A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  He is jealous. And the jealousy clutches him like a whirlpool in an already turbulent sea.

  I had always thought of men’s jealousy as something that had nothing to do with me. It is the man’s problem, arises spontaneously out of his own need rather than my actions. He needs it to stimulate or increase his sexual excitement, to remind him of family romances. But Sandro’s jealousy is not like that. It is a bleak despair. When the despair seizes him, I want to run away, fall into the first pair of arms I can find. The despair makes me pitiless, harsh. Perhaps I fear it will swallow me more quickly than any love.

  Sandro is to have Christmas with his family. I tell him I don’t mind. I am going to friends. The night before Christmas Eve we spend quietly at the loft together. I cook a salmon, chill champagne, put on a Brahms cello sonata. We exchange presents. Sandro gives me an elaborate Victorian necklace he shouldn’t have spent the money on. I give him a stack of architectural books with thick glossy pages. Since my last jaunt to Paul Smith’s in London, I have lost the taste for giving him clothes. We are peaceful and that night in bed, Sandro says to me, ‘I want to give you a child, Maria.’

  ‘I can think of other presents I want first,’ I laugh, but the laugh doesn’t come out quite right and I know he is hurt, has always in any case disliked my dutiful pill swallowing. But I find myself thinking that perhaps he is really asking me to stop wanting him, like his wife after the child.

  On New Year’s Eve we go out to a party together at a neighbouring loft. It is a grand place and there is a live band playing salsa and a great many of my friends. I dance with Sandro loving the grace of his body. I dance with others too. It must be just before midnight that I suddenly feel the mood come upon him, the eyes cutting into my back. The eyes make me angry, make me flaunt myself with greater extravagance. When the bandleader begins the count-down, I am standing between Grant and Sandro and at the midnight stroke, I turn to kiss Grant first. It is a friendly kiss, though perhaps in fondness it goes on fractionally too long. When I give my lips to Sandro, he hisses at me, ‘Whore. I’ve always known it.’

  I walk away, lose myself in the crowd, slip out the door. I am furious. I race home. I look at the sculpture Sandro has given me and I hate it. I want to take a hammer and smash its heaviness into fragments. I throw my coat over its stony eyes, kick my shoes one by one across the room and flop down into the sofa. It’s finished I tell myself.

  I hear Sandro’s key turning in the lock a moment later. He is in before I can block his passage. I put out my hand for the key. ‘You can give it back right now, Sandro,’ I say, my voice flat.

  He flings his arms around me, traps me in strength, kisses me, kisses. ‘Forgive me, forgive me, Maria. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t mean it. I don’t know why…’

  I gaze into his eyes, dark pools of suffering, and suddenly I have the sense that he really does think of me as a whore, has felt me to be a whore ever since I let him continue making love to me even though marriage was not on the horizon. That is the nub of it. In some tangled way, it is Sandro himself I have betrayed Sandro with and his idea of me in the process.

  ‘It’s no good Sandro. No good anymore,’ I say coldly.

  He begs me not to turn him away, holds me, speaks his need of me. I have stopped listening. I am only intent on leaving the circle of his arms. But he won’t let me go and the more I struggle, the stronger his grasp grows. I think I must taste fear for from somewhere inside myself, I find a voice, eerie, pitiless even to my own ears. ‘Not tonight, Sandro,’ it says implacably. ‘You go now. Or you bed down quietly on the couch.’

  His eyes have trouble focussing. When they do, he blinks at me as if I were an armed stranger who had just walked in and his grip loosens. I go slowly up to my bedroom and do not look back.

  In the morning, when I come downstairs, he is still sleeping, his face gentle in repose, like a child’s. My heart turns over. It is the end I know. It has to end. Yet I don’t know how to manage it, or perhaps I don’t quite want to. Then too, the second part of the campaign is due to begin and I feel responsible for it, committed, even if it is now mostly up to the group to run things. There is so much money at stake, so much good will, so many dreams. And the book is due to come out at the end of March. It is dedicated to Sandro.

