Indiscretion (8 page)
“None taken,” I answer.
Maddy turns back to Claire. “Would he have done that? Is he like that? God, how awful.”
Claire, shocked into response, answers, “I really don’t know. At first he was so nice. It was only once we came out here that I saw a different side of him. In New York, he was charming and handsome and successful . . .”
“Quite a catch,” comments Maddy.
“Yes. No. I suppose. But out here he seemed so different, so, I don’t know, he just wasn’t . . .”
“Wasn’t what?” asks Harry.
“He wasn’t . . .” She starts but catches herself, and she says instead, “He wasn’t genuine. Yes, that’s it. He just seemed like a phony. Do you know what I mean? All of a sudden, here, in this beautiful place, next to all of you, he just seemed so fake. The way a paste diamond looks when it’s held to a real one in the right light.”
We pull into their drive. A few lights are on. The sitter’s awake. Ned and Cissy have evidently driven straight to my house. I say my good-nights and follow them over, picking my way like a blind monk through a familiar maze.
L
abor Day. The summer’s last hurrah. Already night is falling earlier. Autumn is waiting on the doorstep. People bring sweaters when they go out in the evening.
Claire is driving with me. She has been out every weekend. She is now one of the gang, part of a nucleus that never changes even when minor characters drift in and out at restaurants, cocktail parties, lazy afternoons at the Winslows’ or at the beach, nights playing charades, sailing in my little sailboat, Johnny’s ninth birthday, skinny-dipping in the ocean, or sitting under the stars listening to Verdi. We are all tan.
I insisted on leaving Thursday night, telling her to call in sick to work. No one will be around anyway, I said. Everyone goes away. We leave in the early evening. We will have dinner and a chat. This is my chance to get to know her better. She will be staying at my house this weekend. As will Ned and Cissy. They arrive tomorrow. The Winslows have other houseguests this weekend.
I order martinis for both of us. She has adopted them now too. Never more than two, I told her once. I repeat an old joke about why martinis are like women’s breasts; one is not enough and three are too many. Words to live by.
We are in an Italian restaurant in town. It has been here since 1947. The booths are covered in red Naugahyde, the menu features a drawing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is the last remaining business on Newtown Lane from my childhood. Even the hardware store has been replaced. There are two things I appreciate about it. One is that it is devoutly democratic. I have seen movie stars eating at tables beside weather-necked fishermen and their families. The other is that they make delicious thin-crust pizza.
I am deposing her. Where she was born, where she lived, where she went to college, what she studied, why she does what she does, who she is. My right hand itches for a yellow legal pad to scratch it all down, but I will remember it well enough.
She is a willing witness, her tongue loosened by gin. And I am on my best behavior, not aggressive, but solicitous, empathetic. She tells me about her father, her French mother, her younger brother, who lives in California, where he works for a software company. But I also know witnesses have their own motivations. They will lie, or twist facts, if they have to. They can be resentful or closed, releasing only the most meager information. Others want me to like them, thinking that will color my interpretation of the law.
And it is clear that Claire wants me to like her. Not romantically, alas. No, she is too easy around me for that. Instead, she treats me the way one would treat a prospective employer. She wants me to see her in the best light, to gain my approval. And she is hard to resist. She laughs at my jokes, she asks me questions, gets me to tell stories. There is nothing a man likes half as much as the sound of his own voice and an appreciative, preferably female, audience.
The conversation steers to Harry and Madeleine. “Tell me more about them,” she says. “I know you’ve known Maddy your whole life. I have never met anyone like them. Are they really as happy as they seem?”
We have almost finished the wine now. Crusts and a few lonely olive slices are all that remain on the platter.
I shrug. “Who’s to say? I mean, happiness is a chimera. The real question is, does the happiness outweigh the bad, because every relationship has both. I guess it’s a question of having more of one than the other. And in the case of Maddy and Harry, I would have to say that, yes, there is more happiness. I know them pretty well, and I have to admit I have never known a couple so well-suited for each other. They know how to work together and have fun together.”
I don’t blame her for being curious. Some couples have that effect. They have a golden aura about them, something almost palpable that makes them shine more than the rest of us. It is as if they walk through their lives with a spotlight trained on them. When they enter a room, you can’t help noticing them.
