“You’re a pretty girl. Maybe Jimmy will be my next,” she said. “But Rafe I just married. In a few years Jimmy and I meet again, run off. Meanwhile, he should marry whoever he likes. You, maybe.” She picked up her cigarette, looked at it, and put it back down. “Maybe you and Jimmy, right?”
“No,” I said. “Do you mind if I get some coffee?” I looked around for a waitress, then remembered where I was.
“Why not?” she said. “Are you already married? You have no ring.”
“No.”
“See? Jimmy’s not, too. Everyone should get married. We will drive to New Jersey. I will be matron of honor. I like all weddings.”
“Well, Leila,” said James. “Not everyone likes to get married that fast.”
Suddenly I saw us, in an office somewhere—me in a cream wedding suit, James in the top hat and tails the circus tried to talk him into. Leila, I was sure, would wear white—any opportunity to look like a bride—sequined certainly, perhaps trimmed in white fur. She’d look like the sugar pourer, luxuriously full and sparkling. She’d give away the groom, humming the wedding march, holding on to his pant leg. At the altar she’d stand right up on her tiptoes to get a good look at everything. There’d be no way to get the three of us in one snapshot.
“I haven’t got a dress,” I said.
“Oh, dresses. They think they need dresses to get married. They think they need rings and cake. No. You need these: man, woman, minister, flowers, honeymoon.”
“Flowers?” said James.
“Must have,” said Leila.
“Well, maybe we’ll do it,” I said. “You make it sound so sensible.”
“And for honeymoon you will go to Niagara. I went there.”
“Which husband?” asked James.
“Most. Niagara is best. So we’ll go now? To get married? You look fine,” she said to me. “Comb your hair. Eat this bun and we will go.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right now?”
“Don’t want to get married? Darling. No. My advice is good. Here—” She pushed the sweet roll closer. “Skinny girl, eat this bun, it will bring you good luck for your wedding. Sweet start, sweet life.”
James laughed. “Leila, you’re in love with weddings.”
“Yes!” she said. “I am in love with many things. Weddings and Niagara Falls and men. I am always in love. See my cheeks? Pink, always, because I am always in love. You too, you be in love and you don’t need to sleep so much, think so much. Yes,” she said, to herself more than to us. “You must get married. New Jersey is minutes away.”
“I’d like a longer engagement,” I said.
“You don’t need!” she said. “Engagements—they are like a prayer before eating, best quick.”
“I’m too young to get married,” said James. He was flirting. I’d never seen him do that before either, though of course it was like dancing—easy, if you did it with someone who really knew how to lead. “I think I’ll just wait for you, Leila. In ten years, I’ll be your husband number eleven.”
Leila smiled at him. “Okay. Too bad for your friend, but good for me. In ten years we will meet here again and get married. You—” She kicked me under the table, the toe of her shoe just touching my knee. “You don’t want this bun? It’s good.”
“No.”
She picked up the sweet roll, which looked as big as a hat in her hand. “Famous circus lady, Carrie Akers, was the world’s fattest short person, or shortest fat person. Three hundred pounds, my height. I try to avoid this. But I will eat the wedding bun, for my own good luck. Ten years we will meet again. You I will marry,” she said to James, “and you will be my maid of honor. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. Every day my heart was broken newly, more efficiently. “I’ll bring the flowers.”
“Roses,” said Leila. “Must have.”
Late that night, I heard a door open. Not all the way at first, just the tongue of a latch plocking as a doorknob turned. I looked to my right, to the door that opened into the hallway, but it was shut. Then the other door, the one that led to a door that led to James’s room, swung open, toward me.
I’d kept it unlatched for this reason, so that if he knocked I could say, “Come in.” I’d expected—if I expected anything—that the knock would come in the morning, when he was ready for the day, or after we’d come home, one last thought before sleep. But except for that first night five days ago, after our meal in the hotel dining room, he’d never used it. Instead he phoned, and we met outside our rooms in the hallway, like any neighbors who went to work together.
Now he stepped in. One small lamp in his suite was on; for a second I could see his outline. Then the first door closed behind him and my room was dark again.
“James?” I said.
He said, “Peggy.” His voice was tense, nervous. I sat up a little in bed, my brain still not up to full speed. Slowly my eyes got used to the dark. He was wearing an undershirt and shorts, which were what he’d brought to sleep in—I’d been there when he packed. At home he had pajamas, which Caroline sewed for him, but he’d decided that they’d take up too much room in his suitcase. His shorts just looked like any man’s underwear, baggy and a little comic.
“What is it?” I asked.
He sat down on the edge of my bed. “Peggy,” he asked. “Do you want to get married?”
It was not a proposal. I’d never heard one before, but I knew that much—not the way he stressed want, not the way he closed his eyes, confused, when he said want, not the way the whole statement leaned on that word instead of married. It was just a question: did I, or didn’t I, and my answer would be only information, not the start of anything.
“I don’t know,” I said. My bed was usual-sized, but still he seemed far away from me. He rested a hand on one of the short posts of the footboard. “Who to?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He rubbed the knob of the post. Finally he said, “Me,” and that word, in the dark, sounded like it might have been a proposal.
