The Short History of a Prince (27 page)

“What do you mean, exactly?”

He looked past Susan, out the window, down the street. “It seems to me that grieving the way we have is a luxury, of our time and place, that it’s a privilege and a burden of our era, that we hold our dead ones so dear. With all the energy we’ve spent mourning we could have built a pyramid to assure Dan an afterlife. People die in other countries like flies. There are women in the third world who still have babies every year, just as they used to in the old days, because they know most of them won’t survive into adulthood. We’re wimps, is what I’m saying. Certainly my mother took a son’s death harder than Jeannie would have, or Mrs. Gamble. I’m not saying she indulged herself, but she was not equal to the task. She was not prepared for failure.”

Susan shook her head. “I don’t blame her for anything, you know that, but the secrecy caused everyone so much pain.”

“It was a different time,” he said. “They didn’t know better. They didn’t realize that I could have used psychoanalysis, or at the least a little family therapy. It wasn’t a reflex, the way it would be today.”

They held their coffee cups in both hands at their chins and assumed the other was remembering all those years back. Susan thought again about what she should say first when she saw Lester. She knew it was hopeless to try to be witty, but if she didn’t think of something she would be sure to act like an imbecile. She clicked her cup against her teeth. She should try to think of a line, something glib, but what?

Walter checked the window to see if Julian happened to be passing by. Julian was tall and he had magnificent lips. He’d stand out in a crowd. You wouldn’t miss him if he was anywhere on the street. He’d as good as call out in his yellow-and-green plaid cap with the earflaps, his long tweed coat, a gold cashmink scarf.

“Do you think I’m tempting fate, Walter? I have two healthy kids, a moderately glamorous career, a good husband, who, besides you, was the person who educated me. Gary still makes me read hard books, won’t take no for an answer. He quizzes me every time there’s a new DeLillo, a new Toni Morrison, a new Milan Kundera. I haven’t ever had a major injury, knock on wood—”

“Suzanne Farrell coaching you for ‘Diamonds.’ Don’t forget that,” Walter put in. The former New York City Ballet prima ballerina had been their idol since they were ten years old.

“The highlight of my career. Sometimes it still amazes me that I have been allowed to dance her role. Her role. And here I am, wanting to turn the whole thing upside down by running off with Lester. Maybe I’m doing this only because, goddamn it, sometimes I just want to read Barbara Taylor Bradford.” She lowered her voice. “Do you know that in Saudi Arabia I’d get stoned to death in the village square for committing”—she whispered—“adultery. I’d be put to death.”

“But there have to be four witnesses, I think it is. That’s how the law goes over there. The stoning thing sounds barbaric, but actually it doesn’t happen as much as you’d think because of the witness clause. And anyway there’s just me here, and I’ll never tell.”

“It’s serious, Walter, that’s what I’m saying. It’s a big deal. I’m really an old-fashioned girl when it comes down to it. I’ve always worked hard, done the right thing, more or less followed Mother’s orders. If Lou Ann knew about this, she’d come after me with her claws out. She’d disinherit me. She’d gladly help Gary kill me. A lot of people have affairs without a second thought, but I can’t pretend it’s just
a roll in the hay.” She closed her eyes for a minute, thinking of that roll in the hay. “Oh well,” she said, sighing, and then she clenched her fists, gritted her teeth. “Do you know what I hate? I despise it when dead people admonish you from the grave or lead their perfect lives in death. I can’t help thinking that Daniel would have appreciated his lot, that he wouldn’t have screwed it all up. It’s so easy to think that way, and yet the dead have a point: we have so much and we’re not grateful, we want more and more, one last little thing, and then that, we say, will be enough. Isn’t it enough to have the life I have?”

“That depends,” Walter said. “If you’re not taking this thing lightly, then I guess you have to ask yourself a few questions. Such as, what is it, exactly, that you long for?”

She was holding a French fry like a cigarette and she had been about to take a bite. “What is it I long for?” she repeated. She stared at him with her mouth open. “What is it I long for?” She said it haltingly that time and as if she were speaking only to herself.

Walter had asked the right question, he knew, could feel it in the tautness of the line between them.