She gets me talking. In a way, it is a relief to share little secrets. I have seen so much and know so much about them. This must be how a servant feels, whispering over the kitchen table, intimate but still apart.
“Does he love her very much?”
It is a question I have never asked, had never thought to ask. The answer, to me, is blindingly obvious. Who would not love Madeleine?
“Of course,” I answer. “Theirs is one of the great love stories of our age.”
It sounds flip, but I mean it. Not in a tragic, fatal way, where love is denied or thwarted, as one might read in a romance novel. They are not Tristan and Isolde, or Abelard and Héloïse. I can think of no heroes of literature who would fit their paradigm. Their story lacks the obstacles to passion. They met and fell in love. It is one of the simplest and, at the same time, most difficult things to do. The drama of their lives is that they know how to keep love alive. And they are not selfish about their love. They share it with so many people. It is what draws the rest of us to them. It’s not that he is a respected author or she a great beauty, or even that they occupy a charming cottage near the beach, or any of their many other attributes. It is the strength of their bond that draws us and inspires us. We look at them and want to be them. I say as much to Claire. I am probably a little drunk and slightly embarrassed by my loquacity.
Later, on the ride back to my house, I make a pass at her.
“Walter, please don’t,” she says. “Let’s not complicate things.”
I apologize. The idea of forcing oneself on a woman is repellent. Maybe if I felt otherwise, I would have been kissed more.
After a few moments, she says, “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” I answer gamely. “I felt it was the polite thing, to have at least tried. Didn’t want you to feel insecure.”
She laughs, briefly placing her hand on my knee. “Thank you, Walter. You made me feel much better.”
We are friends again.
At home, the house is silent. She has never been here, I realize. The center of the action was always at Maddy and Harry’s. “Would you like a tour? I promise I won’t pounce.”
“I’d love it.”
The house was built by my great-grandfather. He called it Dunemere. All houses then had names, but it has been a long time since anyone called it that. Back then people rarely built on the beach. Instead, they preferred to be closer to town and arable land, and away from the storms that periodically devastated the shoreline. It was at the end of the nineteenth century that wealthy New Yorkers began to buy beachfront property, where they built enormous summer homes, only to desert them each year shortly after Labor Day.
In the 1960s, my father had the place winterized, primarily so we could spend Christmas here. He insulated the walls, which had been filled with nothing but old newspaper and beer bottles left by the original builders; he also installed a furnace in the basement and radiators in the bedrooms, but it wasn’t until after my parents died and the house fell to me that it really came to be used all year round, though I do shut it up in January and February and drain the pipes so they don’t freeze.
Unlike many of the modern houses in the area, the interior is dark, its dimensions modest for a house of this size. There is no media room. No family-style kitchen. Real estate agents out here would call it a teardown because the new crop of home buyers would find it too old-fashioned. The design is Italianate; cream-colored plaster on the outside, something that would not have looked out of place in Lake Como or Antibes. In old black-and-white photographs, there are striped awnings over the windows. Inside you walk into a high-ceilinged center hallway covered in the dark stucco that was once so fashionable. The stucco keeps it cool. The walls have family portraits and a large, faded Gobelins tapestry my grandfather brought back from the First World War. Straight ahead and out a large door is a wide brick patio, where my parents held their wedding reception. It runs the entire length of the house and overlooks a lawn that slopes down to the large brackish pond that leads to the ocean. Flanking the door are matching life-size portraits of my great-grandparents. My grandfather, a little boy in a sailor suit, stands next to his father, bespectacled and stern. Opposite, my great-aunt, dressed in crinolines, her hair long, leans on her mother’s lap.
A long table takes up most of the left side of the hallway, and on it sits an old leather-bound visiting book. The book is almost full. The first entry is nearly as old as I am. The older books are in the library, full of spidery script and long-dead names.
“Please sign your name if you want to,” I say.
She does. I have never seen her handwriting before and am not surprised that it’s clear and elegant. My handwriting, like most lawyers’, is appalling. She writes her name and date, and then “You have a lovely home.”
