Memories of a Marriage (6 page)

B
Y THE TIME
she returned from Paris and met Thomas at her brother John’s wedding reception it had become clear to her, Lucy said the previous evening after we had moved into the library, that it was all over between them. The thing was doomed. Of course, she should have told him so right away, but too much was going on around her and in her head, and she couldn’t face the argument and the explanations. Besides, she didn’t have to. In two days, on Monday morning, she was returning to Paris; then, as soon as she closed the apartment and repacked her suitcases, she would leave for Geneva. During the dinner that followed the reception, Thomas had begged her to smuggle him into her room and let him spend the night, but she had refused. Even if she had wanted him, which was not the case that evening, she was dead tired and didn’t like the idea of his sneaking around the corridors in the morning. The house was filled to the rafters; she’d be risking embarrassing gossip
and a blowup with her mother. But she did finally agree to meet him the next morning on the dunes. All he wanted was sex, anytime and anyplace. He’d never gotten it into his head that he had to make it so that she had to have him, had to have him the way you must have food and drink. He was an oversexed capon! As usual, he came too fast and tried to make up for it by going on and on. It was no use. She felt distant—distant and detached—from what he was doing to her body and in her body. The odd thing was that he didn’t realize it. Probably he liked it better when she was passive and just let him concentrate on himself, which was all he wanted to do anyway.

You weren’t invited to the wedding, she continued, there was no reason why you should have been, but if as a novelist you had wanted to get an idea of how those things were supposed to be done that was the one wedding to attend. Edie, the little goose my brother John married, had been an orphan since the age of ten, when her parents and the pilot were all killed going from one of the British Virgins to another in an absurd single-propeller plane, and the cousins who were her guardians were only too happy to have my parents give the wedding at the big house in Bristol. Not that a reception in San Francisco would have made sense. Edie had gone to Miss Porter’s and Smith, and all her friends were on the East Coast. It being John the heir, the parents pulled out all the stops. The house, the lawn, the garden, had never looked better. Lester Lanin came himself and made a little speech about still remembering the time he played at my parents’ wedding reception, which was one of the first big society functions he
had gotten to do. Veuve Clicquot flowed like a river. John Chafee and Claiborne Pell were both there. Given the competition between them, that was a real coup and said a lot about Father’s clout. JFK and Jackie canceled at the last minute, but Lee came, and the president sent a cable that Father read after a fanfare. Naturally, all the family and old family friends were in attendance, as well as a big contingent from San Francisco and John’s Harvard friends. Your pal Alex van Buren was there with his wife, that awful Priscilla, and the rest of the van Buren clan. All in all, it was a truly memorable party. But wherever I looked, whom did I see? Thomas Snow in the blue blazer I had bought for him to wear in Europe and, if you please, some sort of white trousers. Perhaps even white flannels. Can you imagine the kid they’d all seen pumping gas dressed up like that? He stuck out like a sore thumb. You couldn’t miss him.

Good Lord, I thought, what had she expected? Wasn’t she old enough, when she met him, to know that he was not from her milieu?

I think you mean to say, I told her, that he didn’t fit in. Why was that a surprise or a reason to decide that the “thing” was doomed?

You don’t get it at all, she snapped. It’s exactly the contrary. He fit in too well. He was ingratiating himself left and right, and they all loved it. They loved him, even my parents and John. As for Thomas, he was in hog heaven. He had understood from the first that he could use me, and he was being proved right. I hated it. I could see that it was a preview of my future if we remained together.

Did you in fact break up? I asked. The other day, as I was thinking about the old times, I recalled, I am pretty sure accurately, running into Thomas in Cambridge during the spring of his first year at business school. He told me you were in Geneva, but he certainly didn’t give me the impression that it was all over between you.

No, she replied, as I said, I hadn’t told him. I just stayed away and didn’t let him come to Geneva. Where he would have gotten the money for the trip is another question. Probably he’d have tried to borrow it from me. I just couldn’t deal with him. It was a bad time, a very bad time, for me.

