Memories of a Marriage (17 page)

Why then have I allowed myself to think that Thomas had “climbed,” with all the denigrating implications of that expression? Where were my egalitarian, left-of-center ACLU biases and pretensions? The finger pointed at the unreconstructed snob inside me, who could not take his eyes off a damning piece of evidence: barely hatched, the self-made man had had the temerity to marry a highborn heiress. These sour thoughts took me back to the afternoon when Lucy first brought him to my apartment and my amusement at her having a beau who was of all things a townie! And, as I pondered
my offhand response, I had to conclude that my choice of the odious verb had been spot on: of course, Thomas had climbed, and Lucy wasn’t wrong to rail that he had wanted to arrive and had used her as a stepladder. He had taken advantage of her social position and her modest fortune, which at the time must have seemed to him pretty grand. But how could it have been otherwise if they were to marry, or even—inconceivable at the time—simply live together in sin? Could he have avoided meeting her family and friends? Would she have liked to spend her and Thomas’s summer vacations and Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other holidays with Mrs. and Mrs. Snow Sr. in their aluminum-shingle colonial somewhere on the wrong side of the tracks in Newport, in preference to the manse she had inherited in Little Compton or the De Bourgh family seat in Bristol? Would she have wanted to live within his means during the period of however many years when he was still a student or when his salary was a pittance? That would have meant residing in Waltham or Somerville rather than on Beacon Street while he was still at the business school and later when she was continuing with her treatment and he had the business-school research and teaching assignment, and in Brooklyn or in the wilds of the West Side, or, horror of horrors, Hoboken, once they had moved to New York. Would that have suited her? If my memory of my first visit to them on Park Avenue was correct, the answer was no. She would have had to do without nannies, full-time cleaning ladies, and housekeepers; one cannot imagine how she would have coped with Jamie. The other side of the coin is that if she had been a long-term investor
or even a gambler with steady nerves, if she had been careful to hang on to Thomas instead of goading him into a divorce by a stunt that was truly beyond the pale, in material terms she would have done quite well. He would have most likely stuck with her, and she would have inevitably had her turn at the racetrack betting window, collecting the rich payout. She would have ended up “using” Thomas, his position and his money. Could a couple stay together if one partner begrudged the other what had been given or received unequally? I didn’t think so, and if I was right, the real question might be whether, in a couple that wasn’t in approximate equilibrium, “climbing” had been the purpose of the partner who was poorer or socially inferior at the outset. It was a bet I couldn’t win or lose, but I would have wagered any amount that Thomas had married Lucy because he had fallen for her and hadn’t wanted to lose her, which he feared he would if he didn’t take the plunge. That is not to deny, however, that tucked inside him was a strong instinct for self-preservation, that he would not have risked marrying a woman with her lifestyle, to use an odious expression that was not yet in use at the time, her assumptions about what life owed her, and her psychological fragility, if she had not had enough money. And because Thomas wasn’t quite the straight arrow he sometimes seemed, who could say whether Lucy’s lifestyle and fragility had not been the catnip he couldn’t resist, a fragrance as powerful as the sex?

Having reread my words, I had to laugh at the notion of catnip. If the sweet smell of Lucy’s money and Social Register connections had determined Thomas, or had given him an
ever so slight push over the line, he’d been a fool. Certainly, Lucy’s money had made life in Boston and in New York much more comfortable in the early years. Certainly, he had been able to savor guiltily and mostly in secret the sweetness of the De Bourghs’ historical importance and social position, condiments that had also heightened the pleasure of screwing Miss Lucy. But the leg up she had given him, the footstool she’d been? Pure bunk! In its place I saw the contempt in which she’d held him, and how it and the discord between her and Thomas had sapped his energy and, had he been less resilient, would not have failed to clip his wings. There was no getting around it. It wasn’t just Lucy: they had both made a hash of it.

Inexorably, I was led back to Alex’s diagnosis, that the marriage had been doomed because, when you came right down to it, Lucy didn’t like Thomas. Alex was probably right. If she had liked him, she would have been more generous, and Hubert would not have been allowed to come back into her life. But why hadn’t she liked him? He was good-looking, pleasant, and manifestly destined to succeed. She had picked him. Where had she gone wrong?

