Memories of a Marriage (12 page)

That was that. It didn’t occur to Thomas to say to Kidder he wouldn’t be starting work in the fall and ask for a deferment of the offer, but he did offer to commute to Boston on weekends. Her answer was that if they weren’t going to live together the wedding was off; if he wanted her, he had better take a job on State Street. They could get a larger place on Beacon Hill, and he could walk to work. He absolutely refused.

Somewhere at that point I interrupted and said, Once again you had an opportunity to postpone a marriage you were so ambivalent about, or to back out from it altogether, handed to you on a silver platter. Why didn’t you?

She shook her head and told me she didn’t know. She hadn’t been well. Dr. Reiner had been in favor of the marriage.
Now he talked about her going back to McLean. What would happen to her if she broke with Thomas? If she did marry him, yes, it would be a relief to have him in Boston only on weekends—anyway, those weekends when he could make it; it certainly wouldn’t be every weekend; she knew that Kidder worked its young people hard. But she didn’t trust him; he was oversexed; he’d pick up gonorrhea or worse from some slut and give it to her. She’d be terrified to let him near her. Besides, where would he live in the city? He had no one he could stay with; she’d end up paying his rent. He had been quite insulting about working on State Street. Boston was a backwater, no better than Providence; even a year or two of work for a State Street bank would tarnish his résumé and spoil his prospects on Wall Street. Dr. Reiner said she should in fact encourage Thomas to commute. She’d get the emotional space she needed, and it was more sensible to spend money on separate establishments than to push Thomas to take a job he didn’t want. He also said her fears of whores and infections weren’t reasonable. I don’t know what I should have done, Lucy said. I was tired of spending money; I was tired of Thomas; I was tired of Dr. Reiner; I was tired of everything and everybody. Thereupon, out of the blue, Thomas talked the business school into giving him a junior faculty position and a fellowship to do research on valuation theory, both good for two years. In a way it wasn’t all that surprising. He was right at the top of his class, and he’d become close to the professor directing the research. Kidder made no difficulties about delaying his arrival. Al Gordon even called and said he was thrilled by this recognition of
Thomas’s merit. Can you imagine the stupidity of that man? Dr. Reiner was impressed. As for Thomas, his head was turned. He never recovered. Only got worse and worse. He could do no wrong; his work naturally came ahead of everything else; he had to be the center of attention. He actually wrote to my father, Lucy said, about the faculty appointment—when he told me about it I exploded, but he said he’d done it because he knew my father would be proud of him and would be pleased to have the news come from him directly. My poor father responded by sending him a check for a thousand dollars. I was mortified; I could just hear Mother making fun of Thomas. She could be so mean. My idiot brother John also took Thomas seriously, just like Father. It’s the stupidity gene of De Bourgh males. The wedding was a couple of weeks later, Lucy said. I went through the reception more dead than alive. Dr. Reiner didn’t want me to be away for more than a week or ten days. Attending the wedding was too much for my great-aunt—she hardly left her apartment on Pinckney Street in Boston anymore—but she told me to treat the house in Little Compton as though it were my own, although she’d go on taking care of the taxes and upkeep. That’s where we went directly from the reception.

I
HAD TAKEN
to seeing Lucy almost daily, in the afternoon at her apartment over tea or at dinner at the Lexington Avenue bistro. The uneasiness her narration had caused me had dissipated, but for a variety of reasons, including my desire to avoid late evenings and excessive consumption of alcohol, I stuck to my resolution to decline invitations to drinks or to dinner at her place. Occasionally, we took advantage of the fine weather and talked in the afternoon on a bench facing the Central Park boat basin. One day in the park, she asked me point-blank, and with only the thinnest smile, whether I was writing a book about her and Thomas. Was that the purpose of our interviews? Wasn’t that what they really were, ever since I first came to dinner at her house? I told her the truth: I was working on something quite different, a novel set in my native Salem, but after I had finished, if I lived long enough and hadn’t lost my marbles, I might want to write a book about the breakup of a marriage.
A marriage, I stressed, a fictional character’s marriage, not hers and Thomas’s. Naturally, everything I learned in the course of our talks would be part of my experience and my store of knowledge and observations and could have an impact on the story I’d tell. But the book would be a novel, not a memoir or reportage.

A novel. She snorted. And you’ll put me and what I’ve told you into it. I’ll murder you!

That’s one of the hazards of a novelist’s profession, I answered, just as finding some aspects of yourself in a novel is a risk you run by palling around with a novelist—or merely allowing yourself to be in his field of vision.

