We Are Still Married (40 page)

Frankly, it's pretty obvious that he missed that woman
a lot,
which explains why he stopped, on that desolate plain. He must've felt certain she'd leave Cid and follow him, that she didn't
really
see him as the religious doubter who introduced the low jump but as the inventor of the wheel and a guy she could fall in love with, so he dug in and waited for her. The ancient dilemma: he knew that once he developed the wheel and things started rolling, he'd become a somebody like Cid except bigger, and she could love him for
that;
but meanwhile, without her, he couldn't go around the block, couldn't even develop a cold. He lay in the dirt, waiting, his wheel at his side, hearing every little creak or whisper, dreaming of her, waking up believing she was close by. From trench (A) he walked out in all directions (B, C, D, E, like the spokes of a wheel) to watch for her and (F) made one last great circumference of hope before retiring to the hub to lie down and die.

It was rotten luck to invent the wheel in a rocky hilly place, among people with no concept of movement. If the land had been flatter, if the people had said, “Hey, go for it”—but no, it had to be in that rugged valley that held them like a cage, nobody daring to be movers, only jumpers, and when Charley did break out he only went 6.2 miles before he stopped.

And yet—to lie in the dark and wait for a woman to arrive—isn't that exactly how so many of our finest hours have been spent? isn't that when the poems got written, ideas thought up, jokes formulated, great art imagined? See right here how as he lay in the trench he tried to widen it to accommodate what was not yet, but which would be, the bountiful Verde, her generous body settling alongst his, saying, “Oh Charley, oh my darling lovely one,” and while he lay in wait and wonderful expectation, he saw our world in his head. He invented us. He saw every use and adaptation of the wheel, from the cart to the wagon to the barrow, the windlass and mill, the coil and the ball, screw and gearwheel, drill, hinge, pulley, globe and dome, ball sports, turntable, dial, chainlink, compass, roller skate, eggbeater, lawn sprinkler, revolver, rotary press, paint roller, ballpoint pen, lazy Susan, spin dryer, roulette, Caterpillar, flywheel, floppy disc. While he lay in fragrant anticipation of her womanly waist and hips and thighs, he envisioned us in one brilliant moment like a flash of lightning over a ruined amusement park in November, its Ferris wheel and carousel and Tilt-a-whirl lit up,
wham!

He heard steps in loose gravel and desperately wanted them to be hers, the wind in the underbrush to be her saying, “Oh sweet love, I looked so long—let me come into your bed.”

If she came, the wheel didn't matter, and if she never came, it didn't matter either. Her face, her hair, her hands, her shoulders and back, her waist and belly, her legs and feet, her face, her hair, her hands, shoulders, back, and so forth. In her hand a crown of white spring flowers. Naked she bent forward and placed it in his hands and so forth. The rest nobody knows, but perhaps it was not so different then from now. Dying, he met her at last. A last faint sigh of disbelief, and then she touched him.

I
MET HER AT THE BEACH a year ago June 17. I was sitting on the diving dock thinking about going home and making myself a pizza when she climbed up the ladder, putting her hand on my knee briefly. “Excuse me,” she said, and dove in. I jumped up and dove after her. I had never dived headfirst before—had always held my nose and shut my eyes and jumped—but I went after her and followed her down to the murky bottom, where I bumped into her and panicked a little and grabbed on and we came up together. “That was the first time I ever did that!” I said. She said, “Aren't you that friend of Sandra Singleton's—the one who was with her cousin that time we all went to the drive-in? The one who spilled the Coke?” “Yes!” I said. (I didn't care—if that's who she thought I was, then I didn't mind being that guy; I figured I could straighten it out later, when we got to know each other better.) “You said you were going to
call
me!” she said. She put her two cool hands around my neck. I said, “Well, consider this a call.”

She was at the beach with her friend Janelle, who stayed under the umbrella because the sun gave her a headache. She was fish-belly white and looked like she had a terrific headache going at the moment. She said, “It's no fun here, Rhonda, why don't we go to my house for lunch?,” looking at Rhonda, not looking at me.

I said, “I'll buy us dinner,” and went and got five burgers, three fries, and three shakes. Janelle said, “No,
thanks,”
so I and Rhonda ate it. “By the way, I forgot your name,” she said. I bit off half a burger and chewed it slowly, thinking fast. I didn't think she'd be impressed with the name Wiscnek so I gave her a name I made up when I was little, Ryan Tremaine, a name I used when I played detective. She said, “That's such a beautiful name.” “Well, I'm a nice guy,” I said.

She said to Janelle, “Don't you think he ought to get contacts? He'd look so much better without glasses.” Janelle looked at me like contacts wouldn't make any difference at all. She said, “I'm going home. Coming, Rhon?” Rhonda said she'd come later.

We went back in the water. I said, “I don't think Janelle likes me.” She said, “Don't be silly, Janelle is my best friend. We've been friends since we were six.” We dove off the dock until it was almost dark, then sat on the blanket and talked. “I'm cold,” she said, so I put my arm around her. We lay down and she sort of put her arm around me. I told her I loved her. She said I was sweet. We lay there in the dark, talking and getting close to each other, and then after a while she suddenly said, “No, let's not.”

I said, “Why not? I love you.”

“It's not that. I believe in waiting.”

I thought to myself, “I have been waiting a long time already,” but I said, “That's okay. I respect that,” and we folded up the blanket and umbrella, and she kissed me. We talked about marriage. Sort of generally, not specifically in terms of each other, but I got the idea she liked me. Then she said goodbye.

“You're not going out toward Fennimore Parkway, are you?” I asked, taking a wild guess. “Sure,” she said, “hop in.”

