The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Well we heard the most terrible news,” said Beatrice.

  I smiled. Buzz stood hidden among the boys like a figure in a burbling fountain. “You don’t say.”

  “There was a jealous wife. In Fresno.”

  “Didn’t the last story happen in Fresno?” I asked.

  “Well that is apparently where these things happen!” she told me, indignant. “A jealous wife borrowed a plane and crashed it into the playground near her house. And there was a note.”

  “Listen to this,” said Alice, wearing the glow of old love like a veil. “There was a note for her husband that said: ‘You told me once that everyone gets over everything. But it isn’t true and I’ll prove it.’ Imagine writing a thing like that.”

  “I certainly can’t.”

  “And to prove it, she took away the things he loved,” Beatrice said.

  Her sister repeated: “The things he loved—”

  Beatrice sniffled. “Only the awful part is, the awful part—”

  The awful part was that their daughter had been in the plane, and the family dog as well; the things he loved. They had all gone down together in a flower of flame. It was not a radio show, this time.

  One aunt was sighing: “That husband, to watch that plane go down—”

  “That’s jealousy for you,” the other said and looked at me very meaningfully. “That’s what women are capable of. When in most marriages, you know, they can work these things out.” She stood there like a stone column, repeating: “Most couples can just work these things out.”

  “How awful,” I said, “what a thing to think about before your wedding, Alice.”

  “Well—” she began.

  “And you know that friend of Holland’s, that nice white fellow,” her sister broke in. “Well I don’t want to spoil your friendship. But you should know that he’s a liar. A notorious liar.”

  “Oh yes, Pearlie,” Alice said, nodding.

  “He tells people he was an objector. But he wasn’t. He was a coward. A coward and a liar. He cut off his finger to get out of the fighting, oh yes he did, you can see it right there.”

  “We wouldn’t have much more to do with him, if we were you.”

  “Think of Sonny.”

  I wonder what those women were up to. They must have known a great deal more than they were letting on. The lunch long ago, the “worry over the past” and the one’s cry—“Don’t marry him!”—made it clear they were paying attention. They could feel something changing, as the blind can sense a storm, and were working in their fumbling manner to stop us. In some terrified way, they were trying to help me.

  It was only much later that I realized they must have seen to the marrow of everyone involved. They had spent their spinster hours knitting away in front of us, that generation of women who listened to nothing but watched everything, and they had seen our hearts’ desires. I am not saying they approved of them. I think those two women cared only to keep their nephew happy, or what they viewed as happy, and they would have done anything to save him. They had thought that I would save him, but they had begun to doubt. I hadn’t the instinct. I was the type that saw nothing, and then saw everything. I think to save someone, you have to be like the aunts, and look at life with half-closed eyes, and never waver. Yes, I think the key to that kind of life is never to waver.

  The aunts handed me a gift for Sonny, a pretty pink little box, and said they’d be by at two, they could hardly think properly they were so upset, they might treat themselves to sukiyaki, and off they went like two beach balls rolling along the sidewalk, one in polka dots, one in stripes, smiling at each other. Sweet old cats, their conjoined life about to come to its end; the last of their mutual meddling.

  I opened the box. It was a trio of knitted hand puppets: a tiger, a judge, and a wizard. I smiled and studied the beautiful things; they must have chosen these puppets so carefully from the shop, picked among the flawed handmade toys, and yet what scenario these three could enact together was a puzzle. A tiger, a judge, and a wizard … some nightmare divorce proceeding? And did they consider my Sonny a three-armed Martian?

  “I’ll take my hat now, madam, thank you.”

  Buzz smiled as he brushed popcorn from his sleeves. He led me out through the crowd and my heart fell back into its normal rhythm. He took my arm again and whispered, “The way you acted, you’d think we were the lovers …”

  Two weeks later it happened at last; they printed his name on the page beside Weddings and Divorces:

  Drafted: William Platt, Sunset District …

  Annabel DeLawn married William Platt on May 20, 1953, after only a week’s engagement; it happened more quickly than we’d ever expected. The ceremony was a small one at Yosemite Hall, attended by the surviving members of her father’s army regiment. I clipped the photo out of the paper. He was in his army uniform. And she was in a plain white dress with a long piece of lace over her head, the way my mother would lay a dish towel on a freshly baked pie to keep off flies. “The beautiful daughter of General DeLawn,” read the caption, and I had to agree. It was only the day after William Platt’s name appeared in the newspaper, on the draft rolls, that she announced she was going to marry him, though of course she didn’t have to. And it wasn’t in order to save him from the war; there was no exemption left for William Platt, and she wasn’t the type to hide a man from battle, anyway. Very few of us are that type. No, Annabel married William the Seltzer Boy—as I knew she would—because she loved him.

  “I didn’t even know they were engaged,” Holland said as I showed him the announcement in the paper. He undid the noose-knot of his tie. His eyes revealed nothing.

  “I guess they kept it secret. And then William got drafted, so the secret came out.”

  He folded the tie around his hand. He said he remembered lots of boys getting married before they were shipped out.

  “I remember that, too.” I didn’t mention it was for deferrals.

