The Marriage Bed

by Constance Beresford-Howe

“Honours Botany. The literary mag and all that.”

  “Right.”

  “How come you hardly ever hang around with Karen and Bonnie? Where’s your guy?”

  “Oh, I mostly mooch around on my own. Got nobody special. If it interests you, I’m known around as ‘The Ice Cube.’ ”

  “No kidding,” he said with interest. We looked at each other thoughtfully. Then he said, “Care to try that again?” and we did that. Several times. Nobody out there seemed to miss him. I forgot all about the gold medal. Sleep no longer seemed in the least important. Eventually we took our shoes off and lay back together on the pillows.

  “This is nice,” he remarked. “You are nice.”

  “You are Karen’s. That we’d better remember.”

  But my hand, which had no ethics, was smoothing the shirt over his warm chest.

  “I’m nobody’s. Don’t you believe rumours.”

  “What’s this ring you’re wearing, then?”

  “It’s a seal ring – used to be my grandfather’s.”

  “No kidding. What’s that on it, an eagle or something?”

  “To be exact, it’s an eagle displayed, in his dexter talon a sword erect, proper.”

  “How bloodthirsty.”

  “My clan ancestors were a pretty fierce bunch. But the blood’s got very thin by now. They’d be ashamed of me. I came in here, actually, because we were trying some Mexican pot earlier on, and it made me feel sick. See what I mean? And you’re pretty straight too, right? I like your Rapunzel hair, it feels like a big silk rope.”

  At this point, Karen opened the door. What happened then – what we all did and said – is blank now. All I can remember is laughing. And then came those spring weeks of new green in parks under the cool, cloudy sky, and in his narrow student bed.… One brilliant afternoon in particular, I remember, we lay on the young vegetable grass and watched a child in a red dress play in the sunlight with a white cat, and joy distilled itself in those shapes and colours like a real and lasting thing.…

  Sitting on my ignoble throne, I stared down at the chipped tiles of the bathroom floor. We never had got round to remodelling this room, which still had a chain-pull toilet. Without warning my head dropped forward in a short doze, even while one ear kept awake for the kids. Very shortly Hugh’s cough jerked me upright, and I rose heavily, flushed the apparatus, and washed my hands, gripping the basin midway to ride out a cramp. While it lasted, I studied the blistered green paint of the cracked wall as an alternative to any encounter in the mirror with my own blotched and pallid face. What a vision, the eyes sunk in dark pits, the big lips cracked, a pregnancy mask over the cheekbones giving the whole thing a crude, animal solidity. Incredible to recall that people once used to call it beautiful. That was indeed in another country, in the cool, sterile latitudes of virginity.

  Martha’s feet stumped up the stairs and she pushed open the door with a peremptory “Hey!”

  “We knock, please. But come in here if you need to, for God’s sake. Don’t let me find any more poop in the dining-room, ever again.”

  She stared at me, all injured dignity. “That was not me,” she said severely. “Granny did it.”

  A great grin split my mouth. “Nonsense. Do you want to go now?”

  “What?”

  “I said do you need to go now?”

  “Go where?”

  “Oh Christ, Martha.”

  “I’m hungry. I want some strangled eggs.”

  “All right. Come on, then. You can stir them up.”

  One of her rare smiles spread across Martha’s fat face. She cast short arms around my thighs and pushed her head hard against the low-slung drum of my abdomen, creating a warm patch there with her flesh. I smoothed the thick silk of her hair. Here at last was something of value salvaged from the trivial chaos of the day – something beautiful, perfect, and undeserved. I was humbly grateful for it.

  Because it was not moral purity or any lofty sense of values that made me stubbornly adhere to my children once they were so fecklessly conceived. It was just some kind of blind, irrational instinct that appalled me as much as anybody else.

  “But Anne,” Ross said in a voice slow with shock, “that’s impossible. You’re on the pill, for God’s sake. You’ve got to be wrong.”

  “No, I’m not. The test was positive. The doctor says I haven’t been on the pill long enough. Before you, I wasn’t – you know that. So there hasn’t been enough time.”

  “Jesus, Anne. Jesus.”

