THE GOOD MARRIAGE by Glori Simmons
“Squeeze my hand,” the paramedic said to Christopher, but Christopher couldn’t be sure if he’d complied. Which of his hands was the young man holding? He was seated on Christopher’s right side so that was where Christopher concentrated. He hated to disappoint the kind stranger who (as all young men of a certain age did) reminded him of his son, Jonathon. He focused on the reassuring bulge of muscles under the young man’s short sleeves and then the sleeve’s patch where a serpent, thin and wicked, twisted its way up the yellow staff, and tried again to squeeze. It was too late. The young man had already let go in order to pump air into Christopher’s lungs with a ventilator, simultaneously taping a bandage across his forehead.
Christopher and Rosalind had been in an auto accident. The Volvo was totaled. Except for a minor nosebleed, Rosalind was okay. She was following in the patrol car whose siren lights flashed through the back windows of the ambulance where Christopher was strapped flat to a gurney. Each time the ambulance took a turn it felt as if he were a precariously balanced glass on a waiter’s tray. Any moment he might spill.
Christopher imagined his wife seated behind the metal partition in the cruiser’s back seat, clutching her black purse on her lap, nervous as a caged cat. Like a common criminal he could already hear her adding to her version of the story when she told it later to their daughter Renee. But right this minute, she would be blaming herself, her mind frantic and pacing, wanting to see Christopher in order to be assured that he was okay. She had distracted him at the intersection, telling him to take a left, when she knew perfectly well that he didn’t make left-hand turns at intersections without designated turn signals.
When she sighed loudly, fanning herself with the evening’s music program, he’d unintentionally set his foot on the gas. They were dead center in the intersection on a red light, an SUV skidding toward them from the left. Christopher braced himself with the steering wheel. Rosalind gasped. When it hit, the airbags punched them in the faces. The car settled into a spin. Time had gone slowly then, he and Rosalind turning as headlights and the squeal of tires and the tap of rain hitting the windshield surrounded them. It had reminded him of a distant cups-and-saucers ride, the excited shrieks of Renee and Jonathon at his sides. For a split second, he’d felt joy.
He wasn’t angry about the accident. In fact, he had not been angry at Rosalind’s suggestion, only baffled. But she wouldn’t know that. She would be fretting behind him, needing to see his face to make sure he had forgiven her. After fifty-three years, she should know: he didn’t forgive or forget. He simply let things be what they were. Still, she always came at him with her penitent pleas and apologies that had everything to do with her overbearing expectation that every-one see the world as she did and little to do with a true desire to change. Seventy-plus years he’d been an atheist. She knew the concept of forgiveness, with its pious overtones, rubbed him the wrong way, but with Rosalind, everything had to embrace ceremony and superstition.
Do you love me? she demanded every morning over coffee. And every morning as Christopher answered in the affirmative, there was a part of him that felt a twinge of reluctance. Did he love her? Love wasn’t something he’d ever been able to put his finger on when asked. It had rarely been something he felt in the moment. As far as he could remember, he’d never been overcome by it. Rather it had become something to which he agreed upon, something to which he acquiesced. This was not what Rosalind wanted to hear. The sort of love she referred to was flighty – light – something glimpsed from a distance. If touched the wrong way, held to the wrong light, desired too much, it would slip away. At the strangest moments – the time he caught her flirting with Rusty Braun, their neighbor, and he realized that he’d been watching her do the same thing for years, or the day their son, Jonathon, had died – he recognized his love for Rosalind. It would emerge as the slightest tug that reminded him that they were intrinsically attached. He’d never in all their years together told her what he really thought. And his silence, he knew was a kind of love.
* * *
Christopher was right. Rosalind was mulling over the events leading to the accident as she kept her eye on the ambulance from the car behind him. She was worried, upset, trying to figure out who to blame. Christopher was a stubbornly polite man. That had always been a problem between them. He let strangers take the center seats in movie theaters. He offered the window table to the couple behind them at restaurants. He didn’t take lefts – a person could end up on the same street by simply making three rights, so why hold up traffic? Rosalind was more than a little sick of it. He was always correct, always doing things for the right reason, always considerate and fair. It irritated her the way he was always thinking of others rather than of her, always scolding her for her small infractions – talking too loudly at the movies or getting impatient waiting for the restaurant bill. Had she heard him correctly, “Now look what you’ve done,” just before the SUV hit? What about that driver? What was her big hurry? Why did a woman as tiny as that need such a big car anyway? Rosalind hated how good Christopher was at making her feel guilty.
