Manhattan Monologues (23 page)

"Vinnie, I don't want you to talk that way. Those things have nothing to do with you and me. Tell me that you believe that, Vinnie. Tell me, please."

She was a bit taken aback by his gravity, but she decided to take it as a compliment. "Of course, I was only joking."

She discovered that his stern morality was absolutely consistent. He had no use for ambiguities or double standards. When she told him of a Vassar classmate who, finding herself pregnant at the termination of a wholly clandestine love affair, had availed herself of an abortion, without telling her family, he was shocked. She should have had the child, he argued.

"But it would have been her social ruin," Vinnie protested. "She wanted to go on with her life as before. The way her lover was doing. Of course, no one would have much blamed him, even if it had become known."

"
I
would have blamed him. Just as much as I blame her. Even more, perhaps, because as a man he should have been stronger against temptation."

Vinnie decided that she might as well have this out with him, there and then. "You hold that a man should keep himself as pure as a woman?"

"Why should he have any lesser obligation?"

"And that he should be a virgin until he marries?"

"If he expects it of her, why not of himself?"

"But what about the old theory that he should have enough experience to initiate his bride in the rites of love?"

"Does it take so much experience? The birds and the bees don't seem to think so."

"They haven't been petrified by civilization. They haven't had to wear clothes."

"You think Adam and Eve had an easier time? Well, of course, he had no choice, for she was the only woman. I don't think that you'll find me lacking in that respect if you marry me.

"Heavens!" she gasped. "Is this a proposal?"

"It would be, if there were any chance of its being accepted."

"Too soon, too soon," she murmured, almost breathless at his precipitancy. When he wasn't too serious, he was almost too light. But there was no mistaking the yank at her heart. She had brought this man into her life, and she was going to have to cope with him. "I need more time, my friend. Only don't think I'm letting you off the hook. I shall remember that you have made a formal proposal."

"It's not binding, of course, until accepted. And it must be accepted within a reasonable time. How long shall we give it?"

"Say a year?"

But it took only six months. They were married immediately after his graduation from law school, and had the summer to themselves before he started to work at Dillard Kaye.

Vinnie came in time to reflect that too much good fortune may turn into a cloying feast. One of her Vassar classmates had married a handsome Jewish boy who had helped her to her feet after a bad tumble on a Central Park skating rink. Her family shared the routine social anti-Semitism of the New York society of that day, and his family was devoutly Orthodox. Spurned by all four parents, the young couple had eloped in a frenzy of romantic delight and were forgiven by both families on the birth of the first baby. Vinnie ruefully contrasted the excitement of their Romeo and Juliet story with the heavy blanket of congratulation that had almost stifled the pleasure of her engagement.

Had she immolated herself, an Iphigenia, on the altar of her father's ideals? In bringing him the son he craved, had she lost her own position in his life?

Yet her marriage proved to be just what she thought she wanted. Rod worked joyfully and serenely with her father and attained not only an early partnership in the firm but achieved the undisputed position of right hand to the man whom everyone referred to as the "chief." She and Rod, in town and in country, lived in close proximity to the Dillards; indeed, the two households made up what was distinctly the first family of Glenville. Two little girls, in perfect health, were born to Vinnie and Rod, the product of his regular and spirited, if always predictable love-making. And she had taken an active part in local charities and had become the admired chairman of the board of the Manhattan day school that her daughters attended.

But if she had achieved in life exactly what she intended, she had also the bitterness of recognizing the Greek origin of those bearing her gifts. As a heaven without end can become at first cloying and at last fraught with terror, she began to look about her with bewildered eyes. When her father and husband, after a hearty Sunday lunch, reverted to an animated discussion of their last corporate reorganization, she would sometimes wonder whether their Garden of Eden, which she had helped to plant and water, was really open to either Eves or snakes. And when Rod insisted that she was the radiant guide and influence of his life, she had the nasty suspicion that what he really meant was the stimulus he received from their weekly coitus. It may have been for him a kind of beneficial physical exercise.

