The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  “I know that it’s very difficult to figure out what you want at twenty-one.” Olive—the real one, who had never said the word fuck in Carmen’s presence and surely never used it as a verb in her life—squinted into the dying light. “I know that you’ve livened up my home and made my son very happy. I also know that there are certain things you need to just … believe.”

  Carmen groaned and frowned and drank. She wanted this, more than anything. But it wasn’t working. She’d tried repeatedly to will herself into loving Jobe. But it hadn’t worked. “Like what? Exactly what do I believe in?”

  “Yourself.” Olive had settled back in her chair as if to sleep. “You’re a beautiful, warm, smart young woman, and if you really commit yourself to something, it will become—over time—what you want. What you need. I have faith in that.”

  That’s such bullshit. Carmen almost said it, but she caught herself. Olive was looking satisfied and dreamy in her seat. The sun was a glowing orange ball, sinking behind the spires of Manhattan. There was champagne left to be drunk and dinner in a restaurant where Al Pacino was rumored to eat several times a month. It was Carmen’s birthday and Olive had brought her here to celebrate. This was not the right time.

  But four nights later, after she’d left Jobe on campus to teach his final discussion group of the semester and driven to the bar to meet Rory, Carmen decided that the time had come. At eight o’clock, she left a message with Nate saying that one of her girlfriends was having a crisis—her boyfriend had broken up with her, the friend had consumed an entire bottle of vodka, Carmen had to stay with her—and asking if someone else would pick up Jobe.

  When she got back to the table, after using the pay phone, Rory was sitting wide-legged on his bar stool and he reeled her in so she was pressed against the V his lower body made. Carmen felt like she was shining and she wondered, again, at the whims of her senses. Like Jobe, Rory was tall and thin, dark haired, with hands so large he could wrap his fingers around her upper arms. But he was put together completely differently, his chest smooth and lean rather than hollow, his long legs graceful and not at all knobby. These small things mattered not at all, but they made such a difference. Carmen wished with all her heart that this were not true.

  “Everything okay?” he asked her, his voice hoarse in her ear. And she nodded. He folded her head down against his shoulder and rocked her back and forth, humming into her hair. It was only their third date but Carmen knew this was what she’d been looking for. Rory’s cologne mixed with the scents of beer and chips and lime. Her arm, delicate, twined with his in a Tantric sexual way. Every loose movement of his body seeming to suggest something, though he was only keeping time with Dire Straits.

  Carmen drank a second vodka tonic, in honor of her imaginary friend. And she made a silent toast: This had to be done. It was not only time, the deed was well past due. She’d been unable to break up with Jobe any other way; several times, over winter break, she’d really tried.

  They’d seen a movie then gone for dinner in a grotto restaurant that served a hot vegetarian curry. “Remember the masala in the park?” he’d asked, as he did every single time they encountered anything even remotely Thai, Tibetan, Pakistani, or Indian. And Carmen had said irritably, as she always did, “Of course I remember. It was less than a year ago.”

  When they sat she’d been prepared to blurt out everything, all the stock phrases she knew: I just don’t feel the way I should. You’re like a brother to me. I want to be friends. She’d known it would be the end of dinners at the club and of gifts from Olive, but it was the right thing to do. While she was gathering herself, however, Jobe started a long, complicated story about Bernhard Riemann.

  He’d told her about the man before—exhaustively. But usually Jobe focused on the mathematical details: zeta function, complex manifold theory, dimensions higher than four. Carmen tuned this out the way she did when people talked about the stock market. Tonight, however, Jobe returned to a story about his hero that she remembered wisps of from that first night in Baltimore: a long-dead German mathematician’s tragic death and lost work. The tale had a Gothic quality she liked. Their drinks arrived, along with chutney and spongy bread. Someone lowered the lights; tinkling music came from far away.

