When she has kicked off her shoes after work she stands on one foot with her knee on the painted tin cover of the radiator, leaning a shoulder on the glass. The sky narrows to a dark blue cone between buildings, with its tip in a river that can’t be seen from here. But she relaxes. It is close by: a river. Full against its banks and then walled in, moving heavily alongside the streets with its own slow purpose.
The Reader grew up in a mining town with a river running the length of it. Until the age of twelve she lived in a house overlooking the river, which brought a shallow whitewater and a six-foot falls right into town. Two parents, three children, dogs, cats, trees, porch. Then her father died. After that she lived in several smaller houses, and finally, when her mother was getting into serious difficulties, an apartment above the café where her mother sometimes worked. No one called it a studio; it was one room, for just herself and her mother by then—her brothers were gone—and one cat. You couldn’t see the river from the café but you could always hear it, hastening past the town where, with her mother, the Reader lived what she calls the sad part of her life. From time to time it rose out of its bed and flooded the town, drowning people’s goats and pets and occasionally people themselves, sucking them through culverts, upending their trailers, and wallowing away with them before they could wade out to a rowboat—the peaceful golden brown river that gave them fish and black soil and green vegetable gardens.
Now she has made a second river her own, welcoming its tugs and barges, its measured progress into the heart of a city fit to be the destination of water.
Yet Nature has not been banished here, as people in her home town would claim; it haunts the city, especially in this season. Wet leaves plaster the sidewalks, some as big as the pockets of the yellow slicker she wears in defiance of all the city black. She springs down onto the yellow carpet every morning thinking, My wedding. Should she have included a flower girl, one of her nieces, to give more of an aisle-feeling to the space? The space—that’s what the hotel’s wedding consultant calls the long airy room where the wedding will take place. The same was true when she was looking for an apartment: everything, even the closet, was a space.
She doesn’t miss houses with rooms, or anything else about the town she came from. Too much was known there. Even her mother is gone from the town, no longer on her stool in the café lounge late with the regulars and the two floozies and an occasional girl in overalls from the highway crew. Too much was seen in that town, too much gone over in stores and church circles and on the telephone. A widow didn’t go on and on in the sloppy condition permitted in the first weeks; a widow remarried or took an interest in the church or the lives of the next generation, or all three, ideally. To do otherwise, to let a bad habit get the better of you, to drink cheap wine for months on end, certainly to be picked up out of wet grass before dawn and have the snails pulled off you by your own child . . . to do these things was to imply that your loss had exceeded the losses of others. That your husband had been somehow superior. That you, yourself, had been uniquely struck down.
The daughter, the Reader, was another story. In all likelihood people in town still speak of her, persist in expecting her. There, homecoming queens are remembered for a generation. But no one she would want to run into is there. Her brothers left early and never went back.
She can call the brothers . . . or not call them. Her boyfriend is on his way over. Her fiancé, now. Husband: sober word. But her boyfriend has nothing sober about him. He’s like a dog, she tells her friends, a dog in a movie. Everyone on the set is making a movie, but the dog is at a picnic, sniffing, peeing on the grass, called back again and again to flop down, relax. Rewarded for it, for lying there panting. The dog thinks the picnic is real. And it is real. It’s real when her boyfriend is around. That’s partly because he’s rich. The story of Midas is wrong, she thinks: the rich touch things to life. They think what they’re doing is real, and so it is. They don’t get stuck in the wet mud of was. Nothing had to be over, for people like her boyfriend, teased and admired for his appetites—too many green olives at the tapas bar, too much duck breast, too many girlfriends until she came along. True, new to the city, he had gotten himself involved with girls who were not as easygoing as he. But he meant no one harm, and his good nature always rescued him from these episodes, adventures on the way to her.
At the thought of him, and filled with the promise of blue, early evening, she does stretches at the window. All day she has read; taken notes; typed short, courteous letters that will go out under signatures other than her own. The stack she has left to read before the honeymoon is on the scarred steamer trunk where she props her bare feet when she sits on the couch. One panel of the old chest bears a Cunard White Star label.
It was a trunk she saw in an antique store, under a table. She knelt down, bumping her head, ran her hands over it, lifted the lid, and saw it was full of moldy magazines. She could hardly breathe. She bought it.
Just before that she had broken off with a man, a married man who had taken her with him to England on the QE2. He wasn’t rich but he knew how to do things like that. He gave her books and jewelry, a big dinner ring and pearls that had been in his family and should have gone to his daughters. She knows that, now, though at the time she took the heavy pearl brooch from his hand carelessly, like a piece of fruit. And the fact that the big pearls were pears, spilling from a basket of gold, didn’t charm her. The intricate basketwork, the braided handle—she didn’t want these things out of a drawer in his house. She wanted him. “I bet this was your mother’s,” she said.
“It was. She had it from her grandmother.”
In a way she had won after all, shaken him to the point that although he had sworn not to, he still called her from time to time, a year and some months later, just to hear her voice. She talked to him. She could do that now. A man older than her own father would have been had he lived, tall and half bald like her handsome father.
