Marry Me: A Romance

by John Updike

  ‘I’m not so sure that’s how it works,’ she said, trying to fit her impression of life into some sort of generalization. He really didn’t know. Jerry believed in choices, in mistakes, in damnation, in the avoidance of suffering. She and Richard believed simply that things happened. After everything was said about how unhappy her childhood had been – her father’s casual death, her mother’s craziness, her sullen older brother, the succession of boarding schools – there remained her sense that she would, now, be less of a person if it had happened any other way. She would be somebody else, somebody she had no desire to be.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he said, cocking his wrist elegantly – he took more pleasure in his hands than anyone she had ever known – ‘why do I love you? Well, you’re gorgeous, brave, kind – really so kind – alive, female, and all the rest of it that anybody can see. To this extent, anyone who sees you come into a room loves you. The first time I saw you, I loved you, and you were eight months pregnant with Peter.’

  ‘You’re wrong, though. Very few people like me.’

  He reflected a moment, as if reviewing the hearts of their common acquaintances, and then said, with his abrasive dispassion, ‘You may be right.’

  ‘You’re really the only man who sees me as very special.’ Her chin trembled; saying it, she felt it clinched her claim on him.

  He said, ‘Other men are stupid. Anyway, in addition to your evident charms, you are unhappy. You need me and I can’t give myself to you. I want you and I can’t have you. You’re like a set of golden stairs I can never finish climbing. I look down, and the earth is a little blue mist. I look up, and there’s this radiance I can never reach. It gives you your incredible beauty and if I marry you I’ll destroy it.’

  ‘You know, Jerry, a marriage makes something, too. It isn’t all destroying illusions.’

  ‘I know that. I do know that. It kills me. I want, part of all this is, I want to shape you, to make you all over again. I feel I could. I don’t feel this with Ruth. Somehow, she’s formed, and the best kind of life I can live with her will be lived in’ – his fingers illustrated the word in the air – ‘parallel.’

  ‘Let’s face it, Jerry. You still love her quite a bit.’

  ‘I don’t dislike her, it’s a fact. I wish I did. It might make it easier.’

  Her straw sucked air from the bottom of the carton. ‘Shouldn’t we be going out to catch this four-fifteen?’

  ‘Don’t shut me up quite yet. Please. Listen. I see it so clearly. What we have, sweet Sally, is an ideal love. It’s ideal because it can’t be realized. As far as the world goes, we don’t exist. We’ve never made love, we haven’t been in Washington together; we’re nothing. And any attempt to start existing, to move out of this pain, will kill us. Oh, we could make a mess and get married and patch up a life together – it’s done in the papers every day – but what we have now we’d lose. Of course, the sad thing is we’re going to lose it anyway. This is just too much of a strain for you. You’re going to start hating me.’ He seemed pleased at this perfect conclusion.

  ‘Or you me,’ she said, rising. She didn’t like this place. Some children squabbling at another table made her miss her own. Their mother, though no older than Sally, looked exhausted forever.

  As they left the stage-shaped bar, Jerry laughed to himself so theatrically that heads turned around. He seized her arm and said, ‘You know what we’re like? It just came to me. We’re like the Lord’s Prayer written on the edge of a knife. Remember, as a kid, how in Ripley’s “Believe It or Not!” there were always things like that? Done by an old Cherokee engraver in Stillwater, Oklahoma?’

  They walked down the poster-lined corridor, painted blue along one wall and cream along the other, to the departure gates. Sally felt weak under his torrent – disarmed, somehow, and ridiculed. ‘Jerry our marriage would be like other marriages, it wouldn’t be wonderful every minute, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be good.’

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ he moaned, his eyes colourless, flicking away. ‘Don’t make me grieve. Of course it would be good. My God. Of course you’d be a better wife for me than Ruth. Just on your animal merits alone.’

