by Mary Gordon
“Three months after that she'd married Jack; Jack and I were both working for Lindsay then. In the fall of 1967, Jack went across the country with the McCarthy campaign, and late the following January he told Sylvie he'd met someone else and was leaving. Sylvie tried to kill herself. She called me just in time. I went with her to Roosevelt Hospital in the ambulance and let her come back to my apartment. It was just after my first divorce.”
Ruth imagined that apartment, ugly in the willed, self-punishing style of the abodes of men who have left women. But, he told her, Sylvie brought it around wonderfully. She made him meet her at furniture stores, look carefully at swatches of fabric. She arranged for everything: the curtains, the deliveries. “But she didn't go too far,” he said. “She never made me feel she was taking over, she made me feel it was my place.”
“And were you lovers?”
“No. One night I suggested it, and she said, ‘That's not the kind of thing I want.’ I was actually a little relieved. She'd be quite something to take on: all that devotion. One of the reasons she was so devastated by Jack is that she'd given him everything, she'd had no reserve.
“She really fell apart,” said Phil, “and people were ridiculous about it. They thought she was exaggerating. You know, that was the time everyone was leaving everyone. But only Sylvie got suicidal. And then she made this terrible decision: to grow old. All our friends were wearing long skirts or tight jeans, and she began wearing tweeds and cashmeres, putting her hair in a chignon. She couldn't stay in New York, it was no place for her, nobody understanding her, and her always being afraid of running into Jack or the new woman. She's Belgian, but she didn't want to go back. So she decided on London.
“I remember the night she left. I took her to the airport. We were three hours early— you know how I am— so we had too many drinks, which she said she wanted; she wanted to sleep the flight through. But when she landed in Heathrow, she got the news: Bobby Kennedy had been shot. She got hysterical in the airport; when you meet her you'll see how extraordinary that must have been. It was as if someone had taken her marriage to Jack, which she'd decently buried, dug it up and hacked it to pieces publicly. She phoned me, really out of control. I told her to come right back and stay with me. But she said she wouldn't. I just wanted to hear a friendly voice,’ she said, ‘And now I must get started.’”
“And she did,” said Ruth, “she did get started.”
“In a way, yes, of course she did. She got a flat in Clapham and had a small piano moved in. Three days a week she took lessons— she'd never touched the instrument in her life before— with some terribly hard-up young student at the conservatory. Then he got married and went to Sweden, and she began taking lessons with Miss Taub.
“You'll meet Miss Taub, no doubt,” Phil said. “She must be seventy if she's a day. She and Sylvie became best friends almost immediately, and she took Sylvie into her circle, although Sylvie's the youngest of the group by twenty years. And she has this job, she runs some sort of institute for the blind. So she's become a kind of fixture on the South Bank, this beautiful, rather remote woman, taking old women and blind people to concerts. You'll see, we'll have at least one night with Miss Taub, and possibly a blind person. I never know what to do with those occasions.”
“Why?”
“Well, I always feel that my physical health and whatever youth I have is a kind of affront to them. Besides, I'm always afraid I'm going to step on the guide dog's tail and start him howling in the middle of something pianissimo.”
“Phil, guide dogs don't howl. They're used to people stepping on their tails.”
“It would be just my luck to get one that's hypersensitive.”
They drove out of the impressive part of London; just into Clapham it was easy to imagine people living ordinary lives, taking their shoes to the shoemaker's, getting quick meals from Indian takeouts, going to movies because they were too tired to read. Ruth wondered what Sylvie had looked like when Phil had first known her. She remembered the first thing Phil had told her about Sylvie, something her ex-husband had said, that she had always wanted to be an old woman, and she'd turned herself into one so she could have the life she wanted. Ruth had been puzzled by Phil's tone in telling her: he'd sounded angry. She had assumed that he was angry for the whole estate of men: in refusing to fight against aging, in embracing it prematurely, Sylvie was taking herself out of the game. “I won't play,” she'd said, and left the other players feeling foolish. Yet Phil considered her one of his dearest friends.