  Over the next weeks, Sandro and I treat each other like convalescents, circle around each other carefully. When we make love, there is a sweetness to it and I think neither of us know whether this is an elegy or a rebirth. Then everything takes a dizzying turn for the worse. Perhaps it has to do with the stepped up pressure of the campaign and on top of it the frantic publicity around the appearance of my book. Suddenly I am a public person with a vengeance. My picture appears in People magazine. I am interviewed here, there and everywhere, treated like a celebrity. People listen to the ends of my sentences and take them seriously. I hate it, loath being in the limelight as much as I like putting others there. I want to run, be anywhere but New York. At home I am bad-tempered, querulous, exhausted.

  And, of course, Sandro and I are linked together in the public eye, photographed side by side at the site, pictured with the core group planting trees, interviewed about the possibility of further reclamation projects. Meanwhile the Agency is madly busy, deluged with phone calls, letters. Steve and Harold smile brightly at new clients, while I can barely curve my lips into a hello. In the midst of all this, Sandro is swept up by jealousy again, grim, bleak, so much suffering that I am paralysed by it. It is even visible in some of the photographs: he stands there, imprisoned in a posture which is half-way between fury and passion. One night he is impotent. I tell him it doesn’t matter, we’re tired, but he is so distressed that I try to take him in my mouth. He lashes out at me, slaps me, curses me with any number of expletives. I get up, dress quickly. ‘Where are you going?’ he asks, and I tell him that if he is going to treat me like a whore, I may as well behave like one. I am impervious to his pleading. I want to hurt him. I tell him he is a fool, a baby, who doesn’t know how to behave like a man, who doesn’t know the first thing about loving. I tell him he will never be an artist if he doesn’t know how to be a man. I don’t know quite what I tell him and then I race away.

  I spend the rest of the night in a hotel. But the next day, I am contrite. The fund-raising dinner is only weeks away and Sandro and I must act as a team. I put to one side my visions of changing the lock on my door, of chucking out his things. I ring him at the site and leave a message for him to call me back. Instead he turns up at the office at six. He is so pale, I am worried for him. ‘Don’t leave me Maria,’ he says. ‘I’m nothing without you. Nothing.’

  I am sitting behind my desk and he is in front of it, just as he was on the first occasion we met which now seems a lifetime ago. Sandro has changed. Something has gone out of him, a fire, a force. I smile though my face aches, apologize for things uttered in anger. ‘You are an architect, Sandro,’ I say, enunciating each word carefully. ‘A very good one. With a reputation to keep up. Don’t forget that. The next few weeks count.’

  At dinner he is so quiet, that I almost lose my courage. But finally I say it anyway, ‘Sandro, in the next few weeks, while our nerves are so close to the surface… I know you don’t want to go home. But I think, when I’m really feeling tired, I’ll go and stay at a friend’s. A woman friend. Clea, you remember her. The one who works for New York Magazine,’ I pull a name from a hat.

  ‘Not tonight, Maria. Please.’ He has that wretched look on his face and I nod.

  ‘Okay, but no…’

  He cuts me off. ‘I understand.’

  We end up on either side of the bed, like Tristan and Isolde, but the sword between us is invisible. Maybe it is because of that that I wake in the middle of the night to find myself in his embrace, his love-making so tender that I think I have dreamt the intervening months.

  But the following evening, the savage mood is upon him again. We are at an event at the architectural school and those grim black ey
es trace and judge my every movement. I feel like a caged animal and it helps not at all when I tell myself that Sandro too is in the cage. I have to run. I tell him I am going to Clea’s, but go in fact to The Gramercy Park Hotel for the night. Perhaps the place occurs to me from a previous escape. On the off chance, and because I feel wretched, I ring Grant at the office. He is still there, and he comes to dine with me at the hotel. It is such a pleasure to see the familiar irony of his face, to get away from the pressure of Sandro’s misery, that I am drunk on a single glass of wine.

  ‘Do you think I’m a whore?’ I find myself asking him.

