An American Marriage: A Novel

by Tayari Jones

  Roy McHenry Hamilton + Olive Ann Ingelman

  Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr.

  Olive never wrote Celestial’s name beside mine, but there was a lot of room on the page, space to list all the Hamiltons of the future, connected with diagonal lines and dashes.

  Davina Hardrick was different. At least a dozen black Hardricks lived in town, even a few Hardriks, without the c, who changed their names when the family split like a feuding congregation. I envied her these robust roots, thick enough to buckle the sidewalk. She said she was living in Miss Annie Mae’s house, and I tried to remember who Miss Annie Mae was to her, what Bible lines connected them. I remembered Davina’s grandfather, Mr. Picard, or maybe he was her uncle? There had been something extended about her family, that much I did remember. Once I had known who all was kin to anybody else.

  I had run into Davina at Walmart when I had gone to buy flowers for Olive. Davina, dressed in a blue uniform, unlocked the floral refrigerator and helped me select a bouquet that I couldn’t bring myself to deliver. Wrapping my purchase in clean white paper, she asked me if I remembered her from high school, even though she was a couple of years ahead of me. I told her that I did. She asked me if I would like to have a home-cooked meal. I told her I would. A few hours later I stood in front of the clapboard house outfitted for Christmas with multicolored lights and metallic ribbon.

  I climbed up the three concrete steps and stood on the sloping porch. The little house must have been seventy, maybe eighty years old, built probably by Miss Annie Mae’s husband. This neighborhood was known as the Hardwood, where the colored mill workers lived, back when there was a mill, back when colored was a word of respect. I rapped on the silver-wreathed door, almost wishing I wore a hat so I could take it off and hold it in my hands.

  “Hey,” she said through the screen door, looking inviting in a holiday apron that set off her skin tone, a lush brown with red underneath like a nice pair of loafers. She tilted her head to the side. “You look nice.”

  “You, too.” Kitchen aromas spiced the air all the way out here, and I wanted more than anything in this world to cross her threshold.

  “You’re early,” she said with a little smile, not like she was annoyed, but letting me know. “Give me a minute to fix my hair.” Then she shut the door. I sat down on the front stairs and waited. Five years away and you get good at that sort of thing. I sat there, but I didn’t turn my face on the diagonal to the orange-brick funeral home where they had taken care of my mother. Instead, I sat with my eyes on my own fingers, so much like Walter’s, knotty with yellowish calluses. I went in with bankers’ hands and came out looking like a mill worker. But at least I was out. Something you learn in there: keep your mind on what’s important.

  Edwards Street was mostly quiet. A cluster of little boys used bacon and string to catch crawfish in the ditch that ran along the sides of the road. In the distance, I could see the reflection of the neon lights in the liquor store window and feel the faint vibration of the subwoofers that shook the air. This was my hometown. I skinned my knees on these streets; I learned to be a man on these same corners, but I didn’t feel like I was home.

  When Davina came to the door the second time, she wasn’t wearing the apron, and I missed it, though the burgundy dress she changed into highlighted everything captivating about a woman’s body. In high school, she had a perfect figure—small and thick at the same time, what we used to call a “brick house.” Big Roy warned me those girls that are fine at fifteen get fat by thirty, so you shouldn’t marry them. Thinking of Davina, that advice seemed childish and cruel. Yes, she had a lot going on in the bust and the hip, but she looked delicious.

  “You still married?” she asked through the screen door.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She smiled, cocking her head, showing a tuft of tinsel tucked behind her ear like a gardenia. “Come on in,” she said. “Dinner will be ready in a minute. You want something to drink?”

  “What you think?” I watched her splendid curves as she walked the few steps to the kitchen.

  The old me, and I don’t mean the me before I went to prison, I mean the old me from way before I starting going out with Celestial, the me I was in my early twenties and running through women like water—that me would have known what to say. Back then, I knew how to focus. Keep my mind on my money and my money on my mind. I used to say that to myself under my breath, no matter what it was that I was zooming in on. One thing at a time. That’s how you win. But here I was, in front of one woman, one fine woman, and I was sitting here thinking about a wife I hadn’t talked to in two years.

  I’m not saying that I was anybody’s angel during my marriage. As they say, mistakes were made and feelings were bruised, like that one time when Celestial happened upon a receipt for two pieces of lingerie, not just for the one I gave her for her birthday. She wasn’t livid, but it was going that way. I said to her, “Celestial, I don’t love anybody but you.” It didn’t necessarily explain the little piece of paper in her hand, but it was God’s truth, and I suspect that she understood that.

  Sitting in Davina’s living room drinking up her liquor, I held Celestial’s face in my mind, her scent in my nose, her song in my ear. Even still, I looked at Davina and my mouth went wet. “When did Miss Annie Mae pass?” I asked her. “She was a nice lady. I remember when she sold sour pickles for a dime. When we were little. You remember that?”

  “She’s been gone four years now. I was surprised that she left everything to me, but we were always close, and her son lives in Houston now. His name was Wofford. Remember him?”

  I did remember him as the local boy made good who came to speak to us when we were in high school, telling us to not to drop out, get anybody pregnant, or smoke crack. “Yeah, I recall.”

