The phone rang then. Mr. Theo shook his head, directing me not to answer. He wanted me to continue admiring the ring. The answering machine cut in, and there was silence while the recorded message played. “I hope the young lady says yes, sir,” I said.
“Why shouldn’t she?” Mr. Theo asked, a rhetorical question.
The beep sounded, and the familiar throaty voice spoke. “Mr. Bear?” Mr. Theo looked at me. I was impassive. “It’s been a few days, and last time you said call to remind you I was alive. I’m alive, Mr. Bear.”
By that time he had the phone off the hook. “Hi, hello, I just got in. Yes, hello to you too. I’ve been meaning to call. What, tonight? I don’t know if…But I do need to get out, I’ve been working too hard. Yeah, it would be fun. An hour and a half, is that too soon for you?” He laughed. “Hold that thought,” he said. “Yeah, me too.”
He hung up the phone and held out his hand. I returned the ring to him. “If I know Prune, she’ll say yes. Her parents are all for it. So are mine.” He put the ring back into his pocket. “Why else would she have put up with all this? So I’ll marry her, live in Connecticut, settle down. It’s time I settled down. How do you think you’ll like living in the country, Gregor?”
“I won’t know unless I try it, sir.”
“Isn’t that the way with everything,” Mr. Theo said. For a second, I wondered if he meant the idea to be discussed; certainly it was an idea worth some discussion. “I’d better shower; dinner in half an hour?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“And my little sister is getting married too, tomorrow. Wycliffe thinks he’s marrying beneath him, doesn’t he? I’d like to see his face when he finds out who she is.”
He left the room laughing.
19
To the Marriage of True Minds
“Don’t interrupt me.” Alexis snapped it out, impatient. Even while I watched for remorse to appear on her face and noted a distinct lack of it, she went on. “It has nothing to do with what’s just. It has to do with what’s effective.”
“What is it you’re saying, economics is the moral absolute?”
That stopped her. She put a bite of lobster salad into her mouth, and chewed, and thought.
I wondered if we were having a fight. If so, I wondered whether I could take that as a good sign.
“Why is it,” she asked, “that we think morality is so simple? No,” and she raised her hand to keep me from answering. “We do, we think it’s simple, and we think that ours is the right one. It’s an historic premise in this country. Is that because people don’t want to think things out, they just want to feel in the right?”
She was asking me. I tried to think of the answer to her question. Later, I promised myself, I would think about what had happened to the compliant woman I had been lunching with, before I’d made an offhand remark about economic sanctions.
“Speaking for myself,” I said carefully, “morality seems the essence of civilization. To act rightly is what makes civilized life possible. Or, at least, to intend to act rightly.”
“This from a man who walked away from his home, what? how long ago?”
It was like a punch in the stomach. “Fifteen years.”
“And have you been back?” I shook my head. “Told them where you are?” I shook my head.
She waited.
“You don’t know—” I began, but she brushed my words aside before I’d given them utterance.
“And you sit there condemning me for being a moral relativist. Don’t deny it, it’s what you were thinking.”
“Most relativists are easier to get along with than you are,” I snapped back.
“You could only think that if you haven’t ever thought about relativity. I mean really thought.”
“All right.” I took a breath and tried to steer the conversation back to a less lively topic. “If rather than withdrawing economic supports in order to use the power of money to control attitudes of another nation—and I do see your argument—if instead you invest more heavily so that you can have more influence, that may take longer but might work better, I’ll grant you that. What’s the difference though? Isn’t it the ends justifying the means? Which is the essence of moral relativity?”
I don’t know if women tend to move from the abstract to the personal as a general rule; in this instance Alexis did. “You’re right, of course,” she said. “So give me your justification for leaving home.”
“That wasn’t what I was talking about,” I protested. I hadn’t suspected her of arrogance. “There’s a difference between personal and public morality, you know that. You can’t just dismiss that.”
“Yes, I can,” she countered, and then she grinned at me. “I shouldn’t, and I don’t want to, but I can. I won’t, but that doesn’t mean I can’t.”
