The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2012 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com

  Copyright © 2012 Ann Bauer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-190-8

  For John, my Riemann

  Contents

  Copyright

  APRIL 2007

  JUNE 1985

  MAY 2007

  AUGUST 1985

  JUNE 2007

  MAY 1986

  JULY 2007

  JULY 1986

  AUGUST 2007

  FEBRUARY 1987

  SEPTEMBER 2007

  APRIL 2008

  APRIL 2007

  Jobe died on a cool April morning that smelled of wet earth and cherry blossoms.

  It was just after nine o’clock and Carmen stood in the kitchen, about a dozen feet away, holding a dish towel in one hand and her second cup of coffee in the other. She had been looking in his general direction, out the window above his daybed and into the backyard, thinking about the many things she might be doing if her husband were not dying: walking the dog; sitting on a riverbank with a sketchpad and a pencil; lying naked in a bed at the Days Inn next to her librarian, watching The Wire on HBO.

  On the sun porch where he lay, Jobe took a long, weak, wet breath and then simply stopped. It was as when a mosquito quit buzzing, or a jackhammer was turned off. His silence caused a still, nearly prayerful relief. So much so that it took a full minute for Carmen to compute what it meant, that this thing she’d been waiting for had finally happened. And once she did—realizing that she was, for the first time in more than twenty-one years, uncoupled and alone—she walked toward her husband’s body, excitement mixing inside her with horror and a snaking sense of dread.

  It was not as if she’d killed him, Carmen told herself. And simply craving someone’s death was not the same thing. Yet when her steps echoed on the oak floor, she tried to quiet them, setting her feet down carefully, one after the other, toe and then heel.

  There was a pre-Christmas sense of the possible. If Jobe was gone, it would mean everything was over: her marriage, their family, this whole false happy life. She touched his neck while watching a rabbit cross the backyard, its haunches unfolding loosely as it hopped. Her husband was still warm and she doubted for a moment that he was actually dead. Perhaps he was just holding his breath and waiting, curious to see how she’d react. But that wasn’t like him—it was, actually, more like her—and when she put her fingers in front of his mouth, she felt nothing where there should have been an exhalation. She washed her hands anyway and leaned against the lip of the sink, staring at his body. A wave of something unexpected moved through her, loneliness like a dark thundercloud. What now?

  His mother, Olive, had gone home to sleep just an hour before; she’d been up with Jobe all night, waiting, and was exhausted and cold. Carmen had tried to make her comfortable, bringing her a sweater and a thick quilt around 2:00 a.m. The house was drafty, Carmen whispered, the night cooler than she’d anticipated. Olive put on the sweater but draped the comforter mostly over her son. In the morning, Carmen found her mother-in-law pale and icy and offered to make tea, but the old woman only waved her liver-spotted hand and spent several minutes fussing with Jobe’s blankets as if he were a baby in a crib. Carmen put the coffee on instead and stood drinking her first cup and watching from the doorway, aching for Olive, thinking about how Jobe was, in fact, her baby. She would be forever crippled by his death.

  So would the three children that Carmen had then gotten off to school. This included Luca, their eldest, who should have graduated two years ago but went instead to a day program at the high school on a small blue bus. He carried his lunch in a cloth bag, holding it against his body and swaying as he waited on the curb. Every morning Carmen peered through the front window, watching the vehicle stop and swing its door open, fascinated by the way her son climbed up the steps intently, tilting his egg-shaped body forward as if walking against a strong wind. In order for her to be released from this marriage, a mother had to lose a son and this boy had to lose his father. An undeniably good man. It wasn’t fair.

  Carmen walked in a half-circle around Jobe’s still body. Something like a sob threatened to open in her throat but she swallowed it. She wouldn’t give up the house, she thought instead. The boys loved it, especially Luca, who had for ten summers stumped around the yard after his father, a foot shorter with a rectangular head set deep into his shoulders, learning one weekend to plant ground cover and prune rose bushes then forgetting it all by the next. The architecture was vintage Baltimore: a three-story A-frame with a peaked attic and an old-fashioned weathervane, built in 1900—their dream home back when Jobe was well and able to repair whatever went wrong. High ceilings, floors of slanted oak, windows that hung on ropes and rattled in winter. The sink was original: thick, cream-colored porcelain made into a deep bowl and a drain board, jutting straight out from the wall.

  Carmen paced through a slant of sunshine from the south, feeling its contradiction on her back, draining her cup. Suddenly, she was full of questions. Jobe was the one who’d always known about form and process. There were procedures you were supposed to follow in this situation. But she could not recall in this moment precisely what they were. Was she supposed to phone 911, though he was already dead? Should she call the police nonemergency number? Or could she go directly to the funeral home where Jobe had told her he wanted his service?

  Someone—at the very least—had to call Olive. Then, perhaps, the rest would follow. A proper funeral, a burial. But Carmen was not certain what would happen if she picked up the phone. She wished now for tears, if only for Olive’s sake. “I’m finally free!” she imagined herself blurting out to the old woman. “Who would have thought after all these years of waiting, he would disappear easily as that?”

