Mourning Glory

by Warren Adler

  The lies that spewed out of her imagination were like a fecund plant, growing like the great beanstalk in the fairy tale, tendrils popping before her eyes. She was deliberately creating a new person, complete with a new identity and history, solely for Sam's consumption and approval and, above all, for her own selfish benefit. She was convinced that the real facts of her life, the boring truth and unexciting emptiness of it, the recounting of her failures, would cause her immediate expulsion from serious consideration for a lifetime commitment.

  As the details of her false history escalated, she forced herself in self-protection to burn the facts into her memory. Sam was too relentlessly curious about her for her to get away with evasions and incomplete facts. And, of course, she needed to keep the story logical, factual and accurate.

  "Why so many questions?" she would ask periodically, when she felt her imagination tire. They had this great luxury of time between them, lying in bed, their bodies cooling from the profound energy of their lovemaking, alert to each other. They were the only human beings in the center of their circumscribed universe.

  "I need to learn you," he would respond.

  Learn me? Considering the false facts she was bombarding him with, she could not imagine his ever learning her.

  "But you know me, Sam," she would reply.

  As for the unspoken truth, the nonfactual reality, there was no way her body could lie to him. She was not faking it. She hoped that was obvious to him. And truthful. Her explosive responses were genuine and their mutuality beyond argument. Certainly, after this first month of pure rapture, there were no sexual secrets between them. There was not a mark on his body that she did not know. Nor could there be one on hers that he had not confronted in his own exploration.

  She knew instinctively that the sexual aspect of their lives could never be the deciding factor for him, as it hadn't been the deciding factor in his relationship with Anne. She clung tenaciously and impatiently to the idea that originally had motivated her, to be legitimized in marriage. It had from the beginning been her ultimate goal. She vowed never to lose sight of it, despite all other temptations that might waylay her.

  Ring around your finger, dummy. The words reverberated in her mind. She was not, she believed in her heart, constituted to be a kept woman, however financially secure it made her life.

  Despite the glorious time she was spending with Sam, she could not evade the facts of her finances. Unfortunately, the rosy possibility that Mrs. Burns had painted made no allowances for time or money.

  Her money was running out, and among her many anxieties on that score was that Jackie might buckle under the pressure of her newly acquired expenses, meaning that she might drop out of school or otherwise blunt her chances for a better future. If Grace's gamble didn't work out—and it was a long shot—Jackie's future would be doomed. Not to mention her own. She had invested all of her hopes in this enterprise.

  Yet she dreaded the possibility that he might offer her money. However proffered, she knew she would, as a matter of both dignity and tactics, have to refuse. The slightest show of desperation, she calculated, would be fatal.

  Above all she needed Sam's respect, and to avoid being tarred with the brush of Carmen's definition of her character and motives. Besides, she had portrayed herself as financially secure. Would she accept a gift? No; that, too, would have to be rejected. In fact, she had decided irrevocably that anything that hinted of an exchange of value for sexual favors had to be rejected. The stakes were too high for compromise.

  She liked to think that she was acting in a way true to her Catholic roots, with its rigid morality. But, on reflection, that hardly held water. She felt no guilt on the erotic front, not in the slightest, no sense of sin or soiling. She loved that part of it, hungered for it without any hint of second thoughts or conscience.

  What bothered her most was the lying, the proliferation of false testimony. She was not by nature and upbringing a liar.

  On the other hand, she found that she could disregard the anguish over her lying by defining it as simply a means to an end. This, too, was a paradox, since the end could be dangerously compromised by revelation. The fact was that she had gone too far to retreat, and to worry about being exposed would only inhibit her budding relationship with Sam.

  Day after day the lies continued, the soft, intimate cadence of her whispering voice, spinning its frail web of deception with relentless and, to her, surprising creativity and eloquence. Even when she told the truth about her history, it began to seem like a lie.

  "What were your parents like, Grace?"

