Another Marvelous Thing (7 page)

“Did you ever notice how often we're together in extreme weather?” Francis observed.

It was true. They had kept company during the two worst blizzards in fifty years, through the hottest December on record, the coldest June, the rainiest October, and they had seen snow squalls in April and had once broken up on a day when a tornado watch had been in effect.

“Just think,” Billy said, “if someone says to you ‘Remember the ice storm of two years ago?' you will be forced to remember that you spent it messing around with me.”

Francis did not say, as he often did: “I wish you wouldn't use the term ‘messing around.'” He stared out the window and remarked that the rain seemed to be letting up.

Of course it was hard to know what other people remembered. Did Billy remember each blizzard, each drought, each heat wave by Francis's presence during it? That was the thing about a love affair. It went by frame by frame, unlike ordinary life, which unrolled slowly and surely, whose high moments did not tear your heart apart when you thought of them because they were affixed, as surely as a turquoise in a silver bracelet, in context. The time Billy and Francis spent together had a beginning and an end. The middle was full of moments, of one sort or another. It was like a movie—it was like a French movie, Francis said, in which the lovers leave a Chinese restaurant, as they did now, when they thought a rainstorm had let up, only to find themselves pressed together in the doorway of an Oriental grocery store, penned in by what looked like a monsoon. Francis could see the raindrops on Billy's face, and he would see them many times again, just as he frequently conjured her up putting on her shabby clothes or standing under a ginkgo tree in autumn and letting the yellow, fan-shaped leaves drift past her shoulders.

Billy was half asleep in the car on the way home. Love was full of shadows. Even a child of three knew that the illicit lover and his wife were stand-ins for the mother and father. She looked over groggily at Francis. He did not remind her of her father. She yawned and squirmed. She longed to be home alone in her rightful bed with her head pressed against Grey's pillow and to go to sleep as if she were innocent again and the way before her was straight as a shot arrow.

Grey was due back Friday afternoon, and Vera on Saturday at noon. On Thursday morning the sky cleared and after a week of clouds and rain, the sun came out. Francis appeared at Billy's door with a bouquet of flowers in green florist's tissue.

“It's too beautiful to stay indoors,” he said.

“Is ‘stay indoors' a euphemism for going upstairs and have you throw yourself at me?”

“We're going for a walk,” said Francis. “In your closet is a yellow dress with short sleeves. I'll pay you to take off those repellent trousers and put that dress on.”

Billy went upstairs obediently and changed her clothes. She knew from past experience that Francis had a reluctance, like Vera's about sharing drinks, about sharing Billy the day his wife was about to return home. These niceties made less difference to Billy, who lived with her conflicted feelings as if they had been a broken leg.

When she got downstairs, Francis was reading her mail—he did this every chance he got.

“The Medieval Society,” he said, holding up a pamphlet. “The telephone bill. Why don't you ever get any interesting mail? What's this?” He picked up an air letter, clearly from Grey, which Billy plucked from his fingers.

“This is my interesting mail,” she said. “Let's go.”

They drove to an out-of-the-way park they had discovered quite early in their love affair.

“What an entertainment you are,” said Francis as Billy yawned next to him. Billy was exhausted. She had been with Francis every day and it made her feel as if she had been living in the weird atmosphere of another planet—like a ghost dog from outer space. Gesture, nuance, feeling, poignancy—how draining these things were!

The air in the park was perfectly still. The sun poured down.

“Maybe we should knock it off for a while,” said Billy as they walked to the park gate.

“A first,” Francis said. “A breakup in nice weather. Do you remember the first time we came here?”

Billy remembered. It had been winter and the park lay under snow. The cardinals, starlings, and blue jays called from the bare trees. The great, gnarled mulberry tree had been gray and empty. The following June, Francis and Billy had taken a sun-bath near it and watched two Slavic ladies gathering ripe mulberries into a basket.

Now the park was in its early blossom, blooming with pink and orange azalea. The dogwood and magnolia were out, and the path was scattered with petals. The scotch broom was covered with little waxy yellow flowers.

