by Mary Gordon
A going concern? she wanted to say. What kind of way is that to talk about your wife? As if she were an investment you’d been afraid you were going to lose money on that seemed to be, just recently, in the black.
She wanted to tell him that it was a terrible way to refer to his wife. And she wanted to ask him not to talk about his wife to her. She wondered if he told Amaryllis he loved her. She was sure he never told his wife she was beautiful. That would have been impossible. She was not beautiful. Not by any standards. Not by any standards in the world.
Theresa had seen her only once, dropping something off at Tom’s office. She was much too thin. It had been said it wasn’t possible to be too thin, but there were kinds of thinness that were undesirable. Amaryllis’s hair was thin and taffy-colored, and she pinned it to the top of her head in a way that looked uncomfortable. The hairpins were too visible; you could too clearly imagine them painful against her scalp. There were thin red veins all over her face. Was she a drinker? And she dressed in vivid colors—ruby-red tunic, sapphire wide-legged pants—that exaggerated her starved look.
Theresa disliked herself for having these critical thoughts about another woman, a woman close to her own mother’s age. She wished somehow that he’d arranged it so that she’d never seen Amaryllis. But that, of course, wasn’t his fault. She had seen the wife before she was his lover.
Then he insisted on her coming to dinner at his house, the dinner they gave every year for graduate students and particularly serious undergrads.
“I just wouldn’t feel right, Tom. I just couldn’t.”
“It’s important to me to normalize the situation as much as possible. So that if the two of you met on the street, it wouldn’t be awkward. I’ve mentioned you. She knows I think you’re an excellent student.”
So I must go through hours of Purgatory to save you a minute of awkwardness on the street, she thought, wondering where the word “Purgatory” came from. Was it from Dante or was it from Sister Imelda, telling her to pray to the souls in Purgatory so she would never oversleep? She hoped it was Dante. She didn’t want to be thinking of Sister Imelda now.
The house he lived in wasn’t the one she expected. She supposed it should be thought of as her house. Amaryllis’s house. The house of his wife. She’d found herself, Tom had said, in weaving, and when he said that, Theresa had imagined the woman looking into a tangle of threads and finding an image of herself—her thin, unlovely countenance part of a larger fabric. None of the people who had been important to Theresa had had any respect for the domestic arts. The people she knew—they were all women—feared the entrapment of such things, the distraction from what was really important or, in her mother’s case, one more demand threatening her survival. She couldn’t imagine that Tom really respected his wife’s weaving. She thought it was kind that he pretended to.
Theresa had imagined them living in a converted farmhouse, with exposed beams, old pottery (French or Italian), brought back from his travels: the head of a saint given to him by a grateful collector, perhaps a small polychrome wooden statue, since that was his area of expertise. But the house was modern Scandinavian: light wood and glass, the furniture all white but draped with what Theresa assumed were Amaryllis’s weavings, all in what Theresa imagined were called earth tones but which seemed to her only various shades of brown.
Four of Tom’s students had been invited, three undergraduates and his other doctoral student, who had just arrived from a research trip to Siena.
“Leif Erikson,” a young man said, thrusting a reddish hand in her direction. At first, Theresa thought it was some sort of geography quiz. Then she remembered that Tom’s other doctoral student was named Leif Erikson. He was slight and well made; his feet, though, seemed like doll’s feet, too small for an adult; his eyelashes were white; she wondered if he were albino. But no, he was merely very light blond, and his thick glasses, fashionably red-framed, made his eyelashes look even whiter. She couldn’t stop thinking of rabbits, and the combination of rabbits and Vikings made her want to laugh, so instead of introducing herself, she simply nodded. But she was glad that she could even think of laughing at him. She’d feared him, jealously. Suppose Tom thought he was better than her.
“I’ve heard you’re disgustingly learned, that’s what Herr Doktor Professor says.”
“Oh, no, I’ve just … I don’t know … there are just some things I seem to have under my belt.”
