Mourning Glory (27 page)

When she returned the next day she found a new housekeeper
already installed.

For the past month she had lived in a kind of cocoon of
pure pleasure, residing in another dimension of reality, as if her spirit had
entered a new body and was living a separate life from the one she had always
known. She was, in fact, reinventing herself, deliberately, with glorious
abandon.

The lies that spewed out of her imagination were like a
fecund plant, growing like the great beanstalk in the fairy tale, tendrils
popping before her eyes. She was deliberately creating a new person, complete
with a new identity and history, solely for Sam's consumption and approval and,
above all, for her own selfish benefit. She was convinced that the real facts
of her life, the boring truth and unexciting emptiness of it, the recounting of
her failures, would cause her immediate expulsion from serious consideration
for a lifetime commitment.

As the details of her false history escalated, she forced
herself in self-protection to burn the facts into her memory. Sam was too
relentlessly curious about her for her to get away with evasions and incomplete
facts. And, of course, she needed to keep the story logical, factual and
accurate.

"Why so many questions?" she would ask
periodically, when she felt her imagination tire. They had this great luxury of
time between them, lying in bed, their bodies cooling from the profound energy
of their lovemaking, alert to each other. They were the only human beings in
the center of their circumscribed universe.

"I need to learn you," he would respond.

Learn me?
Considering the
false facts she was bombarding him with, she could not imagine his ever
learning
her.

"But you know me, Sam," she would reply.

As for the unspoken truth, the nonfactual reality, there
was no way her body could lie to him. She was not faking it. She hoped that was
obvious to him. And truthful. Her explosive responses were genuine and their
mutuality beyond argument. Certainly, after this first month of pure rapture,
there were no sexual secrets between them. There was not a mark on his body
that she did not know. Nor could there be one on hers that he had not
confronted in his own exploration.

She knew instinctively that the sexual aspect of their
lives could never be the deciding factor for him, as it hadn't been the
deciding factor in his relationship with Anne. She clung tenaciously and
impatiently to the idea that originally had motivated her, to be legitimized in
marriage. It had from the beginning been her ultimate goal. She vowed never to
lose sight of it, despite all other temptations that might waylay her.

Ring around your finger, dummy.
The words reverberated in her mind. She was not, she believed in
her heart, constituted to be a kept woman, however financially secure it made
her life.

Despite the glorious time she was spending with Sam, she
could not evade the facts of her finances. Unfortunately, the rosy possibility
that Mrs. Burns had painted made no allowances for time or money.

Her money was running out, and among her many anxieties on
that score was that Jackie might buckle under the pressure of her newly
acquired expenses, meaning that she might drop out of school or otherwise blunt
her chances for a better future. If Grace's gamble didn't work out—and it was a
long shot—Jackie's future would be doomed. Not to mention her own. She had
invested all of her hopes in this enterprise.

Yet she dreaded the possibility that he might offer her
money. However proffered, she knew she would, as a matter of both dignity and
tactics, have to refuse. The slightest show of desperation, she calculated,
would be fatal.

Above all she needed Sam's respect, and to avoid being
tarred with the brush of Carmen's definition of her character and motives.
Besides, she had portrayed herself as financially secure. Would she accept a
gift? No; that, too, would have to be rejected. In fact, she had decided
irrevocably that anything that hinted of an exchange of value for sexual favors
had to be rejected. The stakes were too high for compromise.

She liked to think that she was acting in a way true to her
Catholic roots, with its rigid morality. But, on reflection, that hardly held
water. She felt no guilt on the erotic front, not in the slightest, no sense of
sin or soiling. She loved that part of it, hungered for it without any hint of
second thoughts or conscience.

What bothered her most was the lying, the proliferation of
false testimony. She was not by nature and upbringing a liar.

On the other hand, she found that she could disregard the
anguish over her lying by defining it as simply a means to an end. This, too,
was a paradox, since the end could be dangerously compromised by revelation.
The fact was that she had gone too far to retreat, and to worry about being
exposed would only inhibit her budding relationship with Sam.

Day after day the lies continued, the soft, intimate
cadence of her whispering voice, spinning its frail web of deception with
relentless and, to her, surprising creativity and eloquence. Even when she told
the truth about her history, it began to seem like a lie.

"What were your parents like, Grace?"

"Loving, involved and interested in my life."

"What did they do?"

She had forgotten. Anxiously, she searched her mind for
what she had told him earlier.

"Oh, yes," Sam said, "You told me. Your dad
was an engineer and your mother taught piano."

"You have a good memory, Sam," she said,
relieved. She needed to be more alert, she told herself.

"You must be musical, then."

"Oh, yes."

"The classics, I suppose. Brahms, Chopin,
Beethoven."

"All of the above."

"How old were you when your mother died?"

"Mom was in her late seventies."

"Which made you a kind of late baby."

His drive for information was maddening.

"Yes."

"What they used to call a change-of-life baby."

"They wanted children badly."

"So you're an only child."

"Yes, I am."

"I'm one myself. Unfortunately, I became the object of
my parents' possession. It was stifling. It was important to get away."

She had hoped that such an intimate insight might set him
off on his own path and sidetrack his curiosity about her. It didn't.
Nevertheless, she was alert to any opening that might get him talking about
himself and short-circuit her having to continue her inventions.

"Did you enjoy working in Washington?"

In the brief silence that followed she had to jog her
memory. Yes, she had said that. Hadn't they discussed that earlier?

"Yes. I loved it. I worked for a senator."

"Did you? Which one?"

For a moment she was stumped. She could barely remember a
name from that long ago. How old would she have been? Twenty-two, twenty-three.
Then a name popped into her mind, another gift of fate.

"Kennedy. I worked for Kennedy. I was pretty low on
the totem pole."

