The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  Only lately, the formula hadn’t been working. The situation with her father was not her fault, but other things seemed to be directly related to the choices she’d made. Her friends from high school all had drifted out of her life. Her last relationship had been with a philosophy T.A. at Michigan, a thirty-two-year-old post-doctoral student who had a wife and a six-month-old at home. He’d been serious, with small, round, John Lennon glasses and thick, silky hair. They got together mostly in his office after hours and drank vodka from Styrofoam cups before having sex. Then one day she showed up and he announced loudly that he could no longer tutor her privately and firmly shut the door.

  It was time to do something different, and Jobe certainly was that. But being pursued so diligently, the object of someone else’s hopeful reaching from a lower social caste, made her cringe. She knew now exactly how her high school boyfriend had felt: looking at her from time to time, gauging whether she was quite good enough to be seen with, feeling as if he had to peel her off him like a too-tight sweater.

  At least Carmen wasn’t mean. She had no desire to do this to someone. The truth was she’d never before given much thought to people like Jobe, those knobby math club boys with strange faces and bodies like wire hangers who seemed to exist only at school. You never saw them at parties, or at the mall, or even in the library. Occasionally, you might help out one who was stammering through a presentation or struggling to connect with a volleyball in gym. One moment’s kindness, a quick, warm smile. That was all it took.

  But now she was faced, hours at a time, with a real grown-up version of those prepubescent seventeen-year-olds she’d once passed blithely in the halls. And he was doggedly helpful, making it very difficult for her to keep from taking advantage.

  She wished there were someone she could talk to. But Carmen was between girlfriends and her sister was not a possibility. Her mother was dead and her father had his own problems. Finally, she was ready to listen to advice but there was no one who could tell her what to do.

  “So what’s our plan? We hang out here with George and Olive … oh, excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Garrett … all week?”

  Jobe scratched his beard and it made a foraging-animal sound. “Ah, tonight for dinner, yeah, that’s the plan. They want us to be ready by seven, if that’s okay. After that?” He shrugged. “You hungry now?”

  Carmen hadn’t realized until that moment that she was. “Starving. What do you have?”

  Again, he shrugged. “There’s always something. Want me to help you unpack and then we’ll go look?”

  Carmen remembered his helping her throw her things into a knapsack in that soiled London hovel she’d been renting. “Sure. You can fold my underwear.”

  She hadn’t really meant it. Yet when she turned around, Jobe was in fact placing her panties in a neat stack in a top drawer of the dresser, and arranging her bras like octopi with arms hugging themselves, setting these alongside.

  “Can I ask you a question?” She was hanging her shirts in the closet, something she rarely did at home. “Why do you still live here with your parents? Aren’t you, like, twenty-five or something?”

  For the third time, he shrugged. This seemed to be his major method of communication. “I don’t, really. I was away at Princeton for four years and I only came back summers.”

  “To work?”

  Jobe shook his head. “Not in the way I think you mean. I did a lot of work in mathematics but I didn’t have a summer job.”

  “So your parents paid your way?” She tried to keep the jealousy out of her voice.

  But again, he twitched his head quickly, left to right. “No. I had a Churchill fellowship. They paid my tuition and gave me more money than I could ever imagine needing for expenses. I still have a lot of it, in the bank.”

  Inside Carmen’s head, she added this fact to the others she knew and suddenly an idea blossomed. “You didn’t have any frequent flyer miles, did you?” she nearly shouted. “You paid for my ticket yourself. Oh my God!”

  Jobe had his back to her. He was unloading her makeup-smeared cosmetics bag, placing the brush and black mascara and eyeshadow with sparkles on the dresser’s top. “Okay, yeah, I did. So what? It was no big deal.”

  She sat on the bed, her stomach itching in random places, as if there were a moth trapped inside. “It is kind of a big deal. To me. I mean, I need to know why.” He turned, looking frightened, and Carmen suddenly felt so sorry for him she almost stood and opened her arms to give him a hug. But that would have sent exactly the wrong message, so instead she stayed still.