She wasn’t laughing, so I added that if I did write the book neither she nor anyone else would recognize her or Thomas in my characters or have grounds to argue that the book was about them. They’d be seeing a mosaic, made of slivers of glass or stone, some picked up as I went along and some I had fabricated. I don’t write romans à clef, I said.

She snorted again and to my great relief kept talking. Our conversations continued over what remained of that week and much of the following week, with time out for the weekend, about which I told her a fib. I said I would be visiting my ailing cousin Hetty in Philadelphia. In reality, I had accepted an invitation from Jane Morgan to spend the weekend with her and her husband in Water Mill, getting wind of which, I hadn’t a doubt, would send Lucy into orbit. As I had expected, the information Jane was to give me proved precious.

Getting married, setting up a real household, not feeling adrift, Lucy said, that was in some ways what I had always
wanted. At the same time, after that awful wedding—it wasn’t objectively awful, nothing at that house could be; it just felt that way—and that monstrous honeymoon in Little Compton, I returned to Boston knowing I was in a trap. One I had set myself and couldn’t get out of! Can you imagine it—Mr. and Mrs. Snow declared that they wanted to call on us in Little Compton and bring things for the house, which turned out to be homemade jams and tomato chutneys, and Thomas insisted that we must receive them? He didn’t want to break their hearts! He didn’t want to burn his bridges! They’d worked so hard! And my heart? I don’t think he took it into consideration. He’d already decided, and you can be sure that his parents were directing his thoughts, that I wasn’t fully rational, so that if he wanted to do this or that against my will the thing to do was to badger me into accepting it. Going along. Having Mr. and Mrs. Snow to tea served on my great-aunt Helen’s best china and best tablecloth. The trust company found the larger apartment we needed on the top floor of a building on Beacon Street across from the Public Garden. It was where Alan Crawford, who taught Renaissance Italian literature, and his wife lived. I’d taken his seminar, and he gave me an A. After the start of the school year, they had us over to dinner once and twice to drinks. I think that Thomas bored Alan, but I could see that Alan was contemplating making a play for me. Living in the same building would have made getting together convenient, and I wouldn’t have minded, but he chickened out. Perhaps Susan, that was his wife, sensed what was going on and read him the riot act. Other than my place on rue Casimir-Perier, which
you surely remember, it was the nicest apartment I’ve ever lived in. Sunny and well proportioned, and with a beautiful view. I could walk to work. But as soon as Dr. Reiner left for his Wellfleet vacation I realized I really wasn’t well at all; I knew I was sinking. Thomas would come home late; he was doing research in the library. He had this idea that when he walked through the door the table should be set, and as soon as he’d washed his hands we should have a drink, which was an idea he’d picked up from me, and sit down and eat. Of course, I was supposed to have the dinner ready, at most it would need to be reheated, that’s all. I couldn’t do that. Why should it be me who set the table, who did the shopping, who cooked? We fought about that. Over and over. Shopping wasn’t easy—I had to go all the way to Charles Street. I could order by phone from one fancy market and have whatever it was delivered, but that meant I didn’t see the fruit or the lettuce, and anyway I had to be at home when the order arrived. We didn’t have a doorman. It was a hot August, the way it can be hot and muggy in Boston. In the streets it was brutal, but even so the apartment was pleasant. You’d think he would have wanted to take a bath or shower when he came home, before we had drinks, and have dinner late when you could open the windows and get some breeze, but no, that wasn’t how it should be; the garage owner washed to get the grease off, but Thomas hadn’t spent his day under some car putting in a new exhaust pipe. It was all I could do to get Thomas to take a shower before he went to bed! And to stop him from sitting down to dinner in his shirtsleeves and necktie. He’d tuck his necktie into his shirt! You have
to live with someone to realize you can’t stand them. We hadn’t tried to live together before, the trip to Italy didn’t count, and now I knew I couldn’t abide him. Oh, of course, he could be taught. Once it had sunk in that in Bristol, even when my father and mother dined alone, Father would put on his green or plum velvet smoking jacket and a foulard or black tie, and Mother a long skirt, and that changing before dinner into something—anything—was what one did, wild horses couldn’t have dragged him to the table in the clothes he’d worn when he came in from the street, and I thought that the willingness to conform was revolting too, so craven, so unnatural. But the stuff about doing his share in the house, there was nothing to be done; the roots had sunk too deep. It was the importance of his work. When he came home from work, everything was supposed to be nice. For him! So he had the right atmosphere to do whatever he was doing. It didn’t help that my boss Emily was on vacation, and I had to go over manuscripts at home just to keep up.