  Davina smirked. “With Miss Annie Mae gone, I don’t expect we will ever see him again in this town.” She shook her head. “My daddy was the same way. Halfway to Dallas before I even turned five years old.”

  I said, “You don’t know for sure why he went.”

  She smiled again, a real smile like she appreciated me trying to look on the bright side. “All I know is that he’s gone. Same trifling story everybody tells.”

  “Don’t call him trifling,” I said. “Men have reasons.”

  She shushed me. “You didn’t come here to talk about my daddy, did you?” And there was a question in her question. Women have that way of asking you more than what they want to know.

  “Food smells good,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Louisiana women. I swear y’all come out of the womb gripping a skillet.”

  I hoped that I would get to the table and see a bowl of crowder peas, pulled from the vines that grew along the fence that separated Davina’s property from the neighbors’. When I was coming up, Mr. Fontenot, the language teacher, had lived there. I ended up enrolled in French class by accident, the only black kid in the room. Me and Mr. Fontenot were close, both being onlies.

  He told me about the French Club, how they met after school and practiced the language in preparation for a ten-day trip to Paris. I asked Mr. Fontenot if there were black people in Paris, and he said, “Both local and imported.” He gave me a novel by James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, that had nothing to do with France, but he assured me that the author was there as we spoke. I turned the book over and studied the sad but intelligent face. James Baldwin was plenty black. “Learn the language,” Mr. Fontenot said, “and I will help sponsor your journey.” But three things happened: I would have been the only black kid going on the trip and nobody thought much of that idea. “Something goes wrong over there and it will be your word against theirs,” Big Roy said. Another thing was the money. Seven hundred fifty dollars would have been my share even with Mr. Fontenot sponsoring me. That’s why no black kids were going. And the last thing was Mr. Fontenot himself.

  When he hipped me to Go Tell It on the Mountain, he didn’t say one word about Jimmy being a homosexual. “J
immy” is how Mr. Fontenot always talked about him, like they went way back. According to Mr. Fontenot, Jimmy started saving his papers for posterity when he was only eleven years old because he knew he was going to be important and that he was going to need “documentation of his trajectory.” He had then given me a little black notebook. “You should keep a journal for future generations,” he said. “When you get out of this town, people are going to want to know how you did it.” It was this journal that ended all my plans, more than the money. Big Roy didn’t like the look of the little book and neither did my mother. Eloe is a small town, claustrophobic and mean sometimes. Didn’t take more than a couple of phone calls for my parents to find out that Mr. Fontenot was “funny like that,” and there was no way they were sending me to Paris under his sponsorship.

  “What happened to Mr. Fontenot?”

  “He passed away in the early nineties,” Davina said.

  “From what?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Come on, you need to eat.”

  I got up and headed to the oval-shaped table, like the one I grew up eating on. Six people could fit easy. I pulled back the chair and was about to sit down when she asked me if I would like to wash my hands. Shamefaced, I asked her where the bathroom was. Lathering up with soap that smelled like girls, I felt a little prickle of anger along the underside of my jaw, but I splashed water on my chin until it settled. Tilting my head under the faucet, I filled my mouth with the soft water and swallowed it down. It had been a long time since I could look into a real glass mirror, but what I saw I could have done without. My forehead was creased like the fan Olive kept in her purse. But at least I was clean; I was shaved. As soon as I got my money right, I would see a dentist and get fitted for a new bridge. Using a fluffy brown towel dangling from a hook, I dried my face and returned to the table, which Davina piled with a righteous feast.

  It was like something out of the Bible. Pork chops swimming in gravy, macaroni and cheese—brown on the top and shiny with butter. Mashed potatoes heaped in a striped blue bowl and next to that a stack of the white rolls Olive used to make. When you tugged them, they came apart in buttery sections. There, snug in a shiny silver bowl, were a few of the crowder peas I had been craving.

  “You want to say the blessing?” she said, reaching out for my hand.

  I closed my eyes and bowed my head, but I didn’t get past “Dear Lord” when my throat started twitching. It took me two breaths to give up on talking. I clamped my eyes shut and swallowed hard against whatever it was that was trying to rise up and get out of me.

  “Dear Lord,” Davina picked up. “Thank you for this food that will nourish our bodies. We thank you for this fellowship. In the name of your son, Jesus Christ, Amen.” She squeezed my hand at the Amen, like the period at the end of the sentence, but I kept squeezing, even when she tried to pull away. I managed to say, “Bless the hands that prepared it,” before I let her go.

  As Davina spooned mounds of everything onto my plate, I imagined myself—a man just out of the joint, about to do some serious damage to some pork chops. I felt a little bit like a punch line, more self-conscious than I had ever been in corporate America, right here in my own hometown. Davina set the food down in front of me, and at the last moment I remembered my manners and didn’t touch my fork until she picked up hers.

  “Bon appétit,” she said with a little smile.

  I said it back and remembered Celestial, who said just that before she ate anything, even her morning cereal.

  I was working my way through a second helping of food and a third round of sweet lemonade when Davina said in a tone that was too breezy for a question she asked twice already, “You still married?”