Before the accident they’d been driving home from a chamber orchestra performance, the Ravel piece still in her head. She liked the way the piano and strings came together then separated again, the way it was both harmonic and not. She stopped humming to gently make the suggestion. “Why don’t you turn left here?” She wanted to pass by the tall white apartment building off Fillmore, to look up at the lit window of their newlywed apartment, but he didn’t know this. He had undoubtedly assumed she was making another of her un-reasonable suggestions. All her life in the city and she still didn’t know the way home, she was sure this is what he thought.
Now, they had been hit and it was her fault. She trembled remembering Christopher on his back being pushed through the ambulance’s double doors. It wouldn’t be long until the gurney would be traded for a casket and the means of transportation a black hearse with curtains in the window. How would she know then that he still loved her, that she still loved him?
Rosalind was proud of their marriage. Fifty-three years – past silver and gold! So many of their friends had been divorced or had suffered prolonged illnesses or the death of a spouse, but she and Christopher had made it work and been fortunate. They were grandparents, in good enough shape to enjoy the role. They took long walks along the ocean and tours in exotic countries. They’d grown into the kind of couple she had always wanted to become – the kind that fed birds from park benches and held hands at the symphony.
When she first met Christopher in 1954, he had been a soft-spoken accountant and she a spunky secretary, a shorthand whiz. After seeing Rear Window at the Alhambra, he’d taken her hand lightly in his on the way to the corner diner. It was an odd sensation – ghostlike – almost as if it weren’t happening. For the three blocks, he never squeezed her hand, never applied pressure. The whole walk, her hand felt like an empty glove on the verge of being dropped from a pocket. Those first few dates, her arms and hands grew exhausted, supporting themselves. His early kisses were like that too – polite, nearly imperceptible flutterings. It was as if he didn’t dare make an impression. Over time she’d taught him what she liked – to have him hold her tight, to have his lips pressed against hers. Over the years, he had learned to accept his own presence. Christopher had hardened and Rosalind had demurred, at least that’s what it looked like on the surface.
At breakfast on the day of their granddaughter Amy’s wedding shower, the bride-to‑be asked Rosalind to tell her what made a good marriage. Rosalind had been stumped. She was proud of their longevity, but a good marriage, what was that? In the movies, couples were always passionately in love or rekindling something, but what she had with Christopher was not that kind of thing. Rosalind considered all the rainy nights that she and Christopher slipped from their warm bed to hover together at the window. All the evenings they’d sat side-by-side at musical events absorbed in their own ways of listening to the same song. That, she supposed, was marriage, the good kind. But a lot had happened between those sweet moments as well. What Rosalind wanted Amy to understand was that her good marriage was based on self-restraint, the secrets they’d kept from each other, the truths about the other they’d never exposed. Still, this didn’t seem like the kind of thing to tell a bride. Furthermore, she didn’t want Amy to tell Renee who would think it sounded cynical.
There had been numerous times Rosalind had outright lied to Christopher. The first, in fact, had ended with their daughter Renee. That hot night tangled in the sheets and the last condom already knotted in the bathroom garbage, Rosalind knew she might be ovulating, but had told Christopher it would be okay to do it one more time. That had been before their marriage, so maybe it didn’t even count as one of her lies. Christopher had never blamed her, never even questioned Rosalind. He had seemed happy – as happy as he ever let himself be – with the accident.
