“The last time I saw you was in a coffee shop,” he said as we sat down.
“A long time ago.”
He thought for a moment. “Nearly eleven years.”
In eleven years, Alec had become a distinguished man. Even in school, he had had a certain elegance, but now in his mid-thirties he was even more polished. He was just my height, with neatly trimmed blond hair, a long nose, a sensitive mouth. He was wearing glasses—little metal-rimmed ones—and a fine silk tie, a suit so soft I wanted to touch it. I felt rough and dowdy in my jeans and boots, a ratty red sweater, my hair jammed under a wool hat.
He told me what he’d been doing. He was an associate professor of art history at Harvard, and he had written a book that had been widely praised, about Millet and the Barbizon School.
“My first artistic passion,” I said with a smile.
“I remember,” he said. “I thought of you while I was writing it.” He was abruptly silent, stirring his coffee. A chorus sang: O’er the fields we go, laughing all the way, ha ha ha . . .“Actually, Wynn, I’ve thought a lot about the past this last year or so, probably because the present hasn’t been terribly satisfactory.”
He was looking into his coffee as if into a book, and I studied his bent head. I could tell he was searching for exactly the right words to finish what he wanted to say. Alec had never, to my knowledge, done or said anything impulsive, and it was a comfort to know that some things never changed. I felt a wave of affection for him. “I’m sorry to hear that, Alec,” I said. “What’s been happening? What’s the trouble?”
He raised his head. “You’re not with the sculptor any more?”
I said that I wasn’t with the sculptor any more, that he was married to someone else. I told Alec about my job in England, my mother’s death, my father’s, and my decision to return to the States.
“I’m sorry to hear your parents are dead. I liked them both.”
“I miss them. Especially my father. After my mother died, he turned into a crotchety old bird for a while—you wouldn’t have known him—but he was mellowing out like crazy when he died.”
“And what about you? What made you decide to come back to Boston?”
“Nothing but homesickness.” I had no idea how to explain to Alec all that that word implied.
“Do you regret it?”
“No—I love being here. But I feel rather aimless.”
“Still painting?”
“Not much. I’m doing a little teaching, and I’m enjoying that more than doing my own work at the moment.” He let that pass, for which I was grateful. “I have no family left, and I don’t know a soul in town any more.” I grimaced. “It’s odd to be in this city and not to be in school. It makes me feel elderly.”
“Well—now you know me.” His eyes were eager behind his glasses. “Maybe that will help.” He looked at me for a moment—I saw him drop his gaze to my breasts—and then he said, “I was married to a colleague of mine for several years.”
He stopped again. We sipped our coffee. Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh. . . . It was warm in there, and I took off my hat; my hair sprang out like a caged hedgehog. Alec didn’t speak, but he seemed to want to talk, and so I prompted, “And what happened?”
The story poured out in a torrent, as if he had never had anyone to tell it to before. The marriage had broken down over issues of professional jealousy. When his book came out, he was promoted and tenured at Harvard, and he became an international authority on his subject, with more travel and speaking engagements than he could cram into his schedule. Meanwhile, his wife’s contract wasn’t renewed, and she found herself without a job. She was bitter. They fought all the time. She became cruel, he said—without specifying what he meant. I imagined how easy it would be to be cruel to Alec, who was always so reserved and courteous, and I also imagined that behind his simple story—he was more successful than she, they quarreled, they divorced—there must be layers of torment.
We sat there awhile, comfortably, talking, and then he walked me home. In the weeks that followed, we began dating. It all seemed very logical. Alec was a nice man; he could be quite interesting behind his reserved manner. We spent Christmas at his place, in bed, drinking champagne; neither of us had anywhere else in particular to go. As the winter progressed, we were constantly together. Alec lived well. After the divorce he had bought a lovely old brick house on Brattle Street and filled it with antiques and Oriental carpets. He was the way he had been eleven years before, but more so: He knew about rugs, he knew about classical music and jazz, he knew about wines, he knew all the best restaurants, he could cook. He showed me parts of Boston and Cambridge I had never seen before. He took me to parties where I met his colleagues, some of them awesomely famous. He made love to me slowly, seriously, considerately. He praised my little sketches. I gave him one for his birthday, of the footbridge and the river, and he hung it in his study.
