Memories of a Marriage (11 page)

I’ll never forgive that bastard, she said after a moment of silence.

I assumed that she was referring to Thomas, but she made her meaning clear a moment later.

Can you believe it, she asked, he gave his word to Thomas that I was sound—that’s the word he used—that marriage would be good for me, and that there was no reason I shouldn’t have children? The next day I asked him how he could say such a thing after telling me I shouldn’t make long-term commitments while I was in analysis. He looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and said that one’s views change with circumstances. The conversation with Thomas had convinced him that this was my big chance for happiness!

I
WALKED
L
UCY HOME
after dinner. Finding she was leaning on my arm more heavily than her doubtless very real fatigue justified, I declined the invitation to come upstairs for a nightcap. You needn’t be afraid of me, she countered, and kissed me on the lips. I’m lonely but hardly dangerous. Come to see me soon. The truth was, however, that the rawness of her narration had made me uneasy: I felt I was being drawn closer to her than seemed wise and instinctively placed the blame on her. I knew that was unfair. She had spent years in analysis—she had said that she continued to see a psychoanalyst after she and Thomas moved to New York—learning how to speak explicitly about feelings and actions that were once, and perhaps still were, considered unmentionable, and I suspected she was still in some sort of therapy. Moreover, if I put aside habits she might have formed during all those years on the couch and looked at the problem strictly as a novelist, I had to ask myself a question
to which I had no convincing answer: how else was she going to tell her story? It was also true that my curiosity, initially piqued by the gratuitous harshness of the way she had spoken about Thomas when we met at the ballet, had turned into something like an obsession. Prudence be damned: I was determined to understand how the quirky but beautiful, charming, and seductive young woman I had known had changed so, had become an embittered and aggressive shrew. It was a question that now greeted me each morning. Age and solitude had clearly done their work, but there had to be something else, a poison that she and Thomas had secreted. Was it possible that the guileless young man she had introduced to me more than half a century earlier, whom I had later known as a prominent and very successful financier credited with having made an important contribution to the resolution of the Latin American debt crisis, and, to use a sobriquet I dislike, a public intellectual of sorts, had been a monster in private life? More of a monster anyway than I and practically everyone else I could think of? So it happened that during the weeks that preceded her summer removal to Little Compton and mine to Sharon, I saw Lucy a number of times, at her apartment for tea—I had sworn to myself I would avoid having meals there—and over dinner in Jane’s Lexington Avenue bistro that had become my East Side dining room.

I was impressed by her ability to keep the narrative going in chronological order, making it relatively easy to reconstruct as I thought about it later. The story developed relentlessly.

The very evening Thomas received Dr. Reiner’s blessing
he came to her apartment carrying a bouquet of red roses and proposed. On bended knee. In her opinion, he was in fact terrified of the marriage that lay ahead and needed to commit himself to it quickly, burning his bridges. How was she to respond? She had set him on that path; she knew she needed to give shape to her life. Of course she said yes. Thereupon he called his parents, right from her apartment. She had assumed the parents would be over the moon when they heard that a De Bourgh had agreed to marry their son, but she was in for a surprise. They said—he had made the mistake of not telling them she was at his side, and both the mother and the father spoke loudly so that she heard every word—that he was too young, that he shouldn’t get married until he had a job and was independent, and that this was a decision he would regret all his life. In subsequent conversations, all of which Thomas incomprehensibly repeated to her, they went after her, saying they could tell she was unsuitable for marriage and motherhood. At first she couldn’t understand. What kind of gossip had they heard, why were plumbers, electricians, and pool men in Newport, the sort of people Snow
père et mère
consorted with, talking about her? Apart from one beach party she’d been to with Alex that had gotten out of hand and was broken up by the police she’d never done anything there that anyone could point a finger at. Then one day she understood: that idiot Thomas had told them that she was seeing a psychiatrist five days a week and was in analysis. That was more than enough for Mr. and Mrs. Snow. They got the picture. She was spoiled goods. On one level she had to hand it to the garage owner and the
bookkeeper: they didn’t let visions of De Bourgh money and social standing distract them from wanting their darling boy to find someone as perfect as he. They thought an unequal marriage would hurt him. On another level they made a big mistake. All that talk made Thomas dig in his heels. If there had ever been the slightest chance of getting him to back out of the engagement it was gone. Moreover, they had succeeded in giving her all the respectable reasons she needed not to have anything to do with them. Thomas would understand if she too dug in her heels and didn’t want them in her house or near her and Thomas’s children. Or if she relented, she would be doing him and them a big favor and would have every right to hold her nose.

