“She won’t be unhappy! It takes very little to keep Elsa happy, just a nice home and the right charge accounts and Alfred and a bit of bed now and then. … Uh, you don’t mind if I still sleep with Elsa sometimes to keep her happy, do you, Vicky?”
“Yes, I do mind. Very much.”
My jaw sags. I quickly clamp my mouth shut, but I’m speechless.
“I think it’s wrong to run two women at once,” says Vicky strongly. “The Moslems get away with it, but look at their women! Anonymous bundles in yashmaks! But women aren’t just anonymous objects, Sebastian! They’re people who can get hurt.”
“Christ, Vicky, you don’t have to tell me that! Other men may think of women as a load of cattle, but I could never be that dumb!”
“Then why can’t you see that Elsa’s an individual, not some anonymous lump labeled ‘wife’? She has feelings, just like anyone else.”
“And I’m respecting them!” I protest. Vicky’s picking up her coat and I’m moving after her rapidly to the door. “I’m going to go on taking care of her!”
“You’re going to humiliate her!” Vicky’s now very angry. We leave the apartment and I follow her as she sweeps down the corridor to the elevator.
“Look, Vicky—”
“Okay, go ahead! Humiliate her! Your marriage is none of my business!”
“Say, you sound as if you’re jealous!” I say, knowing she’s not but trying to neutralize the anger in the conversation with a dash of humor.
She gives me a scornful look as the elevator hits the lobby. “Good night, Sebastian. I’ll go home by myself, thank you.”
I put her in a cab and watch it drive away.
Oh, hell. Oh, damn. Oh, shit.
March 15, 1959. Alfred looks at me with pale pleased eyes and says, satisfied, “Daddy!”
Smart little kid. He knows who understands him. I pick him up and he cuffs me around the ear. Don’t be sentimental, you big bastard, he thinks, don’t be stupid. As if I don’t have enough of that kind of junk already.
I put him back in his playpen. I watch him play. He has a little xylophone which he bashes, and I watch his face, tense with concentration, as he tries to figure out which keys to hit.
A shadow falls across the sunlit nursery. Elsa.
“Alfred, my precious, my angel …” She scoops him up, tears him away from the xylophone, and bombards him with baby talk. Alfred screams with rage.
“Put him down, Elsa, for God’s sake!”
She glares at me with her father’s icy blue eyes. “I want to talk to you.”
Alfred is dumped back in his playpen, but he’s upset. He still screams in indignation. Nurse scampers in and picks him up again. More screams. Poor Alfred. Only one person understands.
Elsa and I go to our bedroom, and Elsa slams the door.
“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?” she says.
Oh, God, here we go, but I guess it had to come sooner or later. I may as well tackle it now and get it over.
“How do you figure that?” I say to give myself time to shore up my equilibrium.
“Because I only get it once a week nowadays and that leaves six days of the week totally unaccounted for!”
Vicky and I have only made love five times in the last two months, because each time we get to bed we end up having a tiff, which allows her to keep me at a distance for a few days. But I’m patient and I’m willing to wait until Vicky’s more settled and can face sex more often. She doesn’t hate it. If she did, I wouldn’t force myself on her, but she can’t yet accept the idea that it could be fun. At present it’s just something she’s willing to do to be polite and friendly, like drinking pink champagne provided for you by a very old friend who should know better. But I accept that a change of attitude takes time, and meanwhile even making love to her occasionally is paradise compared with all those years when I never made love to her at all. I’ve been trying, but I just can’t maintain my interest in Elsa. This liaison, imperfect though it still is, seems to be impinging on my marriage to a degree I never anticipated.
“You bastard!” says Elsa furiously, making me jump.
I pull myself together. “Okay,” I say, “I’m sleeping with her, but there’s no need to get upset—I’ve no intention of leaving you! I’ll stay with you and be a good husband, but the truth is, there are precious few good husbands who are faithful to their wives—ask your father, if you don’t believe me. Your father’s always taken care of his family as a good husband should, but it’s common knowledge he’s always had a lot of other women—”
“My father,” said Elsa, “is a goddamned hypocrite.” She sits down suddenly on the stool before the vanity and looks at herself in the glass. She’s cool, calm, and collected. No tears, no hysterics, no panic.
