Marry or Burn Read online

  “Oh, just something silly. Something I was hearing when I went to see him,” said Lali. “It was merely a laugh. His way of laughing. A most sober man, as Meg will tell you.”

  “And I liked him,” said Meg.

  “I’m not sure you were in a position to know that ahead of time,” Sam said.

  “But yet,” Lali spoke up, smiling away Sam’s remarks, “it is going to be Kevin, isn’t it? Many of the signs were in his favor.”

  THE WEDDING WAS Small, in a room of an old mansion popular for weddings in our city. Lali and Stacey, Meg’s best friend, were the attendants, and on the big round oak table we set out champagne glasses and cake. Meg was almost a vegan by this time and had not really wanted a cake, but her training as an anthropologist made her reluctant to leave it out. “Cake is sacred,” she said. “Pie is folkloric but cake is sacred.”

  “No one’s advocating pie. But if you have cake at your wedding you want to be able to have a piece,” said Stacey.

  “And pie—why is that folkloric?” Sam wanted to know.

  “Four and twenty blackbirds, Daddy.”

  Really we were all afraid that Meg would take on the job herself and bake one of those dark, wet soy cakes. Stacey was afraid it wouldn’t taste good, but I was afraid it would sit there like an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual substitution. Kevin instead of the handsome prince. This was before we really knew Kevin and realized he was indeed the handsome prince and no substitute. By this time he did have a job, teaching English in a private school that didn’t require a teaching certificate.

  Two weeks before the wedding we found a bakery that could make a rich carrot cake that no one would guess had no eggs.

  Andrei crashed the wedding but Meg was able to keep things friendly. She sat with Andrei on the piano bench for a long time in her white dress with her long neck bent towards him, talking quietly, explaining, I believe, her love for the man to whom she had just finished vowing herself for life, until the pianist came and reached in from behind them to strike a loud chord. It was time for toasting and dancing to begin. The talk stopped and the chord pulsed through the crowd while Andrei pulled himself together, unclenched his fists, and agreed to leave the bench.

  How strange, it occurred to me as I watched Andrei during the toasts, that both of these men Lali had plucked out of nowhere for Meg had agreed, as if a spell had been laid on them, to be hers.

  Two years later Kevin had published his novel. Meg was happier than we had ever seen her. She was trying to get pregnant; she even had an anthropology course to teach, in addition to composition and The Power of Place, which had become permanently hers when Stacey got a better job. One day Kevin was standing in front of his high school juniors happily scanning “The Wanderer” when his aorta burst.

  In Marfan’s syndrome the aorta can be as weak and decayed as a strand of old kelp, and no one will suspect it.

  After he died Meg stopped going to work. She locked the door on the apartment where they had lived, without even cleaning it, let alone subletting it while there was no salary to pay for it, and came home. It may sound as though we were the kind of parents who secretly wanted their daughter back, but in this period we came close to telling Meg she might be happier staying with Lali, who had invited her. Because there was nothing we could do but get up and go through the day with her, while hopelessly trapped in the parental obligation of rescue, with Sam already wandering the house new to his retirement and susceptible to despair. She had not come home to be with us, though, so much as to be as she had been before, thereby repudiating, even obliterating, the happiness of two years. Finding this impossible, she mourned with a silent concentration.

  In the spring, Andrei reappeared. He had finally gone to California and made a movie—we had read about it, disbelieving, in People: a documentary about megastores. First Stacey called Meg and said, “You know you’re in that movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “The movie Andrei made, the Walmart movie.” There was a low buzz of talk about the film because it introduced scenes of nudity into a study of the giant complexes going up in small towns faster than the house the fairies built over Wendy in Kensington Gardens. Andrei had elected to film a long-haired woman wandering nude into these stores in various parts of the country. The furious or horrified response of supervisors or security guards, which he filmed with a handheld camera, represented defense of the status quo. The woman also strolled outdoors, past empty storefronts or among the backhoes on farmland being paved for parking lots.

