The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  The rain continued its steady tattoo on the roof. Carmen was drifting pleasantly on the sound but also growing chilly; the warmth from sparring with Danny had drained from her abruptly, leaving her with a pale sensation inside her skin. She reached for a blanket and pulled it over her, stretching out on the sectional whose length would have accommodated her twice, at least. Light from the wine, atop a house filled with children who were going about their individual lives, Carmen relaxed. She wondered what, in addition to this sectional, it would take to go back to the 1980s. Leggings and off-the-shoulder T-shirts? Joe Jackson albums? Microwaves with big, round rocket ship dials and digital watches that glowed bright green?

  She must have fallen asleep at some point, because she failed to notice when the bulb in the ceiling light socket sputtered or snapped and burned out. It was much later—at least it felt that way, as if she had been asleep for hours and surfaced in one of those dream cycles—that Carmen had the sensation of lifting her head and seeing Jobe sitting at the end of the couch, just inches from her draped feet.

  He didn’t look the way he had just before he died, skinny and sick and bruised, but neither did he appear like the younger version of himself. This was a Jobe she hadn’t ever seen before: straight and strong, with the outlines of a man one and a half times the size he had been in real life. Yet there was something soft, almost smudgy, about him. His beard was like a forest, his eyes large and dark, focused but as gentle as a camel’s.

  What an odd thought, Carmen recalled telling herself as she sank back down into sleep. She had never seen a camel, not even in a zoo. Her only experience, really, was those Christmas cards that showed the three wise men riding animals whose golden eyes shone through the night sky. Placid, yet as brilliant as stars.

  JUNE 1985

  The sky was glossy and blue, like a polished bowl turned upside down. Carmen walked along a path in Kensington Gardens, imagining that she’d dwindled to the size of a cereal-box figure and entered some perfect storybook landscape—a diorama with a punk rock theme.

  She wore black leggings, a long, hot pink T-shirt tied in a knot at one hip, and black ballet shoes. There were ten earrings in her left ear and seven in her right, a long feather hanging from one lobe. Her dark hair was streaked with a neon two shades lighter than the color of her shirt, and spiked. Close shaved on the sides of her head, long on top and in back.

  Carmen stopped at a cart near a stand of brilliant red flowers to buy some potato wedges and a cup of jasmine tea. The sun shone hard. The potato man smiled at her with gold and missing teeth and said, “G’day, miss,” when he held out the paper cone and her tea with two sugars and a small paper cup of red vinegar. Still holding her string bag in one hand, Carmen took the potatoes, the tea, the sugars, the cup of vinegar; she accepted the ten pence change in one sweaty palm. Then turning, juggling these items, she looked for a clear place on the grass to sit.

  The whole world sparkled, blinding her momentarily. There were clusters of people dotting the grass in every direction. She blinked and saw a small patch of green bordered by two long, blue bars. Heading toward it, she stepped high over the threshold, which suddenly shifted. Startled, Carmen dropped the smaller cup—containing the vinegar—and lost a third of the tea as well, when it sloshed as she lurched. A distinctly American yelp came from the area around her feet. She looked down, eyes watering from the light and smelled a waft of jasmine rising from warm denim. Below her, there was an impossibly long skinny boy, on his back, looking up. A dark stain bloomed directly over his crotch.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry!” Her feet fidgeted as if dancing and she juggled the things in her hands, dropping the coin as well. “Did I burn you? I did! Oh, shit. Here.” She handed him the potatoes and her purse and ran to a cart that sold Coca-Cola in short, thick bottles. “I need a cup of ice, fast!” she told the Indian boy manning the cart. And when he scowled, she added, “I promise, I’ll come back and buy something from you. But I think I just castrated some guy with my tea.”

  When she got back, however, the boy was sitting up looking not maimed but disapproving.

  “Here.” Panting, Carmen handed him the paper cup of ice. “Just pour this down your pants. Don’t worry, no one’s looking. And that would be better than going through the next week with a blister on your…”

  “I’m a total stranger,” he cut her off, placing the cup of ice neatly on the ground. “What are the chances you’ll leave your money and your…” He had opened the bag and was fingering through it cautiously, “your passport and your bank card with some guy in a park and he won’t take off with them?”

