The Last Lovely City (2 page)

Therefore Carter was pleased, he was very pleased, when Isabel began to speak with some warmth of this new friend, Meredith. “She’s big and fat, in fact she’s built like a cow, and she’s very Southern, but she has a pretty voice and she works in the music department, she teaches there, and she seems to have a sense of humor. You won’t mind if I ask her over?”

Meeting Meredith, and gradually spending some time with her, Carter at first thought she was a good scout, like someone’s sister. Like many big women (Isabel’s description had been unkind), she had a pleasant disposition and lovely skin. Nice long brown hair, and her eyes, if just too closely placed, were the clear, warm brown of Southern brooks. With Carter, her new friend’s husband, she was flirty in a friendly, pleasant way—the way of Southern women, a way he was used to. She was like his mother’s friends, and his cousins, and the nice girls from Ashley Hall whom he used to take to dances at The Citadel.

Meredith became the family friend. She was often invited to dinner parties, or sometimes just for supper by herself. She and Isabel always seemed to have a lot to talk about. Concerts in New York, composers and musicians, not to mention a lot of local gossip.

When they were alone, Carter gathered, they talked about Meredith’s boyfriends, of which she seemed to have a large and steady supply. “She’s this certain type of Southern belle,” was
Isabel’s opinion. “Not threateningly attractive, but sexy and basically comfy. She makes men feel good, with those big adoring cow eyes.”

Did Isabel confide in Meredith? Carter suspected that she did, and later he found out for certain from Meredith that she had. About her own affairs. Her boyfriends.

Although he had every reason to know that she was unhappy, Carter was devastated by Isabel’s departure. Against all reason, miserably, he felt that his life was demolished. Irrationally, instead of remembering a bitter, complaining Isabel (“I can’t stand this tacky town a minute longer”) or an Isabel with whom things did not work out well in bed (“Well, Jesus Christ, is that what you learned at The Citadel?”), he recalled only her beauty. Her clothes, and her scents. Her long blond hair.

He was quite surprised, at first, when Meredith began to call a lot with messages of sympathy, when she seemed to take his side. “You poor guy, you certainly didn’t deserve this,” was one of the things she said at the time. Told that he was finding it hard to eat—“I don’t know, everything I try tastes awful”—she began to arrive every day or so, at mealtimes, with delicately flavored chicken and oven-fresh Sally Lunn, tomatoes from her garden, and cookies, lots and lots of homemade cookies. Then she took to inviting him to her house for dinner—often.

As he left her house, at night, Carter would always kiss Meredith, in a friendly way, but somehow, imperceptibly, the kisses and their accompanying embraces became more prolonged. Also, Carter found that this good-night moment was something he looked forward to. Until the night when Meredith whispered to him, “You really don’t have to go home, you know. You could stay with me.” More kissing, and then, “Please stay. I want you, my darling Carter.”

Sex with Meredith was sweet and pleasant and friendly, and
if it lacked the wild rush that he had sometimes felt with Isabel, at least when he failed her she was nice about it. Sweet and comforting. Unlike angry Isabel.

They married as soon as his divorce was final, and together they bought the bargain house, on a hill outside town, and they set about remodeling: shingling, making a garden, making a kitchen and a bedroom with wonderful views. Carter, like everyone else in the high-flying eighties, had made some money on the market, and he put all this into the house. The house became very beautiful; they loved it, and in that house Carter and Meredith thrived. Or so he thought.

He thought so until the day she came to him in anguished tears and told him, “This terrible thing. I’ve fallen in love with Adam.” Adam, a lean young musician, a cellist, who had been to the house for dinner a couple of times. Unprepossessing, Carter would have said.

Carter felt, at first, a virile rage. Bloodily murderous fantasies obsessed his waking hours; at night he could barely sleep. He was almost unrecognizable to himself, this furiously, righteously impassioned man. With Meredith he was icily, enragedly cold. And then, one day, Meredith came to him and with more tears she told him, “It’s over, I’ll never see him again. Or if I do we’ll just be friends.”