She drove a blue 1982 Mustang convertible, a graduation present from her folks. She headed south on Lake Avenue past the Lake-Hi Drive-in Theater and East High, where I had graduated in 1976, turned right on 44th, and down the Strip past the used-car lots and over the hill past the cemetery two miles and then onto Fennimore. I had been in that part of town only a couple of times in my life. It had curving streets lined with beautiful elms and white houses as big as schools. I picked out one and said, “Here.” She stopped and I got out. “What's your number?” I said. She told me.

I wonder if she would have told me if she had known I am an assistant herdsman at the zoo and live in a studio apartment. I wonder. Anyway, getting her phone number was worth the long bus ride back to Lake, where I transferred to the 16th Street bus that took me back to the beach, where I got in my car and drove home.

I thought about calling her to make sure she got home all right, but didn't because it was almost eleven o'clock, so I put a frozen macaroni dinner in the oven and watched the late movie and passed out on the couch and eventually woke up to smell smoke and see the girl in the movie alone on a deserted road being chased by bikers; then, after she ran into the woods and tripped and fell, there was a commercial, and I grabbed the phone and dialed her number. The phone rang about twenty times, then a man answered. “Hello, has Rhonda gotten home yet?” I asked. “Do you know what time it is?” he said. “She's asleep. Who the hell is this?”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to bother you. Good night.” I disguised my voice so he wouldn't be mad if I met him later.

I woke up at 9:00 A.M. thinking about her, though I was late for work, and wanted to call her up and wish her a pleasant good morning and ask if she felt the same longing I felt, but raced to the zoo, where I found three angry messages on my desk with “IMMEDIATELY” underlined on each one. I was in charge of three high-school kids who worked there that summer, and so I needed a desk to sit behind when I told them what to do, but my job was not a desk job—my crew and I picked up trash and chased animals. The zoo was built with the idea that animals would be seen in their natural habitat and not stuck in little cages, a good idea, but the taxpayers got angry if they went and just saw a lot of habitat—they expected to see animals and they bitched if the moose, for example, were back in the underbrush—so our job was going into the bushes and kicking the animals' butts out of there and getting them into the open, especially the peacocks, flamingos, wolves, deer, beaver, moose, bears, and tigers. The bears and tigers we heaved corncobs at or flushed out with water hoses so they wouldn't lie around in caves or behind rocks as they tended to do. It wasn't a great job but it was what I was paid to do.

I called her at lunchtime (she was gone to play tennis) and again at five o'clock (she was eating dinner and couldn't come to the phone) and finally I reached her at 6:30. “Come on over!” she said. I knew by the address she gave that it was going to be hard to find, but I dressed up in my only good casual clothes and headed her way and in no time I was completely lost not too far from where I was sure she lived. I went around and around on little lanes and drives called Fernhill and Wooddale and Fernwood and Hilldale, where half the driveways are unmarked or say “Keep Out” and you go in to ask for directions and a minority woman in a white dress has no idea what you're talking about and of course there aren't any pay phones for miles, and it got dark and I was getting fed up—I broke out of the maze finally and hit an actual street with stores on it, and called her from a gas station. She said it was too late to come over, because Janelle was there and they were supposed to go to a play. I noticed that she didn't invite me but I didn't comment on it. I did convince her to meet me at Bingo's (minus Janelle) three days later, the soonest she could work it into her schedule.

She never looked more beautiful—to me, at any rate. She was tan and glowing and wore a white dress that really set off her features, including her long neck and perfect collarbones, the perfect picture of the sort of girl I had always wanted to know. I wanted her to love me so bad, I had spent two nights studying up on the college she had said she was going to so that, if it came up again, I could say I had gone there myself. I knew names of courses, streets, buildings, dorms, deans, a ton of material, but the subject didn't come up. Instead she asked if I sailed. She wanted her dad to buy her a sailboat.

“Oh, sure,” I said, as if, to me, sailing was like crossing the street. “I used to sail,” I said, implying that I had gone on to pursue deeper interests, but wasn't sure what they should be—things she'd be interested in, of course, but, on the other hand, not things she already knew a great deal about—philosophy maybe. I decided on Nileism, the theory that nothing matters, nothing matters at all except for this little moment we have together in this dark world. But we mostly talked about her and her summer. I kissed her goodnight and she promised to see me soon. I held her, a little too long, maybe, and then she got in her car and drove away.

It was very hard, trying to be the person she thought I was, the guy who was with Sandra Singleton's cousin that night and spilled a Coke. I needed to know more about him. So that night I called up a Singleton residence in Rhonda's part of town and asked for Sandra. A girl came to the phone who was yelling at someone named Barb to keep an eye on the scallops. “Sandra, you probably don't remember me, but I'm Paul Bryant and I met you last summer, I think at the 7-Hi Drive-in, and the reason I called is I'm trying to locate that guy who was with your cousin that night—remember? The guy who spilled the Coke?”

“Gene. ”

“Right. How could I get ahold of him? He wanted me to call him about a car, and I couldn't remember his name.”

“Parker. ”

“Parker! Right! Where would I find him?”

She said he went out west and she didn't know where exactly or when he might come back. “Does he owe you money?” she said. “If he does, you might as well forget it. What a fruitfly!”

“How do you mean that?” I said. She said that he was a pain in the rear and she had only been nice to him because of her cousin. I said I thought that Rhonda sort of liked him. “Ha!” she said. “Fat chance! Rhonda just likes to make Sam jealous!” Then she had to go and eat those scallops, although there was more I wanted to know. Who was Sam? for example.

I figured that, if Rhonda didn't know Gene was gone, I could go on being him for a while longer, but I should get another story ready in case of emergency (“What guy at the drive-in? A friend of Sandra who? Spilled what Coke? I don't know what you're talking about! I'm Ryan Tremaine, we met at the beach, remember?”) and I had better start developing Ryan as someone she would like to know more than the guy she was mistaking me for.