An American Marriage(82)

What did I expect? The truth is that before Roy materialized in my living room, I had forgotten that he was real. For the last two years, he was only an idea to me, this husband of mine who didn’t count. He had been away from me longer that we had been together. I’d convinced myself that there were laws limiting responsibility. When I sent Andre to Louisiana, I hoped that maybe Roy would choose not to come to Atlanta at all, that he would send for his things, that I would be a memory to him in the way that he was a memory for me.

“Roy,” I said, wondering aloud. “Tell the truth. Would you have waited on me for five years?”

He twitched that same shrug. “Celestial,” he said, like he was talking to someone very young, “this shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Andre made a move as if to join us on the dry grass, but I shook my head. His breath escaped his mouth in exhausted puffs of white.

“How does it feel to make all the decisions?” Roy said. “It’s been up to you for the last five years. When we were dating, it was up to me. You had a finger that needed a ring. You remember that? Remember when I was a fiancé you could be proud of, flashing that rock like a searchlight. I won’t lie and say I didn’t get off on it. But now I don’t have anything to offer you but myself. But it’s better than it was last year, when I couldn’t even give you that. So here I am.” He looked to his left. “Your turn, Dre. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Andre spoke to Roy, but he looked at me. “I don’t have to tell Celestial what I feel. She already knows.”

“But tell me,” Roy said. “Tell me how you ended up with your head on my pillow.”

“Roy, man,” Dre said. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. You know I am. So don’t take this as disrespect, but I’m not going to discuss this with you.” He touched his busted lip with his tongue. “You had a time when we could have talked, but you wanted to fight. Now I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“What about you, Georgia? Do you have anything to say? How did you end up picking Dre over me?”

The true answer was that Olive had settled it by lying in her coffin as Big Roy showed me what real communion looked like, what it sounded like, even what it smelled like—fresh earth and sadness. I could never tell Roy that by his parents’ measure, what we had wasn’t a connection for the ages. Our marriage was a sapling graft that didn’t have time to take.

As if he could hear the murmur of my thoughts, he said, “Was Dre just at the right place at the right time? Is this a crime of passion or a crime of opportunity? I need to know.”

How could I tell him that desire didn’t work the way I thought it did when I was younger, my head turned by the electricity of attraction. Andre and I had an everyday thing. We moved each other like we had done it forever, because we had.

When I didn’t answer, Roy pressed on. “How did we end up here? My key works, but you won’t let me in.”

He gathered his body up and plunked down on the bench, blank-eyed and miserable. I turned to Andre, who didn’t meet my gaze. Instead, he studied Roy, broken and shivering.

“You didn’t do this to him,” Andre said. “Don’t let him set that at your feet.”

And he was right. All around Roy were the shards of a broken life, not merely a broken heart. Yet who could deny that I was the only one who could mend him, if he could be healed at all? Women’s work is never easy, never clean.

“You know where I’ll be.” Andre turned toward his own house.

Andre went his way; Roy and I went ours, me leading Roy the way you would provide assistance to a man who has been shot or has lost his sight. As we climbed the stairs to the front walk, I heard Andre’s calm words. “He hit his head pretty bad. He might be concussed. Don’t let him go to sleep right away.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Thank me for what?” said Andre.

In the bathroom, Roy let me clean his wound, but he refused to go to the emergency room. “I know you can take care of me.”

But there was little to do besides apply antiseptic. As the night stretched on, we asked one another questions to keep sleep at bay, even though both our eyelids hung low, as though weighted down by coins.

“What were you looking for?” I asked him. “When you were going through all the boxes?”

Roy smiled and snugged the tip of his pinky in the gap in his mouth. “My tooth. It wasn’t trash. Why did you throw it out?”

“No,” I said. “I have it.”

“It’s because you love me,” he slurred.

“Stay awake,” I said, shaking him. “People with concussions can die in their sleep.”

“Wouldn’t that be some shit,” he said. “I get out of prison. Come home, find my wife with another man, win her back, and then get in a fight with a tree and wake up dead.” He must have sensed a change in me, even in the dim light. “Did I speak too soon? I didn’t win you back?”

Each time his eyes drooped, I shook him back to life. “Please don’t,” I whispered, opening myself to him, undoing a rusted latch. “I can’t lose you like this.”





Andre


This is how I am lonely.