The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  It was unreasonable to ask for more, but these people had paid for Carmen’s last year in school and given her a place to stay. Surely they wanted her to do something with her degree. Carmen was on the brink of coming right out and asking but she couldn’t figure out how to start. “I need another favor” diminished the weight of what Olive had already done for her. But “You’ve already done so much” was too fawning. The rule, unspoken, was that they did not talk about money or influence. It was unacceptable; it created divisions between people. Only—and Carmen was more and more aware of this as the date of her graduation approached—natural, inevitable divisions remained.

  Two days before the party that would mark the end of her childhood, first as her parents’ daughter and then as an accidental beneficiary, Carmen wandered around the house with nothing to do. She’d searched for weeks to find the part of the city where she’d met Rory: a crumbly, trendy little cross-section where Jobe and his parents would never go. But she was avoiding that area now. And the only other place she’d found was the library, Enoch Pratt, where she sat paging through art books and watching the people. Beautiful young black girls in sequined high heels. Middle-aged women carting baskets full of romance novels. Homeless men wearing all their clothes, shirts layered over shirts, looking for a place to sleep.

  Now, however, it was five o’clock on a Friday; the library was closing. George was out of town and Olive was away on a party-planning mission: talking to the caterer and hiring a couple of men from the country club to park cars. Carmen had made only a few friends in the year she’d been in Baltimore—her life was so remote from campus, and too difficult to explain. Plus, these girls were with their own families, celebrating the end of the school year. No one else, it seemed, was bored.

  She was relieved—excited, even—when Jobe pulled up. He never seemed at a loss for what to do. One could work every day throughout an entire lifetime and still not understand the distribution of prime numbers, Jobe told her once. There was always something new to consider. Nothing stopped because the university was issuing his degree.

  It was something to admire, Carmen thought, as she watched him emerge from the car. Jobe always moved into sunlight hesitantly, as if it were a force that bore down. Now he rose into the golden air of afternoon, gazing upward. Who could tell whether he was seeing the sun’s rays, soaking them in, or contemplating how space expands? Carmen stood at the window in plain view, a fact he never registered as he neared the house. When he came through the door, she called out, “Hey,” and he startled. Turning toward her, he stopped and fixed her with a puzzled look.

  “I thought you’d be out tonight,” he said. “Drinking to the end of college, all that.”

  Carmen shrugged. She couldn’t admit, even to Jobe, that she had nothing to do. “Maybe I’m past all that,” she said and checked for a reaction. He didn’t even crack a smile. “I don’t feel like it tonight, okay? How about a movie?”

  “You mean, you and me?” Jobe took off his jacket, the one he wore though it was nearly 80 degrees. Underneath he had on a long-sleeved T-shirt. It was like he paid no attention to the elements, moving in his own separate, climate-controlled track through the world.

  “Yes, you and me. A movie. It’s not like a major operation.” And yet, she was nervous.

  Jobe squinted, which made him look even more bug-eyed than usual. Why was he being so difficult all of a sudden? Usually it was he who followed her, suggesting they do things. Take a walk, go shopping, eat at the little Indian place. Though since she arrived, last fall, they’d never been dancing again. They rarely stayed out past ten. They had made love perhaps a dozen times, when circumstances coalesced in just the right way: an evening when no one else was home and each had nothing else to do. Carmen could plot each encounter on a graph, not because the sex was memorable but by computing the factors that led directly to it. It was like being married, only without the security or social recognition. Perhaps Jobe, too, was finally tired of the tedium and ready to let her go.

  She panicked but was careful not to show it, sauntering toward him. “Listen, this hot woman just asked you to go see a movie and you’re not even answering. You know that’s rude, don’t you?”

  Finally, Jobe relaxed and grinned. “What movie?” His hands twitched at his sides.

  “Top Gun.” This was more like it. Standing just two feet from him, she could feel the way Jobe wanted her. It was confusing him, making him anxious, and she was glad.

  “That sounds awful.”