“You know,” he said as they approached her street, “you can ask Sylvie anything about me.”
Ruth didn't say what she was thinking, that the problem was that she knew too much about Phil already, that the only real information she wanted was impossible to get: she didn't want more history, she wanted guarantees. “You will be happy now,” she wanted someone to say, “I promise.” Perhaps that was what she'd wanted from Sylvie, but her first glance as Sylvie opened the door told her she wouldn't get it. Sylvie had taken pains to show that her allegiance was with a past which was more real, more vivid to her, than the thin present in which she felt herself required now to live.
Her flat was based on the idea of home of single women who had come to London from the Continent after the war. Modestly, wisely, they had bought the first luxuries available in the early fifties; as if they didn't want to seem too brash they concentrated on light browns and cream colors. Accents of gold might show themselves from time to time— some braid on a throw pillow, a detail of a tapestried chair. Pale green lamps threw their genteel and muted lights on objects neutral as shells. Only occasionally a porcelain box, a cigarette case, a small dish for nuts or candy would cry out that it was un-English and suggest some difficult, exciting European life that had been left for good.
At first Ruth thought that Sylvie had chosen her clothing along the same lines, and as a kind of camouflage to beauty. But then she looked more closely and saw that those careful clothes— the dun-colored blouse, the olive green loose skirt, the beige shoes with a thin chain on the instep— represented Sylvie's real understanding of the nature of her beauty. Ruth wondered if, like a tall woman who wears high heels, Sylvie underscored her unfashionableness to turn it into an asset. She was, after all, nearly fifty, and by choosing to dress older than she was, there was no need for her to acknowledge that she was no longer young. Ruth felt arriviste in her red flowered skirt, blue shirt, jade beads, an outfit she'd been pleased with in the hotel mirror.
Sylvie offered them drinks and brought out little plates of sandwiches. She disappeared again and again into the kitchen, bringing out dishes of odd, Germanic foods: pickled or salted, all desirable because they looked distinctly unnutritious. She seated herself across from Ruth, her spine an inch or two away from the chair back, and said, “Now you must tell me all about your children.” But Ruth grew tongue-tied; her children seemed out of place in the flat. You wouldn't like them, Ruth thought, catching Sylvie's bright and overeager eye. You'd think them spoiled and greedy and uneducated.
“It's so hard to describe one's children,” she said, defeatedly. “One never knows if one's being at all realistic.”
“Anything you said about them would sound like bragging,” Phil said. “Only it would be the truth.”
“How enchanting,” Sylvie said. “Phil's a born father, Ruth, don't you think?”
“None of the potential mothers seemed to think so,” Phil said. “I was game.”
The personal tone seemed almost obscene to Ruth among the artifacts of Sylvie's flat; she blushed for Phil's misjudgment. But Sylvie went on to talk about the other wives, the other women, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The conversation led naturally to people they had known, and Ruth could see Sylvie straining not to talk about old times, times Ruth had not been a part of, but her efforts to update their talk made Ruth feel childish, as if the grown-ups had kindly taken the time to ask her how she liked her school. She'd been through this be
fore, meeting Phil's friends, but it was different with Sylvie. The smooth surface of Sylvie's life, her presentation of herself, left no foothold for Ruth. She jumped up eagerly when Phil said they must leave for dinner; then she felt her action made her appear greedy, and she told Phil to sit down again, they needn't rush. But Sylvie arose then, slowly, as if she were walking out of the ocean, and said, “No, let's go now. It's horrible to be late, don't you think so, Ruth?”
“No, Ruth is unable to be on time,” said Phil. “If she happens to be early, she'll do something— wallpaper the bathroom or begin to learn to play the flute— anything to avoid the terrible fate of being on time.”
“How extraordinary, Phil, and you so anxious always about lateness,” Sylvie said. “This must be love at last.”
They walked into the street wrapped in a garment of bonhomie that Phil, Ruth saw, believed was genuine and beautiful and that to her was a hair shirt.
