by Louis Begley
Philip, Lucy asked raising her voice, have you fallen asleep? What would you like to drink?
I repeated her question stupidly and answered: Would a gin martini be possible?
Only if you make it, she said, and marched me into the pantry.
I mixed a huge one while she watched. A voice out of the unconscious, where time-defying trivia lie in wait for occasions such as this, prompted me: She’d like a highball, long on the Johnnie Walker Red Label I saw on the pantry counter and short on the soda but with plenty of ice. The same unerring voice predicted the hors d’oeuvres she would serve: cottage cheese with canned minced clams on Ritz crackers, set out on a small round Canton-blue export tray.
Suppose Rip van Winkle had awakened and found that everything was just the same, I said. That’s me. Here I am decades later and this place looks exactly the way I remember it. The same admirable furniture, the same dyspeptic ancestors. Most people redecorate at some point, change things around. I like stability. I’m happy to be here.
Goodness, Philip, she said, this must be the first unsolicited compliment you’ve made me. Will there be more? Actually, keeping this big apartment after that monster decamped and Jamie took off for boarding school is the only good decision about money I have ever made. When I look back on it, it didn’t cost all that much to buy and fix up, and I could sell it today for a fortune. But I don’t need to; I can still afford the maintenance, even though the trust and everything else my father and now John have managed has just kept dwindling. I couldn’t help it about Father, but I should have never let John near my money. Why don’t families get it into their heads something so obvious as the fact that genius for making money isn’t passed on from the great-great-great-grandfather to some latter-day twerp just because he’s in the direct line of descent? I’ll never understand it.
We sat down in the library. It had undergone changes, the addition of a huge flat-screen TV and a Barcalounger, the latter an object I would not have expected to find at Lucy’s.
You’re shocked, she said. It’s ugly but comfortable. I spend many lonely evenings on my Barcalounger watching old movies and trying not to get so drunk I can’t get myself to bed. Let’s face it, Philip. People have dropped me or died. Or they’re soft in the head. I don’t blame the dead or the living. Who needs an unglamorous boring old woman at their table? Only other unglamorous old women who think they’ll be better off if they’re friendly. They even invite old bags who live in the country to stay at their apartment. Anything to have company! I’m not friendly. I go to the ballet, New York City and the ABT, the opera, and the philharmonic, but I go alone. I take a taxi to get to Lincoln Center and the bus to go home. I’m not up to fighting for a taxi after the ballet and everything else lets out. Most of the time, I have a bite to eat here before the performance. Et voilà! Not like my life in Paris, or what I had once expected.
I nodded.
Well, then make me another drink.
When I returned from the pantry, she continued. You don’t understand what it’s like. Why should you? You’ve got your celebrity. Everybody wants a famous author at their table. You used to know so many people that some of them must still be alive. I bet they all want to be nice to you. Are you still writing?
I told her I was—or was trying to.
Then you’ve got your work. I have nothing. He took it all away.
The martini had relaxed me. Effect of the liquor or the cataracts I’d agreed to have removed at the end of the summer? This old lady saying one unpleasant thing after another, so different from the young woman I had known and liked, seemed very far away; I saw her indistinctly, as though she were behind a wonderfully diaphanous curtain. Besides, was I hearing her right? Could it be that I had misunderstood because I wasn’t paying close-enough attention? I raised my eyebrows and shook my head, hoping to clear it.
Philip, you know perfectly well who I’m speaking about, she said sternly. You’ve never been dumb, so don’t play dumb. I mean that bastard Thomas Snow. He got everything he wanted and left me with nothing. Yes, he got everything he wanted. From me. Get that into your head. Sex. I must have told you that over and over. He was a sex maniac with no gift for sex. Perhaps if I had let him do to me all the things he wanted he would have never left. Money. This apartment was exactly the kind of apartment he thought he should have, and he got to live in it as soon as we moved to New York. You know that I paid for it. All the furniture, all the nice things, were mine. Do you think that living in this place, surrounded by my family furniture and portraits, didn’t help him at Kidder? Or the parties we gave here for his precious clients and the people from his office? Primitive boors and bores! And the house in Little Compton that’s been in my mother’s family for generations? He had the use of it on weekends and during his vacations, and all the while those awful relatives of his were making it unlivable. Can you imagine having Mother and Father Snow and all his cousins right across the bay? An ocean wouldn’t have been wide enough. And Jamie! It was his idea, he thought we should have a child so I would have something to live for. Very gracious and generous and dumb. Of course, he was scared that otherwise I’d leave! But once we had Jamie, did he lift a finger to help? Too busy first at the business school and then at the office or too busy going over papers he’d brought home or too tired. But never too tired to go out to a dinner party or to fuck! Remember I said in Paris he needed me? Look at me, Philip! He sure did. Only he didn’t need a wife. He needed a live-in whore with a big bank account who’d pay his bills and show him how to live in the great world. Where do you suppose he learned all the moves? From the bookkeeper or the garage owner?