Utterly unselfconscious, entirely confident: this was not the woman I’d thought her. The fluffy hair, the pastel wardrobe—they were like those amusement park photographic setups where you step behind the cowboy, or astronaut, and put your face through. Half my mind was engaged in the parry and thrust of the conversation; the other half was wondering what it would be like to lie on a pillow beside her mind.
I wondered what she thought of Warhol. I wanted to talk to her about alternative energy and alternative schooling and alternative lifestyles. I thought she might well have made her way through Adam Smith and could make him comprehensible to me. How did she explain herself to herself? I wondered, curious.
“You’re an unusual woman, aren’t you?”
And she withdrew. Somehow. Like a day lily folding up at evening, becoming limp and pallid. Because of what I said, although not because of me. I could see it happening, in her face, in her groping at the side of her chair for the little purse she’d set down there.
“I have to go.” Her purse perched on her lap.
“So we aren’t going to spend the afternoon together?”
“I’m sorry.”
I could have persuaded her, I think, and I thought that she might have wanted me to. But I suspected that I shouldn’t, because of what she might think when she had time to think it over.
“I’m sorry too,” I said. I paid, we rose, we went outside to find a taxi, I put her into it and held the door open. “Have dinner with me, a week from Sunday. I’ll let you know where, but in the meantime, think about this. I’m hoping to marry you. I’m going to ask you about that.”
“But Gregor—”
“You’ve got ten days to think it over,” I said, and bent down to kiss her good-bye. When I lifted my mouth from hers, she was smiling.
“It’s eleven days,” she said.
20
Mr. Theo’s Tale
I spent the next Sunday afternoon alone at the Whitney, treated myself to a solitary dinner and a showing of Fellini’s 8 1/2, and arrived home a little after ten. Mr. Theo was in the kitchen, with a glass of beer and the envelopes for his taxes, one thick, one thin. He always mailed his taxes at the last minute. “Let the money work for me as long as it can,” was his argument. I had mailed mine that morning, on the same principal. Mr. Theo looked quite comfortable, his shirttail out, his feet shoeless.
“Welcome home, have a beer,” he greeted me. “You look magnificent, Gregor. What do you and your friends do, Sunday in New York?”
I didn’t answer. He didn’t notice. I got myself a beer and a glass, took off my coat, drank.
He was looking at me as if he’d never seen me before. “The next time you go shopping for ties,” he said, “get two of anything that appeals to you, would you? You do have friends, don’t you?” He answered his own question, “You must, you’re a personable guy.”
One, maybe, I might have answered, if I’d been going to answer. It was a good question, unsettling. I’d never expected Mr. Theo to unsettle me. “Miss Sarah called this morning,” I told him.
I wasn’t sure he was listening.
“They are safely married and safely back. I’ve noted the
phone number and address.”
He nodded, inattentive.
“She has asked that she be the one to tell your parents her news, on their return.”
“They’re going to have a hell of a homecoming. I hope they’re rested up.” He waited. “Next Friday, isn’t it?” He waited.
“I believe so.”
“Could you put out a major dinner, Gregor? Saturday?”
“How formal a meal are you thinking of? For how many?”
“Aren’t you even going to ask me?” he demanded.
“Sir?”
“If I did it.”
Did what? I wondered. Then I remembered. Before I could ask, he told me. “The answer is yes, I did. There’s no need to drink standing up, Gregor. Have a seat.”
“Thank you, sir.” Now that I noticed, he did look pleased with himself.
“And the other answer is also yes. But it wasn’t the way I imagined, not at all. I was losing at Scrabble—so what else is new? Pruny was by the window. And I’d better get to work to stop calling her that, hadn’t I? She’d seemed restless all evening, not the way she usually is, not lumpish. The curtains were open: you never have to draw curtains out in Connecticut, there’s nobody near enough to see in. I don’t know what she was looking at. The light was on her hair and it looked…clean, incredibly clean. I don’t know why I noticed that. So I asked her.”