There was plenty of antidote, it was true, to the paternal and spousal idealism in her mother's freely expressed cynicism, but she had always discounted this as the self-compensation of a sour old woman for her inability to express her love, or her lack of love, to her husband and family.

Where help came to her, if help it was, was from Harry Hammersly. Harry and Rod seemed to represent the attraction of opposites. Best friends in college and law school and now law partners, they always remained in constant touch with each other. Yet Harry, a merry bachelor, was as mocking and impudent and charming as his friend was sober, polite and at times a bit grim. And if he made fun of the world, he made particular fun of Rod. Rod, however, did not appear to mind it. Like a fool in a medieval court, Harry was licensed, at least in Rod's domain, to say what he liked.

Vinnie had originally supposed that she would disapprove of Harry. His impudence verged on heresy, and he laughed at too many sacred things. But his apparent assumption that her wit and wide views lifted her to his level of isolated liberty, making them lonely partners in a world of amiable philistines whom it was their duty to entertain, was flattering. And his well-made, soft, very white-skinned body, which she had once found faintly repellent, even effeminate, she was bothered to find increasingly intriguing to her. The sensuous way he twisted his torso, particularly after making an off-color joke, she reluctantly admitted, titillated her. And in his rare moments of repose, as when he was listening to her—and a very attentive listener he could be—his handsome Roman face waxed almost noble, though he soon enough shattered the impression with his high, almost screeching laugh, as though otherwise some deed of heroism might be horridly expected of him.

At length she began to suspect that there was something subtly undermining in the persistence of his jokes at her husband's expense. And that there might be something disturbing in her own acceptance of these.

One Sunday afternoon in Glenville, when the three of them were seated on the terrace by her father's tennis court after a game of singles between Rod and Harry, which Rod had finally won, the conversation fell on the trial of a famous gangster who was, surprisingly, being represented by a respectable law firm. Vinnie asked whether Dillard Kaye would have taken such a case, and Rod firmly denied it.

"But doesn't even the most hardened criminal deserve a good defense?" she asked.

"Certainly, and hardened criminals can be very picky in choosing counsel, particularly if they're rich. The problem, however, would not arise for us. No gangster would ever come knocking at
our
door. He'd know that his defense would be an absolutely honest one, with no dirty tricks. And that's the last thing they want."

"You imply that the firm representing this gangster is using dirty tricks?"

"If it deems them necessary, yes. We're not all perfect."

"Only Dillard Kaye?"

"Only Dillard Kaye." Rod smiled to make the boast a jest, but what he felt was clear enough.

"I wonder," Harry now observed, "if we would be quite so pure if we didn't have a plethora of less tainted fees. We can afford to dispense with dirty tricks. At least with the dirty tricks of the mob."

"You mean you have other kinds?" Vinnie demanded.

"Oh, we have our nuances and our innuendoes." But here he raised his voice to make another point and distract Rod from what threatened to be a hearty rebuttal. "So you see, my dear Vinnie, how Rod maneuvers to avoid the embarrassment of turning down a would-be client in trouble. He presents the unclean creature with an array of virtues like flashlights pointed at the hiding places of guilt!"

Seated beside Harry a week later at one of her father's Sunday lunches, she decided to get a few things straight. In the mock serious tone one adopts when one is really serious, she asked him, "You don't believe in anything, do you, Harry? I mean in God or ethical principles or anything like that?"

"Well, I'm a positivist, if that's what you mean. It all has to be proved to me. I believe in taste. Good taste and bad."

"You mean like in decorating?"

"If you like. That's one aspect of it. I think it's good taste not to rob or murder or covet your neighbor's wife." Here he rolled his eyes comically. "Though I might be forgiven the last."

She did not comment on this. "And you certainly don't find it good taste to laud the sanctity of Dillard Kaye."

"I don't find my partners apostles, as some do; no."

"You mean Rod."

