Real Life (28 page)

She said what she had had, all this time, prepared to say on this occasion. “I don't think we should talk marriage until you tell me about your first wife.”

He turned his head full in her direction and looked at her in surprise. “I haven't told you before?”

“Alex, you know you haven't. I know it's painful, but I have no idea why. I think I ought to hear about it. Something, anyway.”

“Like a Le Carre novel,” he said. “The defector has to spill everything before the other side will take him in. What's it called—debriefing?”

She wished, as she sometimes did, that he didn't always joke. “I don't mean to be grilling you. If you're going to look on me as the KGB, forget I asked.”

He sighed, and there was a silence. His face against the rain-streaked window lost its smile and looked grim, but she recognized the look as the one he wore when he was writing. He was finding the right words for it—this story he had so long avoided telling her. She knew that now, having committed himself to her, he would tell her what she wanted to know: in a sense, she had him in her power. The car slowed and pulled into a rest stop. “Let's get a cup of coffee,” he said. “And food. If I'm going to talk, comrade, I've got to eat.”

They ran hand in hand through the rain to the nearly deserted Howard Johnson's. They sat in a booth and drank coffee. Alex ordered a hamburger, Dorrie a grilled cheese sandwich, and when the waitress had gone away he said, “All right. My first wife. Beth. You really want to hear this?”

“Only if you really want to tell me.”

“All right,” he said. “Yes. What the hell.” She thought he looked tired. She thought she should probably spare him, say, “Some other time,” but she didn't. She waited silently, and he said, “I've never spoken about it because it's very sordid. I don't like to think about it.” He sighed. “All right, the first thing you need to know about Beth is that she was a bitch.”

At first that was all he said, with variations: a total bitch, a bitch with no redeeming qualities, a bitch who had put him through hell, who had spent years doing her best to blight his life, who had damn near succeeded. A world-class bitch.

The waitress brought their food, and Alex paused and tore into his hamburger as if saying even that much had worn him out. He ate steadily while Dorrie nibbled at her cheese sandwich, watching him. “Bitch”: that meaningless word men use to describe women who have done them wrongs. She waited. Alex would do better than that.

He wolfed down half his hamburger and put it back on the plate. “The second thing you need to know is that she was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen,” he said. “The kind of woman people turn around and stare at. Gawk at. She should have been a movie star, or a model, someone whose face goes up on billboards to stun people with the possibilities of the species.”

“What was she? I mean, what did she do?”

“Beth?” He snorted. “Nothing. She stayed home and worshiped herself. Actually—let me be fair—she was a secretary when I met her. In one of the offices at that little college in New Hampshire where I taught for a semester. A lousy secretary too, her boss told me—jokingly, when I took her away to marry her. They kept her on for her looks. She was spectacular. I'm sure she increased the enrollment at that hellhole. I've never seen anyone so beautiful, and I hope I never do again. She couldn't keep her mind for two seconds on anything but herself, and she was as cold as a clock. And of course, paradoxically, she slept with anyone. Everyone. Any creepy guy who gawked at her on the street, anyone who came to the apartment to fix the phone or wash the windows.” He no longer seemed tired; he seemed to relish his tale. “She had an affair with her dentist, her gynecologist, the super of our building, one of the kids' teachers. Anyone who wanted her—and everyone wanted her, of course. As far as I know, she never said no. Or probably it's more accurate to say no one ever said no to her, since I have no doubt that she's the one who did the asking.” He took another bite of his hamburger, and looked over at her accusingly, chewing. “I told you I can't stand beautiful women and you got mad at me.”

“You should have told me then. Why.”

“But you were so cute when you were mad.”

She laughed obligingly, thinking: how funny it was, how perfectly like an example of Alex's ironic humor, that it was her own safe lack of beauty that had drawn him to her. She didn't resent this; she felt almost proud of it. Here was her small victory against one of those golden girls who had always aroused her envy and misery and dislike: Beth had blighted Alex's life—she had renewed it.

“She told you all this? About her—affairs?”

