Still Life with Bread Crumbs (12 page)

The last time Rebecca had seen her former husband was at Ben’s college graduation. She was delighted to see that he was losing his hair, especially in the rear crown, so that what he had left in the front looked like an afterthought. Of course Peter was easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure. But Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he had betrayed her but because he had betrayed his son. It was one of those statements that sounded sensible until you compared it against actual human psychology.

“I don’t know why you have such a hard time admitting that you are just plain pissed,” Dorothea said.

“The man didn’t deserve you, sweetheart!” said her father.

“I always liked Peter,” her mother said.

The minuet of their marriage was, in memory, mortifying to her: Peter would do something—miss dinner, make a slighting comment or a mess—and she would gather up her shreds of dignity and respond with the silent treatment. Except that Peter liked the silent treatment—he found it restful. In a rage she would have long imaginary conversations in the shower in which she would confront and unnerve him. Eventually she would try to lure him back, disgusted by her determination to be pleasant at all costs, to avoid conflict. But Peter liked conflict, too, at least the edgy understated intellectual sort. Their relationship was like playing chess except that one person had all the larger pieces and the other—her—a line of sad little pawns. Check check check. Checkmate.

All that meant that she had forgotten how much she had actually enjoyed being married in the beginning. When the stratum of her earth had rearranged itself, after the dust storms of Ben’s infancy and childhood, the tornadoes of her marital upheavals, and the tsunami of their divorce, it had covered over forever the memory of the way he had once run his long fingers, with their savagely bitten nails, up the insides of her legs and around her pelvis until her eyes lost all focus and she gasped helplessly. She had lost all memory of how they had lain on the long uncomfortable settee on Sunday mornings talking about what was in the
Times.
Or, more often, Rebecca listening while Peter talked. Sometimes Peter was in the paper, a review, a quotation, and she would read aloud while he repeated, “Oh, come now. Come now, Becky Sharp,” as though it was just all too much, being significant, being revered. When Peter was in the
Times
they almost always had a long afternoon of inventive sex. It never occurred to Rebecca to wonder how Peter would respond to seeing her name in the
Times.

That was later.

Eventually it turned out that Becky Sharp was Becky Dull, her knees and thighs familiar country. The biggest difference between
the two of them was in fact the biggest difference there could be between two people. Rebecca disliked change, and Peter lived for it. It was why he was such a successful academic. Every September, every January, a brightly patterned carpet of upturned faces would materialize in his seminar room or lecture hall, and he would set out to win them over. Deft seduction was his most conspicuous character trait.

Rebecca had met him at a dinner party; the guest who was meant to sit to his right had broken an ankle falling down the escalator at Saks, and Rebecca had been recruited in her stead. On the way down to the street in the small mahogany-faced elevator she had been so focused on what she imagined was Peter’s breath on the nape of her neck—which was, in fact, Peter’s breath on the nape of her neck, a technique that he found had never let him down—that she failed to move when the doors slid open to the rococo lobby, and as Peter stepped forward he had been pressed against the back of her. That was part of the technique, too.

That Saturday he took her to lunch in Little Italy. Naturally, he spoke Italian. He was, at the time, still married, although only nominally, he said. She would learn that Peter was always more or less nominally married. But that was later, too.

Rebecca had little experience with men, although she was nearly thirty. A nice high school boyfriend who was a truly terrible kisser. A number of brief entanglements in college. An art school lover she would run into at an opening a decade after, only to discover what she ought to have suspected, that he preferred men.

Her junior year she had spent a semester in Florence, but she had heard so many warnings about Italian men—“So much for Catholic morality!” her mother had cried at the end of one sermonette, as Sonya snorted like an angry bull—that if one so much as smiled absently at her in a trattoria she chugged her double espresso and fled. Her biography had all
the trappings of sophistication but no actual sophistication at all.

