Memories of a Marriage (3 page)

He had gotten to know Alex and Alex’s parents, Thomas continued, indeed the entire van Buren clan, over the summers he spent, since his junior year in high school, babysitting and tutoring the van Buren nieces, nephews, and grandchildren in math and history at the family’s summer place in Newport. He was from Newport himself, but not the van Burens’ kind of Newport—the notion that I might think otherwise made him shake with laughter. His father owned the garage where everybody, the van Burens included, had their fancy cars serviced, and his mother was a bookkeeper. She’s my father’s business manager. I’m an only child, he added.

Then you’ve grown up near Bristol, I observed, De Bourgh territory.

He laughed. Yes, a short distance as the crow flies! But otherwise … Anyway, the summer before Alex went to the business school he told me he’d be in touch once he had settled down in Cambridge. Being a really good guy, he did call and invite me to parties he and his roommate gave after football games. Then in February of my senior year he invited me, out of the blue, to a small party without a theme. Just those deadly martinis. By the pitcher. She was there—he smiled in the direction of Lucy—and right away he introduced me. I’ll
say it again. He’s a really great guy. I don’t mean just the war-hero stuff. You know he has a Silver Star with three clusters and two Purple Hearts. I mean, he’s never treated me like an employee, nothing remotely like it. He taught me sailing, talked to me for hours about the First World War, which was then my big subject. He reads a lot of history.

That was nice to hear. The decorations were news to me. They showed a modesty that Alex in fact had shared with some of the other returning veterans I got to know at college. You never heard about the Iwo Jima horrors or the Battle of the Bulge or whatever else they had lived through. The generosity toward this young man was mildly surprising; perhaps Alex had turned over a new leaf. But as Thomas talked on about the van Burens’ estate and his wide-eyed astonishment at the tennis court, the near-Olympic-length swimming pool, the boathouse with its sculls and sailing paraphernalia, the kids’ dinghies swinging at their moorings, and the yawl belonging to Alex’s father on which he and Mrs. van Buren would take him and his charges for day sails, I wondered whether he had already seen the De Bourgh establishment or realized that it was in all likelihood no less grand. He wasn’t telling, but he surely knew he was not the sort of young beau Lucy’s friends would expect her to be taking around and introducing to them. In fact, I was willing to bet that his stream of true confessions was intended to make clear he understood such surprise as I felt and had no intention of fooling anyone about his background. He needn’t have worried about that. You couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of people who were of Lucy’s world and cared about
such matters. Yes, he was trim—I learned later that he had been on his high school track team and had specialized in the one-hundred- and two-hundred-meter dash—and respectably taller than she, he had brown hair parted on the side and a nice face with regular features, and he wore a gray-flannel Brooks Brothers suit that was neither too big nor too small for him and a blue button-down shirt just like everybody else’s. If Norman Rockwell had wanted to put on a
Saturday Evening Post
cover a bright-eyed GI on leave, out on a first date with his future boss’s daughter, he might have used this kid—jazzed up a bit of course. And yes, he spoke correctly and without a trace of a regional accent. That was fine and should go down well with his prospective white-shoe Wall Street employers. But in the De Bourgh context, it was no use. He was a townie. The son of a garage owner and a bookkeeper! That might not have mattered much if the garage—the best in town!—had been, say, in Casper, Wyoming. But the indignity of its being next door, in Newport, of all places, was hilarious and bound to give the De Bourgh parents and Lucy’s brother, and I didn’t know how many uncles, aunts, and cousins, a lasting heartburn. That last aspect of the matter, incidentally, turned out to be something I got mostly wrong. Beyond such divagations about class and caste on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, which were part of my writer’s métier, there was another oddity: there were many bankers and lawyers in Lucy’s milieu in Paris, most of them, to be sure, safely married, but I hadn’t noticed that Lucy was particularly interested in any of them. She played tennis doubles with them and their wives; she went to their
parties and dinners; she seemed drawn, however, to the other group of Americans in Paris: writers, painters, and occasional journalists. So why this embryo banker? It wasn’t any of my business. If Lucy had a thing going with this nice boy,
tant mieux!
He was likely to have a good time and learn a thing or two. I liked him instinctively, and I liked the conceit I’d come up with, that in fine, to use one of the Master’s locutions, all three of us, Lucy, Thomas, and I, belonged to the same world, undifferentiated by class, the grand world to which presidents of Harvard University traditionally welcomed at commencements graduating Harvard College seniors: “the society of educated men and women.” Buoyed by these sentiments, I asked Thomas and Lucy to come to a little cocktail party I was giving at my apartment on Friday of that same week.