Phil had been right; Sylvie had made arrangements for them first to have dinner, then to go to the Schubert lieder in the Purcell room with Miss Taub. One of the people from the Institute for the Unsighted had been asked but, Sylvie explained, at the last moment she had got the flu.
“Ah, here's Miss Taub,” said Sylvie when they approached the restaurant. “She makes rather a fetish of being early, but through the years I've managed to indulge her when I can. Tonight she's had to wait.”
Miss Taub kissed Phil and gave her hand to Ruth. It was appropriate, of course; she'd known Phil, and it was her first meeting with Ruth. Of course, it was appropriate, but it was one more brushstroke, Ruth felt, in the group portrait: the two older women, eminently civilized, being courted safely, tenderly by Phil, and Ruth apart, spread out and representing Nature. Sylvie floundered visibly in trying to keep the conversation nonexclusionary, entertaining, smooth. Then, all at once, she gave Ruth a look of pure unhappiness. “See, I am drowning,” the look said, “and it is your fault.” At once Ruth saw that she had been impossible. The pain in Sylvie's eyes was genuine. Its disproportion drew out the maternal side of Ruth: she would not let this woman, who had so clearly suffered, suffer more. She sat up straight, then leaned her elbows on the table. She talked about her children and asked Miss Taub's advice about their music lessons. Phil turned on Ruth his look of bliss. She knew that they had triumphed, but the triumph had been brought about by Sylvie, who had let herself appear, to this unpleasant stranger, intimately weak.
“Bonne chance” Miss Taub said, as they put her in a taxi. “I know we will meet again.”
And Ruth hung on her lover's arm, because the words seemed like a blessing and a talisman, and in her gratitude for them she felt suddenly weak as if she could, without Phil's arm, fall down or faint.
Sylvie had invited them to lunch Saturday at her flat, but she phoned in the morning to ask if she could take them, instead, to a restaurant near her office. The institute librarian, she explained, was sick, and many of the members could use the library only on Saturdays. She could leave one of the members in charge while they lunched, but they could not be leisurely, she said, not half so leisurely as they'd have liked.
Phil had a meeting in the morning; he told Ruth that he would meet her at the institute at one o'clock. But when Ruth arrived, Sylvie told her Phil had telephoned; the meeting would be indefinitely long, and they would have to lunch without him.
Ruth looked around her in a kind of panic. The blind people walked around the room, so even-paced and so sagacious she could have gone down on her knees. And Sylvie walked slowly, certainly, among them, touching some of them on the shoulder, saying their names, as a queen might walk among her castle staff. She introduced Ruth to the man who would sit at the desk while they lunched.
“How lucky you are to have our Sylvie to lunch,” he said, his smile courtly beneath his merely damaged gaze.
“Yes, I'm only sorry my friend is tied up and can't join us,” Ruth said, then felt she'd been tactless. “I mean, it's terrible that on a day like this he has to work.”
“Your friend?” laughed Sylvie. “Your fiance, you mean. They will be married, Ted, within two weeks.”
“Taking your honeymoon before,” he said, but he could not sound worldly. Ruth smiled, then realized he couldn't see her, so she laughed too loudly. Some people sitting at the tables looked toward her with the self-righteous stares of interrupted readers. That the stares were sightless was irrelevant, the censure was the same, and Ruth apologized to Sylvie and to the man Ted, whom she had wanted to praise by her laughter.
“Not at all,” he said. “There's nothing worse than a library prig.”
“Take your time,” he said to Sylvie, who said she would. But when she got outside, she said to Ruth, “Ted's such a dear, and wonderfully intelligent, but if a crowd should gather at the desk, he simply couldn't cope.”
As they walked, Ruth wondered if Sylvie suspected, as she did, that Phil had invented his overlong meeting so that the two women could be alone. For herself, she felt he had erred badly; the small ease she had gained with Sylvie at dinner days before had vanished. She felt, as they walked, that she followed in Sylvie's majestic wake, an undistinguished tug behind a schooner.
After they had ordered, Sylvie asked her about her work, apologizing for her ignorance in science. Then, without transition she said, “Have you ever met my husband, Jack MacGregor? Phil still sees him, I believe.”
