“Well, he obviously spotted you, too,” Tom Matthews said, implying that she must have been one of the standout beautiful girls at the party.
Mallie smiled. “I felt like Leslie Caron when we danced; he was so easy to follow. When we sat down to talk, it turned out we had so much in common. Besides loving to dance, we both smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, although I never liked smoking. I just pretended I did to be sophisticated. He knew my cousin Margie Montell from Chicago. They were on a ship together when Larry’s lacrosse team went to England and Margie was on a European tour with my Aunt Peggy. Larry and I talked and talked and he never danced with anyone else that night. I felt as though we had known each other always. I thought I was in heaven.”
She rolled her eyes at Tom Matthews, as if to admit what a fool she had been. In spite of all her current feelings of contradiction and confusion—her lost trust—she knew she had fallen completely in love with Larry that night in New York. For days, weeks after meeting him, she couldn’t stop seeing his face in her mind’s eye. His gray-green eyes, long dark eyelashes, his small, perfect ears and his smile—slightly crooked—his whole face crinkled when he smiled. His unruly blond hair looked as if it might need a currycomb, and one of his straight white teeth lapped slightly over the other, a tiny identifying imperfection.
“We began writing letters to each other every day,” Mallie said.
“I could hardly wait to go to my box and see his handwriting. I went to Princeton for weekends. He came to Sweet Briar. He asked me to marry him before I ever met his parents or he met mine.”
“That was quite a fast courtship,” Tom Matthews said.
“The problem was that he was a senior about to graduate; I was a sophomore, an art major. I had signed up for a semester in Florence, Italy, to study painting during my junior year. It had been my dream before I met Larry. But then, after that, I didn’t want to go. I could hardly bear to leave him.”
“What did you do?” Tom asked.
“Fortunately, my parents—particularly my mother—insisted that I go. I agreed on the condition they would allow me to drop out of college and get married in June, at the end of my junior year.”
Tom Matthews shook his head. He asked her how she felt all these years later about leaving college before graduating. Mallie said that nothing could have stopped her from wanting to marry Larry, not even her art.
“It never mattered to me that I didn’t finish,” Mallie said. “I wasn’t an academic. From the time I was a child, I just wanted to be married and have a family.”
“How was your time in Florence?” Tom asked. “Were you able to enjoy your painting classes?”
“Oh yes,” Mallie said without hesitation. “It’s hard to imagine now but I really believed that I was an artist in Florence.” She had instant recall of her days at the Villa Mercedes. “I lived and breathed my work. My fingernails were black from charcoal. I had paint on all my clothes. When I wasn’t in the studio, I spent hours wandering the streets of Florence, in and out of the churches and the Uffizi Gallery. It was bliss. At times I even forgot about Larry.” She closed her eyes. “I’m afraid I’ve lost whatever talent I had. I’m not really an artist anymore.”
“An artist is always an artist,” Tom said. “It’s a gift you’re born with. Why did you stop painting?”
What a question, Mallie thought. She wanted to laugh. There was not a moment in her life when she could find the time to paint. She had delivered three boys in less than five years and essentially raised them alone. Larry had traveled as a salesman for the hardware company three weeks out of four for years. She closed her eyes for a moment. Besides her lack of time, Mallie thought, there was really no place in the house to set up an easel or a large table. She had stored all of her Italian brushes and colored pencils, her palette, and her old drawing pads in a corner of the attic. “I’ve done a thousand paintings in my head,” she said. “It’s my escape. Sometimes I realize I’ve been dreaming of painting for hours. I can even smell it.”
Tom shook his head. “With the boys in school, surely you could find the time now.”
The idea had often, fleetingly, crossed her mind. “I haven’t picked up a pencil or a brush in years,” she said. “I don’t know if I still could. Now I’m just a board member of the Art Academy.” She thought of her monthly meetings, the trouble it took to get a babysitter to look after the boys while she went to listen to men and women, mostly older than she, some of whom she had known as her parents’ friends, talk about how to raise money. Although it made her feel important to be there, she knew in her heart she didn’t belong there—she and Larry were in no position to be financial contributors—but she was also aware that the Academy expected her to be a conduit to her father and to Malcolm Brothers’ resources.