This is odd. Something’s not right. This scene’s not going according to plan.
“My mother’s taken too damn much from my father over the years,” says Elsa, still looking at her fat homely face in the mirror. “Poor Mama, she had no choice. She was a victim of her class and her culture and her times. But I’m not like my mother and I’m not living in her times. I’m not going to let you treat me as my father treated her. You think I’m just a lump who weighs one-sixty-five and has no mind of her own, but you’re wrong, Sebastian. You’re just so wrong.”
I get hot under the collar—literally. I have to run a finger under my collar to unstick it. I feel very, very uneasy. Can this be Elsa talking? Can this conceivably be poor dumb cute little Elsa who snuggles up to me in bed and says how wonderful I am? Something’s gone astray somewhere. I’ve missed some vital connection. I’ve miscalculated.
“Look, buster,” says Elsa, suddenly as tough as a James Cagney movie and a true chip off the granite Reischman block, “let me lay this on the line. Marriage is marriage. You stood up before witnesses and promised me fidelity, and I’m holding you to that promise. If you weren’t prepared to keep it, then you shouldn’t have married me. I’m your wife and I’m not sharing you with anyone, least of all with Vicky. You’ve got to choose, Sebastian. Either you come home, stay home, sleep by my side all night long, and act like a real husband, or else I’m seeing my lawyer and suing the pants off you for divorce.”
I try to wake up, but no, this is no horrible nightmare, this is reality, and I’m sweating right here in the middle of it. I try to call her bluff. “You won’t divorce me! You know damned well you’d never get another man!”
She looks at me coldly. “Wanna bet?”
I’m dumb—dumb meaning stupid and dumb meaning speechless. “But you couldn’t … wouldn’t dare divorce me!” I splutter.
“Try me,” says Elsa, blue eyes almost frosting the glass of the mirror.
I turn on my heel and walk out. Or, to be accurate, I stumble away. I grope my way into the living room, pour myself a triple Scotch, and drink it.
There’s a photograph of Alfred on the table by the window, smart little Alfred aged six months, sitting up and glaring, knowing his privacy’s being invaded by some dumb grownup who’s cooing to make him smile for the camera.
When the Scotch is gone, I go back to the bedroom, but Elsa’s not there. I go to the nursery and find she’s stuffing Alfred into a new skip suit for his Sunday-afternoon visit to her mother. Nurse is away getting his coat and boots.
We don’t speak, just look at each other.
“Daddy!” says Alfred, pleased, and points his little finger at me.
I want to smash something. I want to break all the dishes in the kitchen and beat Elsa up. But I don’t. What’s more, I never will. Once I did lose my temper with a woman and gave her such a shove that she knocked herself out on the edge of a nightstand, but I vowed afterward I’d never stoop to violence again. Violence is wrong. Violence is sick. Violence, not sex, is the real obscenity in our culture.
Wiping all violent thoughts from my mind, I pick up Alfred and say to Elsa without expression, “Let’s all go on that visit to your mother.”
; I call Vicky. “Vicky, I’ve got to see you.” I never call Vicky “darling,” or “sweetheart” or “honey.” She’s had enough of those endearments from people who have never understood her.
We meet in the apartment.
“I’m in a big mess,” I say, and tell her about Elsa. I’m drinking Scotch as if the distilleries have ceased production. “We can’t continue to meet here in case she has me watched,” I add. “We’ll have to meet at Fifth Avenue. The detectives can follow me to your father’s house until they wear out their shoes, but they can never prove I didn’t go there just to see my mother.”
“Heavens, I can imagine nothing more inhibiting than creeping around that old mausoleum trying to avoid Daddy and Alicia! I wonder what on earth they’ll think.”
“They’ll like it. It’ll give them a vicarious thrill.”
“Sebastian, dear, they don’t need vicarious thrills. They’ve got real live thrills of their own.”
