The Marriage Pact (1) (17 page)

She
hung up, grateful for her father’s interference as usual. Ahead, she could see
the outline of Jake’s face in the truck’s side mirror, and noticed he was
singing along to the radio. It was the first time all day that she smiled. It
felt good.

A
week after they had signed their “contract,” Jake had received a late
acceptance letter to film school at NYU, where he had been waitlisted since the
middle of freshman year. He had come to Marci and Suzanne’s apartment in person
to tell them he was leaving before the start of the fall quarter.

He’d
be missing football season at Georgia for the next two years, which his parents
thought a most tragic compromise, but they had agreed to support him in New
York anyway. In return, he’d promised to come home for Thanksgiving and go to
the Georgia-Georgia Tech game with his father. He was also planning to be home
for the longer, if slightly less religious, break at Christmas.

As
he broke the news to the girls, Marci saw that he was making an effort to
control his excitement out of consideration for those who would be left behind.
He was going right into the documentary film program, because he had already
completed most of his core classes. The admissions lady mentioned that the
committee had been particularly impressed with his sample submission—a film
he’d made last year about an Athens musician and former heroin addict who was
living with AIDS.

For
her part, Marci had always thought the film was one of the most amazing things
she’d ever seen, so at least the people at NYU knew what they were talking
about. She felt intensely proud of Jake, and shared his excitement, despite the
fact that somewhere in the distance she could hear the very small sound of her
heart breaking. Suzanne, on the other hand, expressed with vigor many
sentiments Marci was holding in by grilling Jake aggressively. How long had he
known this? Was he sure he had to go? Wasn’t the film program at Georgia just as
good? What on earth were they supposed to do without him for the next two
years?

He
endured the inquisition patiently, and by the rehearsed nature of some of his
answers, Marci wondered whether Jake’s mother had asked the same questions.
When Suzanne had finally decided that he could not be prevailed upon to stay in
Athens and stopped ranting, he turned to Marci and looked at her for a minute
without speaking. Her heart raced, and she felt that what was passing between
them in the silence was something like this:

I’m
happy to go, but sad to leave you.

I
know. I’m devastated, but also so excited for you.

If
I were staying here, maybe...

Yes,
maybe.

What
Jake said aloud, however, was: “Are you going to be okay?”

So
much for imagined conversations. He said it with a tone of genuine concern, but
Marci could not see past the fact that Jake thought
she
would not be
okay without
him
. What about him? Was he going to be okay? Or was it so
obvious that because he was handsome and funny and going to live his dream in
New York that he would be fine, and that she was the one who’d be left behind
in this little college town to pine away for him?

“Of
course I will,” she said, a little too brightly. “Truck will take care of me.”

She
regretted immediately bringing up Travis. Jake’s face fell and he murmured
something that sounded like “Yeah, right.”

Marci
tried damage control. “I really am very excited for you,” she said, crossing
the room to hug him tightly. “And we will miss you terribly. We’re just going
to have to pack lots of fun into the next couple of weeks, okay?”

He
patted her back before releasing her. “Thanks,” he said. He seemed to mean it.

Looking
back, Marci remembered very little about the following two weeks. The reality
of finishing the summer quarter, transferring schools, and preparing to move to
New York meant that Jake was busy more or less all the time. When he did have
time to meet the three girls out for a drink or dinner, they spent most of the
time talking about NYU’s famous professors and their credits, classes he was
struggling to decide between, and films he needed to see before the first day
for some reason.

They
looked at maps of the city and pictures of the campus and lists of Broadway
shows. They promised to visit before the end of his first year—spring break,
perhaps—and he would show them the town. They listened to the catalog of film
equipment he needed to buy, everything from cameras and filters to microphones
and spotlights. They helped him load boxes into two trucks: one that he was
driving north; the other going home with his dad because even his tiny space in
the shared Athens apartment was more spacious than campus living at NYU. And he
was gone.