To the right of the table is the door to a large formal dining room, the site of many endless dinners I was forced to endure as a child when my parents were present, spooning soup and eating heavy meals prepared by Genevieve and served by Robert. The walls are covered in Zuber wallpaper depicting El Dorado. I love that paper. It is a gateway to a different dimension, and on the rare occasions when I throw a formal dinner party I am still capable of losing myself in its magical jungles, canoeing down the Amazon or fighting off Indians with my trusty revolver.
There are eight bedrooms on the second floor. The largest was my great-grandparents’. It is known as the Victorian Room. I think I will have Claire sleep here. The canopied bed is too short for me, but it is where I always put first-time guests. The ones whom I like, at any rate. I still sleep in the same room I occupied as a child, over the kitchen in what had been the nursery wing.
Finally, there is the playroom on the third floor. The biggest in the house, it contains an old pool table, bookshelves crammed with popular novels of my parents’ youth—Kipling and Buchan, Ouida, Tom Swift and Robert Louis Stevenson—and chests of drawers filled with exotic costumes brought back over the years by relatives and friends that we used to wear for fancy-dress parties. Along the wall is my great-uncle’s oar from Henley and window seats where I would curl up with a book on rainy days.
“We should do a costume ball,” says Claire. She is rummaging through the drawers. She pulls out a Pierrot costume I had worn as a child. It would just fit her. Then a burnoose my father used to wear that made him look like Rudolph Valentino. I had always admired it most because it had a real dagger. “That would be such fun.” It has been a long time since our last costume party.
For a second I almost make another pass at her but think better of it. Maybe she would have said yes this time. Expensive real estate can be a powerful aphrodisiac.
We go back downstairs, and I lead her to her room. It is large, with windows facing over the pond. I imagine it is probably bigger than her entire apartment. The bed is just to the right as you enter, the French linen part of my great-grandmother’s trousseau. Matching bureaus, a dressing table with my great-grandmother’s silver-backed Tiffany hairbrushes still on it, a fireplace, an escritoire, a pair of Louis XV armchairs. Silvered family photographs. My grandfather in his uniform. My grandmother’s three brothers. Heavy, pale damask curtains. A wide stretch of carpet, a chaise longue, and a table with an old-fashioned upright telephone and an equally ancient radio, neither of which has worked in years but which remain in place because that’s where they’ve always been.
“What a wonderful room.”
“It was my great-grandmother’s. It’s something, isn’t it? You know, back then husbands and wives rarely shared a room. My great-grandfather slept next door.” The room as spare as a Trappist’s cell.
“And where do you sleep?”
“On the other side of the house. In the nursery. Now don’t look at me like that. It’s not like it has Donald Duck posters on the wall. I’ve updated it somewhat over the years. It’s just where I feel most comfortable.”
“But you could sleep in any room in the house.”
“Exactly. And I could eat in the dining room every night and throw costume parties. But I don’t. I come here to relax and sleep and work.”
“Don’t you get lonely?”
“Never. And besides, Madeleine and Harry are right next door.”
We say our good-nights, and I pad off down the familiar carpet past my parents’ former bedroom and the “good” guest room to my old lair. As I lie in bed that night, I fantasize that Claire comes into my room. Once or twice I even venture to the hallway, thinking I may have heard the sound of her feet, but when I finally fall asleep around dawn, I am still alone.
A
fter graduation Harry was commissioned in the Marine Corps. As a college graduate he was automatically entitled to become an officer, and he entered flight training school. Madeleine followed him. They had been married the day after graduation. It was a small ceremony held in Battell Chapel, followed by lunch at the Yale Club. Ned was best man. Madeleine’s father and brother, Johnny, came, as well as her stepmother at that time. Mister and Mrs. Winslow. I had never met them before. His father was a prep school English teacher. Tweedy, articulate, wry, the same broad shoulders. Harry had grown up a faculty brat in Connecticut, living on borrowed privilege. A pet of the upperclassmen as a child, and a guest on classmates’ ski trips and holidays while a student. Unlike most of them, he worked during the summer, one year as a roustabout on the Oklahoma oil fields, another on an Alaskan fishing boat.
