Marry or Burn (32 page)

I was always saying I didn't. I said those days were a blank, but I did have a couple of memories. One was of Shelley at the bathroom keyhole. “Go away,” she said in a harsh whisper.

“I can look too.”

“He's in there. Go play.”

“I don't have to.”

He must have heard us and backed up against the wall by the toilet because when she let me look I couldn't see him. Finally he came out, rubbing his face with a towel as if he had been in there washing.

 

FOR OUR FATHER'S wedding, Shelley and her partner Diana flew in from Chicago two days ahead of time. They stayed with me in the apartment I had shared with my boyfriend Eddie before he moved out. My ex-boyfriend. When she got up the first morning Diana sat down at his piano in her silk pajamas and began to play, with a few wrong notes but a flowing style. After a bit you could tell it was “Stairway to Heaven” she was playing. When I laughed, Shelley said, “She taught herself.”

“No, no, I was just thinking of that sign in the guitar store, NO “STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.” And backwards, remember Ricky told us, it was satanic? And we didn't know who Satan was?”

“Yeah . . . she just now got the sheet music,” Shelley said, scanning the few CDs Eddie had left on the shelves.

Shelley was driving us over the pass because we had Eddie's car and it was a stick shift. I didn't like to drive it in the mountains. The wedding was taking place at a bed-and-breakfast in the Cascades, on the east side. The car was a hatchback with room for three of us, luggage, flowers, presents, a cooler of champagne and the cake. “I'd trust Shelley with it before I'd trust you anyway,” Eddie said. In our laughing days, he had laughed at the way I popped the clutch on the hills of Seattle.

Since then he had been rethinking things. My driving wasn't funny any more and maybe I myself wasn't as entertaining as I thought I was. At one time my interests had had a comic flavor, for him. He would tell our friends, “We used to get the
New York Times
but they didn't have enough obituaries.”

Eddie taught music and language arts in middle school and at night he played the piano in a bar where I went with my friend Kitty from work. We were both at the paper condensing stuff off the wires into those two-inch-long items Karen used to read to people on the phone. Fillers, they were called.

If we stayed far enough into the evening, Eddie arrived, sat down, put a brandy glass on the piano for tips, and played for two hours without looking up or asking for requests, so hardly anybody put anything in the glass. He did smile to himself, once or twice in a set. The first night we saw him, I thought about him later when I was at home in bed. I thought he was a man who smiled privately, a man whose eyebrows would go up in pained transport during certain passages, like Glenn Gould's. A man with thick black eyelashes.

His hands stayed low over the keys, no flourishes. They looked lazy but the sound was crisp. Up close, when Kitty and I invited him to join us the first time, he looked more like a boy, grinning and making jokes, quoting movies. It turned out he had graduated a year after we did. Still, there on the table were the large-jointed hands from the keyboard, lying at rest as the talk went on, as if what came out of his mouth were no concern of theirs. I don't know why I liked to look at them, and to hear his laugh-choked voice, when he really wasn't saying anything, only repeating stories and quoting Comedy Central, or why I waited for Kitty to go to the bathroom and leave me alone with him, when what I wanted was an established grown-up, not solemn but on the melancholy side, with a few creases in his forehead, and convictions.

Eddie avoided convictions. He came from a big Catholic family, with priests in it. I said he should be proud, the Catholic bishops had come out against the war. Furthermore he should
be glad he was raised with a religion to comfort him. He laughed at that, but every so often he would sneak off early on a Sunday morning to go to Mass. He didn't offer to take me with him. “You'd give me a hard time,” he said.

That summer I had been to his brother's wedding, a big Catholic affair with Eddie playing the organ at Mass and making funny toasts at the reception. The brothers took turns dancing with their mother. When she walked out onto the floor on Eddie's arm, taking small steps in her long girdle, I thought,
He is a kind of prince.
That was my last good thought about him for a while, because we had a lot more of the Signature Cocktail and then a fight on the way home, as I'm sure a lot of people do, shut in cars after the odd brevity and letdown of the ceremony and then all the waiting in line and the tense, antique presenting of this person to that one, and the pouring and toasting and clapping, and the mothers with eyes red and smudged because, they said, they were so happy.

