by Susan Isaacs
She could hardly hear him. “Twenty-two.”
“Nick!”
“She’ll be twenty-three August seventh.”
“I’ll send her a card.”
“Jane, stop it. She happens to be—”
“You’re going to be thirty-nine in a few weeks—don’t you dare stop me. You’re going to be thirty-nine and then forty and you’re like a woman, your whole life is tied up with your looks and you’re so afraid of getting older you take up with some young thing to hold back the tide.” He put his hand over hers. “Don’t touch me!”
“She’s not some young thing.”
“Then what is she? She’s twenty-two, hovering on the brink of twenty-three. But you didn’t fall in love with her just because she’s young and she helps you delude yourself into thinking you’re never going to be forty. No. She’s a wonderful human being. So intelligent. You love her mind.”
The flush spread to his face and ears. “She happens to be brilliant. She was summa at Princeton—”
“Shut up, you ass!”
“Jane, I know you’re hurt, but please—”
“Please what? Please let’s be civilized. Please let’s sit down and discuss Pamela. Oh, good. Let’s. Tell me all about her. Tell me about your little love nest.” Nicholas rubbed his forehead. “Please, I want to hear about it. Does she have her diploma up on the wall? A poster of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times? Do you and your twenty-two-year-old summa sit on the floor and smoke grass and discuss the art of the cinema?” She swallowed, a too-loud gulp. “Where is your apartment? I asked you a question.” Nicholas looked straight ahead. She put her mouth to his ear. Before he could jerk away she shrieked, “Where is it?”
“Don’t do that!” He massaged his ear.
“Where is it? I want to know.”
“Lower Fifth.”
“Nice. Nice address. How many rooms?”
“Five.”
“Nice. Modest. Is little Miss Summa paying half the rent?”
“No. She comes from a poor family. She’s been on full scholarship all along.”
“You could at least do something different the second time around. Or is that part of the Cobleigh package deal? Instant upward mobility in return for—”
“Jane, please don’t. Listen to me. We have to talk some more. I need time.”
“And you’re trying to buy it with a twenty-two-year-old.”
“I need time with her. She’s going to be my assistant when I’m shooting Land’s End.”
“How is she going to assist you? On her back?”
“Jane, please don’t!” Without realizing it, she had stopped crying. Now, just as she felt the burning dryness in her eyes, the tears began to flow again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I want to be with her. I have to. I owe it to her. She’s been so completely understanding, so patient.”
“A saint. Pamela is a saint. You can’t beat a twenty-two-year-old saint.”
“Jane, I know how this must sound, but you’d like her if you met her.”
“Like her? I’m sure I’d love her. And so will the girls. They can go out to Montauk and spend some time with you and Pamela. Just remember to put your pants back on before you open the door for them. It’ll be fun. Especially for Vicky. Great fun, having a friend so near her age.”
“Pamela’s six years older,” he said wearily. “Jane, age has nothing to do with it. It’s Pamela. And it’s us. The marriage has gone bad. You know it as well as I do. In all those years, until Pamela, I never…I’m not saying I want a divorce. I don’t know what I want.”
“Do you want to know what I want? I want you to drop dead.”
Nicholas continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I know you’re beginning a career, and I don’t want to embarrass you. I’ll be discreet. I promise you that. No one has to know. If you and I have to make some appearances together, we will, until this is settled. There’s no reason for anything to become public, because I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“I do. You’re going to spend the summer at Montauk fucking Pamela.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it isn’t you.”
“You have no idea what I am.”
“Jane, we’ve been married for eighteen years. I know you better than I know anyone else in the world. And that’s why it’s so terrible for me.”
“Poor Nicky.”
“Jane, I can’t throw away eighteen years. I love her. I love her very much, but you’re such a part of my life I can’t just say goodbye.”
“You are saying it.”
“No. Not yet.”
She ran her cold, bare feet over the rug. “And you want me to wait until you make up your mind. How long should I wait, Nick?”
