Memories of a Marriage (7 page)

She drained the whiskey I brought and held out the empty glass. I made another trip to the pantry, returning with the highball and this time a tin of macadamia nuts. This is good, she said. We didn’t have much of a dinner. I’ll make the rest of this part of the story short. He didn’t call the next morning. No apology, no message, no flowers. Just merciless silence. I hadn’t a single friend in Geneva, no one I could turn to. Anyway, if there had been such a person, what would I have said, what could they have done? I felt humiliated, and I had never been so utterly alone. I had always been surrounded by people during the holidays; I’d always been a part of some celebration; how could I hide my shame? What would I say when I called home? That one I figured out: I told Father I was in St. Moritz skiing and would call on New Year’s Eve if I could get through. Yes, I was having a great time. He didn’t think to ask for a number where he could reach me. I particularly didn’t want to lose face with the hotel people—they were the ones who counted just then—so I came up with the idea of asking the concierge to book a
couchette
for me on the night train to Paris. That was where I said I was going to spend the fêtes. Actually, I wasn’t sure whether I’d really go to Paris and hunker down at the apartment or pretend to be sick and stay in bed until the New
Year. Another scheme came into my head, and I couldn’t get rid of it. It was to throw myself down the hotel stairs, which were carpeted, and pretend I had fallen. I’d fake a concussion or something like it. By that time, it was late, and I had been crying, and I was hungry. I had dinner sent up to the room. When the table was cleared, I asked the waiter to leave the wine and my wineglass and bring another bottle of the same wine. I remember it very well. It was a Fendant de Sierre I had ordered to go with the lake fish I had that evening. White wine has always made me sleep, but nothing was happening. I just sat there, drinking and crying. Finally I got undressed, took a hot bath, put on my pajamas, got into bed, and had a Seconal and a Miltown with the rest of the wine. That didn’t do the trick, and I was determined to have a good night’s sleep, so I took another Seconal. In retrospect, what happened next is clear, though I have no memory of how it happened. I must have sleepwalked because the next morning, around six, the chambermaid found me splayed on the stairs. Luckily, I was unconscious. I had broken my leg, the pain would have been unbearable, and help wouldn’t have come no matter how loud I called. The hotel was almost empty on account of the approaching holidays. My loss-of-face problem was halfway solved: I wasn’t the lady who had no place to go for Christmas; I was the lady who had drunk too much Fendant. I didn’t care. I was in the hospital. When I returned with my big fat cast the roly-poly doctor found nurses to help me. They slept on a foldout cot in the living room. I refused to be in a clinic. At first the physiotherapist came to the hotel. Later the nurse took me there. Father
forced Mother to come over to check up. She realized how much I was drinking and yelled and carried on about how if I didn’t check into the clinic to be looked after for my leg and dried out I wouldn’t be welcome in Bristol. Also how they’d stop my money, which I knew they couldn’t do because of the trust. It wasn’t the first time. I mean she’d thrown me out of the house once before, when I got in trouble in my last year at Farmington and wasn’t allowed to attend graduation. The head was afraid I’d contaminate the other girls! So I told Mother to fuck herself.