“Yes, but he lives in California, and I haven't met him yet.”
Ruth was shocked by Sylvie's question and embarrassed to hear her call Jack “my husband.” They had been divorced seventeen years; Jack had teenage children by the woman he'd left her for.
“We never write, it's such a shame. We've quite lost touch. I'm utterly dependent upon Phil for news of him. Strange, isn't it? You'd think that one would keep in touch with someone so important in one's past. It's lucky I have Phil, or Jack could die without my knowing.”
Sylvie patted the corners of her mouth with her stiff napkin, then folded her hands as if to say, “What is it exactly that you want to know?” Ruth tried to read the beautiful, pale face, but it was blank and formal. A poker face, Ruth thought, and then realized at once how it was between them. She sat across from Sylvie like an inexperienced player before a seasoned gambler. Sylvie had, Ruth saw now, the professional's immaculate composure. The formality of every gesture was a weapon and a code. Concealment was the metier, the game untitled and the stakes unnamed. The purpose of the game itself became known only gradually. It was to get the green player to reveal her hand. Then the professional, seemingly prepared to throw down everything, would discard, in fact, only selected single cards— the obvious, the garish pictures— which could distract the green player from the game's real feat: everything valued or thought important had been kept back.
Ruth felt herself dig in, take root, grow obdurately stable. She asked Sylvie about Belgium, her childhood, her emigration to America. It seemed to Ruth that Sylvie quite purposefully drained all these topics of interest in order to return the conversation to its natural center: Phil. But Ruth knew that she could resist, for lunch was not meant to go on too long. They were both grateful to leave each other. When they parted, they did not kiss.
Ruth watched Sylvie walk down the street, unhurried and assured.
And yet her back was angry, and she thrust her neck a shade uncomfortably forward as she walked. Phil well might say that she was happy, but watching her progress, Ruth saw the effort and the cost. She understood that Sylvie's life had been finished when Jack left her; she walked now as one dead. A blow that others might recover from, she never would; the damage that was temporary for some had been for Sylvie quite final. And the recovery of others, somehow, made it worse. It put everyone into a falsifying light, for if Sylvie's response was just, then others were deficient; if they were sane and sensible, then her life was a waste.
She walked around the squares of Bloomsbury feeling for no reason that she must kill time. The chestnuts held their flowers
jealously, like precious candelabras that had been in the family for years. Some roses were beginning, others would be over in a day. The image of Phil's body kept floating before her eyes, and then parts of his body only: the torso, the back, the legs. She began running to the hotel, terrified that when she got there the room would be empty. It was not. She found Phil on the bed, reading a six-week-old copy of the New Statesman; others were spread out on the floor around the bed. He was touched and gladdened by her eagerness, though she suspected he mistook its causes and believed Sylvie had eased her mind about his past.
They would spend their last evening with Sylvie. Phil apologized when he told Ruth, but it seemed to be the only night Sylvie was free, and they had a piece of luck: they could get tickets for Antony and Cleopatra.“Fine,” Ruth said. “Really, that's wonderful.” She was thinking that she wanted to be home with her children. Their presence was a forced balance to her always. If they were here, she thought, the figure of Sylvie might not have loomed so menacingly, so symbolically; with the children along, she felt she might have been less cruel.
“I've always liked the character of Enobarbus,” Phil said, after the play as they drank gin on Sylvie's settee. “I'd like to have seen him played by Ray Bolger.”
They made up their ideal cast of Antony and Cleopatra, and the time went pleasingly and fast. But Ruth could sense behind it all, like a perfume at once menacing and seductive, Sylvie's dread that they would leave. She kept thinking up little strategems so they would linger: she wrote down things she'd love for them to send her from New York; she asked questions about the children to which she already knew the answers. She kept offering them different foods, and when they refused, running into the kitchen to see what else she had to offer. But in the air there began to arise another scent: the thin, high one that was merely Phil's anxiety about packing, about missing planes. Both women knew that was the scent that must be followed, and they rose at once.