“Sarah still asleep?” Mr. Theo entered from the dining room, carrying his breakfast tray. “She went to bed at ten last night. I don’t know why she needs so much sleep. You don’t think she’s sick, do you Gregor?”
“I’ve given some thought to that, sir,” I answered, judiciously.
He pulled out a chair, sat down, watched me. His tanned face had that sleek look, freshly shaven. “I guess Allie’s working her pretty hard. And Mother too. The kid doesn’t seem to have any social life, but I don’t know when she’d have the time. She’s not still mooning about over Wycliffe, is she? He hasn’t been around, has he?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“Poor kid took quite a nosedive over him. Once the wedding’s behind us, her life will perk up. She can get a divorce. And that’s not much more than two weeks now.”
I rose, to clear his tray off the counter space I would need for the silver. He watched me over his shoulder. “Did you ever have the feeling that—like you’re on a train and it’s going the wrong place?”
“Are you having the traditional jitters, sir?”
“Maybe. I don’t think so. If I am, they’re sure not about Allie. Talk about the pleasure of deferred gratification. No, it’s not that, it’s—it’s as if all you did was decide to step onto a train, and everything follows from its own impetus, not from yours. Did you ever?”
“Yes,” I told him. “I do know what you mean.” I knew better than to quote Frost to Mr. Theo or to mention my own experience of life. I also knew that even if I persuaded him to back out of the wedding, she wouldn’t have me. All I would achieve, assuming I could succeed, would be Alexis’s humiliation.
“I guess that’s why you’re not married,” Mr. Theo—not a man of rich imagination—said. “That reminds me, Tiffany’s should deliver the ring today. Don’t let the boy go until you’ve checked the engraving. It should be my initials inside.”
“Very good, sir.” I accompanied him down the hallway, escorting him into the day.
“They asked me…They tried to sell me a set, his-and-hers rings. Why would a man wear a wedding ring?”
I opened the doors for him. “Perhaps for the same reason a woman does?”
“Not this man. Look at the day, Gregor. New York in May—I don’t know why people dump on New York the way they do.” The limousine awaited him, double-parked in front of the house.
I returned to the silver, listening with half an ear for the sounds of Miss Sarah, upstairs. My private thought was that she slept late because it took so long for her to cry herself to sleep. When the doorbell rang I was rinsing spoons. I went to answer it, drying my hands on the apron.
Alexis stood outside, in a little boxy suit and low-heeled shoes, tidy as a teapot. Her hair fluffed out around her face, fresh from being done by expert hands. It made me sad to see her: in not very many years’ time she would be a little dumpling lady, without vanity because she had nothing to be vain about, Mrs. Theodore Mondleigh, probably an excellent mother although how she’d feel about herself as a wife I couldn’t guess. “Good morning, miss,” I greeted her. “I was expecting a delivery,” I explained my appearance, shirtsleeves and apron. “Miss Sarah isn’t awake yet. But come in.”
She stayed put. “It’s not Sarah I want to see.”
I waited.
“Will you come for a walk with me, Gregor? I want to ask you something.”
“Of course, miss.”
“Don’t talk to me like that today, please.”
I couldn’t think what she wanted of me. Most probably, to be sure I was not going to be part of her married life. “Let me leave a message for Miss Sarah, should she come downstairs. I won’t be a minute—unless you’d like me to change?”
“Why should you?” Alexis asked.
I had no idea, which was why I’d asked.
“I’ll wait out here. You could take off that apron.”
We went side by side down the city street, toward the park, across the avenue and to the pond, where a few boats moved across the gilded water, little plastic Pequods. By the time she sat down on a bench and I sat beside her if not with her, my discomfort had mounted to the point where I only wanted whatever it was to be over with.
I waited, noting the few wandering clouds, wondering if it was going to get hot by midday, watching the boats crossing and recrossing from cement rim to cement rim.
