms around her waist, crouching a little to rest my chin against her sharp shoulder.

  Celestial said it again: “What are we going to do?” I liked that she used the word we. It wasn’t much to grab hold of, but let me tell you, I gripped it with both hands. I said, “We have to tell him. That’s first. The question of where he will live—all that comes later. That’s details.” And she nodded but didn’t say anything else.

  “Four weeks?” I said.

  She nodded. “Give or take. December 23. Merry Christmas.”

  “Let me go talk to him,” I said.

  I turned toward her, hoping she would see this offer as what it was, not a bottom-of-the-ninth bunt but a gentlemanly gesture; I was laying myself down like a coat over a mud puddle.

  She said, “In the letter, he says he wants to talk to me. Don’t you think I owe him that?”

  “You do, and you will,” I said. “But not right away. Let me give him a broad outline, and if he wants the face-to-face, I will drive him to Atlanta. But he might not even need to come here after he knows.”

  “Dre,” she said, touching my cheek so softly that it felt like a kiss or an apology. “But what if I want to talk to him? I can’t send you to Louisiana to handle him like he’s a flat tire or a traffic ticket. I was married to him, you know? It’s not his fault that things didn’t work out.”

  “It’s not about fault,” I said. But of course there was that nagging voice insisting that being with Celestial was a crime like identity theft or tomb raiding. Go get your own woman, it scolded me in Roy’s voice. Other times it was like my father reminding me that “all you have is your good name,” which should have been a joke coming from him. But alongside all the clutter in my head was my grandmother’s advice: “What’s for you is for you. Extend your hand and claim your blessing.” I never told Celestial about the voices, but I’m sure she hosted a choir of her own.

  “I know that nobody is to blame,” she said, “but the relationship is sensitive. I know we weren’t married long, but it did happen.”

  “Listen,” I said, not dropping to one knee; we were way past such formalities. “I don’t want to talk about him before we talk about us. This isn’t how I planned to do this, but look.”

  She regarded the ring centered in my palm, shaking her head, confused. When I purchased the ruby, it seemed perfect and personal, so different from what she had before, but now I wondered if it were enough.

  Celestial said, “Is this a proposal?”

  “It’s a promise.”

  “You can’t do this like that,” she said. “This is too much on me at one time.” She pulled away and walked to my bedroom and closed herself in with a little click of the knob. I could have pursued her. A paper clip could best the catch, but when a woman shuts you out, picking the lock won’t let you back in.

  In the den I poured myself a splash from the bottle of smoky scotch Carlos had given me when I graduated. For almost fifteen years, I stored it unopened in the liquor cabinet, waiting for an occasion. A year ago, Celestial asked about it, and her presence seemed occasion enough. We opened the bottle in celebration of each other. Now it was nearly empty and I would mourn when it was gone. Then I took my glass outside and sat at the base of Old Hickey. There was a little nip in the air, but scotch burns going down. Over at Celestial’s, all the lights were on and the drapes parted. Her sewing room was crammed with dolls, prepared for the holiday rush. All of them looked a little like Roy to me, even though they were of varying complexions, and most of them were girl dolls. Each and every one was Roy. I made my peace with this reality a long time ago. She was a widow. Widows are entitled to mourn.

  She called for me as the moon rose. I hesitated, waiting for a second overture. I sensed the worry as she wandered the house. If she slowed down and thought about it, she would know where to find me. My name reverberated through the vacant rooms only a few moments more. At last, she appeared on the front porch, wearing a floral gown and robe, looking like we had been married a couple hundred years.

  “Dre,” she said, walking across the cold, damp lawn, her feet bare. “Come in the house. Come to bed.”

  Without speaking, I walked past her and headed to my bedroom. The sheets were in disarray, as though she had fallen asleep only to find a nightmare waiting for her. As I would on any other night, I prepared myself for bed, washing up and changing into pajama pants and a T-shirt. Then I returned the sheets to the mattress, and the blankets. I smoothed the covers, folded them back, switched off the light, and then made my way over to where she stood by the closet with her arms crisscrossed over her chest. “Come here,” I said, embracing her like a brother.

