by Louis Begley
Her own parents had not tried to see her or speak to her since she came back from Geneva. They certainly hadn’t invited her to come home. Her only contacts with the family had been with her brother John—they talked on the phone every couple of weeks—and, over money, with her father’s secretary, and that was hardly needed since her allowance came from her trust and she could deal with the trustee herself. Thomas wanted to get married in January, right after his final examinations, so they could get away from the Cambridge cold and spend a week in Puerto Rico. He must have meant by that, she said, that she would have the opportunity to take him on a honeymoon. He couldn’t have afforded the airfare, never mind the hotel. Finally he agreed to postpone the wedding until sometime in early June, after his graduation. That was an easy decision. He didn’t have a cent, and after what had happened he couldn’t borrow from his parents. Waiting until after graduation brought them closer to the time when he would have a job and a salary. She had thought they’d simply get a marriage license and be pronounced man and wife at the city hall, with Dr. Reiner and whomever Thomas wanted among his classmates as witnesses. That was when Thomas’s shameless arriviste side went on full display. He said, We must tell your parents, and, when she protested that she wasn’t on speaking terms with them, he said, Don’t worry about it, I’ll write to them, and did so before she could stop him. Now you’ll get your comeuppance, she told him, but once again she was wrong. Some days later, her father called and, sounding as though he had his mouth full of ice cubes, announced that her mother and he hadn’t expected her to make such a good decision on such an important issue. Thomas was a fine young man, and they were happy to welcome him into the family. They understood that she and Thomas wanted to be married in June; that was fine, they’d be happy to have the wedding at the house in Bristol; he’d already told Thomas there would be a substantial wedding present in the form of money to help them get settled in their new life.
Then, she said, in early January, during the business-school reading period, right before Thomas’s exams, I ran away, telling him I had to go to Paris to see about selling the apartment and the Mercedes. I’d talked about that before, and it represented a part of the truth. The other part, the real reason, was that I wanted to see Hubert. I’d called him the day before and said I was getting married and wanted to have one last good memory of our time together. The idea of my wanting to cheat on Thomas must have really turned him on. There was this pause, and he said, Get a room at the Savoy in London, baby doll, ma petite cocotte, and wait for me there next Friday afternoon. In bed. Your legs open. As always, he made me melt. I sat down and masturbated. I knew his taste in hotels as well as sex, I knew I’d be picking up the tab each step of the way, and I didn’t care. I reserved a small suite with a river view, which at the time, if you had dollars, wasn’t such a big deal. Then in Paris, after signing stuff about the apartment and the car, I bought two Lanvin nightgowns and had my legs waxed at Elizabeth Arden, on place Vendôme. On Friday afternoon I was at the hotel in London, on the bed, my thighs open, ready for him.
I’ll spare you the description of the kinky sex when he arrived. The next day, we had sat down to a late lunch downstairs at the Grill. Oysters and whiting and a lot of wine. He’d made me sore inside, but I liked that, and I was very happy to be on the banquette, leaning against him, feeling the warmth of his body. Something, probably the consciousness that I was being stared at, made me look up. Right away I saw who it was: Will Reading—in fact his father had just died, and he’d become Lord Reading—Thomas’s business-school classmate and friend. He and another toff were at the table directly across from us. Why I hadn’t noticed him before I’ll never know, and there was no way I could have failed to recognize him. We’d met at parties, I’d danced with him, and he’d even tried to feel me up. He could tell that I’d finally seen him, gave me a horrid sort of wink, and came over to our table, kissed my hand the way that sort of Brit does, and just waited. I introduced them—there was no way to avoid it—and to my horror instead of keeping his mouth shut that idiot Hubert said, Oh, I’m charmed to meet one of my cousin Lucy’s friends. My cousin Lucy! Hubert’s accent had never been so thick. I knew that Will wouldn’t resist the urge to tell Thomas; probably he believed it was his duty. The smirk on Will’s face was really something. I couldn’t get the thought that he’d already called Thomas leave my mind for a moment during what remained of that weekend, not during the orgasms or the tears when Hubert decided, after we had returned to the room after lunch, that he would whip me, something he had never tried before, saying, You have it coming to you, you bitch, tu l’as bien mérité, salope. The other thought that terrified me even more was that Dr. Reiner would no longer want me as a patient. I’d lied to him; I had told him I must go to Paris to take care of business and got him not to charge me for the missed sessions; he’d say I’d made continuing analysis with him impossible.