But I wasn’t sure. Something in my heart turned, like the latch in the catch of the adjoining door, not open but ready. It might have been a proposal. I didn’t know how to answer. Why do you want to know? What took you so long? Do you think that’s a good idea? Yes. Yes, that’s what I want.
I could hear him breathing, could see his sloping shoulders.
“Oh, James,” I said.
“I just—” He rearranged himself on the bed. “It just occurred to me you might want to. Get married. I mean, to someone.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re a girl,” he said matter-of-factly, and O girls, what is said passionately evaporates, it’s what’s said as a matter of fact that is precious and damaging and lasting as a brand. “Don’t all girls want to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The neck of his undershirt was frayed, that’s how good my eyes were getting in the dark.
“Stella did. Not to me, but even before she was engaged, she had her whole wedding planned. She knew exactly the music, the kind of cake.”
“Sounds like planning your funeral,” I said. “Not too useful.” I thought about sitting up, taking his hand. I didn’t know if he wanted me to, and I couldn’t think about what I wanted. Not right at that moment. I waited for all those hackneyed bodily responses to good news—for my stomach to drop, my heart to leap, my lungs to empty, as if every part of me were a spectator readying to catch a pop fly. But every part of me was still, and cruelly rational. Every part of me was waiting.
“Do you want to get married, Peggy,” he said. “We could, you know. I mean, I wouldn’t be a good husband—”
Then I was sitting up, I did take his hand. “Yes—” I said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” he answered. “I mean, not like a real husband. But we still could. If you wanted.”
What I wanted was to drag him into bed with me—not for the sex he was delicately reminding me he was incapable of, not even for kissing. Just so we could be closer. Just s
o I could explain how little I needed. It’s hard, I thought, to have a conversation like this without lying down.
“I wouldn’t mind,” James said.
I wanted noise, so I didn’t have to answer. This was all a dream, I thought, and anything I said would be a bomb thrown in to explode it. I wanted some New York clamor outside the window—a siren, an anonymous scream, someone else’s emergency—but this was a fancy hotel and the walls were thick and we were protected from any middle-of-the-night disturbance. All I could hear was the agitated ticking of my travel alarm clock, and I had to stop myself from picking it up to wind it, from the delusion I could calm it down.
I asked, “Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it seems like I should get married before I die. Which means the sooner the better.”
“You don’t know—”
“Like planning your own funeral? I mean, Peggy, I have. I have planned it. And I know what my tombstone will say—just my name, nobody else’s, just the dates of my life. And people will walk through the cemetery, making up stories the way they do, and mine will be one of the graves they think is saddest. They’ll add up the dates, and then they’ll say, so sad.”
I lay back down, still holding his hand. “Is that a good reason to get married?”
“It’s the best one I have. And to make you happy, if it would.”
“Oh, James Sweatt,” I said. I couldn’t think of what to say. Then I tried, “I can’t marry you.”
“Okay.” He started to move his weight to stand up.
“Stop. Hold still. Don’t you want to know why?”
“I don’t think so. You don’t want to, that’s all I need to know.”
“I do want to,” I said. “But, James, I can’t marry you if you’re doing it just to make me happy.”
“Why not?”
“Because. No matter what Leila says, getting married is a big deal, not a weekend trip. And because doing things to make someone else happy won’t guarantee your own happiness.”
“But, Peggy, that’s what you do. That’s just what you’ve always done. Aren’t you happy?”
I began to cry, a little. It surprised me.
“I guess that’s my answer,” he said.
“My answer is,” I said, “yes.”
“What are you answering?”
“Yes,” I said, crying a little harder, “I am happy.”
“Shhh,” he said. “It’s not like I’m doing you a favor. Peggy, I’m doing everything I never wanted to do. I’m making a spectacle of myself. In the realest way. I’m standing in front of people and telling them to gawk at me and making money off it. That was one thing, truly, I never wanted to do.”
“They’d gawk anyhow,” I said quietly. “You know that.”
“Yeah. And the worst thing is, it’s not so bad. I mean, it’s bearable. I feel like my life is turning out to be just this: every day I learn I have a little less dignity than I thought. So maybe I should change my life. Get married.” He took his hand from mine, then reached back to put it on my blanketed foot. “I want you to think about it,” he said. “About getting married, I mean. If you want to, we should do it. I feel like an idiot I didn’t think about it before. I should have asked you years ago.”
I laughed. “What, when you were twelve?”
“If you needed that much time to make up your mind, from then till now, then yes: I should have asked you when I was twelve. Now you don’t have so much time to mull it over. But you promise you’ll think about it, and tell me. Take it seriously. We won’t talk about it until you’re sure, one way or the other.” He squeezed my foot. “I’m tired,” he said.
“Yes. You should get some sleep.”
“I will.” He sighed.
And then, though he was sitting on a perfectly fine bed in a perfectly fine room, he stood up and walked away to his own. He was just a boy; he didn’t know not to leave a woman crying in bed. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, and then nervously, tentatively, disbelievingly, “Sweetheart.”
