The Amateur Marriage Page 25

  Pagan groused about the choice of songs—couldn’t it be something the whole world hadn’t done to death?—and he said the singer had a whiny voice. But obviously this was an honor. (The only other guitar student was relegated to a ragtag group playing background music for Troilus and Cressida.) He spent the weekend before the concert practicing almost nonstop, sitting in a C shape on Michael’s couch with his head bent so low that his face was completely hidden. “I’m going the-ere . . .” he sang, breaking on the high note. Michael got the tune stuck in his head, and during the week that followed he seemed to hear it, forlorn and wistful, while he was reading over invoices or fielding a call from a customer.

  Every one of the Antons planned to attend—not just Michael and Pauline but George and Sally and their two little ones, and Karen if she didn’t have to work late. Knowing this made Michael nervous. It would be the first time his family saw him and Anna as a couple. But he did want them to see; he wanted them to know that she was important to him. So when Anna asked if he preferred that she come in a separate car, he said, “Absolutely not. I’ll pick you up at seven.” And when they arrived at the school, nearly half an hour early, he led her to the very front row of folding chairs.

  The assembly room must once have been a parlor. The tiny plywood stage had a tacked-on look, and the few spotlights were clamped precariously to a mahogany picture rail. Around the perimeter, students’ paintings were propped on easels—version after version of the woods behind the school, as well as several still lifes of summer squash and cantaloupes.

  Anna was telling Michael about the student who would be playing the piano solo—how petrified he was, how he had forbidden his family to attend, how yesterday he had threatened to back out. She was wearing a dressy black dress and heels. It was nice of her, Michael thought, to have made the effort.

  Others began filing in—parents, grandparents, small children. A girl in a leotard peeked out of the door at stage left. A woman in a muumuu rushed past with an armload of binders.

  Then Pauline said, “Oh, here you are!”

  She stopped in front of Michael, with Karen just behind her. She wore a white blouse and a flowered skirt, her hair was freshly tinted and styled, and her bright red lipstick matched her red button earrings. Karen, on the other hand, was her usual frumpy self in faded jeans and a Greenpeace T-shirt. She waited stolidly, her round, bespectacled face resigned, while Pauline prattled on. “All I can say is, I’m glad tonight finally got here. One more chorus of ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ thrum-thrum-thrumming away and I swore I’d—hello, Anna! I didn’t see you! Karen, did you ever meet my friend Anna Grant, I mean Stuart? I’ve been meaning to call and thank you, Anna. The Maestro School has been—”

  She broke off. She turned from Anna back to Michael. Her eyes grew wide and startled.

  What had she seen, though? They certainly weren’t holding hands or anything like that. They weren’t sitting unusually close; their shoulders weren’t even touching. But all at once Pauline got a slapped look, and her mouth snapped shut, and she wheeled away—flung herself away, so that her purse flew out on its strap—and plunged toward the rear of the room. Karen said “Mom?” and sent Michael a dumbfounded glance before she followed.

  Anna raised her eyebrows at Michael, but just then the muumuu woman caroled, “Welcome, all!” in a joyous, ringing voice from the stage, and the two of them had to face forward. Michael didn’t hear what the woman said after that. He was conscious only of Pauline watching him from somewhere in the rows behind. He felt his neck was turning to wood from the strain of sitting motionless, neither leaning toward Anna nor drawing away from her, keeping his eyes front and center.

  The program passed in a blur of white-stockinged limbs and toe shoes, squeaky clarinets, young boys in pasted-on beards, and, yes, somewhere among all these, Pagan’s black bowl of hair bent over his guitar and his nimble fingers plucking chords without a mishap while a girl sang “Wayfaring Stranger” in a voice that wasn’t whiny in the least. But all Michael thought of was restraining himself from swiveling around to search for Pauline in the audience.

  Anyhow, he wouldn’t have found her.