The words “under my belt” made her think of what was under her belt, and she thought of her own body and she wanted to say to Leif Erikson, “Tom is my lover,” and fearing that the words would somehow slip out, she once again went silent.
Where was he? Where was Tom? Shouldn’t he be greeting his guests, making introductions, easing the way? Theresa hadn’t had much experience at adult parties, or parties of any kind, and her eye wandered desperately around the living room, looking for him. Finally, he appeared from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a pitcher of clear liquids and six glasses, beautifully shaped, and inviting.
“Martinis,” he said, “guaranteed to loosen everyone up. Theresa, you’ve arrived. Let me serve you.”
Oh yes, serve me, comfort me with apples for I am sick of love, she wanted to say to him.
Amaryllis came out of the kitchen then, carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres. She passed them around: pigs in blankets, pastry triangles, squares of brown bread with smoked salmon and thin fronds of dill.
“Now I know everyone really wants the pigs in blankets, but fears that will reveal them as déclassé, forcing them to select what they in fact do not desire, but resist the impulse, follow your bliss.”
Tom laughed much too loud at this. Theresa thought it wasn’t that funny. Would she have to introduce herself to Amaryllis? Shouldn’t Tom have done that? He wasn’t a good host, she thought, even her limited experience of host behavior told her this.
“Mrs. Ferguson, I’m Theresa Riordan,” she said, not holding out her hand because Amaryllis was holding a tray and she didn’t want to make things awkward for her.
“Oh yes, the Titian,” she said, looking Theresa up and down. “But you’re not working on Titian, you’re doing those boyish Madonnas, aren’t you. Working against type.”
Why had she called Theresa the Titian? What had Tom told her?
“The great movie stars of the thirties were all androgynous,” one of the undergraduates said. She herself was pencil-thin with a shock of straight black hair. She was dressed entirely in black except for a pair of orange suede boots, high-heeled with toes so pointy they made Theresa’s own toes ache. Theresa thought what she said about the movies was in response to Amaryllis’s comment about boyish Madonnas.
The mention of movie stars—or was it the martinis—suddenly engendered a kind of conversation that reminded Theresa of puppies falling out of a basket.
“Garbo, Hepburn, Katharine I mean, Dietrich. All a bit iffy in the femininity department,” said another undergraduate, whose name, Theresa remembered, was Tristan, and whose father was a diplomat.
“Of course we really don’t know what we mean when we say ‘feminine,’ ” said the woman with the impressive boots.
“Oh, get off it for one minute, Camilla,” said Tristan. “Stop playing more feminist than thou.”
“Well, anyone’s more feminist than thou, Tristan,” Camilla said.
“It’s an interesting distinction, though, isn’t it, the difference between the words ‘womanly,’ ‘feminine,’ ‘female,’ ” Tom said.
He was the professor, so everyone nodded and waited for the next thing he would say. But Theresa knew he was talking about her, talking to her, sending encoded messages that meant you are desirable.
“I mean to say,” he went on, “you wouldn’t say Marilyn Monroe was feminine. But she certainly was female. But would you say she was womanly? With all that implies of the maternal, the protective. She always seemed so in need of protection, impossible to imagine her mothering anyone. But female: absolutel
y, absolutely that.”
“With his usual brilliant incisiveness, my husband has jumped to the heart of the matter. Asserting that Marilyn Monroe is female. Absolutely top drawer, darling,” Amaryllis said.
“Thank you, darling, for the spousal vote of confidence.”
And Theresa was thinking: You are all talking about the bodies of women, but none of your talk is real. What is real is his desire for my body, which, whether or not he loves me, is absolutely real.
“Your mother was an actress, wasn’t she, Mrs. Ferguson?” Tristan said.
“Yes, but she’d never have wanted to be called a star. She loathed the whole Hollywood star system. She simply thought of herself as a professional. Acting was what she did. It was her business, her livelihood. She never took herself too seriously. Or anything else, for that matter. My God, she could make mincemeat of my father’s colleagues who thought their little ivory tower was the world, and that the center of the world was Princeton.”