Now Lucy, I interrupted. The guy was brilliant. He was even good-looking. He did very well, far better than anyone had the right to expect. Why don’t you stop resenting that and instead take credit for having been a formative influence!
I let him get away with murder, she countered gloomily.
The dinner turned out to be a cold affair: roast chicken and a rice salad she said she had bought at the combination grocery-and-meat-and-fish market where she did most of her shopping, a green salad she’d made herself, cheese, and a lemon tart from Payard. They were all on the kitchen table, along with a bottle of a California red that she asked me to open. We helped ourselves and carried our plates and glasses to the dining room.
I suppose you’ve been seeing her, said Lucy after we sat down. Don’t ask who: of course I mean her, Jane the celebrity! She’s probably interviewed you, so at least you have a professional reason to be polite. She seems to entertain on a grand scale. I follow it on Page Six. That’s what he always wanted. Café society. Jamie goes to dinner there every time he comes to New York even if he brings the Chicana, and they stayed with them while Thomas was alive. Do you think it’s right for her to invite him now that Thomas is dead? I think it’s tactless and cruel, rubbing in all her advantages.
She added: I suppose she invites you all the time.
I couldn’t help laughing and told her I doubted that Jane even knew I was in the city.
You had better let her know before she goes to the Hamptons for the summer, Lucy continued. That’s if you want to be invited. Or interviewed!
She still has her house out there? I asked. As you see, I don’t really keep up.
It’s his house, Lucy corrected me, she had the good sense not to marry him until he was rich. Yes, she’s kept the house and cavorts with my old friends, people he met through me. People he met in Little Compton too, not only the city and Hamptons crowd!
Perhaps because she could no longer disregard the look of growing distress on my face, she stopped the onslaught abruptly. After a moment of silence, she said, All right, I can tell you want me to shut up. In that case why don’t you pour me some wine and put the rest of the chicken and rice on the table.
I did as I was told, and for some minutes we ate and drank in peace. Since she made no move to clear the table after we had finished, I took the plates and platters into the kitc
hen and came back with the dessert plates, the cheese, and the tart.
That’s good, she said. Don’t bother about the dishes. The maid comes in the morning.
She didn’t take coffee or tea except for breakfast. It made her too nervous. But the coffeemaker worked, and if I wanted coffee there was a can of Medaglia d’Oro in the refrigerator. Making coffee in her kitchen was just about the last thing I wanted. I decided I’d say goodbye right after dessert.
No coffee for me either, I replied. I have a lot of work and have to make this an early evening.
She took that in, pursing her lips and nodding. Well, well, well, she said. You act surprised to hear how bad things were between Thomas and me. I find it difficult to believe that you didn’t see what a rotten marriage it was and that you didn’t see it coming. Didn’t you know that I should have never married him? Never! Would you like to know why? I suppose you don’t care. You didn’t care back then, and you don’t care now. You just found it amusing, in your perverse way. Why not? You had a front-row seat at the undoing of Miss Lucy De Bourgh. Just the kind of story you like. I should have seen through you.
I said all that was perfect nonsense. I liked her; I had been her friend then and still was. To the extent I had had a tangential connection with the events she was talking about—really limited to meeting Thomas when she introduced him to me in Paris—it was ancient history of which I had only a dim recollection. Afterward, in New York, when she and Thomas were still together, our contacts had been superficial. A small number of perfectly pleasant dinners or drinks. That was all!
Well, well, well, she said once again. So you think that’s all you know. Would you like to know more? Hear my story to satisfy your professional curiosity? Aren’t decadent New England families a subject that interests you? You’ve made money writing about us.
I nodded and said, Of course.
It’s a long story, she replied, but it’s not dull, and I have plenty of time on my hands. We can start now.
I glanced at my watch. It was past ten. Did she think she had to nail me down right then and there because otherwise I’d never come back?
I do want to hear any part of your story you want to tell, I said. As your friend, not some sort of ethnographer, but I really mustn’t stay late.
Let’s leave all this on the table in that case and move into the library, she answered. And I’ll have another highball: like the one you made before only stronger.
I went to bed almost immediately after I got home. The highball had turned into three for her and two for me. Perhaps because I was no longer accustomed to drinking after dinner, I slept badly. The next morning I worked for about three hours, getting nowhere. My prose was flat. I had no verve. When I called it quits it was lunchtime. Once again the weather was perfect. I decided against the cheese and salami in my refrigerator and had an egg-salad sandwich instead at a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue. Afterward I went to the park and sat down on a bench on which my face would be in the full sun. Thoughts of Lucy’s monologue oppressed me. That beautiful, intelligent, wickedly funny girl, always ready for a new thrill, had made such a hash of it. I shook my head, as if that gesture could free me of the past, and looked around. The park, as I had observed each time I had found myself in it since I returned from France, looked fresh and lovingly cared for, a condition that not so long ago one would not have thought attainable. In its way it was as good as the best French public gardens. On a bench on the other side of the path, at a forty-five-degree angle from me, sat a young Hispanic couple. The girl was attractive, but I was repelled by her companion’s short pointed beard. They were deep kissing, either unaware of my presence or indifferent to it.