  “Like I told you in London, I like the way you just do stuff.” He crossed his arms. “You don’t think things all the way through and figure out the safest way to go.”

  Carmen snorted. “That’s for sure. And just look where it’s gotten me.” She spread her arms wide and the seventeen silver bracelets she wore clattered one into the next with an appropriately calamitous sound. “I’m begging total strangers to take care of me because my own life is so fucked up.”

  “Or.” Jobe took a few steps toward her, appearing to build confidence as he moved. “You’re here for a while to make our lives more interesting.” He sat on the bed next to her—here they were again, she thought—only this time he stayed a full foot away. “You know I told you about Bernard Riemann?”

  She thought hard. “Sorry …”

  “The Riemann hypothesis, it’s the hardest problem in math, you know, the distribution of prime numbers, zeros, and curves over finite fields. We talked about all this in London.”

  “Yeah, now I sort of remember.” Carmen settled back against the headboard and drew up her feet. She’d been in the top 25 percent of her class, but suddenly she understood what it felt like to be one of those struggling students in the back of the room. “I would have paid more attention, but I didn’t know there was going to be a test.”

  “I’m not talking about the theory, which, by the way, he never finished because he had this sad, pathetic life that involved mostly studying religion and math and having nervous breakdowns. Riemann was brilliant—probably one of the smartest people who ever lived—but he was weak and scared all the time, and when he died of tuberculosis at thirty-nine, his housekeeper threw out his papers and probably destroyed the proof he’d been working on his whole life.” Jobe took a breath and looked down, as if studying the quilt. “I don’t want to end up like that.”

  There was a moment of silence. “Okay, what I can’t figure out is why that even occurs to you,” said Carmen. “I mean, things change. People change. You can do whatever you want; even if today sucks and it seems like there’s no way out, there usually is. You just have to think of it.”

  “See, that’s why I asked you to come.” Jobe paused and his face became so grave, Carmen felt as if she were looking at a statue in a museum, a man from long ago, perhaps this Riemann guy himself. “May I tell you something?”

  “Yeah.” She waited. “Any minute now. You promised me food.”

  Jobe grimaced and swallowed, making a face as if he were tasting something bitter. “Fine. Here it is. I’m going to die young, like Riemann, and I don’t want to do it like he did: live this frightened, sad life and leave nothing but an unfinished formula that gets thrown in the garbage.”

  Carmen stared at him, no longer thinking of food. “Are you sick?”

  Jobe bowed his head. “Not that I know of. Yet.”

  “But you’re sure you’re going to die.”

  “Well, I mean, everyone’s going to die, so yes, I’m sure. But if you mean am I sure I’m going to do it younger than most people, I don’t have scientific proof but I’m … I don’t know, I have a feeling.”

  Carmen grinned. “You have a feeling?” This was incredibly weird, but also intriguing. She scooted closer to him and swiped his thigh with one hand. “That doesn’t sound very mathematical.”

  “I know. It’s the one thing in my life that makes me irrational and a little bit crazy, which is probably why I li
ke it.”

  “Wait, you like this woo-woo premonition that you’re going to suffer some horrible early death? That makes you feel good?”

  Jobe paused and thought and then nodded vigorously. “Yeah, it really does,” he said. And despite all her earlier resolutions, Carmen jumped up and slung one arm around Jobe, giving him the friendliest hug she knew how.

  “That’s actually kind of cool,” she said into his hair. She didn’t even mind when he slipped one arm around her and hugged her back.

  After they’d finished unpacking, she and Jobe went into the vast kitchen and made a heaping plate of nachos with taco chips and slivered jalapeños and three different kinds of cheese. He heated them under the broiler—a complicated iron contraption that was separate from the oven—until their tops were crisp and brown and bubbling. Then he grabbed a container of sour cream and salsa from the refrigerator, along with two cans of lime-flavored seltzer water, and they snuck up one flight to his room.