  That the film, as Sam pointed out, was the work of a man exiled from a ruined economy, who despised communism more than he hated the consolidation of wealth, was not mentioned in People, which addressed its readers on the subject of the Human Body. Why must a lovely woman be hidden from the great unblinking corporate eyeball? What did the corporations have to lose? What did they so fear from the Human Body?

  The naked woman was not Meg, thank God. But Meg did indeed appear in one scene, her fingers leafing through a rack of CDs. The camera lingered so long on Meg, on the vintage high-necked blouse we knew Andrei had given her and we had advised her not to accept, her lowered eyes, the limpid, shy, music-imagining beauty of her face bent over the CDs, that Sam and I were almost in tears.

  We had never met Andrei in the crawling-through-the-transom period, but now he was back and he had shoes and black shirts and a beard grayer than Sam’s and a Saab. He was a success.

  He came every few days with books and videos and flowers and plants for Meg. Orchids, impossible to keep alive, spilled over the dresser in the bedroom where she slept in the painted iron bed of her childhood. All she did through the summer, and the two more quarters she took off from school, was sit on the porch with the same book in her hands, none of those Andrei kept finding for her, but Kevin’s novel.

  Andrei was dressing in black cashmere sweaters, taking vitamins and St. John’s wort, and drinking wheatgrass. He had put away any notion of the international Jewish conspiracy. He seemed to have rid himself of much of his original personality, certainly those things that had made Sam call him borderline—though not his obsessive notions about Meg.

  By the time Meg folded up Kevin’s shirts for Goodwill and found herself another apartment, a year had limped away. We swallowed our tears as she got into the Saab with Andrei and waved goodbye to us.

  “Do you think she’ll marry the guy?” Sam croaked. I said no. Of course she was only thirty-seven years old, and anything could happen. Not that she wasn’t involved with Andrei; she was, by then. We had seen her cross from bare toleration of him—with his bitter asides, his sneers in Russian, his tender glances and sudden indrawn breaths of impatience, his palliating trinkets—to musing smiles as she listened to him.

  Would neither one of these men have found her on his own? That was the question. What was marriage anyway, if it involved the yoking of two who would not have encountered each other naturally on the planet?

  “Look, Kevin is a great husband, a great son-in-law,” Sam had started in, in the early days. “But aren’t there Kevins everywhere? Or not really, no, but I mean how did it happen to be Kevin?” In time we saw that Kevin came from somewhere and had a loving family and memories and a large place of his own in the world, as it is not so easy to see when you first meet anybody, especially your daughter’s suitor. He had not been provisional at all; he had been permanent. In time we saw that he was in fact the man Meg saw clearly when she met him in the café: good, kind, and if less worldly than many, more upright than most. No, there were not Kevins everywhere. We mourned him. For months after he was buried, with Meg staring into his book on the porch, I would have to say to Sam, “Dear, go a little easy with the sighing. It’s her loss.” And he could have said the same to me.

  “He was a son to us,” Sam would say, wiping his eyes.

  Lali comforted him. “It is so silly here that people say you are doing a good job when you do not weep.” Silly was the strongest ins
ult Lali would offer the United States. Yet in India her family was plotting every day to get her out of the clutches of this country. We had broken Lali of the word nation, though she had stood up to us, arguing gently that this was the only country, really, the word seemed to fit any more, not that that was an entirely good thing.

  Now we knew Lali, she was almost part of the family; we knew she was not the child she had seemed, but a thinker, in her amiable, pragmatic way, getting her degree in political science in hopes of working in an embassy. A smiling thinker. Unlike our daughter, who was a sober feeler. At any rate the United States loomed forbiddingly in the thinking of Lali’s family (“They are a bit less venturesome than I”), with its perilous cities and random mixing and licentious customs, as she reported, her accent deepening as she recited the warnings of her aunts. It was their immutable plan to lure her back to the chosen suitor, now past thirty and still waiting for his marriage to her.