In the morning, I set out for Zabar’s with the intention of stocking up on smoked fish I would take with me to Sharon the next day, when I moved there for the summer. On Broadway, when I was no more than a hundred yards away from the store, a young woman a few steps ahead of me, talking with great animation into her cell phone, veered toward
the curb in order to claim the cab that was discharging a passenger. Unaware, perhaps because my eyes were fixed on her huge head of curly red hair, of the small suitcase she was pulling behind her, I kept walking without changing direction myself until I tripped on something that turned out to be the leash attached to the suitcase. My hands had been clasped behind my back—a habit that is half affectation and half an attempt to alleviate the permanent pain in my lower back. I did not bring them forward fast enough to cushion the fall, and I heard an impressive thud when my forehead hit the sidewalk. The young woman said, Gee, I’m sorry, and got into the cab. Two or three people stopped to observe me. Anxious not to require their assistance or sympathy, I got up smartly, dusted off my trousers and canvas-duck jacket, and was ready to continue to Zabar’s, when one of the bystanders raised her hand and told me I had better do something about the bleeding. I touched my forehead and brought back fingers covered with blood. Next I looked at myself in a store window and saw that the bigger source of the bleeding was a gash in my right eyebrow. There was also a less-alarming abrasion directly above it.

Sewing up my cuts at the St. Luke’s—Roosevelt Hospital emergency room, just beyond Lincoln Center, took less time than I had feared, and I was relieved to learn that the doctor in Sharon would be able to remove the stitches. No change in my schedule was required. I had a sandwich and a big latte at Le Pain Quotidien on West Sixty-Fifth Street and, pleased with my newly displayed stoicism, got my errands done at Zabar’s, packed as soon as I got home, wrote notes to people
who I thought might be interested, however tepidly, in my departure, and, after another dinner of scrambled eggs, cheese, peaches, and wine, went to bed. The painkiller the emergency room doctors had given me had the desired hypnotic effect. The dreams I was convinced it had also procured were so swinish that I was able to disregard them. I got up in the morning refreshed, admired my patched-up face in the bathroom mirror, got the car out of the garage, loaded my meager possessions, and drove to Sharon,
procul negotiis
, as far from the affairs of men as I could manage.

In the third week of August I received a telephone call from Bill Taylor. He was at his house in Lenox; the Tanglewood festival crowds had driven him bats. Was I working too hard to contemplate having a guest, even one who was not only self-sufficient but asked for nothing better than to be allowed to scribble all day, and did I have room? Having finished a complete first draft of my new novel, I was giving myself a breather before starting the serious rereading of the text and the revisions that would follow. But even if I had been in the midst of composition, even if I had been on deadline—a condition I had now managed to avoid for many years—I would have told Bill the same truth: that I was jumping up and down for joy at the prospect of seeing him and that he must come as soon as possible and stay until he was good and tired of Sharon. There is always a little selfish idea in the back of a writer’s head. Mine was that I might get my text printed out in the village, a practice that cost money
but avoided putting too much strain on my aged printer, and get Bill to read it. He was a few years older than I; like Alex he had been in the war, and I believe had been in Alex’s class at college. Unlike him, however, Bill had had nothing to do with the
Lampoon
, final clubs, or even the Signet. His father refused to give him a dime, and he had had no money beyond his scholarship, the GI Bill, and however much of his army pay he had been able to save. Archie MacLeish had admitted him to his writing class in the fall of his freshman year, an unusual if not unprecedented distinction. A collection of Bill’s short stories was published some months after his graduation. I had recognized the quality of his talent as soon as I read them, and my admiration for his work kept growing with the appearance of each new book, of which there were now many.

