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

about, I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Or so in pain. He was shell-shocked.” That was when he released me and I moved away. “He’d recovered a little by the time I got there, but he was like… a plaster cast of a young man, just the outside and nothing within. He was very fragile and quiet and I took care of him. I was hardly able to take care of myself, but he was worse off, I think. It wasn’t knowing him that made me fall in love with him.”
    “He never mentioned me, I guess.”
    Buzz shook his head. “He talked about Kentucky like it was a million years ago. But I knew who you were.”
    “But not what I’d given up.”
    “I didn’t know about the war. You’re right, I can’t possibly understand what it’s like now, I mean. To give up everything again.”
    We passed an automated tableau of the Last Supper, a crowd of alien-eyed apostles with wind-torn beards moving mechanically, our Savior sitting among them and spreading His arms in benediction. He moved slowly, gracefully, as if swimming through the fog.
    “But you’re not doing it for Holland, or for me.”
    He took off his hat, rotating it in his hands like a driver making a long slow turn. “I wouldn’t have come to you for that, I wouldn’t have ever dared. I tried to let it go and forget, that’s what they tell you to do, isn’t it? Travel and forget, meet new people and forget. Do you think I sat there all those years and thought: I want to ruin a marriage? If he was happy, if I thought you were happy—”
    “Before you came, I thought that I was happy.”
    He stopped on the boardwalk and looked at me. “That’s not the same,” he said, “as being happy, Pearlie.”

    We did not move, and so the crowd had to flow around us, some complaining rudely. A peanut vendor bullied his way through the mass of people.
    “You called me,” Buzz was saying. “You know what you’re doing. And it’s not for any of us, probably not even for yourself. That’s not what you’re like.”
    As the vendor passed us, I saw, reflected in the dented metal of his cart, the two of us standing there together on the boardwalk. I was surprised at how we looked together.
    He said: “It’s for Sonny. And that I do understand.”
    “You don’t have children,” I said, turning away from the image to face the real Buzz.
    Buzz grimaced. “No, I don’t.”
    “Then I’m not sure you ever could understand.”
    “It’s why I came to you,” he told me, squinting his eyes against the sudden appearance of the sun. “I felt I could trust you. I’ve been watching you.”
    When he came to our doorstep with two birthday presents, pretending he was lost, he had been watching me carefully for weeks. Sitting on a bench, or at a bus stop, his collar pulled up, observing little Pearlie Cook, that minor character, as she went about her day. Apparently this is what love will do.
    He’d seen me in the mudroom beside the laundry basket—high and wheeled like a perambulator, all steel and Sanforized cotton—dropping clothespins into the sewn-in pocket: a wifely poltergeist, invisibly doing the laundry, the dusting, the dishes. He’d seen me sitting in my own hallway on the chartreuse gossip bench, telephone-talking, and he must have known from the way I played with the nailheads of the upholstery, and pulled at a rip in the leathery vinyl, and cast my eyes up at the ceiling as if the stars were there, that it was Holland I talked to, and what Buzz supposed he recognized, in this static slide show of my life, was someone who would listen.

    “And what did you see?” I asked.
    “Someone trapped under a heavy stone,” he told me. “Someone who would help me.”
    My story proved it: a girl breaking the law to save a boy from war. An accomplice to a crime, not like other women. Fleeing to the ocean to scrub the yellow paint from her skin, the condemnation of her people, her parents, her country. A criminal who might be called from her retirement, one last time,