Memories of a Marriage (8 page)

Ned will open the door, she replied. You’ll have to come to dinner very soon. Even better, spend a weekend with us in Water Mill.

After a pause, she asked how I had been passing my time now that I was back in New York.

First of all working, I said. I’m close to completing the first draft of a book.

A novel? she asked.

I nodded, whereupon she told me she had, of course, read my latest and how sorry she had been that scheduling problems
had prevented her from attempting to prevail on me to find the time for an interview.

That sort of hypocrisy being both familiar and odious, I was at the point of erupting but managed to restrain myself. There was no point in spoiling this lunch and perhaps queering the chances of her taking up the new novel. So I smiled and went on with the account of my activities.

I’ve been putting my apartment in order, I said. Two young relatives, my cousin Josiah Weld’s granddaughters, had been living there for almost three years. My old housekeeper kept an eye on them, but all the same the kids left traces that had to be removed. I stayed at the Harvard Club while that was done and the stuff that had gone to storage was brought back. Other than that? I haven’t particularly wanted company, which is just as well, since so few of the people I used to see in New York are still living in the city or indeed are alive and operational. I’ve gone to the movies and once to the ballet. That’s how I ran into Lucy, I added, at the ballet. Then, a couple of days ago, she had me to dinner at her apartment—alone!

You lucky man, Jane remarked speaking very slowly, that must have been fun, and very enlightening—about Thomas and me! I’m glad you’ve decided to give me equal time.

Actually, I replied, you got off fairly easily, although she does wish her friends hadn’t abandoned her for you. She did have a good deal to say about poor Thomas.

What an awful woman! Jane fired back. When you think how she terrorized him! Thomas, who dominated every meeting he went to, who mesmerized heads of great corporations,
central bankers, politicians, cabinet ministers, would just want to hide, crawl under the nearest piece of furniture, when she telephoned, and since most of the time it was about Jamie there was no way he could refuse to take the call. You know how her voice carries. I couldn’t help overhearing unless I left the room, and he’d make these desperate signs for me to stay. Now Thomas, she’d say, don’t you understand this and that. Now Thomas, don’t play dumb, you know I’m right, Jamie really needs this or that. No, there is no other way. Or, Do you realize how you are destabilizing him? She’d use this snarky psychobabble on him, as if she’d studied at Freud’s knee instead of wasting untold years and money on the couch of a preposterous Central Park West shrink. Dr. Peters thinks this, Dr. Peters says that, now Thomas, Dr. Peters is concerned about Jamie’s autonomy! It used to make me sick to hear it.

She did say that Jamie is a failure. It’s really too bad; I remember him as such a nice little boy and then a nice and attractive teenager.

Don’t let her bad-mouthing turn you against him either. He is still a truly nice man, sweet and gentle, and he’s a failure only if you think every screenwriter is a failure if he doesn’t get an Oscar or write the equivalent of
The Sopranos
! He’s done well at Sundance and in Toronto, and he has something right now in Cannes. He’s making a living, and he likes what he’s doing. Sure, Thomas helped him, and the money he left him has taken the pressure off. What’s wrong with that? What is a father supposed to do with his money? The truth is that he liked what Jamie wrote and understood how stupid it would
have been to say, Listen, kid, you should write better or be more commercial, or If you can’t write better and earn more money then at least learn to count and I’ll take you into the firm! Thomas and Jamie had a really good relationship. Jamie trusted him. Some of that has rubbed off on me. He trusts me too. And you know what? I wish he were my son.

We had ordered our lunch. Jane’s choices amused me: a mixed-green salad followed by a Caesar salad, both without dressing, and a Perrier. So that’s what going out to lunch was about. Small wonder that the owner of my own favorite French restaurant, the last of the breed that could trace its ancestry to the 1939 World’s Fair, had trouble hanging on to his middle-aged clientele, never mind acquiring a young one. I wasn’t going to play Simon Says. So I asked for
pâté de campagne
followed by a hanger steak—rare—and a glass of Côtes du Rhône. I guess she had found my order amusing too and remarked that I hadn’t lost my Parisian habits. That too would be right up Ned’s alley.

