Fictional Lives (14 page)

She accepted and continued to believe this even when she realized that she was going, on her father’s death—and indeed before—to be a very wealthy woman. Outside cheap novels, she couldn’t imagine that anyone would be attracted to someone else for reasons other than personality or looks; the attraction of personality being obviously the preferable kind, and the only kind likely to provide a basis for a satisfactory relationship.

Such a lack, once again, of imagination, combined with an already well-developed intellectual arrogance (by the age of twenty she was firmly convinced that she could see through everyone’s motives for all that they did; so that if there
were
such a creature in the real world as a man who cared only for money she would be able to spot him instantly), made her, clearly, vulnerable to attack. And when, at the age of twenty-nine, she
was
attacked—by a tall, blond, blue-eyed and athletic student of twenty-two, who had come to New York from his native Frankfurt in order, as he told her the first time they met, ‘to seek his fortune’—she capitulated; without a struggle.

It was partly Gerhard’s honesty that made her lay down her arms so willingly. (What he had told her was literally true.) It was partly his sense of fun; his brightness, his kindness, and the way he had of making her feel alive. (‘Are you sure you’re German?’ she had asked him; for she too had her prejudices.) It was partly—despite her having risen above such things—his looks. But above all, it was his ability, as she saw it, to
stay in the world—not being sheltered, as she was, by her family, her wealth, and the small closed circle of friends in which she lived—and to be uncorrupted by it. It was all very well for her to be, as she sincerely tried to be, good and aware and on the side of life. The house she had been born into had been built on stilts; and she had been able to gather her strength up there, in comparative safety, before setting out to explore—still from the comparative safety of a car that had been armoured by culture and security and money—the jungle. But for Gerhard to be, as she sincerely believed he was, good and aware and on the side of life, was altogether more of an achievement. For he, on the contrary, had been born in the jungle itself. He had been raised by parents who were, according to him, drunken, ignorant, and brutal; and had had, though he called himself a student, little formal education. To have survived at all under such circumstances struck Fran as being wonderful; to have survived as well as he had—still to prefer the sun to the cold dead moon—seemed positively miraculous.

She had her doubts, naturally. He was, compared to her, a mere child. He tended, at times, to drink too much. He didn’t care for any of the things she cared for. (Though he said he was quite prepared to care for them.) She didn’t care, she claimed, for the one thing he claimed to care for: cash. He didn’t have, as she hoped she had, and thought everyone should have, any—as she perhaps priggishly termed it—sense of living in a society. (He believed in looking after himself, and all that, or only that, which was necessary to his well-being. He also believed that everyone else should do the same. Any other course of action was, he claimed, mere self-deception and falsity. And self-deception and falsity could only lead to personal unhappiness, and general misery.) And she knew he would never really be a friend of her friends; though he would always be good-natured and pleasant with them, and was too smart to—or anyway smart enough not to—feel threatened by them.

But when he told her that he loved her and asked her to marry him; and told her further that if she accepted him she would never have reason to regret it—if the contract was, to put it crudely, his love in exchange for her money (with her own love thrown in as an extra), he would keep his side of the bargain if she kept hers—she cast her doubts aside. And having received the blessing of her parents, who told her that in spite of everything they couldn’t help liking Gerhard, and the approval of nearly all her friends—who told her, loathe though many were to say it, the same—Fran left the Englishman she had been involved with for the previous five years, and had vaguely assumed she would one day marry—he was very tall, very thin, and was a musicologist whose special field was modern Eastern European music—exchanged the small apartment in Greenwich Village she had been living in for a penthouse on Park Avenue, and told the young German yes.