The other lies were small and white, but much worse in Rosalind’s eyes. For six years, she told Christopher that she loved him, even though she did not. Those were the days when her two children were teenagers and Rosalind did not love anyone – not Christopher, not herself or the plump, lethargic body she inhabited, not the angry girl and boy who stormed through her house. If she could have, she would have stayed in bed all day. Instead, she got up when Christopher’s alarm went off, drank a cup of coffee with him, drove the kids to their private high school, and then returned to the house to watch soap operas. By the time everyone was home, dinner was ready, even if Rosalind’s hair was still wet from her afternoon shower. Before going to sleep, she rubbed Christopher’s neck and shoulders as she always had, kneading the knots along his spine that he said hurt from hours over an adding machine. She despised his invisible pain, yet told herself that her hatred toward it was love. Every night she whispered the word into his ear, not so much for him but for herself.
This wasn’t to say that Rosalind had ever taken their relationship for granted or allowed herself to become entirely comfortable in it. There was always the knowledge that Christopher could at any moment recede, even disappear, taking with him everything they’d had together. She would find herself an old woman, walking alone from the movie theater, her gloves in her hands. The fear kept Rosalind vigilant, attentive.
* * *
In the IC room, Christopher was hooked up to tubes and machines that chirped each time his heart beat or he managed to take in a small mouthful of air. They created an echo, his insides calling to him from the outside. If he moved his eyes to the left, he could see the red digits and a jagged white line graphing his heart. He was having trouble breathing, but he’d had an amazing realization: the pain that had been lodged in his spine for most of his adult life, a dull needling that was as much a part of him as Rosalind or the kids or the numbers that automatically lined themselves up into columns in his head, was gone.
Unfortunately, this was yet another symptom that something had gone terribly wrong. He’d suffered a stroke without knowing it. His right side seemed to be deeply affected. This was just the kind of secret that would upset Rosalind, who insisted that Christopher be open with her. She was demanding in that way, always asking what he was thinking, always directing him how to express his feelings toward her: kiss me, squeeze my hand, turn left. Christopher experienced autonomy in brief, exhilarating snippets. In the backyard watering the plants or puzzling over Sudoku at the desk in their bedroom, he’d remember what it felt like to be on his own again. It gave him the sensation of flight. And then her voice would ring through the house, calling him back to her.
Deep down, Christopher knew that he more or less owed his life to Rosalind, at least the last fifty-odd years of it. He’d been happy at times, something he’d never set out to be. He’d experienced extraordinary things. As a young man, he never planned to leave anything behind, but he had – Renee and Jonathon (he refused to see his son as entirely gone), Renee’s kids Amy and Sam. That was the thing: Rosalind made him live, even though it was not something he’d chosen for himself, even though it had gotten a lot sloppier than he’d expected. Without her, he would have easily walked out into the waves at Ocean Beach one evening after tax season and become another statistic himself, a number pulled into the void.
How many times over the years had he parked his car above the ruins of the Sutro Baths and snuck to the water’s edge with just that thought – six, eight times? He’d gotten close, let the freezing salt water soak into his pant hems. He’d reached down to loosen the soggy laces on his shoes and then thought better of it. The water was the only thing that understood the meaninglessness of it all. It seemed to recognize that it was part of something bigger even than itself, something that didn’t care.
When the moment passed, he often walked the distance up the beach to the camera obscura. It was usually past sunset and locked. Each time as he got close, he hoped to surprise himself and rip the door off its hinge and enter after hours, to stand there in the dark that was both inside and out, real and projected. He never did. At his return Rosalind hovered, scolding him that he was going to catch cold and telling him that next time he should call her if he wanted to watch the sunset at the beach. Didn’t he know how to use a pay phone? In these moments, Christopher found comfort thinking of the note he’d put into their safety deposit box years before. In it, he told Rosalind “I love you” for what he knew would be the final time.
The last time he went to the ocean with such an intention was just after they’d received word from the small liberal arts college where Jonathon had been expelled. They already suspected that he was a poof, but the news coming from the school administration with a return of his first semester’s tuition was hard on both of them. Rosalind insisted that it was a stage, something he would outgrow. This dismissal only pushed Jonathon further. He grew his hair out, wore Mardi Gras beads around his neck, and hung out with men far too old for him who called themselves Fairies.
Christopher wasn’t sure what he expected from Rosalind, just as he wasn’t sure what his true response to Jonathon’s news was or what it should be. He loved his son. He was terribly disappointed. He knew it shouldn’t – and at the base of everything didn’t – matter. Who his son became was out of his control. This, he knew, was a revelation all parents experienced. It was the sort of moment that a couple should face together, but Christopher felt as if he had no one. It was the first time in a long time that he realized he was deeply sad.