A great sadness descended on me. Lucy was old; I was old; Thomas and Bella were dead, along with so many others whose presence I had taken for granted. Bodies rotting where they had been interred or already absorbed into the loam, ashes of others scattered here and there. I had buried Bella at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris alongside her mother and grandparents. Her father, still alive at ninety-one when she died, joined them three years later. Even if there was room in the plot, of which I wasn’t sure, there was no one left whom I could decently ask to see to my being put to rest there as well. I couldn’t imagine saddling my cousin Josiah with a transatlantic burial. I would be cremated, a task either the lawyer who had my testament in his safe or someone in his office could see to with little effort. If my cousin Josiah was alive, he would bury my ashes in the garden of the Sharon house I was leaving to him, under the huge rhododendron outside the window of Bella’s office. If he died first, perhaps one of his daughters or granddaughters would do it. Fear of death didn’t perturb me, and I no longer worried about the mess I would leave behind: manuscripts and files, mementos, and other wretched personal possessions. My papers would go to a university library that had agreed to house them. The rest could be cast to the four winds. Thus far aging, which I had feared, had not been a great trouble. Except for my full share of childhood diseases, colds that lingered longer and longer, and a nasty bronchitis some years ago, I had never been sick. With the aid of an occasional steroid injection into my back, I could still walk to most destinations I wanted to get to, and at a good clip. My memory was unimpaired. Reading glasses had become a necessity, cataracts were a recent development I was about to deal with, and I had lost some acuity of hearing. The irremediable loss was that of ardor. My sporadic couplings with this or that relatively attractive lady after Bella died had been Pavlovian responses to unvarying stimuli: the lady’s availability and the facility of the transaction. I brought each of those sour liaisons to a prompt and I hoped dignified end.
As I pursued those thoughts I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that the young lovers were making progress. The man’s hand was in the girl’s shirt. She had swiveled; her bare legs lay across his lap. Their eyes were closed. I whispered enviously: “Thy willing soul transpires / At every pore with instant fires …” As though on a signal, they sprang up and, hand in hand, hurried to a Central Park West exit.
IV
BY THE TIME she returned from Paris and met Thomas at her brother John’s wedding reception it had become clear to her, Lucy said the previous evening after we had moved into the library, that it was all over between them. The thing was doomed. Of course, she should have told him so right away, but too much was going on around her and in her head, and she couldn’t face the argument and the explanations. Besides, she didn’t have to. In two days, on Monday morning, she was returning to Paris; then, as soon as she closed the apartment and repacked her suitcases, she would leave for Geneva. During the dinner that followed the reception, Thomas had begged her to smuggle him into her room and let him spend the night, but she had refused. Even if she had wanted him, which was not the case that evening, she was dead tired and didn’t like the idea of his sneaking around the corridors in the morning. The house was filled to the rafters; she’d be risking embarrassing gossip and a blowup with her mother. But she did finally agree to meet him the next morning on the dunes. All he wanted was sex, anytime and anyplace. He’d never gotten it into his head that he had to make it so that she had to have him, had to have him the way you must have food and drink. He was an oversexed capon! As usual, he came too fast and tried to make up for it by going on and on. It was no use. She felt distant—distant and detached—from what he was doing to her body and in her body. The odd thing was that he didn’t realize it. Probably he liked it better when she was passive and just let him concentrate on himself, which was all he wanted to do anyway.
You weren’t invited to the wedding, she continued, there was no reason why you should have been, but if as a novelist you had wanted to get an idea of how those things were supposed to be done that was the one wedding to attend. Edie, the little goose my brother John married, had been an orphan since the age of ten, when her parents and the pilot were all killed going from one of the British Virgins to another in an absurd single-propeller plane, and the cousins who were
her guardians were only too happy to have my parents give the wedding at the big house in Bristol. Not that a reception in San Francisco would have made sense. Edie had gone to Miss Porter’s and Smith, and all her friends were on the East Coast. It being John the heir, the parents pulled out all the stops. The house, the lawn, the garden, had never looked better. Lester Lanin came himself and made a little speech about still remembering the time he played at my parents’ wedding reception, which was one of the first big society functions he had gotten to do. Veuve Clicquot flowed like a river. John Chafee and Claiborne Pell were both there. Given the competition between them, that was a real coup and said a lot about Father’s clout. JFK and Jackie canceled at the last minute, but Lee came, and the president sent a cable that Father read after a fanfare. Naturally, all the family and old family friends were in attendance, as well as a big contingent from San Francisco and John’s Harvard friends. Your pal Alex van Buren was there with his wife, that awful Priscilla, and the rest of the van Buren clan. All in all, it was a truly memorable party. But wherever I looked, whom did I see? Thomas Snow in the blue blazer I had bought for him to wear in Europe and, if you please, some sort of white trousers. Perhaps even white flannels. Can you imagine the kid they’d all seen pumping gas dressed up like that? He stuck out like a sore thumb. You couldn’t miss him.