Her own parents had not tried to see her or speak to her since she came back from Geneva. They certainly hadn’t invited her to come home. Her only contacts with the family had been with her brother John—they talked on the phone every couple of weeks—and, over money, with her father’s secretary, and that was hardly needed since her allowance came from her trust and she could deal with the trustee herself. Thomas wanted to get married in January, right after his final examinations, so they could get away from the Cambridge cold and spend a week in Puerto Rico. He must have meant by that, she said, that she would have the opportunity to take him on a honeymoon. He couldn’t have afforded the airfare, never mind the hotel. Finally he agreed to postpone the wedding until sometime in early June, after his graduation. That was an easy decision. He didn’t have a cent, and after what had happened he couldn’t borrow from his parents. Waiting
until after graduation brought them closer to the time when he would have a job and a salary. She had thought they’d simply get a marriage license and be pronounced man and wife at the city hall, with Dr. Reiner and whomever Thomas wanted among his classmates as witnesses. That was when Thomas’s shameless arriviste side went on full display. He said, We must tell your parents, and, when she protested that she wasn’t on speaking terms with them, he said, Don’t worry about it, I’ll write to them, and did so before she could stop him. Now you’ll get your comeuppance, she told him, but once again she was wrong. Some days later, her father called and, sounding as though he had his mouth full of ice cubes, announced that her mother and he hadn’t expected her to make such a good decision on such an important issue. Thomas was a fine young man, and they were happy to welcome him into the family. They understood that she and Thomas wanted to be married in June; that was fine, they’d be happy to have the wedding at the house in Bristol; he’d already told Thomas there would be a substantial wedding present in the form of money to help them get settled in their new life.

Then, she said, in early January, during the business-school reading period, right before Thomas’s exams, I ran away, telling him I had to go to Paris to see about selling the apartment and the Mercedes. I’d talked about that before, and it represented a part of the truth. The other part, the real reason, was that I wanted to see Hubert. I’d called him the day before and said I was getting married and wanted to have one last good memory of our time together. The idea of my wanting to cheat on Thomas must have really turned him on.
There was this pause, and he said, Get a room at the Savoy in London, baby doll,
ma petite cocotte
, and wait for me there next Friday afternoon. In bed. Your legs open. As always, he made me melt. I sat down and masturbated. I knew his taste in hotels as well as sex, I knew I’d be picking up the tab each step of the way, and I didn’t care. I reserved a small suite with a river view, which at the time, if you had dollars, wasn’t such a big deal. Then in Paris, after signing stuff about the apartment and the car, I bought two Lanvin nightgowns and had my legs waxed at Elizabeth Arden, on place Vendôme. On Friday afternoon I was at the hotel in London, on the bed, my thighs open, ready for him.

I’ll spare you the description of the kinky sex when he arrived. The next day, we had sat down to a late lunch downstairs at the Grill. Oysters and whiting and a lot of wine. He’d made me sore inside, but I liked that, and I was very happy to be on the banquette, leaning against him, feeling the warmth of his body. Something, probably the consciousness that I was being stared at, made me look up. Right away I saw who it was: Will Reading—in fact his father had just died, and he’d become Lord Reading—Thomas’s business-school classmate and friend. He and another toff were at the table directly across from us. Why I hadn’t noticed him before I’ll never know, and there was no way I could have failed to recognize him. We’d met at parties, I’d danced with him, and he’d even tried to feel me up. He could tell that I’d finally seen him, gave me a horrid sort of wink, and came over to our table, kissed my hand the way that sort of Brit does, and just waited. I introduced them—there was no way
to avoid it—and to my horror instead of keeping his mouth shut that idiot Hubert said, Oh, I’m charmed to meet one of my cousin Lucy’s friends. My cousin Lucy! Hubert’s accent had never been so thick. I knew that Will wouldn’t resist the urge to tell Thomas; probably he believed it was his duty. The smirk on Will’s face was really something. I couldn’t get the thought that he’d already called Thomas leave my mind for a moment during what remained of that weekend, not during the orgasms or the tears when Hubert decided, after we had returned to the room after lunch, that he would whip me, something he had never tried before, saying, You have it coming to you, you bitch,
tu l’as bien mérité, salope
. The other thought that terrified me even more was that Dr. Reiner would no longer want me as a patient. I’d lied to him; I had told him I must go to Paris to take care of business and got him not to charge me for the missed sessions; he’d say I’d made continuing analysis with him impossible.

