The Amateur Marriage

by Anne Tyler

“She had a wreck,” he said. “Driving the wrong way on an exit ramp. Back in ’87, March of ’87.”

  Lindy said, “Mom died?”

  Her eyes seemed all pupil.

  “The police thought first she must have been drinking,” George said, “or high on drugs, or unconscious. They couldn’t believe that somebody in her right mind could have made such a mistake, till we explained to them that that was just how she drove.”

  He attempted a light chuckle. Lindy failed to join in.

  “But Pagan,” she whispered, finally. “Pagan’s all right, you say.”

  “Pagan’s fine, Lindy.”

  The shade of impatience in his tone surprised even him. She sent him a quick, sharp glance, and he ducked his head and mumbled, almost apologetically, “Though it does seem a bit late for you to be concerned.”

  She went on looking at him.

  “In my opinion,” he added after a moment.

  She opened her Native American pouch and started rummaging through it. A warped leather billfold emerged, and a set of keys strung on red yarn, and a newspaper clipping folded to the size of a credit card.

  I am sitting in my living room with Lindy, George was thinking. The actual Lindy, in person, after all these years. She’s wearing ordinary tan suede clogs with a brown leaf stuck to one sole. She drives a sixty-something Ford Falcon, and one of her sweater buttons is hanging by a thread.

  Lindy unfolded the newspaper clipping and examined it. A peculiar, airy, buzzing sensation surrounded George’s ears.

  “Here,” Lindy said. She handed him the clipping.

  George found a grainy black-and-white photo of two men—one elderly and mustached, one young. It took him a second to realize that the younger man was Pagan. He could have been almost anyone, with his shock of black hair and generic gray cable-knit sweater. Underneath, a caption read:

  Dr. William Gamble, developmental psychologist, and Pagan Anton, longtime child and family advocate, discuss the merits and drawbacks of the proposed legislation.

  “Did you notice the wording?” Lindy asked.

  “The wording,” George said.

  Lindy nodded, smiling encouragingly, inviting him to share her amusement at something.

  “Well,” he said, “yes, I suppose . . . considering that Pagan is only twenty-five . . .”

  “I mean the way they broke the lines up. Or maybe there should have been a hyphen, because it looks as if they’re saying Pagan is a longtime child, doesn’t it?”

  She gave a rough-edged giggle and reached for the clipping. George hadn’t quite finished studying it, but he could tell she felt some urgency about getting it back and so he released it.

  “I found it lying on a desk,” she said. “Isn’t the world amazing? All these years I’ve been thinking about him, trying not to think about him, trying to keep him out of my head . . . Well, not at first, of course. Not when I was so wrecked and bad off. Back then I couldn’t think about anything. But, you know, after I married and all . . . I married a guy with two children. We met when I was still in the commune. You wouldn’t have heard about the commune, but that’s where I cleaned up my act. And Henry came to lead this poetry workshop; he was a high-school English teacher in Berkeley at the time, except now we live in Loudoun County—”

  “Loudoun County, Virginia?” George asked.

  Lindy nodded. “We moved there last year,” she said. “Oh, I realize how it looks! It looks as if I planned it; plotted to inch closer. But honest, it was coincidence. Just a coincidental job offer, and now that Henry’s children are grown . . . But I was going to say, so I married him and he had these two kids, aged six and nine. And first they were just, you know, baggage, but bit by bit I got fond of them. I started, let’s say, loving them. And here’s what’s funny: as soon as that happened, as soon as I felt attached to these kids who were no relation to me, why, all at once I found myself thinking more and more about Pagan. I missed him to death! I thought I would die of it! It’s like those kids were a constant reminder. Well, I knew I had no right. By then he was settled; he’d moved on in life. I vowed I would keep away from him. But then . . .”

  She turned her head sharply and gazed toward a porcelain lamp on her left. For a moment George assumed that something had caught her eye, till he realized she was blinking back tears. After a long, painful silence she turned back to him and said, “Then I found that clipping.”

