The Forever Marriage (39 page)

Would a good mother stop her daughter from having sex in the house, and what would be her reasoning? Was it better to chase them outside to get it on in cars and fields and friends’ houses, the way Carmen’s parents had done? The answer was complicated by an ugly truth: Carmen was jealous. Her fundamental objection—which she admitted only to herself and the Jobe in her mind—was that her daughter had the privilege of feeling things that she, the mother, might never experience again. Heat, wetness, orgasm. It was weird and distasteful to compare their sex lives this way. Carmen wished she wasn’t doing it. But there was no getting around the fact that Siena had something she wanted. And not only was Carmen’s body like something made of popsicle sticks, but Danny seemed to be gone.

He had not contacted her since the night he walked out of the attic. And to be fair, she had not contacted him. Instead she concentrated her energy on eating, reading, drawing, and sitting with the kids during the odd hours when they ended up at home. The first thing that she allowed to break her routine was the email she received the afternoon before her third chemo session was scheduled to take place.

“Plane from Athens does arrive 3 p.m. tomorrow at BWI airport. Will you be picking up?” It was signed with the initials AM.

She called Olive first. “I’m assuming AM is Althea Markos. Did you arrange this?”

“No, dear. I gave your friend my credit card number and told him to charge a flight. I’m assuming he did. Why don’t you ask him?”

Why didn’t she?
Because despite crow’s-feet and cancer she was still, essentially, sixteen years old. And this broke basic rules: calling
the boyfriend who’d dumped her. She could not bear to give him the satisfaction.

After saying good-bye to Olive, Carmen sat for a few minutes.
Be a grown-up
, she told herself and solicited support from Jobe. But he was maddeningly silent. Finally, Carmen dialed Danny’s number, barely breathing. She pictured him holding his cell phone and watching her name pop up on the screen, shaking his head and pressing End.

“Hello?” She was so surprised to hear him answer, she forgot what she’d been intending to say. “Car, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m just … I got this email today, from that woman, the Greek.” This was so jerky and cryptic. Why didn’t communicating with men get easier as you aged? “I’m calling because Olive said. She thought you were the one who arranged this and we should … talk.”

“Yeah, I did. Listen”—he dropped his voice—“can I call you back?”

“Sure,” she said, and the line went dead.

Hours passed and she had finally reconciled herself to the fact that Danny wouldn’t call back (that he would never, in fact, call again) when her phone rang.

“Sorry. Jesus. I hate this. But I told Mega everything and things are, well, worse.” Danny broke off and Carmen reached for something to say, but nothing came. “I’ve only got a couple minutes,” he went on, and she felt a stab of righteous anger—she’d given him hours at a time back when she was still married, even while her husband lay dying—but held herself in check. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot about sending that ticket, what with everything else. But yeah, I talked to her, Althea, and she said she’d come look through Jobe’s papers. The interesting thing was, she seemed to know what I was talking about even before I said it. I mean, she wasn’t surprised to hear the solution to Riemann might be there.”

He’d sounded like the old Danny for a minute, the one who breathed into the phone and talked about licking her until she came. Carmen was caught by this, briefly hopeful. “So what’s the plan? I’d
be happy to pick her up but I have chemo tomorrow morning, and given what happened last time—”

Danny cut in: “Christ.” There was a long dead pause and Carmen wondered if he’d hung up.

“You still there?”

“Yeah, I’m just …” His voice was low, furtive. “I’m thinking. I’m supposed to be at an all-day off-site, and I’ve already missed so much work.” Again, there was silence. “Okay, how about we do this? If you can, you pick her up. And if you absolutely can’t, call me. Or have someone else call me—Olive. I’ll make some excuse.”

This was not satisfying. It felt transactional, like a patched-together carpool arrangement made between distant coworkers. Carmen waited but he said nothing else. “Alright,” she said. “And Danny?”

“What?”

She filled her lungs with air, with pride. “I hope everything works out.” Even she had no idea what she meant by that.
Works out for whom?
But it made her feel better to say it.

When Danny answered, however, she knew this, too, had been a mistake. His tone was even more questioning and miserable, packing infinite discontent into a single word. “Thanks,” he said.

When she arrived at the clinic for chemo the following morning, Carmen was, for the first time, showed into a private spot.