Gerhard was right. She never did have reason to regret it. Her husband was nearly everything she had hoped he would be. (And if it hadn’t been for his occasional drinking bouts, and consequent amnesia, he would have been absolutely everything.) He had been bright and fun and kind before the marriage; he became more so as the years passed. He had made her feel alive when she had met him; with time, he not only made her feel alive, but even—she who had always thought of herself as having been born old—young. Her parents and friends who, while giving her their blessing, had had some misgivings about the match, were, ten years after the wedding, almost more charmed with her mate than she was. He was immensely generous with anyone he liked—and he liked practically everyone—and he was able to talk to and get on with the oddest assortment of people; people who Fran herself couldn’t talk to, or get on with. Often, at parties, Gerhard could be seen sitting quietly in a corner chatting with the most notoriously reticent writer, smiling about something with the
most violently rich-hating socialist, or making fun of, and laughing with, the most extreme feminists.

At times Fran was tempted to subscribe to his philosophy of total selfishness….

In fact, until a few years ago, the union couldn’t have been happier, or more successful. But then, one spring, they had gone to Paris together on business. While there, they had had dinner in a restaurant with some French colleagues of Gerhard’s. And amongst these colleagues had been Lucie Schmidt.

Fran, later, hated to admit it; but it was she, in the first instance, who had become friendly with the woman. She supposed the reason was that Lucie, in a way, and aside from being in the same business, was a female version of Gerhard. (Which was also the reason, probably, why Gerhard, to begin with, took one of his rare dislikes to her.) She was the same age as Fran, and she couldn’t have been described as beautiful. Her nose was too big, her chin was too small, and her hair was too untidy. Yet in spite of this, in spite of a tiresome habit of being endlessly foul-mouthed in four different languages, and in spite of an even more tiresome habit of turning every conversation round to sex, she was immensely attractive. Because she had a beautiful body—above all beautiful legs—because she made clothes, that on anyone else would have looked drab, look wonderful, and because, notwithstanding her continuous swearing and her obsession with sex, she was fun, and alive, very bright—and no fool. (Fran got the impression that the swearing and the talk about sex were put out as a smoke-screen in order to hide this last fact
from
fools. Especially from fools with intellectual pretensions.) What was more, not only did she like Lucie, but Lucie liked her. For the first five minutes in the restaurant the Frenchwoman tried to shock the American. But after that—having apparently failed—she relaxed; and
the two of them got on as well together as friends who had known each other for years.

A month later Lucie came to New York, and phoned Fran; who invited her to lunch, and went with her to the ballet. (‘Don’t ask me,’ Gerhard said. ‘I find it hard enough to enjoy ballet at the best of times. If I had to sit next to that spoiled little bitch I’d probably go mad.’)

Four months later, when Lucie came again to New York (partly for business, and partly to see an ex-husband she was fond of), she stayed, at Fran’s insistence, and against Gerhard’s wishes, at the penthouse on Park Avenue.

Three months later, she came again.

And it was on the seventh day of this second stay, one evening when Cyrus had gone to Connecticut with his grandparents, during a party in honour of some visiting South American novelist, that Fran, almost by accident (she hadn’t noticed that they were missing, and had gone to Lucie’s room to fetch something), found her husband making love with her guest.

She would have assumed, if she’d ever thought about it, that she would behave with perfect calm in such a situation. But maybe because she hadn’t ever thought about it, she did something which shocked her more than the actual discovery. She lost her head, and had hysterics. She started screaming. She rushed over to the bed and started punching and pummelling the naked bodies lying there, wanting to tear out those eyes that were staring at her. (Gerhard staring with fear; Lucie with delighted triumph.) She spat, she pushed, she cried, she scratched. She fought off Gerhard’s attempts to hold her, and she shrieked ‘I don’t give a damn,’ when he told her that all her guests must be listening to her. (Whether they were or not she never knew, but she doubted it; Lucie’s room was a long way from the living room, and everyone there was making a great deal of noise.) And finally she ordered Lucie out of the
house. ‘Now, this minute. If you’re not gone in five minutes I’ll kill you.’

Later that night Gerhard told her that Lucie had been trying to get him into bed ever since she’d arrived; that her hysteria had been unnecessary and ridiculous—‘I never could stand her and I still can’t; I was just drunk and if you hadn’t found us I would have forgotten I’d done it tomorrow’—and that in any case Fran’s insistence that Lucie stay with them had been a kind of challenge to him. She had so pointedly ignored his own views on the subject that he had felt she was testing him. And he didn’t like or approve of tests.