She was twisting her hands in her lap. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her and make her look at me, and tell her, “Liberty has lots of prints suitable for females over the age of fourteen, dark Indian prints, rich colors.” She looked over at me and took a breath, but that didn’t enable speech.
I looked away.
“I’m having a hard time saying this,” Alexis said.
I decided against sarcasm. Almost, I felt sorry for her. “Perhaps I can help. I won’t be staying on with Mr. Theo after the wedding. I’ll give him my notice.”
“That’s not—” she started. “I mean, thank you, Gregor. Theo will give you a good recommendation, I’m sure. But that’s not it.”
She had had all the help she was going to have from me.
“What will you do next?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t have any difficulty finding a suitable position.”
“Do you mind?” she wondered, in a little voice.
I did feel sorry for her. It wasn’t her fault, after all; it wasn’t her doing. It had all been my deliberate doing. “What is there for me to mind, miss?”
“You’re right. It’s none of my business.”
“I didn’t mean that, Alexis.”
“Anyway, when you hear what I’m going to ask you, you’ll think…I don’t know what you’ll think.”
Did she want advice about a wedding present? Not likely, I thought, not bloody likely. Alexis was too tense. Inappropriately tense for merely asking the butler’s advice about what would be welcome and tasteful. “Then what is it?”
If I’d been her, I’d have rapped me in the teeth for the patronizing tone, but she was too wrapped up in her own self-fortifying to take offense.
“I don’t know how to begin.” She lifted her mouth at the ends. Her eyes didn’t see me. “I know, begin at the beginning. The beginning is Theo. Who doesn’t love me—not sexually, if you know what I mean.”
She checked to be sure I was following her. I nodded, I was following her.
“Even someone as inexperienced as I am can tell that. See, I’ve known him all my life, and he’s—he’s perfectly nice and all that, he’s perfectly normal. There’s nothing wrong with him. There’s something wrong with me, that’s the problem, but Theo can’t see past his own nose where people are concerned. He’s terrific about investments, really sharp, both knowledgeable and intuitive—which is a rare combination—but about people…Including himself, you see. That’s where the trouble is.”
She watched my face for its reaction, as if she had explained everything.
“What trouble? Am I being obtuse?”
“You’re not obtuse, Gregor,” she admitted. “I guess, maybe I’m trying to justify what I’m going to ask you. Because as far as I can tell, you’re trustworthy. I mean, even though you did try to deceive me, you’ve never tried blackmail. Not in any way. So you’ve got some idea of honor.”
“Some small token, yes.”
“Don’t get huffy, don’t—If I can’t be honest with you, who can I be honest with?”
I unbent, smiled, let myself cherish her good opinion.
“You know as well as I do that with Theo, if the sex isn’t—And the marriage won’t have a chance if the sex isn’t—”
I was beginning to guess at her purpose.
“Not that there would be a divorce or anything like that, but he’d…I don’t know, we’d have separate bedrooms and things like that.”
I had forgotten how strong an emotion anger is.
“If I’m going to get married, I want it to work. As a marriage.” She looked at me
again, pleading. “And I don’t know anything about making love. Not anything.”
“No,” I said. “The answer is no, Alexis. I don’t go out at stud.”
She was embarrassed but determined. “I wasn’t offering you money or gifts. I know better than that.”
I didn’t answer.
“Or did you mean children, getting pregnant? Because I’ve started taking the pill.”
I didn’t answer.
“But Gregor, I’m not talking about something cheap, some dirty weekend.” She held me in place with a hand on my arm. “It’s Memorial Day weekend; my parents are going off on someone’s boat to Block Island. I thought we could—I thought we might go somewhere, for the weekend, somewhere you’d enjoy, maybe Bermuda or St. Barts? Anywhere you like. I’ve got my passport and you’ve got one, haven’t you?”
She hadn’t meant to insult me. “Alexis,” I told her stiffly, “it’s not possible.”