The rest of the circus performances went better than the first, partly because Leila advised James to wait till she hit the ground, then stand up very slowly. She wanted him to pick her up, too—“I’m so light you wouldn’t believe it”—but he was afraid for his balance. Instead she leaned against him off her platform, put her hand on his shoulder, and whispered in his ear. He told me later she said, “Shall I step off? Shall I step off? When we get married, this is how we will go down the aisle.”
End-of-Movie Kisses
We were engaged. That’s what I told myself, though we didn’t discuss marriage again. Not in New York. Not when we got back home. I thought about it nearly all the time, but I could not bring the subject up myself. I was terrified he’d say, oh that. That was just an idea I had, a bad one. Or perhaps, didn’t you know I was sleepwalking? The words themselves, okay, let’s get married, felt like a bomb in my throat, a bomb I felt like pitching through windows, into living rooms, up through the glass floors of the library, knowing it would explode everything. What would Oscar and Caroline say if I approached them, asking their nephew’s hand in marriage? What would the town say if we applied for a license? At best I’d be met with laughter; at worst by plain refusal. Even the basic facts: a thirty-three-year-old woman and the nineteen-year-old she’d known since he was a child. You cannot have this, they’d say. Maybe this is all you’ve ever wanted, but we’re sorry. Think of how it would look.
So I held on to my bomb, a Molotov cocktail I could taste, sweet like a cocktail in my throat as long as I kept it there.
It wasn’t until we got back from New York that I saw how much the trip had taken out of James. I don’t think he’d seen it either. In New York he had been busy with people and busy with his camera. He wanted to make sure he’d taken enough pictures; even as we pulled out of the city, he clunked his lens against the glass and snapped a photo. “To show Aunt Caroline and Uncle Oscar and Alice,” he said, though of course it was more. I understood, finally: tourists do not take pictures as souvenirs. They want to assemble a new country to tour later, they outfit it with the best parts of the last place: this doorway, that rough-bricked street, a straw-hatted horse, a cheese shop, an empty bedroom. Some want their families there and include them in so many vistas that their new flat world is entirely populated by crowds of the wife and children. The photographer is native and stranger in his glossy dream city, invisible but significant, as natives and strangers often are.
Once home, James started to sleep late. He told me he stayed up until four in the morning and got up at two in the afternoon. He took naps in between.
“Do you feel all right?” I said. “Perhaps you should see a doctor.”
“I need to rest, is all,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
I myself was an early riser. I couldn’t help it. Two Sundays a year I would manage to sleep until ten, and then I felt as though I’d wasted most of the day.
Now, though, my day couldn’t start until I knew James was awake in his house across town. His being asleep so much of the day felt like a terrible absence to me, although weekdays I never saw him until after five anyhow. Asleep, he was not really in the world. I’d have been up since six, as always, had washed my face and dressed and neatened my apartment and walked to the library; I’d have emptied the book drop and refilled the scrap paper holders and perhaps catalogued some books; I’d have checked items in and out, dispensed advice and collected fines and kept myself busy in all the usual ways, but the day could not really begin, was not really a day, until two-thirty when James was sure to be awake and there was a possibility he was thinking of me.
He might phone; he sometimes did, to ask me a question or request a book. We’d put in a phone line at the cottage at last, to save the Stricklands from answering calls all day. He might pick up a book I’d brought him and think of me—wouldn’t he have to? Now he was reading Dickens, one fat volume at a time. I’d planted myself in as many ways as possib
le in his house, in the record player and records and boxes of the kind of bulky pens he liked; in the loaves of bread I bought him and the articles I clipped from newspapers. Every day he’d have to deal with at least one object whose presence in his life was my doing.
At night I tried to keep myself awake, because he was awake. That we were not in the same room or building made no difference. Perhaps he was in the big armchair; the telephone was on the table next to it. He used a pen to dial, like a lady with an elaborate manicure. Perhaps he was reading, or writing, or painting. Was he thinking of me now? How could I go to bed?
But I couldn’t stay awake that late. I listened to the radio, to the talk shows he favored; I thought that way we might be thinking the same thing at the same time. I read. I lay across my bed fully clothed, with all the lights on, in case he called, so that I could tell him, no, I haven’t gone to bed yet. Sometimes I phoned him those late nights, pleading insomnia.
“I knew you’d be up at this hour,” I said.
And we’d talk, and he almost always ended the conversation the same way: “Well, if you’re still awake later, feel free to call. I’ll be up for a while yet.”
Whether he said this out of pity for my imaginary insomnia or really wanted me to call, I don’t know. Anyway, I never could stay up later, even though I sometimes set my alarm clock for three-thirty A.M. I slept right through it and finally had to stop trying when Gary, my landlord, said he could hear it through the floor.
“You can call me, too,” I told James those nights. “You feel free, too.”
But he never did.
Alice, who was three, picked out a kitten for James from a box in front of the supermarket. Caroline had told her she could have one, and Alice insisted on both a white-and-black cat who looked like he was wearing a toupee, and a dark calico. James got the calico. Oscar suggested Peggy as a name, but both James and I were revolted by the idea.
“It’s a compliment,” Oscar said.
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