“She’s my friend.”
Nick leaned forward and took my other hand. “Listen to me, Lily. Listen closely. Budgie is not your friend, do you understand? She never has been. You owe her nothing. Not your loyalty, not your sympathy.”
“I know what she is, Nick. She’s still my friend.”
“Trust me, Lily.”
I took my hands away. “Trust you. Why should I trust you, Nick? You married her. You’re having a baby with her, for goodness’ sake. In April. You’re over the moon about it, remember? That’s what Budgie said.”
Nick took a long drink and lit a cigarette. He offered me one, but I shook my head. He smoked half of it down, knocking ash into the tray between us, before he spoke. “You wanted honesty, Lily. You toasted to honesty. Here’s the honest truth: Budgie may or may not be expecting a baby. God knows she’s used that gambit before. I have no idea if it’s true this time. But I know one thing with perfect certainty: the baby, if there is one, is not mine.”
The candlelight gleamed against the smooth brushed-back hair above his brow. I took his cigarette from the ashtray and smoked it. Nick’s eyes were fixed on mine, stern and sincere. As I opened my mouth to speak, the waiter arrived with the soup, pouring it from a gleaming tureen and into our bowls with solemn ceremony. He added pepper. I finished my martini. The wine came, was uncorked and poured for Nick’s approval. I watched his face in the dim light, and for a moment he seemed so grown-up, so sleek and experienced, while I sat with my frizzy hair and damp clothes and my Seaview hat, the channels of my body opening to flood with gin.
The baby, if there is one, is not mine.
The blood ran lightly through my veins.
“How can you be so certain?” I asked, in a low voice, when the waiter left at last.
“Because I have been to bed with Budgie exactly once, and that was before I married her.”
For some reason, in the shock of this admission, in the dizzying rush of questions and conjectures it let loose, I could only ask: “One night, or one time?”
“One time, Lily.” His hand closed around mine, and this time I didn’t pull back. “One time, not ten minutes, ten miserable and decidedly drunken minutes for which I have loathed myself since. I thought I was achieving the ultimate revenge, and instead I came face-to-face with myself, with how pointless and culpable my behavior had been since . . .” He looked down at our hands, clasped together. “I was still in Paris, on the point of moving back to New York, to take over the business. I woke up the next morning with a blistering headache, determined to start anew, to change my life, to stop behaving like a sulky ass.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
With his left hand, Nick picked up his martini glass, finished it off, and turned to his wine. “Lily, let’s not talk about that yet. I’m not nearly drunk enough, and neither are you.”
“No. I’m feeling quite drunk already. I want to know.”
“Eat your dinner, Lily.”
“Nick, I’m not a child.”
He picked up his spoon. “Please eat, Lily. I’m famished.”
He waited expectantly, spoon poised above his soup, until I gave in and began eating, in a show of hunger I didn’t really feel. I couldn’t taste the soup at all, didn’t notice the wine as I drank. “I think you should know something, Nick. Budgie really is going to have a baby. I’ve seen her, there’s no question.”
“It’s entirely possible.” Nick threw out the admission of his wife’s infidelity with casual ease, between a mouthful of soup and a mouthful of wine.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that while I have been strictly celibate since Paris, my wife has not.”
Strictly celibate.
“Then whose is it? How do you know?”
Nick gave me sharp look. “There may be many contenders, for all I know. I’ve left her to her own devices for much of the summer. But I’d guess the likeliest candidate is Pendleton.”
“Graham?” I dropped my spoon against the bowl with an indiscreet clatter. “But that was years ago!”
“Lily,” he said quietly.
My pulse throbbed in my temples. I reached for my wine.
“I don’t suppose you ever suspected. I was on the brink of telling you at least a dozen times. Then I thought you wouldn’t believe me. I thought it wasn’t my place, that I hadn’t the right to come between you.”
“You would have let me marry him, knowing that?”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. Oh, by the way, your suitor is stopping by to have his way with my wife in the gazebo most nights, on his way home from your house. It’s rather difficult to lead up to.”
“How did you know?” I whispered.
“I was taking a walk one night. I didn’t disturb them. If I thought he’d been sleeping with you, too, I would have said something, Lily. I swear I would. I would have punched his lights out for that, for your sake.”
“But not for Budgie’s.”
He shrugged. “I doubt he sought her out. She would have seduced him deliberately.”
“And how did you know I wasn’t sleeping with Graham?” I asked, after a pause.
“You can tell when two people are sleeping together, Lily, if you’re paying attention.”
I drained my wineglass. Nick poured me another. The streaky green remains of the asparagus soup pooled in the bowl, not at all appealing.
“So I was the warm-up act,” I said. “A few kisses to get the blood flowing. No wonder he was able to exercise such self-control. He had a willing body waiting for him a few doors down.”
“I’m sorry, Lily.”
“No, you’re not. You were quite happy to have him busy in her bed instead of mine.” I looked at him. “You couldn’t have kept her under control, could you? Couldn’t have told her to keep her legs closed?”
“How, exactly? By keeping her busy in my bed instead?”