  "Loving, involved and interested in my life."

  "What did they do?"

  She had forgotten. Anxiously, she searched her mind for what she had told him earlier.

  "Oh, yes," Sam said, "You told me. Your dad was an engineer and your mother taught piano."

  "You have a good memory, Sam," she said, relieved. She needed to be more alert, she told herself.

  "You must be musical, then."

  "Oh, yes."

  "The classics, I suppose. Brahms, Chopin, Beethoven."

  "All of the above."

  "How old were you when your mother died?"

  "Mom was in her late seventies."

  "Which made you a kind of late baby."

  His drive for information was maddening.

  "Yes."

  "What they used to call a change-of-life baby."

  "They wanted children badly."

  "So you're an only child."

  "Yes, I am."

  "I'm one myself. Unfortunately, I became the object of my parents' possession. It was stifling. It was important to get away."

  She had hoped that such an intimate insight might set him off on his own path and sidetrack his curiosity about her. It didn't. Nevertheless, she was alert to any opening that might get him talking about himself and short-circuit her having to continue her inventions.

  "Did you enjoy working in Washington?"

  In the brief silence that followed she had to jog her memory. Yes, she had said that. Hadn't they discussed that earlier?

  "Yes. I loved it. I worked for a senator."

  "Did you? Which one?"

  For a moment she was stumped. She could barely remember a name from that long ago. How old would she have been? Twenty-two, twenty-three. Then a name popped into her mind, another gift of fate.

  "Kennedy. I worked for Kennedy. I was pretty low on the totem pole."

  "He's still there. What staying power!" He paused, became reflective. "Anne was a great fan of the Kennedys. They were a bit too liberal for me. I'm more of a centrist."

  "So am I," Grace said, hoping that he would veer off the subject. She was way out of her depth.

  "We have gone a bit too far to the right, but we do have a way of adjusting. Don't you think so?"

  "Yes, I do. That's what makes our country so great."

  "I agree," he said. "But we do have to stay ahead of the game in every area. Do you realize that in my lifetime the population of America has doubled?"

  "It's very troubling, Sam."

  "In your children's lifetime it will double again. Can you imagine how America will fare with a population of half a billion? And a billion in your grandchildren's lifetime."

  "It is staggering."

  "Anne and I had some lively political discussions. She was very opinionated." He chuckled. "I liked that."

  In that area, she knew she would suffer by comparison. The fact was that she didn't know enough to have firm opinions. She wished he would change the subject.

  "Is Washington where you met your ex?"

  It had been his own conclusion and she did not resist, hoping it would channel his thoughts away from any political discussions. Quickly, she reviewed the time frame.

  "Yes," she said.

  "What was he doing?"

  "He was with a law firm, just starting out."

  "How did you meet?"

  "A blind date."

  It
seemed innocuous and vague enough, and gave her an opening to ask him a similar question.

  "And you, Sam? Where did you meet Anne?"

  "Anne and I met at a dance in Wellesley. I had this friend Carl who was on the prowl for wealthy young ladies. He dragged me up there one weekend and fixed me up with his girlfriend's roommate, who was Anne."

  Cutting too close to the bone, his revelation about seeking a rich girl aroused her curiosity and prompted her to want to further her exploration.

  "Were you looking for a rich girl?"

  "Among other things. I certainly didn't rule it out. Wellesley was pretty toney for me, a kid from Brooklyn College without a dime."

  "Was Anne rich?"

  "I guess by the standards of the time. Her father was a stockbroker. They lived in Manhattan in a huge apartment on the East Side. Family came to Palm Beach for the winter." He grew wistful. "They were real white bread WASPs. I was the Jewboy from Brooklyn."

  "Anne wasn't Jewish?"

  "She converted, went through the whole megillah, mikvah and all. She became more Jewish than me. Her family didn't speak to us for ten years. By then I had made big bucks. Amazing how much difference money makes. Suddenly, I was acceptable. Just barely, but acceptable. I have to say, Anne was great about all that. She thought her family were bigoted assholes, which they were."

