The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  She picked up the little boom box, stopped at the sink for a glass of water, and headed up two flights of stairs. The attic was stuffy. Carmen opened two opposing windows and stood limply between them, letting the breeze sift through her legs. She plugged in the CD player and pressed play; long, sweet, crickety notes began and she sank to the old sectional couch, pulling off her shirt, scratching her back on the nubbly fabric like a bear, finally comfortable, even pulling a fleece over her bare skin.

  She raised her hand to touch the comet, feeling its jagged outline like some miniature planet. Maybe this was like Horton Hears a Who and an entire other world was lodged in her breast. “We are here, we are here, we are here,” she heard the Whos chant. Horton had been Luca’s favorite book when he was six years old; she probably could still quote long passages if she tried.

  Lying back against the cushions, Carmen listened to the golden sounds of the violin mixing with amber cello notes. This wasn’t so bad. Her hand moved in widening circles and grazed her nipple and it was suddenly hard. So her breast still worked! Even after all the prodding and squashing that day, the chemicals that had been pumped into her to light up flawed spots. “Use it,” said a new voice that was more like an idea quietly floating through her head. “Why not?” And she raised her other hand to rub the right nipple as well. There was a sense of excitement so low and gathering it was almost an ache. Then the dilemma a woman always faces if she’s alone: She had only two hands. Moving the right, more dexterous hand down and slipping it inside the waistband of her panties, she darted the left back and forth, fluttering against each of her breasts equally as she found her clitoris and ran her fingers over it and back, slipping them inside only long enough to get them wet and running them back out and up.

  The music changed, becoming a soaring symphonic rush—an early ancestor of the Moody Blues—for which she was grateful. Carmen was breathing raggedly now, pressing down harder and arching her back to rub her nipples against the coarse blanket, which she held taut with one hand. Her eyes were closed but dots of gold light appeared behind them, larger and larger in succession. Her shoulders were opening like wings, her whole body thrashing and about to break into waves, when she felt suddenly that she was being watched.

  Carmen stopped abruptly, her hands bearing down firmly on her body as if to quiet it. This was a familiar pose. Over the years, after they had quit making love regularly but before they slept apart, Carmen sometimes touched herself late at night while lying next to Jobe in their bed. She always waited until he’d given some sign of sleep: steady breathing, or a single adenoidal snore. Once in a while, though, she would have a sense that he was lying too still to be truly sleeping and was, instead, listening. With Danny, she’d learned to masturbate for a man, and to watch with leering pleasure while he stroked himself in front of her. But it felt weird and unseemly to be doing this in front of her husband, and at least half a dozen times Carmen had simply ceased and turned over, acting as if she’d only been restless, keeping her hand—as it was now—pressed between her legs.

  She opened her eyes and looked around the attic, which was lit only by the sliver of moon outside. Could it be possible one of the children had awakened and wandered upstairs?

  The dark was thick, almost palpable, and it hung like fabric unfurled from ceiling to floor. Nothing moved. “Hey?” Carmen called out in a brusque whisper. But there was no answer, and after a few moments she was satisfied and settled back and started the process all over again. This could be better, actually: pushing herself almost to climax and stopping just short, then starting again and feeling her body accelerate ten times as quickly as before, becoming wet and open in a matter of seconds with that near–roller coaster sensation building in her throat.

  As her orgasm started to take hold, Carmen untensed the way one yoga instructor had advised her years ago. She’d been an older woman, tiny and freakishly flexible, who’d thrown out life advice at the most unlikely times. “Relax your pelvic floor for this pose,” she’d told a class that included a dozen women and three men. “Breathe. Slowly. Ladies, you might try this during sex. It will make your climax much higher.”

  It was during this class, actually, that Carmen had realized she could not continue having sex only with her husband. Jobe was not yet sick, but the way he touched her—and avoided her for long periods of time—already had begun to make her feel wooden. While in downward-facing dog, looking between her legs at her own reflection in the mirror, Carmen decided she had to do something. She would find a lover. That was the only way to get through until the kids were grown.

  Like a movie, it all played in front of her as she came. There were flashes of her home life with Jobe and the strange, old-fashioned doctor’s office where he’d been told about his cancer; moments with Mike, the man from her office; and then random glimpses of the forty or so times she and Danny had been together, his blunt hand on her side, the curtains of the hotel room falling at a slant.

  There were flashes of the funeral, of her black-clothed children walking neatly in a line, of the café with Jana and of the mammography equipment, of she herself sitting at the dinner table across from her son and daughter—as if Carmen had stepped outside of her body completely and could watch her own life. These images swirled but not one of them was disturbing. Calmly, even as her body kept rippling, she saw them tinged with the light from behind her eyes. She felt held, not just her forehead and neck this time but her entire being, and this sense remained even as the waves finally receded.

  When it was over, her hands fell away from herself and, effortlessly, she slept.