  She grabbed his forearm, like a rebar inside his sleeve, and squeezed it. “Shut up. Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. You’re going to love it.”

  “No.” Jobe’s face twisted, monkeylike. “You’re going to love it. I’m going to tolerate it.”

  “Well, all right then.” Carmen let go and ran out of the room, climbing the stairs to get her purse and shoes. Turning, she called over her shoulder, “You’re going to need money, because you’re paying, too.”

  Jobe, at the bottom of the stairs, gazed up. “Not unless you buy me ice cream after,” he said.

  She stopped, looked down. His face was serious. This mattered. “It would be my privilege,” she said and fake curtsied, then continued up.

  It was a six-forty movie on a sparkling, warm Friday afternoon, so they had the theater nearly to themselves. They sat through the previews without any contact, Carmen in a ruffled miniskirt with her legs primly crossed. But in the dark—as the jets roared across the screen, their terrible engine noises rattling through the speakers, noses driving through the sky—Carmen felt something unexpected. She wanted him to touch her. It was an ache in her throat, almost like what she’d felt with Rory that first time.

  Carmen edged closer, using the armrest more fully. She shifted as if uncomfortable and brushed his arm with the full right side of her breast. “Sorry,” she whispered. And Jobe cleared his throat but said nothing. She let a few minutes go by. The planes twirled, rising up, trailing smoke. Then they landed and the scene quieted and she leaned in to rest her cheek on Jobe’s shoulder. He was still but then—in a movement so slow and pained, she knew it cost him everything he had—he raised his arm and settled it around her. His deodorant smelled faintly of that night in the London hostel, and his hand reached all the way to her elbow. There was something primitive about this pose. Not sexual, but comforting. She was pleased that he didn’t try to kiss her but allowed her to watch the movie in peace.

  The sky was pale, dove white, when they stepped out of the theater. And a sudden breeze had sailed in from the west, stirring the branches and fallen flowers on the sidewalk. Carmen shivered and thought that Jobe was, after all, smarter for having worn long pants and sleeves. Her knees were freezing by the time they’d walked two blocks.

  “Cold?” he asked. “You probably should have brought a coat.”

  She sighed and marched on. Nothing killed the mood faster than his pronouncements of the obvious. She was losing her desire to be with him, quickly. Time to pick up his ice cream and go home. She glanced at the bank clock as they passed—9:02—and sighed again. They were right on schedule.

  Inside, the ice cream shop was tropical. Carmen leaned, relieved, against a huge freezer whose motor hummed and warmed her legs. The mirrors behind the long counters were streaked with steam, the scoopers in their billed hats sweating, people in line fanning themselves with discount coupons and cards. “Hot,” Jobe said, and Carmen nodded. She watched, satisfied, as he pulled up his sleeves. They ordered: blueberry yogurt in a cup for her, a plain chocolate cone for him. Carmen paid and then they stood on the threshold—the border between warm air and cool wind—looking out.

  There was an old-fashioned porch outside the shop with a few wooden tables and a hanging swing. The couple in the swing got up, leaving crumpled napkins and colored smears behind. “Let’s grab it,” Jobe said and covered the distance in four steps. Carmen walked over more slowly and stood.

  “It’s dirty,” she said, pointing.


  “Uh, yeah.” Jobe considered this. “So you can sit on my lap. I don’t care if my jeans get ice cream on them.”

  “But won’t that make the swing lopsided?”

  He eyed the seat for a moment, then turned and backed into it. “Not if we sit right in the middle, see?”

  “The whole world is a math problem, isn’t it?” she asked, but then she lowered herself onto his lap. It was like sitting on a wood fire that had not yet been lit: his legs and arms slender logs, his fingers and ribs sticks of kindling. The skin stretched over them seemed incidental.

  He finished his cone but kept his hands off her, probably because they were sticky. Carmen grew tired of her yogurt and put the half-eaten cup aside. There was no reason to stay here now that they were done, but she wished they could. A gleaming sliver of moon had come out. People were talking all around them, creating a gentle buzz. And Jobe gave off more heat than one might imagine. By shifting so different parts of her were against him she was able to stay mostly warm.