  Carmen kicked off her shoes and ran her toes through the warm grass. “Pretty good, I guess. ’Cause you didn’t, did you?” She peered up into Jobe’s scowling face.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “But that’s hardly the point.”

  “Oops, I almost forgot!” She snatched her bag from Jobe and took off, running toward the boy’s cart in bare feet this time, her soles tickled by the blades as they lit. She returned moments later with two Cokes and handed one to Jobe. “I promised him I’d buy something,” she said. “You see? I always keep my promises.”

  “That’s an admirable trait.” He sounded suspicious, as if he required more proof.

  “Yes, it is.” Carmen dropped to the ground now and rolled onto her stomach; looking back over her shoulder, she could see her dirty feet waving in the air. Jobe lowered himself carefully, leaving a shoe box worth of distance between them. “Another one is that I’m just a very good judge of people—which is why I trusted you with my things. Besides, I thought I’d, like, emasculated you forever. Can you really blame me for valuing your future children over my stupid purse?”

  He grinned, a slash of perfect, white teeth appearing on his horsey face, and for the first time since she’d tripped over him, Carmen thought Jobe might actually be cute. Sporadically, at least.

  She reached to pluck a potato wedge from the cone that lay on the grass by Jobe’s left knee and broke it open. “Ooohh, good, they’re still hot!” she said as it steamed furiously in her hand. He watched silently as she peeled a chunk of crisp skin from the flesh and placed it on her tongue. “Have one,” she said.

  Jobe took a wedge and ate it whole, opening his mouth to breathe out steam like a dragon. The stain in his pants had grown tendrils that ran down his long legs.

  “Okay, you’re probably right.” Carmen stared at her hands, picking at a chip in the black polish. “I shouldn’t have left my bag with you. But you do seem more trustworthy than most people.”

  Jobe leaned back then, assuming the position he’d been in when she tripped across him. He sighed. “Yeah, I suppose I am. That and my parents are loaded, so I don’t have a big incentive to steal.”

  Carmen got up on her elbows. Not only was this an odd thing to blurt out to a stranger in a park, but back in Detroit, rich people tended to be beautiful. Not just their faces and their bodies and clothes, but the air around them. It seemed to glow. Yet this was the most ordinary-looking person she’d ever encountered, remarkable only because he was so skinny but otherwise completely unmemorable. Worn, as if he might fade into the background. Come to think of it, he had.

  There was a long, awkward pause and Carmen considered getting up and moving on. He might get the wrong idea if she stayed there. The problem was she had no place to go. She had another week in London and roughly fifty American dollars to make it through. Sitting in a park was about all she could afford.

  “So what are you doing here?” she asked, leaning back with her eyes closed. The sun made black things blossom on the inside of her lids.

  “You mean in London, or here with you, or in a bigger sense?”

  “Yeah, I’m asking for your theory of the universe.” Still sightless, she grinned. “No, wise guy …” She opened her eyes and he met them with a sober face. “What I meant was,” she went on, her voice softer, “what are you doing here in this park?”

  “Just re
ading.” He tilted his head toward an old book, now teasplattered, lying face down.

  She picked it up. “Riemann’s Zeta Function. Hmmm, sounds fascinating.”

  “It is, actually. This guy claims there’s an infinite sum of complex numbers that will prove—”

  “What are you, some kind of math prodigy?” Carmen cut in. “I’ve heard about guys like you.”

  Jobe sat silently for a couple of seconds and she wondered if she’d embarrassed him. She was about to apologize, though she didn’t know for what: She alone among her high school friends had always looked up to—secretly envied—the brainy few who set the curve. I didn’t mean … she opened her mouth to say. But before she could form the first word, he answered matter-of-factly, seeming not offended at all.

  “I don’t know if you could use the word prodigy for someone who’s twenty-five. And I’m not even that good with numbers, except the imaginary ones and the ones that don’t exist.”

  “There are numbers that don’t exist?” She sat up, genuinely interested.

