The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  William Platt’s return was a neighborhood event, a hero’s welcome. I watched from my window as the government car turned the corner and stopped before his mother’s house, bedecked in patriotic colors. She ran out, a short woman with bright red hair, arms spread, but before William accepted her embrace, he turned to salute the driver with his left hand. His right arm ended, above the elbow, in a cocoon of gauze. Later, from infection, he would lose it all, and his young wife would lovingly alter his shirts, sewing the cuff of each right sleeve to his shoulder so it dangled like a flag. That day, Annabel ran to him, her blond hair curled in the rain. I remember how they embraced despite the downpour, how he grinned eagerly and she stroked his short hair desperately and he held her against his chest. Soon my window was speckled with rain, flattening the scene like a newspaper photo made up of dots. He was alive; he was a hero. I closed the drapes. It meant nothing; I had already taken on the guilt of a murderess.

  There was a woman my grandmother knew, who owned nothing in the world but some pearls her great-aunt left her, and it was all she’d brought to her marriage: a strand of huge, luminous, beautiful pearls. Quite a treasure for a poor woman. One day there was a fire. The whole house burned down, and her sleeping husband burned with it. The woman came back from the trip she’d been taking, widowed, devastated to see the destruction and, picking through the wreckage, she discovered her scorched metal jewelry box. She opened it—and there were her pearls, as perfect, as beautiful as before only now absolutely black. The heat had done it. The friend who was with her wept: “They’re ruined!” “Oh yes,” said the woman, bringing them out, “they’re ruined.” But that was how she wore them, those blackened pearls; as a token, a holy relic around her neck.

  The day William Platt stepped from that car, saluting with his one good arm, his wife sobbing beside him. The memory of that day. I wear it like that string of pearls.

  People said that when America won the war, the burned-out marquee of the Parkside Theater relighted miraculously and glowed for a week. That was where I met Buzz at an ill-attended, midday double feature. It was one of our final meetings. We sat in the last row; a flash of sunlight brightened the movie screen above us. It was a war film. Prisoners stood in the cold white square of a yard, a warden addressing them in a language they did not know.

  “What did we do?” Buzz whispered.

  “It wasn’t us. It wasn’t our letter—”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There wasn’t enough time,” I said. “Things couldn’t work so fast—”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’s crazy to think they would take that letter seriously, change their draft rolls. You know the army. It wasn’t us. It was chance.”

  A popcorn-box airplane came floating overhead—from kids in the balcony who paid their entrance fee with 7UP caps. A few rows before us, a man I knew to be deaf and dumb watched with sad fascination the pictures that were still silent movies to him.

  A winter prison camp that had no walls, no fence, no barbed wire, as the warden loudly explained. During the day it was heavily guarded, but at night there was just a square of bright light in the middle of nowhere, the prisoners pinned there like moths, and what kept them from escaping was the night, which built its own walls, because all they could see beyond the blinding whiteness of their prison was an impenetrable blackness. “It is the Black Forest beyond, but you will never see it!” the warden yelled. Their night was too black; their eyes would not adjust before they froze. He shouted: “You are blind men now.”

  Buzz said it was his fault.

  “It was chance,” I said again.

  “I talked you into all of this.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “You hid a boy from war,” he told me, speaking close to my ear. “I … I stood up back then and wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t kill. I sacrificed things not to go to war. And now a boy—”

  I shivered in the cold theater. “He never went to war.”

  A pause, then a whisper: “He did.”

  “What are you saying? It wasn’t war. It was an accident.”

  He said, “We used him, Pearlie. Not in their battle but in our own.”

  I turned to Buzz and saw in his eyes something I had never expected to see. Not in a man whose missing finger testified to his unwillingness to fight. A general, in his tent early in the morning, hearing the death toll from the push he has just ordered could not have looked as battle weary. So stricken and sorry. It was the only fight either of us was willing to join. The woman who hid her man, the objector who found him. We would not fight to kill in a war or to set the world aright, not for a country who disowned us, but together we had found our cause. A prize so small it could not be worth this sacrifice. Simply: ourselves.

  “I could go away,” he said in a pained voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  He took off his coat, struggling in the seat, not looking at me but staring up at the screen. “If you asked me to. We’ve done something bloody and terrible and ruined a life. Two lives. I could leave tonight.”

  “And where would that leave me?”

  “You’d go on as before.”

  “But I’d know he wanted someone else—not me.”

  “Maybe you and I should leave,” he said. “I’ve sold everything, it’s all done, you and Sonny could come with me.”

  On-screen, two prisoners played a pensive game of chess. Spotlights lit the parade ground as bright as a movie set, and within the bunkhouse bare bulbs hung glowing from the ceiling. In a flutter of death, one bulb extinguished itself. The prisoners stared at it, as did the guard, who paused a moment before shouting that a light had gone out.

  “That’s foolish talk,” I said. “You didn’t come to take me and Sonny away somewhere.”