  It was sure rotten to get drafted, he said, and gave a sad smile. If there was a last scene with Annabel, on a cliff by the roaring ocean, a grimace of canceled desire, some tearless goodbye—“I guess I’m going to be a good wife”—then he did not show it. No ice clinked in his bourbon; his hand was steady as ever. “He’ll be fine. They’re just training them these days, they won’t even ship him out.” He nodded and looked right at me. We did not speak, that day, of how a boy might hide from war.

  No one ever wondered why William’s luck broke in the end. The notice just arrived one morning and the family acted as if it was the summons they had always expected, the fulfillment of some prophecy; there was no drama about it at all. The war was nearly over. Our president promised us: the mission was almost complete, and we had no reason to disbelieve him. He was, after all, a general. One last push and it would be finished; certainly no newly drafted troops would be sent. The joke at the wedding (among the ancient army men) was that William would not even get to sample Korean “cooking” (said with a filthy gesture) before he came home to good old American potatoes. Apparently William looked around, grinning; I don’t think he understood what they were talking about.

  The end of the war. Buzz hoped it had come; that was the only way he could dictate that letter, back at Playland, with a clean conscience, though afterward, it seemed to us both like a heartless plan. So I hid it in the basement until the air raid. That night, with the siren still singing in my skull, I pulled it from the shelf and mailed it. I assumed nothing would happen; I believed our president, and thought of Korea as being as safe as Minnesota. It seemed blandly American to write a letter to the government: “It might interest Selective Service to know about a misunderstanding that an eligible young man has a brother …”

  Signed with a slipknot P and posted by the ocean. Be a finker for Mr. Pinker.

  The cruelest part, to me, was not that we had sent William off to train for war. He was an average boy, with the average urges, prejudices, and habits; a more heartless person would find it p
oetic for him to stand in a long line of average boys and do what he was told. He had no idea why anyone would not step forward after the oath and become a soldier. I’m sure he believed it was for the common good, and perhaps it was. The disruption of his life, his happiness, his delivery route was a hardship he may not have deserved. But what haunted me was Annabel.

  Marriage is a fairy tale, and, like those stories, it requires a bewitching bargain. It is to trade the thing you value most. In this one, she exchanged her future: Annabel Platt no longer went to State, no longer sat in sulfur-smelling classrooms with boys snickering beside her as the chalk scratched on the board, no longer smiled and removed a professor’s hand from her thigh. There would be no more books for Annabel, no laboratory, no miraculous discovery glowing in an Erlenmeyer flask. She had pawned them all for him.

  Her marriage: I had forced it, like a flower out of season. In my air-raid panic, I had hastily executed Buzz’s aborted plan and never thought, for a moment, of any danger except to that young man. Annabel’s attentions to my husband were thwarted, but I had never meant to thwart her life. She did that to herself, but I can hardly blame her. Those were the times, the rules we lived by. How devastating to remember that daydream of mine, seeing her golden head in the soda shop, that brief murderous image. Of course it was no more absurd than fantasies people indulged in daily on the bus, the beach, about less-deserving subjects; I am no murderess. If I could have found her once again in the soda shop; if I could have crossed Mr. Hussey’s race line to sit across from her in that green-striped booth. If I could have explained it all, perhaps she would have understood. But there was no way to cross that line. So in the end, like a hunted creature trying to throw the scent, I had freed myself only by shifting my fate onto another woman.

  During the war, cars had their chrome painted over, so our freeways wouldn’t shine in the sun and make an easy target for the Japanese. We grew so used to this dimness that it was a shock to see something as ablaze as the expensive car that drove up to our house. The sound of a horn brought me to the window, where I saw it gleaming even in the dull Sunset sun, decorated everywhere with bright chrome that made it seem so new. Everywhere down the block, I saw housewives pushing lace curtains aside to stare, and boys on bikes stopped on the sidewalk to look back, squinting, as from this car—bloodred, as huge and round as the belly of a whale—stepped my private Jonah.

  I walked outside, wiping my hands on a dishrag.

  “Do you like it?” Buzz asked, grinning.

  “Where did you get that?” I whispered, urging him into the house, but he stood outside, looking at the candied shine of the thing. He had become a little reckless, perhaps savoring this story that seemed so rapidly to be coming to its end.

  He ran a hand along the swell below the window. “The dealer let me take it for a ride. Should I get it?” he asked. “It’s really your money I’m spending, but I thought we’d leave you with the old Plymouth if you don’t mind—”

  I saw the wives at the windows and gestured to Buzz. “Hush, get inside.”

  “No, get Sonny,” he said, opening the door. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  I’m sure Sonny was the envy of the block as the other boys watched him climb into the front seat of that lovely car. He sat there at the wheel as if at the helm of a spaceship, his face wide open with pleasure, as he delicately touched, without pressing, every button he could find. I had him move over and I climbed into the passenger side. The door shut with a final sound.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said to Buzz, who took over the driver’s side. “I’ve never been in a car like this.”

  He looked very carefully at me, still smiling. “You like it? You can get a car like this, if you want to.”

  I glanced at the dashboard, the wheel, shaking my head. “No. But it’s beautiful.”

