The Story of a Marriage

by Andrew Sean Greer

  I thought of what I had seen the other day, in the hallway of our house: a man with his mind ajar. A face at last legible, a truce with something inside himself. “Yes,” I said for certain. “Somehow I needed to know that.”

  He walked along in silence for a moment, taking the leaf apart bit by bit. “Thank you,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “You were kind to me.”

  I leaned against the stone plinth, marked with the name of a duelist. “We are friends, you know,” I said. “Despite everything.”

  “It doesn’t seem likely,” he said. “But I’m glad to hear you say it. Despite everything.”

  The sound of a truck came rumbling by, somewhere beyond the trees, and a boy began shouting in a foreign language. I asked if he had mentioned Annabel and he shook his head.

  “So he doesn’t know everything,” I said.

  “Does he need to?” he asked, and I didn’t reply. We had done enough.

  “So tomorrow.”

  He threw the leaf into the grass as he walked along. “That’s right. I thought maybe Holland could put Sonny to bed.”

  “But I’m the one who does that, it’ll seem—”

  He stopped and looked at me. “That’ll be his time,” he said. “Holland’s time, you know … to say goodbye.”

  A brief dread shot through me as I imagined Buzz and Holland coaxing a sleepy Sonny out of his bed, fists rubbing eyes, into a waiting car … but it was quickly replaced with my husband standing in my son’s dark room, nodding his head and turning away. He was a loving and attentive father. Buzz had promised his presence in my son’s life, letters and visits and, later, trips with Sonny; the duties of a father, which Holland would never truly abandon.

  “And what then?”

  Buzz kept walking, going through the evening. “Maybe you and Holland listen to the radio the way you always do.” That would be my time.

  Buzz continued: “And then at ten he’ll say it’s time for bed—”

  “After Groucho.”

  “After that,” he said, pulling aside an overhanging branch. “He’ll say it’s time for bed and you’ll kiss him good night or whatever you do, just whatever you normally do. You might take a sleeping pill.”

  I asked him why I’d need one of those.

  “It might be easier on you.”

  “Easier on you,” I said. “If I just sleep through it.”

  “I have some if you want to borrow them,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He had planned it out so far as to bring a potion for me.

  “No, I have some.”

  He looked intrigued—that I was still, at the last moment, so full of surprises—then walked on. “Then you and Lyle go to sleep and that’s it,” he said, caressing the old wound on his hand, squinting as the sun came through the leaves and flashed for a moment. “I’ll leave you some money on the table. And then more later.”

  I watched as he crossed the grass before me. “You’ll be there? Tomorrow night?” Somehow this hadn’t occurred to me. “When?” I asked Buzz. “I want to know.”

  He said he would come at around eleven o’clock, by the back door. “We’ll load his bags in the car and some other things. I hope you don’t mind, we may take the radio and some of his favorite books.”

  It felt, all of a sudden, like the strangest thing that could ever happen to me. I said, “You’re telling me I’ll wake up and find things missing and be all alone with my son.”

  He saw my expression. “Pearlie … we’ve talked about all this—”

  “I just hadn’t realized—”

  His face convulsed in sympathy and confusion. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  I laughed. Because he’d never asked either of us what we wanted. Not me or my husband, not really. He would have said he’d tried to, that he’d shown us vistas and options, the variety of possibilities, and we had stood mute before them. So he said what he wanted and asked if we’d go along. I don’t blame him. You cannot sit around and wait for other people to figure themselves out. You would wait forever. Half of life is knowing what you want.

  He said, “I don’t understand …”

  What I wanted, now that we had come to it, was so far from what he had shown me. More than the freedom of solitude, of five hundred acres with a fence all around. I wanted to have been born in a different time, in a different part of the world, so I could one day know the sensation that Buzz took for granted—that of naming your desire and feeling the right to possess it.

  “Buzz Drumer,” I said. “What’s going to become of you?”