“Oh, yes. In detail. We had a very sick relationship.” His voice was flat and detached, amused, as if he were recounting the plot of one of Rachel's stories. “Giving me the dirt about all her tedious conquests was her revenge on me because I was the one man she couldn't captivate. I found out about the first one by accident—her carelessness was insulting. And I forgave her. I made a scene, called her names, made her cry, the whole bit, but in the end I forgave her. Big-hearted guy, right? Then it happened again. That was the super. I caught them. And realized that if she'd screw the goddamn super, this overweight slob who stank of years and years of accumulated sweat and stupidity and general grossness, then she must be going down for everyone, with the possible exception of the poodle in the next apartment.”

She almost wished she hadn't asked. Perhaps it was wrong to force him to dredge all this up. She hated his detached amusement; it must be put on, for her benefit, and she wished he wouldn't do it. She wanted to tell him to stop, that was enough, and at the same time, she wanted to know more: what had taken place when Alex had come in on Beth and the super, what he had said, what everyone had done. She had a quick vision of a fat man fleeing down the fire escape, pulling on his overalls.

Dorrie said gently, “May I ask why you didn't leave her?”

He shrugged. “We had two little babies. And no money. I drank instead—it was easier and cheaper. But I never slept with her again after I found the super stinking up my bed. This seemed perfectly logical to me, although she called it priggish and perverse, among other things that were less flattering. It wasn't even that I hated her. I mean, I don't hate the garbage in my trash can. I just don't want to have anything more to do with it. I don't want to touch it.”

“You are a very fastidious person,” she said, thinking of the obsessive, stripped-down orderliness of his apartment, the way he moved around the room while he talked, tidying up.

She hadn't meant to be funny, but he grinned. “Yes,” he said. “I am.” He wiped his mouth, ostentatiously, on his napkin before leaning across the table to kiss her on the forehead. “One of the reasons I love you is that you're so neat. No messy intrigues in your life. No garbage. No layers of deceit. What you see is what you get.”

“I'm not sure anyone is that simple, Alex.”

“I don't mean simple. I mean honest.”

The waitress refilled their coffee cups. Dorrie said, “So why did you finally break up?”

“It wasn't because I hated her. I didn't. I didn't even hate the goddamn super. I didn't even insist that we move. I'm not a hater—too lazy, or something. But she hated me—quite a bit, I think. I can be a sarcastic bastard. And I was so obviously indifferent to her and the poor slobs she lured into her net. Genuinely indifferent, I promise you.” He put his hand on his heart. “I was never a jealous husband, never pissed off at being a cuckold. I honestly didn't give a damn. I wish now that I did care a little. I hate to think that I lived without feeling much of anything for eight years, but that's what I did.”

Could that have been true? Warm-hearted Alex? She took his hand from his chest, and held it. He looked down at their hands, clasped on the Formica, and went on, smiling slightly. “Anyway, all that sort of built up. We gave each other a hard time, to put it mildly. And the boys got older, and took her side every time. She was an incredibly devoted mother. Of course, they were sons. Daughters I think she might have liked a little less. But the boys were her slaves. Still are.” He paused, thinking of his faraway sons. Dorrie wondered if she would meet them, if they would come to the wedding: dressed up in suits, chatting with Hugo about sports. They would scare Hugo to death. They'd scare me to death, she thought. “They're lost to me,” Alex said. “They're her kids—I'm not sure I'll ever see them again. I accept that.” He gave her a hard, defiant look. “Let me be honest, Dorrie. I don't even like them. My own children. I haven't liked them for years.”

“Oh, Alex.”

“What the hell. You wanted to kill your brother; I can't stand my own kids. Now we know the worst about each other.”

She squeezed his hand. “From their pictures,” she said, “they don't seem anything like you.”

He shook his head, dismissing the subject. “They're just lost,” he said. “Not something I want to dwell on.” He looked beyond her into the back of the restaurant as if into the complex parts of his life that were, despite his outpouring, closed to her.

