Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (20 page)

“About time, wouldn’t you say?” Which was dumb, it had been excellent weather all along. It was the kind of thing everyone always said, that was all, like telling someone to have a good day. Carl was home almost on the heels of her own arrival, looking grim: he was greatly disturbed about the death of a thirty-nine-year-old patient who threw an embolism. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Short of raising her from the dead, I can’t think of a thing,” he said, unaccustomedly curt with her.

“I meant make you a drink, perhaps?”

“Chris, I can make my own drink.” The fact was that a predinner drink was not his usual style, but he did splash some bourbon into a glass and then tossed it off straight.

“Are you all right, Carl?”

“What else can I be? These things happen, there was nothing I could do to foresee it. It’s shit, but there you are, it comes with the territory. You just feel like a fucking jerk when you see someone seemingly in perfect health go down like that, you wonder what you’re in business for.”

He went through the swinging doors, was back almost immediately. “I didn’t mean to be cross with you,” he said.

“It’s okay, I can imagine how you must feel. Read the paper, take a nap, dinner won’t be ready for another hour. I love you, dear.”

I couldn’t be a doctor, she thought, looking out the kitchen window. I couldn’t go through that kind of thing. He would pull himself together at the dinner table, though, for the sake of the rest of them. He was a very nice man, a good man. She didn’t want to hurt him, and she wouldn’t. There were things he would never know about her, she would see to that, and what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you.

There were penalties to pay when you gave yourself up to duplicity, unexpected forfeitures, like hidden expenses in an investment: you hadn’t counted on them, really, you dimly sensed that there might be some additional costs, though too titillated by the wonderful thing you had bought on a shoestring to think deeply on supplementary amercements. You had your treasure and the joy in it, so you waived fugitive doubts, relaxed and enjoyed it and told yourself you would deal with the devil when he decided to show up for further and final payment.

But you couldn’t wholly put the old Adversary out of your mind, and besides he was clever, wily, exacting recompense even before it was due, relying on conscience to do some of his dirty work for him. He gave you the golden rose (take it, it’s yours, kiddo) and then laughed up his sleeve when you pricked yourself on the thorns that lay so innocently concealed. But you didn’t give back the rose, you might bleed a little, but you held on to it, gloating. Mine, mine …

Or so you would imagine, thought Christine, trying to sell herself a bill of goods on the guilt and worry she should be feeling. She didn’t believe for a minute that an extramarital affair meant you were of low moral fiber: that was cant. Monogamy happened to be the law of the land and a fairly reasonable way of safeguarding the institution of marriage. Even if it was asking a hell of a lot. She didn’t raise her eyebrows about it, but when it came down to brass tacks if you had an itch you scratched it and, all things considered, copulation with an outside party wasn’t the whole point anyway. In fact was not really — because you were dealing with human vulnerabilities — the point at all, but was more or less beside it.

It was
awful
, for example, that she gave scarcely a thought to the man she was blithely betraying, i.e. Carl, who hadn’t a notion in the world that another man was in the picture — in fact, was in the forefront of the picture. She used to wonder if Carl, who must run into lovely and desirable women patients, strayed occasionally: she had heard a few bitter truths from the mouths of other doctors’ wives. It had always seemed unlikely, since his habits were so regular and ordered, home for dinner when he should be, draped about the house on weekends. Possibly on some trip to another city, a Medical Congress — perhaps then he met some female on the loose, who knew? It had never troubled her. She had to confess to herself that it was of no large import. Was that indifference, lovelessness on her part?

No, it was not, she decided quickly. Her husband was part of her, part of the progress of her life, a good man if not an imaginative one, a little bit like a father, though he was only two years older, but he was steady and down to earth and somehow like a person of another generation: he even used some of the stock phrases her own father did.

If there was a faint, fugitive reservation, it was about the kids. No way in the world they could ever unearth this new facet of her life and yet — well, she was weirdly shy about Bruce and Nancy’s regarding her as other than a parent. There must be something Victorian about her, but it made her squirm to think of their sensing in her a questing sexuality, that Mother had a lover, which meant stolen moments, a dark and dirty wallowing and then coming home to them brazening it out, the Mother-whore. That was the way they would view it!

And it wasn’t like that at all. If it were, it would be far less disloyal to Carl.

But it wasn’t like that.

In fact it was a gorgeous gift, a rebirth, a lustrous wonder, the knowledge of it bursting into her consciousness when morning came and sending her off to sleep at night with a thankful smile. In fact it was something to guard and cherish and protect, like some exquisite, orchidaceous bloom coarse hands could soil and sully, needing painstaking care and love. In fact Jack was not her lover, but her love, his apartment not a way station but a place she felt was home.

