The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  “Hey, sweetheart.” Carmen worked to sound casual. “This is Danny, your escort for the evening.” That was a stupid old mom thing to say, she thought immediately. Danny probably was looking at her now as a doddering, inane housewife. But there was no way she could think of to sex up her image now, in front of her son.

  Thank God they’d given up on their plan to stage an accidental getting-to-know-you breakfast. Originally, they’d been going to meet at Sunrise Deli, pretending to bump into each other while she was out on a Sunday morning with Michael. But Mega had seemed to catch on and suddenly she needed Danny to help her plant some rosebushes that weekend; she’d never, in their eight years of marriage, cultivated a single other thing, Danny swore.

  It was fine, Carmen told him. She’d guessed wrong about Michael at every turn, assuming he’d crumble when she disclosed her cancer only to sit down with him and Olive and have him take the news with prosaic calm. Yes, parents do this; they get cancer. It was just another outlandish thing about them, like the way they insisted you clean your room every week even though no one was going to see it but you.

  “I’d made such a big deal of it, asking Olive to be there with me.” Carmen laughed, re-creating the conversation for Danny so it was absurdly light. “But Michael was just like, ‘That’s a bummer. Can I get back to MySpace now?’”

  “Maybe this baseball game was a stupid idea.” Danny had already bought the tickets from a coworker and Carmen thought she could hear disappointment in his voice. “He seems to be coping just fine.”

  Why did she do this? In order to preserve her stupid pride, she’d made Michael sound heartless.

  “No,” she said, serious now and telling the absolute truth. “He’s coping just fine with my being sick but he’s still heartbroken over Jobe. Michael is like me, but he was much closer to his father.” She paused for a beat. “All the kids were.”

  “Michael,” Danny said now and walked around the dining room table. “I’m Danny. Good to meet you.”

  For the second time that afternoon, Carmen watched her lover reach out to press his fingers and palm against the hand of one of Jobe’s sons. Dust hung in the air, light shifting—raising shadows—between her and the two dark-haired forms. She remembered the night at the restaurant more than a year ago, Jobe’s hand stretching out across the table, touching Danny’s.

  And again there was that image. The golden circles appearing, sinking, and dissolving, like ripples in a pond. Carmen felt buoyant, the room around her an aquarium in which her body bobbed.

  “Paired prime ideals occur more often in commutative rings,” Michael said, pronouncing each syllable with exaggerated care,

  Carmen was jolted. “Excuse me?”

  “Right there, it says that.” Michael pointed to a random paper lying cockeyed on the table, where it was written complete with a question mark. “I think Dad did it.”

  She remembered Jobe’s voice now, a reedy tenor. She’d always longed for him to be low and husky, more muscular sounding. Yet now, she found the memory of his oboe-hued words as soothing as a lullaby.

  “Order is everywhere in mathematics,” Jobe had told her. It was nighttime and they were sitting somewhere in moonlight—on a porch or under a blank black sky waiting for fireworks to begin. “It’s the rule, the basic structure. But even within that ordered universe, there are random occurrences. Sparks.” His hands had flickered in space when he said this, dancing. “Just like in life.”

  She was back at the dining room table, hunched over the piles of papers again, when Olive walked in.

  Carmen craned her head to peer at the clock on the kitchen wall. “You’re late! That’s so unlike you. And just this afternoon, someone who’s always running behind …” Carmen trailed off then, unable even to talk about Danny—the man for whom she’d once waited for an hour in a Super 8 Motel, checking her watch every few minutes, only to discover later he’d been waylaid by a surprise visit from his wife’s parents—despite the fact that he was rapidly turning into a benign family friend.

  “I know. I was, well, sleeping.” Olive sat. Her hair, for the first time in Carmen’s experience, was ruffled. And there was a pillow crease, thick and red among the wrinkles on Olive’s cheek. “I’m sorry, dear. I don’t know what came over me this afternoon. I was so tired I couldn’t take another step, so I thought I’d lie down for a few moments. But when I woke up, hours had passed.” She gazed at Carmen wonderingly, glassy-eyed. “And such dreams! It took me some time to get free of them.”