  Jobe grinned again and flashed that nearly handsome look. He shrugged. “Maybe. That’s what I came here to try to prove.”

  “But if you prove it, doesn’t that mean they do exist?”

  Jobe leaned back on his hands and seemed for the first time not to know how to answer. “You’re smarter than most of the girls like you,” he finally said, as if he’d been debating the whole time whether or not he should.

  Carmen flushed with a combination of pleasure and indignation. “What do you mean ‘girls like you’?”

  But snatching up his book, Jobe rose without answering. “I’ll be here again tomorrow, if you want to have lunch.” He spoke quickly, as if he were giving dictation. “Same spot. One o’clock. See you then … maybe.” And he left her sitting alone in the grass.

  Carmen hadn’t been planning to go. He was a funny boy—nice-seeming, too, in his rather priggish way—but definitely not her type.

  Then, the following morning, her purse was snatched off her shoulder while she stood in the Oxford Circus station studying the Tube map. All she had left was her TravelCard, because she’d already taken it out in preparation to board the train and was holding it in her hand. She showed up at the park at a quarter after one, fuming, to find him in the exact same spot, reading with a grim expression on his furry, ugly face.

  “Hey,” she barked, and he looked up to flash that startling, bright smile, as incongruous as a full moon over a junkyard.

  “Did you put some sort of hex on me?” she asked while they waited in line for vegetarian masala, for which Jobe had insisted he would pay. “I’ve been through three other countries so far. Holland, Belgium, France.” She counted them off on her fingers, which were long and delicate, decked with half a dozen silver rings. “Nothing. No problem at all. Then I meet you, Mr. You’re Not Careful Enough, and wham! Everything on me is stolen. My identity was stolen. And I’m just some poor, dumb American wandering around London with no money and nowhere to sleep at night.”

  “Is that true? You’re going to get kicked out of your place?” Jobe looked suddenly even more serious than usual. Carmen nodded, truly frightened for the first time since landing in Amsterdam five weeks earlier. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll go to the embassy this afternoon and they’ll help you out with your passport. I don’t know about the money, though. Maybe … you could …” He stared at the ground for a few beats. “You might have to stay with me.”

  “I can’t do that.” She patted his arm and felt the fur overlaying his hard bones, like something you might touch in a museum. “Look, I’ll call my father and he’ll be furious, but he’ll wire me some money. It’ll be here by …” She looked into the distance. There was a hot air balloon, a fat green thing like a floating bug, hovering over the park. “Monday, I should think.”

  She liked the way that sounded. She’d picked up a number of small Britishisms in the eight days she’d been on the island. Rather, brilliant, arse. She would go home carrying these with her like souvenirs.

  “What happens ’til Monday?” Jobe asked.

  Carmen shrugged. She was getting hungry, and the scent of curry mixing with the sunshine was making her feel nearly drunk. “I don’t know. I’ll crash with friends, or something. It’s not a big deal.”

  “It’s my fault, as you said. So you’ll stay with me.” He made this pronouncement as they reached the front of the line. “Two veg, with naan,” he said to the shiny-faced man behind the counter. Then he turned back to Carmen. “I’m not going back to Oxford until Wednesday. It’ll work out just fine.”

  Carmen snorted. “Yeah, right.” But she reached out—tentative, as he faced the other way—and briefly touched the narrow band of his side. “Thanks.”

  They sat on the grass again to eat their masala and it tasted better to Carmen than she was expecting—the way something does when you’ve been hungry for a very long time. Then they got up together and threw their paper cartons in the trash bin and began to walk. Jobe was a good eight inches taller than her and gangly as a marionette; he kept placing one hand on her shoulder, in the manner of a school monitor. She liked this. No one had touched her since the man in the Red Light District, who had been trying to steer her into a dark corner of the alley after they’d smoked too much hash. Jobe’s hold on her was light and nonthreatening, so they went together to the youth hostel where he was staying with another student from his hall.

  “This is weird,” she said, wandering through the barren room—nothing but two nearly identical American-made backpacks, a low, scuffed wooden table with chairs, and a couple of beds. “Where am I going to sleep?”