  He looks at me shrewdly, ‘Love life getting out of hand, is it? The pitfalls of passion and all that?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Well, let me think,’ he laughs. ‘You don’t take money. You don’t even take husbands. So on serious reflection, I’d say no. Anyhow, I thought people these days just called it being a free woman.’

  ‘I don’t feel very free.’

  ‘The trouble with you is they all fall in love with you. You’re dangerous. You don’t think sex is just another name for rape. Or power. Now if you were American, you’d have us all up for harassment in the workplace. Retroactively, too,’ he winks at me. ‘Though I take it the man we’re worrying about is not your boss.’

  ‘Are you being done, Grant?’ I ask, suddenly concerned for him.

  ‘No. I’m clean as a policewoman’s whistle these days. Anyhow, I’m feeling too old. Except for you.’ he looks a question at me.

  I shake my head, smile. ‘I think I’m too tired, even for you.’

  ‘I’ll pay,’ he grins.

  ‘Ridiculous.’

  ‘You see. Not even a little bit of a whore. Just one damn fine seducer.’

  I’m surprised at the extent to which Grant’s words relieve me. They give me strength over the next weeks. I need it, for it is in the midst of them that the first letter arrives.

  It comes with the rest of the heaped post which my assistant hands to me in the morning and perhaps I should know from the odd look of inquiry she flashes at me that something is amiss. But I think nothing of it. There have been so many letters seeking advice since the book came out that Andrea sifts the ones she can deal with before passing the rest on to me. This letter is different. It doesn’t ask for advice. It leaps out at me with the force of a malediction. At first I think I am being confronted by the ravings of a madman. Then, I realise with a shudder that this letter, which bears the word ‘bitch’ with three deeply-etched exclamation marks as its only salutation, is from Sandro’s wife. I cannot tear my eyes from the outraged expletives, nor from the mixture of semi-literacy and pulp psychology. Amongst the curses, I am treated as a husband thief and family breaker. But it is not that which scares me,

  What scares me is what I learn through the tangled syntax. Sandro’s secrecy extends even further than I imagined. It is only by seeing the photographs of the two of us together that Louise Jimenez has deduced anything of our relationship. She has deduced it from the way he looks at me in the pictures, not from anything Sandro has told her.

  I have turned him into a marionette, she tells me; I pull the strings which have led him away from her. Not his work, his new life, as he has said. I have made him abandon his child. I, the rich bitch, who can never love him half as much as she does.

  What scares me even more is the letter’s reek of hatred mingled, as it is, with moments of prescience. I stare at the word ‘marionette’, so odd in its context, and wonder if it is true that I have turned Sandro into a puppet, robbed him of independent life. But what scares me most is the threat. Louise Jimenez says if it doesn’t stop she is going to expose us. She will go to the Padre, she will go to the papers, she will scream it from the top of the Empire State Building. I don’t know why this scares me, since everyone in my crowd is aware of my relationship with Sandro. But it scares me: there is a difference between awareness and scandal.

  I do not show the letter to Sandro straight away though I would like to. There are a few more hurdles to leap and I am a professional. But the fear makes me hard. I need to protect myself. I do not sleep with him. I plead tiredness, nerves, beauty rest, headaches. He takes it with a measure of stoicism. There are no scenes. Depression hovers within him, making him quiet.

  On May 4th, the evening of the fundraising gala, I dress with particular care. We are holding a banquet this time, with paid seats, half of the price of which will go to the Project. I am at the head table. I need to look my best. My frock is new, a simple black with straight classical lines leaving shoulders and neck exposed. Over it, I put a Japanese silk cloak, rich in colour. I try to smile naturally at myself in the mirror. I almost succeed. It will soon all be over, I tell myself, and then in a few week’s time Steve and I have agreed I can take a much needed break.

  I am on automatic pilot throughout that evening which glitters and buzzes but doesn’t quite reach the heights we’d aimed for. Perhaps we put our targets too high; perhaps Sandro’s speech didn’t quite have the ardent zeal of the year before. I don’t dare look at him, so I don’t know for certain. In any case, three-quarters of the way is almost there and it has to be counted a success, but all I can think of as the core group hugs each other goodbye is that last year Sandro and I began here and tonight I must tell him it is the end.