"Well, he seems to find your father one."

"And you don't."

Harry laughed. "Oh, I admire him! He can thunder like Jehovah and grin like Satan. He's a primordial demiurge."

"I think Rod really worships him."

"Oh, Rod approaches him as the monkeys approach the rock python Kaa in
The Jungle Book.
But one day he'll come too close and get caught in those writhing coils."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You'll see, my dear. You'll see." And he ended the discussion by turning, with the roast, to his other neighbor.

Harry didn't work as many nights in the office as Rod did, claiming that if one arrived at eight in the morning and stayed until seven at night and didn't "shoot the breeze" with fellow workers and take a two-hour lunch, one could get one's work done. The result was that he was often free to take Vinnie to plays or concerts to which she had tickets but to which, at the last moment, her husband could not go. And sometimes he would take her afterward for a nightcap to his elegant little penthouse, with its sweeping view north of the great green oblong of Central Park.

Listening to him as he took apart the world of her Lares and Penates—indeed, pleasantly accustomed to it as she was growing—it somehow proved to her that all her repressed doubts and reservations had not been merely the idle fancies that flutter through any mind, but were substantial parts of herself, and sins as well, real sins. What made her almost welcome the recognition of sin was that it had a reality that her previous recognitions, or fancied recognitions, had lacked. She might be damned, but didn't one have to have been alive before one was damned? Wasn't it possibly worth it?

As her talks with Harry became more and more personal, he told her about the problems of his private life. He had, the year before, broken off a long affair with a woman because she wanted to marry him.

"But why didn't you marry her?" Vinnie had asked.

"Because I didn't love her."

"But, Harry, the time may have come when you ought to settle down. You're not twenty-one, my dear. Some men are not destined to fall head over heels in love. I don't think the greatest men are apt to feel passion in that way. Daddy, for example. He's never really loved my mother. But you want to have a family and children, don't you?"

"With the right woman, yes."

"And what sort of woman is that?"

"Well, say a woman like you."

She did not reply to this, and he didn't press the point. But they continued, on other occasions, to discuss sexual problems with what she liked to think was a clinical detachment, and in due course they came to an analysis of hers. Harry at last extracted from her the admission that she had never had sex with any man but Rod.

"I think it's a pity," he informed her, "for any woman to be so limited. I'm not saying anything about Rod's performance in bed, which I'm sure is very fine, but there are joys in variety and experimentation, and in an ideal society no one, man or woman, should be confined for life to a single mate. There should be ways of extending one's experience without incurring blame for broken vows. Indeed, that is why wife-swapping is a not uncommon suburban practice."

"Really? Do you think it ever happens in Glenville?"

"I know damn well it happens in Glenville."

"Rod would die at the very idea."

"I agree that he would. So it could never happen to him. Anyway, I have no wife to offer him in return."

"And just what the hell do you mean by
that?
"

"My dear Vinnie, you know very well what I mean by that."

Which, of course, she did. Which, of course, they had been leading each other on to. And indeed she did find feverishly rewarding the different ways of love-making to which her highly imaginative and widely experienced guide introduced her. In this new school she proved herself an eager and proficient student, and the guilt that now assailed her in every hour when she was not with Harry seemed only to add to the intensity of her pleasure. When she thought of the horror that some of her doings would arouse in Rod and in her father, when she heard ringing in her head their exclamations of "decadent" and "depraved," she thought, with an acceptance and resignation that brought some relief, that heaven and hell had to be different places and never the twain would meet.

Toward Harry she now felt a dependence that was more like the blind devotion of a dog than a love in any romantic sense of the word. She took him as a kind of new god who had raped her and become her master. She did not mind the suspicion, rapidly growing to a conviction, that she figured in his plans for ultimate promotion in the firm, though she did not exactly see how, and she also, but without resentment, made out that he must for years have been jealous of Rod's heroic reputation as a Galahad of noble life and sought in the debauching of his wife a revenge for his own moral inferiority.