But certainly not, as her boyfriend claims, a father figure.
She doesn’t hold it against her boyfriend that he can’t judge. Why should he be able to? That, he always says of her long affair, was a bad deal. But—this can’t be explained to him, ever—the disguise in which the older man moved, of someone unapproachable, trapped in his own power, the surprise of him when he rose up and showed himself, streaming some element of his hiding place, as if other men were logs and he a crocodile . . . that had had a charm almost fatal to her. Finally she shook free of it, just in time. She met someone who could soothe her, free her from her concentration on the charming, intent, eroded personality of the man, and from his body—though athletic and graceful—so capturable by hers, so quickly made tense and still. A body marked off into distinct regions, unlike hers that has one surface like a heavy coat of paint. The dry skin of his face so unspringing-back, almost as if you could strip off patches of it by pulling, or leave fingerprints. The thin, dark, almost transparent skin around his eyes . . . maybe she would describe the skin as like the unwound cassette tape you saw for a while, shifting along the sidewalk or caught around the base of a fire hydrant. But she wouldn’t go on and on. “Thin skin, bluish,” she might write if she were the editor she intends to be, striking out lines of prose.
There was a time when creases, baldness, a graying mustache were things that acted on her heart like a drawstring. Probably he was one of many men his age she saw around her now, now that her eyes were opened, men getting out of taxis, crossing lobbies, who might laughingly admit to each other that they were learning in secret, from someone like her, how to be adored.
Thus also in the manuscripts she is reading: always the possibility that such a character, while feeling himself sad, his life-ardor waning, can be startled into explosive action. Especially with a guide—a Beatrice or a Tadzio. Maybe as he strides along the sidewalk with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat his heart is pounding from the cigarettes he can’t give up. Or from longing, mortally pounding. Maybe he has children who
are almost grown, almost not his anymore, with no interest in how wild he is inside. A crocodile, she called him. But not one of the “new” men, gratified by their ability to produce tears; no, his tears are real, his sad half-closed eye has fallen on her. But he won’t stay long, mired in this sort of love. He’ll saw the murky waters aside and swim away. Maybe the motor of his soul is idling with fast jerks, maybe he is sleepless with readiness for the new. In some scenarios he will burst out in another hemisphere, in Africa or Australia. Anything could happen to him. He may not know it. In plots of another kind, all that is needed is for someone who does know it to lay her hand on his and lead it to the new continent of herself.
These possibilities are not the same thing as a romance.
As for women: Often, the Reader says, it’s simply that they’re predictable. They’re embarking on this or that, lowering themselves into unfamiliar waters, testing their freedom. Behind them there’s always some ruin, some man has ruined everything, and then they surmount the ruin. You have to be wary of this material, now there is so much of it. It would be better if somebody gave us a devoted wife. That would be something.
So many ex-wives come streaming across her desk. So many half-crazy plotters, cast-offs, matriarchs without a household. Or the brainy, tough talkers, the intuitives, the solvers of murders. Rarely, a murderer. Revenge is of other kinds. So much revenge. Most of it imagined rather than carried out.
The bookstores are filled with these women. That’s the strange thing, the Reader says regretfully: They’re the readers.
3.
THE BRIDE’S MOTHER in blue silk. The groom’s mother in a linen suit of a fawn color that doesn’t agree with her skin—she knew it with certainty as she was having her hair done—and a necklace of small emeralds set in old coins, to redeem the unlucky color of the suit, because she is a doctor married to an executive, and has good jewelry, while the bride’s mother is practically a street person. The bride bought her the silk dress and jacket and altered them; she got her on her feet and dried out and sober for a week, to arrive at this moment of standing with a fine tremble and a set jaw, in the grip of what is not yet dread, more an apprehension regarding the reception: whether she is going to put her lips to a glass of champagne. Whether, despite her promise to her daughter and her daughter’s faith in it, she will tilt her head and swallow.
When the bride draws near on the arm of her brother, she turns opposite her mother and stops dead, swaying a little off her careful balance. This causes the brother to just miss stepping on her hem, and frown a warning that any delay could collapse the whole occasion on top of them like a tent. The bride smiles at her mother, a studied, down-turned smile of acknowledgment, like a child’s stiff stage curtsy, for the guests to see. When she starts to move again the mother raises her hands to her cheeks.
In actuality she is pressing her fingers into her ears to stop their ringing, but the groom’s mother beside her turns, sees the hands cupping the face in a classic maternal gesture, and smiles her agreement. She does this in spite of knowing her son said goodbye to another woman in his apartment last night.
In the pocket of his morning coat he has the squat figure of Yoda. Silly, but his mother was determined; she climbed on a chair to rummage in the Star Wars box in the top of his closet at home. Why should the bride be the only one to walk down the aisle knowing she had with her some invisible, unbroken tie to the past? As they got ready for bed she found the figure in her suitcase, and at her insistence they dressed and took a cab back over to his apartment quite late, without calling. When he came to the door there was a woman behind him sliding into the bedroom, tossing dark hair forward over streaky, made-up eyes and red lipstick. In the middle of his living room was a black suitcase with everything tumbled out around it, cosmetics strewn under the coffee table, a bra caught on the chair arm along with the cord of a hair dryer, clothes in a heap on the rug, as if somebody had hurled the suitcase at the table or gone at it with an ax.