I bet she gave you the Thomas-the-monster routine, she continued, especially if you haven’t seen her since he died. Don’t let her. You knew him too well to buy that sort of crap.

Jane was wrong there. I had genuinely liked Thomas and had had a good opinion of him, but I also knew that wife beaters and child molesters often come across as nice guys. It all depends on the frequency of your contacts and the angle of vision. But my curiosity, mixed with regret, had been aroused, and I intended to learn more.

Yes, I did hear that he was a monster, I told her, and doubtless it’s not the last time if I see her again, which I think I will.
But Lucy mostly talked about herself. I think the point was to explain why she married Thomas in the first place—when she knew all along it was a mistake. The monster part had to do with his having used her money and, I guess, social position to climb and never giving anything back. And of course, anyway at the start, with his having been so wrapped up in his work that he left her to cope with Jamie alone and so forth. But principally it was about having been used.

I was going to continue, although naturally without mentioning the complaints about sex, but Jane raised her hand to stop me. Look, she said, Thomas put up with a lot of craziness, and I mean real craziness. By all means, listen to her and reach your own conclusions and, if you don’t mind, share them with me if ever the time comes. I’ll give you my own take. For now, just two things. First, he wasn’t a closet Frankenstein monster. Second, don’t go for lies and fabrications about how Thomas and I got together. I didn’t have an affair with him before he and Lucy split. Thomas and I knew each other socially because Horace Jones, my first husband, was—and he still is—a partner in a law firm that worked on a lot of Kidder’s M-and-A deals, including Thomas’s deals, when Thomas was still at Kidder. Afterward, when Thomas and Tim Carroll started the new firm, they kept on giving work to Horace. But there was nothing between Thomas and me. Zero. And it’s a lie that I left Horace because I had my eye on Thomas. I left him because he’d had one office romance too many. Perhaps you wonder why the law firm didn’t boot him out on account of the office hanky-panky which, by the way, according to my moles over there, continued?
That was, in principle, what the firm did at the time. The reasons are that at first they didn’t want to lose the Kidder business, which they thought, because he did so much work for Thomas, depended on his staying at the law firm and, later, after Thomas left Kidder and founded his own firm together with Tim Carroll, because they didn’t want to lose the Snow Carroll business. That’s right, Snow Carroll business. Thomas and Tim talked it over when Thomas and I started going out, and they decided to keep using Horace. Thomas was very clear about it. I’ve got Jane; Horace has lost her; he does a good job; why should I want to punish him? So don’t forget to say hi to Lucy!

Saying hi to Lucy had to wait. I packed some clothes and the indispensable minimum of books, took the train to Wassaic, where my car was in storage, and, my sense of anticipation and disquiet mounting, drove over the Connecticut line to Sharon. The house looked good, and so did the garden. During a quick tour of the property, I checked as always first the trees and flowering bushes that I considered Bella’s, planted by her or at her instigation. They had survived well the winter storms that had hit the valley. So had the peonies, Bella’s favorites; for the first time since she died, I wasn’t missing the moment of their greatest glory. Inside, the house was cold and naked, Peter Drummond and the composer had removed their photographs and knickknacks, and my personal possessions were still in the locked guest-room closets, but otherwise it was fine. On the kitchen table I found a note
from the real estate agent, asking me to call. I’ll come right over, he said when I reached him. It turned out that he had news from Peter. Renting from me had worked out well, and he and Ezra Morris—he reminded me that that was the composer’s name—had gotten to like Sharon and the surrounding area so much they’d been looking for an affordable house to buy. Recently, the Browns’ place had come on the market, Sally Brown the widow having died of a stroke in December. The contract with the estate had been signed, and they expected to take possession in mid-June. So in the end it was Peter giving me notice rather than the other way around. The agent said I shouldn’t worry about being stuck without a tenant for the winter; he was sure he could find a replacement, perhaps another academic. I told him the truth: I felt relieved. Since I was going to live in New York, it seemed right to be able to use the house all year, the way Bella and I had done, and now I could carry out my plan without guilt feelings about taking it away from those nice people.

