Memories of a Marriage

by Louis Begley

  Good Lord, I thought, what had she expected? Wasn’t she old enough, when she met him, to know that he was not from her milieu?

  I think you mean to say, I told her, that he didn’t fit in. Why was that a surprise or a reason to decide that the “thing” was doomed?

  You don’t get it at all, she snapped. It’s exactly the contrary. He fit in too well. He was ingratiating himself left and right, and they all loved it. They loved him, even my parents and John. As for Thomas, he was in hog heaven. He had understood from the first that he could use me, and he was being proved right. I hated it. I could see that it was a preview of my future if we remained together.

  Did you in fact break up? I asked. The other day, as I was thinking about the old times, I recalled, I am pretty sure accurately, running into Thomas in Cambridge during the spring of his first year at business school. He told me you were in Geneva, but he certainly didn’t give me the impression that it was all over between you.

  No, she replied, as I said, I hadn’t told him. I just stayed away and didn’t let him come to Geneva. Where he would have gotten the money for the trip is another question. Probably he’d have tried to borrow it from me. I just couldn’t deal with him. It was a bad time, a very bad time, for me.

  She was sobbing, but when I moved over to her corner of the sofa and patted her shoulder, she brushed away my hand angrily and told me to get her a drink and bring the mixed nuts from the pantry shelf. When I returned with the whiskey and the nuts, I found that she had pulled herself together. I took advantage of the calm to ask the obvious question. So the next thing that happens is that you change your mind and decide to get married?

  It wasn’t quite that simple, she answered, and put to me a question of her own. Did you ever happen to meet Hubert Brillard, the Swiss journalist? He used to come to Paris regularly. Very Swiss, very patrician, very handsome?

  I nodded. I did remember him. He was the super-Aryan I met occasionally, without exchanging more than a casual greeting, at lunches given by my friend Guy Seurat’s publishing house. Brillard was invariably the guest of a fashionable novelist with Algérie Française sympathies published by Guy, who claimed that the fellow’s talent made one forgive him his political opinions. Someone, perhaps Guy, had told me that Brillard’s father had been an important Swiss rightist politician.

  He was the star political editor and columnist at the Journal de Genève, Lucy said, which at the time was a great paper. I met Hubert in Paris, when I was still working for Vogue, at a dinner given by the guy who ran the Newsweek bureau and his wife. I was seated next to Hubert. He offered to walk me home, and on the way told me he was married and had two little daughters. You know what I was like. I asked him to come up to the apartment for a nightcap anyway, and the moment we were inside I grabbed him. I knew what I was doing. He made love like a god—no one had ever fucked me like that. Or since. He explained later it had to do with having been on the Swiss Olympic ski team. The training gave him total control over his body. He stayed in Paris for the rest of that week, and every night we made love until dawn. Later, he’d find reasons to come to Paris to see me. I never knew in advance. He’d call late at night and say, J’arrive. After six months of that he said he was sorry but we had to stop. One of his daughters was doing badly at school; his wife was acting suspicious; he didn’t quite say he was feeling guilty, but that was what I was supposed to understand. I was unbearably sad. It was early fall. In part because of Hubert I hadn’t been home during the summer so, for lack of any other plan, I went to Bristol. Your dear friend Alex used to fuck me when I was still at Farmington and on and off afterward when I was at Radcliffe. He’d have me come down to New York, or else he’d drive up to Boston. When I heard from John he was at the business school, I decided to look him up. Anything was better than sitting around in Bristol and having dinner with my parents and John and Edie. Alex was living in a business school dormitory like everyone else, but being Alex he also had a little apartment on Beacon Hill. That’s where he’d have me stay. We had a good time, and I was beginning to think that this was perhaps how things should turn out when, out of the blue, he told me he was going to marry Priscilla Baldwin. The bitch with the face of a horse! She’d been a year ahead of me at Farmington. Everybody hated her and made fun of her fat ass. The really funny thing is that Alex and she are still married. Anyway, Alex gave me Thomas as a going-away present. He must have laughed his head off.

  She held out her empty glass.

  I made her a highball and returned to my corner of the sofa.