  “I would do it.”

  “You’d get one mile out of town and start to think of him. You want to make amends to me, but it won’t let you love him less. I don’t understand it, but I’ve seen it. What brought you here won’t let you leave.”

  “Take Holland, too.”

  I sighed aloud at that thought, and tried to see his face more clearly in the flickering darkness. I said, “No, Buzz. I can’t do that. Take what you came for and leave me and Sonny be. It’s too late.”

  Boos erupted from the balcony; the wrong reel had been inserted and now a woman from another century, her long blond hair in braids, a basket on her arm, kneeled beside a lake and tossed grass at a young man. He pulled a strawberry from her basket and she laughed with the abandon of youth. Quite wildly, he took her in his arms and kissed her, while the children in the balcony raged and threw their popcorn in the air. She struggled in his embrace, succumbing—and then the girl and her lover were gone. Cheers from above. The screen was winter-white, trapping Buzz and me in its glare.

  A prison made entirely of light. So bright, so white, you can not imagine crossing over into the frozen darkness that surrounds you. Nothing keeps you from it; there is no electric fence or wall around a life, a marriage. Nothing really stops you from saving yourself, your son. It is just light, but it stuns you. It whitens the edges of you like frost. Years pass. The only thing that could spring you from such a prison is an error; a spotlight sputters out, a bulb, and you have a glimpse of the world around you. For a moment, you have your bearings; you see things clearly: how life could be. You look into each other’s eyes, you nod, and in a fit of madness you take off across the border.

  If Buzz left us, he’d return to the same starvation he had known once, years ago, but what we bear once we may not bear again. The bachelor’s apartment; the single-burner stove; the album of photographs under the bed; a harmless, lonely life—he could not live it again. It was what brought him to my door, to skew the world a little, because to do otherwise—to sit and take the life you are offered—can be unbearable. He wanted to please, wanted to live it, but he couldn’t. He did not take the step forward. And so the world lashed back—or no, it didn’t. I
t did nothing at all. It kept spinning, as beautiful as ever, and silently looked on. “They didn’t need to,” as he told me once, when I had asked if they had hurt the prisoners. “We did it on our own.”

  The movie came back on; in the bunkhouse a shivering prisoner began to build a fire. Buzz looked across at me, and the space between us seemed as wide as a church aisle. He could not ask for what he wanted, which was a promise to stay with him, for someone to stay; if not Holland, then me; if not me, then the madness of solitude again. And he would not go back there.

  “It’s too late,” I said.

  He looked at me for a long moment before he nodded. Gratitude and love was on his face. Then, in one of those strange miracles of the cinema, an officer on the screen began to mirror Buzz’s movements: standing up, taking his hat, and walking through a door that, swinging just like the theater door, produced the painful dazzling surprise of a sunny day.

  It was only much later, when I learned the rest of his story, that I fully understood what he had offered with those four words: “I could go away.” The solitary life he might have returned to. His story of pain, which he told me at last. I have said that pain reveals things, and that is sometimes what it takes to break our solitude. To open, briefly, that small window, that view out of ourselves: the life of someone else.

  In the final days of the experiment, Buzz told me, his dreams ransacked his memories, turning them into nightmares. His brain recast familiar scenes like the train ride to Minnesota but this time he appeared as a cannibal, running through the cars. Even his memories were not safe; the hunger got to them, as well. This was not as bad as the blackouts experienced by other men who would lose whole afternoons. They arrived at their rooms unable to explain their absences, terrified of what they might have done. They were not acting; they had gone mad. One spent days stealing fruit from markets and erasing it from his memory. Another ate from garbage cans; another stared at restaurant patrons for hours. And one had to be sent away from the program for good. That was Buzz.

  It was the spring of 1945; peace was coming, though the boys in Minnesota could never have known it. “We had almost forgotten about the war,” he told me. “They told us it was nearly over, and we would help the survivors, but it was very hard to think about that.” Six months had passed, and the starvation segment of the experiment, at least, had come to an end. Hair was falling out; lips and nails were blue; their flesh was puckered and gray, like the skin of butchered animals. But they had survived it. “The stick men,” they called themselves, and would have laughed if they could. “The zombie soldiers.” Buzz’s mind began to glow again, faintly, at the notion that it was over. The hunger. A sturdy, dependable subject for all those months—an ideal subject, in many ways—no one could guess he was about to lose his mind.

  It happened the day they announced the increase in food. Not everyone would get the same amount, the doctors said. The purpose of the experiment, they explained, wasn’t, as the men had been led to believe, to find the best way to bring someone back to life. It was to find the cheapest way. Millions of hungry refugees wandered out of the cities of Europe, and the money had to go as far as possible to save them. There were so many mouths. The group had to find what was enough, what was too little. And so some men were given large portions of food, some less, some still less, and some barely more than they’d eaten all along. It was a bullet to the brain when Buzz heard he was part of this last group.