“I don’t know.” He began to cry. “For two weeks all I’ve been thinking about is you being alone all summer, knowing—”
“Knowing that you’re fucking Pamela.”
“Jane, I still love you.”
She stood, strode halfway across the room, but then turned and came back. She stood before him. His head was lowered and she could only see his bright hair. “Nick.”
“What?”
“At least this will give me more time with Judson.”
“What?”
“Oh, we’ve done lots of other things together. Lots. Do you want me to tell you about some of them?”
“No! I don’t believe you!”
“Since last July. The same as you and Pamela. Isn’t that a lovely coincidence? Maybe we can celebrate our anniversaries together.”
“Jane!”
“Maybe not. Judson and I celebrate alone. He’s a wonderful celebrator, Nick. Wonderful. Wonderful in bed. You should see what we do. Things you never even thought about.”
“No!”
“Oh, yes. He’s so good. I come with him. Over and over. It’s called multiple orgasm, Nick. It’s what women are capable of if they’re made love to properly. And Judson knows how to make love properly. And not so properly. When he lets loose, he’s unbelievable.”
“Stop!”
“He loves to eat me.” Nicholas clapped his hands over his ears. Jane grabbed his wrists and dragged his hands away. “We’re being honest with each other. You told me about Pamela, and now I’m telling you about Judson. She’s twenty-two. He’s fifty-one. She went to Princeton. He went to Bates. I don’t think he was summa, but—”
“Don’t do this.”
“There’s one thing about him that’s summa. He’s so big, Nick. I don’t think you’ve ever seen one like it. Big and thick—don’t cry. I’m just trying to tell you how I’ve been keeping busy while you’ve been so busy with Pamela.”
She thought she was laughing, but then she realized she was choking on her tears. Her chest heaved, expanding for the air it wasn’t getting.
“Jane,” she heard him say.
At last, gasping through her mouth, she caught her breath. Her throat felt swollen with the effort. “I’m fine,” she whispered. “Fine.” She wiped the tears from her face. “See?”
28
FEMALE VOICE: Hello? Hello?
ANNOUNCER: Yes. This is Reverend Joe and you’re on the air.
FEMALE VOICE: Reverend Joe, I’m wondering about that Jane Cobleigh. I was reading Ephesians 5:24, where it says—
ANNOUNCER: “Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.”
FEMALE VOICE: Yes, well now, maybe if she was a proper Christian wife ’stead of acting smart-alecky on the television, if she was standing by his side, the Lord might not have smote her down. If she was a good wife—
ANNOUNCER: “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers, and a prudent wife is from the Lord.” Any of you out there can cite chapter and verse on that one, you call Reverend Joe at…
—Calling for Christ, KMT Radio, Arkadelphia, Arkansas
Nicholas had never been sensitive to noise. He
had grown up in Manhattan, and the constant hum, clatter, and klaxon of Park Avenue traffic had simply been part of his environment, as had the din of five younger brothers and sisters. In Connecticut, the 5 A.M. blare of birds hardly ever wakened him, and when it did, the simple act of pulling the blanket over his ears was sufficient to send him back to sleep.
But in his new house in Santa Barbara, the ceaseless crash of the Pacific against the cliffs below bothered him. The roar, the wild splash of spray, was unnecessarily dramatic, the sound of inexorable doom in a low-budget film. This was the spot he and Pamela had picked, the perfect place to relax. But after a week of constant meetings in Los Angeles, he could not relax with the clamor fifty feet below. The wet surge of sound made him anxious; it was a Watch out, something is about to happen! noise.
One entire wall of the master bedroom was glass. When he peered straight down, he could see neither the entrance to the house nor the road, only the cliffs and the ocean with its crazed white foam belying its deceptive blue calm. Pamela could stretch out on her stomach and watch it for hours. He found himself avoiding the window. It almost made him understand what terror Jane had felt in her bad years; when he looked down, he imagined some typically eccentric California natural disaster—a rockslide, a typhoon—and the house heaving forward and crashing down onto the spiked rocks. He saw himself impaled. A horrible, helpless feeling. Thursday night, in the hotel suite in Los Angeles, he’d said to Pamela, Let’s spend the weekend here. Why? she’d asked. We have Santa Barbara. And you have to unwind after all those meetings.