The other side of the coin, which I obviously didn’t mention to the agent, was the incipient panic into which the news of Peter and Ezra’s departure and the consequent reality of what I intended to do had thrown me. The heating bills, and plowing out my driveway weren’t the real problem; I had decided not to bother about them. The totality of the undertaking unnerved me. It was one thing to think idly about how nice it would be to leave the city and go to Sharon on crisp fall and winter weekends, perhaps even over Christmas and New Year’s, and another to face the implications: seeing to the cleanup and planting in the spring,
worrying about the marauding deer, putting up netting to keep them off the flower beds, deadheading and weeding, the fall cleanup and putting the garden to sleep for the winter—I had let it all go since Bella died, having immediately asked the real estate agent to find a responsible tenant who’d relieve me of all those tasks. It wasn’t the need to do the work that troubled me: I was capable of doing some of it, although Bella’s fondness for gardening had led her to take most of it off my hands. And I knew perfectly well that the landscaping firm that mowed the lawn and the two meadows and had always done the spring and fall cleanup and planted trees and the larger bushes for us would happily take full charge of the grounds. Just as between Mrs. James, my veritable pearl of a housekeeper, and Bob the handyman, all my other creature comforts would be seen to very nicely. The house would be spick-and-span, and its grounds carefully tended, my laundry done, and my clothes cleaned and mended. In fact Mrs. James, aided by Doris, her elementary-school-teacher daughter, would probably like nothing better than to do the shopping and cook my guests’ and my food. It was a cinch, provided
tutti quanti
received checks on time and in the appropriate amounts. Yes, those very good people, whom I’d known and trusted over so many years, who had loved Bella and been so kind during her terrible last year, were still my friends. They’d make sure I received the finest care in my hospice built for one. The checks weren’t a problem. Unless I lived far too long, my savings would be sufficient, and if they were exhausted, the Sharon, Connecticut, hospice would close its doors, and Medicaid, if it still
existed, would have one more old geezer busting a hole in its budget. No, it wasn’t a question of money; it was the utter futility of my existence, the books I was writing included. I realized that I was trembling and said to myself, Stop it, Bella would be ashamed of you. You’ve managed all right here in the summers. If using the house the rest of the year doesn’t work out, you’ll put it on the market and get your fresh air in Central Park.

Feeling calmer, I had a cup of tea, called the handyman and asked him to stop by the next morning to talk about painting and minor repairs, made a list of staples to pick up at the supermarket, and puttered around trying to make the house look and feel less unlived in. Then I sat down at my work-table and during a few hours actually managed to write. It grew dark, and for once it was hunger and the desire for a drink, rather than the flow of words turning into a trickle, that made me stop. I saved and backed up the new text and put my laptop to sleep. There were a couple of bottles of gin in the liquor closet. I made myself a gin and tonic, ate a handful of Ritz crackers out of a box left behind by Drummond & Co., and tried my cousin Josiah’s Kent, Connecticut, number. I was in luck. He and his wife were in residence and were free the next evening. I deflected the invitation to have dinner at their house and asked them to come instead to Sharon and help me start a new chapter of my tattered existence. As an afterthought I added the injunction to bring any child or grandchild who showed up in the meantime. Buoyed momentarily by a vague sense of accomplishment, I set out for a pizza at a roadhouse outside Sharon.

·   ·   ·

Josiah and Molly did bring their granddaughters Natasha and Nina, the two squatters who had occupied my apartment, and Natasha’s boyfriend, a baby-faced fellow with a wispy blond beard and a stud in his right earlobe. I was convinced that the choice of a stud over an earring, as well as its placement, had coded meanings, but didn’t dare to inquire. Instead I asked Zeke whether he was, like the girls, a recent college graduate and was both surprised and amused to hear that he had a graduate degree in computer science from MIT and was working on valuation models for, of all places, Snow Carroll. I told him that I had first met Thomas Snow just before he went to business school and had kept in touch with him until the end. Zeke replied that I had been really lucky. Obviously, in his mind my friend Thomas was a great man. My amusement deepened when Nina told me that she too worked at Snow Carroll, but on mergers and acquisitions, and that it had been she who introduced Zeke to Natasha.