An American Marriage: A Novel

by Tayari Jones

  In the bedroom, we didn’t undress each other. We took off our clothes in our own separate patches of darkness. Davina hung her dress in the closet with a tinkle of hangers, and then she slid herself in bed beside me, smelling of whiskey but also like cocoa butter. She turned on her side and let her hair tumble into my face. I pulled back from its plastic texture because I didn’t want to touch anything that wasn’t real. I yearned to rub against something breathing. I craved something alive. She raised her thigh up to rest on my hip. “You okay?” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m sorry about your son.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  For normal people, talking about the lost would put out the fire, but for me it was like kerosene, gasoline, and a blast of pure oxygen. I kissed her again, shifting to position myself over her. Looking down at her outline in the dark, I felt myself wanting to explain again. But I could never tell her that I didn’t want to fuck her like a man who just got out of jail. I wanted to do it like a man who was home visiting his family. I wanted to do it like a local boy made good. I wanted to fuck like I had money still, like I had a nice office, Italian shoes, and a steel watch. How can you explain to a woman that you want to fuck her like a human being?

  I wouldn’t call myself scared, but I hovered there, supporting my weight on my forearms, honestly unsure as to what to do next. I wanted to please her—not make her holler my name or anything ignorant like that. I wanted to make a good impression. She said she didn’t believe that I raped that woman in the Piney Woods Inn, but isn’t there always a little seed? The second side that every story is supposed to have?

  “Baby,” Davina said, reaching up and crossing her arms over my back, pressing us together. Relying on muscle memory, I used my knee to spread her legs, but she escaped me, lying on her side, facing me. She pushed my chest with her index finger and I lay on my back. “Not yet,” she said, using the flat of her hand to nudge me down when I tried to sit up and reach for her.

  Davina took care of me. That’s the only way that I can tell it. Two days after I got out of prison, she laid me out on her bed and took care of me. With hand and mouth, she touched my entire body, leaving no small parcel of skin unloved. She moved over, and under, and maybe even through me. Whichever part of me she wasn’t loving was on fire, hoping it would catch her attention next. You don’t know what you need until somebody gives it to you exactly the way you need it gave.

  When she was twined around me in such a way that her foot was near my face, I dipped my head to kiss the arch. How someone that grew up here in Eloe could have such baby feet, I didn’t know. Celestial had smooth feet, too. The thought of my wife stirred something in me and I sprang up, like I was waking up from a nightmare. Davina paused, and whatever light was in the room reflected from her eyes. “You all right?”

  “Naw,” I said.

  “Come here,” she said, lying on her back and holding out her arms. Then she called me “baby” in the way that some women do, making it their own one-word language, meaning whatever she needed it to mean. This time it was an invitation. It was as though she said “please.” She wrapped her legs around my waist and I held on to her because my life depended on it. “Baby,” she said again.

  “You got a rubber?”

  “I think so,” she said. “In the medicine cabinet.”

  “In the bathroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do I have to?”

  Davina was quiet in the dark. I rose up on my elbows and tried to see her, but the moonlight didn’t fall on her face. “You want me to, I’ll get up and get it,” I promised, but I was kissing her again, biting softly on her sweet bottom lip. “Do we need it?” I was begging her, whether she knew it or not. I ached to do this, touch another person, no plastic in between. It was like it felt to touch her real hair, growing crinkly at the base of her scalp. It was the difference between talking on the phone and speaking breath to breath. “Please,” I heard myself say. “I’ll pull out. I promise. Please.” We were still touching. She hadn’t shoved me off of her or even drawn her knees together. “Baby,” I said, and it was me speaking the secret language this time.

  “It’s okay,” she said at last. “It’s okay, baby. I’m safe.”

  Celestial

  Gloria taught me to pray when I was three years old. She knelt beside me, showed me how to press my palms together under my chin like a cherub. Church was her thing, not my father’s. There is a certain type of Christian woman who can’t resist a godless man, keeping his soul safe on her knees. Sometimes I wish I were like her, born to save a man; then I could follow my mother’s bread crumb trail.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Gloria almost sang the words, and I repeated, a little baby echo, eyes screwed tight. Before “Amen,” I opened my eyes and asked her to explain “I pray the Lord my soul to take.” She said that it was up to God to see if you got to wake up the next morning, to decide if you’re afforded another day. If you died in the night, you asked to go with Him back up to heaven. Or at least this is how I took it. Stricken, I lay in my canopy bed, afraid to even blink my eyes for fear of falling into an eternal sleep.

  Every night, she put me to bed this way, the two of us chanting. As she knelt beside me, I prayed the way she expected, but when Gloria had gone, I recanted, negotiating to keep my soul for myself.

  Somewhere it is written that your sins fall on your parents, mostly on your mother, until you’re twelve years old. After that, your trespasses are on your own scorecard. Once I had a choice in the matter, I seldom accompanied my mother to services, preferring the easy company of my father. But always, I say my prayers.