  “I’m horribly sorry. Not that it helps much.”

  “Well, but look. Hospitals look after this kind of accident all the time. I mean, it’s perfectly legal. And done by experts and all that. So –”

  “No, Ross.”

  “But –”

  “No.”

  He looked at me in blank dismay. “You don’t mean you’re actually going to go through with it? But that’s crazy.”

  “I know it is. I know that. I can’t help it. For one thing, I know something about genetics and embryology, so the thought – but it’s not just that … I don’t know what it is.”

  “But where does that leave me? Tell me that.”

  “Look, it leaves you just wherever you want to be. This isn’t a trap. You’re free to do whatever the hell you want. And so am I.”

  He put his head in his hands. “For God’s sake, Anne, how can I get married and start a family right now? You know damn well I’ve got years to put in before I can earn enough to –”

  “I know that. Try to get it through your head, I’m not asking you for anything. I’ve done a stupid thing; it’s my fault entirely. It’s also my responsibility. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a fool. You know it’s mine too, even though – oh Christ. Look, you’ve got to be reasonable. You’re not thinking. What about your demonstrator’s job? – you said yourself it could be a toehold in the department – for three years you’ve worked your brains out for the chance. Now for God’s sake, go to the doctor and get yourself fixed up. It’s the only sane thing to do.”

  “I can’t do that, Ross.”

  “But why not?”

  “I’ve told you why. I just can’t do it.”

  He looked at me desperately. “You scare me, Anne. You scare the hell out of me. Please, change your mind. Please.”

  “I can’t. Everything you say is true. But I can’t.”

  “Then I can’t help you. Sorry, but that’s it. It’s my whole future on the line here too, you know.”

  “I know that. So we just come apart, that’s all. No hard feelings. I’ll manage somehow. There are clinics, day-care places. Other people get along, why shouldn’t I? You’re free; I have no claim on you.”

  “It’s not as if I knew – I mean, I thought you were protected –”

  “Of course you did. Stop tearing yourself to pieces. It’s all right, I tell you. I’ll get along fine.”

  “Anne, it would be so simple if you’d only –”

  “Don’t say it again. I can’t.”

  There was a truly terrible silence. Then suddenly, without taking his eyes off mine, Ross broke into clumsy sobbing. The tears tumbled out of his eyes in great round globes and poured down his cheeks, and I put my arms around him protectively.

  “Now Ross, will you listen to me, love. Get this straight, once and for all. There’s no need to go on about marriage and all that. If you want to – and you may not – if so, okay – we can just go on living together. In any case, I can work at the lab right up to the time and again after. You can be involved as much or as little as you like; but understand me, you are not trapped.”

  “Of course I bloody am,” he sobbed indignantly.

  “Not by any ring or licence you’re not.”

  I felt his muscles relax a little. He turned away to blow his nose.

  “Of course I want us to keep living together,” he said. “First thing to do, I guess, is to tell your parents and, oh Christ, my mother, and in
general share round the misery, see what they have to say. Better get it over with as soon as we can.”

  “All right. Only let the poor things see us graduate first. It’s only a week to convocation.”

  “Yes, yes,” he broke in. I knew he was grateful for any excuse to put off these encounters, as who wouldn’t be. I also knew he still hoped I would change my mind and extricate us both from the whole situation. Perhaps I myself hoped somehow I could, but with no real confidence.

  The kids and I ate scrambled eggs out of a communal bowl. I spooned bites into their mouths in a game called Not For You that Hugh enjoyed so much he forgot his dislike of eggs. By the time I got them into their warm, footed sleepers, it was getting late, but instead of putting them to bed, I let them play with their stuffed animals by the sitting-room fire. This indulgence was more for me than for them. While I washed up, I needed to hear their voices, because after dark was the worst part of the day for me. The house developed oppressive creaks and sighs. The empty bed upstairs yawned. Loneliness sneaked up to me, as dangerous as a tangible intruder.