  Tomorrow her father would arrive and the following day there would be a party, and the day after that she was expected to know what to do with her life. Carmen could not conceive of what that would be. She pictured herself back in Detroit, picking up her father’s socks and empty bottles and glasses, her sister stopping by periodically—babies hanging on her like monkeys—to nag Carmen. She’d fought so hard to get through college, even taking money from relative strangers, but what did it matter? She would still end up waiting tables or, at best, working in an art supply store.

  “What are you thinking about?” Jobe’s question startled her. “You look so serious all of a sudden.” He had pushed back as far as he could against the swing, as if arching his body away from her. But this was Jobe. Carmen was almost certain he was only trying to get a better view of her face.

  “Why do you even like me?” She hadn’t planned to ask him this. She hadn’t even been thinking it, consciously. But once the question was out of her mouth, Carmen was curious about the answer. She was moody and sometimes mean to Jobe. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say she wasn’t even half as smart. Without his family, she had no home and no future. The only thing she had to recommend her was that she was pretty, but Jobe didn’t seem like the kind of man who would be captivated by this—at least not for long.

  “I mean it,” she said, because Jobe had not answered. He was simply staring at her. “What is it that makes you want to be here? Now. With me.”

  He paused. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. Carmen glanced around to see if anyone was listening to their strange conversation, but the only other people on the porch were a group of raucous teenage kids who couldn’t have cared less. “It’s not logical. We’re very different. But from the minute I met you in the park I felt like we were … connected somehow.”

  Carmen snorted and Jobe looked down abruptly. Guilty? Hurt? She touched his narrow neck, where his pulse was. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that I burned you and then I got blood all over your sleeping bag.” It still amazed her that she felt no embarrassment with Jobe, even about that. “Those didn’t seem like real bonding moments.”

  “They were.” Jobe was using two long fingers to stroke one of her cold knees and it felt good. Not sexy, but good. “Right away, I felt like I’d met this person I was supposed to find. Like I’d gone to London …” He blushed.

  “What?”

  “Okay, this is the least scientific thing you’re ever going to hear me say. But it seemed like there was a reason I went to London with that dickhead, Tim. I was supposed to. I had to meet you, because we’re going to be together for the rest of my life.”

  She would not realize until much later how oddly he’d phrased this. His life, not theirs. But right now, all she could think was that the time had certainly come. She needed to tell him about Rory; it could all be over. Or she could capitulate: fall into the warm ease he was offering her. His family, his life. There were only these two choices and she had to pick one.

  There was a long quiet stretch. Even the teenagers were subdued. Then the wind swept in again, so hard it made Carmen’s cheeks sting. She ducked her head, laying it against Jobe’s shoulder, and his arm snaked around pulling her in tighter. Somehow, with this single movement, all of her was warm.

  “Okay,” she said. Gently, the swing rocked.

  When her father walked off the plane with a travel bag slung over one shoulder, he looked to Carmen young and unformed. Despite the year and a half of heavy drinking and the job he’d finally found at a tire shop, which he’d told her had strained his back, Antonio had an easy, slouching gait. His color had come back; he must be eating better. Esme had told Carmen during one of their infrequent phone calls that their father had a girlfriend, but Carmen dismissed it: more of her sister’s disapproval and fretting. Probably, their dad had given some woman a ride while her car was being worked on. Esme had overreacted.

  But on the way to the hotel in the car, which he didn’t even comment upon, he spoke twice of someone named Linda. He craned his head, looking around like a toddler in church. He’d left Detroit only a handful of times in the last twenty years, mostly to take his family on vacations to Florida. The East was unfamiliar. He found it cramped, he told Carmen, and toylike. All those narrow brick buildings and swinging signs and streets with barely enough room to park alongside the flow of traffic. It was hard to believe people really lived this way.

