So that evening I told Greg I didn’t think I could go through with it. I said I was terrified of the responsibility of marriage. At first he was wonderful. He held me and kissed me and petted me and said that was perfectly natural: marriage was frightening. And of course, he added, I was probably apprehensive about becoming a department chairman’s wife.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said, though that thought hadn’t occurred to me.
He understood, Greg said. I might not think I was up to the job, but he would help me; and if anybody tried to make me feel incompetent or not worthy of him, he would give them hell.
When I kept on insisting that I didn’t want to get married, Greg asked what had changed my mind. I was still afraid to tell him about Ilse; I didn’t want him to think I’d gone off the deep end. So I came up with the kind of stuff you read everywhere these days about marriage being an outmoded patriarchal contract, and how the idea of owning another human being was fascist. I probably didn’t make a very good presentation, because I didn’t believe in what I was saying. Anyhow, Greg didn’t buy it.
‘You surprise me, Dinah,’ he said, raising his left eyebrow. ‘I’ve never heard you talk like this before. Who’s been brainwashing you, I wonder?’
Well, I swore nobody had. I burbled on, saying I loved him so much, but I was frightened, and why couldn’t we just go on the way we were? After all, I said, he’d been with other women and he hadn’t wanted to marry them. That was a mistake. Greg’s face changed, and he gave me that bad look again. Then he dropped his arm and sort of pushed me aside.
‘What is this?’ he said, laughing in an unfriendly way. ‘The revenge of the bimbos?’
‘Huh?’ I was completely at a loss; but finally I got what he meant. There were maybe four or five women in town who had wanted to marry Greg, and some of them were still pretty hurt and angry according to rumour. He meant, was I doing it for them?
‘Jesus, no,’ I said. ‘I don’t owe those women anything. They’re none of them my friends.’ Then he seemed convinced and quieted down.
But I still said I didn’t want to get married. Greg tried to reassure me some more, but I could see he was getting impatient. He asked if I realised that if I broke off our engagement it would embarrass him in front of everyone and make him a local joke. He’d already had to take some kidding from friends because he’d sworn so often that he was never going to marry again. And there were quite a few people on campus who weren’t Greg’s friends: people who envied his success and would have loved for him to mess up somehow.
I felt awful about that, and I said he could blame it all on me: he could tell everybody I was being silly and neurotic. But Greg explained that this would be almost as bad, because people would think less of him for having a relationship with someone like that.
Then he sat back and looked at me in that hard considering way, as if I was a student who’d plagiarised a paper, or some article he didn’t approve of, and finally he said slowly, ‘There’s something else behind this, Dinah. And I can take a guess at what it is.’
What it turned out to be was, Greg thought I must have got involved with somebody else, probably some guy nearer my own age, only I was afraid to admit it. I swore there wasn’t anybody. I kept saying I loved him, that he was the only person I loved, but he didn’t seem to hear me any more. He pushed his face up close to mine so it filled my whole visual field and looked all distorted, like something you see in the previews of a horror film for a split second: not long enough to be sure what it is, but long enough to know it’s something awful.
‘All right, who is it, you bitch? Who?’ he shouted, and when I kept saying ‘Nobody,’ he took hold of me and shook me as if I were a bottle of ketchup and he could shake out some man’s name, only there wasn’t any name.
When Greg let go, and I could stop trembling and crying, I told him the truth, only he didn’t believe me. Instead he started going over all the other explanations he’d thought up. Gradually things got really strange and scary. Greg was cursing in this tight hard voice and saying that if I really thought I’d seen Ilse sitting in the kitchen cabinet I must be going crazy; and I was weeping. I said that if I were going crazy it would be wicked of me to marry him and ruin his life, and he said I already had.
It went on like that all weekend. We hardly slept, and finally I got so miserable and mixed-up and exhausted that I started agreeing with everything Greg said. That I had probably been brainwashed by feminists and that I was sometimes attracted to younger men; and that I was basically irrational, deceptive, cowardly, neurotic and unconsciously envious of Greg because he was a superior person and I was nobody to speak of. The weird thing was that I didn’t just agree to all this; in the state I was in by then, I’d started to believe whatever he said.
