is sensible. Newcomers already have their hands full. They’re usually here because one of them—sometimes both of them—just had an affair, and they come in shivering with guilt or fury. As soon as one of them starts talking, they go off like firecrackers. More than once we’ve had to pull them off each other, and when we get them separated they’re crying, they’re kicking, they’re trying to kiss each other. They give off a kind of light. They may be miserable, but they’ve never been so alive.
At meetings the new members talk for twenty minutes at a shot. They turn into Clarence Darrows. Somebody eventually has to cut them off, or we’d be sitting here all night. After the group leader asks the new people how they’d like to atone and rebuild their marriages, the ones who have good long-term Life Ties potential propose massive jobs—digging up wide banks of yews, reshingling the whole house. We have to talk them into something reasonable, but secretly we’re all thinking they were right in the first place. People who want to repair their marriages have to put their backs into the effort.
After four, six, maybe even eight months, the new ones start to calm down. They don’t talk so long, and we can tell by their soft, wandering hands that they’re having sex again. We stop hearing about every time someone didn’t get all the grit out of the lettuce. Sometimes we can see them looking around, looking out the window. Sometimes we can see them falling asleep.
The drop-off is pretty quick—only a few weeks before they’re gone. When we see them on the streets they nod and smile but then look away, embarrassed at all we know and hoping we don’t remember their stories.
Of course we do remember the stories, at least the good ones. We cherish them. Those stories are the very things that bring meaning to the Life Ties Statement of Beliefs recited at the start of meetings:
We believe that we are put on this earth to improve it. Through our marriages, we become models.
We believe that marriage is a total union. We share our thoughts, fears, emotions, and intentions with our partners. Marriage creates a single unit, without boundaries or divisions.
We believe that our marriages are the center of our lives. Every choice we make must consider our marriages first, last, and foremost.
Every decision made alone is a betrayal. Every decision made in community helps us build. Through new marriages we build a new community. Through a new community we build a new world.
Marriage is our first strength, our full humanity, our unique creation. We gather each week to reaffirm our unions, to celebrate our strength, to admit our failings, and to vow to improve.
When David and Cecilia read the Statement, they linger over the words as if they were prayer. Nancy and Paul frown, looking for some point of order. But Vivy and Sam barely pay attention. Sam stretches out and closes his eyes while Vivy fiddles with a button. One night she hemmed a pair of pants. Offended, the newcomers tell us that the Jilets look like a couple of teenagers kept for detention. The newcomers are surprised Vivy and Sam come back at all. The newcomers look at us for an explanation, so we tell them all there is to say: Vivy and Sam are there like weather. You never know what it will be, but you know there will be some. One reason to come back is to watch them. Another is to see how long they can last.
Three
Vivy
After a few weeks working from home, Vivy had already lined up a dozen acts for the store, including the Hula King (twenty Hula-Hoops in motion at once), the Two Toms (political impersonations), and Extraordinary Laurel LaRue (feminist jokes while reassembling a carburetor). On a tip from Laurel, Vivy had also penciled in a parrot choir, although birds weren’t her favorite kind of animal act. She was still trying to track down the waltzing dogs. Sam was certain they had retired their dancing slippers—even poodles, he said, couldn’t waltz forever. But Vivy kept sleuthing anyway, calling agencies and old friends, straining to remember the name of the dogs’ trainer. A man who had been able to get six teacup poodles to balance on their front legs and spin in unison wouldn’t just stop.
Phone call led to phone call, and Vivy set up office in the kitchen, spreading her calendar and computer and calculator across the table. The old acts had moved to Nevada, New Hampshire, San Diego, to towns and trailer parks where they could live with family and find work driving school buses. “Oh jeez!” shrieked Teeny Marteeny, the four-foot-ten contortionist, when Vivy finally tracked her down in a tiny town in California so far north it might as well have been in Oregon. “Oh jeez Louise! You can’t hire me—I’ve gotten fat!”
“I’ll bet you can still do handstands. Anyway, this is an ice cream store, not Winterland. Why don’t you come down and give us a try?”
“I’m huge. I look like a beach ball.” She started to cry, and Vivy patiently held on to her end of the line. She’d been hearing a lot of tears. Many of the old acts hadn’t seen a stage since Vivy and Sam had folded the company, and Vivy’s calls reminded them of the lives and hopes they’d used to have.
She heard the story over and over: when no other promoter had shown any love for peculiar talents or countercultural agendas, the performers had tried to represent themselves. They printed up business cards and contacted civic centers. They were willing to entertain at grade schools. They accepted $100, $50, $30, fees Vivy would have hung up on.
“I wanted to perform,” the Hula King told her. “I figured that if I got enough low-rent gigs, I’d eventually break big.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Vivy said. “If you sell low, you stay low.”
“I shagged my butt,” the Hula King said. He paused between words to gather himself. “I was going to show everybody some hustle. Make the rubber meet the road. But once you and Sam were gone, you know what I learned? Personally, all by myself, I didn’t see any reason people would want to see a guy standing up on a stage with twenty Hula-Hoops. I mean, I wouldn’t pay to see me. Without you there to talk me up, all I could think was people would be better off going to a movie. All those years I thought I was paying you to get me gigs, but I was really paying you to tell me I was worth something.”
Vivy scheduled him three months out, to give him time to get his old moves back.
Now, while Marteeny stammered and hiccupped, Vivy calmly wrote her in for the second Saturday in June. “You can stay with us. Laszlo will love to see you.”
“Laszlo. He must be almost a grown-up now.”
“He’s ten,” Vivy said.
“I’ll tell people I’m going to visit old friends. A family. They’ll understand that.” She cleared her throat. “There’s a man here who wants me to marry him. People here don’t know what I used to do.”
“That’s for sure,” Vivy said, laughing. In the old days Marteeny had been at least as famous for her ardent kisses, distributed equally among males and females, as she had been for her yielding, pliant joints. “Do you want to marry him?”
“I don’t know. He has very strong opinions. It doesn’t seem right to say yes, and it doesn’t seem right to say no.” Marteeny sighed. “You and Sam—you guys were cut out of the same piece of cloth. You guys are obvious. This man and I aren’t obvious.”
“I called just in time. You need to talk to some friends,” Vivy said.
Sam strolled into the kitchen and started rummaging in the cupboard. Vivy nodded when he held up a can of refried beans. The
