Then Mary said, “This thing I’ve been meaning to talk to you about—”
The baby stopped nursing and protested, giving away some tension in Mary. Jeremy opened his eyes. He had been aware all day of this news hanging over his head. He even thought he knew what it was. “You’re pregnant,” he said.
“What?”
“I thought—”
“You know I can’t get pregnant when I’m nursing.”
“I was afraid that might not have worked this time,” he said.
“You were afraid?”
He kept quiet. He didn’t know how to take it back.
“Jeremy?” Mary said, but then she let it rest. “Well,” she said, “I seem to be divorced, Jeremy.”
For a moment he thought she meant divorced from him, and his heart gave a lurch. Just for that one little imaginary game he had played? He hadn’t meant anything by it. But they weren’t even married! What was she talking about?
“Guy has divorced me.”
He had asked her, once, what her husband’s name was. It was the least of what he wanted to know, but he had never dared bring up the real questions and he had thought that maybe, having started with his name, she might go on to tell him more. She hadn’t. “Guy Tell,” she said. “Guy Alan Tell.” After that, nothing. Not even chance clues — not even mention of a trip on which her husband, incidentally, had accompanied her, or reports of some adventure in which he happened to be included. That single fact, “Guy Tell,” had become embedded in him, and he had layered it over with a thousand attempts at forgetfulness, with a literal squinching shut of his eyes whenever any thought of her husband recurred. Now her saying the name stunned him. It was as if she had suddenly entered into some hidden fantasy of his — named, out loud, a product of his most private imagination. “What?” he said. She seemed to understand that she didn’t need to repeat it. She waited, calmly.
“You’re divorced?” he said.
He sat up. He noticed how the air waves seemed to shiver, recoiling from a shocking word: divorce. Such a hard, ugly sound. Nothing like this warm-breasted shadow beside him. “Who was — how did you find out?” he said.
“The lawyer wrote me. They got my address from Gloria.”
“From—? I don’t quite see.”
“From his mother.”
“Ah,” he said. This secret husband had had a mother, then. Also a father, and perhaps a grandmother who knitted him winter scarves. He had friends who called out greetings on the streets, he paid visits to people, he no doubt drove a car and made purchases and worked in some place of employment. He had once lain beside this very same woman, perhaps waiting for her to finish nursing the baby before he reached out for her with absolute, cool confidence. A lump of something like clay, thick and soft, rose up in Jeremy’s throat.
“He divorced me on grounds of desertion,” Mary said. “That’s allowed when he hasn’t known my whereabouts for so long.”
“Well—” said Jeremy. He coughed. “I mean — how did she know your whereabouts? His mother.”
“Oh, that’s just lately. I wrote her a letter.”
“You did?”
“Just a note, really. I wanted to find out how she was getting along.”
“I see,” Jeremy said.
“I was very close to her, you see. She was always very kind to me. And the other day I was thinking, ‘It’s Gloria’s birthday right about now. Couldn’t I send her a card to tell her I still think of her?’ ”
She still thought of her. When was that? At what point in her cheerful, bustling day, behind that tranquil face, did her thoughts turn to her old life? Really, he didn’t know anything about her. She might be thinking about her husband constantly; she might be full of discontent; she might be planning some new love affair far away from him. He suddenly remembered a night last week when she had been braiding Pippi’s hair in front of the television. Some celebrities were appearing on a panel show, among them a movie hero with deep, shadowed eyes. “Why does everyone think that man is so attractive?” Mary asked. Jeremy had been filling out contest blanks, ignoring the program. “What man?” he asked. “That one on the left,” she said, “that tall attractive man beside the blonde.” Jeremy looked up then, puzzled, but Mary had not heard her own words and she merely snapped a rubber band on Pippi’s braid and gave her a pat. “Off you go now. Bedtime.” But it wasn’t until now that he thought to wonder: Was she longing for something more? When she read those romantic novels she liked, with the distraught pretty girls on the covers, was she wishing that she too had a man who would carry her up castle stairs or defend her with his sword or even, perhaps, frighten her a little with his dark, mysterious gaze?
As if she had guessed at all the cracks of uncertainty running through him, she turned to look at him over the baby’s head. In the dark her face seemed like a piece of felt. The baby made sucking noises in her sleep, lying on Mary’s arm as limp as a beanbag. Only Jeremy felt some brittle crumbling sensation inside him that kept him sitting upright.
“Jeremy? I guess maybe we could be married now,” Mary said.
“Well, if you wanted to.”
“Do you?”
“I do if you do,” he said.
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“We’ll have to do it in secret, then,” she said. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, Jeremy. For real, this time.”
“Oh, certainly. Anything you say.”
“But I’ll make all the arrangements. Would you like to get married this Thursday? Olivia’s home on Thursdays, she can babysit.”
“All right,” he said.
The crumbling sensation went on. Bits of him kept breaking away and falling, but Mary didn’t seem to notice.
All through the next day, while he sat in his studio filing down the metal edges of a statue, he kept thinking about this mother-in-law whom Mary still remembered after so many years. He saw her as fat, blowsy, good-natured — an open-hearted woman who could give Mary some indefinable quality that he was not up to. He pictured her holding Mary’s letter in enormous, motherly hands. He tried to imagine what Mary would have written. It was polite, it was almost obligatory, to ask a woman about the welfare of her son. “How is Guy doing? I think of him often.” Oh, he could almost see those words in Mary’s round, looped handwriting. “I live with someone else now but Gladys (or Dolores or whatever her name was), it’s not the same at all, he’s so wishy-washy and spends so much time in his studio, and at first he wanted to make love too often and now he doesn’t want to hardly ever.” Jeremy winced and dropped a bolt and picked it up again. He imagined the mother-in-law’s answer. “Guy has a divorce since he gave up hope but you could come back any time, any time at all, Mary. Things have never been the same here since you left.”