“Your doctor’s office phoned ahead to say you had a severe reaction to the last treatment,” said the nurse as she ushered Carmen and Jana into a stall with a curtain, if no door. “So we’re going to keep an extra little eye on you today.”

If anything, privacy prolonged the treatment. Carmen waited more than half an hour for someone to come in and insert her IV—and this only after Jana stepped out to remind the staff. “So very sorry, ma’am, I forgot you were in here,” said the lovely Jamaican girl who had tamped the needle into Carmen’s hand. Her skin was the
color of dark chocolate, her lips full as ripe peaches, her hair streaked with gold. When she left, the girl was all Jana could talk about.

“Stunning,” she said for the third time. “But I couldn’t get good radar on her. What do you think? Straight? Bi?”

Carmen was oddly hurt yet amused by her own reaction.
I really do think I’m the center of the universe, don’t I?
she commented to her internal Jobe.

For the first hour, she lay back and pretended to sleep while Jana paged through a magazine and opened the curtain periodically to check for the lush figure of the Jamaican girl. Carmen waited, expecting the poisons to roil inside her and rise up suddenly, causing her to have a heart attack or begin retching blood. But nothing had happened for more than a day last time, she reminded herself. And eventually she gave in, not relaxing so much as resigning herself. Another round of severe dehydration could put her in real danger, Dr. Woo had said at their appointment yesterday. She was to call him the moment something happened. She touched the cell phone at her hip in which she’d programmed his pager number. That was all that could be done.

“So what’s up with you and Danny?” Jana asked suddenly.

Carmen peeked out from under her eyelids. “Absolutely nothing, why?”

“I don’t know. I just thought you were getting into a pretty deep conversation that night. I guess I kind of wondered what happened, why he left so fast.”

Carmen wished that one of them was a knitter. It had been so much easier talking to Glen’s wife while her eyes were on her yarn. “He dumped me,” Carmen said, holding her face as still as plaster so Jana wouldn’t see even a twitch of pain. “Okay, it wasn’t exactly like that. There was a lot of stuff about his marriage and how he’s trying to do the right thing. But basically, that’s the gist. He’s gone.”

“And you’re okay with this?” Jana’s eyes narrowed in. She saw. It didn’t matter how blasé Carmen tried to be.

She sighed and let go of the last of her false indifference. It was
a relief, as with Danny when she had allowed her blouse to slip down and her scar to show. “No, of course I’m not okay with it. But I keep telling myself this is exactly what I deserve. It’s like you said a couple months ago: I was supposed to be the good-time girl. No complications, just sex. But then my husband died, I got sick. And to top it all off, I got ugly. Skinny and bald. I suppose that’s what I deserve, taking up with a younger guy. I probably look like his”—she gulped before saying a word so terrible—“mother.”

For once Jana was hesitant, her words thought out. “I’ll admit, you do look different.” She glanced at Carmen, checking for a reaction. “Beat up and strung out and not so much old as, well, a little like an alien.”

Carmen’s neck burned from shame. She poured a glass of water from the plastic pitcher at her side and took small sips.

“But.” Jana raised one warning finger. The Rastafarian school-marm. “I think you’re selling the guy short. I don’t get the feeling this is about your hair or your …” She motioned up and down Carmen’s half-reclining form. “You know, the way you are.”

“Excuse me?” Carmen struggled to appear powerful and indignant, which was hard while she was tethered like a trapped animal. “This is a guy with a blow-up doll for a wife. Besides, wasn’t it you who predicted he would run for the hills the minute I was diagnosed?”

“Yeah, well, I hadn’t met him yet. I was wrong.”

I was wrong
. It echoed in Carmen’s mind. Twice in the past few weeks someone had told her this, when for decades she’d assumed that it was she alone who kept doing things wrong.

“Look at it this way.” Jana parted the curtain and peered out for a couple of seconds then snapped back. “Blow-up dolls are only good for one thing. Maybe Danny can’t get a jones on for his gorgeous wife.”

Carmen had closed her eyes again and the chair felt airborne. Like dying, but in a good way. “Funny,” she murmured. “That would be the one thing Mega and I have in common.” The next second, everything came horribly sharp and clear.
Had she really said
that out loud?
Dammit. She hadn’t meant to. “Anyway,” she said, opening her eyes, desperate to move on. “How do you know Danny doesn’t … ?”