He left work early. After several martinis at the Cliff House bar, he left feeling drunk and lethargic. It wasn’t dark yet, so he stepped into the camera obscura and watched as the sunset outside burned itself onto the floor. When the attendant kicked him out, he proceeded to the beach only to find the water’s edge blocked by a huge tide pool. Considering it too much of a bother to walk around it, Christopher started across, not caring when his feet grew wet. Nothing mattered anymore – not Jonathon’s education or his wife’s exasperation. They could – and most definitely would – go on without him. Halfway to the other side, he lay down in the stinky puddle, folding his arms over his chest, prepared for the tide to come in and get him.
He thought he heard the sound of a dog tugging on a leash, but he didn’t move. A cop nudged Christopher’s shoulder with his foot and shined a light on his face. “You awake, fella?”
When the cops dropped him off at home, drenched and reeking of kelp, it was just after ten o’clock, the latest he’d ever made Rosalind wonder where he was. He dared Rosalind to pretend nothing had happened.
She was already in bed, reading a novel. As he undressed, she shook her head at him pitifully. Slipping into bed, he found the undated note from the safety deposit box resting on his pillow. Except he remembered then, he’d taken it out over two years before when they’d updated their wills. At the time, he’d been pretty sure Rosalind was having an affair. Finding a strange comfort that his obligation to her was over, he’d removed the note. Instead, she’d discovered it in his jacket pocket like a phone number on a matchbook. How humiliating was that?
“Are you having an affair?” she asked, squinting at him over her reading glasses.
“It’s over,” Christopher said.
She started to cry. How many months had she lived wondering if he’d been cheating? How many months had she said nothing? Christopher admired her newfound restraint. He was seeing her in a new light. For the first time, he recognized his role in her insecurities. And then there it was – the thing she so desperately needed confirmed so often – his love for her, fluttering inside him like a moth at a screen door. At the water’s edge, is this what had stopped him all those times – this nervous, nearly imperceptible flapping, his ever-evasive love for her longing to slip through to the other side, the screwed‑up desire to see the pain on her face?
Yes, that. That and sheer cowardice, the fear of pain. Looking back from the hospital bed, Christopher guessed Rosalind had saved him from that – the cold undertow – and he was grateful. He needed her to save him now. He was scared. He hadn’t felt it during the car accident or the numbness that had settled through the right side of his body as they spun in their car, but he felt it now. Each time he closed his eyes and held his breath, hoping for a little silence, the monitors started to buzz frantically and a trio of interns would run into his room to adjust his tubing. He would like to hear Rosalind’s voice through the chaos, telling him what to do next.
A face was peeking into his room window: it was her. He could tell by the large red beads that clicked on the window each time she leaned forward and cupped her eyes to look in on him. He’d given her the necklace way back, but she’d never really worn it until recently. He guessed she’d hated it like so many of his other gifts. This evening he noticed how, resting on her leathery chest, the necklace finally suited her. She’d finally come of the large-red-bead age. It was an accomplishment. He’d meant to tell her so.
* * *
It was nearly thirty years ago now; Rosalind had been in her late thirties. She’d taken the family cat, Whiskers, to the vet and waited in the stinky tile lobby while he was put to sleep. The office dog, a squat mix, yapped and jumped behind a child’s gate as the receptionist read a tattered romance.
Whiskers had been Rosalind’s for eighteen years – at their first apartment on Fillmore (just around the corner from the vet’s), then in their first tiny walk‑up and now in the salmon-colored house on Cabrillo. He was unconditionally attached to her. Through years of too much love and unintended neglect, he’d been there, always ready to nose his way under the covers after the long day. His dark fur was now oily and matted, one eye clouded over, crusty balls of poop stuck under his tail. He was far from loveable and no one in the house besides Rosalind paid him any attention anymore, yet Rosalind knew her daughter Renee would ask in her accusatory way why her mother hadn’t stayed with the cat during the injection. Rosalind didn’t have an answer.