  Inside, it was like a laboratory, with a desk along one entire wall—long enough for three chairs set side by side—and shelves full of math and astronomy books. Jobe’s bed was a single, but it was longer than regular ones by at least two feet.

  “Geez, how do you find sheets for that thing?” Carmen asked, kicking the bed with one bright yellow high-top shoe.

  Jobe looked puzzled. “Sheets?” he said faintly, as if he’d never heard of them.

  “C’mon. I haven’t eaten since, I don’t know, yesterday some time,” Carmen said. And they sank to the floor, just as they had in Kensington Park.

  Carmen had too much and destroyed her appetite for dinner, which she deeply regretted a few hours later, sitting at the massive dining room table next to Jobe. Across from them, his seventeen-year-old brother Nate—a Jobe lookalike who somehow managed to be more handsome and not so angular—ogled her from behind his water glass. Carmen looked down at her plate, the fat chicken breast that George (Mr. Garrett) had plunked onto it, and imagined her esophagus a tunnel that was closed for maintenance.

  She’d gobbled way more than her share of the nachos, perhaps two-thirds, relieved the way one is when they’ve forgotten about food for twenty-four hours and suddenly remember—relieved, too, that she was with a man she could eat in front of. But while she was still digesting that heap of chips and peppers and gooey cheese, the act of putting one more bite in her mouth seemed impossible. Next to her, however, Jobe was methodically slicing and consuming everything on his plate.

  “You’re from Detroit, dear?” Olive asked. “Or is it Ann Arbor? They’re close together. Is that right?”

  Carmen nodded, happy to have an excuse to avoid her food. “I grew up in Detroit and I went to school in Ann Arbor.” She’d already slipped into the past tense. College seemed more and more like a memory. “They’re about forty-five minutes apart.”

  “And what are you studying?”

  “Art history, with a minor in fine art. I mean, I know that sounds like the same thing, but it’s really not. The fine art is actual application—you know, painting, drawing, sculpting—so I’ll have a portfolio I can show people when I’m done.”

  “That sounds logical.” George nodded. This was the first time Carmen had actually heard him speak. Jobe’s father was a chemist who specialized in surface coatings, working mostly for the defense department and NASA. Jobe had whispered the last part as they sat side by side on his bedroom floor, as if revealing a secret, or a sin. And she’d laughed.

  “My dad spent the last ten years making Suburbans, which are the biggest gas guzzlers in the universe. He’s personally responsible for the problem with the ozone layer. You don’t have to worry.”

  Now, thinking of that, she used her napkin—a square of gold cloth, smooth but as heavy as wool—to blot her pristine lips and hide the abrupt smile.

  “I always loved the Romantic painters. Is that what you call them?” Olive picked up her wine glass but didn’t drink, just held it in front of her, so Carmen saw her throat through thin crystal and clear, sun-colored juice. Jobe’s mother had an ordinary, middle-aged face but a hooker’s body—huge boobs and a twitchy little ass—that she hid in queen of England clothes. All the money, Jobe had told Carmen matter-of-factly, was hers.

  “Rubens, for instance,” Olive said. “I know you’re supposed to like more modern things these days, those big splotch paintings and such. But I can’t help it.”

  Carmen blinked. Suddenly, without reason, she loved this woman. “Baroque,” she said softly. “Rubens was Baroque. He’s one of my favorites. His Venus …” Then she picked up her silver and forced herself to take a few bites.

  “When we were in Italy … remember, dear?” she asked George, who grunted and nodded. Olive speared a piece of chicken so small, Carmen wondered how it could be held by the tines of her fork. This woman would be better off with chopsticks. “There was that painting in the Uffizi, where Venus was standing in a shell. That was Rubens, wasn’t it? I thought it was.”

  Carmen shook her head. This was the first time her degree had ever come in handy. “Botticelli. It’s beautiful, with the Zephyrs. I can’t believe you actually saw that, in person. I would kill to do that. But the school trip I was on didn’t go to Italy this year and I couldn’t afford to get there on my own.” She looked around at the velvety textured wallpaper and mahogany sideboard the size of a small boat. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to admit to having money concerns; it could be considered gauche. She tried to cover. “My mother died last year and my father hasn’t been working as much ….” At all. The words echoed in her mind.