“Lester,” she said at last. “Lester might say that I’m really longing for God. Could that be it? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if lust was that lofty? So maybe my attraction to Lester has nothing to do with the disappointment in my career, or my boring husband, or my upbringing. Maybe all this yearning is a longing for God himself.” She smiled, marveling at the idea. “Wouldn’t that just be the limit?”

“I bet there are a lot of different routes to God,” Walter said. “And it’s probably a lot more fun and more worthwhile if you take the crooked path and the longest. I think it’s probably not harmony we’re after, not until the bitter end, anyway.”

“What do I long for?” she said again. “I want relief from drudge. Get up, get breakfast, make lunches, send the boys off, go to the studio for class, rehearse, call the sitter after school to make sure Toby hasn’t drugged her, rush home, grab a snack, nag Gary to leave the store, go back to the theater, perform until eleven o’clock, eat dinner, go to bed. This is my life, Walter, my life as a supposed Artist. I want relief, I want—”

“Adoration, and a bit of sweetness? Passion, adoration and a portion of sweetness?”

“Yes, yes,” she hissed, leaning over the table. “That’s what I want. All of it. I want the sleepless nights, the ten-pound weight loss, the drunk feeling of love.” She set her cup down, held her own face in her hands, and said pleadingly, as if she were asking Walter for it, “Sweetness. I want sweetness with a fiddle player. He is everything that Gary isn’t, I know that, Walter. He’s gallant and corny and mildly Christian and a little bit vain. The fact that he’s a stud is probably much more important to him than he’d ever admit. He’s a gentleman caller, is what he is. I think it was the way he spoke to his three spaniels in Houston that got me. He walked in his house and said, ‘You-all dogs want to eat?’ ”

“ ‘You-all dogs want to eat,’ ” Walter echoed.

“I know it’s not much to go on but it charmed the life out of me. And his Christian-ness made me think he might readily be naughty, that he might be itching to be just a little bit wicked. And yes, all in the name of sweetness.”

Walter shrugged. There were different rules governing her world. In his sphere, giving in to temptation made him feel good, and then sometimes bad—or worse, indifferent. Immorality could be lethal, it was true, if you weren’t careful. As an adult he had never felt he’d sinned, that he’d burn in hell, never felt he’d done something that rent the social fabric. He could see that she had the idea that sleeping with Lester, the Houston Symphony concertmaster, might cause her house to blow up, her children to drop dead on the playground. And she would think it served her right.

“When I first met Lester I thought he seemed like Daniel. I told you that, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he said. “Although I hate to think that Daniel would have gotten religion and become a Texan.”

“You’d like Lester, you really would. I realized later that I’d made the Daniel connection to myself, as an excuse, as a reason to get to know Les, to write him letters, to like him in a legitimate way.”

“He reminds me of a dead friend, therefore I get to have sex with him?”

“Oh God, Walter. That’s terrible.”

Walter ran his finger along the plate, in the spot the French fries had been, in the grease and the salt. His remark was a little harsh, he
knew. “Maybe,” he said, “you don’t have to think of the comparison in terms of exploiting a person, but a way to tap into memory. Perhaps you could call it remembering.”

“No.” She shook her head. “That’s too generous. I remember plenty.” She was quiet for a minute, nibbling her bottom lip with her front teeth. “That Christmas party your parents had, for starters? I always think of it in the winter. I can’t hear O Holy Night’ without seeing your Aunt Jeannie trying to get Francie to sing along with her at the piano. You fell down the stairs that night, and I fell in love with Daniel. I didn’t even care that you got hurt. I knew
you’d
survive. Daniel looked so sick in the kitchen. I remember how he stared at me, as if he was taking stock of my strength, as if he was admiring the life in me. He looked at me as if I could save him, and I thought I could, I really did. I thought the power of”—she coughed out the word—“love, could cure him. I think he was an unusual person, Walter. He saw things through this sort of scrim of goodwill, and it wasn’t that he was an obnoxious brownnoser, and it wasn’t only his innocence. He already had the bemused patience of an older, wiser person. I like to think he wouldn’t have lost that quality as an adult.”