After deserting the empty cat carrier at a bus stop, she walked to a nearby coffee shop and let the tears well up and slide down her face as she looked out on an empty lot where she thought she remembered a gas station once stood. The apartment building where Christopher and Rosalind had started their life together was still standing, but not much else on the block. They’d lived there three years, saving up for their first house. From their bay window, between the red spires of the old St. Mary’s Cathedral and the tarnished dome of City Hall, they watched as a new public housing apartment, blocky and utilitarian, stretched toward the sky like Jack’s beanstalk. It had been – and still was – a predominantly black neighborhood filled with shabby Victorians and barbershops and hole-in‑the-wall jazz clubs. Homely by day; seedy by night. At the time, living there made Rosalind feel as if she lived in a real city.
Rosalind still worked then. She remembered the feel of Whiskers rubbing against her silky hose as she fried eggs in her slip and fed Renee Cream of Wheat in her high chair before taking her to the neighbor’s. She remembered the accordion open and close of the building’s elevator gate and how she learned to keep her eyes on the sidewalk to avoid the stares from the men playing checkers outside the corner store and the city’s construction workers drinking coffee from thermos lids. Back then, every man had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Her fondest memories were of the women in their bright hats as if every Sunday were Easter. How she yearned to be a part of their world, to walk through one of the church doors that leaked halleluiahs and be embraced by their big round arms. It was a naïve whim, the desire to be someone other than who she was.
It was a recurring want – and that must have been why, when a short man with a gray beard sat down at her table, took off his beret, and only then asked if he could join her, she nodded yes and told him her name was Judy. He was overdressed for the neighborhood and wore a blue ascot tucked into his lapel. When he asked what was wrong, she could only shake her head. She detected an Eastern European accent in his voice. He took her hand in his and raised it to his lips.
For three weeks, she returned to share coffee with him as they talked about the neighborhood, movies, and his daughter Pauline. Andrei read books for the blind and was fifteen years older than Rosalind. Every meeting he dressed like Thurston Howell III; every meeting she answered to Judy. One day, dropping off suits at the dry cleaner’s on the way to their meeting, she found a note in Christopher’s careful handwriting. It was a love message of sorts, an apology. He’d broken up with someone. Rosalind wasn’t sure what to feel, but she was pretty sure that it wasn’t the infidelity that bothered her, but the outright surprise. Unfaithfulness was so far outside the realm of her husband’s character that it felt as if everything she thought she knew about him was suspect. All these years, he’d misled her. She felt tricked, yet elated.
That afternoon as she neared the coffee shop, she saw Andrei walk out of the same white building that she and Christopher had once lived in. She hurried toward him. Even as he held open the elevator door and Rosalind followed him in, she knew that what she wanted – to see the place that she and Christopher had once inhabited, the views they’d once admired together – wasn’t possible. Now there would be high-rises everywhere, the tip of the new Trans-America triangle in North Beach and most certainly the strange origami shape of the new cathedral off Geary that Christopher disdainfully called a nurse’s cap. And Christopher, the young man who’d stood beside her at the windows, was not who she thought he was. There was no way to back out: Andrei was turning his key in the lock, saying something about how he hoped he had enough Folgers and asking if she ever drank tea.
To her relief, Andrei’s apartment faced another direction altogether. She walked around the sunny rooms, touching the familiar alcoves, trying to gain her bearings, but this apartment had wall-to‑wall carpeting and new kitchen cupboards. The apartment was clean, the worn arms of the couch fitted with crocheted covers. The windows looked out at a new fire station and the old brick façade of what had been as long as she remembered a defunct trolley car turnabout with graffiti on the walls. She watched as Andrei hung his hat on the doorknob of the hall closet. It was the 1970s; women were expected to be liberated – at least the kind of women who ventured into men’s apartments during the day. She would sleep with Andrei. It’s what they’d been working toward all these weeks.