“Wait a minute. What did you mean by that?” Jana was staring. “Are you talking about you and Jobe?”

Inside, Carmen was apologizing as if she was praying. Despite Rory and Danny, all those clandestine meetings, this felt like an unforgivable betrayal—even though Jobe had been dead for nearly half a year. She weighed her answer carefully. “My own husband,” Carmen finally said, “wasn’t able to.” She swallowed. “I mean, there were times when it worked. But for the most part Jobe just didn’t seem, uh, turned on by me. In the slightest. He couldn’t …”

“Are you telling me he had erectile dysfunction?” Jana cried, and Carmen imagined the question slipping out under the curtain, bouncing around the room full of dying people. She grinned briefly, then sobered and nodded. “Eight times out of ten. We barely ever. You know. It’s a miracle we had three kids.”

“Christ, it must be absolute hell to be a man.” Jana knotted her forehead, concentrating. “You know what I think? I think Jobe loved you completely—enough to leave you the goddamn key to the mathematical kingdom—and the whole sex thing … Well.” Jana looked up at the ceiling. “You were pretty attractive in your heyday but let’s face it, you were also kind of a narcissistic twit.”

Carmen stared. “This is supposed to be helping build my self-esteem, right? It’s really hard to tell.”

Jana laughed and leaned down to hug Carmen roughly. “See? That’s why I keep you around no matter how big a twit you can be.”

They settled back into their respective spots, like actors returning to their places onstage. Several minutes went by before Carmen broke the silence.

“I’ve always wondered,” she said, then caught herself in the lie. “No, that’s not true. I’ve only just now thought: It’s possible I would have grown to love Jobe, exactly the way Olive said I would, if we’d just kept at it.”

Jana cocked an eyebrow.

“Stop it. I didn’t mean it that way.” Carmen looked down at the crook of her arm, delicate skin bruised purple and green. “Or maybe I did. But the way we were with each other, it became like a habit. And I wonder if somehow we’d have found a way to
touch
each other, you know—literally. Instead of always being so distant and formal.”

Carmen thought back to the night of her flu, Jobe’s long hand stroking her hair. And a third path unfolded in her imagination: an alternate world in which she moved toward him and he slid his arms around her. Where she was held in the space just under his chin, not just on that long-ago winter night but for years afterward and even now.

“I think—and please don’t tell me it’s too late, because I know that—but I really think I could have.” She paused, startled. There was something at the back of her head, an inexplicable softness cupping her raw and fragile skull. “Fallen in love with him,” she finished in a low tone.

Jana eyed Carmen in a challenging way. “Maybe it’s not too late,” she said. Then she tilted her chair onto its back legs and sat precariously tipped against the wall with her arms crossed.

By the time the nurse finally came to remove Carmen’s IV—sadly, for Jana, not the Jamaican but a fretful gray-haired woman—nothing had happened. Carmen considered each part of herself but felt no more light-headed or ill than she had walking through the door. “You call the minute there’s a problem,” the nurse said, looking at Carmen with dour eyes. Even this did not faze her.

“I think I’m fine.” Carmen turned her face to the sun as they walked out of the building. “You can drop me off at home and go back to the café. I know you need to. I’ll pick up Althea myself.”

“Are you sure? Maybe I should go. Maybe”—she turned to Carmen, leering—“Althea is some hot Greek lesbian. Did you ever think of that?”

“No. I never did,” Carmen said. “Tell you what, assuming I don’t die in the next couple days, I’ll invite you over for dinner. You can figure it out for yourself.”

Jana stood on the curb, suddenly serious, assessing Carmen. “Are you sure? I mean, you look fine now….”

“As fine as an alien can.”

“Exactly. But something could happen. This afternoon. Will you call me?”

“Yes.” Carmen took Jana’s arm, like old ladies do, to cross the street. And Jana let her. “I will call if I need you,” she said.

As they crossed to the metered spot Jana had run out three times to fill, Carmen tightened her grip. For the first time in her life, the idea of someday becoming that doddering old widow who clutched at her friend’s elbow didn’t seem so bad.

Carmen waited outside the airport terminal in almost the exact same spot where Jobe had sat in his BMW on that scorching day that she first arrived.