  AUGUST 1985

  Carmen landed in Baltimore for the first time on a day so torrid that the city seemed to shimmer when she walked out of the airport with a bag slung over each shoulder and began immediately to sweat.

  Someone honked, and she saw Jobe wave from behind the wheel of a dark green BMW. Her father would be furious if he were here; he’d order her not to get in the car. If these people wanted to go to Europe for their automobiles, they weren’t loyal Americans. She should have nothing to do with them. This, more than the sight of Jobe himself—with a freshly trimmed beard that only made the angles of his face slightly more monsterish—made Carmen run to open the passenger door and jump in.

  “Hey,” she said, tossing the larger bag in the back seat. “Thanks for coming to pick me up.”

  “Sorry.” Jobe turned red, as if she’d said something to embarrass him already. “I would have gotten out to help you, but I was afraid they’d ticket me or I’d lose my place in line.”

  “Always the rule follower, aren’t we?” There, now she actually had said something to embarrass him. And she’d been in his car, what? Thirty-five seconds? Carmen sighed and resolved for the hundredth time to be considerate and behave herself. This was not one of her hardened high school girlfriends; Jobe never seemed to be anything but decent and nice.

  She settled back and breathed. There was an odor: not a new-car smell but something better. Leathery and outdoorsy, though nothing could have been further from the truth. Inside the car, the temperature was a perfect and transparent 72 degrees; it said so in blue numbers that glowed from the dashboard. It also posted the outside temperature in red: 102.

  “Jesus, is it always this hot here? I’m, like, melting.” She stripped her overshirt off, leaving her in only a white tank top and bra. Luckily, she’d thought to shave under her arms that morning. She’d debated, but it had seemed the right thing to do if refined East Coast people were going to let you stay with them for a week.

  Jobe darted glances at her as he drove and it was clear he was looking at her breasts. She could not figure this guy out. She’d slept in his bed for two nights (well, one and a half, technically) and he’d never even tried to have sex with her, despite the fact that he’d had an erection three-quarters of the time. Then he’d called her from Oxford once she got home, which must have cost a fortune, just to find out how things were going. Everything was terr
ible, Carmen told him, figuring she might as well spill her guts to this guy she probably would never see in person again.

  Her father had picked up his drinking while she was away, the house had gone to hell, and the housekeeper who’d come twice a week for as long as she could remember had disappeared. It seemed her dad’s job at GM was on the line: They’d given him six months slack after his wife’s death, but he’d reached the end and his boss was offering alcohol treatment or a voluntary layoff.

  “‘I’m no fuckin’ drunk,’” Carmen made her voice gruff and mimicked her father over the hollow telephone line. “‘I’m an asshole, maybe, but so far as I know there’s not a treatment program for that.’”

  “Hmm, what do you think will happen?” Jobe asked, sounding exactly like the professor he wanted to become.

  Carmen didn’t mind the blandness of his question. Any one of her friends would have made a joke about how at least now she could get high in the house and no one would notice. She found herself appreciating Jobe’s earnest quality, feeling for once listened to, thinking about the tent he’d made with his arms that first night when she was achy and scared.

  “I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “I’m not even sure I’ll be able to finish college. I keep asking him, but I don’t think there’s any money left.”

  What she didn’t tell Jobe was how her father had changed. Once swarthy and handsome with sharp brown eyes and dark hair—a second-generation Italian who had married his European twin: a shy, beautiful Spanish girl—he had become hunched and slightly flaccid and gray looking. He no longer noticed when Carmen came or went, though he’d always taken great pride in her. She, the younger daughter who was both prettier and more clever than her sister, Esme, had been the one he doted on. He’d told everyone they knew the story of how Carmen had started kindergarten as a precocious four-year-old. The day she went to her junior prom, he’d taken about a hundred pictures; when she graduated with honors, he’d thrown a party for three hundred people with an open bar.

  The only problem he’d ever had with Carmen was when she mouthed off to her mother, a sweet, timid, chronically frail woman who was easily hurt. And though he’d never finished high school, he’d risen swiftly at GM, from line worker to shift supervisor to management. He had the confidence of a working-class man who had succeeded entirely based on merit, making more money in a year at thirty-five than his father had ever made in a decade. They lived in a five-bedroom house with a pool in the backyard. And nothing Carmen asked for was too much: Throughout high school she’d had a credit card she could use at will that drew directly from her father’s account. If he kept track of what she spent, he never said.

  But things changed just before her trip to Europe. It had been planned the year before, back when doctors were still telling her mother the cancer was contained—a simple procedure to remove it and she’d live a long, healthy life. By the time Carmen was due to board the plane, her mother was freshly dead, her father stunned and angry. He was pursuing a lawsuit against the hospital because they’d assured him his wife was going home less than thirty-six hours before she expired. And he was drinking significantly more than the three or four glasses of bourbon he’d typically had when he came home in the evening. These days he just kept the bottle at his side.

