The Story of a Marriage

Set in 1953 San Francisco, the novel is narrated by Pearlie Cook, a Black woman reflecting on the six months that upended her marriage. The story unfolds against Cold War anxiety, racial segregation, and the persecution of gay men, as Pearlie recounts how a stranger forced her to confront everything she believed about her husband, Holland Cook.

Pearlie and Holland grew up in the same Black farming community in Kentucky, where Pearlie fell in love with him as a teenager. Holland was drafted and sent to the Pacific; Pearlie moved to California for wartime factory work. After the war, she encounters Holland by chance on a San Francisco beach. He does not recognize her at first. They begin seeing each other, and two months later he whispers that he needs her to marry him. She agrees, though he warns she does not truly know him. Before the wedding, Holland's elderly twin cousins, Alice and Beatrice, warn Pearlie that Holland has "bad blood, a crooked heart" (11) with no cure. Alice shouts, "Don't do it! Don't marry him!" (15). Pearlie ignores the warning.

By 1953, the Cooks live in the Sunset district, a fog-bound neighborhood on the city's western edge, the only Black family in the area. Their young son Sonny contracted polio as a toddler and wears leg braces. Pearlie has built an elaborate system to protect what she believes is Holland's physically transposed heart: a doorbell that coos instead of rings, a vibrating alarm clock, a barkless dog named Lyle. Each day she censors Holland's newspaper, cutting out violent stories. The transposed heart is a fiction she has constructed from the aunts' vague warnings.

One Saturday, a stranger named Buzz Drumer appears at the door. He is well-dressed and charming, with blue eyes, a broken nose, and a missing left little finger. He carries birthday presents for both Pearlie and Holland and knows details about her life that a stranger should not. When Holland sees Buzz, his face registers contempt and fear. Buzz becomes a regular visitor, and Pearlie learns he was a conscientious objector classified as Section Eight, a psychiatric deferral. He and Holland were roommates in a military psychiatric ward, not the physical recovery unit Pearlie had imagined.

The truth emerges on an evening when Holland is away. Buzz tells Pearlie that he and Holland were lovers, together in the hospital and afterward, living on Buzz's money, until Holland abruptly announced he was marrying Pearlie. A fight broke out; Holland broke Buzz's nose and left. Buzz tells Pearlie there is nothing wrong with Holland's heart; the hospital pronounced him healthy. The aunts' warnings were never about a physical ailment. Pearlie is stunned, but beneath her shock she feels relief. The separate bedrooms, Holland's distance, the inconsistencies she blamed on herself: All of it finally makes sense.

Buzz proposes a bargain. He is selling his corset business and plans to take Holland away. In exchange for Pearlie's help, he will provide for her and Sonny. But there is another obstacle: Annabel DeLawn, a young white woman Holland drives to her college classes. Holland, Buzz explains, is in a panic, casting about for options: his wife and son, Annabel, and now Buzz. That night, Pearlie reads the newspaper clippings she censored for Holland and discovers the terrifying legal landscape for men like him: arrests, firings, potential life imprisonment. At dawn, she agrees to help. Profoundly isolated as the only Black woman in her neighborhood, with no community to turn to, she sees cooperation as her only path.

At the oceanside amusement park Playland-by-the-Sea, Pearlie shares a story she has never told. During the war, Holland's mother hid him from the draft in his bedroom. Pearlie visited under the pretense of piano lessons, bringing him books. When Holland fell gravely ill, Pearlie called a doctor, and neighbors reported the family. Police dragged Holland from the house; he was drafted, his ship sunk, and he was sent to a hospital where he was mistakenly assigned a white roommate: Buzz. That was the moment love transferred from Pearlie to Buzz. Holland's mother died while he was away, and Pearlie, shamed by the scandal, was driven from her hometown.

Buzz asks Pearlie to remove Annabel as an obstacle. Pearlie observes Annabel at a segregated soda fountain and discovers she is secretly promised to William Platt, a young man who works there. Pearlie never speaks to Annabel. Later, Buzz reveals William has avoided the Korean War draft due to an administrative error and dictates a letter for Pearlie to report the mistake to the Selective Service. She types it but leaves it unmailed for weeks.

During a citywide air-raid drill, Pearlie and Holland shelter in their basement. Holland recites poetry he memorized during his wartime confinement. As the moment turns intimate, he whispers, "Don't ever change" (108). The words enrage Pearlie: Change is exactly what is needed. She realizes Holland will never voluntarily choose or alter his life, that he will continue to be all things to all people until he is destroyed. After the all clear, while searching for the escaped Lyle near the ocean, she drops the letter into a mailbox.

William is drafted. Annabel marries him within a week, abandoning her chemistry studies. Then William is shot during a training exercise and loses his arm. Pearlie is wracked with guilt. At a movie theater, Buzz offers to disappear, but Pearlie refuses, telling him it is too late to turn back. Buzz then reveals the origin of his missing finger: During the war, he volunteered for a starvation experiment. In the refeeding phase, given almost nothing to eat, he blacked out and was found delirious, cutting pieces of his own flesh from his hand. He was sent to the psychiatric hospital where he met Holland. As atonement for what she has done to Annabel, Pearlie slips $5,000 of her savings through the young wife's mail slot.

Buzz finalizes the departure plan: Holland will tuck Sonny into bed, listen to the radio with Pearlie, and at ten she will take a sleeping pill. At eleven, Buzz will come and they will leave. The final evening unfolds as arranged. Holland tucks Sonny in for the first time, speaking to him in a low, serious voice. His hand shakes around his drink. Walking to her room, Pearlie accidentally says "Goodbye" (176) instead of "Good night." Holland's face collapses. He replies, "Good night" (177), smiles, and closes his door.

The next morning, Pearlie expects the house to be empty. She weeps on the living-room floor. Then Sonny calls from the kitchen. Pearlie rounds the corner and finds Holland standing over his morning coffee, a sugar cube turning from white to brown. He stayed. Buzz came the night before, and Holland fought him physically, his own nose broken this time. Buzz drove away. Pearlie declares: "This is my story. In which he stayed for me" (182).

In compressed form, Pearlie narrates the decades that follow: desegregation heard through the radio, Sonny's college scholarship, his flight to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, Holland's death from kidney failure. Years later, Sonny, now president of a nonprofit, encounters an elderly donor named Charles Drumer at a New York reception and delivers a note from Buzz asking Pearlie to meet him at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Pearlie sits in the restaurant, looking down at the lobby where an old man in a gray suit waits. She knows he has come to ask why Holland stayed. She reflects that Holland's choice was not madness but perhaps, "in commonplace lives, our single act of poetry" (195). Outside the window, a young man catches a silver balloon from a tree and hands it to the girl beside him. Taking this as her signal, Pearlie stands and walks out into the day without meeting Buzz.