  It was hard to believe now how often gregarious flocks of people used to swoop into and out of this deserted house. Natural for them to stay away now, of course. People feel uneasy in disaster areas. Even Bonnie, my best friend since college days, seldom came here now. As I dried Martha’s bitten, battered silver mug, I thought yearningly of Bonnie, my onetime roommate. She had come to her god-daughter’s christening in a tight skirt slit so high that the entire length of her gorgeous legs could be enjoyed or deplored by the other guests, depending on age or gender. Edwina’s face was a study in repressed offence. Billie looked openly and keenly annoyed. Her skirt was slit too, but not that high.

  Who else was there that day? Bonnie’s current man, a quiet little Chinese dentist who, she once told me, specialized in delicate oriental love-pinches of quite amazing potency. Tim and Randy, soon to be Ross’s partners, and their wives, one glacially blonde, one shy, pale, and pregnant. Max was in Japan at the time, but a cousin looking like a poor Xerox copy stood deputy godfather for him.

  The christening service itself, with its strange, heathen elements of exorcism, was something I was surprised and pleased to find intact in a modern Toronto church presided over by a breezy young curate who smoked cigars. Billie, of course, had no religion at all, but it had suited her to send me to church and Sunday school all through my childhood, with the result that I was an unbeliever with a sound Christian education. This, oddly enough, was from time to time a sort of comfort to me. The teachings of Christ, while they had no noticeable influence on my behaviour, were at least a point of departure. And churches were friendly, familiar places, their austerities always comfortably similar.

  Bonnie, on the other hand, had belonged in her small-town youth to a fundamentalist sect of some kind that worshipped by shouting “Yeah Lord,” and drinking grape juice out of tiny paper cups. I don’t think she’d ever actually been in a church with candles on the altar and a red sanctuary lamp, and the whites of her eyes showed as she took her place at the font. She had Martha tucked in her arm like an awkwardly shaped parcel, and kept looking down, fascinated, at the small, wincing red face. It was only a few months since Bonnie had been promoted to a corner desk in the big black-glass tower on King Street, and there were moments when the kid from Red Neck, Ontario, could be seen like the fading ghost of this chic person in the slit skirt, owner of the yellow Mustang at the church door. She’d been thrilled to be a godparent, and spent half her month’s salary on a cascade of toys, baby clothes, and silver engraved with Mar’s initials in the curliest possible script.

  Martha herself was decked out for the occasion in a flowing, hand-embroidered gown three generations old. When Edwina produced it, creased and yellow, from its blue tissue wrappings, I gazed appalled at all those rows of fine tucks and delicate frills, and took it straight to a Chinese laundry. They did a lovely job of bleaching and starching it, but as the priest traced his blessing on her forehead, Martha’s face turned plum-red, straining in a way Ross and I understood only too well but Bonnie mercifully didn’t know how to interpret. Before the ceremony was over, Martha had begun to scream in piercing, rhythmic squalls. On the way home in the car, she spat up over her pin-tucked bodice and the lacy shawl Edwina had knitted. The world, the flesh, and the devil were clearly far from licked on this occasion.

  Everyone, of course, came back to the house for champagne. After I’d hastily cleaned her up at both ends, Martha was photographed yelling in various poses. She screamed on energetically in one pair of arms after another while the flashbulbs popped and our ill-assorted guests tried to make conversation with each other. Ross, looking harassed, wrestled out corks and poured foam into glasses. I tried to soothe the baby, who responded by arching her back and shrieking even louder. Randy’s wife put down her glass and retired to the bathroom to be sick. Max’s cousin made a polite little speech and escaped the party with a look of profound relief. Billie said, “Sweetie, too sad, I’m booked for a deadly dull cocktail party,” and twinkled off swiftly on her little high heels.

  “This must be why they used to give them opium,” Bonnie said, raising her voice over Martha’s. “Kids, I mean.”

  “It’s colic,” I said, not without a gloomy sort of pride. “The pediatrician says it may go on till she’s five months.”

  “Jesus. Want to let me hold the little fiend? I think she likes me.”

  “No, Bon, I think I’d better try feeding her. It’s nearly time.” Shifting Martha to the other arm, I unbuttoned the front of my dress and fumbled with the ample cup of my nursing bra. Edwina’s pale eyes froze in unbelieving shock.