“Jesus, is that still going on?”
We discuss our situation further and make some plans.
“The worst result of this crisis,” Vicky says at last with a sigh, “is that we won’t dare go out to the movies or the theater anymore. We’ll be like an updated version of Back Street—although anything less like a back street than Fifth Avenue would be hard to imagine. It’s a bleak prospect, isn’t it?”
I move over to her. “Vicky, I’d leave Elsa tomorrow, but—”
“I know. Alfred. I understand.”
I want to make love to her, but she says no, it’s the wrong time of the month. I seldom take any notice of that with Elsa, but I respect Vicky’s wish to be private, so I kiss her and leave. But I’m worried, worried sick, and all I can think as I drag myself home is that I’m not at the bottom of this mess yet, not by a long shot.
We start meeting once a week after work in the unused west wing of the Van Zale mansion, and it’s not as bad as we’d feared. We take over one of the remote bedrooms and Vicky produces a phonograph and her collection of Frank Sinatra records while I bring my masterpieces by Mozart, including Gervase de Peyer soloing triumphantly on my favorite clarinet concerto. I try to introduce Vicky to Wagner’s music, but she can’t bear it. Pity. I stick to the safe things by Beethoven instead and slip in a bit of Brahms occasionally, but I draw another blank with Bruckner, while Mahler sends her right out to buy a Presley classic that tells me I’m nothing but a hound dog.
It’s odd going to bed together beneath Cornelius’ roof; it makes us feel as if we’re committing incest, but we dress up the bed with our black satin sheets and then we start enjoying ourselves again. At least I do, and I don’t think it can be so tedious for Vicky either, because soon she lets me make love to her twice a week. I’m much encouraged by this, but I can’t help wishing I knew how to make her enjoy it more. It’s difficult to discuss the mechanics of sex without sounding like either a fool or an Elaine May/Mike Nichols satire, but at last I do say casually, “Let me know if there’s something special I can do to make things work well for you.”
She looks suspicious. “What do you mean?”
“Well …” I know I’m skating on thin ice and I can now see it won’t support my weight. I try to back off. “I don’t mean to imply that human existence is incomplete without the occasional orgasm, but—”
“Never mention that word!” she yells at me. “Never, never mention it again!” And she jumps out of bed in a rage and locks herself in the bathroom next door to cool off under the shower.
I get dressed, fix us both large drinks, and when she reappears I do my best to unravel the mystery. Apparently this is a problem Sam encountered, but being Sam Keller, he just tells her all women have orgasms at some time or another and if Vicky doesn’t, she must have some kind of offbeat problem and should see a psychiatrist.
“And what did the psychiatrist say?” I ask politely.
“He didn’t say anything much. I could never really talk to any of the psychiatrists I saw. I thought once I might have been able to talk more easily to a woman, but Sam said all the best psychiatrists were men.”
“Yeah,” I say, grabbing the bottle of Scotch by the neck and pouring myself a double. “That figures. And what did he say when all those wonderful psychiatrists of his failed to cure you?”
“Oh, but he thought they did. I pretended to be cured in the end. It seemed the easiest way out. I didn’t want Sam to go on being worried and unhappy because I wasn’t normal.”
“I see. Yes. So you assumed all the guilt, all the worry, and all the unhappiness on his behalf. That’s great! Lucky old Sam! I salute him!” I raise my glass and drink.
She stares at me. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to say it takes two to make love, Vicky, and if you could never make it then, maybe—just maybe—that husband of yours was partly responsible. And even if he wasn’t, even if he was all hell in bed and you were still unable to tune in, he should have made more effort to put things right than to palm you off on a string of psychiatrists whom you couldn’t relate to!”
“But Sam was so wonderful, so sweet, so kind …”
I’ve had it. I just can’t stand by gritting my teeth one second longer, and setting my glass down with a crash, I swing to face her. “Vicky, Sam may well have been all those things to you at some time or another, but if he allowed you to carry the full guilt of all your marital problems, he’s not such a hero as you think he is. He may still not be a villain, but believe me, he’s no hero.”