Hubert showed up eventually one evening, cool as a cucumber, took a good look, told me I’d been letting myself go,
Tu t’es vraiment laissée aller, ma vieille
, and asked if my keeper—the nurse had tactfully withdrawn into the bedroom—was always there. Wasn’t there some way to send her on an errand, get her to stretch her legs,
se dérouiller les jambes?
The idea wasn’t hard to get: he thought I was underfucked. A little sex would put me in gear. I had been drinking little glasses of Fendant, and the feeling of revulsion he had at first inspired slowly yielded to an imperious and monstrous need to be used by him, to descend even deeper into humiliation. I called out to Madame Berthe and said that monsieur would stay for dinner. I’d see her in the morning. She said,
Bien, madame
, and was out the door. I was wearing a long silk peignoir; it was easiest at home with the cast. Getting dressed to go to physiotherapy was a production. I was sitting on a small sofa—I guess you could call it a love seat. He didn’t try to undress me. Just spread my legs, hiked up the good one so that my foot rested on the seat, opened his fly, and went at me. There is a
Balthus painting of a girl sitting on such a sofa, her legs open. I’ve never been able to see that painting without being again in that room with him inside me, without melting the way he always knew how to make me melt. That set the pattern. No pretense of love, no talk about his divorce or how we might live together. He’d call just before coming over, so I’d let the nurse go; sometimes—rarely—he stayed to dinner, but really the point was to relieve himself, like when he needed to go to the toilet. No, I didn’t want to end it. I’m not sure I would have known how. But I knew I wasn’t well and wasn’t going to get better. Not my leg; it was doing just fine. The big cast had come off, and I wore a light, supporting version. I mean me; I wasn’t well inside. There was one person I had gotten to know a little in Geneva, an American psychiatrist married to a Swiss woman teaching American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature at the University of Geneva. I’d met them at a couple of dinner parties. Bill—that was his name—was also teaching at the university on some sort of contract. I think that’s why he was allowed to do analysis, although he couldn’t prescribe drugs or that sort of thing. But analysis was anyway all he did. He’d impressed me by his brilliance, and it was nice, when we were surrounded by all those Swiss, to be able to speak to him in English. So I called him and said I was in big trouble. He agreed to see me. After we’d met a couple of times he told me I was in no condition to begin an analysis, which in any case would mean commitment to staying in Geneva longer than I intended—based on what I had told him—but he would try to help me
at least through the end of the rehabilitation and physical therapy. Bill didn’t get me off the booze or the sleeping pills, or make me stop servicing Hubert, but just being able to talk and talk—I think for the first time ever—without having to watch my step saved me.

Hubert got out of my life, without anybody’s help, on the Ides of March. I wonder if he’d planned it that way. He pulled out, wiped himself off on my peignoir, which after the first time he had insisted on my wearing, had a double shot of whiskey, and told me this time it’s really over,
Ma petite Lucy, cette fois-ci on se quitte pour de bon
. Brigitte had already moved back to Geneva. Why didn’t I hit him on the head with the wine bottle when he bent down to kiss my hand? I guess I was too startled or too scared or both.

Soon afterward Bill began to talk to me about going home and where I would begin real treatment. I told him that the way I felt and looked New York scared me. He suggested Boston or Cambridge. His training analyst was practicing in Cambridge. If he has time, he said, he’ll be a good fit. I thought about it and began to have a picture in my mind of living in Cambridge or perhaps on Beacon Hill that filled me with nostalgia and a longing for a place I knew but where nobody would be at me, where there were no complications, where I didn’t have to deal with the Swiss or the French. It’s funny: of course I knew that Thomas was at the business school, I kept on getting his letters, but I didn’t connect the dots and realize that he was one person who’d surely be at me. Not that it would have made any difference. Dr. Reiner
could take me. Someone at the trust company found an apartment for me on Louisburg Square, the back of the ground floor with its own entrance and the use of the garden, and I moved in May. Dr. Reiner’s advice was devastating, but I was so beaten down I couldn’t argue: You need to be in McLean. When you’ve been dried out and are less hysterical I’ll work with you. So that’s what I did.

Once again, she was crying. Who was I to blame her or tell her to stop? I tiptoed out of the library, got her another highball, and made one only slightly weaker for myself.

Here, I said, you and I both need them.

She had stopped crying and said, I’ve got to pee. Back in a minute. There is a toilet you can use off the foyer.

After she returned we drank for a few minutes in silence. Then she said, Even this part of the story is longer than I had thought. I’ll finish it in a few words. I was able to discharge myself from McLean toward the end of August, just before Dr. Reiner returned from the Cape. We started treatment, and I made my daily trek to his office in a house at the corner of Sparks and Highland in Cambridge, which was where he also lived. There is sometimes a period at the beginning of treatment, if you hit it off with the analyst, when you surprise yourself by feeling good. That happened to me. A woman I had met when I was still at Radcliffe was a powerful editor at Houghton Mifflin, who later published
The Painted Bird
. She’d been very nice to me and said I should let her know if I ever wanted a job in publishing. I found the courage to get in touch with her; she remembered me and put me to work, at first reading manuscripts and later line editing. It turned out
I could do that well; there’s never been anything the matter with my English. All of us in the family speak well and can write clear prose—even Mother and my brother John. The only trouble with them is that they’ve got nothing to say.

And now I’m really tired, she said. You’d better go home.

