The Embezzler (26 page)

Obviously, everything. But by the time I realized this, idiot that I was, I was too committed to those weekends to give them up. I felt, somewhere deep within me, a new, shocking, surly defiance of the sense of duty that had always dominated me. "What have you really had for all your work?" the truculent inner voice kept snarling. "What have you had but money that you didn't want and a home that has become a hospital?" Oh, I would be loyal to that home! I swore in my odious guilt that I would be. But how would it help Lucy if I gave up my rides?

Never had I discussed my life so intimately with anyone as I did that spring with Angelica. She and I were well prepared for this new friendship as we already knew the important things about each other. I knew about Guy and his philanderings; she about Lucy and her arthritis. She knew my George as well as I knew her Evadne. We were each hilariously refreshed by the novelty of the other's point of view in areas which we had thought too familiar for further surprises.

Nor was the danger only for me. Angelica made little effort to conceal that she found me a welcome contrast to the society that Long Island had offered her in such heaping doses. She liked my indifference to her husband's adored Glenville Club; she liked my seriousness about things that had been simply funny to her; she even professed to like my stuffiness and what she called my "axeless" religiosity. "You carry out so scrupulously the mandates of a God in whom you don't really believe," she told me. "I find that stylish!" I suspected ( and it was more than the wish being parent to the idea) that she had lived too long without love. There was a candor about the pleasure that she took in our rides which had a quaint and charming innocence to it. But what happened to innocence if there was no conscience? And did she not boast of being an epicurean?

So, obviously, we should not have gone riding together, but after only two weekends it was equally obvious that we were going right on with it. There was not even any further pretense that I was being trained for the hunt. Our talk was too important to us. Sometimes we would proceed at a walk for as much as an hour at a time while Angelica talked of her life, her children, her mother, her house—and Guy. She seemed to take it for granted that I would accept any confidences, as if, in all the years of our acquaintance, we had both known that our brief and rather formal communications were destined one day to flower into this equestrian understanding.

One morning as we left the stable, Guy came speeding down the driveway in his yellow Packard roadster with a very vivid blonde, one Mrs. Apsley, on the seat beside him. He jammed on his brakes, hailed us, wished us a good ride and roared on.

"Guy always wants me to have a good time," Angelica observed dryly. "He might do me the courtesy occasionally to frown when he sees me with another man. Just for manners' sake. But no. He never had a jealous bone in his body. Even in the days when he cared."

"He never cares now?" My effort to make the question casual was so clumsy that she smiled.

"Well, he cares for Evelyn Apsley, but that, of course, won't last. What I mean is that Guy is totally without sexual jealousy. Some animals are like that."

"Rather low forms of animals, I should say. Are you jealous of Mrs. Apsley?"

"Not in the least. But then I'm not in love with Guy. I haven't been for ten years. But before that I was jealous. Oh, yes, passionately! I could have torn the eyes out of every girl he looked at. But he was always willing to allow me the same latitude he allowed himself."

"How contemptible!" I exclaimed and kicked my horse into a trot. I was still sufficiently confused about my emotions to hate to hear Angelica talk dispassionately about her husband. She was my heroine, and I wanted my heroine to be very brave, very noble and very wronged, and how could she be all those things if she didn't care what he did? It might seem that I should have been pleased at her conjugal indifference, that I had nothing to gain if she still cared for Guy, but what did I want to gain? Nothing that I would yet admit to myself!

Lucy had gone to Arizona for what was now her annual cure, and George was at Harvard, so that I was without the sense of a family at home to restrain me on the day that Angelica and I had our crucial talk. Once again it started with her analyzing Guy. Her curiosity about a husband whom she professed no longer to love exasperated me unreasonably.

"I suppose the secret of Guy is that he's always content with the status quo," she was speculating. "Any status quo. It can be very undermining to those who live with him. One finds oneself so constantly being used. And Guy uses one in such perfectly good faith, that's the devilish thing! My house, my horses, my friends, my own mother, are always being converted into stage props for the glorification of Guy Prime. We end up looking as he wants us to look, as
he
thinks we are. And as, God help us, we may be! Do you know that if I didn't lock my door at night he'd probably come from the arms of Evelyn Apsley to make love to me? As if we were a blissfully happy married couple? Sometimes I wonder which is the dreamer? Guy or I?"