  George said, “I see.”

  “I was clearing off Henry’s desk so I could play a game of solitaire, and there was this stack of articles about educational issues. And I swept them together and started to put them in the drawer, and that’s when I saw his name. Pagan Anton.”

  She spoke the name lingeringly, giving each syllable its full share of attention. George cleared his throat.

  “For one split second I thought I’d made it up. I thought I was hallucinating. But when I looked at the photo, I knew it had to be my Pagan—that Mexican hair like his father’s. I asked Henry, ‘Where’d you get this? What newspaper is it from?’ He didn’t know. The principal had just handed him a file folder, he said. And there weren’t any clues in the clipping itself. On the back was an ad for mail-order steaks. I said, ‘But he’s a child and family advocate! Couldn’t there be, I don’t know, a heading for that in the Yellow Pages?’ Because already, some time back, I’d tried to look him up in the Baltimore phone book. I was like a stalker or something. I was like someone demented. But all I found was you. Not Karen, not Mom or Dad . . .”

  Her eyes filled with tears again, but this time she went on facing George. “I see now that I always imagined the whole lot of you right where I left you,” she said. “Mom in her miniskirt. Dad wrestling with that old lawnmower. You and Karen kids still.”

  “Pagan’s here in Baltimore,” George blurted out. He felt ashamed of his earlier impatience.

  Lindy watched him steadily.

  “But he lives at the school where he works. That’s why he’s not in the phone book. He teaches an experimental music program for autistic children. He married his college sweetheart and they have a baby boy.”

  “I’m a grandmother,” Lindy said. And then, “Does he hate me?” For a moment, it seemed she was asking whether her grandson hated her.

  “He never mentions you,” George said.

  That sounded so harsh, though, that he hurried to add, “But I don’t know. Who can say? He was so little at the time, I’m not sure he remembers you. Or, rather . . .” Because that, too, sounded harsh. He started over. “When Mom and Dad first got him,” he said, “he didn’t mention anything. He was . . . kind of silent. Kind of deaf and dumb.”

  Kind of autistic, in fact—a thought that hadn’t occurred to George till this very moment. Did that explain Pagan’s choice of careers, which George had always viewed as discouraging if not futile?

  “But gradually he warmed up,” he said. “With Mom, for instance—I remember at first he acted as if he didn’t know she existed, but every time she left the room you could see him sort of stiffen, and then he would relax again when she came back.”

  “So he adjusted, by and by.”

  “Oh, yes! By and by he settled in and had a perfectly normal childhood.”

  It seemed, though, that George couldn’t leave well enough alone. He felt compelled to go on. He said, “The only thing I’m not sure of is, has he really forgotten you? Or does he remember and just not let on? Because sometimes I get the feeling . . . well, sorry to say this, but . . .”

  Why was he saying it? But now he was forced to finish what he had begun. “I get the feeling he’s sending the message that we’re not allowed to bring your name up,” he said. “It’s like he’s silently forbidding us. Though of course I could be imagining things.”

  He stole a glance at her face. At least she had stopped crying; she was listening to him calmly. “I could very well be mistaken,” he told her.

  She said, “I don’t know which to wish for: that he remembers, or that he’s for
gotten. We were so close, once. We did everything together! We were all each other had. But once—”

  She looked at the lamp again. This time the pause was longer.

  “Once I threw him down a flight of stairs,” she said.

  “Oh, well. Well, now!” George said. He shifted in his seat. “Gosh, I’m sure you—oh, why, these things happen! Gosh. Anyhow. So—”

  “And how about you, George?” Lindy asked.

  “Me.”

  “Are you married? Do you have children?”

  “Why, yes, Sally should be home any minute, in fact.” He wished she would hurry. He and Lindy had had ample time alone, he felt. “We have a son at Princeton, and a daughter still in high school. I’m a vice-president with a firm that facilitates mergers for small businesses.”