On Monday morning we were in the kitchen trying to have breakfast. I was in really bad shape; I hadn’t had a bath or done anything about my hair for two days, and over my nightgown I had on an old red terry-cloth bathrobe with coffee stains. I had got to the point where I didn’t care any more if I was crazy or not. I thought that if Ilse Spiegelman meant to haunt me for the rest of my life it couldn’t be worse than this.
So when Greg came downstairs I told him I wanted to forget the whole thing and go ahead with the wedding. I put two pieces of Pepperidge Farm raisin toast on his plate and he looked at them. And then he looked at me and I could see that he didn’t want to marry me any more, and also he didn’t want to live with me.
I was right too. Later that morning Greg called my office and said that he thought it would be best if we didn’t see each other or speak to each other again. So he was putting all my ‘debris’ out in the back entry, and would I please collect it before six p.m.?
Well, after work I went round. I could tell how upset and furious Greg still was by the way he’d pitched my belongings out the kitchen door. My lavender nightgown looked as if it had been strangled and there was raisin granola spilled everywhere; and a bottle of conditioner that he hadn’t bothered to close had leaked over everything. It was a total mess. All the time I was cleaning it up I was crying and carrying on, because I still thought I was in love with Greg and that everything that had happened was my fault. And I couldn’t help it, I didn’t want to, but I looked through the glass of the kitchen door once more to see if Ilse was there. Maybe she would be smiling now, I thought, or even laughing. The cabinet door was hanging open, but it was empty.
I piled everything into the car and drove to my apartment; thank God the lease still had a month to run. But the place looked awful. I’d hardly been there for weeks and there was dust everywhere and the windows were grimed over with soot. I managed to unload the car and carry everything upstairs, and dumped a heap of clothes sticky with conditioner and granola into the bathtub and knelt down to turn on the water.
Then it really hit me. I felt so defeated and crazy and miserable that I slid down onto the dirty yellow vinyl and sat there in a heap between the tub and the toilet. I felt like killing myself, but I didn’t have enough energy to move. I thought that maybe in a little while I would crawl across the floor and put my head in the gas oven.
Then all of a sudden I realised that I was sitting on the floor in a cramped space, just like Ilse. She’d finally reduced me to her own miserable condition.
But maybe she wasn’t the only one who had done that, I thought. And for the first time I wondered if Greg had ever said the kind of things to Ilse he’d been saying to me all weekend, till she blamed herself for everything and was totally wiped out and beaten down. I remembered how his face had turned into a horror-film preview, and suddenly I felt kind of lucky to have got out of his house. I thought that even if he changed his mind now and took me back, and was as charming and affectionate as before, I would always remember this weekend and wonder if it would happen again, and I would have to sort of tiptoe round him for the rest of my life.
What if I was wrong to believe Ilse had been trying to stop me marrying Greg? I thought.
What if she had been trying to warn me?
I still don’t know for sure if that’s right. Now that everything’s changed over there, I’d really like to go to Czechoslovakia and look her up and ask her. But I don’t see how I can, what with my husband and the baby.
Gregor’s never married again, though he’s been with a lot of different women since we separated. I wonder sometimes if any of them have seen Ilse. But maybe she hasn’t had to appear, because none of his relationships seem to last very long.
In the Shadow
Alison Lurie
Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her novel Foreign Affairs. She has published ten novels, one collection of short stories, and a non-fiction work entitled The Language of Clothes.
Celia Zimmern was about the last person she, or anyone else, would have expected to see a ghost. To the other women who worked at the American Embassy in London that year, she seemed almost unnaturally cool and rational. Nothing ever rattled her, or – as far as they could observe – deeply excited her.