Even the mechanics of the situation dismayed her not at all, the careful arrangements, the delicate maneuverings, the dual roles she assumed seemed not so much double-dealing as a necessary evil she cheerfully took on. It was her tribute to Jack, a way to show her wholehearted devotion. She wasn’t only cosseting him, he must be made to see, she was cosseting herself, which anyway was the plain and honest truth, and in a way a terrible truth. If there were to be a phone call, some unfamiliar voice saying there had been a bad accident, she must be brave, it would be Jack who instantly sprang into her mind: Jack had been killed in an accident, Jack was dead. He was dead, she would never see him again, never have his arms around her, never stroll the Manhattan streets with him, never …

This ultimate disloyalty, this calm betrayal of everything she had previously held dear, was so shattering that it made her tremble. At the same time there was a kind of piercing exultation: if there were penalties for this wondrous enchantment she would gladly pay them.

Their hours together were quietly domestic: she often thought of Clover Martinson, with her consort, maybe you could call it, her Anton Ehrenberg. Not living together either, but very much like a husband and a wife, certainly not like a bitch in heat with a sniffing hound circling: you could tell, talking to Clover, that it was quite different, an “arrangement,” a loving and comfortable one. There were so many ways to live, weren’t there, and now she herself was part of a new experience: God, she was happy, she could taste it, she was flooded with it, it ran through her veins, colored her speech and her laugh, glistened in her eyes, moistened her mouth.

“Gee, you look great,” one of her friends said at lunch on a group day together. “Are you having facials or something?”

“Good heavens, you know how I hate beauty salons. Of course not. Why do you ask, was my skin showing signs of wear or something?”

“Silly. Nothing wrong with your skin at any time. No, it’s not that. Just something or other, I can’t pin it down.”

“It’s the summer, I’m a summer gal.”

“Me, fall’s my time. The air like wine, things starting up again after the summer doldrums.”

“What do you mean, summer doldrums? I adore summer, how can anyone
not
?”

“New York summers? They’re the pits.”

“Not to me.”

“Well, damn you, it’s a little sickening the way you look so feisty and all. What’s your secret, huh?”

“Nothing, I just feel good.”

“How do you manage that?”

“Clean living and plenty of exercise, Meryl.”

“I live clean but there’s little to show for it. I’m beginning to hang back from the mirror in the mornings, naked fear. Or worse than that, afraid to go to sleep at night, not knowing what I’ll find on arising. Oh, goodie, a brand new wrinkle.”

“Listen to her, a face like a baby’s bottom.”

“You must be nearsighted, kiddo.”

“Nope. Twenty-twenty, that’s me.”

“Gee, I used to be so vain about my chest and shoulders,” Ruth said tragically. “But now — ”

“Your
chest
?”

“I don’t mean my boobs, darling. No complaints about them yet, but lately I see fine lines running down from my clavicles. I suppose I should train myself to sleep on my back. I find them very disturbing. Portents of the increasing years. I feel like screaming, I don’t want to get old. Goddamn it, why do you have to get old?”

“Old is sixty. Seventy.”

“Old is when men don’t look at you anymore.”

“Old is when you don’t look at them anymore.”

“This is a horrible conversation. For God’s sake, we’re in the prime of life, what do you
want
?”

“Remember that picture,
All About Eve?
When Bette Davis hits forty, and she says to someone, with that wild look of hers, those hyperthyroid eyes bulging, ‘I’m forty! 4-0!’ Well, friends, so are we. Does it hurt all that much?”

“I’m not forty yet,” Clover said mildly.

“Screw you.”

“
And
the prime of life is for men. What isn’t for men? They have the world by the tail, screw them. Look at Cary Grant, he’s older than God and he could have any nymphet he had a mind to reach for.”

“Yes, damn it, it’s true, and true and true. A man can be any old age, four double chins and a revolting paunch. Even when they can’t get it up anymore, they can still call the shots.”

“Comes the revolution — ”

“Dummy. Nothing will ever change it.”

“God, I love Bette Davis.”

“I wish I knew her, I’d hug her to death.”

“You, Christine. You used to do that imitation of her in
The Moon and Sixpence
.”

“No no.
Of Human Bondage
. Yes, sure, I used to do that one a lot. ‘And every time you kissed me, I wiped my mouth … wiped my mouth … you’re a cripple, a cripple …’”

She laughed. “I don’t think I’d do it for Rodney, he’d probably carp at my Cockney.”

“Oh, it’s great, it’s great.”

“Do Ann Landers.”

“You want us thrown out of this restaurant?”

“What were we talking about before? Oh yes, male superiority.”

There was a chorus of protests. “Well,” Helene said, grinning, “anyway, about male supremacy, that’s what I meant to say.” She leaned forward. “You know, you do look sort of Renoir-ripe,” she told Christine. “As if you just came out of a scented bath. You’re not pregnant, are you?”

“Dear God in heaven,” Christine cried. “What a hideous thought! Why are you all picking on me?”