  Riemann was just thirty-nine, Jobe said, gripping a beer bottle in his long-fingered hand. It was the year of the Austro-Prussian War and the mathematician had to leave his university and his town. But he was sick, something chronic—a fragile man, but brilliant. He left behind a sheet of paper that contained the proof of his hypothesis. And when he didn’t return, his housekeeper threw it out along with all the rest of his things. No one else had been able to solve the problem since.

  “But how does anyone know?” Carmen asked. Their curry arrived, steaming, flecked with bits of hot chili pepper. “If the only person to see it was the housekeeper, who’s to say he proved anything? Was she some kind of mathematical genius?”

  Jobe looked down at his plate, perplexed. He worked with strings of symbols so long they took up three blackboards. But her question seemed to stump him. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “But I’m sure that it’s true.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous!” She ate some of the food and it warmed her. The little underground room was candlelit and flickery, like a dream. Dammit! This happened at the most inconvenient moments. Carmen would be with Jobe and realize that she actually was enjoying herself. “Look.” She put her fork down. “There’s something I need to …”

  She looked up at Jobe then and saw that he was gazing into space, hearing nothing, pondering his weird thoughts. She sighed and watched as he tipped the bottle and drank what was left. “Maybe it’s like a curse,” he said before picking up his fork and taking his first bite. “It’s some sort of universal rule: anyone who gets close to solving the problem has to die.”

  He chewed very slowly. It never seemed to bother Jobe when his food was cold—or, similarly, when his body was. Carmen had watched him just that morning walk out to the car in a T-shirt and jeans, ambling without so much as a shiver, as if the bitter wind stopped short of touching him.

  “But at least no one will throw away my work,” he continued, interrupting her vision of him slamming the car door and walking back to the house with the book he’d been searching for in one hand. “I know you would never let that happen.”

  This was such a simple sentence, it seemed utterly impossible to contradict. He hadn’t made any grand pronouncements—hadn’t asked her if she wanted to be with him, near his possessions and papers, at the hour of his death—he’d only absentmindedly assumed.

  She’d failed to break up with him that night and every time she’d tried since. There was no reason; that was the problem. He was a decent, loving boyfriend with a great future. He came to her along with Olive, not to mention that glorious house, vacations, nice cars they could use whenever they chose. To walk away without cause seemed insane, whimsical, somehow childish. She imagined telling him she had to leave because she just didn’t love him and having him stare at her uncomprehending. Or worse, cry.

  The only way, she’d decided, was to sleep with someone else and then confess it. It was drastic but her problem would be solved: Jobe would break up with her. Carmen had been prepared to go out and find someone passable; any man who didn’t repel her would do. But then she’d been lucky enough to meet Rory in a checkout line at Safeway, and her plan had changed. No longer was her goal only to get rid of one man; now she needed to have this other.

  Rory was successful, only a year older than Jobe but eons more mature. Well dressed with a silky goatee that made him look vaguely Hispanic, though he’d told Carmen he was 100 percent Black Irish. He lived alone, in a condo, and carried an actual phone—a boxy, flesh-colored device—strapped to his belt. He groaned now and slid the thing to his hip so he could pull Carmen in closer. It occurred to her that he hadn’t offered to let her use it when she said she needed to make a call. This was troubling. But she could feel hi
m growing hard against her back and her plan was already underway.

  “Want to go back to my place?” he asked.

  She swallowed and nodded and he rose behind her, paying quickly for their drinks, keeping one arm around her shoulders as they walked through the bar and out into the warm spring night.

  “Follow me.” His voice was less guttural out here, more businesslike. “What are you driving?”

  Carmen pointed to the BMW parked at the corner. Rory whistled down low. “Nice,” he said.

  This was the car Jobe had used to pick her up at the airport when she arrived in Baltimore the first time, and her only regret about tonight was that she would use it as one of her props. To involve Olive and George’s BMW in her relationship with Rory struck Carmen as sordid, and she considered for a moment leaving it by the curb to be towed. Of course this would require her to disappear completely, never surfacing in the Garretts’ lives ever again. And as suddenly as the idea popped into her mind, it made perfect sense! They would assume she’d been killed. Jobe and Olive would mourn her together. No one would be hurt.

