The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Help me,” Buzz said again.

  I am sure we each loved a different man. Because a lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’ve married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that’s why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he is dead.

  “You’ve asked for enough already,” I told him.

  “I must seem like a monster to you.”

  “And you asked like it was nothing at all.”

  “I know what it is I’m asking.”

  Other women did not do this, did not walk this far along the boardwalk with their enemies. They did not knead the red bird in their glove as they talked. They did not abandon their duties, their marriages, their lives like this.

  I said: “Have you tried a threat?”

  “Pardon?”

  “A threat.”

  He examined me. “What do you mean?”

  I glared at him. “You know what I mean.”

  For a moment I thought I had him. Then he gave the faint flutter of a smile, of admiration, as he made out what was floating through my head. “Blackmail won’t work,” he said quietly. “Not with me.”

  “I read up on things.”

  “I’m giving up my life anyway. I know you’re angry. But the police don’t frighten me, not anymore. They won’t frighten Holland either,” he said, unblinking. “Something else is holding him back.”

  I could feel blood spiking from my heart to my head, like the rhythmic pain I’d had late in carrying Sonny. To be painless, I had thought whenever the throbbing returned to my side; to be painless again is all I ask. In the days since Buzz’s late-night visit, I kept wishing for it to stop, only it was not exactly pain; what washed through my blood, at unexpected times, was fear.

  I told him, “The other night you said ‘someone.’”

  He looked at me with very narrow eyes.

  “I’m not really the one in the way, am I?”

  I amazed us both, there by the seawall. How remarkable we are, in our ability to hide things from ourselves—our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds: jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding—for even I was startled by what I said next:

  “The girl.”

  If by some miracle I live into a golden era, when racial strife is ended, and time machines are commonplace, and human hearts as clearly charted as the moon, I will travel back and find that young wife by the seawall. I will take her in my old arms and tell her it will be all right. I will tell her that I know she thought she’d learned the awful thing—an old lover come back to claim her husband—yet now here was more, a girl, and everything had come unraveled again. But young wives do not listen to old women. Their fears are so fresh to them; it is inconceivable that everyone has felt them.

  “They can’t really be carrying on,” I said to him.

  He paused, thinking how to put it to me. “I need your help, it’s complicated.”

  “How can you still … if there’s a girl—”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” he said, shaking his head.

  I looked at him in absolute astonishment; how could it not change anything? Once again my husband was called into doubt. A girl. Of course it changed everything. A man could not be all things; none of us could be. We did not fit the shape of each container, shifting like water; we were always, unalterably ourselves. Weren’t we? And yet there it was, in my mind: the ring of a bicycle bell.

  It had always vexed me, hearing that sound each Saturday when Holland gave Annabel DeLawn a ride. It was simple enough: he worked for her father, and was such a favored man that he was given the honor of chauffeuring her to classes at State. I had wondered why she couldn’t drive herself; perhaps her father would not allow it, or preferred the notion of a Negro driver. For his princess. So every Saturday when Holland had extra work, and that bell shattered the peace of my day, my husband looked up at me with startled eyes—and then his napkin went down in a crumpled pyramid before he kissed me goodbye. A heart full of worry. Not only because of how it looked, how it had always looked for colored men seen with white women. But because of his beauty. Like the unseen electric force that turns a motor, yet is itself unmoved, his beauty seemed to power this passion in others. It was his naïve talent. But the father was right in his trust; Holland would never knowingly betray it, but the girl herself might. He was innocent, just as the mindless flower is innocent every morning when it opens. That bicycle bell in the front yard; his napkin abandoned on the table; I knew what might happen, with anyone.

  “She’s an obstacle,” he said. “He’s at a point in his life where he doesn’t know quite who he is or what he wants. He’s struggling. He’s casting around for options, and she’s one of them. You and Sonny are one. And now I’ve appeared.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You wouldn’t know it, but he’s in a panic. He doesn’t know which way he wants his life to go.”

  “He’s not going to leave with her—”

  “No, but it’s a delicate situation.”

  “Oh, I know all about that. A white girl’s not to be trifled with. They make up things.” Terrible things, panicked lies. Then I raised my hands in bafflement again. I muttered: “The aunts were right.”

  “What’s that?”

  Holland was ill, and never in the ways I had imagined. Bad blood, a crooked heart. It was the sickness of a man floating at sea, half dead in the green light of the oil fires, shouting to the blank horizon just to hear his echo. So he would know he was alive. A man in the hospital, a girl in the neighborhood—it was the same struggle. A ghost breaking dishes so someone will know he’s there. I had not saved him; I had only masked the pain like morphine.

  We passed by the noisy bumper-car ring. Amid the cries and helium-voiced laughter, I felt its presence: that unnerving sensation of static electricity passing through me on its way to someplace better.

  “I don’t want to ask you this, but I have to,” I said. “Does he have a weak heart?”

  “What’s that?”

  I explained and he looked at me with no judgment at all. It was as if he understood the various flights of fancy someone might have about Holland Cook, the excuses one might invent. But the hospital had pronounced my husband as physically healthy as anyone. There wasn’t anything wrong with his heart.