“No!” I flashed out. And then, quietly: “No. It tortured me, imagining you two together. I could see it in the way she would cling to you as you danced. Her lipstick on your face. It looked like you were passionate lovers.”
“Budgie is a brilliant actress. One of her more useful talents.”
“You weren’t half bad yourself,” I said bitterly.
“Yes, I was. If you were paying attention. Kiki saw through it without any trouble.”
“Yes, Kiki.” I set the spoon along the edge of the soup plate and finished my wine. “Let’s dance.”
He rose with me and took my hand, and we danced gently next to the orchestra. Another couple joined us, emboldened by our example. Nick’s enormous hand wrapped around mine, dry and warm; the other rested at my waist. He danced a little close, but not too close: a thin film of open air still lay between us. I loved his smell, gin and wine, cigarettes and rain. It surrounded me in Nick, immersed me back in the dewy new sensation of falling in love, of being loved in return.
I leaned my head back to remind myself of Nick’s face, and found that he was looking at me, too.
“Don’t say it,” I said.
“I won’t. I can’t, can I? I’m a married man.”
When we returned to our table, the steak was waiting. We ate quickly, finished the wine between us, started another bottle. Nick lit me a cigarette, lit one for himself. I asked him about Paris, and he told me how beautiful it was, how he would walk through the city on his way to the office and wonder which garret we would have lived in together, which mansard window we would have looked from every morning. He smiled at me when he said this, met my enraptured gaze with that warm crinkle-eyed expression I loved so much, because it was as if he had saved it just for me. The wine floated pleasantly between my ears, Nick’s face floated pleasantly before my eyes.
When the waiter came to offer us dessert, I shook my head. “Let’s go, Nick.”
“You haven’t had your chocolate cake.”
“I’m not hungry. Take me somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t care. Out of here.”
Nick turned to the waiter and settled the bill. Outside, the rain had returned with zeal, thundering down from the darkened evening sky to flood the running streets. Nick turned up his collar and opened his umbrella. “Stay here, under the awning,” he said. “I’ll find us a taxi.”
It took almost a quarter of an hour, but he snatched one at last as it disgorged a carful of drunken passengers into a jazz club nearby. He bundled me inside, holding his umbrella over my head, and climbed in next to me.
“Where to?” asked the driver, looking in the mirror.
Nick looked down. “Where to? Your apartment?”
“God, no. I can’t stay there, not until it’s been professionally fumigated.”
Nick said to the driver: “Gramercy Park, please.”
I was hazy with wine, hazy with Nick. I nestled into my seat and marveled at his endlessness, only inches away, his infinite capacity to shelter me. I looked through the corner of my eyes at his lapel, and thought that it was the same chest that had hovered in love above me seven years ago, that it had somehow hovered over countless women since, had felt the press of countless eager breasts since, and now here it was again.
The buildings blurred past. I felt as if the taxi were floating down a very fast river.
“What were they like?” I asked. “The women of Paris.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I just need to know. You know me.”
The cab lurched around a corner. Nick stared out the window at the streaming rain. “I don’t remember most of them. I was usually half-drunk. It didn’t matter.”
“Were they beautiful?”
“Some of them, I guess.”
I gripped my hands together in my lap. Even drunk, I felt the words like a blow to the stomach.
“I was trying to prove something, Lily. I was trying to prove that you had meant nothing, that what I had felt that night, what had happened between us that night, meant nothing. That all I had to do was find a woman, any woman, and go to bed with her and there it would be. That you weren’t special after all. And every time, I proved myself wrong. Every time, instead of proving that I hadn’t really loved you, I proved the opposite. I felt emptier than before. Guilty, too, for behaving like such a cad, using them so miserably. For the dishonesty of it.” He turned to me. “So I gave it up.”
“Until Budgie came along.”
“She was the worst of all. The worst mistake possible.”
The cab turned into Gramercy Park.
“How did it happen?”
“Don’t, Lily.”
“I need to know. Did you seek her out?”
The cab stopped on the corner, before the remembered lines of Nick’s father’s spare apartment building. Nick reached into his pocket to find his money clip. “No, I didn’t. I told you, I had given up by then.”
“Then what happened?”
“She approached me at the Ritz, while I was enjoying a farewell celebration with the Paris office. Laid me raw with one of her expert remarks, you know the sort.”
“About what?”
“About you, of course. What else could do the trick? Then once I was sufficiently bloodied, she let me know she was willing, and we went upstairs. I stayed ten minutes and left. I didn’t even undress. I paid for her room on the way out.” He helped me out of the cab and shut the door with a hard slam.
He was right. I shouldn’t have asked. I could see the details now: the elegant room with its panels and gilding and private bath, the velvet bedspread, Budgie spread out invitingly among the scented pillows with her red lips and sleek depilated body and her breasts like new apricots. I had imagined such things before, of course, and more, but this time I knew it was real, that it had happened. The ten-minute coupling, fierce and short. Nick standing up and buttoning his trousers, still breathing hard, his face heavy with arousal, his hair disordered. Nick stopping by the front desk afterward, to pay for her room with crisp franc notes from his money clip. In my drunken mind, I couldn’t seem to hold any image for very long, but an instant was enough.