  Apparently you cannot feed a starving man and expect gratitude. That is what they learned from the study, and later from the concentration camps. A man, nearly dead, will snarl at his plate of food. In that way, we are untamable.

  He shouted several times a day at mealtime, taunting the men whose plates were two or three times the size of his; sometimes he refused his food altogether, tossing it onto the floor in a rage he could never explain. But he was a good subject; he pulled himself together. He told himself it would be over soon; this was not real life. It was just war; it was the life eventually you leave behind. It took all he had to sit at the table and eat the food they gave him, at least to stay alive.

  “I don’t remember,” he told me, “what eventually happened to me.” He accepted the refeeding system for about two weeks, and the doctors were surprised to see he began to lose instead of gain weight, because even his small diet was four hundred more calories than he’d eaten for half a year. Once again, he became irritable with doctors and with his fellow patients. He spoke to no one, read no books, would not even listen to the radio with his former friends. He would pour water into his plate and mush it like a milk shake, staring at the others as if daring them to do something about it. Eventually, though, he ate it with a spoon. He did not remember doing anything more unspeakable than this.

  “They tell me I disappeared one afternoon, didn’t show up for my physical, didn’t leave any sign that I’d gone to town or anything. I suppose I blacked it all out, like the others. I don’t remember. I can’t explain it.”

  He did not remember being discovered in a garage. Or how a gleaming ax lay near him on the ground, among all the bits of metal, or how he crouched beside the workbench, involved in some activity. It was only when they got closer, he told me, that they noticed the blood freely flowing from his left hand and watched, with horror, as—delicately, lovingly—he fed himself tiny gobbets of his flesh.

  This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love story, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass. Not an ordinary story of men in battle but of those who did not go to war. The cowards and shirkers; those who let an error keep them from their duty, those who saw it and hid, those who stood up and refused it; even those too young to know that one day they would rise and flee their own country, like my son would, when his time came to go to war. The story of those men, and of a woman in a window, unable to do a thing but watch.

  I saw it all. Holland Cook silhouetted in his hiding chamber and years later on a gray beach, staring at the sea that had swallowed him. William Platt home from Virginia in his uniform, wife running to him, smiling as he saluted with his one remaining hand. Buzz Drumer rubbing his hand as his “tell” in conversation, and blasted with grief in the white light of that movie theater, greeting the return of his own madness. Sonny’s voice on the phone, the day I would get his draft card, years later. I saw it and thought, “I’ll save this one.” A reprieve for one man, a release from the turning wheel. Surely the world won’t miss one more. Surely there has been enough.

  It is madness not to do as you are told. Not to step forward from a hiding place, a deferral, from a line of frightened young men. But it is astounding how different men are; not all from the same clay, for when it comes to the kiln, some break wide open or change in ways even the maker can’t predict.

  Where is the dollar bill for those men? For the cowards, the shirkers? Like the one Buzz gave me, by accident, on our first meeting by the sea? Covered with the signatures of nineteen-yearold soldiers headed of year-olding in bars and signing dozens of bills, using them to pay for drinks, hoping their memory would still circulate after they shipped off, and fought, and died for their country.

  There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names.

  How else will we be remembered?

  A few nights later, a succession of streetcars took me far from the Sunset. I was no longer Pearlie Cook; I was a stranger in a cloth coat and cat-whisker bow, a mystery on the tramline, a colored girl clutching her purse, headed who knows where. This was not unusual for most people, used to being surrounded by strangers, nothing expected of them. At one point, the streetcar lost its electricity and the driver had to walk outside with a long pole to reconnect the wires, and as we sat in darkness, the man across from me gave me t
hree glances: my legs, my hands, my eyes. I could be any girl, headed anywhere. A late-night shift at a factory, a date at a nightclub, an affair out at the farthest edge of town. The car awakened with light and he gave me one more appraising look before he got off at his stop. No one ever glanced at Pearlie Cook, but I was someone else that night.

  As a WAVE, I had always considered taking a streetcar to its very last stop, and now that I lived at the very end—nothing is more final than an ocean—I traveled backward to downtown, and in a quiet, dreamlike state, I made my way to where Chinatown met North Beach, to the spot where sailors have been coming since the Gold Rush. It used to be called the Barbary Coast. It wasn’t called that in my day. It was called the International Settlement—it said that, in fact, spelled out in huge metal letters over the archway on Broadway.

  The priests had long ago doused the red lights, so it was probably only half as seedy as a hundred years earlier. Coffee shops and bars full of long-haired poets, bearded radicals. One particularly elegant woman, in a melon-sleeved princess coat and a daisy veil, could have been transported that instant from Paris. All that gave her away was her walk (horribly burlesque) and her eyes, fishing everywhere for a customer. She even caught my glance and gave me a pleasant snarl. I didn’t mind; I had been given worse in soda shops. She passed under the blade sign of a dance hall (MADAME DUPONT: DANCES FIFTY CENTS) and was lost in its atomic neon glow.