"He's still there. What staying power!" He
paused, became reflective. "Anne was a great fan of the Kennedys. They
were a bit too liberal for me. I'm more of a centrist."

"So am I," Grace said, hoping that he would veer
off the subject. She was way out of her depth.

"We have gone a bit too far to the right, but we do
have a way of adjusting. Don't you think so?"

"Yes, I do. That's what makes our country so
great."

"I agree," he said. "But we do have to stay
ahead of the game in every area. Do you realize that in my lifetime the
population of America has doubled?"

"It's very troubling, Sam."

"In your children's lifetime it will double again. Can
you imagine how America will fare with a population of half a billion? And a
billion in your grandchildren's lifetime."

"It is staggering."

"Anne and I had some lively political discussions. She
was very opinionated." He chuckled. "I liked that."

In that area, she knew she would suffer by comparison. The
fact was that she didn't know enough to have firm opinions. She wished he would
change the subject.

"Is Washington where you met your ex?"

It had been his own conclusion and she did not resist,
hoping it would channel his thoughts away from any political discussions.
Quickly, she reviewed the time frame.

"Yes," she said.

"What was he doing?"

"He was with a law firm, just starting out."

"How did you meet?"

"A blind date."

It seemed innocuous and vague enough, and gave her an
opening to ask him a similar question.

"And you, Sam? Where did you meet Anne?"

"Anne and I met at a dance in Wellesley. I had this
friend Carl who was on the prowl for wealthy young ladies. He dragged me up
there one weekend and fixed me up with his girlfriend's roommate, who was
Anne."

Cutting too close to the bone, his revelation about seeking
a rich girl aroused her curiosity and prompted her to want to further her
exploration.

"Were you looking for a rich girl?"

"Among other things. I certainly didn't rule it out. Wellesley was pretty toney for me, a kid from Brooklyn College without a dime."

"Was Anne rich?"

"I guess by the standards of the time. Her father was
a stockbroker. They lived in Manhattan in a huge apartment on the East Side. Family came to Palm Beach for the winter." He grew wistful. "They were
real white bread WASPs. I was the Jewboy from Brooklyn."

"Anne wasn't Jewish?"

"She converted, went through the whole
megillah,
mikvah
and all. She became more Jewish than me. Her family didn't speak to
us for ten years. By then I had made big bucks. Amazing how much difference
money makes. Suddenly, I was acceptable. Just barely, but acceptable. I have to
say, Anne was great about all that. She thought her family were bigoted
assholes, which they were."

Grace wondered if she would be subjected to conversion if
she married Sam, not that it mattered. Ring around the finger. Above all else.

"What's a mick ... mick something?"

"Mikvah.
Rabbis put the
lady in a pool, supposed to wash away their gentileness. Something like that.
My Orthodox grandparents were still alive then. Anne insisted on doing it out
of respect for them. Frankly, I didn't much care either way. But, I must say,
Anne did like the idea of being Jewish, daughter of an ancient people, an
underdog and a minority. My son was
bar mitzvahed
and my daughter was
bat
mitzvahed
. Not that it made much difference in their lives."

Grace had noted that he hadn't talked much about his
children, and what he had said indicated disappointment about how they had
turned out. Of course she wanted to know more about them, but he did not seem
to want to continue on that path.

"Considering the gap between you, it's amazing how
well things turned out," Grace prodded. She wasn't referring to the sexual
gap and Sam understood. Since the gap between her and Sam was at least as wide,
probably wider, she needed to know how it had been bridged.

"We came from different worlds. Anne was the product
of American ancestor-worshippers, of people who came over on one of the first
waves, way back in the seventeen hundreds. Her mother was DAR and her father
was Society of Cincinnatus, a descendent of a Revolutionary War officer. They
considered themselves the American aristocracy, and they had imbued Anne with
all the attributes of that class. It used to be called breeding. Anne knew all
the little rituals of the class, the way they spoke and thought and acted, the
way they entertained, their confident coolness and sense of superiority. Oh,
they were bigots. Catholics were way down on the social scale and Jews were
below that. And what was I, a hustling Jew from Brooklyn who fit all the
stereotypes. I was a natural at business. Didn't matter what kind. I could
squeeze a buck from a stone. But what I didn't have was Anne's sense of taste
and class with a capital
K.
What good was money if you didn't have that?
Anne taught me how to be perceived as someone with class. Hell, just look at the
possessions in this house, the antiques, the paintings, the look of old money.
It's a genuine look, not phony, because Anne was genuine, the real thing. She
taught me how to act, how to look, how to live."

It seemed so strange and incongruous for Grace to be lying
there naked, intimately entwined with this man, while listening to this
relentless drumbeat of praise for the lost wife, perfect Anne. Anne the classic
mate. Anne the wonderful. She snickered to herself, taking refuge in the one
place where she, Grace, dominated. Anne the unfuckable!

Except for that single aspect, it was impossible for Grace
to think of herself in the running to replace such an object of awesome praise.
Certainly, she, the daughter of a barber, badly educated, at the bottom of the
economic ladder, with a loser's past and a child who was slipping into the
netherworld of white trash, could not possibly aspire to be the mate of this
man who had experienced the instruction of an American aristocrat. She wanted
to scream out her true reaction to his litany of admiration, but, of course,
she held back, knowing that she still had one golden pointed arrow in her
quiver that could not be attributed to Anne.

She kissed him on the lips, then disengaged and kissed her
way downward from his chest to penis, which rose to the occasion. Her lips
teased him as they pecked along the shaft and below, pausing to whisper,
"Did she ever do this?"

"Never."

"Or this?"

"Never."

She felt him tense with pleasure as she ministered to him,
her hands busy elsewhere, searching for his most vulnerable points of pleasure,
feeling the sense of sympathetic joy.