The Marriage of Sticks Read online

  The Marriage of Sticks

  Jonathan Carroll

  In her thirties, Miranda Romanac has an interesting, successful life. But she is also alone and adrift—in certain essential ways lost in the middle of it. At her high school reunion she discovers a shattering fact that further undermines her already shaky sense of who she is and where she is going. Then miraculously she meets the remarkable Hugh Oakley and her life does a 180-degree turn for the better. But everything has its price, and the consuming love affair with already-married Hugh begins to take a bitter emotional toll… When they move to a house in the country to start a new life together, the reality Miranda had once known begins to slip away the moment she walks in the door the first time. It is quickly replaced by alarming, impossible visions and strangers she somehow feels she knows but couldn’t possibly because they are all from other times and places. Other lives utterly alien to her own begin to affect her and all that she loves. But that is just the beginning of Miranda’s odyssey, because sometimes the worst thing that can happen to us is finding out who we really are.

  Jonathan Carroll

  The Marriage of Sticks

  To

  Ifah

  Roger Peyton

  Ellen Datlow

  Wendy Schmalz

  Patricia Powell

  What would I do without you?

  Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.

  Thomas Lux, “Old Man Shoveling Snow”

  Part One

  1. The Dog Makes the Bed

  In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. Yet despite having lived that story, most people have neither the courage nor any idea of how to tell it.

  I did not live this long so that now, when I am finally able to talk about my life, I will lie about it. What’s the point? There is no one left to impress. Those who once loved or hated me are gone or have barely enough energy left to breathe. Except for one.

  There is little else to do now but remember. I am an old old woman with a head full of memories, fragile as eggs. Yet the memories remain loud and demanding. “Remember me!” they shout. Or “Remember the dog that spoke.” I say, “Tell the truth! Are you sure? Or are you making up more convenient history just to make me feel better?”

  It is too easy to turn your best profile to history’s mirror. But history doesn’t care. I have learned that.

  Mirrors and treasure maps. X marks the spot not where a life begins, but where it begins to matter. Forget who your parents were, what you learned, what you did, gained, or lost. Where did the trip begin? When did you know you were walking through the departure gate?

  My story, the X on my map, began in a Santa Monica hotel with the dog that made the bed.

  We’d met right after college. For a while, for a year and a half, both of us truly believed this would be the great love of both our lives. We lived together, visited Europe for the first time together, talked shyly about marriage and what we would name our children. We bought things we knew would live in a great old house we’d have someday by an ocean. He was the best lover I ever had.

  What ruined us was simple: at twenty-one you’re too damned optimistic. Too sure life has so many wonderful things in store that you can afford to be careless. We treated our relationship like a dependable car that would always start and run, no matter how cold or bad the weather. We were wrong.

  Things got bad very quickly. We were unprepared for failure and each other’s dumb cruelty. When you’re that young, it is easy to go from lovers to enemies in a couple of breaths. I began calling him Dog. He called me Bitch. We deserved the names.

  So why, twelve years later, was that very same Dog sitting in an expensive hotel room when I came out of the shower, wet hair wrapped in a towel and pleased to see he’d made the bed? A bed we’d shared for the last ten hours with as great a relish as always between us? Because you take what you can get. Women love to talk. If you find a man who loves to listen and who happens to be a great lover, damn the rest. You’re the one who has to live inside your skin and conscience. If you can visit an old lover and still revel in whatever things you once had between you, then they are still yours if you want them. Is it right to do? I only know that life is a series of diminishing returns, ending with too many days in a chair, staring. I always sensed it would be that way. I wanted to be an old woman remembering, not complaining or fretting until death rang the dinner bell.

  Over the years Dog and I had met when it was convenient. Almost always it was a joyous, selfish few days together. Both of us left those meetings replenished. His word, and it fit.

  He’d made the bed and straightened the room. But that was Doug Auerbach: an organized man and a successful one too, up to a point. I admired him but was glad we had never married.

  The place looked exactly as it had the day before when we’d walked in. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, watching a game show on television. The oohs and aahs of the audience sounded sad in that cavernous lilac room. I stood looking at him, toweling my hair, wondering when we’d meet again.

  Without taking his eyes from the set, he said he’d been thinking about me. I asked in what way. He said he’d been married and divorced, had only sort of succeeded at what he’d wanted to do with his life, and generally regretted more than he was proud of. He saw me as just the opposite. When I protested, he looked up and said, “Please don’t!” As if I was about to do something terrible to him.

  Then he turned off the television and asked if I would do him a big favor. Across the street from our hotel was a large drugstore. He wanted me to go there with him while he bought a razor and some shampoo. He knew I had lots to do before my plane left for New York that evening, but there was no leeway in his tone of voice.

  I hurriedly dressed while he sat and watched me hustle around the room. What could be so important about a trip to the drugstore? I was annoyed, but also felt there was something both pathetic and urgent about his request.