  Grace wondered if she would be subjected to conversion if she married Sam, not that it mattered. Ring around the finger. Above all else.

  "What's a mick ... mick something?"

  "Mikvah. Rabbis put the lady in a pool, supposed to wash away their gentileness. Something like that. My Orthodox grandparents were still alive then. Anne insisted on doing it out of respect for them. Frankly, I didn't much care either way. But, I must say, Anne did like the idea of being Jewish, daughter of an ancient people, an underdog and a minority. My son was bar mitzvahed and my daughter was bat mitzvahed. Not that it made much difference in their lives."

  Grace had noted that he hadn't talked much about his children, and what he had said indicated disappointment about how they had turned out. Of course she wanted to know more about them, but he did not seem to want to continue on that path.

  "Considering the gap between you, it's amazing how well things turned out," Grace prodded. She wasn't referring to the sexual gap and Sam understood. Since the gap between her and Sam was at least as wide, probably wider, she needed to know how it had been bridged.

  "We came from different worlds. Anne was the product of American ancestor-worshippers, of people who came over on one of the first waves, way back in the seventeen hundreds. Her mother was DAR and her father was Society of Cincinnatus, a descendent of a Revolutionary War officer. They considered themselves the American aristocracy, and they had imbued Anne with all the attributes of that class. It used to be called breeding. Anne knew all the little rituals of the class, the way they spoke and thought and acted, the way they entertained, their confident coolness and sense of superiority. Oh, they were bigots. Catholics were way down on the social scale and Jews were below that. And what was I, a hustling Jew from Brooklyn who fit all the stereotypes. I was a natural at business. Didn't matter what kind. I could squeeze a buck from a stone. But what I didn't have was Anne's sense of taste and class with a capital K. What good was money if you didn't have that? Anne taught me how to be perceived as someone with class. Hell, just look at the possessions in this house, the antiques, the paintings, the look of old money. It's a genuine look, not phony, because Anne was genuine, the real thing. She taught me how to act, how to look, how to live."

  It seemed so strange and incongruous for Grace to be lying there naked, intimately entwined with this man, while listening to this relentless drumbeat of praise for the lost wife, perfect Anne. Anne the classic mate. Anne the wonderful. She snickered to herself, taking refuge in the one place where she, Grace, dominated. Anne the unfuckable!

  Except for that single aspect, it was impossible for Grace to think of herself in the running to replace such an object of awesome praise. Certainly, she, the daughter of a barber, badly educated, at the bottom of the economic ladder, with a loser's past and a child who was slipping into the netherworld of white trash, could not possibly aspire to be the mate of this man who had experienced the instruction of an American aristocrat. She wanted to scream out her true reaction to his litany of admiration, but, of course, she held back, knowing that she still had one golden pointed arrow in her quiver that could not be attributed to Anne.

  She kissed him on the lips, then disengaged and kissed her way downward from his chest to penis, which rose to the occasion. Her lips teased him as they pecked along the shaft and below, pausing to whisper, "Did she ever do this?"

  "Never."

  "Or this?"

  "Never."

  She felt him tense with pleasure as she ministered to him, her hands busy elsewhere, searching for his most vulnerable points of pleasure, feeling the sense of sympathetic joy.

  "Did she ever say how wonderful and beautiful and manly and strong and hard you are?"

  "Never," he gasped.

  On another level, it was impossible to believe that she was doing this, competing in this way with the perfect Anne, the dead Anne, who had not been even remotely perfect in this one regard. Grace herself was not a woman of sexual experience, and everything that she was doing came from some weird instinct buried deep in the female psyche.

  "Is this good?" she asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it spoken.

  "God, yes."

  "The best, the very best?"

  "Absolutely."

  She stopped for a moment and looked up at him.

  "I want to taste you, Sam. Is that okay?"