“
I’m
not picking, I’m annoyed,” Ruth said. “But then you always were queen of us all.”

“I beg your
pardon
?”

“It’s true. You don’t have a bad angle. And your daughter’s the same, they’ll fall like flies for Nancy. I used to think your legs were too skinny, that the calves could be rounder. I was wrong.”

“Tell me more,” Christine said, dimpling.

“Uh uh. Fuck off, you don’t need any admiration societies, you must know you’ve got it, so I’ve said enough.” She smiled. “If I didn’t love you I’d hate you. Me with my crow’s feet.”

“Look, let’s not be idiotic, I just feel great, that’s all. You feel good, you look good. Like Clover with her James-Lang theory.”

“Why
do
you feel so good, then? Is Carl going to win the Nobel Prize for medicine?”

“Not that I know of, and I fear not that he knows of either.” She hesitated, toying with her cigarette lighter. “It isn’t anything like that. It isn’t-”

They were waiting. She saw their faces looking at her. They were all looking at her and waiting for what she had to say. Ruth, and Helene, Meryl and Clover. Bright, expectant faces, the faces of her friends, curious, half smiling. She felt reckless. She wanted to say, “Why do I feel so good? It’s very simple — you see, I’m in love. I’m very much in love.”

It was an almost uncontrollable compulsion. Like when you’re sitting in the balcony of some theater, with a bag of peanuts in your hand, and you think what if I dropped one of these peanuts down, it would land on someone’s head — what if I did it? And you want, like anything, to do just that, so much so that you get scared and frightened that some devil in you will take over and your hand will reach in the bag and throw the peanut.

You see, ladies, I’m in love
.

You didn’t drop the peanut and you didn’t say what you wanted to say, that you were on cloud nine because you had fallen in love and everything had changed and you would almost kill to keep what you had.

She laughed and reached for a cigarette. “Sue me,” she said. “I feel good, period. I feel great and don’t ask me why. I just plain feel the best I ever have.”

They looked disappointed. Inquisitive too. It was accepted, however. How would they ever guess the truth? She had always been Caesar’s wife, and she had no reason to suppose that the others weren’t the same. They talked about men a lot, but if any of them had her own secret it was well concealed. They had certainly never discussed the marriage bed (my husband does it this way, how does yours?): they were not women who operated that way in their friendship. The compulsion to spill her guts was gone, she was relieved that discretion had come to the fore. What she wanted, she knew, was to shout it out to the world at large, her immense happiness, her stupendous well-being. It was, after all, only natural.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said after lunch, when Ruth, as they all drifted out to the street afterwards asked if she couldn’t go for a walk somewhere. “Maybe even dinner, Chris? We could call home, I thought we might go down to the Village or something, browse around and then hack it back to Marchi’s, make it a whole day.”

“It’s just that I promised to take a run over to Rodney’s,” she apologized. “He’s having a few people in, I said I’d be there to help a bit.”

“He’s still intruding on your time?”

“Not really, he’s doing very well on his own, I don’t see him all that much nowadays. I did promise to be there today, though.”

“Oh, hell. Anyway he lives uptown, let’s amble on up together.”

“I thought I’d go to Bloomies and pick up a few goodies for him. Some paté, a jar of those oversized olives.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“It wouldn’t be much fun. Ruth, I’ll just pop in there only for a minute and then cab up to Rodney’s.”

“Well, okay. Listen, maybe we can go someplace next week? There’s a dandy new exhibit at the Wildenstein. I understand some magnificent Seurats. Okay?”

“Absolutely. I’ll call you.”

“Fine. Well, dear, keep the kindergarten in good order, don’t let them fingerpaint themselves to death. Yes, I know, his mother’s a good friend of yours, greater love hath no man. Well, then, I’ll hie myself over to Madison, for endives, I’m fresh out. Have fun.”

“You too.”

She watched Ruth walk off, in her designer dress, all crisp, clean lines, and the Mark Cross handbag clasped in Ruth’s summer-tanned hands. Friends. Friends had dwindled in importance, you lied to them easily and expertly, the way you lied about everything these days, it didn’t even prick your conscience. All you wanted was to get off the hook as gracefully as possible, with a cordial smile.

She turned the corner and walked over to Park, waited for the light to change and then, crossing, walked the block farther down to Lex, staying with it until Jack’s street, where she continued on down to Third. Now she quickened her steps. She had said it would be — oh, say, around three-fifteen or so when she would be there, told him for God’s sake nothing to eat or drink, she would have had her fill of both. She had meant, let’s go to bed, and he had known that: his eyes had acknowledged it, and the coverlet would be pulled down and he would be waiting for her, would greet her at the door, impatient and loverlike. She ran up the stone steps, going home, going to where she belonged, and pressed the buzzer.