“But—”
I take her by the shoulders and give her a sharp jerk to show her how important it is that she should see Sam without the halo her guilt has nailed to his memory. “Don’t canonize Sam,” I say strongly. “That would be a very big mistake. Sam wasn’t a saint, Vicky. He was human and he had his faults, just as we all have, but he covered them up so efficiently with that notorious Keller charm that you probably weren’t aware of them. You’ve got a right to be very angry with Sam about some things, just as you’ve got a right to love him for others. Well, be angry! Get mad! Don’t just say, ‘Oh, it was all my fault … I was a wife who failed her husband.’ Don’t turn the anger in on yourself! Try saying instead, ‘That son of a bitch Sam Keller—he turned his back on me when I needed him, he was a husband who failed his wife!’ That still may not be the exact truth, but I’ll bet my bottom dollar it’s one hell of a lot closer to the truth than this myth of failure and inadequacy you’ve been carting around on your back for so long!”
She stares at me until I feel I’m a mirror, one of those mirrors you see in horror movies which reflects a death’s-head instead of the human being before the glass. I pour her some more Scotch and shove the tumbler into her hand.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“No,” she says. “Don’t say sorry, and don’t—”
“And don’t say ‘orgasm’ either? Okay, Vicky, whatever you want. Unlike Sam, I’m not about to get upset just because you don’t thrash around in bed like some acolyte performing the rites of Dionysus. To be truthful, I don’t give a damn what you do so long as I’m not making you miserable. Am I making you miserable?”
She kisses me. “No. You make me very, very happy. You make me believe …” She stops.
“In yourself? Do I make you believe in that neglected long-lost person who exists under the neurotic misfit who hated being a showpiece wife and a model mother and doing the things which all women without exception are supposed to find totally satisfying and rewarding? Do I make you feel less guilty for not enjoying the suppression of your own personality in order to sacrifice yourself for your husband? And have I finally convinced you that any meaningful relationship between a man and a woman should be a matter of give and take, and not all take on the one side and all submissive, self-effacing, soul-destroying give on the other?”
She doesn’t answer. Tears are streaming down her face. Finally she says, “It was all so wrong, wasn’t it? It shouldn’t have been like that. I was like those P
OWs in Korea. The ones who were brainwashed.”
I put my arms around her and hold her close. There’s another long silence, but when she says, “I think I’m beginning to feel angry,” I know that she’s put her crutches aside at last and begun her long uphill walk back from the far side of hell toward a new life not yet begun.
I’m in F. A. O. Schwarz buying a present for Postumus. Last year Alfred was given a useful string of colored beads which he could chew without poisoning himself, and I think Postumus would enjoy the gift as much as Alfred did.
When I leave F. A. O. Schwarz I grab a cab uptown but suddenly I remember I’m out of Trojans. Hell. Where’s the nearest drugstore? I lean toward the driver.
“Go over to Madison.”
The driver thinks I’m nuts, but we go over to Madison and all I see is a series of little shops with one dress in each window and no price tag in sight.
“Go over to Lexington.”
“What are you looking for, buddy?”
“Drugstore.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” The driver swoops on uptown on Madison for three blocks and halts outside a drugstore on the corner. Telling him to wait, I run in.
No Trojans. I buy another brand and race back to the cab, which swings over to Fifth Avenue. That’s wasted time, and I have to be home by eight, otherwise Elsa won’t believe I’m working late.
Mother meets me in the hall. Damn.
“Oh, darling, I thought you were Cornelius! Come and join us for a drink. He should be home any minute now.”
“I’ve brought a present for Benjamin. Maybe—”
“Hi, Sebastian!” calls Vicky from the top of the stairs as she tries to figure out how to rescue me. “A present for Benjamin, did you say? What a nice surprise—come up to the nursery!”
Cornelius walks in. “Sebastian! Come and have a drink!”
I usually make a special effort to arrive before the drinking invitations, but the combination of F. A. O. Schwarz and the contraceptive hunt has disrupted the schedule.
Sins of the Fathers Page 51