She was sobbing, but when I moved over to her corner of the sofa and patted her shoulder, she brushed away my hand angrily and told me to get her a drink and bring the mixed nuts from the pantry shelf. When I returned with the whiskey and the nuts, I found that she had pulled herself together. I took advantage of the calm to ask the obvious question. So the next thing that happens is that you change your mind and decide to get married?

It wasn’t quite that simple, she answered, and put to me a question of her own. Did you ever happen to meet Hubert Brillard, the Swiss journalist? He used to come to Paris regularly. Very Swiss, very patrician, very handsome?

I nodded. I did remember him. He was the super-Aryan I met occasionally, without exchanging more than a casual greeting, at lunches given by my friend Guy Seurat’s publishing house. Brillard was invariably the guest of a fashionable novelist with Algérie Française sympathies published by Guy, who claimed that the fellow’s talent made one forgive him
his political opinions. Someone, perhaps Guy, had told me that Brillard’s father had been an important Swiss rightist politician.

He was the star political editor and columnist at the
Journal de Genève
, Lucy said, which at the time was a great paper. I met Hubert in Paris, when I was still working for
Vogue
, at a dinner given by the guy who ran the
Newsweek
bureau and his wife. I was seated next to Hubert. He offered to walk me home, and on the way told me he was married and had two little daughters. You know what I was like. I asked him to come up to the apartment for a nightcap anyway, and the moment we were inside I grabbed him. I knew what I was doing. He made love like a god—no one had ever fucked me like that. Or since. He explained later it had to do with having been on the Swiss Olympic ski team. The training gave him total control over his body. He stayed in Paris for the rest of that week, and every night we made love until dawn. Later, he’d find reasons to come to Paris to see me. I never knew in advance. He’d call late at night and say,
J’arrive
. After six months of that he said he was sorry but we had to stop. One of his daughters was doing badly at school; his wife was acting suspicious; he didn’t quite say he was feeling guilty, but that was what I was supposed to understand. I was unbearably sad. It was early fall. In part because of Hubert I hadn’t been home during the summer so, for lack of any other plan, I went to Bristol. Your dear friend Alex used to fuck me when I was still at Farmington and on and off afterward when I was at Radcliffe. He’d have me come down to New York, or else he’d drive up to Boston. When I heard from John he was
at the business school, I decided to look him up. Anything was better than sitting around in Bristol and having dinner with my parents and John and Edie. Alex was living in a business school dormitory like everyone else, but being Alex he also had a little apartment on Beacon Hill. That’s where he’d have me stay. We had a good time, and I was beginning to think that this was perhaps how things should turn out when, out of the blue, he told me he was going to marry Priscilla Baldwin. The bitch with the face of a horse! She’d been a year ahead of me at Farmington. Everybody hated her and made fun of her fat ass. The really funny thing is that Alex and she are still married. Anyway, Alex gave me Thomas as a going-away present. He must have laughed his head off.

She held out her empty glass.

I made her a highball and returned to my corner of the sofa.

Of course Thomas didn’t get it, she resumed. He thought Alex was this great guy doing him a big favor. I didn’t get it either; I didn’t see it was a poisoned offering. All I knew was that I hadn’t been left holding the bag and, for a change, someone loved me and couldn’t get enough of me. I don’t know what he told you about that trip to Italy, but he wouldn’t have told you what I’m going to say now. When he was driving he’d have one hand on the steering wheel and the other in my crotch. He’d scare me out of my wits. Sometimes I had to tell him to pull off the road and let him fuck me in the backseat. It was like an obsession. His ignorance of practically everything was astonishing. I’ll never forget having to explain to him when we looked at a Bellini crucifixion at the
Uffizi who the two other guys were on the crosses to the left and the right of Jesus. The garage owner and his wife didn’t go to church, so he didn’t go to Sunday school. I’ll give him credit, though: once I had told him something it stuck in his memory, even if he chose to forget that he’d learned it from me. Anyway, when our Italian tour was finished we drove to Paris, and that’s where we said goodbye. Although I’d had second thoughts about getting him invited, I’d gone ahead and done it, and we were going to meet at my brother’s wedding. He knew I hadn’t decided how long I’d stay in the U.S., and I’d told him there was no chance of my getting a job in Cambridge or Boston or anything like it. The only way I’d live with you, I told him, was if we were married, and you’re not ready for that. It was a very hot afternoon, and we were crossing the Tuileries after lunch. I was teasing—I had no intention of marrying him—but I thought it would be fun to hear him protest and carry on about how it wasn’t so. But he didn’t. I think he was relieved. He was scared to death that I’d say I wanted to get married.