Endless meetings about William the Conqueror. The bankers were even more high-strung than the studio executives, and the executives’ corporate palpitations made the film’s mercurial English director appear calm to the point of somnambulance. Thirty-five million dollars on the line for an epic about an eleventh-century political and military genius whom Nicholas Cobleigh and an eccentric screenwriter who shaved his head found fascinating. When the money men shook Nicholas’s hand, they held it too long. They were frightened. How are things? they’d ask in high-pitched voices. Fine, he’d say, keeping his voice low. Aren’t things fine, Arthur? he’d ask the director. Fine, the director squeaked. It was April 1980. Shooting was to begin in less than three months in England. It was too late to stop. Was everything fine? He didn’t know.
Nicholas stood at the rear door. He preferred the back of the house. A series of landscaped terraces led to a long grassy knoll and, at the end, a bright blue swimming pool. The back too was excessively dramatic, but in a reassuring way; he’d bought the house from the owner of a newspaper whose wife was an amateur decorator. Nothing immobile escaped her designing eye; even the pool tiles had a geometric Greek pattern. Just as she was ripping out all the English ivy on her trellises on the side of the house and getting ready to replace it with Comtesse de Bouchard clematis—her husband related this at the house closing to Nicholas with tears in his eyes—she’d dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Nicholas could not see Pamela from the house, although he could hear her rock music. From a distance, most of the music itself was lost and all he could hear was the percussion and the sound of the group’s voices. The lyrics were unintelligible to him even at close range, although Pamela, with her spongelike memory, could recite every single word; from far away, half the lyrics were blown out to sea and the other half resembled the wild barking of seals on the rocks.
Pamela would swim laps in the pool, then go into the gazebo at the far end to hide from the sun. Her skin was so fair that even for her half-hour’s swim she wore a T-shirt to protect her back and shoulders.
He stared at the gazebo. It looked like a doll’s house made of white latticework. After the swim, Pamela would strip off her T-shirt and bikini bottom, wrap herself in a terry bath sheet to keep warm, and curl up on a wrought-iron bench and listen to the music she knew he couldn’t tolerate. He wanted to go down to her but Murray was due any minute, and if he went into the gazebo he wouldn’t get out so fast; he’d probably wind up trying to coax her out of her towel. He knew much of Pamela’s shyness, her awe of him, after almost two years, had to be a game, but it was a game he did not want to stop playing.
Her rubber thongs were two dots of yellow before the entrance to the gazebo. It was a warm day. Maybe she had taken off the towel. It was too bad she couldn’t sunbathe nude in one of the big chaises by the pool so he could watch her. When her clothes finally came off, she was wonderfully unselfconscious. For her twenty-fourth birthday, he’d given her a five-carat emerald ring. He’d slipped it on her finger one day when she was in the bathroom naked, her foot raised up on the rim of the tub. She’d been rubbing some sort of lotion onto her heels and soles. Here, he’d told her. You shouldn’t go around without anything on. You could catch cold. Her skin was milk white.
Nicholas turned his glance from the gazebo and looked at the sky. It was royal blue, with no clouds. For some reason, he thought about Jane. Their first summer in Connecticut, she’d spend entire days in the sun. Now and then she’d grab for the bottle of suntan lotion, but only to rub another coating onto the girls’ fairer skin. By the end of the summer, he’d become pale gold; Jane’s skin was rich and dark, as if she’d been cast in bronze. One morning he’d placed his forearm against hers; the contrast was striking. Do you think I’m terribly exotic? she’d demanded. Or just dark? Terribly exotic, he’d told her. And beautiful.