But when Alec asked me to marry him, I resisted. I knew I didn’t love him—I loved Patrick, I would always love Patrick, whether he was married or not, whether I ever saw him again or not. No one else could come close to what he had meant to me. I knew that. And I wasn’t sure Alec loved me: It seemed sometimes that I was just another treasured possession, like his house or the antique armoire he brought back from his last trip to France. But he said he loved me, several times, and finally it seemed petty and cruel not to believe him.
He proposed once formally, over dinner at a Russian restaurant, complete with champagne and a ring. I said I couldn’t marry him, I didn’t love him enough. But a week later he asked again, with more champagne, the same ring, a witty sonnet he had written. He was charming; he made me laugh. Impulsively, a little drunk on champagne, I said yes.
Why did I marry him? The simple answer was that he wanted it so much. The more complex one is that I had lost everything, everyone. My daughter was dead, Patrick was married to someone else, my parents were gone, I had no real job, my friends were scattered, my beloved Boston was a lonelier place than I had expected it to be. It seemed like a good idea to make someone else happy, and in doing so I would find comfort, peace, purpose. We’ll have a good life, Alec had said, and I believed that that was true.
“You have no idea how much this means to me,” he said as he slipped a ring on my finger—a dainty but far from small diamond he had found in an antiques shop in Paris, where he had just been to a conference. His voice was very serious; his eyes shone. My heart turned over. I wished I could love him that much, but it was no longer true that I didn’t love him at all—how could I not? Who could measure such a thing? Who could balance it out? And was love ever equally given and received?
As I considered the life we would have together the thought came to me—a thought I had banished for years—that it was time for me to have a child, that I needed more than almost anything to have a child. I imagined having children with Alec: a little boy in glasses, an artistic, graceful little girl. I put my arms around Alec and kissed him.
We were married the following autumn. On our honeymoon we went to Paris, a city Alec knew as well as he knew Boston; he spoke decent French and had friends there—pleasant, English-speaking art historians and museum people. We took a side trip to the town of Barbizon, where I did some obligatory sketching—his old dream of the perfect life. He would turn to me at odd moments—in the shop on the Champs Élysées where he bought me perfume, in the Café Loup while we waited for our table—and say, in his modest way, “Hasn’t this turned out well, Wynn?” And he would take my hand and kiss it.
We were sitting in the Jardin de Luxembourg when we first discussed having children. The French children fascinated me. They seemed, all of them, to be fine boned, beautifully dressed, well behaved. I could see Alec and me with a child sitting on the bench between us, that imaginary little daughter. We would buy her a balloon from the stand at the entrance. She would wear the smocked dresses my grandmother had made for me, still stored away in tissue paper in
my closet. Alec would teach her little bits of French.
When I brought up the subject, Alec said, “Let’s wait a while. I’m too involved in my work right now. I know I couldn’t be the kind of father I would want to be.”
This was a reasonable thing to say. I knew what kind of father Alec would be when the time came: creative, attentive, passionately involved. I linked my arm through his. “When do you think would be a good time?”
Before he could answer, something strange happened. It was a soft September afternoon, sunny and dry. Alec and I were sitting by the pond, where a small boy in a striped T-shirt and pale blue shorts was sailing a boat. He was perhaps three. His mother and an older sister stood by, talking quietly in rapid French. Suddenly the boy turned and looked right at me. “Maman!” he called. “Maman!” He started toward our bench. My heart leapt: Instinctively, I smiled and reached out my hands. Then the child looked confused, spotted his mother and ran toward her. We were both frizzy haired, both in pale dresses. “Maman!” He clasped her around the middle, and she lifted him into the air and kissed him.