“Okay, so if Larry was from Rhode Island, how did you end up living in Memphis?” Tom asked.
Mallie explained that from Larry’s first visit to Memphis, he had loved her family and friends, the relatively warm winter that would allow him to play golf most Saturdays, and, of course, the hunting opportunities—duck, quail, dove, wild turkey—so close by in Arkansas and Mississippi. “When we got engaged,” she said, “my father offered Larry a job at Malcolm Brothers and he accepted.”
“Were you happy about that?” Tom asked.
Mallie considered his question. Part of her had imagined that Larry would work in Providence or New York and she had felt a certain excitement about that. Another part of her felt comfortable with the idea that they would have a life like her parents. She wondered if, at the time, she had really felt she had a right to offer her opinion. It had been her husband’s right to decide what he did for a living and where he did it.
“I think I was happy about it,” Mallie said. “My father and Larry got along so well in those days. I thought it was a great opportunity for him. Since I didn’t have a brother, the idea was that he would someday follow my father as president of the company. And every-one—all my friends—liked Larry. It felt so natural to me.”
Mallie saw flashes of the early days of her marriage. The night she had tried to cook fried chicken—the burnt outside and raw inside—her tears, Larry’s sympathy, his immediate response of taking her out to dinner. The blue velvet robe he gave her for their first Christmas together. The sex—the awakening, the thrill she felt from his touch. All she had wanted in those days was to be with Larry.
“What was your married life in Memphis like?” Tom asked.
Mallie thought about his question. As best she remembered it, life had been easy in Memphis in the early sixties. Or so it seemed at the time. Friendships were passed down from generation to generation and the old families still ruled. She was from an old family and Larry, as her husband, was immediately accepted. There was so much tradition about the way they lived, going to her parents’ house for dinner on Wednesday nights, just as her parents had once gone to her grandparents’ house when she was growing up, dressing up the boys to go to an annual social party on Christmas morning, joining the right secret society during the Memphis Cotton Carnival. Larry fit right in and seemed to enjoy all of it. He was given a junior membership in the Memphis Country Club, not only an invitation to the camaraderie of the weekend golf games and the Men’s Taproom, but also the only place in town where they could go out to dinner on a Saturday night with their friends without lugging liquor bottles in brown paper bags. In those days of dry counties, only the clubs could serve mixed drinks. They often drank too much on weekends and certainly they lived beyond their means.
“One of our problems from the beginning was that we always looked rich,” Mallie said, “the way we lived in a big house and all—but we aren’t and never were. My father bought the house we live in. He worked out some sort of a tax thing for Larry to pay him rent, then a few years ago my father turned it over to us rent-free. When we started going to Watch Hill with the boys for our summer vacation, Larry’s parents gave us a house.”
“What’s Watch Hill?”
Tom asked.
“A summer resort in Rhode Island,” she said. “It’s where Larry’s family has had a place for generations. I fell in love with it the first summer he took me there. The cool, sunny climate. Swimming and tennis every day. The boys love it there to this day.” A deep crease formed on Mallie’s forehead. “It’s also the place we got into trouble years ago.”
“What do you mean, trouble?” As fast as they were shifting subjects, Tom was following her train of thought wherever it led.