  Jobe looked around, as if seeing the hostel’s ugly linoleum and pale blue walls for the first time. Then he shrugged. “You can have my bed. I’ll put a sleeping bag on the floor.”

  “But there’s another guy staying here, right?” Carmen said, her eyes darting toward the other bed. “It won’t work.”

  Jobe grinned but cleared his throat nervously. “Sorry. It’s just that you seem like the kind of girl who would be …”

  “What?” She glared up at him.

  “Um, you know, okay no matter what happens. Like pouring hot tea on a total stranger or getting your purse stolen. I mean, you seem like you just … accommodate.” He looked at the floor. “I’ve always wanted to be more that way.”

  Carmen studied him and felt a slow melting. There was something about this odd person that got to her, made her want to be nicer. “Alright,” she said. And this one word, thankfully, gave them plenty of things to do. Jobe rode with Carmen on the subway to the rooming house where she’d been staying. It was dank: a tiny mouse hole of a room. She’d convinced herself it was daringly Bohemian when she’d agreed to rent it, by the day, from the bushy-browed Irishman with the scar who’d leered and asked, “Will ye be needing linens, miss?” while he ran one finger down her left breast.

  Now, looking at the place alongside Jobe, whose cell-like hostel was at least clean, Carmen was embarrassed by the cracked walls and mouse droppings in the corners.

  “My dad said he’d already paid a fortune for me to go to Amsterdam and Paris, he wasn’t going to shell out more for London.” She shrugged. “This is what I could afford on my own.”

  “So why’d you come?” Jobe was stuffing rolled-up jeans and T-shirts into a knapsack he’d found on the floor. He’d already explained to her that he was from Baltimore, studying at Oxford—earning his doctorate at the Mathematical Institute—but it was spring break so he’d taken the train down to London with her. “Was there something in particular you wanted to do?”

  Carmen tilted her head so the feather she wore brushed her shoulder. “I couldn’t stand the thought of coming all this way, over an ocean and everything, and not seeing more. It seemed so … boxed in. I don’t know. I’m not explaining this very well. It just. I wanted to feel like things were possible, you know?”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Jobe sa
id. And he looked directly into her eyes, holding himself steady, skinny chest barely moving. It was as if he were calculating, she thought. He was figuring her out, adding her up. Despite his wiry hair and bony, gawky body, this drew her in.

  She considered moving toward him, but the attraction wasn’t exactly sexual. There was no part of her that wanted to touch him; he was fascinating the way a live lobster was. All those disparate body parts—claws and tail and antennae—moving in ways that looked mechanical and surreal. “What’s up?” she said finally.

  But instead of answering, he dropped his gaze and went back to folding her clothes.

  Back at Jobe’s hostel, his friend from school had arrived: a brawny boy named Tim who wore a flannel shirt open over a white tank top. His jeans were soft and work-worn, his feet in unlaced, oversized boots. He was sitting wide-legged in a chair, drinking a beer, reading from a book that lay open on his lap. Immediately, Carmen forgot her mild interest in Jobe. This was more like it: broad shoulders and big hands. She could see herself with Tim.

  The three ordered a pizza for dinner. A mistake. The Brits did many things well, Carmen had learned—tea, scones, meat pies—but pizza was not one of them. It was undercooked and dripped with a tasteless tomato sauce. She gnawed on a slice but felt increasingly queasy about the flop of soft, bready crust on her tongue. When she put it down, half eaten, Jobe stared and looked fretful. “You okay?” he asked.

  She itched with irritation, the way she had when her mother used to hover over her. Carmen’s mother, dead nearly a year now, had been fretful and easily hurt. It was, Carmen often told herself, a relief to be on her own. But then, as sometimes happened, darkness spread through her like ink and she felt simply small and sad. “I’m tired,” she said to Jobe. “And cold.”

  The once-sunny day had collapsed into a stormy evening with extravagantly frothy brown clouds. Rain spattered the dirty windowpanes. Everything seemed unfamiliar, and Carmen tensed her cheek muscles so she wouldn’t cry. It was probably hormonal; her period was due in a couple of days. She really needed to get a grip.