I was right about Will and Thomas; I was wrong about Dr. Reiner. Thomas called just as Hubert was leaving for the airport. He didn’t shout; in this funny little voice he used when he was really mad he said, You’re cheating, only a month after our engagement, and you’re already cheating. I was still in bed, finishing my breakfast, and Hubert, instead of walking out the door, sat down on the side of the bed, put his hand under the covers, and tried to make me come, all the while making faces, a sort of commentary on what I was telling Thomas, and wouldn’t take his hand away although I kept shaking my head and tried to close my legs tight. It came out that as soon as Thomas had heard from Will he had tried the Savoy, on the off chance, and had asked for me. Thank God the room was in my name! I lied and lied and lied. No wonder Hubert was amused.
She went on to say that she had told Thomas on the phone that the Swiss man she was having lunch with (she didn’t reveal his name) was someone she had known years ago when she first came to Paris—she was smart enough not to say a word about Geneva—that it was all over between them, had been over for years, that he was working in London and was having difficulties at his job and in his marriage, that he had written to her, and that, since she was going to be in Paris anyway, she’d decided she really should see him and tell him in person that she was getting married. She’d wanted to say goodbye nicely. Thomas didn’t believe her. That was perfectly clear. Finally she said, Please don’t say or think things you’ll be sorry about later. I will be in Boston on Thursday. Let’s talk then. Of course he kept calling her every few hours until she checked out of the hotel, repeating, over and over, How could you have done such a thing? Then in Boston, at first he wouldn’t see her. He told her there was no going back. It would be impossible to trust her, and the more he said that each time she called him, the more she begged him to reconsider. Meanwhile, Dr. Reiner astonished her by saying that what she had done with Hubert was an exorcism, her way of expelling the incubus, a necessary part of the progress toward coming to terms with herself. They resumed their daily sessions—naturally he changed tack and charged for the ten or so sessions she’d missed—and he encouraged her to persist with Thomas. He didn’t think Thomas would accept the truth about the encounter with Hubert—but what was that truth?—and thought that rather than attempt to give him an account of those days she should work hard on demonstrating her commitment to him and to the marriage. By early spring she had succeeded—that was how Dr. Reiner saw it. The June date Thomas and she had picked for the wedding in Bristol fell directly after the Harvard commencement; the reception would be a small and modest affair—her family, inevitably his parents and a couple of aunts and uncles and cousins, some of his business-school friends, Will Reading not included, and a few close family friends and neighbors. Lucy tried to put her foot down when it came to the van Burens, who qualified as neighbors and friends; she really didn’t want Priscilla or Alex, but in the end they were invited, as was I.
Thomas wanted you there, Lucy told me. You didn’t come, I can’t remember what excuse you gave, but you sent those lovely Georgian silver sugar tong
s. The van Burens came, every single one of them, and gave us napkins. I swear it’s true: tea-sandwich napkins!
But by that time it had also become evident that she would be unable to terminate the treatment with Dr. Reiner when his August vacation began and resume analysis or therapy in the fall with another doctor in New York. This was not Lucy’s own idea, although the prospect of changing analysts had been terrifying her. It was Dr. Reiner himself, she told me, who said he couldn’t take responsibility for ending her treatment at that time, not after all that had recently happened; he believed she should continue with him for at least one more year. He offered to see Thomas and tell him his opinion. Because Thomas, of course, was as usual thinking only of himself and his wonderful career and the offer he had accepted from Kidder Peabody of a job that started in the fall. Morgan Stanley hadn’t made him an offer, although they’d made one to Josiah Weld. That had left Thomas speechless; he simply couldn’t understand how such a thing could happen. His own record at the business school and at college was so much better, and he had the LSE degree. The reason was clear as a bell to Lucy, she told me, and she said she had explained it to him. You aren’t white enough for Morgan, she said, and you never will be. One look at you and all they see is a striving townie. Afterward of course he invented the story that he preferred Kidder because he was going to work with Al Gordon.
That was that. It didn’t occur to Thomas to say to Kidder he wouldn’t be starting work in the fall and ask for a deferment of the offer, but he did offer to commute to Boston on weekends. Her answer was that if they weren’t going to live together the wedding was off; if he wanted her, he had better take a job on State Street. They could get a larger place on Beacon Hill, and he could walk to work. He absolutely refused.
