Marry Me Read Online Free Page A

she have guessed that the first evening, while she was painting her eyes in the bathroom and he was watching Arnold Palmer sink the winning putt on television, he would fall into a depression, and that for fifteen minutes she would have to hold him on the bed while he stared at the white wall and murmured about pain and sin, before he gathered the courage to button his shirt and put on his coat and take her to a restaurant. In an eye-whipping spring wind they walked block after block on the wide, diagonally intersecting streets, looking for a restaurant. Away from the illuminated monuments and façades, Washington seemed dark and secret, like the rear of a stage set. Limousines swished by with a liquid, lonely sound heard in Manhattan only very late at night. She felt the curse slowly lift from Jerry’s mind. He became manicky and leap-frogged a parking meter, and in the restaurant, a fancy-priced steakhouse catering to Texans, he impersonated a Congressman escorting the Queen of the Minnesota Dairyland. Honeh, Ah could take a shaaan to you. Their waiter, eavesdropping, had expected a huge tip, had been plainly disappointed. Strange, how fondly she remembered the awkwardnesses. In a narrow little gift shop, where Jerry had insisted on buying toys to take home to his children, the saleswoman kept turning to her as if she were their mother, tentatively, puzzled by her silence. On the last morning, by the elevator, ontheir way to breakfast, she had been asked by the head chambermaid if the room might be cleaned, and she had said yes; this woman was the first person to treat her without a flicker of doubt as Jerry’s wife. When they returned at noon, the venetian blinds had been torn away from the window, their bed was stripped and shoved against the bureau, and a slouching Negro was lathering the carpet with a softly screaming machine. Jerry and Sally left the hotel in one taxi and took separate planes home and found that the coincidence of their absences had not been noticed. Their momentary marriage, a wedding ring overboard, sank greener and greener into the past and became irretrievable. No matter what happened, it would never happen again, never happen the same, in all of time. It would be silly – insane – to risk everything and go to him now. For now the venetian blinds of their affair were, if not quite torn off, at least set at a revealing tilt: Josie blushed and stiffly left the kitchen when Jerry’s usual ten o’clock call began ringing; Richard sat drinking the evenings away with a thoughtful dent in his upper lip; and the glimmering, watchful expression almost never left Peter’s face. Even the baby, who was learning to walk, seemed shy of her and preferred to lean on space. Perhaps this was a hallucination – at times Sally feared for her sanity.
    She stood up. The seam of water and sky, marked by the thin beige line of the Island, seemed to exclude an immense possibility. Panic struck her. ‘Bo-oys,’ she called. ‘Time to go-o!’
    Bobby’s body twisted and dropped to the sand in a tantrum. He shouted, ‘We just came, you nut!’
    ‘Don’t you ever call people that,’ she told him. ‘Ifyou’re rude, people won’t know what a nice little boy you are.’ It was one of Jerry’s theories that if you often enough told someone he was nice he would become nice. In a way it did work. Peter came to her, and Bobby afraid of being left alone, sulkily followed to the Saab.
    Don’t go. No. Yet the command had no weight, no weight whatsoever, and though she read it in a dozen obstructive omens that bristled about her as she dressed and lied her way out of the house and drove to the airport and paid her way onto the aeroplane, it remained a weightless sentence, afloat on the deep certainty that she should go, that going was the only possible thing to do, and absolutely right. A righteous tide lifted her over the snag of Josie’s surprise, carried past the children’s upturned faces, pushed her through the