After that followed a brief and intense and, to Carter, slightly unreal period of, well, fucking: the fury with which they went at each other could not be called “making love.” Meredith was the first to taper off; she responded less and less actively, although as always she was pleasant, nice. But Carter finally asked her what was wrong, and she admitted, through more tears, “It’s Adam. I’m seeing him again. I mean, we’re in love again.”

This time, Carter reacted not with rage but with a sort of defeated grief. He felt terribly old and battered.
Cuckold
.
The ugly, old-fashioned word resounded, echoing through his brain. He thought, I am the sort of man to whom women are unfaithful.

When he moved out, away from Meredith and into an apartment, and Chase Landau fell in love with him (quite rapidly, it seemed), Carter assumed that she must be crazy. It even seemed a little nuts for her to ask him for dinner soon after they met, introducing themselves in the elevator. Chase lived in his building, but her apartment, which contained her studio, was about twice the size of Carter’s and much nicer, with balconies and views. “I liked your face,” she later explained. “I always go for those narrow, cold, mean eyes.” Laughing, making it a joke.

Chase was a tall, thin, red-haired woman, not Southern but from New York, and somewhat abrasive in manner. A painter of considerable talent and reputation (no wonder Meredith was impressed). Carter himself was impressed at finding inquiries from
Who’s Who
lying around, especially because she never mentioned it. In his field, only the really major players made it.

Her paintings were huge, dark, and violent abstractions, incomprehensible. Discomforting. How could anyone buy these things and live with them? As they sat having drinks that first night, working at light conversation, Carter felt the paintings as enormous, hostile presences.

Chase was almost as tall as Carter, close to six feet, and thin, but heavy-breasted, which may have accounted for her bad posture; she tended to slouch, and later she admitted, “When I was very young I didn’t like my body at all. So conspicuous.” Carter liked her body, very much. Her eyes were intense and serious, always.

As they were finishing dinner she said to him, “Your shoulders are wonderful. I mean the angle of them. This,” and she reached with strong hands to show him.

He found himself aroused by that touch, wanting to turn
and grasp her. To kiss. But not doing so. Later on, he did kiss her good night, but very chastely.

Used to living with women, with Isabel and then with Meredith, Carter began to wonder what to do by himself at night. He had never been much of a reader, and most television bored him. In the small town that Chapel Hill still was in many ways, you would think (Carter thought) that people knowing of the separation would call and ask him over, but so far no one had. He wished he had more friends; he should have been warmer, kinder. Closer to people. He felt very old, and alone. (He wondered,
Are
my eyes mean? Am
I
mean?)

He called Chase and asked her out to dinner. “I know it’s terribly short notice, but are you busy tonight?”

“No, in fact I’d love to go out tonight. I’m glad you called.”

His heart leaped up at those mild words.

During that dinner, Chase talked quite a lot about the art world: her New York gallery, the one in L.A., the local art department. He listened, grateful for the entertainment she provided, but he really wasn’t paying much attention. He was thinking of later on: would she, possibly, so soon—

She would not. At the door, she bid him a clear good night after a rather perfunctory social kiss. She thanked him for the dinner. She had talked too much, she feared; she tended to do that with new people, she told him, with a small, not quite apologetic, laugh.

From a friend in the law school, Carter got the name of a lawyer, a woman, with whom he spent an uncomfortable, discouraging, and expensive half hour. What it came to was that in order to recover his share in the house, Carter would have to force Meredith to sell it, unless she could buy him out. None of this was final, of course; it was just the lawyer’s temporary take on things. Still, it was deeply depressing to Carter.

Coming home, in the downstairs lobby of his building he ran into Chase, who was carrying a sack of groceries, which of course he offered to take.

“Only if you’ll come and have supper with me.” She flashed him a challenging smile. “I must have been thinking of you. I know I bought too much.”

That night it was he who talked a lot. She only interrupted from time to time with small but sharp-edged questions. “If you didn’t want to go to The Citadel, why didn’t you speak up?” And, “Do you think you trusted Meredith at first because she’s not as good-looking as Isabel?” The sort of questions that he usually hated—that he hated from Dr. Chen—but not so with Chase; her dark, intelligent eyes were kind and alert. He almost forgot his wish to make love to her.