Two people agree to lock themselves in together, in defiance of reason and the Dissolutions column, and we celebrate it every time. I said something to that effect. Eddie said his brother's new wife, far from being stupefied, as I had suggested, by the ornate event she herself had planned in every detail, was simply a girl who knew how to be happy. “Is that right?” I said. “How?” He thought it was just another question like the ones I had asked about the Mass. Why did we clap after they kissed? Did people always clap in church? In movies I had never seen such a thing. Why didn't we kneel? Weren't you supposed to kneel, in the Catholic Church? Where were the statues and the candles? Why was marriage a sacrament?

The second phase began when the narrow space of my apartment—a place I had chosen for the tight shelter of its room-and-a-half—had made room for his piano and skis and kayak.
If I woke up at night I would see his two bikes, the front wheel of the city one facing its horns in on us from the balcony like a rained-on, aggrieved animal, and he, awake or asleep, would have moved onto my side of the bed, against my back. In the hot room his body steamed under the layers of covers he had to have.

Then he started taking my glasses off to look at me. I couldn't see him. He said, “I'm sorry, it's your eyes when you take off your glasses.”

“Maybe I should get contacts.”

“No, no, it's what I like. I like that sweet, bleary look.”

“Shall I take off my shoes and get pregnant?” That's what I said, instead of saying I liked his eyes too, the black eyelashes that cast an openwork shadow when he played the piano or read under a lamp. I don't know why I did that. I don't know why I said one thing rather than the other, and kept trying to break something down in him, some resolute optimism, which had soothed me in the early weeks.

“OK, I won't do that any more.”

“I can't see shit without my glasses.”

“Are you trying to see shit?” Then to be nicer or to get away from the table he moved over to the piano and played a few bars of something.

“What's that?”

“Hovhaness. It's called ‘Beloved, You Looked into Space.'”

That
beloved
did it for a few days. Then he said something. He said despair was learned. Look at Shelley's problems—surely they had something to do with seeing John, our father, deal with things in the way he had, with his protracted mourning.

“Oh, for God's sake,” I said. “
Protracted
. Quit talking to Karen.”

If, Eddie said, he had had some struggles himself, he didn't
intend to bring anybody down about them. What he wanted at this point was to ride his mountain bike or go hiking on weekends—by himself if I chose not to enjoy such things—and yes, maintain a good mood. Play music. Get married when the time came. Sure. Have children.

Children. Did he have any idea what that meant?
Children.
How
every minute of life
, children were in your power and you in theirs? How if you were no good at it, how if you disappeared—

“Let's say I wouldn't.”

“Wouldn't what?”

“Disappear. Say I luck out and get a full lifespan.”

“There's no point. There's no point in arguing this.”

“I'm not arguing, Jenny. Anybody see any kids here for me to run out on?” Finally he grinned, not so much at me as out the window at his bikes. He shook his head and said, “I've had some tough roommates, but we always worked it out, we always—”

“Go find them,” I said. “Have a beer.” His expression didn't change but he kept looking out the window. I said I was sorry, because his face, if I looked at it and forgot what he was saying, had that effect on me. I was sorry and I wasn't. I could see that we had fallen into a routine combat but I wasn't sure which one of us I wanted to win.

When we finally decided he would move out, he came back every week to practice. It was too expensive to move the piano a second time. He came at the end of the school day, when I was still at work, but I could tell when he had been there because the radiators would be hissing. I could turn them down, I could turn them off if I wanted to. No more deadweight comforter on the bed, steamed windows, jokes from movies, trips to look at bigger places because our two incomes made one decent one and a piano could have its own room. No more schoolboy analysis of Shelley and me.