  “Are you alright?” Carmen asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. This of all things had never occurred to her, that Olive might become frail or sick. It was ridiculous that it hadn’t; the woman was seventy-three. She’d been through the deaths of her husband and her son. “Here, you sit. Let me get you a glass of water. Or some wine?”

  “Actually, dear, if you wouldn’t mind. A little scotch over ice wouldn’t hurt.”

  Carmen grinned. “No problem. I think I’ll join you. Unemployment has its perks. Though we may have to call a cab to get to the restaurant.”

  Olive waved her hand—that gesture she seemed to have been born making. “What the hell?” she said, and Carmen gaped. Had her mother-in-law opened her mouth and begun barking it couldn’t have come as more of a surprise. Then she laughed.

  “You are in a strange mood.”

  “Yes.” Olive pulled a compact and a hairbrush out of her purse and began straightening her silver curls. “You may as well bring the bottle.”

  It took Carmen several minutes to get everything together. Someone—Siena and Troy, no doubt—had emptied all the ice trays and stuck them back in the freezer without refilling them. So Carmen was left to chip shards out of the automatic icemaker they’d given up using because it created a discolored glaciery block. Finally, Carmen returned to the dining room carrying two glasses filled with yellowish ice and the Glenlivet from Jobe’s study. It was as if she and Olive had simply switched places; now the older woman was bent over the papers that Carmen had been studying, shaking her head and muttering to herself as she leafed through.

  “Oh, thank God,” Olive said when she saw Carmen. “I’m going to need to drink if I want to understand any of this.”

  “Believe me, there isn’t enough scotch in all of Edinburgh.” Carmen set the glasses down and poured a couple inches into each. “I’ve been going through these all day. I had this friend of mine …” She grew warm, but handed Olive her drink and went on. “He’s a librarian and used to deciphering things, but he couldn’t understand any of this. He said from what he’s read, Jobe was working in an area no one else understands.”

  “No offense intended to your friend, dear, but I think it might be better to have a mathematician go through them.”

  Carmen’s cheeks burned in earnest. She turned to the sideboard to refill her drink. “I thought of that,” she said, facing the mirror on the wall. Her eyes were huge in her face, her hair lustrous and longer than it had been in years. She looked—for this brief moment—the way she had during that trip to New York with Olive more than twenty years before. “But what’s to stop that person from saying there’s nothing here, then taking all the work Jobe did and stealing it?” Swiveling, she tipped the bottle over Olive’s glass. “Maybe I’ve just watched too much Law & Order, but it seems like a risk. Besides, I was looking for something math geeks wouldn’t necessarily pick up on.”

  “That being?” Olive tilted back in her chair, looking uncharacteristically off-balance. What was happening to the people in Carmen’s life? Danny becoming responsible, Olive giddy and disheveled.

  “It was something the doctor said to me today about general patterns and randomness. Jobe spent his life on this problem: trying to prove that prime numbers get generally farther apart as the numbers go up, but there are exceptions—points where the primes contract—that are impossible to predict.”

  There was a beat of pure silence. “I had no idea you knew so much about Jobe’s work
,” Olive said. She sounded either young or tearful or drunken. Maybe all three.

  “Neither did I, to be honest.” Carmen put her glass to her cheeks, one and then the other. Something had happened to her. She was pulsing with heat. “I thought it was all beyond me. I talked to him about it but only, you know, that way you do when you’re married. Listening because it was his life. Never really trying to decipher anything. Now, I wish I’d paid more attention.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  Carmen shook her head. The scotch was in her mouth, reminding her of a night—another lifetime—back when everything had been truly random. Nothing was yet determined. Everything could change. “Nothing, really. The chemo is going to get harder. I’m going to lose all my hair, get sicker, possibly anemic.” Carmen took another drink, the whisky’s resinous flavor almost erasing the aluminum she’d been tasting nonstop for weeks. “He’s doing this because I’m young and statistics show women under fifty have more recurrences. But I shouldn’t give up hope, because I’m an individual. A unique point.” She held up her forefinger, just as Dr. Woo had done, and stared at it, willing away the tears that rose. “I know, I know. I’m grasping at straws.”