  Of course Thomas didn’t get it, she resumed. He thought Alex was this great guy doing him a big favor. I didn’t get it either; I didn’t see it was a poisoned offering. All I knew was that I hadn’t been left holding the bag and, for a change, someone loved me and couldn’t get enough of me. I don’t know what he told you about that trip to Italy, but he wouldn’t have told you what I’m going to say now. When he was driving he’d have one hand on the steering wheel and the other in my crotch. He’d scare me out of my wits. Sometimes I had to tell him to pull off the road and let him fuck me in the backseat. It was like an obsession. His ignorance of practically everything was astonishing. I’ll never forget having to explain to him when we looked at a Bellini crucifixion at the Uffizi who the two other guys were on the crosses to the left and the right of Jesus. The garage owner and his wife didn’t go to church, so he didn’t go to Sunday school. I’ll give him credit, though: once I had told him something it stuck in his memory, even if he chose to forget that he’d learned it from me. Anyway, when our Italian tour was finished we drove to Paris, and that’s where we said goodbye. Although I’d had second thoughts about getting him invited, I’d gone ahead and done it, and we were going to meet at my brother’s wedding. He knew I hadn’t decided how long I’d stay in the U.S., and I’d told him there was no chance of my getting a job in Cambridge or Boston or anything like it. The only way I’d live with you, I told him, was if we were married, and you’re not ready for that. It was a very hot afternoon, and we were crossing the Tuileries after lunch. I was teasing—I had no intention of marrying him—but I thought it would be fun to hear him protest and carry on about how it wasn’t so. But he didn’t. I think he was relieved. He was scared to death that I’d say I wanted to get married.

  Then the unexpected happened. I was still in Paris, supposed to take a boat at the end of the week, when Hubert called, as always in the middle of the night so he’d get me and not the answering machine. He’d once told me he didn’t like leaving traces. When I heard his voice I melted. Literally. I wasn’t touching myself or anything, but I was all wet down there. In this great baritone voice he said, I want you, you must come to Geneva. His wife was moving to Zurich to be near her parents; the girls were in boarding school; he needed me. He was getting a divorce. Not that any of it mattered. If he’d told me to skip John’s wedding, I’d have done it. What am I saying? If he’d told me to go out of the house in my nightgown and exhibit myself on the boulevards, I’d have obeyed. There wasn’t an act of self-abasement I wouldn’t have performed on his orders. But he was very kind and said instead that since I clearly had to go to Bristol he was coming to Paris. All he asked was that I move to Geneva as soon as possible. The next three days in Paris made me his slave. Do you remember what a lot of noise I made when I came? With him, I howled.

  I drove the Mercedes to Geneva with the top down most of the way, singing old camp songs and spirituals, imagining my life with Hubert. He had told me to meet him at the Hôtel des Bergues. It turned out that he’d reserved an apartment there, on the top floor—a bedroom and a slightly larger living room, both with a view of the lake. I wondered how we were going to fit in it, since I understood that he liked to work at home, but it turned out it wasn’t for both of us. Just me. Until the divorce proceedings were decided he was going to live at his old place. That was what his lawyer had advised. We settled into a routine. I went for long walks along the lake and in the old city. Some da
ys I drove out to the country, on one or the other side of the lake. Most evenings we had dinner in my living room, sent up by room service. If I was alone, I’d eat in the hotel restaurant. The food was good, especially the Swiss dishes. Hubert had a whole lot of functions and dinners he had to attend, pretty much as a part of his job, and more often than not he didn’t ask me to come along. That was all right with me. His friends were polite but without warmth, and I wasn’t sure what they thought about Hubert’s bringing me along or about my living in Geneva without any visible occupation. Hubert said it was enough that he introduced me as an American journalist. I thought I should have a more substantial explanation, one that I could also give to my parents, and he came up with the silly idea that I was working on a long article that might become a book about Madame de Staël and her years in Coppet. He gave me a biography that I read quickly in order to sound halfway intelligent, and she began to interest me, but I really didn’t care. The only thing that counted was the nights—every night—that he spent with me. He made me beg, pretend I was a bitch up on her hind legs and beg for each thing I wanted him to do. I had to name it very precisely. I was in a trance of sexual contentment. We went on like that until right before Christmas, when he told me that he would spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Zurich with his wife and daughters. That’s what Brigitte—that was the wife’s name—and he had decided was the responsible thing to do. They didn’t want the girls to be upset. Then the day after Christmas, he would take them skiing in Zermatt until the end of their school vacation. I yelled at him. I couldn’t stop; I just kept yelling until he hit me, and he walked out, without a word, slamming the door. I thought he’d broken my nose. The bleeding was so bad I couldn’t stop it, although I tried everything, pinching my nose, putting ice on it. Finally I called the concierge, and he sent the hotel doctor, a nice roly-poly man who came right away, packed my nose with gauze, and gave me some Miltown and Seconal pills. I didn’t even have to tell him what had happened. He’d taken one look at me, shaken his head, and said, Ah, les hommes …

