The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  Nearing orgasm, she pictured the moment when Danny and Jobe shook hands: palms pressed together, the two men had mingled. Minute dustings of each one left on the other. And this—having each of them inside her within the space of less than a day—felt not like a betrayal but like a gift: She was bringing together two completely disparate men to make a whole. The next morning, she’d been mortified by all this mental blather, even though only she knew how ridiculous she’d been.

  Now she watched the priest drape Jobe’s coffin with an embroidered, white cloth and imagined his gaunt, still body inside. His cells, finally, had stopped reproducing their mutant selves. The factory of ducts and tubes that had produced his half of their children was silent. The hand that had once touched Danny’s was beginning already to decay.

  The man who’d been present at the births of their children. The one she’d once promised to love until they were parted by death. The boy who had saved her twice when she was broke and offered her shelter and given her a family and to whom she owed a lifelong debt. So much for all that.

  Carmen shivered. All morning she’d been numb, but now there was a big, empty space opening inside her, like a pool filled with ice into which she might fall. When Luca returned to the pew, she reached out and pulled him toward her, standing behind him, placing her chin on top of his squarish blond head. He patted her arm with stubby fingers and radiated a rosy glow that she could feel like sunlight warming her skin. Throughout the rest of the service he propped her up. But also, he was the only thing holding her firmly to the ground.

  Their house was quiet in the days that followed. Carmen was expected to stay home.

  The owner of the ad agency where she worked had come to the funeral and the luncheon afterward. Fred Lang was a tall, silver-haired man who did things the way they were supposed to be done: His tie was charcoal gray, his shoes polished but not shiny as befitted the occasion. He kissed Carmen, Olive’s mustardy potato salad on his breath, and told her to take as much time as she needed.

  “Such a tragedy. Jobe gone at forty-seven, his children still so young.” Fred shook his handsome head gravely. “Please. Call if there’s anything I can do.…” So many people said that. But what needed doing, Carmen thought, had finally been done.

  Danny attended for only a few minutes, long enough to eat a few cookies and hug Carmen. No one noticed; everyone who came through the door was reaching for her. She clung to him for a good minute and breathed in his scent, then watched a little lost as he walked back out through the door. Olive, too, left early, supported on either side by her remaining two sons.

  Her friend, Jana, had provided most of the food but had to leave midafternoon to attend to some refrigeration crisis at the café she owned. So a number of other people stayed on to clean up, chattering cheerfully and prolonging the task, it seemed, much longer than was necessary. Oddly, they were the ones Carmen knew least well—friends of friends or secretaries from the math department whom she’d never had the chance to meet—and none of them seemed to know the others. Yet they moved like a team and appeared to be having great fun.

  Loudly, they devised an assembly line for washing the serving dishes and stowed them all over Carmen’s kitchen so she knew that she would be opening cupboards for months to find stray platters and creamers and big, metal spoons. But it was easier to let this happen, simpler than figuring out a way to say, “Please get out, I’ve been waiting for twenty years to have this home to myself. Just go.”

  Finally, they did—all in a group that Carmen imagined would stay intact for years: They would start meeting for coffee once a month to discuss the sad event that brought them together, move on to trading book suggestions, form a club. And then, suddenly, she was alone in a house that felt as if it were breathing. She was in the living room, having just ushered the last of the do-gooders out onto the porch where she could hear them cluster and trade phone numbers and talk on. When she turned, she saw the outline of Jobe as if he’d been drawn in white chalk against the empty air, ducking his head so as not to hit it on the ceiling as he came down the front stairs.

  The children were watching TV in the den with the volume turned down so low they couldn’t possibly hear it. Siena was talking as if she couldn’t stop and the boys would answer her, Michael’s voice high and Luca’s thick and low. Carmen knew she should go in and say something to them but she simply didn’t know what that thing was. While she tried to figure it out, she walked through the rooms of the house, touching items. It seemed odd to her that Jobe was gone but his clunky black watch still lay on the kitchen counter, casually, as if it were something he’d meant to take with him but had accidentally left behind.

  Around nine o’clock, she stood in the doorway looking at her three children on the couch. The program was changing, going from flashy half-hour comedies to an hour-long drama, something with lawyers.

  “I just wanted to check…” Carmen began. The children turned to her, Michael and Siena with faces not frightened but flat and lifeless. Carmen’s heart beat fast. Could the death of a father be communicable, she wondered? Maybe his children were in danger of tripping off the earth after him. She would have to keep watch.

  “You seem glad that he’s dead,” Siena said abruptly, and Carmen caught her breath. Her mind raced: Siena knew! She’d been living with the fact that her mother did not really love her father. That when she, Carmen, grabbed her gym bag at 6:00 a.m. and claimed to be taking an early morning spinning class, she actually was leaving to fuck a long-haired librarian at a hotel with a low, last-minute Price-line rate. In that moment, Carmen’s carefully constructed world seemed to be made of wet paper.

  She thought about turning and leaving. Then she looked at Siena and saw there was none of this: no sneering or disapproval. This wasn’t about her or Danny, their infidelity; it was about Jobe. “I’m happy for him,” she said, at least half honest. “For your father. I’m very glad he’s no longer in pain.”

