Marry Me Read Free Page B

sleeping pills from his own prescription.’
    ‘I could call Josie this evening and say I’m in the city and the Saab has broken down. It’s been acting funny lately I know they’d believe me.’
    ‘Oh, sweetie. You’re so gallant. It would never swing. They’d find out and he wouldn’t let you have the children.’
    ‘I don’t want the children, I want you.’
    ‘Don’t say that. You love your children very much. Just looking at Peter made you cry.’
    ‘It was you who made me cry.’
    ‘I didn’t mean to.’
    She didn’t know how to answer this; she could never tell him that you were responsible for things you didn’t mean to do as well as things you did. He believed in God, and that inhibited her from giving him instruction on anything. Through the kitchen window she saw Peter finding Bobby. Peter had forgotten the message she had given him, and his older brother led him out of sight into the woods.
    She asked, ‘Will you be at the State Department all afternoon? Could I call you there if I come?’
    ‘Sally don’t come. You’ll just crucify yourself for nothing. We’d only be there one night.’
    ‘You’ll forget me.’
    His laugh shocked her, she had meant this so seriously.
    ‘I don’t think in two days I’ll forget you.’
    ‘You think a night with me is nothing.’
    He paused; she felt in the unreeling seconds that she was being given line. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think a night with you is almost everything. I’m hoping for a lifetime of them.’
    ‘Hoping’s a nice safe thing to do.’
    ‘I don’t want to fight with you. I never fight with women. I don’t think we should take any risks until we know what we’re going to do.’
    She sighed. ‘You’re right. I say to myself, “Jerry’s right.” We mustn’t be reckless. There are too many other people involved.’
    ‘Hordes of them. I wish there weren’t. I wish the world was just you and me. Listen. You don’t want to come. The airlines are all messed up by this strike at Eastern. Right now I can see six four-star generals and two hundred guys in Dacron suits shoving towards Gate Seventeen. My plane must be about to board.’ He was in a phone booth at LaGuardia. The flight he had planned to take had been full; he had killed the time of delay by calling her. She thought, If he had gone on the right plane he wouldn’t have called me; and this casualness, the implied smallness of her place in his life, enlarged him, scooped wider with its insult the aching hollow of her love.
    He was waiting for her to laugh or agree, she couldn’t remember which. ‘I love you so much,’ she said limply.
    ‘Hey how will you explain this on your phone bill? I wouldn’t have called collect if I’d known we’d talk so long.’
    ‘Oh, I’ll just say – I don’t know what I’ll say. He never listens to what I say anyway.’ Sally sometimes wonderedhow many of her accusations of her husband were unfair. Her conversation was like a garden gone wild; surprising weeds sprang up in it every day.
    ‘They are boarding. Good-bye?’
    ‘Good-bye, darling.’
    ‘I’ll call you Wednesday morning.’
    ‘Very good.’
    He heard a rebuke in her tone and asked, ‘Shall I call you from Washington? Tomorrow morning?’
    ‘No, you’ll have things to do. Be busy. Just think of me a little.’
    He laughed. ‘How could I help but?’ He waited, said, ‘You’re the one,’ pecked a little flat kiss into the telephone, and hung up. She replaced the receiver quickly, as if stoppering a bottle from which Jerry might escape.
    Her hair uncombed, her bathrobe flapping, Sally went outdoors and screeched at the edge of the woods, ‘Bo-oys! Bee-each!’
    The woods screening the houses of the neighbourhood from one another smelled profoundly of summer, not the usual delicate Connecticut scent of thinned underwood and grass but a rich warm odour of layered leaf mould and mouldering logs – the way vacations had smelled when she was a child from Seattle