We passed by the silent doorman with a nod of Nick’s head. We went up the elevator to Nick’s floor. Nick found his keys and opened the door for me. I stepped through into the darkness, warm and slightly damp, though not as warm and damp as outdoors. Nick closed the door behind us and removed his hat, and instead of reaching for the light, reached for me. His thumbs found the tears on my cheek.
“What’s wrong, Lilybird?” He took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped my face.
“It’s too late, isn’t it? It was always too late.”
Nick leaned back against the doorway, while the shadows of the living room took shape behind him. “I want you to know something, Lily. Another thing, an important thing. Every time I kissed a woman, touched a woman, I knew it was wrong. I thought in my heart I was an adulterer. On my wedding day, six months ago, I remembered how I’d once called you my wife, and I felt like a bigamist. I have always belonged to you, whether I liked it or not.”
I couldn’t speak. I breathed, in and out, staring at the patch of floor next to his polished shoes.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I know it’s too much to forgive, but I’m asking anyway. I have been unfaithful in every possible way, God knows, but I cannot live another instant without asking you to forgive me. Not absolution, only forgiveness. Because I will spend the rest of my life repenting for what I did in Paris.”
I looked up. The lights were still off, and his face was shadowed, which was just as well. In the claws of my jealousy, I wanted to know everything. I wanted a point-by-point catalog of names and ages and hair colors, of acts performed and positions assumed. I wanted to know where he found them, how he got them in bed, whether he kept lovers or took a new girl each time. I wanted to know how many, how often, how quickly, how slowly. I wanted to know whether he spent the night. I wanted the merciless details branded on my brain to give me relief from my years of wondering.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” I said.
Nick reached his long arm and took off my hat and set it on the hall table, next to his, under the unlit lamp. “I will fix this, Lily,” he said. “I promise I’ll fix it.”
We stood there in the dark foyer of Nick’s apartment until my feet began to ache and I stepped away, swaying, thickheaded with wine and shock. Nick caught my arm. “Come inside and dry off.”
We went into the living room, and Nick turned on a single lamp. I took in my breath. The place had changed: the furniture was more or less the same, and the art on the walls, but it was jumbled now, lived-in. Nick’s books lay stacked about the tables and floor. A desk and chair sat in the corner, which I didn’t remember, scattered with papers and pens and a slide rule. Against one wall leaned a collection of large rolled-up papers: blueprints, probably. There were architectural models on every surface, made of paper-thin wood glued together with meticulous exactitude. “Are these yours?” I asked, fingering one.
“A hobby. It’s kept me busy in the evenings, this summer.”
“They’re stunning. Has Budgie seen them?”
“No, she’s never been here. She likes the apartment uptown. Listen to me. You’re wet and tired and drunk. I want you to go in the bathroom and take a bath and put your things to dry. I’ll bring you a robe to wear.”
“But . . .”
He held his finger to his lips. “Hush. No arguments.”
I was wet and tired and drunk. I went obediently to the bathroom and drew a bath in Nick’s tub, where I washed myself with Nick’s soap and lay staring at Nick’s ceiling. I could hear him in the other room, the kitchen, running water and opening cabinets. The warm water mingled with the wine to produce the most delicious languor throughout my limbs, the steady dissolving of each needle of jealousy piercing my skin.
He loves me. He’s always loved me.
He left. He slept with other women. He slept with Budgie, he married Budgie.
> It meant nothing. It was nothing. He was using them and thinking of me. He loves me and no one else. He spent ten minutes with Budgie and left.
Then why did he marry her?
Why, indeed?
Did it matter? He hadn’t even slept with her since, or so he claimed. He hadn’t fathered her child. He had no tie to her, other than a piece of paper, a piece of paper that made him a bigamist in his own heart.
My thoughts revolved drunkenly, around and around, among stale old images of Nick in bed with other women and fresh new images of Nick in bed with me, loving me, whispering my name, whispering, Lilybird, Lilybird.
I rose and dried myself with Nick’s white towel. A knock sounded on the door. “Come in,” I said.
Nick poked his arm through the door. A dark striped robe dangled from his hand, impossibly large. “It’s too big, I know, but you can roll up the sleeves.”
I took it from him, wrapped it around me, and rolled up the sleeves. The ends dragged a good six inches on the white floor tiles. I spiraled my wet hair in the towel and emerged, clean and sleepy and tipsy. I came right up to Nick and put my arms around his neck. “I love your bathroom,” I said. “I love your apartment. I love you.”
Nick put his hands on my arms. “Lily. You’re drunk.”
“So are you. We drank together.”
“We drank roughly the same amount, but I’m twice your size.”
“Kiss me, Nick.”
He kissed my forehead and took my arms. He brought them gently around between us. “I want you to drink some water, take some aspirin, and go to bed.”
“Will you join me there?”
He searched my face. “Do you want me to?”
“More than anything.” I reached up on my toes for him, but my kiss landed on his chin.
He drew my hands up to his mouth and kissed each one. “Lilybird. I’m going to sleep on the sofa tonight.”
I came back down on my heels. “What?”
“You know it’s best.”
“No, I don’t.”
A Hundred Summers Page 25