Memories of a Marriage

by Louis Begley

  Once again, she was crying. Who was I to blame her or tell her to stop? I tiptoed out of the library, got her another highball, and made one only slightly weaker for myself.

  Here, I said, you and I both need them.

  She had stopped crying and said, I’ve got to pee. Back in a minute. There is a toilet you can use off the foyer.

  After she returned we drank for a few minutes in silence. Then she said, Even this part of the story is longer than I had thought. I’ll finish it in a few words. I was able to discharge myself from McLean toward the end of August, just before Dr. Reiner returned from the Cape. We started treatment, and I made my daily trek to his office in a house at the corner of Sparks and Highland in Cambridge, which was where he also lived. There is sometimes a period at the beginning of treatment, if you hit it off with the analyst, when you surprise yourself by feeling good. That happened to me. A woman I had met when I was still at Radcliffe was a powerful editor at Houghton Mifflin, who later published The Painted Bird. She’d been very nice to me and said I should let her know if I ever wanted a job in publishing. I found the courage to get in touch with her; she remembered me and put me to work, at first reading manuscripts and later line editing. It turned out I could do that well; there’s never been anything the matter with my English. All of us in the family speak well and can write clear prose—even Mother and my brother John. The only trouble with them is that they’ve got nothing to say.

  And now I’m really tired, she said. You’d better go home.

  V

  A HANDWRITTEN NOTE thanking Lucy for dinner and saying I had been profoundly moved by all she had told me about Geneva seemed nicer and more friendly than an e-mail. Next morning I walked briskly in the park, a regime I was trying to impose on myself, took a bath, and wrote to Lucy. Her apartment building was near enough to the NY Society Library, where I intended to spend the afternoon doing research, for me to decide to go there on foot and deliver the letter personally, instead of putting it in the mail. However, after the doorman had examined the envelope he announced that Mrs. Snow had left for the country. He’d forward my letter with the rest of her mail. Her not having mentioned the imminent departure struck me as odd, but the reprieve was welcome. I wouldn’t need to see her again any time soon. That evening I sent her an e-mail saying that a proper letter was on its way and wishing her a good summer. She answered immediately, explaining that she had rushed off to Little Compton to attend an emergency town meeting about a proposal to widen a road near her property and would be back after the weekend. The doorman was an idiot: he should be holding her mail instead of forwarding it. She would call in the morning to straighten him out. Would I be in New York when she returned? Could we have dinner? She wasn’t moving to the country for the summer until the Fourth of July weekend. I answered that I’d be around and would look forward to seeing her.

  As it happened, I was planning to be away during the weekend as well, at my place in Sharon. The real estate agent had assured me that the tenant to whom I’d been renting the house during the academic year—Peter Drummond, a political science professor at Bard—and his partner, a composer whom I’d met several times without managing to remember his name, had left it in apple-pie order, just as in the past years. Nonetheless, it seemed best to see for myself and perhaps arrange for a fresh coat of paint in the kitchen, living room, and my bedroom. It had occurred to me as well that since I had given up my apartment in Paris and would be living in New York it might be nice to be able to use the Sharon house year-round. Before making a final decision, I wanted to find out from the agent how much it would cost to keep the house heated through the winter and to have my long and twisting driveway plowed. I was also concerned about Peter and whether he would find it difficult to relocate. If that were the case, I’d give him at least a year’s notice. I was going to leave on Friday morning, which gave me a couple of days when I could see Thomas Snow’s widow, Jane, a project I’d had in mind ever since I’d arrived in the city. Lucy’s rants had somehow imbued it with new interest. Jane had remarried, but I had not met her husband and had in fact forgotten his name as well. All the same, finding her couldn’t be a problem. The weekly show of her interviews with authors, on which I had twice appeared, continued to be aired on public television. I had no doubt that my editor’s assistant had her office telephone number or would know how to get it.