At Christmas only weeks before, Walter had looked down the back stairs at his parents’ house. He had remembered how angry he’d been at Susan, how the minute his head hit the last stair he’d understood that she was going to use Daniel’s sickness for her own purposes. He had sometimes believed it was his neurosis that had made him think ill of her, that she herself had only been a sixteen-year-old in love. He had despised her, hated the sight of her, for nearly five months.

She was in distress across from him, wiping at her eyes. “You’re not lying to Gary after all,” he said. “We are hashing over the past. You wouldn’t believe what a nightmare it is to be in high school every day, how the smallest things, a paper punch, a milk carton, Reese’s peanut butter cups in the grubby paw of some boy—how one small image brings back an entire horrible day twenty years ago.” He noticed a speck of nail polish on her engagement ring, and he took her hand in his and with his fingernail chiseled at the spot. “You might want to take this thing off, you know, before dinner. So anyway, if we were back there in Oak Ridge, doing life over, with our knowledge intact,
nothing, not one person, would be recognizable. This is how I see it, through my rose-colored scrim: Mrs. Gamble, true to her real nature, would be a dyke with a crew cut and Dobermans instead of collies. She’d be a dowser, or maybe even a surgeon, or a plumber, something that requires hunting down an error, finding a source, following a pipe or a vein through a system. Sue Rawson would live with a buxom blond biker and be completely under her power. Trishie Gamble wouldn’t exist, but if she did, she’d be out in the yard sucking on Quaaludes, handing them beyond the fence to all the little children, to counteract her mother’s vitamin campaign. We didn’t know that what we did in high school would actually mark us, would stay with us, change us. Choice, action, fate, only affected people’s lives if they were characters in Greek theater or a Henry James novel. I used to take everything, every last move, seriously, partly so that I would feel a sense of drama that I didn’t think really existed in my life, or would ever exist. I couldn’t go through the car wash without pretending it was something significant, a rite, a purging ritual. There was terror, real Aristotelian terror, I made believe, when the water came thundering across the car, and the smell of detergent went straight up your nose and behind your eyeballs, and finally the quiet, the white sign lighting up, the light that absolves and urges you out into the world, the black words: DRIVE AHEAD.”

“We were such geeky teenagers,” she said fondly.

“Nerds of the highest order, and so unaware. It’s shocking to think that while we were doing our demi-pliés at the barre up on the twelfth floor of the Louis Sullivan Building the Cultural Revolution was going on. Parents in China were made to watch their children jump from the top of buildings to their deaths. What defined my childhood wasn’t Kennedy’s assassination, and Bobby’s assassination, and Martin Luther King’s assassination, those great divides, the tragedies that determined the befores and afters. My defining moment was seeing
Serenade
at Ravinia, with Sue Rawson. What was one president’s death, a martyr or two, compared with seeing angels, getting a glimpse of the spirit world?”

Susan smiled across at him, and withdrew her hand. She thought that Lester probably wasn’t as interesting as Walter, that even supposing he was the love of her life, if such a thing was actually possible, he
would never know her the way her old friend did. He was looking out into the street, watching each person pass. “You must miss the city,” she murmured.

“Sometimes,” he said absently, without turning from the window. “Do you remember that night you danced to
Serenade
in our living room, by the way? You were possessed. You bewitched us. You hocus-pocused Daniel from some far corner of the house and he came to watch. Mitch went crawling on the floor after you finished, not just to claim you, but also to try to absorb some of the magic, hoping it would rub off on him. He had previously thought he was the next great star in the making, but watching you he realized he didn’t have it for the big leagues. It was that night that determined his future as a developer in Southern California. You didn’t even have a skirt on, you were wearing jeans, and yet there was this feeling of billowing fabric. If you dazzled Mitch and me, think what Daniel must have felt. He’d never seen anything like it, never dreamed—”

“But do you know what was awful, Walter, so painful for him? When he couldn’t go to school, when he couldn’t swim, he found he didn’t have friends. They fell away, abandoned him. He couldn’t talk to anyone, not only because they didn’t know what to say but because he realized they weren’t capable of meeting him at his level. He didn’t feel arrogant. He was just lonely, sad. We used to talk about that. We had some good conversations in those months—at least, I remember thinking they were profound discussions. Teenagers are deep, anyway, sifting through right and wrong, justice and injustice. Only we had an immediate reason to think about God and death, the nature of love.”