Mary's on the Hilltop had set in, rendering progressively more irrelevant his extreme reluctance 'to put her in the home'; he had reached a sort of marker in his life. But depressing as it was, the event had nonetheless been predictable for a long time; he had seen it coming much as Dan and Mercy Hilliard had known despairingly long before the day arrived that sooner or later they would have to put their daughter Donna in an institution providing long-term care. So he did not have the excuse that he had been dazed in shock that evening when he said what he should not have, asking Diane what he should do.
"You should move right back into it," Diane said immediately. "That's a good house, just like my house is a good house. That place you're living in right now," a large garden court apartment in the Old Wisdom House overlooking Hampton Pond, 'may be where the swells all want to go when they retire, half the year playing golf and shuffleboard in Florida, the other half back here playing golf and lying about their grandchildren. But you'll never be one of those silly men in colored pants with white belts and shoes. Besides, you're not old enough."
"Well," he said, 'the golf I could handle with pleasure, but it looks like I probably wont have the grandchildren."
"Looking for sympathy?" she said. "Won't get it from me. Rachel's always apologizing for not bringing her two back here more often, "so they can get to know you." Uh huh. "Perfectly all right," I always say. "Time enough for us to become dear friends when they go to Harvard. Then they can drive out and see me."
"Nothing wrong with where you live now, it's a very stylish place. But no matter what you have somebody do to it, it'll never be a good house, the kind of place you hang onto and go back to, because it's where you live, and belong. What you need's the sort of place that hangs onto you; that's what I really mean. It keeps you, not you, it, and that's what keeps you going strong."
"And you think I'm going to need one of those of my own," he said. He had been ashamed of himself even as he said it. It was arguably excusable 'never any harm in asking' but just the same it had also been a cheap dodge to take advantage of her compassionate mood in order to wheedle something out of her, something that she didn't want to give him.
She'd raised both eyebrows and gazed at him over the big white plate of veal scallops in cream sauce, and then after a brief but unmistakably reproving silence, she had snickered. "Amby," she had said, 'really now, of course you will. Of course you'll need your place to live. Of course you need a house."
So the terms of their non-aggression pact, 'our treaty," she called it, after that little stutter had resumed evolution along the lines they had begun to take, arriving at it fairly soon after Walter's death.
"Look, Amby," she had said to him she was a practical woman making coffee in her kitchen, using her foot to steer her possessive grey-and-black striped tiger-cat along the mopboard under the sink so that she wouldn't step on it; she had called Merrion Saturday morning and asked him to come over two days after they had gone to bed together the first time because that seemed to her what should be done next.
"This sex business: we've got to talk about it. Come to some kind of agreement we both understand. Or else it's going to get out of control and cause all kinds of problems, maybe end up ruining us. I don't want that to happen. I don't think you do, either. Tell me you don't either, all right? Humor me, at least, and say it, even if you're not really sure yet. This is important to me. I'm surprised how important it is."
"It's important to me, too," he had said, sitting down at her kitchen table, and it was. Having left her very early Friday morning in the still darkness so as to spare her attentive early-rising neighbors the effort they surely would have made to deduce the implications of the presence of what she called his 'flashy car' in her driveway in the sunrise on his way home he had gradually begun to understand that he didn't know what he ought to do next, how to act or what to say the next time he saw her; arrive with an armload of roses or act as though nothing remarkable had taken place. He was slightly flustered to find that mattered to him. As it hadn't mattered, he realized, in the aftermath of what had become a fair number of other sexual friendships he had enjoyed over the course of what he was now somewhat startled to notice had somehow turned into quite a number of years.
"Thirty of 'em, in fact, give or take," he said to Hilliard. "And I have to say it's been quite a while since I can remember being actually concerned the next day about how the lady actually felt about the fun we had last night. Not since Sunny went and died on me, I guess. What was there to get all concerned about? All it was was just getting laid now and then. That's how the grown-ups have fun. And if we should run into each other again, or maybe call up and make sure we did that, well, maybe wed fuck again. Or then again, maybe not. If the time ever came then when we hadda new chance, wed see how we felt. "Inna meantime, many thanks, I hadda good time. Appreciate you lookin' out for me like that."