  She’d gone straight home, evidently. Or straight somewhere, clear out of the building, because when the muumuu woman returned to the stage, applauding with just her fingertips, and announced that refreshments would be served in the solarium, Pauline was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Karen. The only Antons were George and Sally, seated at the rear in case one of their children caused a disturbance. Jojo clung to Sally’s arm, and Samantha was asleep in her lap. “Good job, kiddo!” George said, rising to give Pagan’s hair a tousle, and then he asked Michael, “Where’s Mom?”

  “Wasn’t she sitting with you?”

  “Haven’t seen a sign of her.”

  “Well, she . . . must have left early, I guess,” Michael said. “Karen must have driven her home.” He let a suitable interval pass and then he said, “George, Sally, I’d like to introduce Anna Stuart.”

  “How do, Anna,” George said pleasantly.

  But it was Sally who truly looked at Anna, and then looked back at Michael before saying, “It’s good to meet you.”

  “I believe George and I met once before,” Anna said. “But that was thirty-some years ago; so I’m not surprised he’s forgotten.”

  “Oh, you’re a friend of the family?” Sally asked her.

  “From long ago. I went to high school with Pauline.”

  Michael could see that Sally was trying to pu2zle this out, but she asked no further questions.

  Of course they couldn’t skip the refreshments. And of course they had to thank Mr. Britt, and smile through a dozen compliments from various parents and then try to figure out whose parents so the compliments could be repaid. Michael’s face started aching. He wondered if there was any end to this.

  But finally they were free to go. He and Anna and Pagan stepped out into the blessedly quiet night and located Michael’s car. It was far enough from downtown so that stars shone by the thousands. Michael wished he could bring Anna home with him. But since it was a Friday, he would have to deliver her to her door and then take Pagan on back to the apartment.

  Pagan was unusually talkative, no doubt from relief. He asked Anna, “Could you tell that I was nervous when I started?” and “Did you notice I came in a little late on the second chorus?”

  “You did wonderfully,” Anna told him. “It was a really fine performance.”

  Michael drove in silence through the blackness of Falls Road. He’d been an idiot to imagine that Pauline would have known and said nothing.

  Now all at once it seemed everyone knew; everyone had an opinion. Wanda Lipska asked why he kept falling for Protestants, and Karen said the least he could have done was give Pauline a little warning, and Pagan (all at once aware of the implications, evidently) grew tongue-tied and evasive every time Anna showed up at Michael’s apartment. George volunteered that Anna seemed like an okay lady, but Pauline’s sister Sherry called her a Jezebel. “It’s an accepted fact that friends don’t steal friends’ husbands,” she said. Sally wondered if Michael might like to bring Anna to dinner sometime, though not of course when the children were awake in case they told Pauline; so maybe they ought to just go to a restaurant instead. Leo Kazmerow said he was glad as hell to hear Michael had stopped living like a monk. Then the staff at the store got wind of things—how, Michael couldn’t say—and traded conspiratorial smiles whenever he left work early, inquired slyly about his weekend, asked who’d picked out that new shirt for him.

  But what was there to know, really? He and Anna had not discussed their feelings for each other. They certainly weren’t sleeping together—nowhere near it. Maybe they were just good friends who happened to sit extra close and kissed goodbye when they parted. Was that the way Anna saw it?

  In his shaving mirror he practiced: “Anna, our relationship has begun to mean a lot to me.” No: “You have begun to—” What a stilted phrase, “mean a
lot.” Was he capable of “I love you”?

  Whenever she was due to come over he changed his sheets and tidied the bedroom, although she had not set foot there since viewing his pictures. And was he capable of that? The only woman he’d ever had sex with was Pauline, less and less frequently the last few years of their marriage. He didn’t know how people instigated these things. Ask straight out? Just proceed unless stopped? When he and Anna kissed, her mouth was soft and pliant but her lips stayed closed. He let his hand rest on her rib cage, high enough under her arm so that he could feel the stitching along the edge of her brassiere, but she never made that subtle shift of position that would bring his fingers closer to her breast. She gave no hint of wanting anything more from him than what they already had, and he supposed this was significant, in someone ordinarily so direct and confident.

  Maybe he should just give up before he made a fool of himself.