But it’s too late to make anything of that, to question her son or help him extricate himself from either thing. His mother has poured out the last of what she can pour into him. When she first saw him with his best man rather grim beside him this morning, he was pale and tired; she herself is tired and wondering if anyone marrying anywhere in the world during this particular hour could possibly see the thing through to a day like this, a child’s wedding, thirty years down the road.
Her husband’s glasses are foggy. She takes his hand. Few at the company he owns are among the guests today or have ever seen this side of him, with cold hands and sweating nose. It’s too late for either one of them to finish all they were intending with this son, their only child. Although they have not put it into words between them they see him as hopelessly distractible, already swept away by the intrigues of his accidental job at a magazine—after so many applications to business school and medical school—and having no time for hard work, or for friends or sports or anything much other than the woman of the moment.
Was there something they did that made him turn out this way? Heaven help this girl he’s marrying, pretty as she is. Is she pregnant? How nice she is, despite her one-upping of some of them at the table last night about this article or that book, despite those officious brothers—or one of them officious and the other withdrawn—at the rehearsal and the dinner, and the wives trying to pretend they’re on good terms with the poor mother who didn’t seem to know them apart. For the groom’s mother knows, from her son—who is in the flush of an explorer’s admiration for this brisk, unsuspicious girl with her brains and her ideals, an admiration his mother worries would be subtly altered by the absence of thick yellow hair twisted up on the head in a chaste braid, long waist, breasts verging on heavy—that the bride’s brothers have repudiated their mother. Or one of them has and the other just follows along. They don’t have anything to do with her. One of them has her power of attorney, she couldn’t be trusted with a check if she had one to endorse; the other pays the rent on the room she has at the moment and is lucky to have—without it she would be little more than a street drunk—in a boarding house in Baltimore. A hole, the groom calls it, though he never saw it, or met the mother before this week, having stayed behind when his bride-to-be flew down to Baltimore to bring her back for the wedding.
Out of the hole into this hotel, old and fine, with its pleasing sconces and buttery sheets. The sons have seen to it that she move into a better hotel than the one their sister had been able to afford for her. Now she’s staying in the one where the wedding and reception are to be held. Her sons are uptown in yet another, with their wives, having left all the children at home.
She ate her costly breakfast in the coffee shop. The groom’s parents too are in the wedding hotel, but they didn’t come into the coffee shop for breakfast. She didn’t want to think they might have been instead having breakfast with their son and her daughter, who announced last night that they didn’t believe in the prohibition on seeing each other before the wedding, and would meet in the morning. “Not tonight. Tonight we need our sleep,” her daughter said.
They have dispensed with some of the wedding rituals. The reception is going to be free-form, but for the ceremony itself they’ve kept traditional music—a keyboard with an amp for the organ tones of the recessional—and language, phrases such as Dearly beloved, and keep thee only unto her which they would never, the bride said sternly, attempt to improve upon. For after all, as she argued to her boyfriend, whatever state her mother was in now, she had been the model for till death us do part. And they would not get into composing any special vows to close loopholes or leave them open, whichever, the bride said with a laugh.
The old, the new, the borrowed: these she has gathered. Her mother was to provide the blue. Instead of a blue garter she brought a blue glass bead from a broken necklace, a gift of her husband, a bead she had carried in the pocket of whatever coat she owned from the time her daughter was a baby, so that now it was rough and almost
colorless, as if salt had etched it. “I can’t believe you still have this! I used to go in your pocket after it and put it in my mouth! I loved to feel the little nick, see? But of course now little kids can’t have anything this small, they could choke.” Some of her friends already had children; the rules they lived by frightened the Reader a little even as she saw them as perfectly correct. They were what awaited her but did not yet have to be concentrated on. “Oh, but where will I put a bead?” Miraculously, the maid of honor knew that some wedding dresses had a tiny flat pocket, sewn into a seam somewhere or hanging on a silk cord for just that purpose, the storing of some talisman, and this one did, inside where the gores of the heavy skirt swung open.
Tomorrow before the airport taxi comes, the mother thinks, I might just disappear. Her younger son has slipped her an envelope and she has enough cash. She could take the train to Baltimore. It wouldn’t have to be the fast one. She could make the trip last hours and hours, among the snores and smelly socks, sleeping or just looking out the window. Stay out of the club car. Get off in Philadelphia for air, and board another train later. Wander in that off-the-train daze in which for minutes, to the eye, even the marble walls of stations creep faintly, like the near land out the train window moving at a different rate from the far. What would she do in Philadelphia? Walk, look around her. Everything in cities was changing for the better, the maid of honor on her right had told her at the rehearsal. She was the best friend, who had a job in the mayor’s office. Is everything changing? The mother has a TV to keep her informed but the changes are far away from her room, her path to the Minimart.
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