The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  There it was, at the corner of Broadway and Kearny: a bar called the Black Cat. It had been there since the thirties. No windows, barely a sign, but it seemed full when the door swung open and revealed a bare bulb hanging, black or nearly black walls, posters tacked to them, a man standing just inside the door with a basket of buttons. I stood there for an hour as he handed them to transvestites with a smile, and the “ladies” would pin them to their stuffed bosoms or their hats, laughing, and walk inside. I later got close enough to read one, and found it said: I AM A MAN. The bar had been turned inside out by police every week or so, on the pretense of a law banning deliberate intent to pass for the opposite sex. So to keep from being arrested they wore these buttons. I heard later that the men inside—not just the transvestites but all of the men—stood a few feet apart from one another, because there was a law about that, too.

  I didn’t go inside. I just stood and watched the men. Two fairly young ones came out, laughing, smoking cigarettes, coat collars turned up against the night air, white shirts and black ties like clerks. Lovers, I assumed. It amazed and terrified me to see people name their desires so freely, so easily, as if there were nothing to lose; as if it were as simple as pinning them on like a button. The men stubbed their cigarettes out against their shoes in a kind of dance, and then field-stripped them—tore them apart so the tobacco floated in the air. A soldier’s habit. So the enemy couldn’t track them.

  An older man in a cowboy hat arrived and put his hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. They spoke for a moment before going inside together, and the men I had been watching exchanged a single smile before only one was left, looking defiantly around. Not lovers, then. I could not get anything right.

  But I did sense something. Beyond the inscrutable movements of these men, the world they had built beneath the ordinary one; beyond the seedy lights and grimy hotels, the hauntings of sex that had not changed for a century; it was a feeling, which I could not name at the time, of something awakening. It was happening all around me, in the bookstore across the street, in the cafés, and in the bars. It was as if part of the body was stirring, moving very slowly to rouse the rest. Some change was coming; I was part of it. The way we lived would not do, would not hold. A decade from now, and nothing would be familiar in this spot. Not even me.

  I won’t pretend I saw it clearly then. That, looking at the man outside, at the Black Cat, I didn’t grapple with disgust or outrage or that most unforgivable of self-deceits: pity. Certainly I pitied that young blond man. Even as I was willing to grant Buzz what he wanted, what I assumed my husband wanted, even as I saw it more and more as a real kind of love, I pitied that man on the street.

  Seen from a distance, the scene is comic. After the sailor passed, the young man caught my gaze. We regarded each other for a moment and he smiled at the colored girl in her old hat. As our eyes met across that dark street, I understood. That I pitied him no more than he pitied me.

  I went home on the streetcar oddly warmed by what I had seen, determined to see out the course of the next week, the last one of my former life. I was like a thief in his hideout, drinking cold coffee, reading every day in the paper about the baffled cops, with only one week left to wait, one week before it’s safe, and he can sneak back to where he hid the diamonds.

  I have a rendezvous with life …

  “Market and Duboce!” the conductor shouted. “Sunset Tunnel ahead!”

  The wedding of the younger aunt took place at a colored church in Santa Rosa, cactuses blooming in pots by the door, the bride dressed all in blue. Sonny carried the ring, and of course dropped it, giggling, at the proper moment. Alice giggled as well. I have rarely seen a look of such satisfaction on a woman’s face, but even greater was that of the groom: elegant, portly, and handsome, he kept smiling, looking up at the one pane of stained glass—our Lord Jesus Christ ascendant—as one would look at a man who had lost a friendly wager. The eldest sister stood beside her, holding the small bouquet of yellow roses, listening carefully to the preacher, nodding at every period in his sermon. He spoke of God’s time and our time. I saw that Holland wept a little when his old aunt kissed her groom. The only audience was a few old women with fans and loud “Amens,” and when it was over and the couple was being congratulated, I left with Sonny to find a restroom. When I let him run back inside, and was alone in the hallway, I noticed a middle-aged woman hiding behind the door, looking inside. She wore a small yellow hat, a flower pinned to her dress, and an expression of grim determination.

  “Which one is the bride?” she asked in a small, sharp voice. She must have come at the very end of the ceremony.

  I introduced myself, and she said hello before announcing solemnly: “I’m his daughter. From his first family.”

  “I didn’t know he had another family.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes.”

  I said it was a shame she’d never met my aunt before, but she shook her head. “Oh he never did dare show her to us. He carried on with her when I was just a little girl. Still married to my mother, oh yes. Now she’s dead and here they are. I didn’t come to see the wedding, I’m not a masochist. I just wanted to get a good look at her.”

  She peered discreetly into the room, searching the faces. The aunt: a mistress. And here, slipping the preacher a twenty: the married man whose loss had left its own mark on young Alice. He must have considered leaving his family for her, throwing it all over long ago, but at last came to his senses and returned to his family. Perhaps the eldest sister had a hand in it. Only now, when everything was over, and they were old, and sensibilities no longer mattered, had he returned. And Alice had accepted him. I had not bothered to look at the whole of that woman’s life, her hidden reserves of rebellion.