  The person she really wanted to talk to was Danny—he would make this alright, put it in the proper perspective, understand her point of view—but he was probably sitting behind the information desk where he’d been the day she met him. Enoch Pratt had opened its wide doors half an hour ago and by now Danny would be giving out information about Greek myths and Milton Friedman and the sex lives of animals. She couldn’t call him at work; she couldn’t call him at home, either. For the past year, they’d conducted their relationship mostly through a series of text messages, but Carmen was puzzled over how, exactly, to key this one in: Jobe died 2day. Meet me @ 5?

  So instead, she watched her husband not breathing. His body seemed an affront without life in it: huge and wasteful, like an empty container that would have to be disposed of at great difficulty and cost. She envisioned herself telling their children, the two—Siena and Michael—who would not be surprised because they had been expecting this, coming in from school and peering around doorways every day for weeks as if they were asking the question. And Luca, who probably would not understand no matter how many times she explained.

  “But when will he come home?” she imagined their older son asking in his thick voice. And in that moment, looking at Jobe’s still body, she felt a clear stab of pain. This, though she knew it came t
oo late to redeem her, was a relief.

  Outside, birds sang. The smell of dewy grass came through the window screen, along with pale sunlight and a sudden gust of warm air. Carmen crossed the room again and reached out more gently. She took Jobe’s hands—which were large and sickly orange with prominent veins—and placed them neatly at his sides. He was her husband and she had loved him, though never well enough. Her resentment dissipated quickly and she ran two fingers over the skin of his cheek, drawn taut above the line of his beard, up and over the curve of the bone. She’d taken good care of Jobe these last months, never once forgetting his medication, getting up in the middle of the night to sit with him while he breathed through the pain. There had been plenty of chances to end his misery and her own—for months, thanks to the bag full of morphine in the refrigerator, his life had been literally within her control—but she had never seriously considered it. Even those few times when Jobe himself, with eyes like an animal, had proposed the idea. She could see he was more frightened than hopeless, hoping she’d say no, and so she had.

  There was only that one time on their honeymoon, many years ago, when he had almost died and she’d realized with a bolt of clarity: This was the only way she would ever be free.

  The conditions had been right that night: darkness, a sharp drop-off into the Mediterranean, not a soul around to witness. But it hadn’t happened. In fact, it was she who caught his arm and reeled him back from the edge, but whether out of conscience or affection Carmen couldn’t say. She considered, as she always did when she thought of this, whether she would have been happier living the other way, as the brave young widow who was her secret twin.

  If Jobe had died back then, she probably would have moved from Baltimore to New York or San Francisco. She might have gone on to find someone for whom she felt real passion, and with Olive’s blessing. She almost certainly would not have had Luca whose defect, the doctor had told them—given her young age—was an anomaly, one inexplicably blighted sperm or egg, a mistimed collision. Had she let the unwanted husband fall to his death, all this could have been prevented. These children, this house, two decades of life steered in the wrong direction, as if she’d veered off a highway accidentally and couldn’t get back on.

  Carmen shivered and glanced around at the sparkling, silent room. Was it possible that Jobe could hear the things she was thinking, now that he was dead? Perhaps he had discovered in just the last five minutes her infidelities and frustration. The fact that she had played this game in her head hundreds of times over the years: If she could go back in time, would she change things? Unmarry the man she had never wholeheartedly loved and prevent the damaged child from being born? She answered herself differently on different days. Today she could not think clearly enough to decide. So instead, she took a breath and lifted her hand to pick up the phone.

  “Olive,” she said, when the old lady answered. “He’s gone.”

  The funeral went off without a hitch. Bewildered by the details, that’s how Carmen had come to think of it, like a stage production they’d managed to put together without anyone falling down or forgetting his lines. The children, dressed in black, were model mourners. Siena wore her hair on top of her head and cried quietly during the entire service. Michael looked startled, as if he had seen something that frightened him, his legs still for once as if there were weights strapped to his feet.

  It was Luca who surprised her. Not only had he understood when she told him about his father, but he had appeared already to know. He’d nodded his large head in the way he did—without much of a neck to flex, it was more a bobbling gesture—and looked at her with an oddly wise expression in his small, wide-set eyes. Now, sober and stolid and wearing one of Jobe’s striped ties though it was at least five inches too long, he kept one wide hand on the casket as he stood beside it, stroking lightly as if his father inside would feel this and be soothed.

  Someone waved at Carmen from across the chapel. It was Danny, who looked like a puppet among this crowd of tall men. Jobe’s two brothers—Will and Nate—her sister Esme’s banker husband, the professors from Hopkins wearing their uniform of unruly beards and open-necked shirts, black jackets, and long, pipe-leg pants. Even Michael, who had grown several inches in the six months since turning twelve.

  Only Luca, who was built more like a platypus than a man, was similar in stature to her lover. Historically Carmen had preferred tall, broad-shouldered men, but she also had a weakness for paradox: Danny had Cherokee skin and hip-length dark hair combined with pale Irish eyes. He drove a Jeep and listened to rap music, but he also wore reading glasses on a chain around his neck and sat at an information desk each day.