  She broke off and said, I’m not sure I can go on. Get me a drink and for Christ’s sake have one too. You make me nervous just sitting there like an old maid. Have you joined AA or something?

  She drained the whiskey I brought and held out the empty glass. I made another trip to the pantry, returning with the highball and this time a tin of macadamia nuts. This is good, she said. We didn’t have much of a dinner. I’ll make the rest of this part of the story short. He didn’t call the next morning. No apology, no message, no flowers. Just merciless silence. I hadn’t a single friend in Geneva, no one I could turn to. Anyway, if there had been such a person, what would I have said, what could they have done? I felt humiliated, and I had never been so utterly alone. I had always been surrounded by people during the holidays; I’d always been a part of some celebration; how could I hide my shame? What would I say when I called home? That one I figured out: I told Father I was in St. Moritz skiing and would call on New Year’s Eve if I could get through. Yes, I was having a great time. He didn’t think to ask for a number where he could reach me. I particularly didn’t want to lose face with the hotel people—they were the ones who counted just then—so I came up with the idea of asking the concierge to book a couchette for me on the night train to Paris. That was where I said I was going to spend the fêtes. Actually, I wasn’t sure whether I’d really go to Paris and hunker down at the apartment or pretend to be sick and stay in bed until the New Year. Another scheme came into my head, and I couldn’t get rid of it. It was to throw myself down the hotel stairs, which were carpeted, and pretend I had fallen. I’d fake a concussion or something like it. By that time, it was late, and I had been crying, and I was hungry. I had dinner sent up to the room. When the table was cleared, I asked the waiter to leave the wine and my wineglass and bring another bottle of the same wine. I remember it very well. It was a Fendant de Sierre I had ordered to go with the lake fish I had that evening. White wine has always made me sleep, but nothing was happening. I just sat there, drinking and crying. Finally I got undressed, took a hot bath, put on my pajamas, got into bed, and had a Seconal and a Miltown with the rest of the wine. That didn’t do the trick, and I was determined to have a good night’s sleep, so I took another Seconal. In retrospect, what happened next is clear, though I have no memory of how it happened. I must have sleepwalked because the next morning, around six, the chambermaid found me splayed on the stairs. Luckily, I was unconscious. I had broken my leg, the pain would have been unbearable, and help wouldn’t have come no matter how loud I called. The hotel was almost empty on account of the approaching holidays. My loss-of-face problem was halfway solved: I wasn’t the lady who had no place to go for Christmas; I was the lady who had drunk too much Fendant. I didn’t care. I was in the hospital. When I returned with my big fat cast the roly-poly doctor found nurses to help me. They slept on a foldout cot in the living room. I refused to be in a clinic. At first the physiotherapist came to the hotel. Later the nurse took me there. Father forced Mother to come over to check up. She realized how much I was drinking and yelled and carried on about how if I didn’t check into the clinic to be looked after for my leg and dried out I wouldn’t be welcome in Bristol. Also how they’d stop my money, which I knew they couldn’t do because of the trust. It wasn’t the first time. I mean she’d thrown me out of the house once before, when I got in trouble in my last year at Farmington and wasn’t allowed to attend graduation. The head was afraid I’d contaminate the other girls! So I told Mother to fuck herself.