“Ah,” I said. He’d wanted to tell the story and I happened to be there; like the Ancient Mariner, he’d seized on me.
“I said,” Mr. Theo said, “‘We ought to get married.’” He paused. I didn’t say anything. “She said,” he said, “‘I think we’d better.’” He paused again. “The truth is, I thought she’d be pleased. Hell, I thought she’d be knocked off her feet and all that. But not Prune, she didn’t turn a hair, as if she wasn’t even surprised; she didn’t even turn around to look at me. But then, we’ve known each other forever…In any case, we’re having dinner on Wednesday.”
“Here?” I was rather curious to see this woman.
“No, of course not. A restaurant. I plan to marry the girl, not seduce her. Do you think it’s funny she was so…cool?”
I had no way of knowing.
“It’s not as if there’s anyone else; her parents would have told my parents. But I don’t know anything about her past, do I? Maybe there once was somebody? But I doubt it. I think there’s just me. She never talks about herself. But I’m damned if I know why she said yes.”
“I’m sure she had good reasons,” I reassured him.
He nodded, having no doubts. “I think Europe for the honeymoon; I feel like being traditional. After we tell the parents there’ll be an announcement in the Times, a June wedding. I haven’t even kissed her, Gregor. I’ve never touched her. It’s so Victorian.”
I didn’t tell him that my guess is that the Victorians were just like the rest of us—only they didn’t talk about it. “Does that concern you, sir?”
“Concern, as in make me nervous? If she’s going to be frigid?” He shook his head. “Not a bit, in fact it’s the biggest turn-on in years. I haven’t felt…I was almost shaking, I kid you not, sitting behind the stupid Scrabble board, I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand up. It’s going to be hell waiting until June. I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?”
“No. It’s understandable. I can understand it.”
He laughed out loud. “I like to think of you dandling my children on your dignified knees. I like the picture. You will stay on, won’t you?” He gave me no time to answer. “Connecticut is a good place to raise kids. You ought to get married yourself, Gregor.”
I permitted myself: “I have been giving it some thought, sir.”
“You have?” He lifted his glass to toast me. “You are? It must be something in the air. We’re falling like flies.”
21
What the Machine Said
Word spread quickly. Isn’t it Virgil who employs that metaphor about rumor’s dark-winged flight? Only this, of course, was not rumor but truth. I wondered, bringing in the mail, turning on the machine to hear the morning’s messages, if it could be said that truth flies as quickly as rumor. Socrates would dispute that. However, if I named it not truth but fact—except that the air is so full of flying facts, like bats in a boathouse, that all one can do is swing at them with a tennis racquet, bringing down as many as one can. Of Mr. Theo’s engagement, however, it could be said that word spread quickly. An event of some note, it seemed.
Whirr, beep. “Teddy, it’s Lisette. Congratulations, I think. I sure congratulate her. The truth is, if I’d known you were on the verge of marriage, I’d have handled you a little differently. And if that pleases your vanity, it’s meant to. Best wishes to you, Teddy, best of luck. Sorry about…it all.” Beep.
Whirr, beep. “Theo, Dad here. We’ve changed to a Thursday evening flight, so we can be rested up to join you Saturday. I’m sure you know how pleased we are.” Beep.
Whirr, beep. “Well, I am impressed, little brother. It’s Babbsy, remember me? Mother called last night and I’d hoped to catch you this morning before you went to work, but I guess—it’s seven twenty-five, our time—But I’m impressed, the way they cut their stay short to come home and celebrate. Remember how much trouble we had fitting my wedding in between a trip to London and the Member-Guest Tournament? Comes from being a boy, you think? Or marrying the right person. Although I can’t imagine why Prune is marrying you, unless she figures she knows you at your worst so there’s nothing horrible to discover. I guess you know what you’re doing, you two. I should say congratulations. I guess I do. Sorry to be cynical, and I do hope everything goes well for you. You’re older than I was; maybe you’ll be smarter. I don’t get too excited anymore about weddings, mine or anyone else’s, but I’ll be there, with bells on, you can bet on that. If you’re happy, I’m happy for you.” Beep.