  “My dear,” she whispered, leaning forward with a warning creak of corset, “whatever are you thinking of? Leave your guests to Ross and me, and take the baby upstairs.” Tactfully she tried to interpose herself between the company and the indecency of my exposed breast.

  “Not to worry,” I said, trying to keep my voice polite as Martha latched rather noisily onto the nipple.

  Mother rose sharply to her feet. Her pale lips moved in inarticulate protest. Eyes averted, she muttered something about the GO Train, and went. Ross followed her out. After a considerable interval he came back looking tired.

  A welcome lull had by that time descended, during which Martha suckled and the rest of the gathering relaxed. Freed from the presence of the older generation, we abandoned champagne in favour of beer, slipped off our shoes or lit up a joint as the spirit prompted. Ross stretched out full length on the sofa and closed his eyes. After watching Martha feed for a while, with a curious look on her face of mingled fascination and revulsion, Bonnie sat down beside her dentist and lit a cigarette.

  “You’re still up all night with Baby?” Randy asked. He glanced with some apprehension at Martha as she vigorously rooted and sucked.

  “One of us has to rock or walk her half the night. Anne does the feed and walks the floor awhile, then I take over, rock and walk. If that doesn’t work, I put her in the pram and we go out. Motion therapy. Last night I shoved her all the way to Ontario Place, nearly, at ten miles an hour. Anyhow, that’s how it felt.”

  “What an awful warning,” murmured Bonnie.

  “Neither of mine ever had colic,” remarked Tim’s wife, touching her blonde chignon complacently. “In fact, I don’t believe there is such a thing. You shouldn’t give in to her when she cries. You’re making yourselves into slaves.”

  Ross and I both eyed her without friendliness.

  “Maybe those kibbutzes are the best places for little kids,” somebody said vaguely.

  “No, there’s no good, cheap substitute for marriage,” said Randy’s pale wife wistfully, her hand creeping into his.

  “Man, haven’t you heard? It’s been found,” said Bonnie. She shot one smoke ring neatly through the other. The dentist looked at her with his shallow black eyes that could not be seen to express anything.

  “Nobody – but nobody –” she
went on, “needs to hold out their wrists for the old cuffs. Holy matrimony my ass. It’s the biggest con game ever sold to generations of suckers.”

  Somebody loyal among the married raised a mild demur, but Bonnie only crossed her magnificent legs and focussed on him the full beam of her bright, intelligent blue eyes.

  “Listen, friend. I’ve got a sister now thirty-one. She got married at nineteen. Two instant kids. Hubby still in college, so they’re poor as lice for years. Finally he gets qualified, but they’re still all screwed up with a mortgage and kids’ teeth to get straight. Year after year, no holidays, no decent clothes, just running between supermarkets to pick up specials. Freezing the old home-grown vegetables, you know? Scraping wax off the goddam kitchen floor. Like that. And for what? Because last month hubby dear told her he’d like a divorce, please, so he can marry a drive-in waitress. That’s the reward she got for following all the rules.”

  “Oh, come on. Marriage doesn’t work by rules,” I protested.

  “No, it works because a lot of crazy women are still willing to give up their own lives and live in chains. They still believe all that jazz about Adam’s rib, I guess.”

  One or two of the wives began to speak at once, but Bonnie’s voice, with a considerable edge to it, overrode theirs. “Balls,” she said. (How I wished Edwina were still with us.) “Finks like you only show how brainwashed you are. It’s all those centuries of it – lying on your backs in the victim position. Some of you actually like it there. But that’s no excuse.”

  “Bonnie, you’re too naive,” said Ross. “You actually believe there’s such a thing as freedom? For male or female? You know damn well nobody’s free. Nobody human, that is.”

  “I am, chum.”

  “Come on, be honest. When a woman blames male-dominated society and all that crap for her personal unhappiness, she is just a whining cop-out.”

  “I am not personally unhappy,” said Bonnie with cold distinctness.

  “Wait, I never said that.”

  “Just the same, personal failure is personal failure,” I put in, attempting to soothe what was evidently keen irritation on both sides. “It isn’t marriage that’s wrong, it’s your sister’s priorities. Scraping wax – Christ, no wonder he took off.”