  “Mergers for small businesses,” Lindy repeated. George glanced at her suspiciously, but she seemed merely to be turning the phrase over in her mind. “You used to make model airplanes covered with tissue paper,” she told him.

  He gave a short laugh and said, “Not anymore.”

  “And Karen? Is she married too?”

  “Nope. She’s a hotshot lawyer, something to do with the homeless.”

  He expected Lindy to be impressed, and might even have been trying for it. (Karen wasn’t really as hotshot as all that.) But she wore the distracted expression of someone preparing to speak the instant the other person shut up; and almost before George had finished she said, “Please, George, will you call him for me?”

  He didn’t have to ask whom she meant.

  “Please?” she said. “And then if he wants—if he doesn’t say no—I could get on the line.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “I couldn’t bear it if I called and he hung up on me.”

  No convincing excuse came to mind. He couldn’t explain even to himself why he was so reluctant. In the end he had to say, “Well, all right, Lindy.”

  He rose and waited for her to rise too. “The phone’s in the den,” he told her.

  “Oh,” she said, but she went on sitting there. Then slowly, like a much heavier woman, she collected her purse and hauled herself up and wrapped her layers of sweaters more closely around her. “I’m scared to pieces,” she told him. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  He led her back across the front hall without answering.

  In the den, he switched on a lamp and settled her in a leather recliner. Then he sat down at his desk and reached for the phone. It was a newfangled phone with automatic dialing—a mystery to him, but Sally was good at these things and she had programmed it for him. All he had to do was punch a single button. In Lindy’s presence, this felt like showing off: See how effortlessly I, at least, can get in touch with your son? And it was misleading as well, because Sally was the one who kept in touch with the family, most often. Still, when Pagan answered, George did his best to sound hearty and familiar. “Pagan. Hi. It’s George,” he said.

  “George? What’s up?”

  Somehow, the Antons had reached the stage where a phone call meant bad news; you could tell it from the apprehensive note in Pagan’s voice. It must have been Pauline’s death that had led them all to that expectation. So George drawled his answer out long and slow and easy. “Oh, nothing much. Not a whole lot. Can’t say much is doing at this end, but . . .”

  Oddly enough, he felt his heart start to pound. And Lindy, perched on the edge of the recliner, was gripping her bag so tightly that he could see the waxy white of her knuckles beneath the skin.

  “. . . but I do have something of a surprise for you,” he said. “You’ll never guess who I’ve got sitting across from me.”

  “My mother,” Pagan said flatly.

  George said, “You knew?”

  Lindy raised her chin and watched him.

  “No,” Pagan said, “but who else would it be?”

  “Right. You’re right. So. Would you like to tell her hello?”

  “Why not,” Pagan said.

  George passed the receiver to Lindy and then (against every inclination) rose to leave. He was nearly out of the room before she spoke. “Hello?” she said.

  He hung around in the hall long enough to hear her say, “Oh, I’m fine. And you?”

  In the living room, he sat back down in his chair and stared into space. The unreal feeling still buzzed around his head. He searched his mind for images of the Lindy he had known—a bony child, all knees and elbows, forever clambering over him or nudging him aside or reaching past him for something. Her shins covered with bruises from roller-skating and stoopball. Her hair matted and tangled, no matter how often their mother tried to comb it.

  He remembered how they’d compete with each other, fight over every candy bar and comic book. “Me first!” Lindy would tell him, and he would say, “No fair!” and their mother would call, “Stop that, you two!” He saw Lindy playing jacks on the sidewalk in front of the store, snatching up ninesies and tensies in a heedless, all-out swoop that kept the backs of her fingers perpetually scraped raw. He pictured the bedroom on St. Cassian Street that he and his sisters had shared, which had formerly been their parents’ room and long before that, their grandmother’s—he and Lindy in the double bed and Karen in the crib. At night Lindy whispered stories to him. “Once there was a man with no eyes who died in this very house, did you know that?” He would clap his hands over his ears but then remove them, horrified and intrigued in equal parts. “And then what?” he would ask.

  Maybe the woman in the den was an impostor.