Otherwise she would have realized that some of Peter’s technique was a little shopworn. Otherwise, when he sent his first wife and their two young children back to England in first-family exile and persuaded the university to shift him from one apartment building to another, with better views and light, so he and Rebecca could start afresh, she would have seen the inevitable shape of her own future.

“He didn’t break the glass,” said Rebecca’s grandmother on her wedding day, sitting in a corner of the entrance hall in a floral dress that smelled of camphor.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Rebecca’s mother had whispered.

Her grandmother’s distress that Peter had not smashed the traditional glass underfoot at the end of the ceremony, that there had been no chuppah and no rabbi, had been muted somewhat by the wedding announcement. “You don’t know what a big deal it is for a Jew to get one of these things in
The New York Times
,” her grandmother had said in a loud whisper. Rebecca’s mother was miffed that the paper, after doing a bit of investigating, had refused to describe her as a concert pianist, or even as a pianist at all. Peter had looked at the misty photograph of Rebecca and read the copy below and said, his accent sharp as a paper cut, “And so we mark the first time that the words ‘Balliol College’ and ‘women’s undergarments’ have appeared in print in tandem.”

There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic. For some reason, Peter had thought she was the latter. But even if that had been the case, the problem inherent remains the same—once she becomes a wife, the exotic becomes familiar, and thus predictable, and thus not what was wanted at all. Those few women who stayed exotic usually were considered, after a few years, to be crazy.

Rebecca learned this over time, and to her sorrow. As with many marriages, hers was based on essential misconceptions. In her case she had been misled into thinking Peter was reliable, perhaps because he was very careful always to put cedar shoe trees into his shoes and because he always wore the same cologne, a bay rum that could be had only from a shop in a London arcade.

It turned out that he was not reliable, just finicky about small personal things like that. He still used a shaving brush and a straight razor.

But Rebecca had liked being married to him for a long time, or at least had liked being part of a pair, having someone to talk to even if he did not seem to be listening, having someone to warm the bed beneath the duvet on cold nights when the old radiators knocked more than they burned. She liked taking an arm on a slick street, having someone pay for the cab. Perhaps she used the words “my husband” more often than many women. She liked reading his manuscripts and didn’t much mind that he was not as delighted by the paintings she produced. She was not delighted by them much, either. They had a flat, lifeless quality. It was not until one of her professors told her the photographs she was taking as the basis for some of her paintings were much more interesting than the paintings themselves that she had shifted permanently from painting to photography and found her calling.

Perhaps that was the beginning of the end. Or maybe it was the baby. Or maybe it was simple numerology. At thirty he had married his first wife. At forty he had married Rebecca. At fifty he married the assistant curator with whom Rebecca had surprised him in the back bedroom at a cocktail party farewell for a university colleague. They were in the room with the coats piled on the bed, so they certainly meant to get caught. When Rebecca arrived home Peter refused her demand that he sleep on the couch in his study. “I have a perfectly fine bed in which I intend
to sleep,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt and releasing a whiff of secondhand Diorissimo, and sex.

So Rebecca had slept on the couch instead. “Mommy,” Ben had said sternly next morning, “you’re in the wrong place for you.”

Sometimes she thought it was not losing her husband she had minded most, but losing the lovely big apartment they’d shared, with its windowed kitchen and its herringbone floors. The university’s apartment, into which the assistant curator would move, and where she would eventually raise their twin daughters after giving up her job. Bad move, Rebecca had thought, assuming, correctly, that in the foreseeable future the curator would need to support herself once more.

“I like my old room better,” Ben had said when he and Rebecca moved into the place on West Seventy-Sixth Street. The curator wife had called him Benjie, until her own children were born, when she began calling him “your son” and his bed had been moved to the smallest bedroom so the twins could have a larger one. Until then Rebecca had occasionally thought of warning the woman of what would happen when Peter turned sixty. Which did happen when Peter turned sixty. The new woman was a graduate student whose name was Piper. The twins, according to Ben, were acting out because of abandonment. Peter was unchanged.

“I thought you’d seen this coming,” Peter had said the night Rebecca had surprised him with the soon-to-be third Mrs. Symington.