  Even worse was Carmen’s sister, who had suddenly become their father’s keeper. Married to a sturdy but boring guy who managed a bank and seven months pregnant, Esme had somehow displaced Carmen entirely while she was out of the country. She came over several times a week in her frilly maternity tops—looking more beautiful than she ever had before, her body giving in to its natural plumpness, her plain face glowing—and fussed over their father.

  “You could help out a little,” she said to Carmen one day as she stooped precariously to pick up the plates and glasses he’d left on the floor near his favorite chair. “Daddy’s taken care of you for twenty years. Is it too much to ask for you to wash a dish?”

  But then she’d marched to the kitchen with the armload and washed them herself, making the question rhetorical so far as Carmen was concerned. Sometimes, when Esme was not due to come for a couple of days—because Carmen would not give her sister the satisfaction—she vacuumed and straightened and tried to coax her father into setting his alarm before he went comatose in his chair at night. But he came home, one of the few times he actually made it to work in July, with a pink slip. It was the very same day that her tuition bill from the University of Michigan arrived. Because of nonpayment in spring, the letter said, she would have to settle her account and prepay for the fall semester in order to continue. She could call the number for the financial aid office if her circumstances had changed. Carmen was about to do this when Jobe phoned for the second time.

  He was back home in Baltimore and said casually that it might be nice for her to come out for a visit; he had several thousand frequent flyer miles racked up and he’d be happy to use them to fly her out.

  “Wouldn’t your parents mind?” she asked, looking around her own kitchen and seeing that it was grease stained and filthy, which was made all the worse by the fact that it was enormous and modern with a six-burner stove she probably should clean. “I mean, technically I’d be using their free ticket, right?”

  “My parents,” Jobe said, “have no idea frequent flyer miles even exist.”

  “So tell me about these people,” Carmen said now, sitting in the purring BMW, sucking in the icy air as if it were oxygen. “Your parents. What are they like? And how much do they know about me?”

  “The young lady from Detroit?” Jobe grinned. “I think they have some vague idea you’re the daughter of the chairman of Ford.”

  “And they got that vague idea … how?”

  Jobe shrugged. “Most of what I told them was that I met you in London and helped you out when someone stole your purse. My mother was robbed once in Greece, so she felt an immediate bond.”

  “And their names?”

  “George and Olive. But you should call them Mr. and Mrs. Garrett.”

  “Seriously? I mean, my friends’ parents told me to use their first names when I was in, like, sixth grade.” She thought back to summers in Elise Jacobs’s house: playing jacks on the hardwood floor, making fortune-tellers out of folded paper, rifling through her dad’s old Playboys then having him come home and tickle them both on the couch until they nearly wet their pants.

  “My parents are …” Jobe concentrated, furrowing only one eyebrow, and for an instant Carmen caught sight of the cute boy she’d glimpsed in Kensington Park. “They’re kind of hard to describe. Do you read much Somerset Maugham?”

  Carmen shook her head. “You read, too? I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius math geek.”

  “Yeah, well.” Jobe turned into a driveway that Carmen couldn’t see the end of; it had to be a quarter-mile long. “Sometimes we read.”

  Carmen had her own room—an irregularly shaped space on the third floor with a double bed, a dresser, a desk, and a small easy chair with a reading lamp, all in shades of plum—and her own bathroom with a shower but no tub.

  “Where’s your bedroom?” she asked as he showed her around, flipping on light switches and pointing things out like a bellman.

  He reddened. “It’s down a level. My parents are kind of conservative when it comes to these things.”

  “What ‘things?’” She could feel herself blushing, too, which was rare. Why did this guy have such an odd effect on her? “I didn’t say I wanted to have sex, I was just asking where your bedroom was.” She looked over her shoulder at Jobe, who was standing with his hands in his pockets, and wondered if she actually did want to. The truth was, she had no idea why she was here in this strange city with this boy she barely knew. It was clear he was interested in her and she didn’t want to lead him on, but her feelings were—for one of the only times in her life—completely unclear.

  One minute she’d be aggravated by his accommodating her moods, wishing he’d
stand up to her the way her high school boyfriend had, calling her out and saying, “Stop being a bitch, Car,” whenever she got snotty or demanding. The next, Jobe would tug at her with a quiet insistence; she would remember falling asleep next to him in London and feeling safe for the first time since her mother died. Also, she’d discovered that cute, brawny boyfriend from high school—her first—was secretly sleeping with other girls, and the worst part was that she later figured out it was he who had leaked the information so she’d find out and break up with him. A dirty, cowardly trick.

  She’d always had high standards, dating at her “level” or sometimes even above. Few girls could pull this off, but Carmen had discovered early on that sheer moxie often bought her entry into social groups—and relationships with men—that seemed out of her league. So she became, by sixteen, the girl most likely to sing onstage or play strip poker. She painted seriously, setting up a studio in a corner of the basement at home, stretching her canvases herself. Don’t do anything half-assed and forget what other people think; these rules were, she would have told anyone who asked, the secret to a successful life.