  “No, dear. I don’t believe you are,” came Olive’s prim voice. Carmen blinked. Her mother-in-law, too, had morphed back into that neat, patrician wedding planner from 1986. What was happening to the two of them? It was like time travel. “All signs tell me you’re grasping for exactly the right things.”

  “What signs?”

  “Luca!”

  Carmen thought at first this was an answer. But Olive’s voice was full of the heedless warmth she reserved only for her grandchildren. Carmen turned to see Luca walking in to greet his grandmother. On the way, he swept his hand—the right, which he had used last to grasp Danny’s—along the rounded line of Carmen’s cheek.

  Yes, signs, pay attention, Mom, he seemed to say with his chortle. Then he bent to hug Olive who raised her arms and seemed to levitate up, out of her chair.

  An image rose in Carmen’s head and for once she didn’t run away from it. Rather, she moved in and watched her earlier self half-reclining in a hospital bed on a winter day twenty-one years before. Pallid and spent, awash with shame and a sense of failure, young Carmen extended a blunt-faced infant to Olive. And her mother-in-law took an involuntary step back.

  It was only a single moment, and Olive had recovered quickly. Then she’d taken Luca carefully in her hands and up into her arms. “Poor baby,” she’d said, swinging him gently, her grip on him appearing to grow stronger as she swayed from side to side. “Poor, poor baby.” But Luca had only stared and yawned at her, as if bored.

  Then Jobe had walked into the room. So young! Carmen could see that now. Olive’s own least beautiful child, and secretly her favorite. “You’ll find a way to make this child happy,” Olive said to him. It was an order, more than a prediction. Jobe had nodded vigorously as if to say, “Of course,” though Carmen could see tears gathering in his eyes. And she’d wished, for one fleeting speck of time, that he was standing close enough for her to take his hand.

  “I had this very strange dream today,” Olive said, once they were seated in the little Turkish restaurant that was Luca’s favorite. Lamps swung around them, twinkling light reflecting off the high cherry wood booths like stars in a forest.

  “Was it about Dad?” Luca asked. The menu sat unopened under his folded hands. He had it memorized; there was no need to struggle through the printed words. “Did he tell you?”

  “Yes, in fact, he did, dear,” Olive said. “So what do you feel like eating tonight?”

  Carmen looked from one to the other, their faces—both—like cherubim in the rosy glow.

  “Tell you what?” Carmen demanded. She didn’t believe any of this, yet she was panicked. If Jobe were watching, if he knew about Danny, if he were able to communicate with Olive and her children, there was no end to the damage that would be done. “What did Dad tell you?”

  “He solved the puzzle.” Luca rested his chin flatly in the palm of his hand.

  “What puzzle?” They were looking at her as if she was missing something obvious. “You mean Riemann? That puzzle?”

  Both heads bobbed up and down—Luca’s and Olive’s—moving in and out of the light.

  “I suspect it’s somewhere in those papers you were looking at earlier,” Olive said as she studied the menu. “I was so delighted when I got to the house and saw you already had them. Though Jobe seemed sure you’d take care of it somehow.” Then she turned to Luca. “Will you eat some spanakopita if I get it? The piece they serve is always too big for me.”

  Carmen was envisioning herself stirring Jobe’s documents, holding glasses full of liquid precariously over them, dropping the page that held his one, crucial, victorious formula and letting it slide under the table. She saw herself walking through the dining room later, spotting the dirty, walked-on piece of paper, bending and crumpling it. Throwing it away.

  She blinked rapidly. Clearly, the spirit of Riemann’s cleaning woman was haunting her. Carmen wondered what retribution had been like in the 1860s. Had that woman been mutilated and pumped full of poisons for her sins, too?

  A waitress in a long white apron and pinned-on scrap of veil hat appeared. “Can I get you something to start?” she asked.