A
HANDWRITTEN NOTE
thanking Lucy for dinner and saying I had been profoundly moved by all she had told me about Geneva seemed nicer and more friendly than an e-mail. Next morning I walked briskly in the park, a regime I was trying to impose on myself, took a bath, and wrote to Lucy. Her apartment building was near enough to the NY Society Library, where I intended to spend the afternoon doing research, for me to decide to go there on foot and deliver the letter personally, instead of putting it in the mail. However, after the doorman had examined the envelope he announced that Mrs. Snow had left for the country. He’d forward my letter with the rest of her mail. Her not having mentioned the imminent departure struck me as odd, but the reprieve was welcome. I wouldn’t need to see her again any time soon. That evening I sent her an e-mail saying that a proper letter was on its way and wishing her a good summer. She answered immediately, explaining that she had
rushed off to Little Compton to attend an emergency town meeting about a proposal to widen a road near her property and would be back after the weekend. The doorman was an idiot: he should be holding her mail instead of forwarding it. She would call in the morning to straighten him out. Would I be in New York when she returned? Could we have dinner? She wasn’t moving to the country for the summer until the Fourth of July weekend. I answered that I’d be around and would look forward to seeing her.

As it happened, I was planning to be away during the weekend as well, at my place in Sharon. The real estate agent had assured me that the tenant to whom I’d been renting the house during the academic year—Peter Drummond, a political science professor at Bard—and his partner, a composer whom I’d met several times without managing to remember his name, had left it in apple-pie order, just as in the past years. Nonetheless, it seemed best to see for myself and perhaps arrange for a fresh coat of paint in the kitchen, living room, and my bedroom. It had occurred to me as well that since I had given up my apartment in Paris and would be living in New York it might be nice to be able to use the Sharon house year-round. Before making a final decision, I wanted to find out from the agent how much it would cost to keep the house heated through the winter and to have my long and twisting driveway plowed. I was also concerned about Peter and whether he would find it difficult to relocate. If that were the case, I’d give him at least a year’s notice. I was going to leave on Friday morning, which gave me a couple of days when I could see Thomas Snow’s widow, Jane, a project
I’d had in mind ever since I’d arrived in the city. Lucy’s rants had somehow imbued it with new interest. Jane had remarried, but I had not met her husband and had in fact forgotten his name as well. All the same, finding her couldn’t be a problem. The weekly show of her interviews with authors, on which I had twice appeared, continued to be aired on public television. I had no doubt that my editor’s assistant had her office telephone number or would know how to get it.

Lucy’s sneer about Jamie’s visits to his stepmother, however, led me to think that most probably she was still living in Thomas’s Park Avenue apartment, the location of which, south of Seventy-Second Street and on the desirable west side of the avenue, I now realized, must be one more thorn in Lucy’s side. Accordingly, the next morning, before turning to the young man at the publishing house or Google, I dialed Thomas’s old number and asked to speak to Jane Morgan. As I might have expected, given the anemic sales of my two most recent books, my name clearly meant nothing to the secretary who answered and proceeded to grill me at annoying length. In the end I passed the test, and Jane came to the telephone. She sounded enthusiastic about getting together and introducing me to her husband Ned and wondered aloud which would be better: the three of us having dinner, or she and I first having lunch à deux and going over the old times. I expressed a slight preference for the latter solution. My familiar haunts on the Upper East Side had all apparently disappeared or were no longer establishments where someone like Jane would wish to be seen, but she suggested a French restaurant on Lexington Avenue not far from her
apartment. We could meet there at one, this being a day when she didn’t have to be at the studio. She said she’d make sure we had a quiet table.

She was still a knockout and didn’t look a day older than the last time I’d seen her—not surprising in one who had surely always watched her figure and her complexion but somehow very comforting and pleasant. I was discovering that seeing people my own age or, as in Lucy’s case, only four or five years younger gave me little pleasure. It was all very well to recall a shared past, but what I really wanted was a bridge to the present. We devoted the unavoidable ten minutes to the folly of the Iraq adventure and another five minutes to John Kerry and his promising but oddly lethargic candidacy. Ned is working for his campaign, she told me. He’ll be interested in talking to you about how you and other writers can help. In turn I told her that I knew some of the senator’s Forbes cousins, had been thinking along the same lines, and had been frustrated by the difficulty of volunteering to do anything other than send money.