I had been living long enough in Paris to become friends with an interesting group of French literary and artistic types, whom I was sure Lucy would like, including a couple of fine music and art critics—and had invited a number of them, as well as some Americans working for the
New York Times
, the
Herald Tribune
, and
Time
. The French and the Americans didn’t make much of an effort to mix, but that was par for the course. I kept an eye on Thomas. At first he remained at Lucy’s side, but eventually American journalists who crowded to speak to her in effect shoved him aside. I was about to go to his rescue when I saw that no intervention was needed. He was chatting away with Guy Seurat, the great-grandson of the postimpressionist painter and my best friend in France. I joined them briefly and found Thomas’s French a bit stiff but perfectly sufficient. When I next checked,
Guy was introducing him to an editor at Gallimard and his Sorbonne-professor wife. It was a good thing, I thought, that he had connected with the French contingent. Several of the American guests had a history with Lucy. There was no way Thomas could have known that, unless she had chosen to tell him, but such things can sometimes be inferred from the way a man takes your measure, and they hurt.

Sometime before summer I ran into Lucy at a reception at the British embassy. It was a beautiful mild evening. We left at the same time, and when she told me she was going home, I suggested that we walk together. I would leave her at her door and continue to rue de Vaugirard. There is no greater or more exhilarating public space or urban view than that offered by the astonishing ensemble of place de la Concorde, the bridge that crosses the Seine and takes you to the National Assembly, and the vista of Notre-Dame to the east and Pont Alexandre III and the Trocadéro to the west. For a while we savored it in silence. Then she told me that she and Thomas would tour Italy together as soon as he had finished his army service. Her brother was getting married in Bristol on the second Saturday of September. Of course, she’d be there. After the wedding, she’d probably return to Paris. She hoped I’d be there.

I observed that it seemed as though she and that very nice Thomas had something serious going.

He really loves me, she answered. I think he needs me. Perhaps I need him too.

·   ·   ·

A novel of mine was published in the United States in February of the following year, making it necessary for me to go to New York to see my editor and various public relations people at the publishing house, as well as my agent, and do some readings and other promotional events. It was good to get away from Paris. The conflict over the future of Algeria was tearing France apart with a vehemence not known since the Dreyfus Affair. Toward the end of my stay, invited by the Harvard College literary magazine, I gave a talk at the Sanders Theater in Cambridge. The turnout was good, and the audience agreeably enthusiastic. Unbeknownst to me, Thomas had come to hear me and waited to say hello as I left the building on the way to a reception the undergraduates were giving at the magazine. I invited him to come along. On our way to Bow Street, he gave me an enthusiastic, even bubbly, account of his and Lucy’s Italian tour. They had “done” Florence and the Umbrian towns, Venice, Padua, and Rome and then, after a two-day visit to Naples, drove back to Paris, where they parted. He took the train to Le Havre, from which his student ship was sailing. She was due to sail a week later, from Cherbourg. First-class on the
France
, he told me. Lucky Lucy! But they got back together in Bristol, at her brother’s wedding. Then she left for Paris and Geneva.

I asked what news he had from her.

She’s still in Geneva, he told me. I’ve been getting letters, but we’ve only spoken a couple of times. The difference in time zones seems to get in the way. She didn’t come home
for Christmas. I’m worried about her. She’s never explained what she’s doing there. If I can swing it, I’ll go over right after school ends. I’ll have too much work to do it over the spring break.