Mallie told Tom about the Sunday morning she was cleaning up the living room and discovered one of Larry’s old friend Louise’s gold hoop earrings under the pillows of the couch. A group of friends had come back to the house after the Saturday night Yacht Club dance. Mallie had been tired from playing in a tennis tournament and had gone to bed earlier than usual. She had watched Louise—by then, her friend as well as Larry’s—flirt with Larry at the dance, but she’d paid little attention. Lots of women flirted with Larry. He told her once that Louise’s nickname in high school had been “Easy, squeezie, Weezie.” That night, Mallie had seen them dancing together, both of Louise’s arms around Larry’s neck, The Four Tops record playing “Baby I Need Your Lovin,” one of hers and Larry’s favorite songs. Mallie knew she should have stayed up until everyone left, at least until Louise left. She would never know what really happened. She had thrown the earring in the trash and never mentioned it to Larry, or to anyone—up until now.
As Mallie finished telling Tom about the summer in Watch Hill, she saw him glance at his watch. Their time was up. He stood and opened both his arms to her. She rose from her chair and let him encircle her. For a second she wished she had not talked so much about the past. All those details about meeting Larry and those things about her art and Watch Hill and living in Memphis. Had any of that conversation been really meaningful? But Tom had encouraged her to talk about those things. Standing there in his office with his arms around her, Mallie hated for the session to end. She felt an affirmation that lifted her from the perplexities of her fractured, uncertain life with Larry. She wished a week could magically disappear so that Tuesday would come around and she could be with Tom again.
Chapter Nine
The following Tuesday could not come soon enough for Mallie. All week she had felt as if she were playing the role of a good wife, saying only what she thought she should say, asking only those questions she should ask of her husband. She hoped he had a good day at the office. Was he planning to go hunting over the weekend? Even her contact with the boys felt staged. She fixed meals, did laundry and drove carpools, but she felt detached from the deep connection with each of them that had been such a sustaining part of her life from the time they were born.
Walking into Tom’s office, Mallie left the pretense behind. While he still had his arms around her in his way of greeting her, her emotions began spilling out. “Oh Tom, I just don’t know how I can keep on doing this,” she said.
He broke away and motioned for her to sit down. “Let’s talk about it,” he said. “Tell me.”
“I feel as if I am living this phony life. I don’t say anything I mean. He answers me in monosyllables. It all feels crazy.” Mallie was shaking her head. She felt her hands clenching, as if something was about to explode inside of her. “The worst part is that I don’t think I care anymore. About Larry, I mean.”
“Mallie, this is a very difficult time for you, for both of you,” Tom said. “But it’s important that you try to stay focused on developing an understanding of who you are and what your life is really about, whether you are married to Larry or not. That’s what you are doing here.”
“But I feel so phony,” she said. “I just want my life to be the way it was when we first got married.”
“Life never stays the same, Mallie,” he said. “What we have to do is the work to understand how we make decisions about what it is that is important to us. Then when life presents us with difficulties, we are better prepared to know how to make the changes we need to make.”
Tom’s voice was comforting to Mallie. Just being in the room with him was comforting. Still, she was not sure she understood what he meant. Changes? Changes in herself? Changes in her marriage? “How do I do that?” she asked.
“You said you wanted to go back to your early days with Larry. Let’s talk about how you felt about yourself and your life with Larry after you began having children.”
Mallie knew she could recall that time. She began talking as if she were reading from a diary. “In those days, Larry was hardly ever at home,” she said. “We rarely talked on the phone. I was too exhausted to talk at night—and long distance was expensive. Our weekends were strained. He’d come home wanting to relax and have a home-cooked meal. I’d feel desperate to get a babysitter and get out of the house. We argued a lot.”
“Did you make love?” the priest asked, lacing his fingers in his lap. “Besides the procreation times, I mean?”
Mallie lowered her eyes. It would be difficult to explain. Sex. How could she explain the truth about their sex life? “I thought about it all the time when he was away,” she said quietly. “I used to have daydreams about being this beautiful, sexy, loving wife, waiting for Larry to come home and imagining that he would take me off to some magical place where we would make love all night. For a time, I read Tom Robbins’s books—Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—do you know about those books?” she asked. The priest shook his head. “Really graphic, sensual books, unlike anything I had ever read,” she said. “I could hardly wait for Larry to come home. But, more often than not, when we’d start to make love, I’d hear one of the boys cry and I’d have to jump out of bed. Or I’d start worrying about not putting in my diaphragm. Or—” Mallie felt tears forming. She shook her head. “It got really frustrating. You know—” Could she really tell Tom that sometimes she would lose the desire or Larry would lose an erection? “I began to worry about it all the time. I felt horrible. I thought our sex life was over, that I couldn’t make him happy.”