  Antonio had never asked about her circumstances. This was good, actually, because they would have been difficult to explain. When Carmen had admitted back in August that she would not be completing school because her father had run out of money, Olive had waved her hand as if this were impossible. “It will be taken care of,” she’d said, the tense confusing Carmen.

  “How will it be taken care of?” she’d asked Jobe. “I don’t understand.”

  “My mother will pay the tuition.” He shrugged. “It’s hard not to be crass about this, but what you owe is like spare change to her. We’re talking about the U, right? Maybe four thousand to get you through the last year? That’s less than she donates to the local humane society.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry, that did sound crass,” Carmen teased him, all the while a weight lifting away from her chest.

  She hadn’t truly understood until late August, when Olive told her to “send for her things,” that she would be staying on in the Garretts’ house—like some sort of domestic exchange student—and using the BMW to commute.

  Antonio had insisted on making his own hotel reservations, and Carmen was glad he still had that much pride. She turned into the parking lot of the Sheraton and got out, waiting for her father to retrieve his overnight bag from the back seat. He looked sober: steady and clear. Carmen wondered when he’d pulled himself together, and also why he hadn’t called her up remorseful, apologizing for what had happened at the tail end of her college years and asking if he could make it up to her—perhaps by sending her to graduate school. But neither of them had ever mentioned his drinking or the tuition he hadn’t paid or her lost senior year at Michigan. And it felt wrong to start now.

  Earth movers grumbled and steel beams clanged in the distance. Baltimore was building a fancy new development on the Inner Harbor. What had been a slum with tent villages bordering the water was now becoming a baroque three-story restaurant complex with a nightclub and piano lounge. Jobe had promised to take her there the week it opened. Carmen pointed to a brand-new restaurant and told her father there was a life-size cherry-red Cadillac inside, hanging above the bar.

  “So is he your boyfriend?” Antonio lit a cigarette and they hung outside the door of the hotel while he smoked it. “You don’t talk about him that way, but it seems like you’re going to marry him.” Carmen instantly felt relieved. He acted more like an uncle or an old family friend, but Antonio was still her father. He understood her. He would help her figure out what to do about Jobe. She opened her mouth and started to form the words, I ne
ed to …, just as Antonio dropped the cigarette butt and stepped on it and said, “Well, let’s get inside. I’m going to need a shower before I meet these future in-laws of yours.”

  She lay on one of the two double beds reading the Baltimore city guide from the bedside table while Antonio took his shower. He burst out of the bathroom, handsome in his uniform of black jeans and cowboy boots with a white towel over his bare, muscled shoulders, letting loose a wet cloud of steam. “Should I shave?” he called. “Is it that sort of dinner?”

  Carmen thought about Jobe’s full beard, Nate’s messy attempt at one, George’s ruddy cheeks. Her father stood in front of her, lean face shadowed, looking like some spaghetti Western movie actor—one of the sexy, filthy bad guys who would be dead by the end—and she felt an uncomfortable twinge of wishing for a man like this. Not him, of course. Though objectively she had to admit, sick as it was, she found her own father more attractive than she did Jobe.

  “No,” she said to him. “You don’t need to shave. You look fine.”

  Yet when they arrived at the house, Carmen was sorry. They walked through the door and into the large foyer and when she turned, Antonio suddenly looked silly and shrunken next to her. A cartoon mouse, with a funny, twirling, Mexican-style mustache, standing on his hind legs in the opulent lair of a cat.

  George, who had flown in earlier that day himself—taking a limo back from the airport though Carmen was there with one of his cars—entered the room with one large hand extended. “Good to meet you, Tony. Scotch?”

  “Sounds fine,” Carmen’s father said hungrily. She watched as he took the glass and tried sending him a message with her eyes: Don’t bolt it. Her thought rays were only moderately effective. By the time George turned around, shaking his own glass, making the ice cubes clink, Antonio had drunk at least half. His eyes were mellow and he’d begun to glow.