But then he remembered, and all that desire returned. He told her, “It’s all I can do not to touch you. You’re most terrifically attractive to me.”

By way of answer, she smiled and leaned to meet him in a kiss. For a long time, then, like adolescents, they sat there kissing on her sofa, until she whispered, “Come on, let’s go to bed. This is silly.”

Carter had not expected their progress to be quite so rapid. He hardly knew her; did he really want this? But not long after that, they were indeed in bed, both naked. He caressed her soft, heavy breasts.

Pausing, sitting up to reach somewhere, Chase said, “You’ll have to wear this. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Lord. I haven’t done that since I was twenty. And look, I’m safe. I never played around.”

“I know, but Meredith did. A lot.”

“I don’t think I can—”

“Here, I’ll help you.”

“Damn, I’m losing it; I knew I would.”

Strictly speaking, technically, that night was not a great success.
Still, literally they had gone to bed together, and Carter’s feeling was that this was not a woman who fell into bed very easily (unlike—he had to think this—either Isabel or Meredith).

The next day he had another appointment with the lawyer, who had talked with Meredith’s lawyer, who had said that things looked worse.

“I don’t know why I’m so drawn to you,” Chase told him, “but I really am.” She laughed. “That’s probably not a good sign. For you, I mean. The men I’ve really liked best were close to certifiable. But you’re not crazy, are you?”

“Not so far as I know.”

Chase did not seem crazy to him. She was hardworking, very intelligent. Her two sons, with whom she got along well, were off in school, and she was surrounded by warm and admiring friends; her phone rang all the time with invitations, friendly voices. But, as Carter put it to himself, she did sometimes seem a little much. A little more than he had bargained for. Or more than he was up to right now.

Their sexual life, despite her continued insistence on—hated phrase—“safe sex,” was sometimes great, then not. Chase complained, though nicely, that out of bed he was not affectionate. “I could use more plain, unsexy touching,” she said, and he tried to comply, though demonstrativeness was not at all in his nature.

Carter’s broker called with bad news, quite a lot of bad news. Carter, like most people in the market, had taken a beating.

Even Chase would admit that her work habits were a little strange. She liked to get up late and spend a couple of hours
drinking coffee, phoning, maybe writing a letter or two. She would then go into her studio (a room to which Carter was never admitted). At times she would emerge to eat a piece of fruit, heat some soup, or, less frequently, go out for a short walk along the graveled paths of old Chapel Hill. Back in her studio, immersed in her work, quite often she would forget about dinner until ten at night, or eleven; she did not forget dinner dates, but she sometimes phoned to break or postpone them.

Carter argued, “But if you started earlier in the morning you could finish—”

“I know. I know it’s impractical, but it’s the way I seem to have to work. I’m sorry. It’s not something I can change.”

Along with feeling some annoyance, Carter was moved and a little alarmed by her intensity, her high purpose.

Sometimes, in bed, Chase cried out quick, impassioned words of love to him—which Carter did not answer in kind, nor did he take what she said at those moments too seriously. In fact, as he was later forced to recognize, he gave rather little thought to Chase’s deeper feelings. “You didn’t want to deal with what I felt,” she accused him, and he had to admit that that was entirely correct.

“Adam and I aren’t getting along at all,” said Meredith to Carter, over the phone. “I don’t know—he’s a lot more neurotic than I thought he was.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” was Carter’s response. Not saying,
Now
you find this out, after wrecking our marriage and costing God knows what in lawyers’ bills.

“He’s very dependent,” Meredith said. “I don’t really like that. I guess I was spoiled by you.”

“I don’t know why she’s telling me this stuff,” Carter said to
Chase when she called; the old instinct of compulsive honesty had forced him to repeat the conversation with Meredith.

“I think she wants you back,” Chase told him. “You wait and see.”

“You think so? Really?”

“Jesus, Carter, you sound sort of pleased. If she did, would you even consider it?”

“Well, I don’t know.” As always, the literal truth; he did not know.

“God, Carter, she slept with everyone. Everyone in town knows that. Why do you think I insisted on safe sex?”

She was furiously excited, almost hysterical, Carter thought. She was out of control. A little frightening—but he only said, “Oh, come on, now.”