Then the unexpected happened. I was still in Paris, supposed to take a boat at the end of the week, when Hubert called, as always in the middle of the night so he’d get me and not the answering machine. He’d once told me he didn’t like leaving traces. When I heard his voice I melted. Literally. I wasn’t touching myself or anything, but I was all wet down there. In this great baritone voice he said, I want you, you must come to Geneva. His wife was moving to Zurich to be near her parents; the girls were in boarding school; he needed me. He was getting a divorce. Not that any of it mattered.
If he’d told me to skip John’s wedding, I’d have done it. What am I saying? If he’d told me to go out of the house in my nightgown and exhibit myself on the boulevards, I’d have obeyed. There wasn’t an act of self-abasement I wouldn’t have performed on his orders. But he was very kind and said instead that since I clearly had to go to Bristol he was coming to Paris. All he asked was that I move to Geneva as soon as possible. The next three days in Paris made me his slave. Do you remember what a lot of noise I made when I came? With him, I howled.

I drove the Mercedes to Geneva with the top down most of the way, singing old camp songs and spirituals, imagining my life with Hubert. He had told me to meet him at the Hôtel des Bergues. It turned out that he’d reserved an apartment there, on the top floor—a bedroom and a slightly larger living room, both with a view of the lake. I wondered how we were going to fit in it, since I understood that he liked to work at home, but it turned out it wasn’t for both of us. Just me. Until the divorce proceedings were decided he was going to live at his old place. That was what his lawyer had advised. We settled into a routine. I went for long walks along the lake and in the old city. Some days I drove out to the country, on one or the other side of the lake. Most evenings we had dinner in my living room, sent up by room service. If I was alone, I’d eat in the hotel restaurant. The food was good, especially the Swiss dishes. Hubert had a whole lot of functions and dinners he had to attend, pretty much as a part of his job, and more often than not he didn’t ask me to come along. That was all right with me. His friends
were polite but without warmth, and I wasn’t sure what they thought about Hubert’s bringing me along or about my living in Geneva without any visible occupation. Hubert said it was enough that he introduced me as an American journalist. I thought I should have a more substantial explanation, one that I could also give to my parents, and he came up with the silly idea that I was working on a long article that might become a book about Madame de Staël and her years in Coppet. He gave me a biography that I read quickly in order to sound halfway intelligent, and she began to interest me, but I really didn’t care. The only thing that counted was the nights—every night—that he spent with me. He made me beg, pretend I was a bitch up on her hind legs and beg for each thing I wanted him to do. I had to name it very precisely. I was in a trance of sexual contentment. We went on like that until right before Christmas, when he told me that he would spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Zurich with his wife and daughters. That’s what Brigitte—that was the wife’s name—and he had decided was the responsible thing to do. They didn’t want the girls to be upset. Then the day after Christmas, he would take them skiing in Zermatt until the end of their school vacation. I yelled at him. I couldn’t stop; I just kept yelling until he hit me, and he walked out, without a word, slamming the door. I thought he’d broken my nose. The bleeding was so bad I couldn’t stop it, although I tried everything, pinching my nose, putting ice on it. Finally I called the concierge, and he sent the hotel doctor, a nice roly-poly man who came right away, packed my nose with gauze, and gave me some Miltown and Seconal pills. I didn’t even
have to tell him what had happened. He’d taken one look at me, shaken his head, and said,
Ah, les hommes …

She broke off and said, I’m not sure I can go on. Get me a drink and for Christ’s sake have one too. You make me nervous just sitting there like an old maid. Have you joined AA or something?