I sat back against the bench, my heart thumping, wanting to laugh at myself but too upset to laugh. I didn’t need to know French to understand maman. For that quick, mad moment a child had reached out to me, called me mother, and it had left me horribly shaken.
Alec just chuckled; he didn’t notice my reaction. Absentmindedly, he watched the two children with their mother for a moment, and then he said, “Let’s see how it goes. Of course, you know we’ll be doing a lot of traveling. Think how difficult that would be with small children. We would either drag them along or you’d have to stay home with them. Either way, it would be intolerable.” He took my hand. “And I have to admit, I like the idea of being alone with you.”
I watched the little boy with his mother. He smiled shyly at me over her shoulder. His sister spun on one foot, her white skirt filling with air. I could still hear that shrill little voice: Maman! Maman! “Alec,” I said. “What does that mean? You’ll always be traveling. That won’t change.”
“All I’m saying is let’s wait a while, Wynn. I just don’t feel ready.” He looked into my face. “You weren’t thinking of getting pregnant on our honeymoon, were you?”
I managed a laugh. “No, but—I thought, maybe, soon. I would like us to have a child.”
He gestured toward the little French boy and his pinafored sister. “It’s easy when you see cute kids like that to think what fun it could be,” he said, smiling. “But we have to think of the reality.”
Back in Boston, I became caught up in my husband’s interesting life—his classes, the research he was doing on a new book, the academic issues surrounding his job. Who would be promoted, who would get tenure, who had a book coming out and how was it received: Those were the things that drove our lives. It was a relief for me to focus in on Alec’s world. There was so little in my own.
As time went by and I still wasn’t painting, I could see that Alec was disappointed. He had the art historian’s reverence for people who actually produced the stuff. You’ve got to paint, he insisted. You’re a painter. Forget getting another degree, forget looking for a job, don’t get bogged down with teaching—you should be painting. I thought of my mother, but I let him persuade me to fix up a studio in the tall, third-floor attic, bringing some of my parents’ things out of storage to furnish it with, funky old objects that wouldn’t have fit into Alec’s house. I loved that studio, with its bare wooden floors and sloping ceiling, my precocious painting of Snarly on the wall along with a few things my students had produced. Justin and Margery came up there for their lessons, and when Justin went off to Yale and Margery’s husband was transferred to Baltimore, Samantha and Alice took their places—a teenager and a woman in her forties, both with more talent than money, that I taught for practically nothing. I had a mini-fridge and a hot plate in one corner. Near a window that looked out over the dignified rooftops of Cambridge was my old bed heaped with pillows. If I’d wanted to, I could have moved in.
From time to time, I even tried to paint there. I would get out my oils, find a suitable canvas, make marks on it. I even finished one, a view of the rooftops that I had sketched a dozen times. The drawings were promising. The painting was like a bad translation from a foreign language.
I still had my little box of Patrick mementos stored away in a drawer. I had considered getting rid of them, but I couldn’t, any more than I could get rid of the envelope that held the Molly McCormick clippings. From time to time I added new information to the Patrick file—a major exhibit, another grant, a commission—conscious always that the man I read about was someone who, most likely, despised me. For years, the visit to Uncle Austin haunted me—his hostility and, by extension, Patrick’s. I didn’t care: I had to know where Patrick was, what he did. I had to know he was still there—that he was, in some sense, all right. And like someone biting down on a toothache, I looked in art magazines and in the newspapers for items about Sonia Shapiro, but though I occasionally found something about the DGA Gallery I never saw her name. She was probably busy having babies, I thought, and the toothache intensified.
Alec was perpetually busy with his students, his research, his conferences. I traveled with him sometimes, especially when he went to Europe, but I didn’t mind staying home alone hanging around in my studio, reading, writing letters to Marietta and Rachel, absurdly overpreparing for my classes. I had moments of restlessness when I longed to do something more useful or more active, and the abdication of that simple need to get away from myself by putting parts of myself on canvas was a wound that couldn’t heal.