“She was someone who was able to portray both intelligence and desirability,” Tristan said.
“Oh, God, yes, my mother had no trouble broadcasting sex, in her hypercivilized way. Believe me, I know more about my mother’s sex life than I ever wanted to.”
Theresa was mortified, but the others seemed to be enjoying the revelation and they all laughed. She was disturbed by both Tom’s and his wife’s habits of saying critical things about their parents. In public. To strangers. She would never have dreamed of saying anything critical about her mother, never have dreamed of saying that now she looked like a third-rate country-western singer and her new husband was a bore and a slob. Or that she didn’t know what a fellowship was. She would never have exposed her mother in that way; her life had been too hard. And it would have been unthinkable to say anything critical about her father, whose life had been a ruin. But perhaps criticizing their parents in public was something Tom and Amaryllis had in common. Maybe criticizing their parents brought them closer. They had, Theresa reminded herself, been married over twenty years. But although she was his wife, and got to have a life beside him and to call him hers, Theresa didn’t envy her. Amaryllis Ferguson was not a desirable woman. Tom would never say to her as he said, over and over to Theresa, “I adore your body. Yours is the body I adore.”
And of course Amaryllis couldn’t understand his work. “She takes a kind of pride in not being intellectual,” Tom had said. “Growing up as she did, she’s fed up to the teeth with it. Of course, she’s highly intelligent. But she puts more stock in the intuitive, and what she calls the intelligence of the hand.”
“What movies do you like?” Camilla asked Theresa. Theresa knew she was trying to be kind, trying to include her in the conversation. But it was always the case when anyone asked her a direct question—her mind went blank.
“I don’t go to the movies much,” she said.
“Yes, well, there is something premodern about Theresa, isn’t there?” Tom said.
“Maybe she’s been alive for hundreds of years,” said Camilla, giggling. “Maybe she’s a vampire.”
Was she drunk? Theresa wondered. Was she trying to be friendly, to include Theresa in a joke? Or was she being aggressive because she thought Tom favored Theresa? The last, she believed.
“Maybe we should stay away from her during the full moon,” Tristan said.
“Vampires are the new locus of the sexual imaginary,” said Leif Erikson, who hadn’t spoken.
“As long as it’s just imaginary,” Amaryllis said. “The curry needs me. I hear it crying out, Help me, help me, I’m ready.”
Where had they learned it, all of them, this way of talking, this exaggeration, this leaping from branch to branch like frantic monkeys, not knowing if any branch would hold or, if it broke, what the damage might be? Tom was following his wife into the kitchen, carrying two trays.
Theresa couldn’t taste anything. Lamb curry, she’d been told, but it might have been anything. She had said nothing through the whole dinner. She wondered when it would be possible for her to leave.
Amaryllis tapped her wineglass with the edge of her knife.
“Those of you who’ve been here before know that we always end every dinner party with a ritual. I’m afraid we’re boringly famous for it. Everyone must sing for his or her supper. One song, a song from your childhood, or whatever you consider your home.”
Apparently, they’d all been here before. None of them seemed surprised. They all seemed ready. Camilla sang a song from the Auvergne, where her parents had honeymooned and where, she said, she may very well have been conceived. Leif sang a sea shanty; his father loved to sail. Tristan, of course, sang a melody from Tristan und Isolde. Tom and Amaryllis made a duet of “Foggy, Foggy Dew.” Theresa was in a panic. She couldn’t think of a single song. There had been no singing in her family; there had been no family dinners. Only the problem of getting her father fed and ready for bed, and then Theresa and her mother settling down in front of the TV, eating their dinner off trays. Because of her father, they didn’t join her mother’s sisters and their families for holidays. It was too difficult to get help on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and, quite soon, they never even thought of it.
“I really don’t sing,” she said. “I have a terrible voice.”
“Nonsense, we’re all friends here,” Amaryllis said. “Nobody’s judging you. It’s all just good fun.”
The table went silent. Everyone’s eyes were on her. Fun, she wanted to say. You think this is fun? I think it is simply hell.