Somewhere at that point I interrupted and said, Once again you had an opportunity to postpone a marriage you were so ambivalent about, or to back out from it altogether, handed to you on a silver platter. Why didn’t you?
She shook her head and told me she didn’t know. She hadn’t been well. Dr. Reiner had been in favor of the marriage. Now he talked about her going back to McLean. What would happen to her if she broke with Thomas? If she did marry him, yes, it would be a relief to have him in Boston only on weekends—anyway, those weekends when he could make it; it certainly wouldn’t be every weekend; she knew that Kidder worked its young people hard. But she didn’t trust him; he was oversexed; he’d pick up gonorrhea or worse from some slut and give it to her. She’d be terrified to let him near her. Besides, where would he live in the city? He had no one he could stay with; she’d end up paying his rent. He had been quite insulting about working on State Street. Boston was a backwater, no better than Providence; even a year or two of work for a State Street bank would tarnish his résumé and spoil his prospects on Wall Street. Dr. Reiner said she should in fact encourage Thomas to commute. She’d get the emotional space she needed, and it was more sensible to spend money on separate establishments than to push Thomas to take a job he didn’t want. He also said her fears of whores and infections weren’t reasonable. I don’t know what I should have done, Lucy said. I was tired of spending money; I was tired of Thomas; I was tired of Dr. Reiner; I was tired of everything and everybody. Thereupon, out of the blue, Thomas talked the business school into giving him a junior faculty position and a fellowship to do research on valuation theory, both good for two years. In a way it wasn’t all that surprising. He was right at the top of his class, and he’d become close to the professor directing the research. Kidder made no difficulties about delaying his arrival. Al Gordon even called and said he was thrilled by this recognition of Thomas’s merit. Can you imagine the stupidity of that man? Dr. Reiner was impressed. As for Thomas, his head was turned. He never recovered. Only got worse and worse. He could do no wrong; his work naturally came ahead of everything else; he had to be the center of attention. He actually wrote to my father, Lucy said, about the faculty appointment—when he told me about it I exploded, but he said he’d done it because he knew my father would be proud of him and would be pleased to have the news come from him directly. My poor father responded by sending him a check for a thousand dollars. I was mortified; I could just hear Mother making fun of Thomas. She could be so mean. My idiot brother John also took Thomas seriously, just like Father. It’s the stupidity gene of De Bourgh males. The wedding was a couple of weeks later, Lucy said. I went through the reception more dead than alive. Dr. Reiner didn’t want me to be away for more than a week or ten days. Attending the wedding was too much for my great-aunt—she hardly left her apartment on Pinckney Street in Boston anymore—but she told me to treat the house in Little Compton as though it were my own, although she’d go on taking care of the taxes and upkeep. That’s where we went directly from the reception.
VIII
I HAD TAKEN to seeing Lucy almost daily, in the afternoon at her apartment over tea or at dinner at the Lexington Avenue bistro. The uneasiness her narration had caused me had dissipated, but for a variety of reasons, including my desire to avoid late evenings and excessive consumption of alcohol, I stuck to my resolution to decline invitations to drinks or to dinner at her place. Occasionally, we took advantage of the fine weather and talked in the afternoon on a bench facing the Central Park boat basin. One day in the park, she asked me point-blank, and with only the thinnest smile, whether I was writing a book about her and Thomas. Was that the purpose of our interviews? Wasn’t that what they really were, ever since I first came to dinner at her house? I told her the truth: I was working on something quite different, a novel set in my native Salem, but after I had finished, if I lived long enough and hadn’t lost my marbles, I might want to write a book about the breakup of a marriage. A marriage, I stressed, a fictional character’s marriage, not hers and Thomas’s. Naturally, everything I learned in the course of our talks would be part of my experience and my store of knowledge and observations and could have an impact on the story I’d tell. But the book would be a novel, not a memoir or reportage.
A novel. She snorted. And you’ll put me and what I’ve told you into it. I’ll murder you!
That’s one of the hazards of a novelist’s profession, I answered, just as finding some aspects of yourself in a novel is a risk you run by palling around with a novelist—or merely allowing yourself to be in his field of vision.
She wasn’t laughing, so I added that if I did write the book neither she nor anyone else would recognize her or Thomas in my characters or have grounds to argue that the book was about them. They’d be seeing a mosaic, made of slivers of glass or stone, some picked up as I went along and some I had fabricated. I don’t write romans à clef, I said.