  Siena nodded and Carmen breathed. This was the right answer. “And none of us has to worry about him anymore. You included. It’ll get easier. You’ll go to school and it will feel better, not having to think about your father here, lying in bed so miserable, wondering if he’s”—she swallowed only slightly before saying what came next—“died yet. Now, you know.”

  “But I don’t know. At least, before, I could picture where he was. Now, he’s just … gone.” Something washed across Siena’s face and Carmen recognized it immediately as nausea. Years of mothering kicked in. She considered, briefly, grabbing Siena’s arm and whisking her into the bathroom rather than let her make a mess on the rug. Then the moment passed.

  “Dad’s fine. He’s happy now.” Luca would have sounded matter-of-fact except that he couldn’t, the way his teeth hugged his fat tongue and the words came out like they were wrapped in cloth.

  “You don’t know that,” Siena hissed, turning. And Carmen watched as she always did, the way these two wavered and danced, taking turns being the older child. Luca’s placidity and three extra years of life meant the title was his. But he couldn’t add a column of numbers or summarize a newspaper article. Siena, who was taking AP pre-calc this year and had her first boyfriend—an eerily polite kid named Troy who’d attended the funeral with his mother and held Siena’s hand when they stood beside the grave—enjoyed every advantage. Sometimes, like now, Carmen resented her daughter for this.

  “Yes, I do.” Yeth, ah doo. “Dad told me.”

  “When?” Carmen asked. “When did he tell you?”

  “The night he died.” Daahd.

  Carmen leaned her head against the doorway. “How did he tell you?”

  Michael’s gaze switched back and forth between his mother and his brother, like someone monitoring a debate.

  “This is bullshit! I’m not listening to this.” Siena stood, her face even whiter than before. Carmen put two fingers on her daughter’s arm as she flew by. It wasn’t much, but enough to make contact, to say: I’m here. I’m staying. I�
�m not as good a person as your father, maybe, but I’m going to stick around.

  “You probably had a dream, honey.” Michael’s frightened face floated in the periphery and Carmen was aware that she had two parenting jobs to do at once. It came as a sharp surprise that what she needed—what she wanted in that moment—was Jobe. He could talk to Luca while she took Michael into the kitchen and comforted him. She pictured them with their heads together: Jobe would be grave, serious about Luca’s claims. There were infinities too small to calculate, she could imagine him saying to their older son. Particles that couldn’t be seen even under the most powerful microscope. Who’s to say there weren’t also spirits made up of all the tiny, incalculable bits that humans left behind?

  Carmen closed her eyes and felt a shift in her head, a gear locking into place. “Or,” she said, opening them, looking at her two sons at once, “it could be you and your dad had a way of communicating that none of the rest of us understand. Maybe that’s your, you know, gift, the way Michael …”—she shifted, the word gift still lingering, precious and too sweet on her tongue—“the way your brother has a talent for making people laugh.”

  The boys actually seemed satisfied with this, which surprised her. And above them, for a fleeting moment, Carmen saw something glimmer: a leaf-shaped luminescence twirling in the air. Then she blinked and it was gone. Fatigue, she decided. This was far more difficult than she’d anticipated.

  In fact, it was not at all what she’d imagined. Having Jobe gone.

  The next day was Saturday and it rained, a cold, continuous sheet of steel. Spring had gone into hiding.

  Siena had returned that noon to her job as a waitress at the Pizza Pub. Michael had a baseball game that got called off but he immediately found a friend’s house to go to. Carmen drove him the five blocks so he wouldn’t get wet. And in between looking at the road she glanced at her son whose expression eased in tiny shutter jerks—like a time-release series of photographs—as they moved away from the house, the site of his father’s death.

  “Have a good time,” she said as he put his hand on the latch.

  But instead of throwing the car door open and calling back, “Okay!” as he always had, her younger son turned to her and said, “You, too,” in a perfect mortician’s voice. She stared as he unfolded himself from the car and walked—Jobe’s walk, with a slight swing to his left foot—hurriedly up the drive.

  On the way home, Carmen thought about how nice it would be if Danny came over. They could make love with hands and mouths like octopus suckers, attaching to each other in a hundred different ways under the water, then when they were finished they would lie and listen to the rain. She squinted, trying to recall if she and Jobe had ever done that. Before she had begun to chafe at their marriage in earnest she hadn’t been attracted to him, exactly, but she found him warm and comforting and it was pleasant enough to be touched by him when her body was ripe.

  There was a time, while she was pregnant with Siena and sexed-up all the time, that she recalled straddling him one night and riding him, looking down to see his horsey Abraham Lincoln face contorted as he concentrated on the task at hand, ignoring that and putting it out of her head and imagining instead that he was a woman with long, dark hair. How to account for the penis, she didn’t know or care. It was rare enough that she and Jobe succeeded in getting this far, Carmen was determined to take advantage; in her fantasy, there had been a group of rapt men watching from the corner of the room.

