“Sugar,” Dale Mae said, “it’s the hardest thing to remember. All I can be is me, and all you can be is you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I have no idea. Sing me some of them blues.”
Mr. Albemarle sang:
What I like about roses I like a lot—
I like a smell, a thorn, that jungle rot.
I like a red, a yeller, a vulvate pink.
And a king bee going down the drink.
Mr. Albemarle and Dale Mae got themselves some coffee and got naked and got squared away for some intimate quality time together in a small bungalow he’d found in the fog, which intimate quality time Mr. Albemarle kicked off by announcing to Dale Mae, sitting cross-legged on the bed with her coffee steaming her breasts and looking to Mr. Albemarle some deliciously beautiful, perfectly joined in her parts and the parts appearing to be cream and vanilla and cinnamon and cherry and chocolate, and some of her looked like bread, also, smooth tender bread like host wafers — he tore himself away and said, “I warn you, I’m a bad piece of work, emotionally.”
“Well, bully for you,” Dale Mae said. “Do you know what to do with me?”
“I believe I do,” Mr. Albemarle said, gently placing a knee on the bed and taking Dale Mae’s coffee and setting it safely on a night table so she did not get burned in the clapping straits of his desire. He clapped onto her like an honest man. She returned everything he gave her by time and a half. It knocked him silly and made him pat his own butt, looking for his wallet, when it was over. He did this when he wasn’t sure who he was. In the willing arms of an agreeable woman possessed of reason and courage, Mr. Albemarle had to doubt it could really be him she was holding and he wanted invariably at these moments to see his wallet.
“Relax, you piece of work,” Dale Mae said.
“Okay.”
He did. It was difficult, to do that. Relaxing was hard, and dangerous, he did not trust it. That was why you had drunks. They had the most difficulty relaxing. They wanted it most, feared it most, claimed it most, almost never managed it.
“I will break your heart,” he said to Dale Mae, breathing hard on her breast, a sugary warm air coming from it as if it were a lobe of a radiator.
“Hmmm?” Dale Mae asked. “You go right ahead.”
“Go ahead?”
“Why not? Break break break.”
Someday, maybe today, he was going to do a woman right. Dale Mae’s breast was next to his eye and looked like a cake with one of those high-speed-photo milk-drop crowns on it. He had a tear in his eye and was hungry for cake. It was thanklessness that plagued and dogged hard the heels of affection. Affection was that which, and the only thing on earth which, you should be eternally thankful for.
When Mr. Albemarle got up from these his exertions upon Dale Mae, the warm giving stranger, he felt fresh and sweet as a large piece of peppermint candy. He told Dale Mae this and she told him he’d better take a shower, then, and get over it. He kissed her and she kissed back and he took the shower and she was still there when he got out. Her heart hadn’t been broken yet. It was progress. There was hope.
“It’s not easy,” Mr. Albemarle said later when they were strolling all along the watchtower hand in hand and in love, “to work this particular bit of magic.”
“What particular bit of magic?” Dale Mae asked.
“Marriage.”
“Indeed,” Dale Mae said, noticing a piece of shale on the walk and throwing it over the edge. Mr. Albemarle waited to hear it land, curious he had never tried a sounding in the mysterious moat before. He was still keening his ear when Dale Mae said, “This particular bit of magic? You deem us married?”
“In a figure of—”
“In a figure of nothing. Not speech, not nothing.”
“Okay. Sheesh! What’s up your reconnaissance butt?”
“My what?”
“Nothing.”
He held her hand, petulantly but not unhappily. Marriage was a tricky bit of magic. Holding hands was a tricky bit of magic. She needn’t be so hyper. There were — it occurred to him, now having been posted to the old verity that he was, whether holding hands or married or not, finally alone, always — there were people who had in their minds something called a “true marriage,” as opposed, Mr. Albemarle supposed, to a pro forma marriage. He had no idea what this true marriage purported to be. He was not speaking of it when he constructed his pithy impertinence about magic and a marriage being made to work. He meant the false land. It was a tricky bit of magic to stay together, was what he meant.
“I meant, it’s a tricky bit of magic to stay together,” he now said to Dale Mae, who squeezed his hand and patted their held hands with her free one as if to say, “You’ll be all right.” This little gesture proved his point: it was condescending enough that he wanted to take his hand back.
But she was, of course, right. Magic or not, tricky or not, it would bear no comment, it needed no more pressure upon it, the gratuitous happy union, than was naturally on it, the meeting and clinging together of two naturally repellent, irregular surfaces. They clung together out of desire but were aided, in his view, in their sticking together by a sap of hurt. This glue oozed from them despite themselves. For all Dale Mae’s tough lightness, she was holding hands, too. She was very tough and very soft. She was nougat.
“You’re a nougat,” Mr. Albemarle said to her, announcing it at large all along the watchtower. Emboldened, he then said, a little less broadly, a little more conspiratorially, “True marriage schmoo schmarriage.”
“What?”
“Schmoo schmarriage,” he repeated.
Dale Mae thumped him on the nose and held him by the back of the neck with one hand and at the small of the back with the other and pulled hard with both hands, scaring him with her strength.
All along the watchtower, it was quiet. “I think songbirds are overrated,” Mr. Albemarle offered. “Really inflated. Not nowhere near what they’re cracked up to be.”
Mr. Albemarle got them two buckets of range balls from a vending machine he’d never seen all along the watchtower before. As much as he had patrolled it, this caused him wonder. The machine itself was a wonder: a plastic fluorescent box dispensing not junk food or soda water but golf balls. What would come out of a vending machine next? Shoes? Pets? Beside the machine, incongruously to his mind, was a barrel full of clubs, for free use in ridding yourself of your buckets of balls. Mr. Albemarle got them each a driver, and he and Dale Mae slapped and topped and scuffed and hooked and sliced and shanked and chillied the balls into the moat of spoiled affection. Mr. Albemarle had the feeling that each ball contained a message of some sort to the brokenhearted from the not yet broken. They were like fortune cookies except that they were more like misfortune cookies. He could not imagine what one of these misfortunes might actually have said, and when he inspected a ball it read only “ProStaff” or “Titleist 4” or “The Golden Bear.” Yet he felt that each ball, whether it soared over or squibbed immediately down into the moat, carried a secret meaning from the players all along the watch-tower to the wrecked players beneath it.