Whirr, beep. “Ted. Kyle. What do you want to go and do a thing like that for? Just kidding, buddy. Seriously. I lay claim to hosting your bachelor party, so give me a date. We’re falling like flies, have you noticed?” Beep, whirr.
Beep. “It’s Christine Rawling, Theo, to say first that we are all glad to accept your invitation to dinner Saturday, and second how pleased Martin and I are at your news. We think you’ll be very happy with our girl. We’ll tell you so in person on Saturday. That’s at seven thirty, isn’t it?” Beep, whirr.
Beep. “Theo, Davy here. Well done, little brother, the parents are all in a dither and Alice and the kids are pretty excited too. I’ll be proud to be your best man—returning the favor. Call me tonight. I’ll be in meetings most of the day, then coaching, so it better be after dinner. You won’t regret it, Theo, that’s my brotherly advice.” Beep.
Whirr, beep. “This is Reverend Smallquist’s office returning Mr. Mondleigh’s call. If Mr. Mondleigh could get back to us as soon as possible, with the date he wants, the Reverend is holding all open spaces in his calendar until he hears from Mr. Mondleigh.” Beep, beep, beep.
22
Careless Love
I reserved a table at Le Cirque, and a small suite upstairs at the Mayfair as well. I couldn’t be sure how Alexis would answer me, but it seemed wise to have a place ready, should bedding her be part of the evening. I had always avoided trading in futures, but this once it seemed reasonable.
By the middle of the week leading up to the Sunday that would tell my fate, I had everything ready. It remained only to await the event, and to prepare Mr. Theo’s engagement dinner.
In fact, I fully expected Alexis to turn me down. There are, however, many ways of declining, and many of those are postponements. She would decline, I would persist, and, with luck, eventually…
I opened the door on Wednesday morning to bring in the mail but found instead Miss Sarah, seated on the stoop, her dark head bent into her hands, her suitcase on the sidewalk. She looked up at me and her face was wet, as if she had just come in from the rain, although the sun shone on her. I looked more careful
ly. She was weeping. “Miss Sarah. Let me bring your suitcase in,” I said. “Excuse me, Mrs. Wycliffe.”
She preceded me into the house. “The suitcase goes upstairs, Gregor. To my room. And it’s Miss Sarah.”
I had to make up the bed, open the windows to freshen the air, and be sure the bathroom was properly supplied. By the time I got back downstairs, she was in the kitchen. The kettle was on the stove and she had a teapot out and a cup. “I’m looking for honey.”
“I’ll do that, miss,” I offered. “Would you like something to eat with your tea?”
She fidgeted with the teapot, with the cup and saucer, with the spoon. She wore a short black skirt and a black long-sleeved leotard. She wore a gold band on her left hand. “I’m not hungry.”
She took the top off the kettle. Looked in. Replaced the top. She moved the teapot around on the counter. And sighed. And squared her shoulders. And turned around to tell me. “I’ve left him.”
“Oh?” It didn’t seem kind to say that I’d guessed as much.
“I packed up everything that’s mine, and he’ll never have to know I was ever there.” She was resolute and brave.
“Ah,” I said.
“I thought”—her voice quivered, and she controlled it—“he loved me.”
“Ah,” I said, and the kettle whistled. She looked helplessly at it. I guided her to a chair and prepared the tea. She was weeping again, so I tactfully ignored her, except to put the box of tissues near to hand.
By the time the tea had steeped and her cup was poured, she had blown her nose and was ready to explain.
“He said, he thought I was good and pure and beautiful, but now he knows I’m a liar and a cheat. When I told him. Who I was. This morning, because I didn’t want to lie to him. I didn’t want to live a lie. He hadn’t even looked at the marriage license. He could have looked at it if he wanted to know, after I signed it. He asked me if I was really a dancer and I had to tell the truth. I couldn’t lie to him. So he walked out.”
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