"He is the dreamer," I said firmly. "Your feet are on the ground." I glanced away from her, over the meadows, to the long purple façade of her beautiful house. "So don't unlock your door."

I sensed the embarrassment in her averted head, but I knew that she was not offended. Her remark had been wildly provocative. "Never fear. I shan't. All that is long over between Guy and me. Tell me one thing about Guy, and then I'll stop talking about him." She reined her horse to a stop and gave me a searching look. "Has he borrowed any money from you recently? I mean since we've been riding together?"

I flushed very red. "No."

"Thank goodness." Abruptly she trotted on. "That's all I wanted to know."

"Are you having money troubles?" I demanded anxiously.

"No more than usual. Never mind about them. I count on you for sympathy, not for cash."

"But cash means so little to me!" I protested, spurring ahead to catch up with her. When she did not turn, I let slip the last cable of my common sense. "Nothing means anything to me but you!"

Angelica turned now, smiling, and reached over to hit my shoulder with her riding crop. "Pupils are not supposed to make love to their riding instructors!"

"Angelica, I adore you!"

For answer she simply kicked her horse and galloped away. All the way back to the stable she kept ahead of me, and when she dismounted, the presence o£ the groom prevented further confidences. But I noted the high color in her normally pale cheeks.

"Thank you, Rex," she called to me cheerfully, "for a very pleasant ride!"

My car was parked at the stable, in full sight of the groom; there seemed no way to be alone with her. As she continued to smile, I walked over to the car and got in. She waved her riding crop, still smiling, as I drove off.

O
N OUR NEXT
Monday lunch Guy looked very grave and told me that he had an important matter to discuss. For a terrible moment I thought it was going to be Angelica, but almost immediately my incredulous ears were hearing his plea for a loan of a hundred thousand dollars. With a trembling hand I wrote the check right there at the dining room table. The trembling was caused by a giddy combination of relief and anticipation. The bawd is only a loathsome figure to the satisfied lover. At that moment Guy seemed as benevolent as Santa Claus. He had given me back my good conscience.

Now I come to the part of my memoir where I can mince no words. Lucy was off for the winter in Arizona. Guy was "squared." The next time I went riding with Angelica I proposed, in a dry, businesslike tone, designed to strip my words of any cheap seductiveness, that we become lovers. In like manner, if with the slightest parody of it, she agreed. Thereafter, we met every other afternoon, for a period of four weeks, in an apartment that I rented on Riverside Drive. Then our relationship was brought to a sudden close.

Those four weeks jump out of my chronology as a period with no true part in my story, a chapter of lurid fiction irreverently inserted in a sober Victorian two-volume "life and letters," a ballet stuck into a social problem play. It was dope or euphoria or ecstasy. It was the highest point or the nadir. It was not I—at least the "I" that I had been and was to become again. It was Rex Geer posing as somebody else, Rex Geer so terrified of what he was posing as that, in the hours outside that furnished apartment overlooking a wintry river, he plunged convulsively into work and, when there was no work, grabbed people, buttonholed people, went into people's offices and clubs, did anything, in short, to avoid being caught alone with his conscience. And when he came home at night he would take two sleeping pills, he, who had never taken a sedative in his life!

I staved off remorse for two of those four weeks, and then it exploded in me like a fire bomb. People at the office asked me if I was sick or in pain. Walking down the corridors of de Grasse I sometimes put my hand to my side as if to allay an agony that seemed to be physical. But I did not give up Angelica. There was never the remotest idea of that. If anything, my agony increased my pleasure in what caused it.

On a Saturday night at the end of those four weeks I happened to be alone, except for the caretaker and his wife, in my Long Island house. During Lucy's absence I had given the staff a vacation. I was in the library reading, when Angelica, in a red evening dress and mink stole, appeared suddenly and defiantly in the doorway. Her hair was blown, and she was panting.

"I've left him!" she cried. "I've left him, and you can't make me go back!"