"That was the way that it worked. There was this one woman I got so I knew pretty well at the New England Regional Meetings one year, and she was just real hot to trot. So we connected, and for the whole three days of that conference there up at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, that is what we did: we fucked our brains out.
She had her regular steady boyfriend back home in Portland. He was a lawyer and she had no complaints at all; he took as good care of her as he possibly could good swift dash inna bloomers two or three times a week. Regular as he could be, but that hadda be his limit. He was married, and either his wife wasn't dumb enough so she would actually let him pack a change of clothes and get out of her sight for an overnight trip for fear he might not come back at all or else he didn't feel he could neglect his practice for three days at a stretch, I'm not really sure. Whatever it was, I wasn't complaining. She wanted her cookies and I wanted mine and we found we could make a deal. A loose woman at loose ends: I take her as a gift from God.
"She was back the next year, and the year after that, and so was I, naturally, and both times we picked up like wed never left off. The year in-between conferences, there's been nothin', no phone calls, no letters, no nothing; it's like for each other we don't exist except up in New Hampshire in June. But that once a year when we came back for the meetings, we came back all of the way. It was just the goddamnedest thing.
"The fourth year she didn't come back. I don't know what happened to her. Maybe the lawyer's wife finally found out and shot her or something like that. Or he divorced the bride and they got together. I was kind of afraid to start asking' around; thought it might look funny, you know? But it seems kind of strange, when you think about it: During those three years inna course of nine days I prolly fucked her thirty times. We were young; we did it like there was no tomorrow.
And today I don't know if she's alive or dead, and she's the same way about me, and I bet she's no more upset than I am. It was straight sex, no more'n that.
"Well except for Sunny, that's how all of them were for me; that's how I looked at it, and I've been happy. I've been a contented man. Now it seems like I'm not looking at it that way any more. Something here seems to've changed."
"See, I don't belong here, like you do," Diane said. "In this town. In this valley. Even though I've been here, more'n quite a while, it's not like I belong here. Or I didn't belong here, at least, when I first came. I just sort of settled in for a while, and at some point after that discovered I had stayed. As though I'd gone to sleep and when I woke up, here's where I was. Where else would I open my practice? And after that Walter was here. So when I decided that I was with Walter, I also realized that I'd probably be here for the rest of my life. I was at rest; where I belong became irrelevant.
"Now I'm not at rest anymore. I'm not saying I don't like it, not that, but I am confused. When I started thinking Friday morning about what we did Thursday night, I had kind of a hard time keeping my mind on my patients' problems which is what they're paying me for."
"Wait a minute," Merrion said. "What is this you "don't belong here"?"
Merrion said. "Sur
e you do. You've been here for a long time. Close to thirty years by now, or so, pretty close to it. If you and Walter weren't together when I first came to the court here, I know he was, and you must've gotten here pretty soon after that. Because I've been in that courthouse now for about thirty years, and, I'm not saying that you're old, now, but you've been here a long time."
She laughed. "It's just dawned on you, hasn't it?" she said. "Just hitting you now. I can see you thinking it. "My God, what the hell've I done? I've been to bed with an older woman. She's practically old enough to be my mother."
"Oh boy," he said. "Diane, I hate to tell you this, but the fact of the matter is: you're wrong, very wrong. Women that I've always hung around with've generally been about my age, within three or four years of how old I am. Don't get me mixed up with my friend. I haven't hung around the schoolyard since I got out of school. I'm actually a very nice guy."
She said "Oh." She sat down at the table in the kitchen opposite him and gazed at him for a while and then she frowned and looked at her hands and said: "No, I know that. Or else I don't know that. Oh, I don't know what I know." She looked up at him again. "I didn't mean for this to happen," she said.