  “I’m really bad with direction,” Carmen said, holding on to Rory’s arm. “And that last V and T hit me really hard. Why don’t you drive us?”

  Rory looked down at her, with the expression of a high school teacher hearing a tired excuse. She was losing him. She had to do something. So Carmen stood on her toes and kissed him, open mouthed, running her hand over the bulge in his pants at the same time. “Okay,” he said, pulling her toward a dark Chevy her father would have loved.

  The ride was blissfully short: Rory steering with one hand and letting the other play over her thighs; Pink Floyd pouring out of the speakers and echoing through her chest. Then they were in his apartment, a little smaller and danker than Carmen would have predicted but overlooking the water. Besides, her expectations probably had been thrown out of whack by Jobe’s family’s estate.

  “You want something to drink?” Rory asked as he led her through dark rooms to the bedroom in the back.

  “A glass of water,” Carmen said.

  “Coming up.” He gave her a playful shove onto the bed and went into the adjoining bathroom to draw some water into a blue plastic cup, which he set on a table next to her head.

  Carmen lay sprawled, her shoes still on. His windows were bare of curtains, framing a silver moon, and the room was eerily silent. “Hey, do you have any music? I was really digging The Wall.”

  “The lady has her demands.” Rory pulled his shirt over his head and walked, hairless chest gleaming in moonlight, to the next room. Thirty seconds later she heard the opening chords. “Anything else?” he asked, coming back in.

  “No.” Carmen looked out the window at the lights swinging on their ropes and wires over the bay. “You.”

  He made a raw, animal sound that she could feel in her own throat. Then he was above her, hands moving: unbuttoning her shirt and laying it open, unzipping her jeans and peeling them down. Like a man skinning a fish, he stripped the clothes neatly from her raw skin and bones and hair. All the time, she was bathed in music and moonlight, her eyes wide open. This—Carmen thought as Rory crouched over her, sliding the head of his rock-hard cock up and down between her legs until she begged him to do it—this was exactly the way making love was supposed to feel. With Jobe there were always clumsy moments, small aborted movements that went nowhere, as if he’d started down a path to find her and run into an obstacle that caused him to back up and try a different direction. She usually ended up dry, pained by the friction, holding on to his shoulders and waiting for it to end.

  Must stop thinking about that, she instructed herself and gave in then to Rory who was pumping into her rhythmically, making low yelps. She cleared her mind just in time to come at the same moment Rory did: a simultaneous arching and clawing that clearly meant something. They were joined in a way she and Jobe had never been.

  Afterward, they lay panting, side by side. Don’t leave me now, Roger Waters sang. Carmen edged closer but Rory did not fold her against his long body or take her hand. “That was great,” he said, turning toward her. “You’re really sexy.”

  “With you I am.” Carmen said it before she’d thought through the implications.

  “What do you mean, with me?” Rory popped up sideways and propped his head in one hand. “You’re not sexy with other guys? I doubt that.”

  “There’s just … this one guy. I mean, I don’t really want to talk about that.”

  “What, are you shy all of a sudden?” Rory grinned. “After this? C’mon, it’s okay. You can tell me about the other guys. It’s not like I’m going to get all possessive on you.”

  “Really?” Carmen turned toward him and stretched, her nipples grazing his chest. “You wouldn’t care at all if I went home to someone else?”

  Rory laughed. “Oh, I get it, this must be the Beemer man!” He reached out to rub one of her breasts and though she’d been wanting him to do this—asking for it, really—now it stung. “Nope. You can go back to your boyfriend or your husband, or whatever you’ve got waiting for you at home. But next time you want to get laid by someone who knows where all the secret buttons are, you just give me a call. I’m always happy to help out a gorgeous woman in need.”

  The album had ended and after he said the last word, Rory’s apartment was deadly quiet. Carmen sat up, reaching across him for the cup of water, and when he tried to touch her, she batted his hand away. This was irrational: She’d been using him to break up with Jobe and she shouldn’t be angry. But she couldn’t help it. Oddly, she was offended mostly on Jobe’s behalf. However accurate he was, Rory had no right.