She snorted again and to my great relief kept talking. Our conversations continued over what remained of that week and much of the following week, with time out for the weekend, about which I told her a fib. I said I would be visiting my ailing cousin Hetty in Philadelphia. In reality, I had accepted an invitation from Jane Morgan to spend the weekend with her and her husband in Water Mill, getting wind of which, I hadn’t a doubt, would send Lucy into orbit. As I had expected, the information Jane was to give me proved precious.
Getting married, setting up a real household, not feeling adrift, Lucy said, that was in some ways what I had always wanted. At the same time, after that awful wedding—it wasn’t objectively awful, nothing at that house could be; it just felt that way—and that monstrous honeymoon in Little Compton, I returned to Boston knowing I was in a trap. One I had set myself and couldn’t get out of! Can you imagine it—Mr. and Mrs. Snow declared that they wanted to call on us in Little Compton and bring things for the house, which turned out to be homemade jams and tomato chutneys, and Thomas insisted that we must receive them? He didn’t want to break their hearts! He didn’t want to burn his bridges! They’d worked so hard! And my heart? I don’t think he took it into consideration. He’d already decided, and you can be sure that his parents were directing his thoughts, that I wasn’t fully rational, s
o that if he wanted to do this or that against my will the thing to do was to badger me into accepting it. Going along. Having Mr. and Mrs. Snow to tea served on my great-aunt Helen’s best china and best tablecloth. The trust company found the larger apartment we needed on the top floor of a building on Beacon Street across from the Public Garden. It was where Alan Crawford, who taught Renaissance Italian literature, and his wife lived. I’d taken his seminar, and he gave me an A. After the start of the school year, they had us over to dinner once and twice to drinks. I think that Thomas bored Alan, but I could see that Alan was contemplating making a play for me. Living in the same building would have made getting together convenient, and I wouldn’t have minded, but he chickened out. Perhaps Susan, that was his wife, sensed what was going on and read him the riot act. Other than my place on rue Casimir-Perier, which you surely remember, it was the nicest apartment I’ve ever lived in. Sunny and well proportioned, and with a beautiful view. I could walk to work. But as soon as Dr. Reiner left for his Wellfleet vacation I realized I really wasn’t well at all; I knew I was sinking. Thomas would come home late; he was doing research in the library. He had this idea that when he walked through the door the table should be set, and as soon as he’d washed his hands we should have a drink, which was an idea he’d picked up from me, and sit down and eat. Of course, I was supposed to have the dinner ready, at most it would need to be reheated, that’s all. I couldn’t do that. Why should it be me who set the table, who did the shopping, who cooked? We fought about that. Over and over. Shopping wasn’t easy—I had to go all the way to Charles Street. I could order by phone from one fancy market and have whatever it was delivered, but that meant I didn’t see the fruit or the lettuce, and anyway I had to be at home when the order arrived. We didn’t have a doorman. It was a hot August, the way it can be hot and muggy in Boston. In the streets it was brutal, but even so the apartment was pleasant. You’d think he would have wanted to take a bath or shower when he came home, before we had drinks, and have dinner late when you could open the windows and get some breeze, but no, that wasn’t how it should be; the garage owner washed to get the grease off, but Thomas hadn’t spent his day under some car putting in a new exhaust pipe. It was all I could do to get Thomas to take a shower before he went to bed! And to stop him from sitting down to dinner in his shirtsleeves and necktie. He’d tuck his necktie into his shirt! You have to live with someone to realize you can’t stand them. We hadn’t tried to live together before, the trip to Italy didn’t count, and now I knew I couldn’t abide him. Oh, of course, he could be taught. Once it had sunk in that in Bristol, even when my father and mother dined alone, Father would put on his green or plum velvet smoking jacket and a foulard or black tie, and Mother a long skirt, and that changing before dinner into something—anything—was what one did, wild horses couldn’t have dragged him to the table in the clothes he’d worn when he came in from the street, and I thought that the willingness to conform was revolting too, so craven, so unnatural. But the stuff about doing his share in the house, there was nothing to be done; the roots had sunk too deep. It was the importance of his work. When he came home from work, everything was supposed to be nice. For him! So he had the right atmosphere to do whatever he was doing. It didn’t help that my boss Emily was on vacation, and I had to go over manuscripts at home just to keep up.