"But you just said…" he said.
"I know what I said," she said.
"Well, now I'm confused," he said. "First you said it was important to you and that now we've slept together, we have to get things straight and have some rules, and that was fine with me. And now you're telling me instead it's something else. A mistake or something."
"Amby," she said, 'before Walter died, I'd seen you a lot but I didn't really know you very well. I'd never really thought about you as my friend; whether you were someone I knew and trusted, and wanted to have as my friend; only about you as one of Walter's friends. When Walter died; after the shock wore off and I'd started to get my bearings and so forth, well, I certainly hoped sex would be a part of my life again I'm a normal, healthy, adult woman — but I didn't really expect… I didn't know, I didn't have anyone in mind. I didn't have any idea, who it would be with. That I'd be with in this new part of my life.
"But I have to be honest with you: I didn't think it would be you. Now don't be hurt; I didn't think it wouldn't be you, either. You were never; it was never part of my plan, not that I had any plan, really, but… I don't know what I mean here. To get involved with you. As lovers, I mean."
"Why not?" he said.
"Now you are hurt," she said, 'and I didn't mean that to happen either.
It's just that you and the people you know and the life you've always led, you were someone who was completely different from Walter. Whether you knew it or not, you were sort of a romantic hero to Walter. Do you understand what I'm saying? Walter was exactly what he looked like: a small-town, small-business, family man. His whole world was family, and the business that his family'd started, and the small towns where the family lived and knew the people, ran the business. His whole life was in the Four Towns; it always had been he liked it that way.
"It was how I liked it, too. I'd grown up in a settled environment in Minneapolis, a very conventional family. But once I went to Madison to go to college that phase for me was over. I became rootless. I had adventures, I guess you could say, and I enjoyed them. But after some years I began to worry. I didn't have any base of my own. So Walter's Four Towns were nice for me to come back to, an orderly world where people stayed in the same place and you could depend on them. Not the same world but the kind of world I'd grown up in. I don't think I'd ever been really afraid before that, uneasy, maybe, but with Walter I felt safe again. He was an utterly settled man. When I was with him I knew everything was going to be all right. I never dreamed he'd die so soon.
"He admired you. You, and as much as he fought with him all the time, Danny. When Mercy kicked him out last year, he was the only person I know, man or woman except, I'm assuming, you who was on Danny's side.
The two of us had some sharp words over that. In a way you two were Walter's imaginary friends. You and Danny lived around here just like he did; you moved in the same world and you acted like everyone else, but you were also different. You were pirates. He liked his life all right, but it was quiet; there was action in the lives you two were living they were exciting: You were in politics.
"In a way he wanted to be like you, or thought he did anyway, and because you let him be friends with you, he could feel he was like you, a little bit. He thought you brought a touch of glamor to his life. He was absolutely fascinated by the people that you know, all the rogues and rascals you and Dan did battle with, in your daily life. He envied you. I didn't mind that, as long as he didn't actually try to be like you; he couldn't've done it. He wasn't cut out for the rough and tumble, and deep down inside he knew it. But when he had too much to drink and started talking big; that pose he liked to put on, pretending he was part of your life, the turmoil, and the drama, and the thrills, well, he just loved doing that. For a while he forgot who he really was."
"But you didn't," Merrion said, 'you didn't love having him do it."
"I didn't encourage it, no," she said. "But I didn't try to discourage it, either. I don't think I could've, if I'd tried, but I didn't really try. He had a great time, a wonderful time, pretending he was one of you. But then you all went home. The next day he was back here with me, hung-over but with me, the solid Walter I'd liked the minute that I met him, and grew to love, and married. Of course I was glad he'd had fun. But I hoped he'd never change.
"And so when he died, well, I had no idea of winding up with you. When I felt it starting to happen, felt myself getting attached to you, I hoped I was getting it wrong. But I wasn't. I did become attached to you. Wanting to or not. And so now I have to deal with it, that's all. We have to deal with it now."