  Early in October, Mrs. Brunek from the old neighborhood phoned to say that Mrs. Serge had died. “I know you still looked in on her,” she said, “so I thought you should be told. She passed peacefully in her sleep, we think. Her daughter-in-law found her when she stopped by with the day’s groceries. The viewing’s from three to five today and the funeral’s tomorrow at ten.”

  “Well, thank you,” Michael said. “I’ll certainly be at the funeral.”

  “Ask Pauline if she’d like to come too,” Mrs. Brunek said.

  But Pauline, when he called her, said no. She did have a job, she pointed out. She couldn’t skip merrily out of the office anytime anyone died. Mrs. Serge was not just anyone; she’d lived next door to them the first seven years of their marriage. Michael suspected that this had more to do with Anna. Pauline had hardly said a civil word to him since the night she’d seen the two of them together. She’d reverted to the bitter, blaming tone of the days just after they separated. His tactic was the same now as then; he pretended not to notice. “Oh, all right,” he said. “I’ll just convey your condolences, then.”

  “I am perfectly able to convey my own condolences,” Pauline said icily.

  “Good enough. So long!”

  He hung up. Then, without stopping to consider his motives, he called Anna and invited her instead.

  Anna had barely met Mrs. Serge. In fact, he was impressed that the name meant anything to her. “I don’t think I’ve seen her since your wedding,” she said, “but she was such a sweet person. I remember she brought a present bigger than she was!”

  “An epergne,” Michael said.

  “A what?”

  “A foot-high plaster slave boy holding two plates to put pastries on.”

  “My,” Anna said.

  “I guess I just want your company. It’s always so depressing going back to the old neighborhood. Everything’s falling apart or torn down and there’s only a handful of people left that I used to know. But I realize tomorrow’s a school day. I just thought maybe, on the off chance—”

  “It’s the day I don’t have morning classes, though,” Anna said. “Could I be back by one o’clock?”

  “I guarantee it.”

  “Then I’ll come.”

  After he had hung up, he told himself that she must like him a little more than she would just a friend, or why would she have said yes to this? Then he felt ashamed that he was viewing poor Mrs. Serge’s death as an opportunity for a date.

  He wore black to the funeral and so did Anna, he was pleased to see. St. Cassian’s people put stock in such things. It was a beautiful fall day, crisp and brilliantly sunny, and Michael had allowed enough time to swing by the old store on their way. A mistake, he realized as soon as he turned the corner. That the building had gone from groceries to liquor to secondhand clothing he already knew; he was braced for the sight of bleach-spotted housedresses and brittle, crumpled work boots in the window. But today the window was covered over with brown paper, and a hand-lettered For Sale sign was tacked to the door. He pulled up to the curb and peered more closely. On the second floor—uninhabited for years now, probably used for storage—yellowed paper shades gave the windows a sightless look. “Oh, what a pity,” Anna said.

  “I’m just glad my mother can’t see this,” he told her.

  “It seems smaller than it used to, doesn’t it?” she asked. “I know everybody says that about places they go back to, but this seems tiny. It’s hard to believe people found all the groceries there they needed, once upon a time.”

  “Well, they didn’t need as much, in those days,” Michael said. “Or as much variety, at least.”

  As he drove on toward the church, he reflected on his store in the suburbs, with its sense of space and light. Sometimes he looked around at the merchandise—the English water biscuits, Spanish olives, French mustards in their cunning blue-and-white pottery jugs—and he felt as if the place were not really his. He felt deceitful and pretentious. Although of course it had all been his idea. Pauline might have been the one to urge the move, but it was he who’d had the vision of something higher-quality to suit the tenor of their new neighborhood.