  ‘We have to talk, Sandro,’ I say, as soon as we are home.

  ‘Not tonight, Maria, please,’ he strokes my hair softly. ‘Let’s keep tonight as it is.’

  I avoid his eyes. I make some hot chocolate, put two mugs on the table and next to his the letter from his wife.

  ‘Read it,’ I say.

  He glances at the writing and his face twists. He gives me an imploring look.

  ‘Read it,’ I repeat. The weeks have made me cruel.

  He reads the letter quickly, crumpling pages up as he goes. I wait for him to say something and when he doesn’t, I murmur, ‘You’ve lied, Sandro. Lied to us both. One big lie. It’s over. All over.’

  He stares at me for a moment, his face expressionless. Then he slams his fist on the table. ‘You’re right. It’s over.’ He pushes his chair back with a screech and in a minute he is out of the door.

  I don’t get up. I sit there gazing at the closed door. Then I start to laugh or at least I think I’m laughing, but when I touch my face, it is wet with tears.

  The next day in the office there is a phonecall from a television news programme asking if Sandro and I can be interviewed at the site at four o’clock. I tell them Sandro should be available, but I can’t make it. They fume a little and I tell them perhaps Steve can stand in for me. Grumpily they settle for that and I ask Andrea to get a message to Sandro and to speak to Steve who agrees.

  On his return from the site Steve comes into my office and flops into the armchair.

  ‘What’s up? Chief Architect Jimenez never showed.’

  ‘Oh? Perhaps he’s had enough of cameras.’ I doodle on my notepad.

  ‘He never showed at the site or the office either. Carmen told me. She stood in for him.’ Steve is examining me, looking at my doodles. ‘Something happen between you two?’

  I shrug. ‘It’s over.’

  ‘Oh ya? Too bad.’

  He is waiting for me to tell him more and I don’t want to, but Steve has a way with waiting which makes some form of speech imperative so I blurt out, ‘He didn’t tell me he had a wife and he didn’t tell his wife he had me.’

  ‘Oh. Nothing serious then. Just a mere matter of eternal triangles.’ The joke falls flat when I don’t laugh. ‘Hey…’ he comes round to my side of the desk and puts his arm round me.

  ‘I’m okay. But his wife is threatening scandal. Cultural wars. East Harlem vs Rich Bitches.’

  Steve whistles. ‘You rich?’

  ‘Depends who’s doing the counting.’

  ‘Ya. Tell you what. Chuck and I’ll take you out over the next few days. Keep the awesome profile smiling.’

  �
�You’re on,’ I say and try the profile for him.

  At the door he turns back. ‘Timing isn’t great is it.’

  I’m not sure whether or not this is a reproach. ‘Hasn’t been great for months,’ I mutter.

  ‘Got ya.’ He gives me a commiserating smile.

  Three nights later I come back to the loft after dinner with Steve and Chuck, switch on the lights to see Sandro sitting in the blue sofa. He is surrounded by magazines. There is a glass of whiskey in his hand. The face he turns on me is slightly askew as if he hasn’t had time to shape it into an expression. The eyes are brooding.

  ‘Come to get your things?’ I ask as casually as I can.

  ‘It’s over,’ he says. His voice frightens me.

  ‘Yes,’ I murmur. ‘Want another goodbye drink?’

  ‘It’s over I said.’

  It is only then that I notice the two scratched cases standing near my study.

  ‘Let’s celebrate. Let’s go dancing to one of those places you like and have our picture taken. Let’s paint the town red, blue, green.’

  ‘Sandro…’

  He makes a grab at me.

  ‘You’ve been drinking.’

  ‘Just started. Gonna do lots more,’ he strokes my bottom lasciviously. I try to move away from him, but he propels me towards the door. ‘Got your jacket on already, so it’s nice n easy. And I like your pants, all snug. Anyone else been in them in my absence?’