  I bit my lip so I would not cry in front of this man. I looked out at a pair of gulls that stood on a column, fighting over a bit of food, gnashing at each other with their red-pipped beaks and losing, with every parry, their tenuous footing.

  “Talk to Annabel for me,” Buzz whispered in the growing darkness.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Try for me. Woman to woman.”

  “There’s nothing to say. I can’t talk to a white girl and ask her to—”

  “Just try.”

  I considered this carefully. I asked a simple thing in return.

  We had reached the edge of Playland, where the second roller coaster rose in black reptilian coils above what they called in those days a “dark ride.” Over the entrance, in fiery letters, blazed the word LIMBO—and in they went, the laughing teenage couples in their jolting carriages, and out they came, startled and red-faced, lipstick smeared. It was not really a ride for children, not really a haunted house. It was a machine, perhaps like one Buzz and I were constructing, one we have all tried to make, with stories and surprises and romantically lit rooms, a machine meant to force the heart to action. In my mother’s day they called it a “tunnel of love.”

  I watched one white couple emerge from the ride. The girl, in bright makeup and tomboy jeans, her hair mussed wildly around her face, laughed uproariously at something that had just happened, or b
een said or seen inside. The boy was trying to quiet her, but she kept batting away his hand, shaking her head and laughing. So young, I thought. But it was not true. They were hardly younger than me or Buzz.

  I asked him for money. “For Sonny and me.”

  Buzz said he understood. “But I don’t have much cash sitting around. It’s invested.”

  “Considering what you’re asking me to—”

  “I know, I know. But I have to be careful. That money’s all I have. You could take off,” he told me. “With Sonny. You could just take off and leave me. And I need you.”

  “You don’t understand,” I told him. “How can we just take off?”

  He looked at me, blinking, for a moment. “How much do you want?”

  I considered this. “A hundred dollars?”

  From the look on his face I knew I’d asked for too little. It was a shocked expression, almost amused; he stood digesting what I had said, and then quickly drew out his wallet and began counting money, crisp and green in my hand. I should have asked for more. Two hundred, five hundred, who knows what he could have given me? Who knows what would have been enough? We will never guess our price correctly.

  “Look at this,” I said, showing him one bill, worn with handling and covered in writing.

  “Oh,” he said softly in the darkness. “A soldier’s dollar.”

  It was a bill signed by all the members of a division—the Seventh Infantry—as part of a tradition where, before shipping out to Alaska and then to Pearl Harbor, the soldiers all signed a set of dollar bills and headed to a bar to spend them. You used to come across these dollars all the time in San Francisco, though they were rare by 1953. A way for those doomed boys to be remembered, a scrap of immortality.

  “It’s getting dark,” I said.

  “Trust me, Pearlie,” he said as he turned to buy me a soda. There was no need to say that. All alone out in the Sunset, I had to trust a rich white man. There was no one else to turn to.

  Buzz spoke with the vendor, his profile stark against the ocean, the break in his nose more apparent than ever. Our bargain: that this would be the face Holland would see first thing in the morning and last thing at night, wherever they decided to live. They say there are many worlds, populated by the different paths we take in life, and in any other one, Buzz would have been the enemy. But I had seen the dangers, and picked my side. There was no other world for me but this one. Treaties shift according to the war, and to release Sonny from this madhouse, I was willing to accept, if not friendship with this man, at least a cautious truce.

  I looked around at that old faded amusement park. It is gone now. Taken down years ago, after the place had gone sour and dark around the edges, the broken parts of the rides never replaced, the caramel corn reheated and reused until nobody bought it anymore. It was old-fashioned by then, part of a lost time: fun-house mirrors that warped the normal world; sudden drafts that blew girls’ skirts into the air; the thrilling jolts and shocks of the rides themselves—they tore free, somehow, into a country where everything became warped, and shocking, and upside down. The fun and freedom; the terror and restraint; only the ocean was left behind. Torn down—and burned down, parts of it, by owners desperate enough to make a final penny from junky old Playland-by-the-Sea. I am not saying that I loved it or miss it; you could never have caged a frenzy like that forever. I am only saying that it’s gone.

  “This is lunacy,” I said to Buzz. “I think I should just talk to Holland.”

  “No,” he said, very firmly.

  I asked, “Why not?”

  “I’ll … I’ll handle Holland.”

  “I’m his wife,” I said haughtily, drawing myself up beside the seawall. “I think I know him well enough.”

  We both stood in silence at the utter ridiculousness of this statement. All around us, families came and went with balloons and stuffed toys in their hands, faces marred with chocolate and ice cream. I began to laugh at the absurdity of it all and could not stop. It was the shock and relief of a storm cloud bursting open with rain. I leaned against the vendor’s cart and gasped for breath, laughing helplessly until I saw that Buzz was laughing, too. He shook his head and sniffed in amusement. And that was the first time that I felt it. As we found our breath and stared at each other, sighing: the peculiar bond between us.