"Did you leave your dinner party, too?" I asked, as casually as I could, to calm her, and walked over to take off her wrap. "Didn't you tell me you were entertaining the local gentry?"

"We were entertaining all the idiots on the board of his damn club. An annual affair. And right in the middle of dinner up he jumps, with a half a bun on, to make one of his incessant toasts. You know how he
loves
toasts. He could make one in an Automat!" Here she went to the fire to warm her hands, but in a moment she had whirled around at me. "You won't believe what he toasted tonight.
Us!
"

I gaped. "You and me?"

"Well, not quite, though he would have been capable of that, too." She laughed, a bit wildly. "He toasted him and me. Our marriage. He said, with
tears
in his eyes, mind you, that it was our twenty-second wedding anniversary and he wanted to drink to 'two point two decades of bliss.' And he meant it, that's what kills me. I could stand anything in the world but his meaning itl"

"Is that when you departed?"

"No, I waited till dinner was over. I did that much for him. I slipped away while the ladies were out. Ma will see that they join the gentlemen." Here she snorted at my concern for detail. "Ma is always sublime in a crisis. It brings out the Roman in her."

"Oh, your mother is there," I said, relieved.

"Yes, and she'll keep Guy in hand. I left her a note, telling her to persuade him that it would be useless to come after me."

"And will she?"

"I don't know, and I don't care!"

I busied myself now at the cupboard getting her a drink. For the first time in a month my mind was working clearly, however feverishly. "You propose to stay here?"

"If I may?" she exclaimed in surprise. "If you'll take a poor refugee in?"

But I rejected her lightness of tone. "When I bought this house, I put the title in Lucy's name. That was more than a legal technicality. I regard it as her home."

"Pardon
me.
I'll leave right now!"

"No, my dear. You will spend the night. In a guest room. Tomorrow we will figure out a plan."

"Oh, Rex, how can you be so cold?" Angelica's tone had changed abruptly to one of throbbing appeal. "I respect how you feel about Lucy. I respect your delicacy. You can lock your door tonight if you want. What do I care about this house? Let Lucy have it. Let her have all your money, too, if she wants. Not that she does, worse luck. That would be too easy. But, poor sick darling creature that she is, isn't it enough if she has the home and George and the sympathy of all the world? Can't she let you go? Can't you and I have a little something of what's left of our lives? Good God, it's ridiculous! Here we are living in an age of universal divorce and acting like two characters in
The Scarlet Letter.
If you put it up to Lucy, do you think she'd refuse us?"

How well I knew she wouldn't! I think that moment was the climax of my agony. For there was no escaping the fact now that I was cheating two women. Nor is there any telling how I would have got out of it had not Swain, my caretaker, appeared just then in the doorway, very embarrassed and apologetic, to announce that a Mrs. Hyde was asking for me. Angelica and I exchanged glances.

"Alone?" I asked.

"Well, she's alone in the hall, sir. But she came in a big yellow car with a chauffeur."

It was Angelica who answered for us. "Tell her to come in. And, oh, Swain," she called as he turned to go. "Mrs. Hyde is my mother. I asked her to pick me up here tonight."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Have I saved your reputation?" she demanded sarcastically, when Swain had gone. "Let me ask, in return, that you not desert me while Ma is here."

Mrs. Hyde, then in her seventies, with unwrinkled skin and white hair, dressed in black velvet with no jewelry but a small antique necklace, was more effectively feminine, more persuasively authoritative than when I had first met her. She came into the room as if she were making a simple after-dinner family call. She was carrying a knitting bag and paused before the portrait of the money-lender, which she examined with a tranquil attentiveness.

"I'm afraid it's a fake," I murmured.

"Ah, but one forgives it for making such an effort," she answered pleasantly. "I've never seen a picture trying harder to be a Rembrandt."

"Won't you sit by the fire?" I urged her. "And can I get you something? A liqueur?"

"No, thank you. At the Primes' one dines very well. We had everything a body could want." Here she sat down and at once took out her needlepoint. As she prepared to work, she cast an oblique glance in Angelica's direction. "Except perhaps a hostess. Although in
her
mood, there's some question as to how much one wanted her."