  The front door slammed, and Sally called, “George?” He heard her heels tapping across the parquet. When she appeared in the living-room entranceway she seemed to have come from a whole different planet, with her ash-blond hair as sleek as brushed aluminum, her cheeks bright from the cold, the collar of her cashmere coat standing up around her face. “George, is Sam home yet? I forgot to tell her—what is it?”

  “What’s what?” he said.

  “Why are you looking like that?”

  “I’m not looking any way.”

  “What’s going on, George?”

  “Nothing’s going on!” He stood up with elaborate slowness and loosened his tie. “Though one thing I guess I should mention,” he said. “Lindy’s here.”

  “Lindy who?” Sally asked.

  “Lindy, my sister.”

  She stared at him. She said, “Here in this house?”

  “She’s on the phone just now with Pagan.”

  At that moment, Lindy arrived in the hall behind her. Sally spun around.

  “How’d it go?” George asked.

  But she appeared not to hear him. She was looking at Sally with a strangely blank expression. Just as George was realizing that he ought to make introductions, Sally rushed over to her and seized both her hands and said, “Lindy! Oh, this is so exciting! This is so unexpected! I’m Sally, by the way—George’s wife. I am so, so happy to meet you!”

  Lindy used to hate it when people fussed like that. (Their own mother, for instance.) But now she took it in stride, or perhaps didn’t even notice. She allowed Sally to lead her to the couch.

  “Have you been here long? Where’d you come from? How’d you find us?” Sally asked. She perched next to her, still in her coat, so that she seemed to be the one visiting. “What do you think of your brother? Would you know him? You don’t much look like him, do you? I guess you got your dad’s coloring.”

  George said, “Sally, could we just hear how her talk with Pagan went?”

  “I’m sorry! Listen to me run on!” Sally cried. Then she sat up straighter and laced her fingers together and waited primly for Lindy to speak.

  Lindy said, “Oh. Well.”

  “Was it very emotional?” Sally asked. “I can’t even imagine! All these years, and then, why, you must have had so much to say to each other!”

  “Not really,” Lindy said.

  “Was he just speechless with amazement?”

  George said, “For God’s sake
, Sally, let her talk, will you?”

  Sally blinked. Lindy said, “That’s all right.”

  She spoke somehow without moving her lips, her face stiff and numb-looking. “His voice had changed,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing you don’t think to brace for—that he wouldn’t have that clear little sweet little voice anymore.”

  “But what did he say?” Sally asked, and then she shot a quick glance at George.

  “He was perfectly polite. He asked how I was; he said it was nice to hear from me; he said yes, he had a family now . . . I said to him, I said, ‘Do you think maybe we could meet?’ He said, ‘Meet.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t really see the point, do you?’”

  Sally said, “Point!”

  “Well, I suppose that’s understandable,” George said.

  Both women looked at him.

  He said, “In view, I mean, of the . . . you know, circumstances.”

  “No, we do not know,” Sally told him, and then she turned back to Lindy. “I hope you convinced him otherwise.”

  “No, I just said, ‘Fine,’” Lindy said. “I said, ‘In case you ever might want to get in touch, though, I’ll leave my number with George.’”

  “He was just taken unawares,” Sally decided. “He’s very kind-hearted; believe me, he is. It’s just that he wasn’t expecting this. He’ll call back! I promise he will. That phone’s going to ring any minute.”

  “No, I don’t think it will,” Lindy said. She gathered her sweaters around her. She said, “I should be getting home now.”

  “Right now? But we’ve barely met!” Sally cried.

  “I do have a husband waiting.”

  “You’re married? Where do you live? I don’t know anything about you!”

  “George will tell you,” Lindy said. “I just seem to be really, really tired. I have to go.”

  She rose and started toward the front hall, holding her bag in both hands. She moved as if her feet hurt.

  George said, “Wait.”

  She paused, not bothering to look at him.

  “What about Dad and Karen?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to see them?”

  “Maybe some other time,” she said.