He had done, he shouted, no more than she had wanted him to do….

Which might, Fran told herself a few days after, be true. Or at least have an element of truth in it. Which in turn—together with the fact that she had exposed, with her reaction, a corner of her character she hadn’t known existed, couldn’t, for all her much-vaunted self-knowledge, account for, and was, in any case, bitterly ashamed of (to behave like that just because two people are making love!)—would explain why she wasn’t able to forgive Lucie Schmidt or Gerhard (or, if it came to it, herself), and why she had forbidden Gerhard ever to see ‘that whore’ again. Forbidden him despite her realization that by so doing she was ensuring he would. For Gerhard didn’t like being forbidden to do things any more than he liked being tested.

How often he saw her she didn’t know, though she did her best to find out; even contemplating having an investigator follow him. It wasn’t very often, she suspected—Lucie was based in Paris—but it was often enough for the wound to be kept open, and aching; and for her hatred of the woman to become an obsession. She would dream of Lucie Schmidt; she would spend hours willing Lucie Schmidt to be killed in a car crash, or a plane crash, or to have something fall on her
head as she walked by a construction site; and she would spend longer hours discussing first with friends, and then with anyone who would listen, how she could prevent her husband from seeing Lucie Schmidt again.

Which made, of course, matters worse. For not only did nothing that was said help her, but the very parading round town of the affair enraged Gerhard; and made him all the more determined to continue it.

(Some people told Fran she should be calm, forget the whole business, and stop making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Others told her she should see a psychiatrist, who would help her to come to terms with her rage. And others still told her she should leave, or threaten to leave, Gerhard. All of which advice was worthless because ‘the business’
was
a mountain; because she had always been proud of her ability to come to terms with herself by herself, and she didn’t want to lose her pride, which was her ultimate defence against all the possible hurts of this world; and because—this above all—she had no real reason to leave Gerhard.)

Finally, however, and perhaps inevitably, time came to her assistance. Her husband was having an intermittent relationship with a Frenchwoman. It was as simple as that. She didn’t like it, but couldn’t do a thing about it; and after it had been going on for two years she no longer had the energy to dwell constantly on the wretched fact. Her obsession didn’t vanish; but she did manage to put it into storage, and keep it mainly out of sight.

And out of sight it had remained, more or less, until three months ago. Until, that is, Fran had noticed—and remarked upon the fact—that Gerhard was drinking more than normal; and until she had heard first, through friends of friends, that Lucie Schmidt was back in town, and then that she was planning to stay for a while.

Yet though, when she did hear it, her obsession once more
loomed up before her, at least this time Fran was able to prevent its shadow from falling on her face; and at least this time, apart from a couple of fights with Gerhard (both occasioned by her not finding him at the office when she had phoned him there) she didn’t allow it to interfere with her daily life too much. Three years ago she had been forever cancelling parties and dinners and meetings…. What was more, since she not only still loved her husband, but also still didn’t regret having married him—which, she reflected now, as she finished dressing for the ballet, was another reason why she continued to support him—she tried not to push him further into a corner, and stopped herself from going around telling everyone of this latest development. In fact she only told one person.

That person was David Chezzel.

*

Partly because she realized she had a share of the blame, Fran hardly thought, over the next few weeks, of the book that David claimed to be writing. Though she did have other reasons as well. One was that the story the man had outlined was not of a kind that interested her; she was not a fan of the murder mystery, whatever form it took. And another was that Gerhard, from the evening of the ballet onwards, had become so attentive and kind to her, seemed so eager to apologize for the wrongs he had done her over the last four years, and was so willing to do whatever she wanted—unprecedently he accompanied her to London for a week, to attend a poetry festival—that she began to hope that Lucie Schmidt was a thing of the past. Indeed, her husband was with her so much of the time—he almost stopped drinking, never phoned to say he was going to be tied up, and didn’t have a single attack of amnesia—that she didn’t see when, even if he’d wanted to, he could have met his French mistress.