  I remember his smile as I approached. I am not likely to forget that face, though I last saw it so long ago. I still see it, like a rubbing made from a church engraving, which believers can admire years after the church has burned down. He watched me quietly the entire time I came to him across the grass.

  I put the bird of my gloved hand over his ruined one.

  Buzz looked into my eyes and then he kissed me. It seemed like a very natural thing to do: kissing a boy before he leaves for war. A flicker of grief and desire. I never thought I’d miss him, on our last day. I was too busy preparing for a new life, a new world for my son. But I would miss the sound of that voice, the broken nose, the hat left on the seawall. Fainter and fainter as the years went on, until just those separate parts of him remained. A faded fresco in my mind. It’s the loss we don’t speak of, losing a friend forever. We call it life; we call it time passing. But it is a kind of heartbreak, like any other.

  “What’s going to become of you, Pearlie Cook?”

  “Give us time,” I said.

  Buzz looked at his watch and said the words “ten o’clock.” He gave a quick wave of his hand and walked away from me down the path. I watched his hat move through the leaves until it disappeared in the greenness of the grove. I waited for ten minutes or so before I started home. Tomorrow. Ten o’clock and I would take the pill. Eleven and he would come as I slept. By midnight, they would be gone.

  I’m sure that day was no different from any other for Sonny. I awoke him whispering “Good morning, sweet boy” and Lyle came in to bother him until he stood up, grumbling; he drank his milk and ate his toast, cut with a measuring cup into a moon. We visited the park, which was mercifully free of other children. Back home, he took his nap with his odd hand puppets. He slept for twenty minutes while I stared at the clock, and after who knows what dreams, Sonny woke grumpier than before, so I spent a difficult hour coaxing him onto the sofa with a picture book. For the fortieth time I read aloud about a bunny that went inside a hill, and as Sonny gradually fell under its hypnosis, my mind began to wander. Two hours, now. Holland would be home in two hours, and then dinner, and then bedtime, and then the radio.

  Suddenly, of all things, we watched through the picture window as a bird flew straight into the glass with a bang.

  You’d never guess what grown-up Sonny remembers from his childhood. Not the aunts bustling around our house; not his best friend Lyle, who lived just two more years. Not Buzz Drumer. “I remember your stockings had gold diamonds on them with a P,” he tells me when he comes to visit. “And you losing a ring behind the dresser. And I remember a bird flying into the window and how it scared me.”

  Who can fathom a boy’s life?

  A noise from the street—whirr, up and around went Lyle like a top! Sonny’s father was home. His hat came off, a warm smile came on, and boy and dog raced to greet him. Sonny told him all about the bird at the window and his father listened patiently and accepted the whiskey I handed him. Noodles for dinner, eating while gabbing away at his father, Lyle waiting below for some dropped macaroni. Then a bath, more solemn than usual, asking, “Mommy, will I go down the drain?” He tried the white rubber duck; it did not fit. Then the cold shiver before the towel, and the naked race through the house—caught at last by his father. “Why don’t you tuck him in tonight?” “Well … sure if you like.”

  His father tucked him into warm sheets, and rea
d him the bunny story and the duck one again, and then, as Sonny struggled against sleep at this miracle of his father’s presence, Holland began to speak in a low, serious voice.

  “He made me read two stories,” Holland said as he came back in, settling himself into the big armchair.

  “Well he knew he could get away with it,” I said from the couch.

  “What’s on the docket tonight?” he asked, as he always did.

  “News, then Groucho, then bed I think.”