But Alec was right: We had a good life. He was a model husband, always coming up with ways to please me. It was a tradition that he serve me Sunday breakfast in bed—the bed was huge, the omelettes perfect, the mimosas made with fine champagne. He loved buying me presents; any occasion, no matter how trivial, was an excuse to give me jewelry. (One Groundhog Day, I found a pair of black pearl earrings on my pillow.) We threw elaborate dinner parties, cooking together amicably in the kitchen. Alec considered vintage jazz the perfect music to cook by, so he would put on Harry James or Louis Armstrong or Jack Teagarden and sing along as we chopped and sautéed. People seemed to like coming to our house. It was so beautiful there, and the wine was always good.
“You people are exactly like an ad for something on TV,” a French professor named Lydia said once after her third or fourth martini. “I don’t know what, but whatever it is, I would definitely buy it.”
“How do you manage to get along so well?” another Cambridge friend asked. She was recently divorced. “I’ve never heard you disagree about anything. I’ve never even heard you raise your voices to each other.”
We were at a dinner party. Alec smiled across the table. “Have we ever disagreed, Wynn?”
I pretended to think. “There was that time you thought the brie wasn’t runny enough,” I said, and everyone laughed.
It was a joke, and it wasn’t true.
More and more, we disagreed about the issue of having children. Years went by. Alec wasn’t ready. He was too busy. We traveled too much. The responsibility was staggering, the expense was insane, the world we lived in was no place to bring children into.
Once he said, “My students are my children. Overgrown babies, all of them. Believe me, I don’t need any of my own!” Then he held up both his hands in that way he had. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I know you don’t feel that way. I’m well aware that teachers all over the place are producing children right and left. But sometimes I’m overwhelmed. You’ve got to give me some time, Wynn.”
I gave him a year, five years, ten. He never said a definite no. There were times when I thought about children constantly, eyed them on the street, burned with envy while some young mother pushed a stroller as casually as if it contained groceries instead of a small person she had given birth to. I can even remember certain ones. The little Parisian boy in his blue-striped T-shirt. A sw
eet-smelling baby I held once, briefly, in line at the supermarket while her mother struggled with a screaming toddler. A tiny brother and sister, hand in hand, making their slow, solemn way around the skating rink at Harvard, who suddenly, simultaneously, looked up and smiled at Alec and me. I almost understood those pathetic women I sometimes read about who stole other people’s children, plucked them out of carriages or met them as they came out of school and spirited them away.
Periodically, we would talk about names (Eleanor, Jon, Iris, David). We decided the back bedroom would be perfect for a kid’s room, with its wall of built-in cupboards for toys. Alec took a lively interest in the children of our friends, picked out wonderful gifts for them, sent his sister and her children in Michigan an elaborate Christmas box every year.
These were good signs, I told myself. I kept hoping; I didn’t let myself consider that he might never be ready for a child of his own.
Occasionally, I considered telling Alec about my daughter, wondering if it might influence him—if he could see how profound my need of a child was, how far back it went. I was stopped not only by the old feelings of guilt and shame, but by our lack of real intimacy: Our best talks were about food and furniture and art, not about how we felt, especially when the feeling was painful.
And of course, I was never entirely convinced I deserved another chance. I had had a child, I had given her up out of selfishness and weakness. I still thought often about Molly McCormick: her sweet, eager face, her terrible life and death. I could imagine Alec asking: Why should you produce another one? What makes you think you’d be a better mother this time?
I talked about some of this once with Marietta, when I flew out to California to visit her—something I did every year or so since my return to the States. Marietta had become a moderately successful screenwriter, valued for her ability to doctor an ailing script, but she had made most of her money from her second divorce. After a brief, foolish first marriage to an actor with a bad cocaine problem, she married a well-known producer who left her after seven years for an English actress and felt guilty about it. One of the things Marietta acquired was a weekend place in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking Malibu. “He got the bimbo,” Marietta said, when she recovered her sense of humor. “But I got the house.”
Five Questions Page 17