  “Do you have brothers or sisters?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, but we weren’t invited. He knows how we feel. Tell me which one she is. I want to see her face.”

  I pointed out Alice in the corner, talking to the preacher.

  The woman shook her head adamantly. “That ain’t her.”

  I said it certainly was.

  She smiled. “I heard how beautiful she was. It was just like him, to be tempted by a beautiful woman. My mother was all that kept him in line. He couldn’t turn away from a pretty face. Which one?”

  I stood in wonder at her words. I had seen pictures of the aunts. They were solid, intelligent women, wonderfully dressed. But they had never been beautiful.

  “I tell you that’s her.”

  She stared at the scene intently as her father made his way across the room, took his new bride’s hand, and kissed her on the lips. The preacher quietly applauded.

  “Can’t be,” she said, then tore the flower off her dress, threw it on the ground, and walked away without another word.

  I stood in the doorway and watched her get into her car and angrily speed off. Alice and her groom emerged, and Sonny, who had been entrusted with the rice and could hardly stand the suspense, began tossing it wildly into the air. None of it touched the married couple—nothing could touch them—as they made their careful way, holding hands, down the stairs and toward the small reception we had planned. The eldest aunt was approaching; I was meant to help with the food. I took a deep breath, glad that no one had witnessed the scene with the daughter. I suppose it had been unforgivable for that old man, in his wild youth, to have considered breaking everything for a plain girl. An ordinary girl, shy and doubtful of her charms. The tragedy of her family, averted, only to reappear. The daughter must have realized, seeing that old woman dressed in blue, that it had not only been the heat of passion that had flared in her father decades ago. The temptation of mere beauty. She would have accepted that as how men were, no threat to her mother’s memory. But here was something senseless, enraging, beyond understanding. At least for a stranger to love.

  “Sonny, that’s enough rice now. Pearlie, are you coming? I need you to bring out the egg salad, I’ve got my hands full with—”

&nbs
p; “Of course, Beatrice, right away.”

  The next day, I made my last atonement.

  It was a small house, one of the older models, without the additions of a turret or a sunken living room, and from the outside there was something a little shabby about it beside its more glamorous neighbors; no one had yet cleaned the sea grime off the stucco or repainted the trim. But, through an open picture window, you could see the inside was different. The walls were freshly painted in inexpensive “milk paint”: blue pastel in the visible parlor. A junkyard spinning wheel sat as homely as an old maid in the corner, webbed with satin thread. The cheaply, ingeniously furnished house of newlyweds.

  No one seemed to be home; I walked up with my envelope, careful that nobody should see me. Below an old-fashioned twist doorbell sat the blank open mouth of a mail slot. In it went; done. I stepped behind a juniper. And I assume it was the faint sound of that envelope hitting the floor that brought her suddenly to the picture window.

  I was just a foot away from Annabel. One hand sat on her hip, holding a feather duster, her hair up in a kerchief; she looked around, but I was well hidden and had the luxury of watching her from the shadows. A second glance told everything. For Annabel Platt was pregnant. The brown fabric of her apron made no excuses for it, and in a moment she had shifted into the classic pose of motherhood: the saintly hand on the belly, the chin receding slightly into the fat of the neck.

  She saw the envelope, then disappeared for a moment, returning with it in her hands. I saw her look around again, but I was in shadow. Then, as Annabel Platt opened it with her long white fingers, her face hardened into astonishment. One by one, she counted out five thousand dollars.

  There is no final forgiveness for the things we do. The awful part is that it goes on forever. What happened to William Platt, and to young Holland Cook. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that it happened because of me. They killed Ethel because she would not “deter” her husband; but my crime was far worse. I was willing to step in and alter a war, and a marriage, and the course of several lives. That is how I see it. It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.

  Annabel’s hand went once again to her belly. A faint smile. Then, as I watched her put those bills back into the envelope and place it on a side table webbed with lace, I knew it was over. I had atoned—or had begun my atonement—for the shipwreck I had made of things. Perhaps imagining the changes she could now make in her life—the classes she could return to, the help for William, for her baby—she touched the spinning wheel and set it in motion, and we both watched, together, as it turned on its wobbling axis.

  That particular day had a noisy, foreign beauty to it. Italian churches and cement temples white and pink beside the ocean, fragrant eucalyptus, spiny century plants and yucca, all lit from the west by a bright clear sun. Outside my house, the sky was a fat lovely blue, streaked with airplanes, with a sun everywhere at once, stirring things into action—people were out as if on a holiday, raucous as a crowd of birds.

  As I came to the open door, I could see Holland in the hallway, staring out of a window, his hands in the pockets of his suit, wearing an expression of peace. Bright and unfocused, looking up beyond the roofs of the houses, his shoulders low and relaxed against the wall, his sleeves rumpled from where his hands sat loosely in his pockets, his watch catching the light and flashing like a heliograph; a mind ajar. Unbolted like the window he looked through, his thoughts blowing gently. It was like seeing a map unfolded on a table, the creases pressed flat so it lay spread out wide; a map to places I had been with him, and if I stood there long enough I might see at last how they all connected.