She said, “I'm sorry, Alex,” and he focused on her again almost with annoyance.

“Forget it,” he said, so harshly that she was unable to go on and say, I'll make it up to you, you'll have other children, you'll get another chance.

There was an awkward pause, and then he sighed, and continued, “So finally I made a little money. And divorce became possible, and once it became possible it became a necessity, like some drug I'd heard about but could never afford before. I had to have it.” He shrugged. “And so we split. Just in time, probably. One of us would have gone mad if we'd hung on together much longer. Me, probably. I'm sure Beth is as impervious to madness as she is to most things.”

He seemed to be done. He finished up his hamburger, drank his coffee. She was sure he had told her the whole story, and yet she felt she knew nothing. How could such a marriage have endured for so long? What had it been like, day to day? Had they ever talked? Had they gone out? Gone to movies? Had they looked at the paintings in the Boston Museum? All those Millets Alex said used to be there, a roomful—had he looked at them with Beth? And the little boys: had there been picnics, parties, the Freedom Trail, Sturbridge Village? Or had Alex sat alone in his room, drinking? Warm-hearted Alex: how had he endured it? Perversely, against her will, she wondered if Beth had a sad story too—if Alex had blighted her life while she was blighting his. She wondered what it was like to be someone people turned around to look at. Beth walking down Boylston Street with her pretty little sons, stopping traffic. She wished, suddenly, passionately, that Alex was a bachelor, that he was bringing to her a past as neat and uncomplicated (dull, flat, empty, she thought) as her own. She didn't want beautiful, bitchy Beth trailing behind him—Beth and the lost boys. She believed him, that he had been glad to be rid of his wife, that she meant nothing to him, and yet she knew he must have loved her once. And the boys. He must have cuddled them as babies, kissed them, lifted them high in the air to make them squeal with delight. She thought of her parents and Phinny. You might not like your children, but surely you kept loving them.

“Any more questions?”

“Only one,” she said.

“Grill on, comrade.” He smiled at her. “But I know what your question is. The answer is yes, I did. But not with anyone I cared about. I couldn't find anyone to care about. I thought everything was over for me.”

It hadn't been what she was going to ask, but she looked at his weary, shadowed eyes, the wisps of graying hair around his ears, the stitching of wrinkles around his mouth, and said to herself, Drop it, Dorrie. Lately, in the parts of his new novel that she had been reading, his hero, Henry—the writer with the dog—had been thinking a lot about the passing of time, about growing older, about the unlikeliness of his ever seeing the Grand Canyon before he died. Alex had told her that Henry would reach it in the end. He and Woofy would stand before the immensity of it, red rock and vast vistas, and Henry would be happy. For the first time in his life, Alex had said. He had also said that it was because of Dorrie that his book would have a happy ending. She said, “When you say everything was over, I assume you mean what Rachel calls the ecstatic bit.”

“Hey, don't writers have a gift for it? Yeah, that's what I mean. No more ecstasy. And then I met you.”

It hadn't been her question, but his answer was exactly what she wanted to hear—was what, for years and years, she had assumed no man would say to her. Everything over, until now. “And it's been unbridled ecstasy ever since,” she said lightly, tears behind her eyes.

“Damn right.”

They sat looking at each other, holding hands across the table. His hand was long, thin, veined, yellowish with the remnants of his summer tan; hers, held in it, looked pure white, and young. She liked it, she realized, that he was so much older than she: nine years. He would keep her young; she would always be his young wife.

“How could we not get married?” he asked. He was smiling at her as he had over Rachel's bouquet. “It's been inevitable since the night we met.” It was true, she thought: love had pounced on them quickly and dragged them down. There had been no games, no fooling around, none of the fears she was so used to in her relations with men. She had never had to doubt him. But something was tugging at the calm surface of her mind—some hitch? Something besides Beth and the boys and Alex's past. It came to her:
Hugo
. She shoved it away again; it would work out. How? The question kept bobbing back, like an ice cube in a drink. How, precisely?

“I do love you, Alex,” she said, as if apologizing.