  Animal – the word stung, but why? She had looked into the mirrors in Paris and seen the truth of it; people were animals, white animals twisting towards the light. At Gate 27 the animals were wearing suits, but they had packed themselves like cattle in a chute, and they smelled of panic. For the first time, Sally felt the blindness of the situation. Dozens had arrived ahead of them. The illusion of order maintained by the curt young ticket-sellers in the ample waiting room disintegrated out here among the strident posters for Bermuda and for New York musicals with long fey titles. No airline employee was in sight. The steel door of Gate 27 was shut tight, like a gas chamber. The concrete floor tipped, as if to drain blood. Jerry set down his suitcase near the corrugated wall and motioned her to sit on it, then left her to go and talk to the men at the head of the crush. He came back to say, ‘Gee, two of those guys have been waiting since noon.’

  ‘Do you have those numbered passes?’ she asked.

  He rummaged, distraught and limp, through all his pockets twice before finding them; then snapped them into view like a magician. An invisible loudspeaker barked. A Negro in big blue sunglasses and a pilot’s cap opened the steel door from the other side. A pale little narrow-faced purser huddled close to him. The loudspeaker announced the boarding at Gate 27 of the four-fifteen flight to LaGuardia, and a serene parade, displaying lightweight suitcases, well-dressed children, and flowered hats, came down the corridor. These were the people with reservations. The rest of them, the standbys, were herded to the other side of the pipe railing. One by one, the reservations were checked through at the desk and disappeared. A crescendo of complaint from the jam of standbys threatened the Negro in blue sunglasses; he looked up from tearing tickets and flashed an exhilarating grin, a great smile dazzling in the depth of its pleasure, its vengeance, its comprehension, its angelic scorn. ‘Keep cool, men,’ he said. ‘Let the wife get him out of the house.’

  Disproportionate laughter answered this jest. Jerry laughed too, and looked down at Sally warily, and she was disgusted; they were toadying to the Negro with their laughter. That he had noticed them at all gave them hope of passing through the gate. The gate had become something shameful that they must bribe and beg to enter. When the last of the reservations were checked through, there was a consultation at the desk and two numbers were read off, numbers that had no relation to the numbers Jerry and Sally held. Two men, the mysterious elect, in costume and appearance no different from the others, detached themselves from the pack and passed through. The Negro lifted his blue sunglasses and slowly gazed at the remaining faces. His eyes were bloodshot. They rested a moment on Sally, who had risen from sitting. ‘That’s it, friends,’ he said.

  A guttural moan of protest went up. ‘What about a section?’ a man shouted. The Negro didn’t seem to hear. He side-stepped, and the steel door clanged shut behind him. A phalanx of people who had disembarked farther down the corridor marched into them; they were all forced back into the waiting room, which had grown smaller. Sally’s heels ached, her throat felt dry again, and the man beside her appeared painted and strange, both close and far, like, in a school play, another girl playing the part of her husband. His gathering fright, which she could scent, insulted her. She told him, ‘Jerry you’re not seeing the humour of it.’

  He asked, ‘Shall we try American?’

  ‘I don’t have enough money for another ticket.’

  ‘Jesus, neither do I. I’ll have to get ours endorsed.’

  He stood in the bunched, protesting line for fifteen minutes, and, their tickets endorsed, they raced down the long rats’-passage of corridors and stairways that connected the north and main terminals. The American Airlines quarters were on the far side. They were larger and more subtly lit, but the slick surfaces had not repelled the plague of confusion. Coming away from the ticket desks w
ere several familiar faces, other veterans of the wait. ‘No soap, kids,’ one man called to them cheerfully. So they were known. They must be conspicuous; did they look so illicit? Did they stink so of love?

  The American ticket agent, speaking like a recording, confirmed the bad news; no space north until tomorrow morning. Jerry turned, his mouth puckered distastefully under his peeling nose.

  Sally asked, ‘Can we get our United places back? We still have our passes.’

  ‘I doubt it. Oh, I am incompetent. You better get a pilot for a lover.’

  They raced back, her blistered heels crying out at every step, and Jerry stood in line again, and the girl with the artificially white hair, grimacing, cancelled the endorsements. He returned to Sally and told her, ‘She says there’s no point in trying to board the five-fifteen, but they expect a section to be ready by six. Will Richard be home?’

  ‘I suppose. Jerry, don’t look so wild. It can’t be helped. Let’s just accept these extra hours together.’