  THE BABY WAS a beauty. Our grandson. He had his father’s well-shaped head and Meg’s soft, thick brown hair. He had an easy nature, like Meg, and an absorbed, tinkering, solving disposition, like Marcus.

  For she had found him again. Andrei, of all people, had suggested it, as a joke. When she had finally made it clear that she could not marry Andrei, he had packed up and gone back to L.A. He was working as a key grip while he made his own films; he had met a sound mixer who was comforting him. He still called Meg, and he called Sam and me to ask about her. He had become a man who took the time to call. He called to tell us to see obscure movies he had worked on, and then to tell us he was engaged.

  Meg had gone back to the farm near the airport, back to the porch. Marcus was not only there, he had twenty horses boarding and had resumed planting the fields he had let to the neighboring farm.

  It was spring. They walked in the fields and on into the woods where some of the horses liked to scratch themselves against trees. They climbed several fences. What were the steps over the fence, so perfectly fitted for climbing over? They were stiles. He had built them. Stiles. What were those big white flowers in the next field? Where? There, in the grass. He threw back his head and laughed.

  The laugh, Lali had said, is an attribute of the man, and if you delight in it, go forward.

  “Flowers! Those are calves.” He was still laughing, bent over with it. “Herefords. That’s their white faces.” The calves were lying down, hidden in the thick grass.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” Meg said.

  He remembered she had mentioned that. He had a good recall, it turned out, for everything she had said at that first meeting. He was ready to change many things, though the difficulty would be in changing himself. Never mind that, she said.

  Lali, before she said her tearful goodbyes and went back to India for her own marriage, sighed with admiration as she held our grandson on her lap. “Oh, someday, Meg, I will come back for this, and you must say you will do it: you will let me find him his bride.”

  Choice in Dreams

  MOLLY WAS HOPING to have a dream in which she didn’t disgrace herself, in which she got to be an innocent tourist. There would have been solace in seeing her parents alive again, in one of those dreams that accept grief as a kind of heavy, immovable scenery but scour it of the peeling paints, leaving the sweet bare wood. Or she would have liked to ride a horse, as she had done effortlessly in childhood dreams. Or to see her beloved high school boyfriend and tell him she’d changed her mind, she didn’t have to stay a virgin after all.

  So many choices in dreams. But instead of seeing her parents or riding a horse she dreamed the usual dream, the one saturated in shock, relief, delight, and shame. In the dream, she did what she had only dreamed of. In abandon and selfish joy, thinking all the while “At last!”—she did disgrace herself. She dreamed of Mike O’Meara.

  Awake, she turned over and pressed against her husband’s back, as if he might have looked in through the window of his own sleep at her acts with Mike.

  Why dream of someone else’s husband? A man whose wife dragged him out of bed on workdays because he couldn’t get up, he was hung over. A man who couldn’t fix the washer in a faucet and left his towel on the good bedroom furniture in their run-down house, pieces that had belonged to his wife Alice’s grandmother, because Alice came from a prominent family in their city, from one of the hilltop mansions of the philanthropic Catholic garrison, and Mike, a Catholic of a different sort, had carried her off. A man now bald, with legs atremble from chemo and radiation. A dead man. Is this a choice one would sensibly make, even in a dream?

  On the positive side, a man who adored children, who could give you the hour of birth and the distinctive biography of each of his five kids. A man who made his living writing about crime and had been seen to shed tears in the morgue. A man who put his arm around his wife when she was telling the story of how they had to get married when she got pregnant, a man who said, “Thank God things used to be that way,” and whose oldest, smiling son stood up at the table and took a bow. A man who went out on his own and bought his wife a garnet necklace he could not afford, because she loved red and all she had left, she said, was a good neck.

  MOLLY AND JEFF got to know Mike O’Meara when he was dying. Jeff knew him for some time before Molly ever met him, because he showed up one day at the hospital to interview Jeff for an article about a corpse, and they liked each other. Jeff was a pathologist and Mike needed anatomical details. They got along so well that Mike took to stopping by the Path lab whenever he felt like it.