  “Dre,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want to get married, make everything legit, aboveboard. You have to tell me, Celestial. You can’t leave me hanging.”

  “The timing’s not right, Dre.”

  “Just tell me what you want. Either you want to marry me, or you don’t. Either we’ve been playing house for almost three years, or we’ve been here building something real.”

  “Is this an ultimatum?”

  “You know me better than that. But, Celestial, I need to know and I need to know now.”

  I loosened my grip and she went to her side of the mattress and I went to mine, like boxers in our corners.

  Nobody talked; nobody slept. I wondered if this would be the end of us. I considered rolling over to join her in her territory, the side of the bed that smelled like lavender. We often slept close, sometimes sharing a single pillow. But this night, I felt like I needed to be invited, and it didn’t look like an offer was coming. You can never know another person’s mind; this is one thing I have learned. But regardless, she extended herself to me before dawn, barely ahead of the deadline ticking in my chest. She reached for me with her hands, her legs, her lips, her everything. I was right there, ready, like I was spring-loaded.

  As far as the state was concerned, she was another man’s wife, but if the events of the last five years have taught us anything, it is that you can’t trust the state to know anything about the truth of people’s lives. In my bed, in the exhausted, sweaty tangle of us, you couldn’t tell me that this was not communion.

  “Listen,” I whispered into the perfume of her skin. “Roy being locked up isn’t why we came together. You hear me?”

  “I know,” she said, sighing. “I know, I know, I know.”

  “Celestial. Please, let’s get married.”

  In the dark, she spoke with her lips so close to mine that I could taste her words, rich and peaty.

  Celestial

  At the time, I was a newlywed, combing rice from my hair. Eighteen months in, I danced the line between wife and bride.

  Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk. You have the limb, freshly sliced, dripping sap, and smelling of springtime, and then you have the mother tree stripped of her protective bark, gouged and ready to receive this new addition. Some years ago, my father performed this surgery on a dogwood tree in the side yard. He tied a pink-blooming limb stolen from the woods to my mother’s white-blooming tree secured from a nursery lot. It took yards of burlap and twine and two years for the plants to join. Even now, all these years later, there’s something not quite natural about the tree, even in its amazing two-tone glory.

  In my marriage, I never determined which of us was rootstock and which the grafted branch. The baby we were trying for might have rendered this irrelevant. Three takes you from being a couple to being a family, upping the consequences for walking away, upping the pl
easure quotient for staying home. It wasn’t as calculated as all of that at the time. The chilly rationale of hindsight is what exposes the how and why of something that once seemed supernatural. It’s the magician’s manual that shows you how the tricks are done, not with sorcery but with careful cues and mysterious devices.

  This is not an excuse, just an explanation.

  I woke up on the morning of Thanksgiving beside Andre, wearing his ring. I never imagined myself to be the kind of woman who would find herself with both a husband and a fiancé. It didn’t have to happen this way. I could have asked Uncle Banks to draw up divorce papers the instant I knew that I couldn’t be a prisoner’s wife. In the wake of Olive’s funeral, I knew I wanted Andre, sweet Dre, who had been there all along. Why didn’t I set this thing right on paper? Did some dormant love for Roy sleep inside me? For two years, that was the question in Andre’s eyes, just before bed. It is the question just beneath the words in Roy’s letter, like he wrote it down, erased it, and scribbled over it.

  There are many reasons. Guilt seeps in through the cracks in my logic. How could I serve him with the divorce papers, subjecting him to yet another state decree, another devastating development? It seemed gratuitous to make official what he certainly already knew. Was I being kind, or was I just weak? A year ago, I asked this of my mother, who offered me a glass of cold water and assured me that everything works for the good.