On March 10, her fortieth birthday, he’d left the meeting he was in, went into somebody’s office, and turned on Talk. There she was with a Broadway chorus dancer who had just turned thirty, a fifty-year-old housewife whose husband had just left her, and an eighty-year-old poet, talking about getting old. She’d been wearing a white blouse with puffy sleeves, and its scooped-out neckline showed off her dark neck and shoulders. She had looked exotic. Her hair was pulled back to one side and she wore giant hoop earrings. The poet had asked her what sounded like a put-up question: How does your husband feel about your turning forty? He’d gotten angry, because while they’d agreed not to make their separation public for the time being, they would not do anything to play upon the old Golden Couple image. But Jane hadn’t done that. She’d just shrugged and said, It doesn’t seem to bother him at all. Very smooth, with a nice smile. He’d turned off the TV and gone back to the meeting.
The week before that, he’d spent hours wondering if he should send her a gift. Something simple, like a book. A grand impersonal gesture, like an Italian sports car. Finally he’d just called her and said Happy Birthday. He’d half expected her to break down and cry. When she didn’t, he asked, Is there anything you’d like for your birthday? No. No, thanks, Nick. But I appreciate your calling.
For the time being they were husband and wife, although months passed without his seeing her. Often he turned on her show thinking she’d look different; have a gray streak in her hair or be grotesquely fat. But there she was: Jane.
They hadn’t even gone to lawyers, although he knew that was coming. Just around Jane’s birthday, Pamela had said, You know, I’m going to be twenty-five next August. She’d been leaning back in a chair, and her hands rested on her stomach. He’d realized she was thinking about having a baby.
Pamela had been so understanding. You’re a good, faithful, honorable man, Nicholas, she’d told him. You can’t toss aside—what is it?—nineteen years of marriage. And even though it doesn’t create an ideal universe for me, it’s the thing I admire most about you. Your essential goodness.
He’d finally said, Let me finish William and we’ll go back to New York and I’ll set my house in order. Do you understand, Pamela? She’d nodded, so sweet, small, quiet, not demanding any more assurance than that, and he’d added, We’ll make the separation public, and then the minute the divorce becomes final, we’ll get married. She’d thrown her arms around him and cried. I don’t want to pressure you, Nicholas. You know that. But I want to have your children, and—her voice broke. He said, I know. I know.
T
he doorbell chimed, and by the time he got to the front of the house the maid had let Murray in. Murray’s only concession to California was a Panama hat with a plaid band. When he’d first bought it, on a trip several years earlier, he’d asked, Hey, Nicky, doesn’t it make me look like a real sport? Nicholas looked at him: a sport in a dark blue suit and a maroon tie.
“Hey, Nicky,” Murray said, “it’s done. They’re renting you some house on a hoo-ha square in London. Two servants plus driver, plus bodyguard, plus gymnastics trainer, and they’ll set up a whole gym for you.”
“A secretary?” Nicholas asked.
Murray twirled the hat by the brim. “You’ve got it. You want to take Florrie, or should she stay in New York and they get you someone in London?”
“Let Florrie stay in New York. I need her there.” The maid managed to pry Murray’s Panama from his grip. She left the front hall with it. “Do you want a drink?” Nicholas asked. Murray seemed content to carry on their conversation in the hall.
“Club soda.”
Nicholas led him over rugs, tiled floors, planked floors, and marble floors, through the house into a small barroom that overlooked the back. The bar was an elaborate system of mirrored shelves set on mirrored walls, so the pouring of a single drink had enormous reverberations. “Lime?”
“No, thanks. This is fine. Hey, Nicky, this house is really something.”
Nicholas, pouring himself a glass of wine, caught Murray’s eye in the mirror. Murray looked down and made himself busy, rotating his glass to reduce the carbonation. Since he’d flown in the week before, Murray had been a mass of nervous mannerisms. They could barely spend time together without Murray shredding a napkin or mutilating a paper clip.
“You don’t like the house, do you, Murray?”