  Hubert showed up eventually one evening, cool as a cucumber, took a good look, told me I’d been letting myself go, Tu t’es vraiment laissée aller, ma vieille, and asked if my keeper—the nurse had tactfully withdrawn into the bedroom—was always there. Wasn’t there some way to send her on an errand, get her to stretch her legs, se dérouiller les jambes? The idea wasn’t hard to get: he thought I was underfucked. A little sex would put me in gear. I had been drinking little glasses of Fendant, and the feeling of revulsion he had at first inspired slowly yielded to an imperious and monstrous need to be used by him, to descend even deeper into humiliation. I called out to Madame Berthe and said that monsieur would stay for dinner. I’d see her in the morning. She said, Bien, madame, and was out the door. I was wearing a long silk peignoir; it was easiest at home with the cast. Getting dressed to go to physiotherapy was a production. I was sitting on a small sofa—I guess you could call it a love seat. He didn’t try to undress me. Just spread my legs, hiked up the good one so that my foot rested on the seat, opened his fly, and went at me. There is a Balthus painting of a girl sitting on such a sofa, her legs open. I’ve never been able to see that painting without being again in that room with him inside me, without melting the way he always knew how to make me melt. That set the pattern. No pretense of love, no talk about his divorce or how we might live together. He’d call just before coming over, so I’d let the nurse go; sometimes—rarely—he stayed to dinner, but really the point was to relieve himself, like when he needed to go to the toilet. No, I didn’t want to end it. I’m not sure I would have known how. But I knew I wasn’t well and wasn’t going to get better. Not my leg; it was doing just fine. The big cast had come off, and I wore a light, supporting version. I mean me; I wasn’t well inside. There was one person I had gotten to know a little in Geneva, an American psychiatrist married to a Swiss woman teaching American eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature at the University of Geneva. I’d met them at a couple of dinner parties. Bill—that was his name—was also teaching at the university on some sort of contract. I think that’s why he was allowed to do analysis, although he couldn’t prescribe drugs or that sort of thing. But analysis was anyway all he did. He’d impressed me by his brilliance, and it was nice, when we were surrounded by all those Swiss, to be able to speak to him in English. So I called him and said I was in big trouble. He agreed to see me. After we’d met a couple of times he told me I was in no condition to
begin an analysis, which in any case would mean commitment to staying in Geneva longer than I intended—based on what I had told him—but he would try to help me at least through the end of the rehabilitation and physical therapy. Bill didn’t get me off the booze or the sleeping pills, or make me stop servicing Hubert, but just being able to talk and talk—I think for the first time ever—without having to watch my step saved me.

  Hubert got out of my life, without anybody’s help, on the Ides of March. I wonder if he’d planned it that way. He pulled out, wiped himself off on my peignoir, which after the first time he had insisted on my wearing, had a double shot of whiskey, and told me this time it’s really over, Ma petite Lucy, cette fois-ci on se quitte pour de bon. Brigitte had already moved back to Geneva. Why didn’t I hit him on the head with the wine bottle when he bent down to kiss my hand? I guess I was too startled or too scared or both.

  Soon afterward Bill began to talk to me about going home and where I would begin real treatment. I told him that the way I felt and looked New York scared me. He suggested Boston or Cambridge. His training analyst was practicing in Cambridge. If he has time, he said, he’ll be a good fit. I thought about it and began to have a picture in my mind of living in Cambridge or perhaps on Beacon Hill that filled me with nostalgia and a longing for a place I knew but where nobody would be at me, where there were no complications, where I didn’t have to deal with the Swiss or the French. It’s funny: of course I knew that Thomas was at the business school, I kept on getting his letters, but I didn’t connect the dots and realize that he was one person who’d surely be at me. Not that it would have made any difference. Dr. Reiner could take me. Someone at the trust company found an apartment for me on Louisburg Square, the back of the ground floor with its own entrance and the use of the garden, and I moved in May. Dr. Reiner’s advice was devastating, but I was so beaten down I couldn’t argue: You need to be in McLean. When you’ve been dried out and are less hysterical I’ll work with you. So that’s what I did.