  The store was one of those large discount places that sold thirty kinds of toothpaste, and all the customers seemed to be moving down the aisles in a stupor.

  Like the others, we grazed the razor and shampoo shelves. It was clear he was in no hurry to find what he wanted.

  “What’s going on, Doug?”

  He turned to me and slowly smiled. “Hmm?”

  “Why do you need me around to buy soap?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, only looked at me and seemed to consider the question. “I’ve been wanting to do this ever since I heard we were going to meet. More than the talk, the sex, more than anything. I just wanted to go into a store with you and walk around, making believe we were husband and wife. Just out for a few minutes to buy some aspirin and a TV Guide, maybe a couple of ice-cream cones. It would’ve been better really late, but I didn’t want to say anything last night.

  “I’ve always been jealous when I go into an all-night drugstore or market and see couples shopping together. I look in their baskets to see what they’re buying.”

  “Didn’t you ever do that with your wife?” I wanted to touch his arm but held back.

  “Sure, but I didn’t know I was doing it then. Now I do. Know what I mean? Then it was just a drag, something necessary. With you, I knew it would be a little adventure and we’d know we were having fun while we did it. Even if we didn’t buy anything, it’d be…”

  He looked at me but didn’t say anything more. The worst part was, I knew exactly what he was saying, and was sorry. Yet there were other things to do and they were more important to me than this. I wanted to comfort him but wanted to leave just as much. It meant so much more to him than to me.

  We bought his stuff, went back to the hotel, and checked out.
Waiting for my cab out on the street, we hugged. I told him we’d see each other in New York at the end of the summer.

  When the cab arrived he said, “You know there’s a famous rap singer now named Dog. Snoop Doggy Dogg.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re the only Dog Man I’ll ever love.”

  He nodded. “Thanks for the drugstore.”

  That should have been reason enough to tell me that there was more in the air then than oxygen. Why does it take a lifetime to realize that premonitions are as numerous as birds in a cherry tree? During the cab ride to the airport I saw something else that, in retrospect, certainly should have told me to think hard about what was going on rather than just look at my watch and hope I didn’t miss the plane.

  The driver was a big old man who wore a San Diego Padres baseball cap and didn’t utter a sound other than a resentful grunt when he banged my suitcase into the trunk of his car. That was fine because I sat in the back with a cell phone and returned calls to people I’d avoided while in L.A. I had the practice down to an art—call someone and tell her you’re on your way to the airport but just had to touch base with her before you left. Then she told you everything in a five-minute chat she would have taken two hours to tell over an expensive dinner. Who said patience came as you grew older? I had less and less and was proud of it. Whatever success I had was due to keeping things short and sweet, and expecting the same of others.

  In the middle of my last call I had my eyes closed and didn’t register what the driver said until a moment later. When I opened them we were passing an astonishing sight: there by the side of the freeway was a woman in a wheelchair.

  It must have been eight at night and there were no streetlamps, only the stab and drift of headlights across the Los Angeles darkness. Only a moment to glimpse her and then we were gone. But for that moment there she was, illuminated by the car in front and then us: a woman sitting in a wheelchair on the shoulder of a superhighway out in the middle of nowhere.

  “Nuts. L.A. is full of nuts!”

  I looked in the rearview mirror. The driver was staring at me, waiting for me to agree.

  “Maybe she’s not nuts. Maybe she’s stuck there, or something has happened to her.”

  He shook his head slowly. “No way. Driving a cab, you see things like that four times a day. You want to see how crazy the world is, drive a cab.”

  But that didn’t satisfy me and I called 911 to report it. I had to ask the driver exactly where we’d been on the road. He answered in a curt voice. The operator asked if there were any more details. I could only say no, there’s a woman in a wheelchair on the side of the road and something’s wrong with that, you know?

  The whole flight to New York I kept thinking about that half hour in the drugstore and then the woman in the wheelchair. Both made me uneasy. But then we landed and there were so many things to do that week before I met up with Zoe.

  Even the idea of seeing my old best friend and doing what we’d planned made some part of my heart nervous. We were going to our high school class’s fifteen-year reunion.

  Events like that always sounded great months before they happened. Then as the time closed in, my enthusiasm began to curdle like bad milk. With this reunion, part of me wanted to know what had happened to certain classmates after all those years. The other part was both petrified and appalled to be seen by people who’d owned my life when I was eighteen years old.

  Now I am unconcerned by my past, but at thirty-three I wasn’t. Back then, embarrassment still arrived in capital letters. I cared very much what most people thought of me. Even fifteen years after high school, I wanted to walk into the reunion sure that most of my old classmates would be pleased, impressed, or jealous—and not necessarily in that order.

  Zoe was different. Compared to my life since high school, Zoe Holland’s had been a shooting gallery, with her as the target. She dropped out of college freshman year and married when she found out she was pregnant. The culprit was a vain little scorpion named Andy Holland who, three months after they were married, started sleeping around with whomever he could find. Why he wanted to be married neither Zoe nor I could ever figure out. They had two children in quick succession.