They walked without speaking, each thinking a million things. Real life opened before them: their spouses home in their rightful places. In July and August, the Clemenses went to a house in the South of France. In August, Billy and Grey went to Maine.

The next time Billy and Francis came to this park—although they might part for good and never come back—the leaves would have turned from green to red and yellow. The cedar waxwings would be eating the last of the crab apples. The light would have turned from gold to silver and the air would be chill.

But now the sunshine warmed them. They walked with their arms entwined. Francis kissed the top of Billy's hair, which was warm and sweet.

A few violets bloomed beneath a birch tree. Francis picked one and stuck it behind Billy's ear. Billy picked a spray of broom and put it through Francis's buttonhole.

Thus bedecked, they ambled. Actually they were killing time and putting a spin on their last moments all at once. They might part forever—it hardly mattered. These moments, so vivid and intense, were as enduring and specific as a piece of music, and could be replayed over and over again.

As they walked through a grove of poplar trees, the light speckled their arms. Above them cardinals, starlings, and chickadees called to one another. The lawn was dotted with dandelions and buttercups. This pleasant afternoon might be temporarily forgotten, but with the merest effort surely it could be called back in almost perfect detail.

A Little Something

Late one Saturday afternoon at the beginning of the new year, Francis Clemens sat at a dining room table waiting for his soup to cool. In his own household, the food was generally excellent, but he was not in his own household and the soup he was about to eat had come straight from a can. It was accompanied by two sad-looking pieces of toast that had the texture and taste of corkboard. The butter on this bread tasted, as his wife, Vera, would have said, “a little iceboxy.”

Francis wore twill trousers, a blue shirt, and a pair of socks. His shoes and underwear were upstairs, and his wife was in Hawaii redesigning the house of a famous dancer.

Across from Francis, nibbling a saltine, was Billy Delielle. As usual, she was sleepy. She dipped the end of her saltine into her soup and licked it absently. She looked like a baby learning to eat.

“What a sight you are,” said Francis tenderly. She was not quite awake.

“You look rather sweet,” she said. “You look like a ruined satyr. Your hair is all mussed.”

Francis patted his hair into place. “When we finish this awful soup, let's go upstairs and take a nap.”

“Nap,” snorted Billy. “That'll be the day.”

She was wearing his sweater which made Francis's heart flutter. He could never quite get over her, even if he had just seen her three seconds before. He peered to see if she was going to finish her soup. He was starving and he knew he had eaten the last of the bread. He reflected that he never got enough to eat at Billy's and that, no matter how much he got of her, his hunger for her never quite abated. He looked out the window to see that it was sleeting. The idea of going out into the cold to get a decent lunch held little charm. Under the table he nudged her with his foot.

“Hey,” he said.

Billy looked up. She was half asleep. “Hey what?” she said.

“I'm starving.”

“Hmm,” said Billy.

“I require an egg,” said Francis. “More soup. Anything.”

“There aren't any eggs,” Billy said. “I ate the last one.”

“Soup,” said Francis.

“There isn't any more,” said Billy. “This is the last can.”

“A saltine.”

“This is the last saltine,” said Billy. “Do you want half of it?”

Francis regarded the saltine half. It looked wet and it was not, in fact, half. It was more a scant third.

“There's some wheat germ,” said Billie. “On second thought, there's not. Gee, I'm not good for much, am I?”

“Not for food,” said Francis. “But you have compensating charms.”

“Hey,” said Billy. “I know what. You stay here.”

She went into the kitchen and returned carrying a pottery terrine in the shape of a goose. Francis knew at once that it was full of pâté de foie gras.

“I forgot about this,” Billy said. “Grey's uncle sent it to us ages ago. And look! Water biscuits.”