  Eventually they took such a shine to each other that they made a plan to meet for dinner with their wives, and then the friendship of years began, beginning with the five Mike had left to live. He got his diagnosis soon after that first dinner, so almost all the time Molly was in love with him his death was on the way. She says “almost all the time” to herself because he seemed perfectly healthy the night they all crowded together into a booth and raised their glasses.

  This was the period when food was first being served in a mound. Even in bars—they were in Mike’s favorite bar—a plate arrived like a bed piled with coats. If you ordered fish you would have to go in with a fork tine and give a tug, disrupting the mashed potato in ruffs of chard, with slices of seared tuna forming praying hands on top. Jeff said it helped to be a pathologist. Alice was the first to plunge in and dismantle her pile, as Molly, laughing, picked up her fork without a thought and looked directly at Alice’s husband for the first time since they had sat down. All she had noticed as he slid into the booth and shook her hand were stooped shoulders and dark mussed hair, like his wife’s.

  At what exact point did she put down her wineglass and feel a flowing engagement with all that was going on in the bar, downstairs in the street, and beyond that on the waters of the Sound where ferries were passing with their lit windows, because she was looking at Mike O’Meara?

  A few weeks later, Mike served out the first of Alice’s casseroles with a big silver spoon that had belonged to her grandmother, and they began on their friendship. At the O’Meara table everybody interrupted and spilled things and sopped them up with the grandmother’s linen napkins and tilted back in the rickety chairs to laugh, distracted from whatever Alice was serving by the talk about crime and politics and religion, spun out of Mike’s pronouncements and backed up by Alice’s facts, and distracted too by each other—the three boys and two girls, the youngest already half grown, allowed from their earliest years to stay up late and shout their own opinions, or when they were older, to state them quietly with the irony of those newly back from college. And wine—Mike had to have a lot of wine, and Alice let him have it because she couldn’t stop him and she wasn’t one to fasten her hopes on somebody else’s improvement.

  Alice was a woman, Molly saw right away, in whose presence people including herself felt themselves amiable and worthy, at their best. Perhaps because of having been reared as she had been, in a kind of material and religious Oz, as Mike described it, and without seeming to will
the condition on herself, Alice lived in a state of approval. She had known Mike since they were first graders at Saint Joseph’s school. “She was the good girl,” he said. He looked at Molly. “I bet you were the good girl too.”

  “I was,” Molly said. “But not any more.” They all laughed, Jeff threw his arm in front of her to restrain her, and for a moment she was safe inside the tent of marriage.

  In the ninth grade, at a retreat in honor of the Blessed Virgin, Mike had handed Alice a joint and she had taken a deep drag.

  “That did it,” he said. “I was in love.”

  “In love,” Alice said with a sigh. “I was the one. I was the proverbial slave. I had a lot of penance to do. They had me pray for him. Wasn’t that smart?”

  “And then the families got involved,” Mike said. “I was too good for her.”

  Mike had not gone off to college when Alice did; he had skipped up a ladder of city jobs into the police department, where his way with witnesses and his regard for details worked their way into his file and landed him in Homicide. But he lost heart for the work. He knew something about crime, and because he could write, they took him on at the newspaper. You could do that then, hire on with promises instead of credentials.

  Even though eventually he wrote a syndicated column on crime and appeared every so often on TV, few people in town would have recognized Mike or known where to find him if they had something to say about a crime. He wasn’t at the paper, he was out and around, in courtrooms and jails and morgues. And bars, of course; he had a lot of drinking to do in the course of a day.

  Molly had seen the danger in liking Alice too much, but it was too late for that; in no time she and Alice were in and out of each other’s houses and Molly was reading through the youngest girl’s poems because she, Molly, had once published poems in magazines—though sometimes the four of them did not get together for months. As couples, they had the kind of friendship in which regularity and obligation were kept at bay. Jeff was always saying what good friends that made them.