Manhattan Monologues (17 page)

"I had no idea you'd be so forward in justifying what you'd done!" she protested after a fit of tears. "It never occurred to me that you'd scandalize the court by championing free sex!"

"I didn't. Olivia got hold of my correspondence with Newt Chandler and gave it to her lawyer."

"It's the same thing! How was I to know that you and he were writing letters about your unconventional notions? I merely expected that the awful Olivia would get a common or garden type of divorce and that my darling boy would then be able to marry the woman he loved."

"I never knew you felt that way about Olivia."

"Because I took care that you shouldn't. After all, there she was, your wedded wife, and you showed no sign of being ready to shed her—not until I learned that you'd finally met a woman who understood you and loved you. Oh, I loathed Olivia from the beginning! I loathed her because I saw that she was what I'd been, a castrating female. You needn't stare at me like that. You've always thought I castrated your father. But I was determined that I'd make it up to you by never touching your manhood. You were going to be a complete man,
my
man, if there was anything I could do about it. And then that bossy Olivia had to get her claws on you!"

"But what induced you to stoop to such a thing as an anonymous letter? So unlike you, Mother!"

"Because I remembered how moral you could be about your obligation to others. I knew you'd never upset Olivia by asking for a divorce. The only way you'd get your freedom would be if
she
asked for hers! I counted on her pride and her temper and her greed. If she got everything she wanted, she'd be willing enough to let you go. Only I never thought she'd get as much as she did!"

Which, of course, was my fault. When Olivia followed up the tip of Mother's anonymous letter by hiring a detective to confirm its allegations and then faced me angrily with his report, I defended myself, claiming I had done her no wrong. Had I groveled before her as she demanded, she might have forgiven me, but when she heard my argument in rebuttal, her fury knew no bounds.

She sued for divorce in New York on the grounds of adultery, which I did not contest, and then asked for custody of our boys on the grounds that my correspondence with Newt, which she had purloined from my desk, revealed a moral character unfit to be trusted with the rearing of children. This I contested, but did not deny any item of my individual creed. I ended up with the scantest visitation rights and the loss of three-quarters of my income.

The only good thing to come out of the whole mess is that I can now marry Cornelia when she obtains the divorce that her easygoing husband will not deny her.

"And
then
we shall see," she assured me with a smile that was nothing if not enigmatic, "how 7 will behave when you find your next girl."

"Will you be another Olivia?"

"Much worse. For I shall kill you."

S
OME SAY
that a woman's dangerous age is forty; for me it was delayed by a decade. I had already lived half a century by the year 2000, having entered the world early in Harry Truman's second term, and on my birthday I thought, to put it as boldly as I then dared to, that I had obtained just about everything that my world had to offer.

What were those things? Well, to being with, I was a successful decorator, and had been the subject of feature articles in
Vogue
and
Architectural Digest.
My work, noted for its nostalgic return to Edwardian and late Victorian models, was reputed to be relieved from the stuffiness of pomposity of such eras by my eye for color and light and chintz, by my sense of space and air and cheerfulness, and my hand has been seen in some of the finest rooms in New York, Greenwich and the Hamptons. My husband, Augustus (Gus) Barker, to whom I have been harmoniously wed for twenty-six years, was a member of Harrison Levy, internationally known investment bankers, and made a fortune of I don't even know how many millions. We lived in a splendid penthouse on Park Avenue and a thirty-room "cottage" on the beach in Southampton. Our two children were happily and substantially married, my daughter to a junior partner of her father's and my son to the daughter of a former governor of New York. I had managed to preserve both my health and my figure, was considered an exceptionally handsome woman for my age and had once been listed in
Style
magazine among the ten best-dressed women in Manhattan.

So why have I been struck by a nagging little doubt that has grown as rapidly as a malignant tumor and landed me at the gates of a nervous breakdown? I've tried to attribute it to advancing age, to a delayed change in life, to a puritan sense of having been too long the darling of fate, or to some inevitable rebalancing of scales tipped too far in my favor, but I keep coming back to one thing: my marriage.