  She went into the bathroom and stood for a long time, looking at her naked reflection in the mirror. Rory was accurate in this, too: She was gorgeous, her body sculpted, breasts high, waist small. “You’re a beautiful, warm, smart young woman,” she heard Olive say. When Carmen came out, Rory was lying on the bed with one arm slung over his eyes. She started getting dressed.

  “Time to get you back to your car,” he said but did not move.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Carmen said. “I can find it myself.”

  He peeked out from behind an elbow. “Really? I mean, that would be awesome. I’m beat. But are you sure you know where to go?”

  “I’ll take a cab.” Carmen shoved Rory aside and scrabbled for her underwear, which had become tangled in the sheets. “Money’s not an issue.”

  “Whoa,” he said sleepily. “You are like my dream come true.”

  Outside, the streets were damp. It had rained while she was in Rory’s apartment and a fine mist continued, like cobwebs around her shoulders and in her hair. The night smelled faintly like motor grease—the way her dad often did when he came back from the plant. Carmen might have hailed a cab if she’d seen one. But her sense of direction had always been excellent and she figured out within a few blocks exactly where she was. The car was less than two miles from here and she deserved to walk.

  “Help a guy out, miss?” A man suddenly blocked her way and Carmen shrank back until she saw what probably was his wife and baby huddled in a doorway nearby.

  “Here.” She opened her wallet and took out all the bills, about eighteen dollars, and handed it to him.

  “God bless,” he said, but Carmen only darted around him and walked on.

  It was past three when she let herself into the house. Everything was quiet. Carmen placed her car keys in the bowl on the hall table, where she always did, and made her way up the wide stairs. As she neared the top, a voice came out of the darkness. “How’s your friend doing?”

  Carmen took the remaining steps and faced Jobe, who appeared more a darkening of the air than solid flesh. “She’s better now. It was a bad night but I think she finally understands that she’s better off without the guy.”

  His hand emerged from the dim to graze Carmen’s shoulder. “Must be awful. I don’t know what I’d do … without you.”

  He did not draw h
er forward, which is what Carmen had been expecting. Instead, they stood linked only by his fingers on her shoulder and the long bridge of his arm. After a couple of minutes, it was she who stepped in to find his actual body—checking to be sure he was real, not made only of shadow. And he was. She slipped her arms around him and put her forehead against the framework of his chest and he held her this way for a long time.

  There was a week when Carmen thought she might not graduate.

  She needed a photo ID to apply for her degree and somehow she’d lost her driver’s license. She could not bear to explain this to Jobe, who had saved her from identity theft once before. Panicked, she looked everywhere. But just as she was about to confess the problem to Olive and beg her to bribe someone at the DMV, the card appeared as if by magic on the table beside Carmen’s bed. It was a sign, she thought as she picked it up. If she could just quit being thoughtless and stupid—that girl who left her purse in the park with a stranger—everything would be fine.

  There was a huge party planned to celebrate Carmen’s and Jobe’s graduations, hers with a B.A. in art history, his with a PhD in applied mathematics. This was like being an eighth grader feted alongside her older brother, the senior class valedictorian. But Olive ordered invitations inscribed with both sets of information and insisted that Carmen invite people. They resembled wedding invitations, only no one said so. And Jobe, as usual, seemed completely oblivious to the implications of what was going on.

  He’d had offers from nine universities. Oxford wanted him back. Princeton had a postdoc they’d asked him to apply for. Johns Hopkins had offered him full professor status from day one. Meantime, Carmen was puzzled. She’d made some inquiries at museums and discovered that their curators—even junior staff—all had graduate degrees. Cincinnati offered her an unpaid internship but she would have to commit to a full year and move there at her own expense. For once, being an “adopted” Garrett was of no help. They had connections with arts organizations all over the East Coast, but no matter how Carmen hinted, Olive failed to make a single call.