Free The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer Page A

walked with Buzz along a boardwalk by the sea.

     

    There weren’t many places where a white man and a colored girl could meet in 1953. I could not leave Sonny too long with the aunts, and Buzz knew only his part of downtown, so on my suggestion we met by the ocean, at an amusement park called Playland-by-the-Sea.
    It covered the ocean edge of Golden Gate Park, like the fringe of a scarf, and if you were foolish enough to stand in the chilly Pacific and look back on the city, you would see it laid out before you against the sky: roller coasters like sentinel dragons flanking the games of chance and restaurants. Hot House Tamales! Salt Water Taffy! Chocolate-Dipped Bananas! They lined up like a cartoon strip, on what would be the finest beach property in America if it wasn’t for the fog, so that only a few braved the seawall: Russians remembering their lost homeland, pairs of secret lovers, and people, like us, who sought its cloud-cover to hide.
    I told him my story, there with the foghorns singing to the west of us and calliopes singing to the east. And when I was done, Buzz removed his soft hat so that his gold hair lay shining and motionless in the wind. How hollow, to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You’re boneless as an anemone. Children ran by, racing for the fun house, half delighted and terrified. I watched his face very carefully, but I did not know him well enough to recognize his moods, a crinkling of his eyes that might be a sign of anger or of doubt. I tried to see what my story meant to him. He had always thought of Holland as a war hero, a beautiful wounded soldier, and I wondered if this story might warp that image: a flame placed too near a wax statue.
    “I don’t expect you to understand,” I said firmly.
    “How did your parents not know?” Buzz asked after a moment of frowning thought. “Going to piano lessons, disappearing all the time with books. They must have guessed.”
    “They didn’t pay too much attention to me.”
    He said that was foolish, I was their daughter.

    “I wasn’t …” I began, pulling my coat close around me. “I wasn’t quite what he wanted.”
    “It must have been awful for you,” he said, but I could not look at him, so I didn’t know which he was talking about, my father or my husband.
    “It was worse for Holland. For everyone to see him like that, dragged out of the house.”
    “I don’t know,” Buzz said. “I think it might have been worse for you. It’s always worse for the one who stays.”
    We wives are such territorial creatures. Not just where our husbands and sons and houses are concerned, but over the painful past. Like the Chinese soldiers bricked into castle walls to make eternal guardians of their ghosts, we are bound to protect that past, though we are helpless to do anything but moan and shake our chains. This man had come to take away my husband, and what I needed to tell him was that he, too, was wrong; there was another Holland Cook he didn’t know. Though Buzz might have returned after years to claim his old lover, he knew him no better than I.
    “Why did you tell me that story?” he asked.
    “I thought you should hear it.”
    “It does make sense of things,” he said. He was facing me as we walked, head bent down close to mine.
    “I gave up my youth in that town to take care of him,” I said hotly.
    “What I—”
    “I gave up any kind of love they had for me, I had to leave. And I lost him.”
    Buzz said he understood. He looked around; perhaps I was too loud.
    “No, you don’t,” I said in a struggling voice. Buzz put his hand on my arm and the fabric was so thin that I could feel the unsteadiness of his pulse. “I don’t think you possibly could. No matter how well you think you know him.”

    “I don’t claim to know him.”
    “But you said—”
    “When I met Holland in the hospital,” he said, keeping his hand on my arm, “the Section Eight hospital, the one he never told you