Not that Gus has become in any way uncongenial or been unfaithful or deficient in expressed affection. In everything we have done together, he has always had my full concurrence. Let me try to put it this way: he created me. Or, better yet, he fitted me into the setting of his life as adroitly and seamlessly as a great stage director might fit a vital prop into the scenery of his drama. Now what's wrong with that if the show succeeds? And ours has succeeded—you might say, with standing room only. Aren't I the beneficiary as well as he? Ah, yes, but it is always
his
show, never mine. I have a life, yes, and what many would call a very good one, but is it mine? Can I say that I have really lived?

The psychiatrist whom I have consulted suggested that it might help me—and her—if I wrote up a short summary of what I considered the salient facts of my biography, which, of course, is what I am doing now. In novels and short stories this kind of exercise is made interesting if the reader is able to note passages where the writer is evidently under a delusion, or where he or she is consciously or unconsciously altering facts to justify or vindicate past doings. But there will be no reader of this memorandum unless I decide to show it to the doctor who suggested its preparation. I cannot be sure that I am always telling the truth, but I can certainly be sure that I am trying to, for it would be curiously foolish to pick up my pen in order to fool myself. Yet people do it, one knows. In any case, I must make a start.

***

I was born Alida Schuyler, to a younger branch of the great clan that Lyman Horace Weeks designated, in his
Prominent Families of New York,
"one of the most distinguished in the United States." The ambitious and "upwardly mobile" Alexander Hamilton had chosen his bride from a senior branch as a way to cloak his illegitimate birth. Through the generations, we replenished our diminishing coffers by marrying into the families of the new and newer rich, and few young men started life with more advantages than my father, who had good looks, money and a venerable name—Livingston (Livy) Van Rens-selaer Schuyler—though it sounded like the take-off of an old New York moniker in a Harvard Hasty Pudding show. But what good could all that do a man if he was born an ass?

That was the question I put to myself again and again as early as the age of sixteen, as I watched our fortune dribbled away by Daddy in such ill-advised investments as gaudy "epic" movies and awkwardly situated amusement parks, lured by big-talking touts who hopped cheerfully from bankruptcy to bankruptcy until they finally hit the jackpot—after leaving Daddy far behind. They gambled for the fun of it, but Daddy did it to make money, which is always fatal. When he was reduced to a small but life-saving trust fund that he couldn't invade, he retired from business to divide his life between the golf course and the bridge table, at both of which he excelled and to which he should have devoted himself from the beginning.

Mother, beautiful, languid and of simpler origins, (Daddy, unlike his wiser forebears, had married for love), thought she would have no further trouble in life after she became Mrs. Schuyler, but when the unrestricted money was gone, she showed herself unexpectedly efficient in taking control of the trust income—Daddy had been shamed into submission—and using it with enough dexterity, plus her sagacity in cadging favors from rich friends and relations, to preserve a niche for her family on the fringe of the "best" society. Huddling under its precarious covers, she may even have felt a species of happiness.

Such content, if content it was, was not for me. I had observed my parents' world critically and assessed its value—accurately, I think. It still had some of the old trimmings of its former high status; few of its members had fared financially as disastrously as my father; a goodly number were richer than their parents had been. What happened to them was simply that they lost their monopoly; their clubs and private schools and exclusive resorts were not taken from them but had now to be shared with those once rejected. There was enough money for both old and new rich, though the new appeared to have the lion's share of it, and no one was more conscious of the destiny of that share than Miss Alida Schuyler. I realized that my name was no longer an honor card, but it was still a card, and you can win a trick with the two of clubs if it's a trump. It's a question of playing every pasteboard in your hand for its maximum value. My parents exhausted all the mental skill they had at the bridge table. I preferred a larger sphere of action.