  He parked behind the elementary school but then sat there with his hands on the wheel. Anna sent him a questioning look, and he told her, “Last Christmas, I drove downtown to give Eustace his usual Christmas envelope. Do you remember Eustace? No, I don’t guess you would—colored guy who used to work for me at the old place. He retired when I sold it but we still keep in touch. So I knocked on his door and this young fellow answered—big frizzy hairdo, African-print gown or smock or whatever hanging out over his jeans. I said, ‘Is Eustace here?’ He said, ‘Who wants to know?’ I said, ‘Only his old employer, come to give him his Christmas envelope.’ He said, ‘He don’t want your envelope!’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He said, ‘Get away from here with your envelope!’ Then I heard Eustace somewhere at the back of the house. He was calling, ‘Who’s that, Jimmy? Jimmy, who’s there?’ but this young fellow said to me, ‘Who do you think you are, anyhow, coming round here with your envelopes?’ and he shut the door in my face. I don’t know if it was just him who felt that way or Eustace too. But I surely didn’t mean any harm! I’d been bringing that envelope for years; Eustace always just thanked me politely!”

  Anna said, “Well. Times change, I guess.”

  “They certainly do,” he told her.

  Then he sighed and opened his door.

  Times had changed at the church, too. He could see that as soon as they entered. Oh, physically it was the same—dim and glimmery, smelling of wax candles—but only the very oldest mourners were in black. The others had on every color of the rainbow, clothes they’d never have dreamed of wearing to church in his youth—T-shirts, polo shirts, khakis, sneakers. Wanda Lipska walked down the aisle dressed for a yachting trip, it looked like, in a navy blazer and white pants. Leo Kazmerow, seated one pew ahead, wore an electric-blue nylon windbreaker, and when he turned to say hello, Michael saw the emblem of a gasoline additive emblazoned on his chest pocket. “Mikey boy,” Leo said. “Look who’s here, hon,” and he nudged his wife, whom Michael had not at first recognized because she’d put on so much weight. Her back had grown as broad and beefy as a truck driver’s, and her hair—a harsh, artificial brown—was the consistency of cotton candy, so puffed up that he could see air through every wisp.

  He would have introduced Anna, or reintroduced her, but just then the service started. A priest he’d never seen before stepped up to the altar and the organ changed its tone of voice, after which six weedy young boys wheeled a gleaming casket forward. These must be Mrs. Serge’s grandsons. Michael seemed to recall that Joey had had a whole swarm of children.

  Anna sat just close enough for him to feel the warmth of her arm and the slight motion of her breathing. At some point, she placed her hand next to his and he took hold of it, gratefully, and folded his fingers around it. His thoughts wandered to an evening the week before when she was leaving his apartment and he had said, “Don’t go,” and she had said, “Stay?” and he had said, “Stay.”
And for a moment it had seemed that she might, because she smiled at him so seriously. But then she’d leaned forward to kiss his cheek—not his lips but his cheek—and said good night and left. He wished now he hadn’t been so forward. He hoped he hadn’t ruined things.

  At the end of the service, when Leo’s wife turned to resume their conversation, he had to resist the impulse to drop Anna’s hand like a hot potato. In this neighborhood he was still a guilty, furtive boy. And when Mrs. Brunek said, “Give my love to Pauline, hear? That poor, poor woman, having to raise her grandson all on her own,” he hunched his shoulders stoically and made no effort to defend himself.

  It was barely past eleven o’clock; the service had been a short one. “Didn’t I promise you’d be back in plenty of time?” he asked Anna as they descended the steps. They weren’t going on to the cemetery. “We can have a bite to eat, even. Shall I take you out to lunch?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll grab something at home,” she said. “There’s a lot I’d like to get done before I go to school.”

  This was the kind of thing that kept him off balance. Didn’t he have a lot to get done? But he would gladly have postponed everything for Anna’s sake. Anna, evidently, didn’t feel the same way.

  He was quiet on the drive to her house. Anna glanced at him from time to time, but she didn’t comment.

  On the off ramp from I-83, merging onto Northern Parkway, they were crowded to one side by a speeding sports car. Michael had taken note of the car several minutes before. He already knew the driver was a maniac. So he slid over easily, without any sense of emergency. Anna, though, was less prepared. She flinched, and then she laughed at herself. “Sorry,” she told Michael.

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  They reached Falls Road and he turned left. He was replaying her reaction in his mind—her sharp intake of breath and her involuntary recoil. Always before she’d sat so calmly, the most relaxed and uninvolved passenger. She had never so much as pressed her brake foot to the floor.