It got worse when classes at the business school started and he had to prepare the course he was teaching in addition to doing the research. You’d think he deserved a medal, because everything he did was so special and he was doing it all so well. Meanwhile I was trying to fix Jerzy Kosinski’s manuscript, and that was difficult not only because I was putting it into real English but also because Emily was stuck on the idea that it was basically a true account of what had happened to him during the war in Poland that should be published as a memoir and wouldn’t back off, even though it was clear, if you asked questions about it without spooking
Jerzy, that the book was a brilliant, inspired invention that could only be published as a novel. The truth is that Jerzy liked me. Not only the way most men usually did, thinking of sex, but because of how I helped with the manuscript. There was nothing between us, but when Thomas finally met Jerzy at Emily’s he went into one of his lockjaw-and-withdrawal routines, hardly able to speak, because right away he had sensed the attraction. Of course, Jerzy saw exactly what was going on and picked on him. That happened every time he and Thomas were together, and it was too bad because when we moved to New York, Jerzy was one of the very few interesting people we knew, and through him we could have met everybody.

For a while I tried hard to create a world for us away from the business school and Thomas’s colleagues. Most of them were dreary, and the ones who weren’t liked me, but when they did Thomas would act like a spoiled brat or make a scene after they left if we had them over or when we came home from wherever we had been. I got in touch with some Radcliffe classmates living in Boston or the suburbs. One had also been at Farmington with me. I had the idea that old friendships could be revived. Since I felt constantly drained from fatigue, it wasn’t an easy thing to do, but I made the effort. The response of a couple of them—one living in Dover and the other in Cambridge—was wonderful. It made me remember that being Lucy De Bourgh had its good sides. They genuinely wanted to see me, to meet Thomas, to introduce us to their friends. But after a weekend dinner or lunch at their house, followed by a meal at our apartment or
at an Italian restaurant in the North End, I could see it was no use. They’d gotten married soon after graduation to men a few years older. One was a lawyer. The other was working for Raytheon in some scientific capacity. They’d all had proper weddings with nice Shreve and Crump invitations, bridesmaids, and ushers; they had children in kindergarten or first or second grade; they played indoor tennis. The men had sloops they kept in Marblehead. If the weather was right, they sailed on weekends. For summer vacation they’d take their boats up to Maine to stay with parents on Mount Desert, where the whole clan would gather. It was the same story with my Borden and Hubbard cousins in Boston. They liked Thomas all right, whatever that meant, perhaps he amused them, but he didn’t sail, he didn’t ski, he was younger, and he was self-important. There was no place for him when they got their friends together on Saturday evening to dance to records. Or for me. The wives, perhaps the men too, sensed that something had gone wrong with me. What had come of all that time I had spent in Paris, hadn’t there been a problem at Farmington, although they couldn’t remember just what it was about, was there trouble between my parents and me, where had I found Thomas and who was he anyway, why hadn’t they been invited to our wedding, had we in fact been married in Bristol? You can imagine this sort of thing. My old classmates and cousins with their well-run lives, their routine of dinner parties, and once a month, or however often it came, time to twirl around the dance floor at the waltz evening. My cousin Bessie actually invited us twice. Thomas didn’t have tails, but that was all right, he wore his dinner
jacket, which he’d bought alone so it had the wrong cut and anyway didn’t fit. The real problem was that he didn’t know how to waltz. He hardly knew how to dance! Where would he have learned? I didn’t try to teach him. It was pointless, because you really had to dance very well or on that floor you were a nuisance. I liked to waltz, I liked those evenings, and whether Thomas knew how to dance or didn’t made no real difference. But Bessie stopped inviting us. Perhaps this wasn’t a new development, but the truth is that I was only then becoming aware of a simple fact. Lucy De Bourgh was
déclassée
, no longer someone you kept on your list once you had them on it. On top of that, I was less and less well. Dr. Reiner didn’t think I was making a sufficient effort during our sessions; once more he talked of sending me back to McLean; he had me evaluated by a colleague on Marlborough Street, an awful man who talked of trying an electroshock treatment. I escaped from his office in tears. The next day when I saw Dr. Reiner he said the Marlborough Street man should have perhaps explained how far ECT had progressed and that it was only one of several possible therapies. Nevertheless, I should be aware that he, Dr. Reiner, considered our failure to move forward troubling; he was taking it very seriously. He asked questions about my work, which was actually the only thing in my life going well, and as usual about Thomas. I told him the truth. The marriage had been a mistake; I disliked Thomas; I was sinking into a bog. Dr. Reiner had no answer. He was wrecking my life and emptying my bank account pretending to look for one.