Rosalind couldn’t explain why it seemed reasonable, why inside she barely felt anything. Of course it had to do with the note, but it wasn’t as simple as revenge. Over the years, she’d flirted with dozens of men. She’d kissed Christopher’s boss at a party, let strangers’ hands linger on her thighs on the bus, and placed Rusty Braun’s oil-drenched hand on her milk-engorged breast one afternoon when he was tinkering with his Karmann Ghia in his garage. In comparison, these infidelities seemed much more grave than what was about to happen.
They stepped into Andrei’s bedroom where a birdcage took up one corner of the room. When the canary saw him, she started to sing. It reminded Rosalind of “Pigeon Beach,” the neighbor’s low, flat roof outside her and Christopher’s bedroom window where the gray birds, cooing illicitly, had watched them sleep and argue and make love over the first three years. She tried to remember the last time she and Christopher had made love. Andrei pulled a drape over the cage as Rosalind sat on the corner of the bed and took off her clothes, folding them neatly and setting them on the desk chair. She never saw what he did with his ascot.
It was disorienting at first: all of the daylight and his body so compact and hairy compared to Christopher’s gangly limbs. And her own body foreign with his. She closed her eyes, listened to his breathing as it sped up, and concentrated on her skin. His beard brushed against her shoulders, her stomach and breasts, and then returned to her chin. As he whispered the name that wasn’t hers sweetly into her ear, she thought about the blind people to whom he read. Did his voice replace their internal voices after time? She thought of the bird tricked into evening beneath the drape and of the women in their Sunday hats. She thought of her clothes folded neatly on the chair so near, her husband’s note folded into her skirt pocket. She thought of her daughter who had most certainly discovered sex. And of her son Jonathon, just at the cusp. She thought of Christopher, how this experience would be one of the few things she would never tell him. She thought sadly of the intended recipient of his note. It occurred to her then, that he hadn’t given it to her. There was a strong possibility that the affair was still going on. There was a vastness inside of her chest that she did not want to fill.
Rosalind never returned to the coffee shop again. Over the years, she’d never said a word to anyone about what she’d done. Although it was an old habit – to seek approval and forgiveness from Christopher – she figured out how to forgive herself. And when the time came, she was able to forgive Christopher as well.
Looking into Christopher’s hospital room window, she wondered if it was the memory of Andrei – certainly dead by now – that had prompted her to want to drive by the old apartment building. Rosalind knew she should go in to Christopher, but she was afraid. It was the same fear that had overcome her as she climbed into the apartment elevator that day so long ago: the fear of something changed, a past wiped out. When she touched the glass, her heart raced. She could almost feel the emptiness wash over her again.
* * *
Christopher had gone to sleep – or maybe he’d entered an atheist Limbo. One side of his body felt heavy and cold, the other non-existent. Not light. Not heavy. Not hot. Not cold. Not wet. Not dry. Just not. It was as if half of him had disappeared, while the other half had been submerged in sand. When he tried to remember why he was here, or where here was, a song played in his head that made him want to laugh.
The machines began to chirp louder than ever. There was a bustle around him. The interns, now in full scrub gear, stepped through the door, Rosalind following. One of the doctors pulled a chair next to the bed for her as they read the monitors and wrote on the board clipped to the end. “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, darling,” he heard Rosalind whisper through the chaos as she lifted a hand – his? – to her lips. Her voice was hoarse and calm. When he tried to squeeze back to let her know he understood, he couldn’t feel her hand, but he remembered how it felt. As early as that morning on the way to the Conservatory, he’d noticed them, warm and practical on his, her fingers folding over his fingers, her wedding ring turned so that the small diamonds – one for each ten-year anniversary – pressed against his skin like little teeth.
Christopher tried to smile up at her, but even his mouth felt numb and clumsy. He loved her, this he was certain of. He closed his eyes: headlights. “Again, again, daddy!” Renee begged. Jonathon tugged at his hand. Christopher was dizzy, but the pain was gone. He couldn’t tell if this was in the present or in the past. “I’m not letting go,” Rosalind whispered into his ear through the wash of ocean waves. When he saw his hand in hers, it was as if she were holding up a lost glove. He had something to tell her, but what it was, he couldn’t remember.
Glori Simmons is the author of a forthcoming story collection, Suffering Fools (Willow Springs Editions). Her fiction has most recently been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Chelsea, and Fourteen Hills.