Celia didn’t even seem excited by her undoubted effect on men – which she should have been, they thought, because there was really no explanation for it. She wasn’t beautiful, only rather pretty: slight, small, with a halo of crinkly dark-oak hair and oak-brown eyes with lashes so long and dense that some thought them false. Her manner wasn’t flirtatious or seductive, and she always dressed quietly. Most people didn’t realise that Celia’s fawn wool suit was a thrift-shop Chanel, and her navy crêpe a Jean Muir; they only noticed that she wore the same clothes over and over again.
For Celia, such monotony was preferable to its alternative. If she had a failing, she knew, it was that she wanted the best or nothing. Unfortunately, the best is usually expensive, and as a result not only Celia’s closet but her tiny elegant flat in Knightsbridge was almost empty. She would rather shiver all day than wear a cheap synthetic sweater, rather sit on an Afghan cushion or even her beautifully waxed parquet floor than in a plastic sling chair. Her acquisitiveness expressed itself so fastidiously that most of the time it seemed more like asceticism. But anyone who had watched Celia in a shop, stroking the surface of a beige suede skirt or lifting a perfect peach from green tissue paper, would have known other-wise.
Celia made no public show of her good taste – or of any other preference. On the job, especially, she maintained a very low profile; she took in information rather than giving it out. She’d never understood why most people strove to voluntarily repeat facts and anecdotes and opinions they already knew. Whereas by listening carefully one might hear something interesting, even something that would turn out to be useful.
Because Celia’s manner was so low-key, members of the public tended to assume that she was employed at the Embassy in some low-grade clerical capacity. In fact she was a career diplomat with a responsible position in the Information Section. Her attitude at work was one of polite attention to the matter at hand; but underneath this was an almost formidable administrative intelligence and decisiveness.
Though a few of Celia’s female colleagues considered her somewhat poor in spirit as well as in wardrobe, most liked and even admired her. From their point of view her only fault was that she attracted too many men, and that she continued to go out with ones in whom she had no serious interest, constantly accompanying them to restaurants, concerts, theatres, and films. She was nearly thirty, they said to each other; why couldn’t she settle on one guy and give somebody else a chance? It wasn’t fair. ‘I don’t even believe she sleeps with most of them,’ one irritable young woman from the Visa Office asserted, calling Celia ‘a bitch in the manger’.
Celia herself was modest and a little cynical about her social success. She knew it was mostly her gift as a listener that attracted and held men, just as it soothed irritated officials and calmed impatient journalists. Somehow, she had the ability to focus her entire attention on whomever she was with, letting them speak at length without intruding any personal opinions. ‘That’s very interesting,’ she would say if the monologue faltered. ‘Tell me more,’ or ‘Really! I never knew that.’
What still rather surprised her was that none of the men she knew ever caught on. They took her ready responsiveness for granted, as they would that of a superior computer system. Indeed, she sometimes privately compared herself to those computer programs that can imitate psychotherapy and even produce a transference. A similar transference usually appeared in any man Celia went out with more than once or twice: a feeling of love and trust, and the conviction that she was deeply sympathetic with all his views. So strong was this conviction that often, even when Celia declined to put out, they wanted to continue seeing her, to engross her attention for life.
Celia was aware that her acquaintances wished she would settle on one guy, and also that she was twenty-nine. Even from the point of her career, marriage would be advisable. In this connection, her mind turned most often to an economist named Dwayne Mudd. He was a large handsome young man among whose many assets were good manners, sexual energy, professional competence and a declared wish to have children. When she admitted to her friends that Dwayne was talking of marriage, they told her she could hardly do better. He was perfect, they said.
It was true, Celia admitted to herself, that Dwayne Mudd was a Rhodes Scholar, a member of a well-known midwestern political family, a former college track star, a magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, and an alumnus of Yale Law School, with what was probably a brilliant career ahead of him. Why was it, then, that when she imagined being married to him her strongest feeling was one of restless depression? Was it just his ridiculous name?