I was right about Will and Thomas; I was wrong about Dr. Reiner. Thomas called just as Hubert was leaving for the airport. He didn’t shout; in this funny little voice he used when he was really mad he said, You’re cheating, only a month after our engagement, and you’re already cheating. I was still in bed, finishing my breakfast, and Hubert, instead of walking out the door, sat down on the side of the bed, put his hand under the covers, and tried to make me come, all the while making faces, a sort of commentary on what I was telling Thomas, and wouldn’t take his hand away although I kept shaking my head and tried to close my legs tight. It came out that as soon as Thomas had heard from Will he had tried
the Savoy, on the off chance, and had asked for me. Thank God the room was in my name! I lied and lied and lied. No wonder Hubert was amused.

She went on to say that she had told Thomas on the phone that the Swiss man she was having lunch with (she didn’t reveal his name) was someone she had known years ago when she first came to Paris—she was smart enough not to say a word about Geneva—that it was all over between them, had been over for years, that he was working in London and was having difficulties at his job and in his marriage, that he had written to her, and that, since she was going to be in Paris anyway, she’d decided she really should see him and tell him in person that she was getting married. She’d wanted to say goodbye nicely. Thomas didn’t believe her. That was perfectly clear. Finally she said, Please don’t say or think things you’ll be sorry about later. I will be in Boston on Thursday. Let’s talk then. Of course he kept calling her every few hours until she checked out of the hotel, repeating, over and over, How could you have done such a thing? Then in Boston, at first he wouldn’t see her. He told her there was no going back. It would be impossible to trust her, and the more he said that each time she called him, the more she begged him to reconsider. Meanwhile, Dr. Reiner astonished her by saying that what she had done with Hubert was an exorcism, her way of expelling the incubus, a necessary part of the progress toward coming to terms with herself. They resumed their daily sessions—naturally he changed tack and charged for the ten or so sessions she’d missed—and he encouraged her to persist with Thomas. He didn’t think Thomas would accept
the truth about the encounter with Hubert—but what was that truth?—and thought that rather than attempt to give him an account of those days she should work hard on demonstrating her commitment to him and to the marriage. By early spring she had succeeded—that was how Dr. Reiner saw it. The June date Thomas and she had picked for the wedding in Bristol fell directly after the Harvard commencement; the reception would be a small and modest affair—her family, inevitably his parents and a couple of aunts and uncles and cousins, some of his business-school friends, Will Reading not included, and a few close family friends and neighbors. Lucy tried to put her foot down when it came to the van Burens, who qualified as neighbors and friends; she really didn’t want Priscilla or Alex, but in the end they were invited, as was I.

Thomas wanted you there, Lucy told me. You didn’t come, I can’t remember what excuse you gave, but you sent those lovely Georgian silver sugar tongs. The van Burens came, every single one of them, and gave us napkins. I swear it’s true: tea-sandwich napkins!

But by that time it had also become evident that she would be unable to terminate the treatment with Dr. Reiner when his August vacation began and resume analysis or therapy in the fall with another doctor in New York. This was not Lucy’s own idea, although the prospect of changing analysts had been terrifying her. It was Dr. Reiner himself, she told me, who said he couldn’t take responsibility for ending her treatment at that time, not after all that had recently happened; he believed she should continue with him for at least
one more year. He offered to see Thomas and tell him his opinion. Because Thomas, of course, was as usual thinking only of himself and his wonderful career and the offer he had accepted from Kidder Peabody of a job that started in the fall. Morgan Stanley hadn’t made him an offer, although they’d made one to Josiah Weld. That had left Thomas speechless; he simply couldn’t understand how such a thing could happen. His own record at the business school and at college was so much better, and he had the LSE degree. The reason was clear as a bell to Lucy, she told me, and she said she had explained it to him. You aren’t white enough for Morgan, she said, and you never will be. One look at you and all they see is a striving townie. Afterward of course he invented the story that he preferred Kidder because he was going to work with Al Gordon.