He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at his plate. She didn’t want to embarrass him; she didn’t want him to find her wanting, pathetic. She thought of Joan of Arc. A song came to her. She would sing it now.
“Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea,” she began.
But the minute the words were out of her mouth, she saw that she had made a mistake, that in trying to save him and herself from embarrassment, she had embarrassed him even more. It was a ridiculous song. They had invoked Auvergne, Wagner, the Appalachian, the great Atlantic. She had invoked her own impoverishment, her own lack of right to be where she was.
“Wasn’t that supposed to be a song about marijuana?” Tristan asked.
“Well, they didn’t tell us that in Catholic school,” Theresa said, and everybody laughed, as though she had at least been witty. But she had simply told the truth. She understood that the necessary ingredient in all their talk was mockery; self-mockery was fine if it included a mockery of one’s own past, one’s own family, one’s own education.
“I suppose by the time you came along, they’d completely given up the Latin and all the wonderful traditional trappings,” Amaryllis said. “I don’t suppose you learned Gregorian chant? Such a perfect form, so simple.”
“Theresa’s a fabulous Latinist though,” said Tom.
“Sweet to think of you among those little nuns,” Amaryllis said.
She wanted to say: They’re not little nuns. They visit people on death row. They hire ex-cons to do their yard work, and face up to their neighbors’ complaints. They stand up to the bishops, who could ruin them financially. One of the “little nuns” you think you know something about is traveling around the country with other “little nuns” gathering support to resist an imposition of male authority, restating the Vatican’s order that they have a male cleric supervising all their meetings. What have you ever done that takes one tenth their guts? she wished she could say. But after all, she was implicated in the woman’s betrayal; she was her husband’s lover. She could only be silent as Amaryllis Ferguson made a crude parody of the lives of women she loved.
“Well, she’s a protégée of Joan Gallagher’s, Ammie,” Tom said.
“Oh, my Lord, the terrifying Joan. It always took me a week to recover from an evening with her. Such an exhausting display of intellectual energy. Positively Amazonian. I had no choice but to take to my bed afterwards. That is, when I worked up the courage to encounter her. Usually I just hid. You
can imagine my ecstasy when I learned she’d married a podiatrist. I adore imagining what kinky things they get up to with corn plasters and arch supports.”
Theresa wondered how Joan Gallagher would have behaved at this table. But Joan Gallagher would not have had Theresa’s secret. That hers was the body the host adored.
And she wouldn’t have had the other secret that washed over her when her mind wasn’t entirely engaged. That her period was six days late.
“Your wife knows about us,” she said, the next time they were together in the Days Inn near Bridgeport.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “That’s just your Catholic guilt.”
“She knows about us, Tom. I can tell.”
“Even if she did, we have an understanding, and we have for years.”
The words sickened her. She always knew she wasn’t the first. But now he’d made it clear.
“You’re lucky I’m addicted to you, or I’d say you were too much of a silly goose to waste my time on. And I have a bit of good news. Amaryllis is going to a crafts fair in Vermont all next week. So we have a bit more time. And we can stop throwing away the family fortune on this hideous room with the blankets made of some petroleum product.”
I love this room, she wanted to say. This room and all the other rooms exactly like it. Because it is where I am with you.
When she was with him, she felt she was inhabiting a world as full and beautiful as any of the paintings she loved. A world that had the intensity of Bellini’s skies, the vividness of Mantegna’s apples, the richness of Bronzino’s draperies. It had nothing to do with the rest of their lives. With his wife or her mother or Joan Gallagher or Sister Maureen or Sister Imelda. It had nothing to do with the past or the future. They were together. They were happy. The time they had was the only time.
“I wouldn’t feel right being in your wife’s bed.”
“Neither would I,” he said, “there’s a foldout couch in my study.”
“Can we spend the night?”
“Can’t risk it,” he said, kissing her shoulders. “Nosy neighbors. One day I’ll take you somewhere fabulous. For more than just one night.”