  When I lived alone, I spoke the prayers aloud, but now that Andre shares my bedroom, I move my lips around the words, but I don’t give them air. I pray for Roy. I ask for his safety. I ask for his forgiveness, although in the clean light of morning, I know I have done nothing wrong. I also pray for Andre, and I ask him to forgive me for asking for forgiveness. I pray for my father, and I pray that I’ll figure out how to be his daughter again.

  My mother taught me that we have no secrets from God. He knows our feelings because He made them. When you confess your sins, He will bless you for your courage. He will bless you for your humility. He blesses you when you’re on your knees.

  God must know that in the bottom of my jewelry case, snapped into a felt box, is Roy’s missing tooth. A root woman would know what to do with it; even I, not talented in the unseen, can feel its blazing comet energy in the palm of my hand. But I have no way to harness this power or command it to my will.

  Roy

  I spent about thirty-six hours straight with Davina Hardrick in what used to be Miss Annie Mae’s house. Life is full of wonders. Who would have predicted that a girl I knew only a little bit in high school would capture me so completely that I hardly remembered my way home? The only reason I left her bed at all was that she put me out so she could go to work. Between her good cooking and her good loving, I could have stayed there forever. When I finally showed up in the rumpled clothes I had been wearing (or not wearing) for the last day and a half, Big Roy was waiting on the front porch. The two Huey Newton chairs stood unoccupied while he sat on the concrete floor with his legs hanging over the side, his feet planted in the flower beds. His left hand was curled around my mama’s yellow coffee cup and the other was gripping a honey bun he ate straight from the wrapper. “You alive?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, bounding up the stairs. “Alive and well.”

  Big Roy pulled his eyebrows up a couple of inches. “What’s her name?”

  “I am sworn to secrecy to protect the innocent.”

  “Long as she’s not married. I would hate to see you go through all you been through just to get shot by some hard-leg over a woman.”

  “You’re right. My story is tragic enough as it is.”

  “More coffee is on the stove,” he said, jerk
ing his head in the direction of the front door.

  I fixed myself a cup, then returned to the porch and sat down next to my father. I looked up and down the road thinking about myself, a habit I picked up when I was gone. You sit there thinking about where you want to be, who you want to be with. What you wish you could eat. I used to sit there for as long as twenty minutes or so thinking about Kalamata olives and what I would eat them on. Now I was thinking about Davina and wondering if I could go back over there tonight.

  Was I cheating on Celestial, or was I cheating on my memories of her? I suppose a man in my position should receive some sort of special consideration. I won’t say that Davina Hardrick saved my life with her plush thighs and her “baby” language, but she salvaged my something, if not my life, maybe my spirit.

  Big Roy spoke over the rim of the yellow coffee cup. “You need to learn how to use the telephone, son. You can’t just disappear. Not after everything that has happened.”

  I felt my shoulders round as I tucked my head almost to my chest. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t think about it.”

  “You got to remember how to consider about other people.”

  “I know.” I slurped some more coffee, and he handed me the half-eaten honey bun. I tore it in two pieces and stuffed the sweet bread in my mouth. “Trying to get used to being myself.”

  Big Roy said, “You need to get in touch with your wife today. Let her know.”

  “Let her know what?”

  “Not about whoever got you over here grinning like Jiminy Cricket. But you got to let her know you’re back home. Trust me on this, son. Whoever you been with, she may seem special right now, but she’s not your wife.”

  I threw my hands up. “I know. I know.” I hadn’t had a little scrap of happiness in five entire years and he wasn’t even going to let me have an hour of basking in the sun.

  “But wait until you wash up,” he said.

  He was right. I needed to make some plans to get back to Atlanta, to greet Celestial skin-to-skin and ask her whether we were still married. A part of me said, if you have to ask, the answer is no. Maybe I was setting myself up. Two years of no visits is a message; why did I need to hear it from her own lips? Whatever she had to say for herself would draw blood, and it wouldn’t be a clean cut. The truth would hurt jagged, like a dog bite.

  But there was still the simple and undisputed fact that she didn’t divorce me. If she didn’t get out of the marriage officially, it was only because she didn’t want to. That carried some weight in my book. Besides, even a dog bite can heal.

  When the phone started ringing, I hadn’t gotten dressed any further than my shorts. The outdated telephone rang with a loud metallic jangle. “Tell Wickliffe I’m waiting on the porch,” Big Roy shouted from outside.

  Pussyfooting to the kitchen, half-naked and barefoot, I picked up the phone and said, “He’s waiting on the porch.”

  The man on the other end said, “Excuse me?”

  I said, “Sorry. Hello? Hamilton residence.”

  The man on the other end said, “Roy, is that you?”

  “Little Roy. You want Big Roy?”

  “It’s Andre. What are you doing answering the phone? I thought you weren’t getting out until Wednesday.”

  The last time I saw Dre, he wore the gray suit he would wear to Olive’s wake. I could feel the crowd in the visitors’ room watching him as we talked, trying to figure out the deal with us. I knew how I looked: like everyone else in there, worn jumpsuit, black skin. Everything else about me was details. In his dress clothes, Dre didn’t look like a lawyer; he presented more like a musician who moved to Europe because “cats in the States don’t get jazz.”