"Yes," he said.
"Be patient with me, Amby," she said. "I do have a good heart, you know."
The young man she had met and started living with during her second year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the spring of 1963 had been a graduate assistant in the department of economics assigned to teach a basic survey course to freshmen, 'very bright and very intense, and very Marxist, too." She said his name was "Tommy."
In February of that year he learned that he had won a fellowship to study for a year at the London School of Economics, 'which sort of disappointed him, because he'd wanted Cambridge. But I thought it was wonderful, and I thought he was wonderful and we were wonderful, and when it was time for him to go I went right along with him. Maybe I was right who knows? Maybe the two of us actually were wonderful, just like I thought, and therefore when we lived in Saint John's Wood, flat broke, it wasn't really cold and dreary, like it began to seem half an hour or so after we got there. Maybe it was magical, whee, just like I pretended.
"Tommy couldn't pull it off, believing it was magic. I suppose it's just possible he was right, and I was silly. That fellowship was for one, not two, and my stuffy, settled Three-M parents my father was a scientist for Three-M back home in strait-laced old Minneapolis had cut off my allowance when I dropped out of school.
"They really took a very narrow view of things. They said they didn't recall seeing anything in the Wisconsin catalogue that described a year of shacking up in London as the third year of what they'd agreed to pay for me to get, a four-year, liberal arts education.
"They'd thought of that as their biggest present to me, the foundation of the rest of my life. After I graduated if I still really wanted to apply to Juilliard and see if I was a good enough oboeist to become a professional musician, I could do that. And if I didn't want to do that, or did but didn't get in, then I'd be able to teach music in high school somewhere, because I'd have that solid college education. I'd be able to make a living for myself like a responsible adult. But I'd only completed half of the bargain. Now I was living in sin and being free in London. So therefore no more money.
"I don't know or maybe I just don't remember what it was exactly that I was going to do after
that, after Tommy's year in London. Live happily ever after, maybe. But it was okay, just the same. We had a year like every girl and boy should have, one of wretched, grinding poverty, but unlike a lot of traveling scholars, he actually did study, and he did get his master's degree. And then we came back to Amerika with a K instead of a C and were against the war and stuff, and Tommy taught at MIT and got his Ph.D. You had to give that boy credit. He looked like a dope-smokin' hippie; he talked like a refusenik draft-resister, and he really didn't have a single stinkin' capitalist-running-dog bone in his whole body. But he loved his economics and he worked his butt off, and whatever you thought about how he looked or how he talked, you had to admit he knew his stuff. The kid was good, clearly headed for stardom.
"So I dumped him, naturally," she said. "Couldn't have that now, could we, being married to a star? Absolutely not. I think I dumped him, anyway; it's possible he may've dumped me. Probably depends on who's telling the story. But that was all after a while, not right off.
First he got a job teaching at UMass." and something studious and academic began stirring around again, deep down inside my fevered brain."
She held her hands aloft as though to indicate she was having a vision.
"I perceive that I am getting on in years. By this time I am almost twenty-four, ancient, and I suppose I am beginning at long last to grow up. As the hot-shot young professor's, ah, demure young wife, I was able to get free tuition. Then I was able to talk the proper authorities first into accepting the credits I'd sort of left behind at Wisconsin, and also some I'd sort of picked up while I wasn't doing much of anything else besides sleeping with Tommy in England, kind of studying at the University of London. After that, talking very fast, into letting me switch my major to psychology."
"Wow," Merrion said, "I'm impressed. They always made me give them money."
She smiled. "You probably weren't demure," she said. "I was, I was very demure. And academics're suckers for that. As a teacher's wife I was entitled to the undergrad free tuition anyway, and when they let me transfer credits like that, they were being maybe more than just a little bit crafty. They wanted Tommy to stay at UMass. Didn't want him flying off to some other place, better-known for its economics. So I'm sure it was at the back of their minds to use me to tie him down a little more securely, get his wife involved with a UMass. program of her own.
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