They
saw him once at Thanksgiving and twice at Christmas, for cheap dinners out that
provided relief from all the concentrated time with their families. He flew
back to New York for New Year’s Eve in Times Square with his new friends, while
Suzanne and Marci somehow got roped into helping chaperone Nicole and her high
school friends, who had a fairly tame little party.

Marci
had somehow lingered in her sickly relationship with Travis until early
December, having attempted to break up with him more than once, and discovering
that for someone called Truck, he was more sensitive than one would expect.
He’d become annoying and clingy in a way that was far from attractive, but she
couldn’t bring herself to end it. Perhaps even the worst relationship was
better than none for keeping her mind off Jake. Or maybe she held out hope that
he would come out of his whiney funk and be the fun, slightly arrogant guy
she’d met at the pizza parlor months before.

Perhaps
it was coincidence, then, that Marci finally ended it after their reunion
dinner with Jake at Thanksgiving, or maybe his presence had reminded her that
she could do better than Travis the Truck. In any case, Jake’s obvious
disappointment that Travis was still in her life had been just the tiniest bit
gratifying, ashamed as she was to admit it. Still, it was time to end it, and
open herself up for worthier options.

By
Christmas, however, Jake reported that he was seeing an art student named
Renee, who he described as “Bohemian,” a word that meant nothing to Marci. When
they visited Jake at spring break, they discovered that it meant she wore no
makeup and cat-eye glasses, and talked through their dinner at a Vietnamese
restaurant about Marxism and the oppression of the working class. She and Jake
fed each other noodles with chopsticks while Suzanne and Marci rolled their
eyes at each other and tried to focus on their dumplings and rice.

Later
that night, Marci piled couch cushions on her head and prayed for a fire alarm
as she tried not to listen to the
decidedly
Bohemian noises coming from
Jake’s tiny bedroom, where Renee had insisted on staying the night despite the
presence of his out-of-town guests. “I guess
that’s
what he sees in
her,” Suzanne hissed in the darkness beneath the moaning and panting, answering
the silent question they had both been asking themselves all evening. Marci
didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or throw up.

Outside
Renee’s presence, however, Jake was his usual affectionate and considerate
self. Marci expected the next day to be awkward between them, but either Jake felt
no such discomfort, or he was making a tremendous effort to block it out with
flirty jokes and seamless conversation. It was so...normal. They might’ve been
back in Athens, before their hook-up, or anything else. It didn’t take long for
Marci to feel comfortable again in spite of her expectations. With no little
effort, she closed Renee and the chopsticks and the sex noises into a tiny
cavern in her brain and sealed the opening.

This
pattern continued over the decade that followed. They saw less of Jake during
senior year because everyone was busy trying to graduate, and no one was
surprised when he got a scholarship offer to stay on for graduate school.
Meanwhile, Marci took her English degree straight back to her parents’ house
and got a job in the lingerie department at a department store. Suzanne took
her résumé and her high heels to every museum in town, eventually snagging a
job as an assistant to the special events coordinator at the High Museum of
Art.

“It’s
not related to art
exactly
,” she explained to Marci over their weekly
Saturday coffee date, “but at least I get to work in the museum. It’s a foot in
the door.”

“Hey,
at least you’re not spending your life looking at people in their underwear and
trying to get bras back on those stupid plastic hangers,” Marci countered. “I
don’t have my foot in any door except the dressing room.”

A
few months after graduation, a regular customer suggested that Marci try a temp
agency if she wanted more regular hours with better pay. She jotted down the
name of a friend who worked in staffing on the back of a receipt paper strip,
and in a couple of weeks Marci had entered the world of answering phones,
sorting files, and being referred to by nearly everyone as “the temp.” She
learned to buy panty hose on sale and keep a bottle of clear nail polish in her
purse for runs. She brought a tiny notebook with her to every assignment so she
could write during the inevitable down times.