We didn’t meet until I went to live in Paris, probably because he hadn’t participated in the sillier aspects of undergraduate life. By then he had become close to a number of people involved with the
Paris Review
, one or two of whom I knew well. But the introduction was made by my friend Guy Seurat, who had become his French publisher—as well as Bella’s and mine. Bill was from New Orleans, where for generations his family had run a livery business that eventually evolved into a carting and moving company. The South was a world I knew only from the southern school of writers, which was then in great vogue. Bill’s works were markedly different from theirs. Mordant and cerebral, shunning flights of rhetoric, his tales of siblings’ internecine struggles over property were closer in mood and outlook to Mauriac’s
depictions of cannibalism as practiced by the bourgeoisie of the Bordeaux region than to the treatment of not dissimilar themes by Faulkner and, later, Flannery O’Connor. Like many American writers and artists, he drifted away from Paris in the sixties—I had remained because of Bella—found he didn’t like the way oil and gas money was transforming New Orleans, came back to Paris frequently, staying in a pied-à-terre in the Marais, but in the seventies and the eighties had lived principally in a fourth-floor railroad walk-up on upper Lexington Avenue that he shared with Dick Berger, a conceptual artist slowly becoming fashionable. Toward the end of that period, after Dick had dumped him unceremoniously, Bill bought an old house on a quiet side street in Lenox. We had hit it off in Paris, becoming good professional colleagues. But it was Bella whom Bill had loved, who knew the ins and outs of his affairs, including the disastrous entanglement with Dick, and who dispensed advice and consolation. Once we had fixed up the house in Sharon, Bill started a tradition of visiting us there each summer, usually around Labor Day. He drew closer to me after she died, as though I had been left to him in her will. He too was alone now; one younger man after another left him for reasons Bill couldn’t fathom or didn’t care to discuss.

A couple of days after his arrival I invited my cousin Josiah and his wife, Molly, to dinner. Bill liked them. Our meals with them, and whichever of their daughters and granddaughters happened to be around, had also become a tradition. This time they came alone. We ate on the screened porch seated so that we could all admire the moon, which had risen early
and hung over us like a yellow lantern. I had dispensed with the services of Mrs. James and served steaks I broiled on my small outdoor grill, boiled new potatoes, and a tomato salad, followed by a peach tart baked by Mrs. James’s daughter. It was the kind of dinner Bella would have chosen for a hot August night, and I couldn’t help being pleased that I had pulled it off. Except for Molly, who was going to drive, we drank more of my old Chinon than was reasonable, and I didn’t mind Josiah’s ribbing me about my conferences with Alex and general obsession with Thomas and Lucy.

Really, Bill interjected, Philip still sees her? I kicked the habit so long ago that if you asked me whether she was dead or alive I would have had to say I’m not sure. I do know that Thomas died some years ago, and she certainly wasn’t dead at the time of the accident. The
Times
said he’d been survived by both wives. Of course, I know Jane. She’s interviewed me. I confess that I used to know Lucy very much better; we’d see each other all the time in Paris and then in New York, when Dick Berger and I were still together. I even knew Thomas; I’d see him in New York. Then it was all over. Still, why do you suppose the thought that Lucy might not be alive has crossed my mind? Wishful thinking?

Josiah laughed. It’s because dying has become such a habit! But rest assured. Lucy’s alive and kicking. Philip can fill you in. He is currently the world’s leading expert.

I hadn’t liked the bitchy edge of Bill’s remarks about Lucy and was glad that the conversation veered to Iraq. The day before, a suicide bomber had blown up the UN headquarters in Baghdad killing the UN’s head representative in
Iraq and more than a dozen other people. The cluelessness of Paul Bremer, our new proconsul, the incipient religious war in that benighted country, the looting of its art treasures that our military failed to stop, and the sneak attacks on our troops filled all of us with apprehension and gloom. At least we’ve gotten rid of Saddam, Josiah interjected, breaking the silence. Bill protested that if America was on a quest to slay dragons, there were many others waiting in line, some even more monstrous, like Kim Jong Il. He for one was convinced that if we continued on that path the end result would be the demoralization of our country and the eventual unhinging of its economy. All his money, he said, except for an amount in cash that he figured was roughly equal to one year’s expenses, was in stocks. Should he sell? If he sold, what should he buy? Josiah gave him long-winded advice about the need to diversify and the virtues of investing in equities. As for himself, he said he was buying gold for his family’s life-buoy fund. Gold coins. You could always find a buyer, even if some crisis made you unable to get your money from the ATM. In addition, unless you’re dumb, you’ll be able to finesse paying tax on the gain. And believe me, he added, if you hold gold you will have gains.