  I slowly finished chewing, swallowed, and washed it all down with lemonade. “How you want me to answer that? This is what I got: I was married when I went in, and she didn’t divorce me.”

  “You don’t have to talk in circles like a lawyer.” She seemed hurt, like I came here and ate her dinner under false pretenses.

  I took a breath and gave her as much truth as I had on me. “I haven’t seen her in two years. Not since my mama passed.”

  “You talk to her on the phone?”

  “Not lately,” I said. “What about you? You with somebody?”

  She looked around the room. “You see anybody up in here?”

  We let the subject drop, like we were both satisfied that we had done our due diligence.

  After we ate, I jumped up to help clear the table. I scraped the plates and stacked them in the sink. Davina gave a little smile, like the way you might smile at a baby that tried to do something grown, like play the piano. “Don’t worry about the kitchen. You’re company.”

  I swear to God, I didn’t come over here just to have sex with Davina. I swear to God that it wasn’t what I came over here planning for. Did I come here hoping for it? I can’t lie and say I wasn’t starving for a woman, like Walter warned me not to be. But I was also starving in general. I was starving for my mama’s cooking, been starving for it since the day I left for college. Davina Hardrick had invited me to dinner. If all we had done was eat, I would have left with more than I arrived with.

  “You want coffee?” she asked me.

  I shook my head no.

  “Another drink?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and she poured me another one, paler this time.

  “Don’t want you to get a DUI,” she said, and I was disappointed that she was already thinking about sending me home.

  “Can I ask you something,” she said. “About when you were gone?”

  “You know I didn’t do it.”

  “I know,” she said. “Nobody around here thought you did it. It was just the wrong race and the wrong time. Police are shady as hell. That’s why everybody is locked up.”

  As a salute, I tipped my drink and finished in one hot gulp. I held out my glass to Davina.

  “One question.” As she fell serious, I braced myself for another question about Celestial.

  “Yes?”

  “When you were gone, did you know someone named Antoine Guillory? Full name Antoine Fredrick Guillory?”

  “Why,” I said. “That’s your man?”

  She shook her head. “My son.”

  “No,” I said, with condolence in my voice. If he was her son, he couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen at the most. “I never met him.”

  “They call him Hopper? Or Grasshopper?”

  The nickname I did know. Hopper wasn’t the youngest person there but still too young for adult prison, too frail and too pretty. I remembered his rouged lips and hair flattened with homemade lye.

  “I don’t know him,” I said again.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “No Hopper.” I held my glass out to her again. “Please, ma’am?”

  She shook her head. “I’m cutting you off. It’s for your own good.”

  “Girl, I ain’t worried about no DUI. I walked over here. This town ain’t no bigger than a minute.”

  “Roy,” she said. “A lot of things have changed. You’re not trying to be walking around at night. I don’t know what’s worse, police or everyday people. Hopper got caught up on a weapons charge. He was only trying to protect himself. Sixteen years old and they charged him as an adult.”

  “Trust me. I am not afraid. You know where I been the last five years?” I said, this time with a laugh that scraped my throat. “You think I’m scared of some country motherfucker jumping out from behind the bushes talking about boogety-boogety?”

  “If it’s a country motherfucker with a gun, yes.” Then she slapped my arm and gave me a real smile, one with dimples. “Boogety-boogety. You so crazy. I’ll get you one more. But I won’t make it strong.”

  “Fix yourself another one, too. I can’t stand drinking by myself.”

  She came back with the drinks poured into two little glasses like the ones my mama used for orange juice. “Ran out of i
ce,” she said. I held my glass up and we toasted without saying what to and then threw it back like a shot. It felt good, reminded me of my first job; at the company holiday party, the white folks poured top-shelf liquor and we sucked it down like water, like there was no end to money.

  Davina got up and switched on some music, Frankie Beverly talking about “happy feelings.” She popped her fingers a couple of times as she made her way back. This time she folded herself back onto the cushion like she was showing off all her hinges. “Hey,” she said with a little play at the edge of her words.

  I can’t say whiskey made her beautiful. Davina wasn’t a PYT any more than I was a young executive. But I used to be, and she used to be; something of it was left in us both, I think. Davina was everything I ever missed, transformed into warm brown flesh.

  “You okay?”

  I shook my head no because that was all I could do.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I shook my head again.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You just got home. It’s always tiring when you get back.” She said it like I had been released from the army or the hospital.

  In a motion like a librarian, Davina touched her hand to her lips, and I leaned in behind it. Celestial—I couldn’t help thinking of her—isn’t a small woman; she is big-boned and stacked, but not soft like Davina, who felt like the robes at a four-star hotel. I tried holding myself back because I didn’t want to reach for her like a caveman, and I can say that every moment I spent fully clothed was a miracle. I kissed her deep when I let myself go, driving my tongue in her mouth, finding the spicy flavor of whiskey and liking it. She let her fingers roam around my body, as dainty as a firefly but with healing in her hands like a storefront preacher. She worked her way under my shirt and the feel of her very cool palms on my hot back was electric.