  Suddenly, something darted in front of her car and she braked hard. A raccoon or a small dog, she couldn’t be sure. Or maybe there was never anything at all. Carmen breathed for a moment and drove on slowly. The thought came to her that she was her children’s only parent now. There was an extra burden of responsibility to stay alive.

  She pulled into the old garage and turned the key. There was silence, and she missed the way her previous car used to tick after she switched it off. They had meant to replace this garage. It was the next project that Jobe and Luca were going to tackle, once spring came. At least that had been the thought last winter, when Jobe was still planning to live, before myeloid leukemia came to fill the vacuum where lymphoma had been.

  Carmen got out of the car and ran out the wide open door of the garage—which required manual closing, something she would not stop to do today—thirty feet to the house. By the time she got inside, her hair was streaming with rain.

  She climbed the creaky wooden stairs and went into the bathroom to towel off. She was lucky she wasn’t as short as her sister, Jobe had commented when they bought the house, because the medicine cabinet, set permanently into the wall, was so high. But even at five-foot-seven, in bare feet, Carmen’s chin was cut off by the mirror’s bottom edge. Taking her towel into the bedroom, she stood in front of the full-length mirror that Jobe had affixed to the back of the door. Faded jeans and a black shirt, no makeup, silver rings on the long, slender fingers that had just recently begun to wrinkle. It was the uniform of the domesticated bohemian, only now there was no one around to tame her. Carmen had the option to become the sort of middle-aged woman who ricocheted through town in long, brightly striped scarves and caftans and earrings made of tiny bells.

  But of course—it was like a voice intruding, neither male nor female, speaking directly into one of the synapses of her brain—you always could.

  Down in the kitchen, she made a second pot of coffee. She’d always consumed too much when Jobe wasn’t there to drink his share and now he would never again oblige her by taking his cup and a half. Again, the strange rudeness of this thrust itself at her. She had yearned to be unyoked from him for years but had never computed all the small inconveniences Jobe’s absence would cause, or the flashes of loneliness: that first morning after it happened, waking before dawn in bed and sobbing until she could hardly catch her breath. Carmen shook off the memory and washed the metal apparatus of the coffeemaker, picking the silt off with a paper towel, calling for Luca to come down.

  “Hey, honey?” Her voice was raised and artificially bright, like in a horror movie when the heroine is trying to deny that she is scared and alone inside a big empty house. “How about some chocolate coffee?”

  This was something Jobe had dreamed up for Luca, who tended to be sleepy in the morning and difficult to awaken for school. He would heat half a cup of milk in the microwave, then fill the rest with coffee and squirt in a spoonful of chocolate sauce. When Carmen objected, saying this was like having dessert for breakfast, Jobe showed her the ingredient list on the flavored non-dairy creamer she used. She could still see her husband’s hairy, many-jointed finger, pointing to the sugar content—5 grams—and tapping the side of the carton. She’d been furious then but had taught herself in the weeks that followed to drink her coffee black.

  Luca came down the back stairs now, a narrow wooden passage that led directly into the kitchen. He stood with his head cocked to one side, watching from his small eyes as she measured the chocolate carefully with a large metal spoon. Outside, the rain had picked up and was making the sound of hundreds of corks tapping on the tile roof. The coffeemaker sent off clouds of steam.

  “It might not be as good as Dad’s,” she said, setting Luca’s mug down on the table.

  He shrugged and shuffled forward, pulling out a chair and sitting tentatively the way he did, like a traveler who’d stopped to rest on a rock. Carmen took the chair opposite him and held her cup in both hands.

  “How are you doing?” It sounded as if she were reading from a script. What to say after your son’s father dies.

  “Okay.” Luca took a sip of the drink and looked worried.

  “More chocolate?” she asked, pushing against the long wooden table in preparation to stand.

  “No. It’s too much.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “T’s okay. Dad told me…” Luca got up then, tipping his ovoid body out of the chair and walking over to take the pot of coffee from the warmer. He poured about two ounces into hi
s cup then waved his hand over the top. Carmen watched, fascinated. Was it possible her son could perform incantations using nothing but coffee, chocolate, and milk? “Want some?” He held the pot forward and Carmen let him refill her cup, even though she was starting to feel the buzz inside her bones.

  Luca sat again and Carmen reached for something to say. Jobe never seemed to have this problem and could sit with Luca for hours, communicating in single words and small random gestures. Jobe had never, she thought with furtive affection, displayed the slightest frustration with Luca’s disability. Sadness, certainly. But even that only at the very beginning, and then he was done.

  “It used to rain like this when I was in London,” Carmen said. “All the time. I remember feeling like my hair would never not be wet.” I was your age, she almost said. But then she was struck by the quick bolt of pain that always came when she compared her firstborn to other twenty-year-olds, even herself back then. For her the sadness had never quite disappeared.

  Luca said nothing and she went on. “But the day I met your dad was sunny and warm. It was like … being born, you know? Coming out of this wet cave into the light.”

  She knew it was ridiculous, talking to him like this. Luca didn’t understand metaphor; he barely knew the facts about childbirth. Yet he nodded gravely, as if he understood everything.