  His hands hung exhausted at his sides. He reached for her arm. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  They walked past machines vending candy bars and Harold Robbins, and pushed through a besmirched double door into the open air. She took off her shoes and he carried them one in each hand. She took his arm and he shifted a shoe to his coat pocket so one of his hands could hold one of hers. They found a long pavement, down in front of some faceless low brick buildings, where apparently no one ever walked, and walked a distance down this pavement. The cement was warm to her stockinged feet. Jerry sighed and sat on a cement step between two patches of weary grass that needed mowing. She sat down beside him. They looked across a no man’s land of raw earth where a solitary bulldozer rested tilting, as if abandoned in the middle of a lurch on the stroke ending the working day. An air of peace hung above these scraped acres. Beyond, a filament of highway bridge silently glittered with the passage of cars. There were trees, and some reddish rows of government housing, and a distant plantation manse on a low blue ridge, and an immense soft sky going green above the hushed horizon. It was a landscape of unexpected benevolence. Her toes felt cool out of her shoes, and her man regained his reality in the presence of air and grass.

  ‘I see us,’ he said stretching his arm towards the distance, ‘in Wyoming, with your children, and a horse, and a cold little lake we can swim in, and a garden we can make near the house.’

  She laughed. She had once said, in passing, that she had always wanted to return to the West, but not to the Coast, and he had built their whole future on it. ‘Wyoming’ – the very word, when she wrote it to herself, seemed open and free. ‘Don’t tease me,’ she said.

  ‘Do I tease you? I don’t mean to. I say these things because I feel them, I want them. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not very strong with you; I guess I should pretend I don’t think it would be wonderful. But it would be wonderful, if I could swallow the guilt. We’d spend the first month making love and looking at things. We’d be very tired when we got there, and we’d have to start looking at the world all over again, and rebuild it from the bottom up, beginning with the pebbles.’

  She laughed. ‘Is that what we’d do?’

  He seemed hurt. ‘No? Doesn’t that make sense? I always want land after making love to you. This morning, stepping into the street with you on my arm, I saw a little plant in the window of a shop, and it was terribly vivid to me. Every leaf, every vein. It’s the way I saw things in art school. In Wyoming, I’d take up painting again, and draw toasters for an ad agency in Casper.’

  ‘Tell me about art school, Jerry.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. I went there, and met Ruth, and she painted quite well in a feminine way, and her father was a minister, and I married her. I’m not sorry. We had good years.’

  ‘You know, you’d miss her.’

  ‘In ways, perhaps. You’d miss Richard, oddly enough.’

  ‘Don’t say “oddly enough”, Jerry. Sometimes you make me feel it’s all my doing. You and Ruth were happy –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘– and along came this miserable woman pretending she wanted a lover when what she really wanted was you for a husband.’

  ‘No. Listen. I loved you for years. You know that. It didn’t take our sleeping together to tell me that I loved you; it was the way you looked. As to marriage, you weren’t the one who brought that up. You assumed it was impossible. It was I who thought it might be possible. It was bad of me to mention it before I was sure, but even that, I did out of love for you; I wanted you to know – Oh, I talk too much. The word “love” is beginning to sound nonsensical.’

  ‘You’ve done one thing wrong, Jerry.’

  ‘What’s that? I’ve done everything wrong.’

  ‘In making me feel so loved you’ve convinced me being somebody’s mistress is too shabby for me.’

  ‘It is. You’re too nice, you’re too straight, really. You give too completely. I hate myself for accepting.’

  ‘Accept, Jerry. If you can’t take me as a wife, don’t spoil me as a mistress.’

  ‘But I don’t want you as a mistress; our lives just aren’t built for it. Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there’s no institution except marriage. Marriage and the Friday night basketball game. You can’t take this indefinitely; you think you can, but I know you can’t.’

  ‘I guess I know it too. It’s just that I’m so scared of trying for everything and losing what we have.’

  ‘What we have is love. But love must become fruitful, or it loses itself. I don’t mean having babies – God, we’ve all had too many of those – I mean just being relaxed, and right, and, you know, with a blessing. Does “blessing” seem silly to you?’

  ‘Can’t we give each other the blessing?’

  ‘In making me feel so loved you’ve convinced me being somebody’s mistress is too shabby for me.’

