498
JAMES MERRill
There were bad moments, though. I had no ties. My parents
were dead. I was thirty-five years old, one moving body inside
another. What does anyone do in my position? I got married.
Muriel.
This poor, foolish, virgin librarian had staked her job, her
room, perhaps her entire future, on a summer's trip West. Up to
then she had spent her best moments scanning the heavens above
Iowa, filling her little heart with the play of clouds and tints, and
her little head with the certainty that if once those skies were seen
reflected in some vast expanse of water-the Pacific Ocean for
instance-all would be changed, life would no longer pass her by,
she herself would turn lovable overnight.
Again, that curious faith in destinations.
She never saw the Pacific, she mayor may not have become
lovable, but life definitely did not pass her
by-I
stopped for her.
She had been resting on her suitcase at a crossroads; a placard
round her neck read
California or Bust.
She saw the car stop, saw
that it was powerful enough to take her where she wanted to go.
She was too tired, hungry, and sunburned to wonder about its driver.
That came later, offshoot of the basic physical infatuation with
the machine.
We
headed
West-my intentions were honorable. We might
have gone all the way but for that billboard somewhere in Nebraska
advertising a "Motorists' Chapel. Worship in Your Car." My weak–
ness for novel experience within the traditional framework, or chassis,
together with Muriel's empty, peeling face, caused me to stop, propose
to her and, once accepted, make inquiries that led to the first mar–
riage ceremony ever performed in an automobile. A national mag–
azine paid all expenses. For weeks people recognized us wherever
we went. Many wished they had thought of doing the same thing.
My marriage was not unhappy, it was unreal. Legally each
other's dearest belonging, we spent, as I might have foreseen, more
and more time in rooms, eating places, shops, or under trees with
sandwiches and books of verse. "And if thy mistress," read Muriel
aloud, "some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes."
Parked up a hill, the car shimmered in waves of heat, gazed wrath–
fully, peerlessly out over our heads.
