Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

Walking down St. Cassian Street, Michael had felt like the survivor of some natural disaster. Wanda Lipska had died in ’98 (heart attack) and one of her daughters had died, even — the oldest one, who’d been born a few months before George — and Katie Vilna was dead of lung cancer and Johnny Dymski of liver cancer. And going all the way back, there were Michael’s parents, dim as old photos, and his brother, Danny, still and forever a boy of nineteen, although if he hadn’t fallen ill he might very well be dead of old age by now anyhow. In the end, everyone dropped away, and someday it would be Michael’s turn even if he half fancied that he would go on forever.

When they’d telephoned him about Pauline, he’d had trouble taking it in. This will be the first whole day I’ve lived on the planet without her, he had thought when he woke the next morning. But still it had seemed unreal. He had been able to picture parts of her so clearly: those two piquant points on her upper lip, the quirky sprig of lashes at the inner corner of each eye where most people’s lashes don’t grow, her eyes themselves so pansy-blue and trustful and expectant. He knew that he and she had been unhappy together, but now he couldn’t remember why. What were the issues they’d quarreled about? He hadn’t been able to name even one. He’d remembered the cold, hateful fury she could call up in him, the nights on the couch, the sharp silences, the ripped feeling in his chest, but what had it all been about!

“You were ice and she was glass,” Lindy had told him recently, in one of their conversational crashes. “Two oddly similar substances, come to think of it — and both of them hell on your children.”

He’d said, “Lindy, show some charity, here. We did the best we could. We did our darnedest. We were just… unskilled; we never quite got the hang of things. It wasn’t for lack of trying.”

I THINK so but I don’t KNOW so. He was crossing Beverly Drive to make the turn onto Winding Way now, one palm on his lower back where it was starting to give him that twanging sensation. The oak tree on the corner, once the only full-size tree in Elmview Acres, had been cut down. All that remained was a stump.

And maybe it was the sight of Pauline’s street, or maybe that the effort to dredge up one memory had accidentally unearthed another, but all of a sudden he recalled a party they’d thrown in the early seventies, a cocktail party for the neighbors, where Pauline had pulled him aside and whispered, “You’ll never guess what Dr. Brook just did. He reached into my potpourri bowl and popped a handful into his mouth.”

“He did what ?” Michael asked, and she nodded, pink with suppressed laughter.

“That bowl on the buffet,” she said. “And here’s the worst: I saw him do it in plenty of time to stop him, but I didn’t. I watched him reach into the bowl while he was talking to the Derbys, and then I left! I just left! I just turned on my heel and walked off!”

And the laughter had burst forth, finally, and she had clapped both hands to her mouth like a child, her eyes glinting wickedly above them.

Or the time they’d gone to New York together, just before Pagan came to live with them. They started down the stairs to the subway platform and she asked him for a token. “I already gave you a token,” he told her.

“Yes, but I need another,” she said.

“What happened to the first one?”

“Well, I ate it,” she said.

“You what?”

“I put it into my mouth for some reason and just accidentally… I ate it, all right? I went ahead and ate it. Why make such a big deal about it?”

He smiled now, if he didn’t smile then.

He could almost pretend to himself that Pauline had still been alive all this time, pursuing her own routine in her own corner of the world. He could imagine her in the front yard of her house, which lay just around the next bend. She was filling the bird feeder or picking up stray twigs under a sun that was, unaccountably, more like an August sun, as golden as forsythia and warm and almost liquid. When his footsteps drew closer — their familiar, uneven rhythm — she would stop work to listen, and when he came into view she would straighten, shading her eyes with one hand. “Is it you?” she would ask. “It’s you! It’s really and truly you!” she would cry, and her face would light up with joy.

He began to walk faster, hurrying toward the bend.