  Buzz pushed his hat back on his head and started up the car. He said, “We’ll need something nice and big to cross the country in.” And for the first time in a while, the “we” he spoke of didn’t include me.

  I looked down at my son, then spoke softly to Buzz: “You’re crossing the country? You’ve talked with him?”

  “Just about me. Not about everything.”

  “I’d never know—”

  “Later,” Buzz said, his hand on Sonny’s head. “I have something I want to show you.”

  I looked back at my married home. The old Cook home within the new development. White, square, a plain façade punctured by a ruby-colored section of glass above the doorway: cherry on a sundae. Overgrown with vines, of course, and handsome the way a domesticated animal is handsome: the house where every real event of my life took place.

  The car started up with the low rumbling of a caged beast, and I sat and caressed its striped leather, imagining how its shiny newness would be coated in dust and crumpled bits of paper, crosswords and broadsheets; how in this same seat my husband might fall asleep for hot Nebraska hours while Buzz, the boss, drove a road so straight and empty he could read from a paperback novel propped up beside the dashboard. Across the Golden Gate, the property was greener than before, fooled by a lush out-of-season rainstorm, and seemed fuller in its thick coat of grass. I listened to Sonny shouting about his day from the backseat, my eyelids flickering with exhaustion, and I found myself staring sleepily out at the fog unrolling above us like fleece until my eyes closed.

  I dreamed of William Platt, of all people. I dreamed that he was helping me over a wall, that it was very important we get over that wall because something was coming behind us—more than an enemy, of course—a monster, a darkness moving on the horizon. But I was caught in that dream substance that glues you to the spot; it kept me in danger as William pulled and pulled on my arm and called me a horrible name … and then suddenly we were in Playland, and I was sitting in the ride operator’s seat, and William was on the ride itself—in a swan boat, for some reason, and not a hearse car—there he was, waving and waving at me with that broad smile as his boat approached the darkness. And then, like a movie shown with a missing reel, he was gone and standing before me was a rain-soaked Holland with a single word on his lips …

  I awoke, alone, in a dandelion heaven. My heart was beating rapidly; I let out a plaintive sob. The car was parked beside a dirt road, which parted the gold grass like a comb through hair, and, among the dandelions (young blonds and old grays), I noticed casual bouquets of poppies that seemed to sparkle. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t light but crickets, everywhere, leaping. They lay stone-gray on the ground, until disturbed, and then they leaped into the air and exposed their underwings, which shone for a moment a bright Prussian blue. Why this flash of color? How could it ever help the bugs survive? There is no explaining beauty.

  Through the window I saw Buzz, sitting on a blanket beside a fascinated Sonny. The sun made them both shade their eyes with their hands, like surveyors. My son was all smiles, and he didn’t notice a common butterfly writing in the air above him.

  My door made an old-fashioned slam.

  “I agree, that’s a wonderful idea,” I heard Buzz say, gesturing to the ocean swell of hills. “What kind of house would you put there?”

  My son considered this a moment. “A tree house!”

  Buzz laughed. “Well there ain’t that many trees. How about a house on stilts?”

  “All right.”

  “Show me where.”

  But I had already grabbed Buzz by the arm and pulled him through the weeds back to the car, crickets leaping everywhere. He looked amazed, as if I were a stronger woman than he’d counted on, but I did not wait for him to speak before I whispered furiously:

  “How dare you?”

  “I wanted to show Sonny—”

  “I know what you’re doing. I’m no fool.”

  “Little boys like to dream, too.”

  “How dare you show my son these things? Show him all this.” I thrust my arms out at the open sky, the clouds as bright and crenellated as the grass below, all of it
moving, rustling, in the strong wind that smelled of the ocean. My scarf blew all around me. “Asking him what kind of house he’d like, my God! Get him dreaming and then you’ll take it away.”

  He took off his hat and said, quite calmly: “It’s going to happen, Pearlie.”

  “Don’t make him promises. Don’t break his heart.”

  “It’s going to happen. Now there’s nothing standing in our way. We’re going to make it happen, together.”

  “It’s going to happen my way,” I said. “If I get the money, your money, I’ll do what I like.”

  He looked away from me smiling slightly despite my shouting. He said, “It’s five hundred acres, like you said.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like you told me. I just wanted you and Sonny to see it.”

  I held my mouth open but could think of nothing to say. A turkey buzzard flew high above us, so high it looked as pretty as a hawk, hovering, adjusting its wings, staggering in the hot blue sky. Five hundred acres with a fence all around.

  “It’s too soon,” I told him firmly.

  “No, Pearlie. You have to prepare. If you know what you want, you can have it, but you have to let go of your old life, and of Holland—”

  “I don’t like it,” I snapped at him. It made me angrier than ever, somehow, that he’d tricked a dream out of me. That he’d listened, and thought it over, and drove us out to see it. “I don’t like it. You buy my husband from me—”

  “Now calm down.”

  But I would not calm down. My voice was very soft and firm: “You buy my husband from me like he’s at auction. You break up our family—”

  “Pearlie—”

  My hand gestured to where my son had wanted his house on stilts. “It’s an old story.” He knew what I meant.