“Why not? Theo won’t know, he’s going to Hilton Head. He won’t even know enough to be grateful. Isn’t it what you were after anyway?”
“I was after more.”
“But you knew I couldn’t marry you, not once I knew the truth. Unless—Gregor, you weren’t planning not to tell me the truth, were you?”
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t say. I didn’t know.
“So what’s the problem?” she asked. Dogged. “I’ve thought about it and—It wouldn’t be degrading for you, Gregor. At least, I could be wrong, but I think you really do like me.”
I didn’t deny it.
“At least to some extent.”
She was unsure now. I waited.
I could almost see her stiffening her resolve. “And I find you attractive.” She made herself meet my eyes. “You know that as well as I do. You’re very attractive.”
I think I must have smiled. Well, it was good to think that I had at least troubled her.
“And I dreamed about you, it was…You lifted me down from a wagon, as if we were going to an old-fashioned dance, a square dance, and…your fingers touched my ribs, through the blouse I wore, I could feel them. I keep feeling that, how your fingers touched my ribs.”
“You are trying to seduce me.” I didn’t tell her how she was succeeding.
“No. I’m asking you to help me out.”
“The answer is still no, Alexis.” No with more regret, with a lot more regret.
She accepted it. There was no point in staying there, so I got up. I was about five paces away when the thought struck me. “You won’t ask somebody else?”
“There’s nobody else to ask. I don’t blame you, Gregor. I wouldn’t either, if it were me.”
I went on, away, slowly. Thinking. After another few paces I turned around to look at her: she sat quietly, watching the toy boats on the artificial pond. I walked back, slowly. She saw that but said nothing.
“All right,” I said.
I had surprised her.
“But it has to be my weekend.”
“But—”
I didn’t reach out a hand or smile or make it easier for her in any way. “A nonnegotiable position,” I said.
“Yes, of course. I can see that. I can accept that. Thank you, Gregor.” She hesitated. “I think.”
“I’ll let you know where to meet me, late Friday afternoon. You’ll be back home Monday evening.” I was all practicality.
“What should I pack?”
“Whatever you usually would, for a weekend.”
She nodded, swallowed. “You’re awfully nice to do this, Gregor.”
I could have laughed out loud. Nice wasn’t the word most people would use, for me or for her. But I thought she was right about Mr. Theo and the chance of success for the marriage. “Listen, Alexis,” I said, sitting down beside her, taking one of her cold hands in both of mine. In for a penny, in for a pound: I planned to enjoy myself; I planned for her to enjoy herself. “I want you to think about this, all the time until Friday. We’re lovers, you and I—me for you and you for me. That’s how it’s going to be.”
“But Gregor—”
The hand I held had Mr. Theo’s ring on it. “I know, just for the weekend.” It was a ring for a longer-fingered, brighter-nailed hand, not for the little stubby fingers I held. “For the whole, long weekend,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning what I don’t know.
“You know? I don’t think I am.” The realization pleased me. If I could have pulled it off, we might have been quite something, Alexis and I. “You’re a woman a man could give up everything for.”
The words, as I spoke them, seemed true. It wasn’t what I thought I’d been thinking, and they were probably false, but in the circumstances they rang true enough.
“Because of my money,” she answered.
“Don’t be sorry,” I asked her.
She withdrew her hand. “Then it’s settled.” She stood up and looked down at me. “I was going to see if Sarah wanted to go to a movie tonight. Theo’s out of town on business”—which was the first I’d heard of it—“so I thought Sarah might like to.”
I didn’t know why she was marrying him, and I knew several reasons why she shouldn’t, but that was no way to win her—if there remained any chance to win her, if that was what was hidden away in the bank-vault subconscious of my mind. I didn’t think that was it, however; I thought it more likely that my pride had been pricked, and this was a chance to soothe it.
I wasn’t thinking, that’s the truth. Why not? Why shouldn’t I? That was the extent of my thinking.
“Shouldn’t we go back?” Alexis asked.