In May of that year, not long after my return to Paris, my friend Guy Seurat and his doctor wife, Elsa, invited me to spend the long Ascension weekend with them at their house in the Vaucluse, a couple kilometers from the little town of Camaret-sur-Aigues. Standing in a large garden, it had been in Guy’s family until the 1880s, when it passed into the hands of a rich industrialist from Marseilles and his heirs, who had inflicted on it the sort of improvements that have defaced so many similar French residences. The family bought back the property in the 1930s, and Guy, ever since he inherited it from a bachelor uncle, had been engaged in a heroic and not-inexpensive effort to restore its exterior, including removing the modern stucco and replacing it with a
crépi
—slaked-lime plaster—of a color typical of the region. He and Elsa did much of the work themselves, enlisting friends whenever they could, and I had myself spent one Easter vacation sanding and painting window shutters and uprooting grass from the front courtyard so that it could be replaced, in the eighteenth-century manner, by fine gravel.

When I arrived by car from Avignon in the late afternoon, Guy and Elsa’s other guests were already there, a couple I didn’t know: a black-haired, pale-complexioned young woman of stunning beauty and a large man dressed in an
outfit—lime linen slacks and a red silk shirt worn with a silk paisley ascot—that his kind of French bourgeois considered appropriate for weekends in the country and shopped for at Sulka’s on rue de Castiglione. They were, I learned moments later, Bella and her husband Marc de Clam. Ascension was late that year, and a dry very warm day was followed by the sort of Provençal night that makes you wish dawn would never come. A late dinner was served on a trestle table under a moonless sky by the Seurats’ combination housekeeper and cook, who together with her husband also watched over the property in the Seurats’ absence, a not-inconsiderable responsibility in a part of the country plagued by burglaries. I found myself seated next to Marc. He talked volubly. The failed Generals’ Putsch, an attempt by disaffected high-ranking officers to overthrow General de Gaulle, had taken place a mere three weeks ago; and OAS, the clandestine arm of Algérie Française, the Algeria-must-remain-French movement, had begun its campaign of assassinations and violence. His sympathies clearly lay, if not with OAS itself, then with the
pieds-noirs
, the non-Muslim population of Algeria in part descended from French colonists, who refused to give up the country they considered theirs. My views were diametrically opposed to Algérie Française and everything it stood for, but I didn’t contradict him. Nor did I ask what kind of link of ancestry there was between him and Armand du Paty de Clam, who would have surely approved of his tirade. I hardly spoke. My thoughts and gaze were fixed on Bella; it was a
coup de foudre:
lightning had struck, I had fallen in love.

Dinner ended very late. Another couple, Bernard and
Francine Bruneau, had joined us. The housekeeper had gone to bed, so we all cleared the table and scraped and rinsed the dishes before stacking them in the sink and on the kitchen table. As I watched the Clam couple say good night and disappear, I was gripped by envy, precise and humiliating. Guy proposed an after-dinner scotch. I accepted. After some hesitation Bernard and Francine said they too were going to bed. It was what I had hoped for: I was left alone with Guy and Elsa. When the conversation became desultory, I asked them about the other guests.

It’s a class reunion! cried Elsa. All three of them were at Stan all the way through
hypokhâgne
. And then Bernard and Marc were together again at Sciences Po.

Bernard is in business with his father, who is an antique dealer on Faubourg St.-Honoré, she continued, and Marc works for Banque Worms.

I had frequented enough members of the elegant Parisian bourgeoisie to know that by Stan they meant Collège Stanislas, the most esteemed of French Catholic schools among whose eminent graduates was none other than General de Gaulle, so detested by Marc de Clam.

And the wives? I asked.

Francine has twin boys. She left them with the grandparents for the weekend. That’s a job and a half, but she also helps out in the antiques business. She did the École du Louvre.

And Bella, Guy chimed in, the redoubtable Bella! She went through
khâgne
at Fénelon and came in second or third
in the examination for Normale Sup. Of course she got in and graduated brilliantly. Midway through Normale, she married Marc. She’s never taught. Instead, she’s one of my authors. Two years ago we published her delectable little study of Madame de La Fayette. She’s working on something new now, but she won’t say what.

“Redoubtable”! I thought I had sensed it: she was as brainy as she was beautiful. Fénelon was the best of girls’ lycées; École Normale Supérieure was the
nec plus ultra
of French humanities education. The intellectual snob inside me was smiling and nodding approval.