  I had been glad to see him. Dre was my boy. He introduced me to Celestial the first time, even though it didn’t take until much later. When we got married, he stood up with me, signed his name. Now here he was on the last Sunday Olive would be aboveground.

  “Will you carry her for me?” I asked.

  Dre breathed deep and nodded.

  It’s painful to even recollect it, but when he agreed, I felt thankful and furious all at once. “I appreciate you,” I said.

  He whisked my words away with his piano-player fingers. “I’m sorry about all of this. You know, Banks is still working. . . .”

  Now it was my turn to wave him quiet. “Fuck Banks. Even if he got me out tomorrow, it would be too late. My mama is already dead.”

  Hearing his voice now, I felt that same mix of shame and rage I felt when he said he would carry Olive’s casket. It made my throat itch, and I had to clear it twice before I spoke.

  “What’s up, Dre? Good to hear from you.”

  “Likewise, man,” he said. “But you’re early. We weren’t expecting you for a few more days.”

  We, he said. We weren’t expecting you.

  “Paperwork,” I said. “Bureaucracy. Someone in the Department of Corrections said it was time for me to go and so I went.”

  “I hear you,” said Dre. “Does Celestial know?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “No problem,” Dre said after a beat. “I hope you don’t mind holding steady for a couple of days.”

  “Y’all are driving down together?”

  “Just me,” said Dre.

  I hung up the phone and went back out to the porch and stood over Big Roy. From this angle, I could see the little scars on the top of his balding head. I remember my mother kissing them when he would whack his head on the light fixture that hung a little too low over the dining-room table. She was crazy about that dinky little chandelier, and my father never asked her to take it down.

  “It wasn’t Wickliffe,” I said. “It was Andre.”

  “What did he say that got you so shook up that you’re standing outside in your drawers?”

  I looked down at my bare legs, turning ashy already. “He says he’s coming down to get me. Just him.”

  “That sound right to you?”

  “I don’t know what’s right.”

  Big Roy said, “You better get to Atlanta and see if you have any marriage left.” He paused. “If that’s what you want.”

  “Hell yeah, it’s what I want.”

  “I had to ask because ten minutes ago you didn’t seem so sure.”

  The phone rang again and Big Roy jutted his chin toward the house. “Answer it. It’s either going to be Wickliffe or Celestial. If it’s Wickliffe, tell him I’m calling in. If it’s Celestial, you’re on your own.”

  I let it jangle until she gave up.

  I returned to the kitchen dressed in the best apparel Walmart had to offer, khaki pants and a knit shirt with a collar. At least I had good shoes. In the mirror, I looked like a budget Tiger Woods, but I didn’t look like an ex-con. “I want to go home.”

  Big Roy was stooped in front of the refrigerator rummaging inside. “Atlanta, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You made up your mind quick,” he said. “Andre lit some kind of fire under you.”

  “I always knew I was going to go, but I didn’t know when. Now I know that when is as soon as I can.”

  “You set to drive?”

  I reached in my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. After all these years in prison storage, the leather was still soft and supple. Stuck to a punch card for lattes, was my driver’s license. The photo was of the successful me; cocky and sure in my button-down shirt and burgundy tie, I grinned, showing two rows of strong square teeth. According to the state of Georgia, I was clear to drive a vehicle for another six months. The Peach State also was under the impression that I lived at 1104 Lynn Valley Road. This license was the only thing I had left from before. I held it up and let the light play off the state seal. “All set, but I don’t have a car.”

  “You can take the Chrysler,” Big Roy said, opening an egg carton and finding only one lonely egg. “I need to go make groceries. Two grown men need to eat breakfast.”

  “Daddy, how you going to get to work withou
t a car?”

  “Wickliffe will ride me around if I help him with gas.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “I thought you said you were ready to go.”

  “I said I’m thinking about it.”

  “You know, sometimes you can make up with bacon what you don’t have in eggs.” Big Roy opened the fridge wider and bent himself low enough to rummage in one of the drawers. “One sorry strip of bacon. I guess you could have the egg and I could have the bacon.” He went to the cabinet and opened it, showing neat rows of tin cans. “I got it! Salmon croquettes. You eat them, right?”

  I looked at Big Roy like I was meeting a stranger. His body was too large for my mother’s kitchen, but he did all right, cracking the single egg one-handed and whipping it with a dainty fork.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Daddy. It’s just that the entire time I was growing up, I never knew you to touch a pot or a pan. But now you putter around the kitchen like Martha Stewart.”

  “Well,” he said, with his back to me as he kept whipping that solitary egg, “losing Olive left me with two options: learn to cook or starve to death.”

  “You could marry somebody else.” I hardly got the words out. “It’s legal.”

  “When I want somebody else, I’ll find somebody else.” Big Roy said. “But if all I want is a meal, then I’ll cook.” He held up the can of salmon and smiled. “They don’t tell you, but a lot of foods have recipes on the back of the can to tell you how to fix it.”

  I watched him for a while longer, and I wondered if this is what it meant to move on, to learn to live in a new way without someone. He was busy over the little bowl and sprinkled in some cayenne pepper. “The problem is that they don’t tell you how to season it right. It’s a smart rule of thumb to shake some pepper anytime you dealing with a can recipe.”