  Carmen had never noticed before how two hundred years ago this place was. Looking around at the dark tables, chained lanterns, and hunched diners’ backs, she counted forward: thirty-eight hours until her next chemo session. Time expanded and contracted. Centuries of research, twenty-one years of marriage, four meals, another drink. She’d paused too long since the question; everyone was staring.

  “Give us a flask of the house red and some stuffed grape leaves,” she said too brusquely, but Olive nodded. “Luca, how about you?”

  “Seltzer,” he said, struggling visibly to form first the t and then the z.

  Once the waitress had gone, Carmen turned back to her son. “So your dad came to you in a dream and told you he’d solved Riemann? And to you, too?” She glanced at Olive, a well-dressed, upright woman gazing into the distance. What was happening? Her mother-in-law had turned into a less crone-y version of Nancy Reagan. She herself was having some kind of Ebenezer Scrooge moment, seeing ghosts of mathematicians past. Her son was talking to his dead father. Siena was right. Their entire family had gone nuts.

  “He didn’t tell me,” Luca said. “He showed me.”

  “So could you solve it now if I gave you a paper and pen?” She actually began reaching for her purse, but Luca simply rolled his eyes.

  “It’s not like that, Mom.”

  “How is it, then?” she asked gently.

  Luca fell silent—this was more than he usually spoke in two days—and looked at Olive, whose eyes were shining like a child’s.

  “I thought …” Olive began, then stopped and started again. “You know me, dear. I’m not like this. Some guilt-ridden old woman so destroyed by her son’s death she begins imagining things. That’s what I told myself at first.”

  “Guilt-ridden?”

  Olive breathed deeply through her nose and scanned Luca from his shoes to the top of his head. It was as if she was doing an inventory, and when she was done, she turned full-on to Carmen. “For lying to my son and pushing your marriage forward, even after that young man came to the door with your driver’s license. That very handsome”—Olive shifted her eyes but only slightly, so she was gazing at an empty spot in the air—“very … confident young man.”

  Carmen felt squirmy inside, and as cornered as she had that night long ago when Olive caught her coming out of Jobe’s room. No, more. She looked pointedly at Luca, wondering what had made Olive decide to have this conversation now, in this place, in front of him. But Olive ignored her.

  “What was his name?” she asked, not unpleasantly but with the air of an old lady simply trying to grasp a memory. “Robert? Oren … ?”

  Carmen relente
d. “Rory,” she said. And as she did, she could see him standing on the Garretts’ wide brick porch, holding the little, plastic card, smiling down at the well-formed middle-aged woman who answered the door. Carmen wouldn’t have been surprised if Rory had made a pass at Olive. At the very least, he’d have turned on the charm, made her understand what kind of man he was.

  “So he returned my driver’s license, and you put it on my bedside table without saying a thing. Why?” Carmen stared directly at her mother-in-law now. It was time. To her right, Luca seemed to preside—a benevolent presence neither disturbed by the conversation, nor judgmental about it. Only witnessing.

  “Because.” Slowly, Olive refocused and held up her end of the stare. “I didn’t want to know anything. Oh, not that I would have said so at the time. I think, back then, I just convinced myself that it was nothing. That what the boy said was true.”

  “Which was? What did he say?”

  “That you’d stopped in to his office to talk about rental properties. He was checking your credit. You’d left it behind.” Olive’s voice was robotic.

  “So?” Carmen challenged her, senselessly. Suddenly, without knowing why, she’d switched sides. “You thought I was trying to leave Jobe and move out on my own. Get an apartment without him.”

  “Yes, I thought you were considering it. Or rather …” There was a flash of pain on Olive’s face and Carmen felt remorse. But before she could reach out, Luca’s hand crept somehow more quickly than hers to touch his grandmother’s hand. “I told myself this was what had happened: You were uncertain—scared—that you thought briefly about leaving then realized how much you loved my son. Only … there was a part of me …” She shook her head. “That Rory was a very handsome young man,” she repeated after several seconds had passed. “Exactly the sort of boy I could imagine you dating, going to parties with, dancing with….” Here, thankfully, she stopped. But the next logical item on the list hung silently in the air.