  She waved back, discreetly, with two fingers. Danny had said he would come but she didn’t know whether to believe him—Who was filling in at the library? How had he explained his relationship to Jobe?—and now that he was here, she wasn’t sure she was glad. It felt unnatural for the two men to be together in one room, now that her husband was dead. Whereas, she recalled, she’d found it strangely stimulating the one time they met before.

  It had happened entirely by accident, about a year ago. Jobe and Carmen had been at a Federal Hill restaurant with people from his department and she had leaned back during a long conversation about the mathematical constants of bridge building, letting her ears relax so that she stopped processing syllables and heard only the various notes and sounds. When she saw Danny walking behind the maître d’ with a blonde at least ten years younger than he, she was numbly unsurprised. Carmen tracked them as if they were characters on a movie screen: the woman especially, who looked like a superhero cartoon character, constructed in perfect proportion for a form-fitting zip-up rubber suit.

  Danny was in a soft blue shirt that night and his long black hair hung in a braid down his back. The very same back that she, Carmen, had dug her nails into just that morning as she strained against him and came. It was surreal to see him now, devotedly living his other life. But there was also power in watching—in his being unaware of it—and Carmen basked for several seconds in an unfamiliar sense of control.

  Then Danny turned his head, as if he’d felt her eyes on him. He registered her with two blinks and accommodated quickly. Carmen saw him lean toward the blonde and whisper something into her ear; she imagined his breath, laced with American Spirit cigarettes and the vapor of hazelnut-flavored coffee, which he drank at his desk all day. Then they were walking over. It was an interesting move—ballsy and unnecessary—that felt to her like the opening play in some sort of high-stakes competition. It turned her on, not just to him but in a general way.

  “Carmen, hi! I thought that was you.” Danny seemed proud, standing close enough that she could smell his cologne, which was leathery and sweet. “I’d like you to meet my wife, Mega.”

  Danny and the superhero shook hands all around: Carmen, Jobe, plus the various other mathematicians who were sitting at the table, nodding and pushing their glasses up, ogling Mega’s tiny waist and perfect melon breasts.

  “Jobe,” she said, as her lover’s hand reached out to meet her husband’s, “this is Danny. He works at Enoch Pratt.”

  “Ah, the library,” Jobe said, nodding. And there was that interminable pause that always followed his pronouncements of the obvious, while everyone at the table struggled for a way to continue. Carmen breathed through the space, the way she’d learned to do.

  “So what do you do, Jobe?” Danny finally asked, though he knew not only what but also the specifics of the Riemann hypothesis and had gone so far as to research “nontrivial zeros” one day when the library was slow. “I can usually wrap my head around any topic well enough to give you the high points, at least,” he’d told Carmen afterward. “But I’ve read about a dozen articles on this Riemann thing and whatever it is just evades me. Something about prime numbers, quantum mechanics, the meaning of life.” Danny had shrugged. “Your husband must be freakishly smart. Some kind of modern-day Gauss.”

  Yet now Jobe answer
ed, as he typically did, “I teach,” and let it go at that. Sometimes his modesty struck her as false, this two-word response somehow more pompous than the longer one: I’m the Dwight Enright endowed professor of higher mathematics at Johns Hopkins. On this night in the restaurant, however, she saw that it was in his view simply the most accurate and economical answer. Warmed by the combination of soft candlelight and wine—as well as the weirdly satisfying sense of being, literally, between these two men—she reached out and took Jobe’s hand.

  “You make it sound as if you have a third-grade class somewhere,” she said, stroking his knuckles with her thumb. “Like you’re teaching simple division.”

  Jobe looked startled. It was, possibly, the first time she’d touched him in weeks. He’d glanced at Carmen with gratitude—she remembered this now, at his funeral, how his eyes had suddenly been alight—before one of the other math guys broke in. “Might as well be,” he said gruffly. “Teaching the undergrads. All they care about is getting drunk and getting laid.”

  “Sounds just like every third grader I know.” Danny flashed a quick “no-offense” grin and waved. “We’ll let you get back to your meal then,” he said, though there was no food left, all the plates had been cleared, and only Jobe was still drinking coffee.

  This had happened during his remission: after the checkup where Jobe’s original cancer was pronounced “cured” but a few weeks before he would begin running a low fever, and bruises spread like ghostly crabgrass across his back and legs. That night when he was supposedly healthy they had made love, for the last time ever, even though she’d been slightly too full from the meal at the restaurant: fat homemade pasta, oily salad, and tiramisu for dessert.

  If it had been Danny, she would have avoided sex because she felt flabby and possibly flatulent. But this was her husband. He had pulled at her nightgown, tugging at the hem like a child, the way he had for more than twenty years. And she had lifted it over her head without embarrassment. They hardly kissed any more; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d encountered his tongue. But that night she’d tried, a drunken experiment, and his beard felt stiff and foreign against her cheeks. Within minutes, Jobe was inside her and his long, bony body was against hers, like a pencil indenting a soft eraser. He moved in and out, pistons working. She couldn’t have reached his mouth again if she had wanted to—he was rigid and had drawn back for thrusting, so his face was too far above her head—but this only added to the alchemy. Alone beneath Jobe, Carmen entered a dreamy place where divisions disappeared.