“Do you realize how normal that is?” Tom spoke softly.
Mallie shook her head again. “I didn’t think it was normal at all. I thought there was something wrong with me—that I was a failure as a wife.” As she spoke those words, her mind created the scene of her visit to Dr. Blagen before she was married. He was the gynecologist her mother had sent her to see for instruction. Knowing she was a virgin, the doctor had bluntly said, “So Mallie, do you want to ask questions or do you want me to just tell you?”
“Just tell me,” she had said.
“It’s really simple,” Dr. Blagen looked at her over his half glasses and spoke as if he were the Delphic Oracle revealing the great secret of the universe. “It’s the screw in the wheel that keeps the whole wagon going. If the sex is okay, honey, the wagon goes the whole distance. If it’s not, the wheel comes off and the wagon falls in the ditch.”
When Mallie heard herself tell Tom about Dr. Blagen’s analysis of sex in marriage, she had the urge to laugh. “For years I had a mental picture of our wagon stuck in a ditch,” she said. “I knew Dr. Blagen was serious, but it was so silly. I began to picture Larry and me wandering around the ditch wondering what to do next.”
Tom smiled for a moment, then asked seriously, “Are you telling me that you thought it was purely what you perceived as a sexual failure that has caused all the problems in your marriage?”
She nodded. “I kept hoping it would change—go back to the way things were with us when we were first married—before I knew he was involved with someone else.”
Tom listened without changing his expression. “Were there many occasions when you specifically knew about another woman?”
She nodded. “One of the worst nights was at a house party after a summer wedding in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Do you know the Delta?”
“Only by literary reference,” Tom said. “Tennessee Williams’s plays. Eudora Welty. I love Faulkner. Read all his books. Tell me abou
t it.”
Mallie and Larry had many friends in the Delta—Tunica, Clarksdale, and Greenville, Mississippi. From the memory vault of their various social visits—dove shoots, weddings or debut parties—she sketched out for Tom the grand lawns and gardens of the Delta, the opulence of their social events.
“That night in Clarksdale, the wedding began at eight to avoid the excessive heat of a July day,” she said. “After a lot of champagne and dancing and a late supper on the lawn, Larry and I went to bed in an upstairs guestroom around two in the morning. I woke up at four and Larry was gone.” She closed her eyes for a second. “I couldn’t imagine where he was. In my nightgown, I crept down the stairs to find him lying on the floor next to our hostess, his pajamas hanging loose.” She stopped and took a breath. “He didn’t see me. I stood at the bottom of the stairs staring at them in disbelief then I slunk back up and sat on the landing, wide awake for at least an hour, trying to sort out how I felt. I couldn’t decide if I was angrier at Larry—or at my hostess, who was, supposedly, a friend—or if was I angry at myself.”
“Why would you have been angry at yourself?” Tom asked.
“Oh Tom, it was that same old thing. I always thought there was something I did—or didn’t do—that caused Larry to get involved with other women.”
Tom shook his head. “It’s hard for me to believe.”
“There were so many strange situations with other women. One time, years ago, I was on a business trip with Larry in New Orleans when I tripped on the edge of the sidewalk and broke my tibia in four places. I had to stay in the hotel for three days with my lower leg in a cast on a raised pillow. Larry spent the time shopping in the French Quarter. He brought me flowers and a pair of pale pink lace bikini panties. Then the strangest thing—he showed me another pair for his secretary Rosa.” How ridiculous that situation sounded when she described it.
“He told you he was taking his secretary a pair of lace panties?” Tom could not disguise his skepticism.
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