  What do you want from life? Could you even say? I know I could not, even when Buzz Drumer came and asked me. But part of us must know, and I think that’s what I saw on Holland’s face, that day in the hallway. It was as if he had been turned inside out, and all the secret wants, the longings of his youth, showed everywhere on his skin, like the bright hidden lining of a glove. When for a moment he saw what he wanted.

  The very next moment, Holland noticed me, smiled, and was about to speak when a small voice came from the other room:

  “Lyle’s back!”

  My son and my dog were both upon me, each more desperately happy than the other. Lyle pawed at my dress, and I leaned down to hold him; he licked my face and shivered in a frenzy of love.

  “It’s a miracle!” Holland said, grinning down at us. “We were out on the lawn, and Sonny started shouting. We saw him coming down the street.”

  “I can’t believe it!” I said.

  “Poor Lyle, he was running as fast as he could.”

  Sonny said, “Lyle peed everywhere!” and then the dog leaped away, full of an energy I had not remembered. Sonny seemed to think he was chasing his mute friend, but Lyle in his turn seemed intent on chasing Sonny. They scampered out into the kitchen, froze in tense positions of attack, and then, when Sonny yelled his name, both animals leaped at each other, then fell onto the hall rug between me and my husband, rolling with open mouths and lolling tongues before they fell to a panting stop. Someone once wrote about two old friends like these, wondering how long they could have stared into each other’s eyes. Forever?

  “When?” I asked.

  “About two hours ago,” my husband said, watching them. “Where were you?”

  “Dropping off something. Where had he been?” I asked, and then laughed at myself for thinking anyone could ever know.

  My husband smiled. “I guess he was done with adventures. It looks like he had one or two.”

  Was it just Lyle’s return I’d seen on his face? A lost dog running down the street might be enough for anybody. Fur flying everywhere in the sun, tongue hanging from his mouth, eyes bright in recognition of the family he loved, of the familiar smells sparking in his brain, and of his own great luck. Perhaps it was enough to leave my husband’s face as open as I’d seen it in the hallway. Or was there more? I believe that while I was in North Beach, Buzz had visited the house and taken his old lover on a long walk by the ocean. Perhaps at last he said, Come back to me, as I had done years before on the streetcar tracks. He had spoken the right words. Ones that urge our hearts to action, always the same: Let me take care of you.

  Later, Buzz told me that the date was nearly set, that he would be leaving early one morning and Holland would come with him: “Pearlie, you have to get ready for the thought that soon you’ll be alone.” Not until he said that did I truly picture what we had been planning: as plain as Holland getting in a car. All the anguish and plotting came down to the slam of that door. But what I also understood, for the first time, was that I would be losing Buzz as well. It had all seemed an impossible fantasy, and now I heard Buzz saying: “I’ve told him what I want, how I never could forget him in all those years.” It was that show of passion that always moved my husband, had taken him from Buzz’s life into my own, and now would return him to his habitat. The passion of others. “He’s like a mirror that way,” Buzz told me. It was the truest thing he ever said about Holland Cook.

  On the day of his return, gnawing gingerly at my son’s hand, Lyle lay on the floor, skinny and matted with burrs. Everything golden about him was tarnished, dirty; I assumed it never occurred to either male to give the dog a bath; he looked like a free animal, owned by nobody. Yet he had come home. Perhaps, like most of us, he was too domesticated in the end.

  “You love us, don’t you?” Holland asked, teasingly, rubbing the dog’s belly, and Lyle closed his eyes in pure delight. “We forgive you, you crazy thing.”

  If Lyle could have howled to the skies, I’m sure he would have.

  The last time I saw Buzz alone, it was in an unloved park. Young poplars filtered the light, and nettles crowded the shadows where, like frightened birds beaten from the underbrush, a pair of lovers quickly emerged and hurried off to their parked car. We descended to the clearing, unkempt except around two stone plinths that marked the last duel in California. Hardly anyb
ody visited the spot. I was the one who had found it on the map and suggested it; we had nearly run out of places to meet. We did not, however, need any more places.

  “You have to tell me,” I said.

  He paused and looked at me seriously. “Tomorrow.”

  “You leave tomorrow? That’s too soon, you didn’t say—”

  “It’s tomorrow, Pearlie,” he said. “That’s what you and I talked about, and it’s the best thing. I don’t want to delay; it’s all so delicate with him. The Chinese say to be happy, you must be swift.” I wondered if the Chinese really said that.

  I examined his face carefully. “You’ve told him?”

  He ran his hand through the leaves of a bush. “We had a long talk the other night.”

  “You’ve told him everything.” He nodded. “You’ve told him about me.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  He pulled off a leaf and spread it in his hand. “That I would take care of you and your son.”

  “He knows I’m not abandoning him?”

  “Nobody is abandoning anybody,” he said, looking up. “He knows. That you understand and this is what you want for Sonny.”

  Birds were fussing in the trees. “That’s not quite how I would have said it.”

  “Then I apologize. I did the best I could. I’ve been so anxious.”

  I turned to him and asked, at last: “Doesn’t he love you?”

  Buzz turned the leaf in his hands and stroked the small ridge of veins, smiling. He said, “He does. I know it for sure now.”