  Sunset had arrived, barely pinking up the fog. And at last, the lights came on across the length of Playland, a thousand bulbs or more, flashing along the roller coaster curves, and lighting up the shoreline of our city in a way that would have made us a welcoming target during the war. The instinct to turn them off was still strong, left over from a vanished world. Because this was a time of blessed peace.

  And then Buzz did a very surprising thing. He turned to me, motleyed by the flash of fairground lights, and took my hand in his. I struggled, seeing myself as others passing on the boardwalk saw me: a colored woman, poorly dressed, eagerly talking with a handsome white man. No one would have known, from how he held my hand, that this man planned to take my husband from me. That over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

  I did not know what to think of Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish wife convicted of helping her husband hand nuclear secrets to the Soviets. In speckled trial photographs, her face seemed hard as a porcelain doll’s, her body stiff with anger, dressed in the outdated hat and cloth coat of a poor woman. It was difficult to think of her as a mother. She was forced to wear the shame of the whole affair—even her own brother stood witness against her at her trial—and when finally she was sentenced to death, no relative would accept her children. They were to be orphaned. The general consensus at the time was that Ethel had let this happen, the ungrateful Jewish woman, deceiving the very nation that had liberated her race, had let her children be orphaned, her family name ruined, all because she would not speak against her madman husband. Even my neighbor Edith could not bear the disgrace.

  The cabinets have been unlocked now, the government papers, yellow with age, have been released; her now-dead brother’s confession has been heard and we know the truth: that Ethel Rosenberg, born Ethel Greenglass, was no spy. But it changes nothing, for no one claimed she was a spy. She was sentenced to death, as the judge put it, because she did not “deter” her husband. Her handsome Julius, sworn to revolution. The judge said that her silence—not her actions, but her silence—had altered the course of history, that a weak-chinned Jewish wife with a lovely singing voice had brought about the Korean War, the rise of communism, the death of so many of our soldiers, and perhaps the end of the world. Delinquent wives will hasten our ruin. And so she had to die.

  “Hold me close,” Ethel wrote to her husband in Sing Sing, “my heart is heavy with wanting you.” What charmed circle had he drawn around her to keep her silence? As I read their passionate letters, and imagined her singing “Goodnight, Irene” to him from her adjacent cell, and stared at their photographed kiss, I longed to feel something for her. The good wife. The bad American. The bad mother. She looked, in her mug shot, like a woman from the last century: shirtwaist and cameo, hair wild and unset, an immigrant just arrived from a burning country, her eyes looking past the camera as if her vision pierced through walls and saw the chair awaiting her. Lips pursed in some twisted fervor that was worth her very life, her sons’ lives, worth all our lives. Silent, still silent long after it could be of any help to anybody. Who was she fighting for? Her beloved Julius? Herself?

  “Poor Ethel,” was all I could manage to whisper, and my husband would look up from his clipped newspaper and put his hand on my arm: “Colored folks got their own problems.” That was true enough.

  Holland Cook kissed me goodbye every morning at eight and hello every evening at six, as lovely and regular as the phases of the moon. I iced his drinks from the same howling freezer, pinned up his same laundry, and iron
ed our world as stiff and flat as ever. He held my hand and smiled at me with the sweetness of an old lover, and I smiled back. And yet none of it was real; after Buzz’s declaration, our movements felt like those of mechanical people once a penny is dropped in the slot. Or better: figures from a dream.

  Today any woman would leave him, but divorce in those days meant finding legal grounds. Insanity, intemperance. There was always, of course, adultery, but the aunts’ stories had taught me how difficult getting the proof could be. In my doubt about Annabel, I considered following the lovers out to some trysting place, my husband and his supposed mistress fogging up the Plymouth with their eager breath. But Buzz persuaded me it was a crazed idea. There is no good explanation for why love compels this of us: that we must seek out and witness the very scenes that would destroy us.

  Despite these mad revelations, I could not leave him. He was not just Buzz’s first love, he was mine as well, and so we shared that famous sickness; it ebbed and flowed through our blood like malaria. Who could leave until the last moment, and even beyond that, when he might still turn around and reach for her? Who wouldn’t wait for change long after change is possible?

  I tried to convince myself I was past caring. Each cup of coffee, each starched shirt and matched sock; the thousand cords that bound me to my husband. I pictured a hot-air balloon bound to the earth. One by one, I thought, with these simple automatic tasks, I would undo each cord. This shame and panic in my heart would pass; I would feel it growing, daily, more buoyant. Free from pain. In a month, three months, I might scarcely care what happened to him at all.

  And so our routine continued. It was early one evening; he and Sonny played on the living-room rug, toys spread out before them. The favorite was a paratrooper that, when tossed in the air, unfurled to reveal a parachute, printed with a hawk, as it floated gently to the carpet. Lyle, unfortunately, had gotten to the parachute and torn it to loving pieces, so Holland had to repair it with an old bread bag and some string. I had given Sonny my metal belt to play with. From the radio came talk of the war: the president, promising an end was near, that even those still being drafted were unlikely to see action.