Francis adored foie gras. He thought, longingly, of brown bread with Normandy butter, endive salad, chilled white wine, and spicy little
cornichons
to go with it, but here at Billy's table, they ate their slices on stale water biscuits. He thought of other meals he would like to have with it: double consommé with tiny meat dumplings, Bibb lettuce with mustard dressing, toast points. On white plates with big linen napkins. This was his way of making mental reference to Vera, who knew how to serve foie gras, without thinking about her.

Francis considered himself an excellent husband. He fetched his wife's luggage, picked her up from the airport and carried her thence, drew her bath when she was tired, weather-stripped the bedroom windows, saw to her investments, gave financial advice to members of her family, was moderate in his habits and, in general, was a cheering sort of companion. His many years with Vera were rich in history.

And yet, he thought, as he gazed at the top of Billy's head, at his age a man required a little light and dark—a little something that made the images of life as clear and startling as those on a photographic plate.

Francis often thought of this love affair in architectural terms—as a folly or gazebo or some small chapel done in California Spanish Gothic. Whatever it was, it was an eccentric structure full of twists, turns, gargoyles, and mazes—a kind of created wilderness, like the gardens of Capability Brown.

He smiled across the table. A smile stole—the only way it ever got there—across Billy's features. It quite lit up her face and reminded Francis how much he loved her.

“It's so rare to see you smile,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Each time I see it, I always think I ought to have a picture of it.”

“Smart idea,” said Billy. “You could make it into postcards and send it to your friends at Christmas.”

Late at night Francis went out into the cold and drove to his own abode to sleep alone. He and Billy did not have what Billy referred to as “sleep-over dates.” The ostensible reason for the shunning of sleep-over dates was the late-night telephone call from a traveling spouse, but the truth, although Francis was not sure quite
what
the truth was, was probably more complicated. For instance, Billy hated his house and usually refused to set a foot within it. Therefore their dealings took place at Billy's. Furthermore, she became extremely uneasy whenever Francis followed her into her bedroom. Francis, of course, followed her any chance he got—when she went to change her clothes, for example. He had noticed with an unpleasant jolt that the bed his mistress shared with her husband was rather small, whereas the bed he shared with his wife was rather large.

Late at night it was not unusual for Francis to find himself wide awake, exhausted, and unable to sleep. The theme of this insomnia was Grey Delielle. Often he simply held an image of Grey in his mind—Grey with his elbows on Francis's dinner table talking in his soft, intelligent voice, an image from the one dinner party Billy and Grey had been to, although they had been invited several times.

What did he know about Grey? That he had done graduate work at the London School of Economics and had worked on Wall Street for a year before he quit in a combination of boredom and despondency. He had been snapped up to be economic adviser and troubleshooter at the Valeur Foundation, where he wrote white papers on economic trends and represented the foundation at various seminars and policy meetings here and abroad. He had invented the Delielle curve, which predicted the fluctuation of interest rates. He had two sisters, Helena and Alice. Helena, Francis seemed to remember, lived with her husband and children in Scotland. He could not remember what Alice did. Perhaps Billy had never said. Grey had studied Russian and as an undergraduate had had a fellowship for a year at the University of Leningrad. He was a minor expert on iron curtain country economies.

He was five feet eleven and a half, had wavy brown hair, and wore the kind of glasses the National Health gives out—plain, round, with a wire rim. He liked racket sports—had Francis once entertained the notion of playing squash with him?—and also loved soccer.

The only subject on which Billy was forthcoming about Grey was his relationship to the natural world: he was a trout fisherman, a tier of flies, a finder and cataloger of bird's nests, fossils, animal bones. He was interested in flora and fauna of all kinds, in contrast to Francis, who liked cut flowers and domestic animals such as Irish terriers and beef cows.

And what did this amount to? Billy's real life was Grey. They almost looked alike: well made, dark-haired, solid.

These reflections made his heart pound.

Every once in a while he would try to snag another crumb of information from his beloved.

“About you and Grey,” he would begin. A perfectly blank look would cover Billy's features. She did not approve of this sort of conversation. Francis had to admit that she had never solicited anything about Vera: he had always told her more than she ever wanted to know.