  “After a drink, I hope.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  It was eight o’clock. Holland touched the knob of the radio beside him and it came to life: Morgan Beatty News. For the first few moments, the fabric thrummed visibly against its wooden cage, as if Mr. Beatty sat inside, breathing against the burlap, and after it settled down I smothered an impulse to say, “You should fix that.” Holland lit a cigarette and listened peacefully. Mr. Beatty went on about the hundredth suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge, Mrs. Dian E. Black, revealed now to be a phony. As I saw it, if I’d asked Holland to “fix that,” he would have turned his solemn face to me and said there were three hours remaining of his life in this house. In which of them should he fix the radio? Instead, he sat in the sunset glow of the lamp, smoking his cigarette, listening to the fake note that Mrs. Black had left—“Sorry, but I had to go”—and staring at the masking-tape pot on the shelf. The time for all that was over. He picked a piece of tobacco from his lip.

  “Another?” I asked, and he smiled.

  “Oh, make it a double.” The old chuckle. “One for you, too.” I brought up another glass.

  “There you go,” I said as I set his drink down and took a cigarette. It was nearly nine.

  He automatically held a flame up to my face. Goodbye, I thought as the cigarette lit with a hiss. He flicked the lighter closed and smiled.

  “I saw Mrs. Platt the other day,” I said. “William’s mother.”

  He seemed a bit startled by this. “Did you?”

  “Annabel’s opening a shop on Maiden Lane.”

  “Downtown,” he mused, sipping from his drink. “People can afford the wildest things.”

  “Her father must be helping her out. William’s taking over when the baby comes.”

  He laughed, and I asked what was so funny. “Oh nothing,” he said. “Men helping women out with their businesses.”

  “It’s a new world,” I said.

  “It sure is.”

  At nine thirty, Groucho came on the radio. My husband sat still, staring, like the portrait of a war hero. Then, for a second, the radio cut out and I could hear the clatter of the ice in his drink. I looked and his hand was shaking. I caught his careful glance, and in those eyes: a look of dazzling pain.

  The awful strain he must have been under, that night. I’m sure in his delicate, transposed heart—a heart that in its way existed—he felt at last the weight of what he had done. For in a way we had not done it; he had done it. By being what everyone wanted him to be—being the husband, the flirt, the beautiful object, and the lover—by pleasing us all in giving us his gracious smile, he had tortured each of us when it did not turn our way. Beauty is forgiven everything except its absence from our lives, and the effort to return all loves at once must have broken him. As I saw it, he was choosing one love—the loudest love, the purest—and in choosing Buzz, he felt the others collapse around him. Mine, and Annabel’s, and everyone’s he met on the street. He could not have held them up forever. It was a childish notion to think he ever could, childishly cruel. And that was what I saw in his eyes; the look of a man forced, at last, to leave the possibilities of youth behind. To figure out the heart’s desire. I saw, from the look of pain there, how truly sorry he was.

  What is it like for men? Even now I can’t tell you. To have to hold up the world and never show the strain. To pretend at every moment: pretend to be strong, and wise, and good, and faithful. But nobody is strong or wise or good or faithful, not really. It turns out everyone is faking it as best they can.

  Groucho had ended, the applause drowned by a wave of static. Holland reached over to click off the radio.

  “I guess it’s time for bed,” he whispered.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’m beat. I really am,” he said, then turned to me: “Pearlie …?”

  “What’s that?”

  He held my gaze for a long time without saying anything—it was not in him to say those words—but I knew, from his expression, what he meant. It was what we had never discussed, what he probably had wanted to say the night of the air raid and had lost his chance; here was the last he would ever have: “Tell me now if this is what you want.”

  I was still in my twenties. And here’s what I thought would be the worst: that no one else would ever know me young. I would always be this age or older, from now on, to any man I met. No one would ever sit back and remember how young and frail I was at his bedside, at eighteen, reading to him in that dark room with the piano playing downstairs, and again at twenty-one, how I held the flap of my coat against the wind and held my tongue when a handsome man called me by the wrong name. What I would miss—and it occurred to me only then, with his brown eyes on me—was the unchangeable, the irreplaceable. I would never meet another man who’d met my mother, who knew her untamable hair, her sharp Kentucky accent, cracked with fury. She was dead now, and no man could ever know her again. That would be missing. I’d never know anyone, anywhere, who’d watched me weeping with rage and lack of sleep in those first months after Sonny was born, or seen his first steps, or listened to him tell his nonsense stories. He was a boy now. No one could ever again know him as a baby. That would be missing, too. I wouldn’t just be alone in the present; I would be alone in my past as well, in my memories. Because they were part of him, of Holland, of my husband. And in an hour that part of me would be cut off like a tail. From that night on, I would be like a traveler from a distant country that no one had ever been to, nor ever heard of, an immigrant from that vanished land: my youth.