  ‘It is. You’re too nice, you’re too straight, really. You give too completely. I hate myself for accepting.’

  ‘Accept, Jerry. If you can’t take me as a wife, don’t spoil me as a mistress.’

  ‘But I don’t want you as a mistress; our lives just aren’t built for it. Mistresses are for European novels. Here, there’s no institution except marriage. Marriage and the Friday night basketball game. You can’t take this indefinitely; you think you can, but I know you can’t.’

  ‘I guess I know it too. It’s just that I’m so scared of trying for everything and losing what we have.’

  ‘What we have is love. But love must become fruitful, or it loses itself. I don’t mean having babies – God, we’ve all had too many of those – I mean just being relaxed, and right, and, you know, with a blessing. Does “blessing” seem silly to you?’

  ‘Can’t we give each other the blessing?’

  ‘No. For some reason it must come from above.’

  Above them, in a sky still bright though the earth was ripening into shadow, an aeroplane hung cruciform, silver, soundless. He put his arm lightly around her shoulders and looked at her in a different mood; his face broke into its fatherly smile, forgiving, enveloping. He said, ‘Hey’ and looked at his knees. ‘You know, I can sit here with you and talk about loss, about my losing you, and us losing our love, but I can do it only because you’re with me, so it doesn’t seem serious. When I have lost you, when you’re not there, it’s a fantastic ache. Just fantastic. And everything that keeps me from coming to you seems just words.’

  ‘But it’s not just words.’

  ‘No. Not quite, I guess. Maybe our trouble is that we live in the twilight of the old morality, and there’s just enough to torment us, and not enough to hold us in.’

  The timbre of his voice, dipping towards some final shadow, chilled her. She moved forward, out from under his arm, stood up, inhaled, and let her mind expand into the landscape. ‘What a beautiful long day’ she said, trying to recapture their pleasure in discovering this place.

  ‘Almost the longest of the year,’ h
e said, rising with the pert little dignity he put on when he felt rebuffed. ‘I can’t remember if the days are drawing in now, or still opening up.’ He looked at her, imagined she didn’t understand, and explained, ‘The solstice.’ Both laughed, because he had explained the obvious.

  They returned to the waiting room and found it still full. The five-fifteen had departed. The aroma of hot dogs had intensified; it was suppertime. The three young people behind the counters had grown bored with the indefatigable emergency. They passed wisecracks back and forth between them, shrugged a great deal, and did not so much answer as indulge the angry press of anxiety before them. The girl with white hair was sipping coffee from a mug displaying the airline insignia. Jerry asked her if the six o’clock section was ready yet.

  ‘We have not received word, sir.’

  ‘But you said an hour ago there would be one.’

  ‘It will be announced, sir, as soon as definite word is received.’

  ‘But we have to get home. Our – baby-sitter has to go to a dance.’ How like Jerry Sally thought, to lie, when he did lie, so badly. A dance on Tuesday night? She and the girl looked at each other, and Jerry, exposed between them, nakedly asked the girl, ‘Is there any hope?’

  ‘We have requested a section from the head office and are awaiting word,’ the girl said, and turned away to sip her coffee in privacy.

  Jerry looked so grim that Sally told him, ‘I’m hungry’ hoping to elicit one of his rude friendly jokes about her appetite. But he accepted the statement simply, as a responsibility, and, heavily retrieving his suitcase from behind a plastic chair, led her back through the blue and cream corridor to the bar. All the tables were full. He put the suitcase by a metal post and had her sit on it while he went to ask if they had sandwiches. He returned with two thin dry ham-and-cheeses and two paper cups of coffee. Why not a real drink? Perhaps he thought it would be indecent, in their predicament, or that they needed to keep their wits. At home Richard right now would be bringing her a gin and tonic, or a Daiquiri, or even a rum Collins or a gin daisy. She had bought him a cocktail shaker for their first Christmas, and even in their bitterest times he would ceremoniously bring her a sweet drink. She imagined that Richard would have made an occasion, somehow, out of this wait – an occasion at least for bluster and indignation. A burly man with imperfect vision, he loved to come to grips. He loved kitchens, he loved to make the refrigerator tremble. She could taste now the Daiquiri he would bring. So cold.