The nineteen-sixties were the period of my greatest revelation. At Spence School in New York and at boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut, I was a docile and conventional student, with my eyes open and my criticism suppressed. I always felt not only that I was at odds with most of the people around me, but that any protest I enunciated would fall on deaf and perhaps scandalized ears. My parents, as I have indicated, were frozen in the glacial past of their imagination, and many of the boys and girls of my age, particularly the latter, were living in the future, equally unreal, of theirs. They exulted in the prediction that a new age was dawning, one where the old rules of sexual propriety, class distinction, formality of dress, religious observance and patriotism would be swept aside in favor of freedom of choice and act, freedom, in short, of everything. This was accompanied, of course, by the reign of drugs, and it may have been the violent and prolonged attack of nausea that followed my first and only experiment with marijuana that proved my salvation. What I gleaned from the experience was the knowledge that my contemporaries could prove themselves just as silly asses as my parents, and that was my first step to maturity.

When my older sister ran off with a young man under a suspended sentence for passing drugs, and had to be recovered by the payment to her vile seducer of a sum my parents could ill afford, I made my definitive break with this "wave of the future." I would prepare myself to succeed in a world that was neither my sister's nor my parents'—in other words,
the
world. It seemed to me that all the protests against the war in Vietnam had only hardened the grim obstinacy of misguided hawks and that the goal of new liberties had only betrayed our youthful extremists into the clutches of anarchists and Reds. When the great breaker of the new wave finally broke, what was left but free sex? And how can you make a life or a living out of that? While, in the meantime, all around us were rising the new millionaires.

I took to reading articles about the luxuriously appointed interiors of the new—and old—rich in the fashion magazines and decided that therein lay my future—or my beginning. Mother entirely approved of my choice, as decorating was the most acceptable of ladies' occupations, and she arranged for my interview with the man who became the first great teacher and influence in my life, Beverly Bogardus.

He was then in his mid-thirties, a decade and a half older than I, and already a rising star in the decorating world. He took an immediate interest in me as soon as he learned—for I at once felt that I could be frank with him—that I was totally uncommitted to any political or social change in the world about me. He hired me, though at an exiguous salary, and, in developing my own style, I took more than a few hints from his. He was certainly something of a genius in his field. He could make a future out of the past while shunning the banality of the modern. What I think he saw in me was a Schuyler saved from the terrible sixties, a Schuyler, so to speak, unspoiled, who could be used in shaping a future as yet undetermined.

He was not, by any means, a handsome man. He had a long, lanky figure and a sloppy posture, and his messy blond hair fell down over a wizened pale countenance with large, unexpectedly boyish blue eyes, which lent him briefly an air of youthful innocence that was entirely misleading. He was brilliantly sardonic and utterly without mercy in his assessments of even close friends, but there never seemed any bile or ill temper in the cheerful guffaws that his own sallies evoked from him. He mocked himself as well as the world, or gave the impression of doing so.

The reason, I learned early, that he never attained the first position in our profession was that he would never put himself out for people. He was notoriously slow in his work, and not even the shrillest protest of the richest chatelaine would induce him to accelerate the completion of one of her chambers. He would absent himself from the office for days at a time without offering so much as a lame excuse. He acted as if he despised his success as sincerely as he did that of his rivals. He was widely supposed to be homosexual, and I had reason to believe that his strong attachment to my husband, though not returned in the same way, was more than platonic, but he was also known to have been the lover of a great society beauty. I believe he was attracted by the unattainable, in both sexes. Or it may have been that he disdained to commit himself to any bourgeois limitation in the areas of sexual gratification. He would never have lost the world for love, or lost love for the world.

He paid closer attention to me and my training than he did to any other junior in his office, and he sometimes described me to friends, only half-mockingly, as a Trilby to his Svengali. But he was interested in teaching me more than the art of design. He wanted me to understand the workings of our world, and he professed to see, in the increased lavishness of the homes of the rich—the meat and drink of our business—not the mere icing on the cake of a material society, but the heart and soul of a desperately corrupted era.