  But Olive had stopped eating her microscopic bits of chicken and looked directly into Carmen’s eyes. The woman was either slightly drunk or about to cry, Carmen thought. Perhaps both. “I’m so sorry, dear, I had no idea. That must have been absolutely terrible for you. For your whole family.”

  “It was.” Suddenly, Carmen didn’t care about hiding anymore: her family’s financial troubles, or her loneliness. She just wanted to tell Olive the truth. “My dad worshipped her and he’s been, well, kind of useless ever since she died. Europe was supposed to help me get over it but ever since I came back, things have really sucked.”

  There was silence around the table. Nate was looking at her bugeyed, as if she’d just farted. Under the heavy cloth, Jobe put his hand on her thigh and she was grateful. She angled closer to him to let him know, and she felt a glow of happiness emanate off him. Finally, Olive spoke. “I’m sure you’ll get to Italy one day, dear. It’s not going anywhere.” Then she stood briskly to collect the plates herself and never even mentioned that Carmen had barely touched her meal.

  “I love your mom,” Carmen said, as they drove through the damp, sultry streets. The outside thermometer read 82 degrees, though it was nearly ten o’clock. “She’s not what I expected, at all.”

  “What did you expect?” Jobe signaled and turned left, using both hands on the wheel, just the way you were taught in driver’s ed.

  “I don’t know, someone stuck-up I guess. Like, she grew up with all that money and I expected her to act like she was better than everyone.”

  A shower of streetlight lit up the car and Jobe, who looked genuinely puzzled. “Why would having money make her better?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one who told her my dad was some big shot at Ford. Wasn’t that because they wouldn’t want to associate with someone who came from a long line of grease monkeys?”

  He turned into a parking place and centered the car, braking and turning off the key before he answered. “That’s not why I told them that.”

  “Then why?” It was already getting hot in the car and Carmen didn’t want to sweat. She’d showered after dinner and changed into one of only two dresses she’d brought, this one pale orange with ragged sleeves and an uneven hemline and ruffles around the waist. Jobe sat, not answering. “Well?”

  “I just … I didn’t want them to think you were interested in me for our money. That’s all. I don’
t bring girls home all that often and I thought, if they knew about your situation, they might, you know, assume …”

  “Oh.” Carmen felt the prickles start under her arms. Fuck it. They were going to a dance club so she would be getting sweaty in any case. “Is that what you think? That I’m here because you’re rich?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t sound very sure.”

  Jobe shrugged and turned toward her, his face bisected by a crooked shadow, more than half of it in darkness. “I honestly don’t think money has anything to do with it. On the other hand, I’m not at all clear on why you’re here. One minute you seem interested in me, the next you don’t. And that’s okay. But I will tell you straight out.” She heard him breathe in and hold it for a few seconds then gently exhale. “I like you. I don’t know why. You’re too young for me, and a lot more prickly than I usually like. But I’ve heard these things happen sometimes and there you go. I’m just living proof of the way actual life doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Carmen sat without answering. If she were honest, she would tell him now: I’m sorry. I just don’t feel that way about you. It would hurt him and make things awkward; she might have to go home earlier than planned. But it was kinder than this, wasn’t it? Letting him believe there was a chance things could develop when, really, she’d just wanted someone nice to take care of her for a few days.

  She was about to speak, tell him the truth, when Jobe opened his door and got out, then leaned back down to stick his head into the car. “It’s hot out here. Let’s go in.”

  She breathed. It could wait. She’d formulate exactly how she wanted to tell him while they were on the dance floor. But once they entered the club, her heart started to thump in time with the music and she edged up close to Jobe’s back, brushing his hand with her body twice, trying to stay with him in the throng. The air was thick with sweat and cologne, the space cavernous and dim; dust hovered in the pale rose and purple lights that lit up the open floor.