  He hesitated, then nodded. She had never done this and wanted him to know, wanted it to be remembered as something that had never happened between him and the perfect Anne, the neutered Anne.

  She bent over him again and felt him tense, then explode in her mouth.

  Later, when they had cooled and she lay in the crook of his arm, she felt oddly victorious and was certain that she had made her point. It had also brought his focus back to her, and the questions began again.

  "When you were married, Grace ... did you have secrets from your ex?"

  In the context of the moment the question was worrisome, as if she had overplayed her hand in exhibiting what might have seemed to him too much sexual expertise.

  "Not like yours, Sam." Another absolute truth.

  "Odd, isn't it, that I should feel guilt about it only after she's gone?"

  "Why torture yourself, Sam? It's over."

  "The memory isn't over."

  "Then maybe you should have told her. Confessed."

  "I was a coward. When she was alive I was afraid to risk telling her, and when she was dying I didn't want to add to her pain."

  It occurred to Grace that maybe her little exhibition of sexual prowess had been counterproductive after all. Somehow it had recalled his deception.

  "Do you believe your husband was faithful?" he asked suddenly, after a long pause.

  "How can one be sure? Like Anne, though, he didn't show much interest in that area." A half-lie, she decided. Jason's indifference had come later.

  "I admire your self-discipline, Grace."

  "It wasn't discipline, Sam. I didn't care."

  "Not care?"

  "Frankly, I was as bored as Jason when it came to that." She turned upward to look at him, then kissed his cheek. "Not until you came along, Sam."

  She immediately regretted the comment, although that was another truth. She could tell by his facial expression that he might have doubted the assertion and she let it pass. Naive older men, she supposed, could be vulnerable to wishful thinking and might accept such an explanation, deluding themselves. Not Sam, she decided. Millicent Farmer would have kept up a drumbeat of praise for her unfortunate dupe.

  "I hope you believe me, Sam," she said, watching his face.

  "Why shouldn't I?" />
  "It sounds so ... phony," she sighed, mimicking herself. "'Not until you came along, Sam.'"

  "Some things you can't lie about."

  "Women fake it all the time," Grace muttered. "You men are such ninnies."

  "I told you, I'm a good judge of people. And I don't think you're a very good actress."

  "Well, you're wrong," she said, displaying a childish pout. "I am faking it."

  "Well, I'm not." He chuckled.

  "That's pretty obvious."

  Her hand felt his penis harden again.

  "You can't fake that. No way."

  Suddenly he reached out, brought her face to his and kissed her hard on the lips, their tongues intertwining. When they had disengaged he said, "There's more to this than meets the eye."

  For a moment she was confused. Had he discovered the truth?

  "Yes, there is," she agreed. She had, after all, the advantage of knowing the truth about herself. For a while they slid into silence.

  "What was your husband's name, Grace?"

  Oh, God, she thought, digging into her memory. Had she lied about his name? She couldn't remember.

  "Martin," she replied, unable to bring herself to acknowledge Jason as a real person, further distancing herself from the truth of her past.

  "And you never had a clue? You know, about his being gay."

  "Not a clue."

  Again she was entering territory that was unfamiliar.

  "If you're not comfortable talking about it, we could drop it."

  How could she be comfortable? she thought. Creating another person out of whole cloth was an uncomfortable process. Yet she feared dismissing it out of hand.

  "Were you devastated?" he asked.

  "How would you react?"

  "Not well, I think."

  She wondered if she had gone too far out on a limb. But on reflection she decided that it did have a certain logic to it. If she had said that her husband had left her for another woman, which was equally untrue, it might have diminished her in his eyes, marking her as a woman who could not hold her man, undesirable and boring.

  Above all, she had to protect this image of herself as desirable, intelligent, educated and cultured. She had never considered herself to have any of these attributes, although she was beginning to suspect that she had not done herself justice about her intelligence. How, then, could she have developed such cunning?