  I placed my hand on Andre’s sleeping shoulder, cupping my fingers over his birthmark. He breathed deeply, trusting that the world would keep spinning until he had gotten his rest. Life was less daunting at five in the morning when only one of us was awake. Andre had grown into a handsome man. His long and lanky solidified into slim but strong. He was still leonine, with his sandy hair and reddish complexion, now like a lion full grown and not just an adorable cub. “You two are going to have some pretty babies,” strangers said to us from time to time. We smiled. It was a compliment, but thinking of babies raised a knot in my throat that threatened my air.

  Jolted by a dream, Andre caught my hand with his, so I rested against him a while longer. Today was Thanksgiving. One of the hurdles of adulthood is when holidays become measuring sticks against which you always fall short. For children, Thanksgiving is about turkey and Christmas is about presents. Grown up, you learn that all holidays are about family, and few can win there.

  How would my mother, the dreamy romantic, interpret this ring on my finger, deep red like an autumn leaf? According to the ruby, Andre is my fiancé, but Roy’s diamond, so white that it’s blue, insists that this is impossible. But who listens to the wisdom of jewelry? Only our bodies know the truth. Bones don’t lie. What else hides in my jewelry box? A small tooth, ivory like antique lace, with a serrated edge like a steak knife.

  Everyone in Southwest Atlanta knows my parents’ house. It’s a landmark of a sort, although no plaque marks the spot. Situated at the junction of Lynhurst Drive and Cascade Road, right before Childress Street, the grand Victorian stood abandoned for almost a half century before my father rescued it from the squirrels and chipmunks. Set back from the street, partially hidden by a green wall of unkempt shrubbery, it stood like a turn-of-the-century cautionary tale in this community of tidy brick houses. When I was little, we passed it on our way to Greenbriar Mall, and Daddy used to say, “We’re going to live right there. That monster was built after the war, a consolation prize for losing Tara.” When I was very small, I took him seriously and pleaded against it: “But it’s haunted!” “Yes little lady,” he said. “Haunted by the ghost of history!” At this point my mother would intervene. “Your father is being rhetorical.” Then Daddy might say, “No. I’m being prescient.” And Gloria would say, “Prescient? Try delusional? Or maybe optimistic. But stop it. You’re scaring Celestial.”

  And Daddy did stop it, until his money came in. After that, he rekindled his fascination with the crumbling mansion on the hill with its cupolas and stained glass. Uncle Banks discovered that the property was in the hands of the old-money family who had owned it since Reconstruction. They couldn’t bear to live in it since Southwest Atlanta had become all black, but they couldn’t bear to sell it either. Or at least they couldn’t until Franklin Delano Davenport showed up three generations later with a briefcase full of cash money handcuffed to his arm. Daddy says that he knew that a cashier’s check would do, but sometimes it was all worth it for the gesture.

  Gloria didn’t think that the white folks would relent, but she knew better than anyone that her husband was capable of hitting a long shot. Who would have thought that he, a high school chemistry teacher, would land upon a discovery that would make them comfortable, as she likes to put it. When he returned sans briefcase, she discarded the brochures for modern stucco manses just outside the perimeter and started researching contractors that specialized in historic renovations. She says she is happier here, anyway, on the fringe of the old neighborhood, a community of schoolteachers, family doctors, and other salary-and-benefits jobs that were put into play by the civil rights movement. In one of the swanky subdivisions farther west, her neighbors were likely to have been rappers, plastic surgeons, or marketing executives. For his part, Daddy says he’s glad not to be under the thumb of some homeowners’ association that would try to tell him what he could and couldn’t do with his own damn house.