She
learned when to finish work quickly and ask for the next assignment and when to
drag things out a little so the person in charge of her that day wouldn’t try
to come up with something ridiculous “to make the most of you being here.” Some
people knew how to manage staff: they used her time well, treated her
respectfully, and allowed her to go home with a full day’s pay if she finished
her job at 3:30 or 4:00. For others, bossing around the temp was a first tiny
taste of power to be relished, and if you weren’t careful with them you’d end
up at the end of a day sorting all the items in a supply closet by color, or
cleaning some unknown sticky mess out of a refrigerator.

What
she loved about temping was the constant change. She got to meet lots of people
and experience various working environments up close and personal without
commitment. Not being too invested in the work gave her freedom. She could
leave at 5:00 and not think about work again until she returned the next
morning. Social pressure to hang out with coworkers at lunch was minimal, so
she would find a tree-lined spot to park her car, eat a sandwich, and write. At
night, she went home to her parents’ house and sacked away savings for her
secret dream...to move away from Atlanta and find her true self somewhere out
West.

She
heard from Jake fairly often, usually by e-mail. He came home from New York
once or twice a year and they would get together, typically with Suzanne and
Rebecca, plus whomever anyone was dating at the moment. Suzanne always seemed
to have someone different on her arm, and rarely bothered introducing them to
Marci, much less bringing them to make stilted conversation with Jake on his
visits. Rebecca, on the other hand, had been dating the same guy, Dennis, since
her spring formal senior year. Apparently Greek life was paying off for
Rebecca.

Marci
dated sporadically, usually men she met at her assignments: a young lawyer who
somehow also played semi-pro tennis, a human resource manager who didn’t call
her until her assignment ended to avoid sexual harassment charges, even a car
salesman she’d met while filling in for the dealership’s receptionist while out
on maternity leave. She never saw anyone for more than a few weeks, though. She
had a plan to run away from home, and a desire to be free to do it in the way
that suited her, not full of compromises with someone else.

Jake
didn’t talk much about his love life after Renee, who had left New York after
senior year for graduate school in Wisconsin. He didn’t seem terribly upset
about the loss, but Marci didn’t probe, either. Maybe a better friend would
have encouraged him to talk about his feelings, but there were some things she
just didn’t want to know. Despite his silence on the subject of dating, Marci
guessed that he was seeing people periodically, based on the timing and content
of his e-mails or rather, what he left
out
of e-mails. She wondered
whether perhaps her discomfort about Renee had shown, and that Jake was sparing
her feelings by keeping quiet.

A
year and a half after graduation, over the audible protests of Suzanne and her
parents, Marci loaded up her car and moved to San Francisco. She leased a tiny
apartment in the sketchy but affordable Tenderloin area, sight unseen, and took
four months’ worth of rent and utilities with her. She felt very Jack Kerouac,
ready to become the next great American writer.

And
she managed to stay for nearly two years. One boyfriend, seventeen temp
assignments, four magazine articles, and three bounced rent checks later, she
packed the car again and headed to Austin, the city that seemed a perfect
compromise between San Francisco and Atlanta, geographically and culturally.

In
the meantime, Jake had moved home to Atlanta and was working for a small
production company that made commercials for local businesses. In his spare
time he freelanced on a few music videos for little punk bands and shot game
footage for some local club teams. Now it was Marci coming home for holidays,
and little crowds of friends appearing at restaurants to welcome her home when
she did. It was nice and fun and made her homesick all at once.

She
and Jake developed a kind of unspoken agreement between them over the years.
Neither of them talked about people they were dating or brought them around the
other, unless it was unavoidable or had become somewhat serious. Because she
lived out of state, it was easier for Marci to appear alone, even when she was
dating someone. Often Jake appeared at parties or reunions with whoever he’d
been seeing at the time, because he’d been unable to explain why she was not
invited without eliciting an immediate fight. He’d come to whatever restaurant
or house where they were gathered, kiss Marci on the cheek, and then introduce
his date politely before mouthing, “Sorry!” behind her back.