Or did it have something to do with the fact that Dwayne seemed to assume Celia was fortunate to be courted by him? When he told her that she was really very pretty, or that she would make an ideal diplomat’s or politician’s wife, she somehow felt he was giving himself a pep talk. He was excusing himself for not having chosen someone richer and more beautiful; above all, someone from another prominent midwestern family, because as he had once remarked, in politics it’s a big advantage to have a wife with good connections.
When Celia told Dwayne that she didn’t think she would ever want to marry him, he didn’t seem to hear her. ‘You can’t mean that seriously, darling,’ he said. Even though she repeated it, he insisted on treating her reluctance as feminine coquettishness. ‘You’ll come round,’ he said, smiling. ‘I can wait.’
But Celia, though she told herself that she could hardly do better, was more and more determined not to come round. Privately, she had begun to refer to Dwayne as the Wombat; not only because of his admiration for Australia, where he had spent his last posting, but because of his cropped furry hair, broad and somewhat furry hands, solid build, and stubborn tenacity.
Usually Celia kept her growing annoyance with Dwayne to herself, but occasionally it slipped out. Once, for instance, he called her office four times in a single day, mainly to say that he was thinking of her and of what he referred to as ‘last night’.
‘He must love you very much,’ said her boss’s secretary, Crystal, who was softly pretty and romantically inclined.
‘Dwayne Mudd is a sentimentalist,’ replied Celia. ‘He probably read somewhere that women like this sort of constant nuisance and interruption.’
A few days later, a cornucopia of sugar-pink rosebuds appeared on her desk at lunchtime.
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Crystal exclaimed.
‘Well. Maybe,’ Celia said. ‘What I think is, if you’re going to buy flowers, you should go to a flower shop. Anything you find on those stalls outside the underground is going to be dead before you get it home.’ She held the crumpled paper cone out horizontally, so that the weak stems, studded with knots of crumpled, rusting pink silk, drooped downwards.
‘But it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?’ Crystal asked.
Celia, who disagreed, did not contradict her. ‘You know what they always remind me
of, flowers like these? Those shoddy cut-price umbrellas they sell in the same place, outside Bond Street station. They never open right either, and quite soon they collapse completely.’
They’re kind of sweet now, though, you know.
Crystal looked at the roses in a way that caused Celia to ask, ‘Would you like them?’
‘Oh, yes! Thank you.’ Crystal raised the paper cornucopia to her lace-trimmed blouse and buried her nose in the faint fragrance.
‘I guess Dwayne still wants to marry you,’ she said finally, exhaling.
‘Yes.’ Celia gave a little apologetic laugh. ‘Of course that’s impossible. I couldn’t marry a man whose name was Dwayne Mudd. Imagine what it would mean – a lifetime of bad jokes.’
‘You could keep your own last name. Lots of girls do that now,’ Crystal suggested.
‘You’d still be married to him and have to hear the jokes,’ said Celia. ‘Just for instance, Dwayne told me once that in elementary school he was known as “Muddy Drain”.’
Crystal giggled. ‘But he must believe he still has a chance,’ she said. ‘After all, you keep seeing him. And you still have his mother’s gold watch.’
‘Yes,’ Celia admitted. She lifted her slim hand, admiring again an exquisite bracelet watch made in the nineteen-thirties by Cartier, with a woven gold-mesh band and a tiny oblong dial elegantly engraved with Roman numerals. ‘But it’s only a loan, you know. I’ve promised to return it the moment Dwayne finds someone else to marry.’
‘He’ll never find anyone as long as you go on encouraging him,’ Crystal predicted.
‘I don’t encourage him,’ Celia protested mildly.
‘You must, or he wouldn’t still be hanging around. He’d find another girlfriend. I think really maybe you should give back his watch and tell him you don’t want to see him any more.’ Crystal’s voice shook slightly.
‘But I do want to see Dwayne,’ Celia said, smiling, not offended – indeed, Crystal had never seen her offended. ‘He’s quite pleasant to be with and he knows a great deal about international economics and the Common Market. I just don’t want to marry him. He realises that.’
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 23