Marry Me Read Free

saw things as themselves – ‘that broken bottle. I have no secrets.’
    ‘It’s such a beautiful bottle. Look how the curves ofbroken glass take the sun. It’s like a tiny roller coaster, around and around.’ He wished again for a cigarette, to gesture with.
    Whenever a distance between them seemed about to grow, she would call, ‘Hey?’
    ‘Hi,’ he’d answer gravely.
    ‘Hi,’ she answered back.
    ‘Sweetie, why did you marry him in the first place?’
    And she told him, told him at unprecedented length, hugging her knees and sipping wine, told him so charmingly, in her delicate, careless voice, the twentieth-century story of her marriage, that he kept laughing and kissing the small of her naked bent back. ‘So I kept taking riding lessons and miscarried that one, too. So he sends me into analysis and this goddamn analyst, Jerry – you would have liked him, he was like you in being very ethical – tells me – I don’t know what the matter with me is but I always try to do what men tell me to do, it’s my terrible weakness – he tells me, “You’re going to have this one.” So O.K., I had it. I was so confused I probably thought it was the analyst’s baby I was having. But it wasn’t. It was Richard’s. And then once I’d had one it seemed I had to have some more to make the first one right. But it doesn’t work that way.’
    ‘You know why I’ve had all my babies?’ he said. ‘I never really understood until the other night, something Ruth said. You know she’s this great believer in natural childbirth. Well Joanna was really quite painful for her so now it turns out we had to have two more so she could perfect her technique.’
    He had hoped Sally would laugh at this, and she did,and in a sudden mutual gush they cashed into the silver of laughter all the sad secrets they could find in their pockets. She had more secrets than he. The inequality of their exchange grieved him, and as the dunes looped longer shadows into their small valley he kissed her wrists and confessed, in a desperate attempt to balance their plights. ‘I did a very bad thing in marrying Ruth. Much worse, really, than if I’d married for money. I married her because I knew she’d make a good wife. And that’s what she’s done. God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Sally.’
    ‘Don’t be sad. I love you.’
    ‘I know, I know, and I love you. How can I not be sad? What can we do ?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Go on like this a little more?’
    ‘It won’t stand still.’ He gestured upwards and stared as if to blind himself. ‘The fucking sun won’t stand still.’
    ‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ she said.
    Both on their knees, they began to gather up their equipment and to revolve in their minds the fragile lies they must deliver to their homes. She looked so calm and docile, his Sally, in the sandy light, her pale hair falling as she bowed into some tiny simplicity of this, their only housekeeping, that he angrily embraced her, for the last time this day. All their embraces felt to be the last. Almost lazily, she kneeled against him and flattened her body to his and encircled his back with her arms. Her shoulder tasted warm; his lips moved on her skin. ‘Baby I can’t swing it,’ he said, and the flutter of her nodding made their bodies vibrate together. I know. I know.
    ‘Hey? Jerry? Over your shoulder I can see the Sound, and there’s a little sailboat, and some town far off, and the waves are coming in to the rocks, and it’s so sunny, and just so beautiful? No. Don’t turn your head. Believe me.’

2
The Wait
    ‘Good-bye?’
    ‘Don’t say that word to me, Jerry Please don’t say it.’ Sally’s wrist ached from holding the receiver so long, and now her whole forearm began to tremble. She pinched the receiver between her shoulder and her ear and used her freed hands to button one of Peter’s straps; in the last few months he had learned to dress himself, all except for the buttons, and she