  Then, out of the blue, Andy announced one day that he was leaving. Zoe was suddenly on her own with two babies and no prospects. The fact that she prevailed was inspiring because nothing she had done before prepared her for it.

  She had been one of the queens of our high school class—high grades, lots of friends, and the captain of the high school football team, Kevin Hamilton, was her love. Everyone looked at Zoe and sighed. But she was such a nice person that almost no one resented her good fortune.

  She was an optimist and, even in the midst of her later torment, believed if she worked hard and remained kind, things would improve.

  She took a couple of part-time jobs and struggled through. When her kids were old enough to go to school, she enrolled in community college. There she met the next disaster in her life, a handsome guy who began beating her up a few months after he moved in.

  Suffice it to say, Zoe’s philosophy wasn’t correct and throughout the ensuing years more bad happened to her than good. By the time the class reunion rolled around, she was living in a sad little house in our old hometown; one of her children did serious drugs and the other didn’t have much to say for himself.

  I took the train up from Manhattan. Since my parents moved to California, I hadn’t been back to Connecticut in a decade. The ride that hot Friday afternoon was the beginning of a trip to the past I was ambivalent about making.

  I hadn’t seen Zoe for years, although we spoke on the phone now and then. She was waiting for me at the station looking happy and exhausted in equal measure. She had put on weight, but what really struck me was how large her breasts were. In high school one of our constant running jokes was how neither of us had much in that department. Now there she was in a black polo shirt that stretched in ways that said it all. I must have been pretty unsubtle in my staring because after we hugged, she stood back, put her hands on her hips and asked in a proud voice “Well, what do you think?”

  There were people walking by so I didn’t want to say anything too obvious. I shook my head and said, “Impressive!”

  She hugged herself a moment and grinned. “Aren’t they great?”

  We got into her old Subaru station wagon and drove through town. All the way to her house she rhapsodized about new boyfriend Hector, who was the greatest thing to happen to her since she didn’t know when. The only problem was, Hector was married and had four children. But his wife didn’t understand him and… You can take it from there.

  She had the look of a saint in a religious painting. I kept looking from her face to those movie-star breasts and didn’t know what to say or think. Married Hector held her life in his hands but she seemed thrilled. From the sound of it, she was just happy someone was interested enough to want to hold her life, take the weight from her while she rested up.

  Her house was so small that it didn’t have a driveway, so we parked on the street in front. At first glimpse, it was the kind of house you see in biographies of famous people as the home where they were raised, or the first one they owned when they were starting out, poor but enthusiastic.

  She had arranged for her kids to be away for the weekend so we could have the place to ourselves and not worry about them.

  As she fumbled through her keys searching for the one to the front door, I felt a momentary squirt of fear go up me. Suddenly I didn’t want to go into this house. Didn’t want to see what was there. Didn’t want to see the concrete results of my friend’s life on the mantelpiece, the walls, the coffee table. Things like photographs of kids gone bad, souvenirs from places where she’d been happy for a few days, a cheap couch that had known a million hours of unmoving asses watching TV with no real interest.

  But I was completely wrong and that broke my heart even more. Zoe had a wonderful home. Somehow she had distilled all of h
er love and care into those few small rooms. Walking through them, admiring her taste, sense of humor, and talent for putting the right things in exactly the right places, I kept wondering, Why hasn’t it worked for her? Why has everything gone so wrong for such a good person?

  There was a small backyard that she’d saved for last to show me because there sat the surprise. Pitched in the middle of it was a familiar brown tent that made me laugh loudly as soon as I saw it.

  “Is that it?”

  Zoe was beaming. “The exact same one! I’ve saved it all these years. Tonight we’re going to camp out again!”

  When we were teens, our weekend ritual in the summer was always the same: set up this tent, stock it with junk food and fashion magazines, then spend the night inside gabbing and dreaming out loud. Our houses belonged to our parents, but this old Boy Scout tent in Zoe’s backyard was ours alone. Her brothers were banned from it and we took swift action when they tried to invade. What we talked about in there all those nights was as secret and important as the blood moving through our veins.

  I walked over and touched the tent flap. As I held it between my fingers, the rough familiar cloth was an instant tactile reminder of a time when life still made sense, limits were for old people, and James Stillman was the most important person on earth for me.

  “Look inside.”

  I bent down and peeked into the tent. Two sleeping bags lay on the floor with a Coleman lamp between them. There was a box of Zagnut candy bars.

  “Zagnuts! My God, Zoe, you’ve thought of everything!”

  “I know! Do you believe they still make them? Oh, Miranda, I have so many things to tell you!”

  We went back into the house. She showed me to her daughter’s room, where I changed into cooler clothes. Afterwards she suggested we take a drive around town before dinner and have a look at our old stomping grounds.