She hadn’t. Sometimes now she was still amazed, and mortified, that she hadn’t. Peter liked stories, liked reading them, telling them, analyzing them. Beginning, middle, end. Drama. Rebecca simply wasn’t much of a story. If it hadn’t been for the Kitchen Counter series she wouldn’t have been a story at all. It was only in the last few years that she had begun to realize that this wasn’t her fault. She realized that marriage doesn’t really
make much of a story. Even in a marriage as truncated as her own—nine years, more or less—most of it is the mundane middle part. That was the part Peter couldn’t bear. That was the part Rebecca had liked most. It was the part she still missed, missed terribly without even knowing it.

THANKSGIVING 1956

Bebe hired a black woman who lived in Harlem to cook dinner for her husband, her six-year-old daughter, her parents, and a couple who lived in the apartment above. There was a twenty-four-pound turkey, corn bread dressing, mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and three kinds of pie. Bebe refused to tip the woman because she arrived nearly forty minutes late to the apartment. The next day, eating a turkey sandwich with salt and mayonnaise, Rebecca decided Thanksgiving was the best holiday, although she had little to choose from: her family never celebrated Hanukkah but her father was militant about ignoring Christmas and insisted they spend December 25 eating Chinese takeout and going to the movies.

Rebecca liked moo shu beef but liked turkey sandwiches better.

THANKSGIVING 1966

Bebe decided to try Thanksgiving at the Berkshire Hotel. From then on, Winter family Thanksgivings were held at the Berkshire. However, by the time Rebecca was married and concerned about how to explain that she and Peter did not want a hotel meal on a holiday, her parents had decided to go to Delray Beach from November to March.

The Delray Beach and Tennis Club had a Thanksgiving buffet. Rebecca did not visit her parents in Florida until December. Peter did not visit them at all.

“It’s not my holiday, darling,” Peter said when she expressed relief that they could have their own Thanksgiving meal, in their own home. He said this every Thanksgiving at some point. He said the Pilgrims ate turkey because their religion forbade joy. The American guests all laughed, secretly impressed by the use of the archaic past tense of
forbid.
One year a historian became contentious: “Now, you see, that’s a basic bowdlerization of the Puritan experience in America,” he said with his mouth full. “Oh, dear Lord, Owen, next you’ll provide us with a history of the yam in an agrarian culture,” Peter drawled, and everyone laughed again.

THANKSGIVING 1990

Rebecca and Ben had Thanksgiving dinner at the Delray Beach and Tennis Club. “This is like a restaurant,” said Ben, who was six. “He misses his father,” said Rebecca’s father, making a well in his potatoes for his gravy. “Look, Benjie, do it like this.”

“This is my daughter,” said Bebe to one of her friends who stopped by the table.

“The famous photographer?” the woman said.

“She’s getting a divorce,” Bebe said.

“Anyone can prepare a turkey,” it said in one of Rebecca’s cookbooks, still sitting on the shelf above the refrigerator in her apartment in New York. She groaned, and not simply because she imagined she could hear Ben, on the inflatable mattress in the cottage’s second bedroom, having sex with the young woman he has brought up to visit with him.

(In fact Ben was doing push-ups. Rebecca is unable to tell the difference between the breathing of a man performing rhythmic exercise and one in the throes of coitus. Which may be the clearest reflection of her sex life during her marriage. Peter Symington was a thrilling and imaginative lover before the clinking of champagne glasses at the wedding lunch; after, he was burning calories and fantasizing about the girl in the short skirt in the front row of his survey course. While Ben does push-ups, Ben’s
girlfriend, a young woman named Amanda, has gone outside to have a cigarette. This habit will eventually, nominally, lead to the end of her relationship with Ben at a New Year’s Eve party. That, and the following conversation between Rebecca and her son over Thanksgiving dinner:

“So then he shot the raccoon.”

“He shot him? He couldn’t trap him and take him somewhere else?”