All this was in the second phase. It was in the first phase, right after he had moved in, that I was in Chicago to share with Shelley my good spirits, my change of fortune, my repudiation of doubt, and to meet Diana.

They had just bought a condo. If I had had to guess, I would have said Diana would be messy, but the place was spare and chastely neat. With the mirrors, the tall windows, the trees in pots, it had a sneaky luxury, somewhere between a good hotel and a chapel. It had an air of being held in readiness for something other than just sitting around. Some visit not mine, some visitation. I thought of what Eddie would say about it. He would like it. He had not been raised by Karen; he saw nothing wrong with luxury. “Hey, a vet and a lawyer,” he would say. “Why not?”

Right up to the day her law school loans came through, Diana had been poor. That's why she had Norfolk pines in the bay windows and hushed lithographs of winter branches on the walls: in the part of town she came from all they had was tree of heaven, which grew in empty lots and stank. Every year, the school nurse sent notes home saying Diana came to school in shoes that were too small. Karen knew about the trees and the shoes from Shelley. Karen could always get things out of you. Karen said if they opened Diana's closet when they were showing me the place, I should not comment on the shoe racks.

I ran my hands over the slate coffee table and appreciated the view of Lincoln Park, the art, and Diana's law books high up, reachable by teak ladders on wheels. Diana climbed up one to show how convenient it was. I looked over at Shelley. She hadn't changed, she didn't notice where she was. She had given me a tour of the clinic where she worked, a cat clinic not far from their new place. She took a scrawny young cat with twitching ears out of its cage and the whole time we were
walking around she carried it, confined in a towel because it was demented. A cat could be demented. It had been weaned too soon and had to be held in a firm grip and given something to suck. We had never had cats at home. What about the dogs by the side of the road?

“Good beer,” I said when Diana handed me a bottle. “Ale,” she said, and winked at me. “
Blond.
” I looked at the label. She took a long swig from hers. Her hair was the shiny flat blond of a Scrabble tile, though it wasn't clear whether that was a natural color because her groomed eyebrows were dark.

“Hey, don't flirt with Jenny,” Shelley said.

Since then Shelley had been home a couple of times, but I hadn't seen Diana again until they came for the wedding. Whenever there was a lull in the talk, she would go over and feel out three or four chords, standing up, in her listening-for-the-muse style—I tried to think of what Eddie would have called it. “We have to get a piano, it's time,” she kept saying to Shelley as we sat around.

I was on my guard, but she got the story of our childhood out of me. Shelley said, “You already know all that.”

“I just want to get the whole picture. You'd be a good witness, Jenny.”

“You mean I'm easily led.”

“I mean you answer. Not like Shelley.”

“Shelley has dignity,” I said. “So—now it's your turn.”

But Diana was finished with our talk. She went out and stood on the balcony, where there were no bikes now, and came back stretching and yawning. “God, I just want to go back to bed. I do. I have to. There's no
sun
here. Isn't it supposed to be summer?”

They had my room; Shelley's eyes followed her as she closed the door. Into Shelley's face of stubborn reserve came a flush, a
humble, all but witless half smile. She said, “She needs more sleep than some people.” What was this? This was love? Was this what came about? This stupid, helpless smile?

We left early the next morning. Diana fell back to sleep as soon as we hit the freeway. She slept until the North Cascades Highway began its climb, when her eyes opened and she sat up and said, “OK, who
is
this woman? Jesus. She killed a bear.”

“She didn't kill it,” Shelley said. “Fish and Wildlife killed it.”

“She tried to. She didn't do what he told her to. He told her to run. I mean, how do you know what you would do?” No one answered her. “So OK then, what would
you
do?”

“No idea,” Shelley said. “What about you?”

“Well, I don't know! But Jesus, I don't think so. I mean I identify but I . . . no.”

“I heard you were a girl of action,” Shelley said.