  Daddy is headstrong and persistent; these qualities are the key to his unlikely success. For twenty years he retreated to his basement laboratory tinkering with compounds after long days of teaching high school. Most of my childhood memories of him involve him wearing a lab coat ornamented with a mishmash of vintage slogan buttons. “free angela!” “silence is consent!” “i AM a man!” Daddy let his afro thrive, wild and uncontrolled, even after “black is beautiful” mellowed into “black is just fine.” Few women would have hung in with this sort of unkempt, dreamer husband, and never mind the peculiar odors that floated up from downstairs, but Gloria encouraged Daddy’s experiments. She, too, worked all day, but she found time to fill out his patent applications and mail them in. When he is asked how he went from being a barefoot boy from Sunflower, Alabama, to the mad-scientist millionaire he is today, he explains that he was too ornery to fail.

  I never imagined that he would ever turn his inflexible nature against me and Dre. After all, Dre had been my father’s first choice. Roy, with his aspirations raw and pink like the skin underneath a scab, made my father like him as a person but not as a husband for me. “I bet he showers in a coat and tie,” my father said. “I respect his ambition; I had mine. But you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with a man who has something to prove.” For Dre, on the other hand, Daddy had nothing but fondness. “Give ole Andre a chance,” he said every so often, all the way up until the morning of my engagement party. When I insisted that we were like brother and sister, Daddy said, “Ain’t nobody your sister but your sister.” When he was on the wrong side of a fifth of Jack Black, he said, “Me and your mama, we came at our marriage the hard way. But you don’t have to be smacked around by circumstance in order to live your life. Consider Andre. You know what he’s about. He’s already part of the family. Take the easy way for once.”

  But now it was all he could do to greet Dre with a curt nod hello.

  Thanksgiving morning, Andre and I arrived at my parents’ home light-handed, bearing little more than the news of our new commitment and Roy’s upcoming release. I had promised two desserts—German chocolate cake for my father and chess pie for my mother, but I was too shaken to bake. Sweets are curious, temperamental, and moody. Any cake mixed by hand on this day would slump in the oven, refusing to rise.

  We found my father out front struggling with his Christmas decorations. With so much acreage, he had space enough to properly express the full scope of his holiday spirit. His T-shirt was on backward, so only in atlanta ran across his narrow back as he squatted in the middle of the vast green yard, using a straight razor to open three cardboard boxes of wise men.


  “Remember those shirts?” Dre said as we inched up the steep driveway.

  I did remember. Only in Atlanta was one of Roy’s many entrepreneurial ventures. He hoped it would be like a southern version of the I Love New York craze that made somebody somewhere extremely wealthy. Roy had only gotten as far as ordering a few T-shirts and key chains before he was taken away. “He always had a plan,” I said.

  “Yeah. He did,” Dre said, turning to me. “You okay?”

  “I’m good,” I said. “What about you?’

  “I’m ready. But I can’t lie. Sometimes I feel guilty as hell for just being able to live my life.”

  I didn’t have to tell him that I understood, because he knew that I did. There should be a word for this, the way it feels to steal something that’s already yours.

  We watched my father for a couple of minutes, gathering ourselves to perform holiday cheer. From each box, Daddy extracted Balthazar—the swarthy wise man—and stuffed the others back where they came from. What he planned for the six discarded white kings, I had no idea. Awaiting his attention were a crèche, two blow-up snowmen, and a family of grazing deer covered in lights. On the porch was Uncle Banks, halfway up a ladder, situating what looked like dripping icicles.

  “Y’all,” I said, throwing my arms wide and embracing the entire scene.

  “Celestial,” Daddy said, not ignoring Dre but not acknowledging him either. “You bake me a cake?”

  “Hey, Mr. Davenport,” Dre said, pretending to be welcome. “Happy Thanksgiving! You know we weren’t going to come over here with our arms swinging on the holiday! I brought you some Glenlivet.”

  My father jutted his chin in my direction, and I leaned in and kissed his cheek. He smelled like cocoa butter and cannabis. He finally extended his hand to Andre, who accepted it with an optimistic face. “Happy Thanksgiving, Andre.”