“You go ahead,” I said. It was a limited victory but still worth savoring. “I’m going to sit here until I’ve gotten over the shock of your appalling proposition.”
Which it was, the more I thought of it. Appalling, and rather wonderful. I was appalled, and eager.
28
Memorial Day Weekend
I was early at the airport and saw her come in, undistinguished in a crowd. She wore a mottled lavender suit, full-skirted, loosely jacketed; her dress bag she carried over her shoulder. The blown-dry hair, with its swept bangs, the little leather purse, the sensible shoes—her gait, like her face, was purposeful. She looked dowdy, dumpy. I wasn’t disappointed. She looked like herself.
I bent to kiss her cheek, in greeting. I didn’t take her bag. I had one of my own over my shoulder, and with my free hand I held her free hand. Without looking, I knew she wasn’t wearing Mr. Theo’s ring.
For the length of the plane trip we spoke only twice. I don’t count her inquiry as we boarded, “Pittsburgh?” I’d hoped to surprise her.
After liftoff I took a little square box out of my pocket and opened it for her. A pair of wedding rings shone gold against black velvet. “This one’s yours.” I gave it to her, and she slipped it onto her finger. “I didn’t know if you’d want me to wear one.”
“Yes, I would, please.” So I put it on. Then she looked out the window, thinking her own thoughts. I read the copy of The Atlantic I’d bought in the airport. She didn’t seem tense, I was at ease: we could have been a married couple.
Somewhere high over Pennsylvania she turned to me. “Gregor?” Worried, apologetic. “I should have asked before, I’m sorry. About an HIV test.”
So she had thought of it. I was relieved to know that. “I had one a couple of months ago,” I told her. “I haven’t had a sexual encounter in the last six months. I’ve never been promiscuous, never knowingly slept with a high-risk person, but there’s always a chance. You have to know that. As far as I know I’m healthy.”
“And I’m a virgin who’s never had a blood transfusion,” she told me, and turned back to the window.
She trusted me. She was right to, but…Despite everything, she took me at my word, she knew she could take me at my word.
Alexis interrupted my thoughts by turning around again, to ask, “Not for six months? But I thought men—?”
“That’s boys,�
�� I said, and she laughed, pleased.
The suite also surprised her. She took in the basket of fruit, the flowers, the whole wide living room with floor-to-ceiling windows, the city spread at her feet. Our luggage had been set down in the foyer.
She wandered—opening a door to find a kitchen, another door to a bedroom, back across the thick carpeting to another door and another bedroom. I watched her. “It’s too much, Gregor, too expensive. And the car too.”
“You said you’d leave the arrangements to me,” I reminded her across the width of the room.
“But you can’t—”
“All right, a financial disclosure. A limited financial disclosure.” I took off my jacket while I spoke, to hang it in the coat closet. “I make a very good salary and have no living expenses. That’s one of the benefits of domestic service, you know.” I turned back to her. “I can afford anything I want for this weekend, Alexis.”
“But two bedrooms? Why two bedrooms?”
“I didn’t know—” This I wasn’t sure how to say. “It doesn’t matter that much to me. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. If you want to change your mind.”
I had amused her. She answered me patiently. “Usually I think about things for a long time before I make up my mind. So I don’t often change it. I’m too old to be that young, Gregor.”
“So you haven’t changed your mind about this.”
“No,” she said.
“Ah,” I said.
“Have you?”
“Me? Why should I?” An evasive answer, but I couldn’t explain a growing sense of apprehension.
“How would I know? I don’t know anything about men, you know that. I don’t know all that much about you, either.”
“Well then, what kind of restau—?” but she spoke at the same time “Should I change into—?”
“You go ahead,” she instructed me.
“I was wondering where you’d like to eat.”
“Anything is fine. Whatever you like. I’m not very hungry.”
She was not enjoying herself. “Well,” I suggested, “if you’re not hungry. The question is…We could get it over with now. Would you prefer that?”
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