  No, Holland, not what I wanted. Too late, now, to ask, if that was now what you were doing. I could not tell. What I wanted was you, but not you as I had always known you. Not the boy in the room, anymore; not the soldier on the beach, misremembering my name. It was not enough to live on. Not once the flood had come, to wipe it all away; it was not enough to replace things just as they were. You as you were. I had lived like a woman whose lonely house, it was rumored, had a treasure buried in its walls. It was enough to dream of it, but once those walls had been torn down, the rooms strewn with plaster, I could not live there. Not that I could regret the chance I took—what else is life for?—but I would not be a dreamer, a keeper, a hiding place. The world was about to change, and I could feel it. And I was still young. I would change with it.

  I gave no answer. Instead, I cleaned up the glasses, put away the bourbon. I walked to my bedroom and then, without meaning to, I turned and said, “Goodbye.”

  He stared as if he might have heard me wrong. I will never know what he thought I said, there in the doorway; I will never know because he is dead now, and I had only meant to say “Good night,” but at that moment it seemed possible our lives had gone unsaid for a minute too long. It seemed possible we were going to say all the things we had left unspoken. That he would stand there and say “Tonight I’m going to run away for love” and I would fold my arms over my breasts and say “Tomorrow I’m going to try it alone” and we would stare at each other, chalked by the hall light, and it seemed possible we would strike each other, wail and beat each other for what we had done, what we had taken without asking—the silent breakfasts and grinning dinners, the countless hours of each other’s lives—nothing more or less than a marriage.

  But Holland did not speak. He reached for a pack of matches from his breast pocket, and then he looked at me with a curious expression. His eyes went large and his mouth collapsed at the edges, like something left in the rain, and despite everything
I had the sudden urge to rush over and comfort him.

  Had he heard me say it? I will never know. He just replied, softly, “Good night,” then smiled at me and went into his room. The door clicked shut; I heard the mechanism of the lock. I went into my own room, scented with spilled perfume, and watched as Lyle lay down on his sheepskin. Every light in the house went out. And then all was quiet.

  It was ten fifteen when I took the doctor’s pill; it felled me like an ax.

  When I was a girl, the Green River flooded our town. A line on the courthouse, engraved with the year 1935, marks where water rose above the heads of full-grown men. I remember how the tops of the apple trees broke the water all around us in green islands, their branches heavy with floating fruit. I remember how frightened my parents were. We waited as the water rushed by in the darkness. And I was young. I had no idea that it would ever end. I thought that maybe this was how we would live now.

  That was the form my dream took, under the influence of that pill. I was back in that old house, with my parents, and the water rising up and lapping against the porch; the green apples drifting by like planets. But in my dream we stood there for some reason unsure of what to do. “Secure the windows!” I kept saying, and they looked at me very afraid, unmoving: old people. And the water kept rising higher, dark and viscous around our ankles. “What do we do?” they kept asking. “What do we do?” I knew it, someone told me once. How do you survive a flood? Do you leap in the water, on anything that will float? Each on his own box or table? Or do you huddle together in the attic? I could not remember. One was right, and one was terribly wrong. It was like a test, in school, on which everything hinges. And still the water was rising. “What do we do?” my mother begged. Then I remembered. I told her, and in that dream the moment I told her—her old face broadening in a rare smile—for some reason I heard myself saying, clear as anything, as if it were not even a dream: “How could I have gotten it so wrong?”