  Lucy’s sneer about Jamie’s visits to his stepmother, however, led me to think that most probably she was still living in Thomas’s Park Avenue apartment, the location of which, south of Seventy-Second Street and on the desirable west side of the avenue, I now realized, must be one more thorn in Lucy’s side. Accordingly, the next morning, before turning to the young man at the publishing house or Google, I dialed Thomas’s old number and asked to speak to Jane Morgan. As I might have expected, given the anemic sales of my two most recent books, my name clearly meant nothing to the secretary who answered and proceeded to grill me at annoying length. In the end I passed the test, and Jane came to the telephone. She sounded enthusiastic about getting together and introducing me to her husband Ned and wondered aloud which would be better: the three of us having dinner, or she and I first having lunch à deux and going over the old times. I expressed a slight preference for the latter solution. My familiar haunts on the Upper East Side had all apparently disappeared or were no longer establishments where someone like Jane would wish to be seen, but she suggested a French restaurant on Lexington Avenue not far from her apartment. We could meet there at one, this being a day when she didn’t have to be at the studio. She said she’d make sure we had a quiet table.

  She was still a knockout and didn’t look a day older than the last time I’d seen her—not surprising in one who had surely always watched her figure and her complexion but somehow very comforting and pleasant. I was discovering that seeing people my own age or, as in Lucy’s case, only four or five years younger gave me little pleasure. It was all very well to recall a shared past, but what I really wanted was a bridge to the present. We devoted the unavoidable ten minutes to the folly of the Iraq adventure and another five minutes to John Kerry and his promising but oddly lethargic candidacy. Ned is working for his campaign, she told me. He’ll be interested in talking to you about how you and other writers can help. In turn I told her that I knew some of the senator’s Forbes cousins, had been thinking along the same lines, and had been frustrated by the difficulty of volunteering to do anything other than send money.

  Ned will open the door, she replied. You’ll have to come to dinner very soon. Even better, spend a weekend with us in Water Mill.

  After a pause, she asked how I had been passing my time now that I was back in New York.

  First of all working, I said. I’m close to completing the first draft of a book.

  A novel? she asked.

  I nodded, whereupon she told me she had, of course, read my latest and how sorry she had been that scheduling problems had prevented her from attempting to prevail on me to find the time for an interview.

  That sort of hypocrisy being both familiar and odious, I was at the point of erupting but managed to restrain myself. There was no point in spoiling this lunch and perhaps queering the chances of her taking up the new novel. So I smiled and went on with the account of my activities.

  I’ve been putting my apartment in order, I said. Two young relatives, my cousin Josiah Weld’s granddaughters, had been living there for almost three years. My old housekeeper kept an eye on them, but all the same the kids left traces that had to be removed. I stayed at the Harvard Club while that was done and the stuff that had gone to storage was brought back. Other than that? I haven’t particularly wanted company, which is just as well, since so few of the people I used to see in New York are still living in the city or indeed are alive and operational. I’ve gone to the movies and once to the ballet. That’s how I ran into Lucy, I added, at the ballet. Then, a couple of days ago, she had me to dinner at her apartment—alone!

 
; You lucky man, Jane remarked speaking very slowly, that must have been fun, and very enlightening—about Thomas and me! I’m glad you’ve decided to give me equal time.

  Actually, I replied, you got off fairly easily, although she does wish her friends hadn’t abandoned her for you. She did have a good deal to say about poor Thomas.

  What an awful woman! Jane fired back. When you think how she terrorized him! Thomas, who dominated every meeting he went to, who mesmerized heads of great corporations, central bankers, politicians, cabinet ministers, would just want to hide, crawl under the nearest piece of furniture, when she telephoned, and since most of the time it was about Jamie there was no way he could refuse to take the call. You know how her voice carries. I couldn’t help overhearing unless I left the room, and he’d make these desperate signs for me to stay. Now Thomas, she’d say, don’t you understand this and that. Now Thomas, don’t play dumb, you know I’m right, Jamie really needs this or that. No, there is no other way. Or, Do you realize how you are destabilizing him? She’d use this snarky psychobabble on him, as if she’d studied at Freud’s knee instead of wasting untold years and money on the couch of a preposterous Central Park West shrink. Dr. Peters thinks this, Dr. Peters says that, now Thomas, Dr. Peters is concerned about Jamie’s autonomy! It used to make me sick to hear it.

  She did say that Jamie is a failure. It’s really too bad; I remember him as such a nice little boy and then a nice and attractive teenager.

  Don’t let her bad-mouthing turn you against him either. He is still a truly nice man, sweet and gentle, and he’s a failure only if you think every screenwriter is a failure if he doesn’t get an Oscar or write the equivalent of The Sopranos! He’s done well at Sundance and in Toronto, and he has something right now in Cannes. He’s making a living, and he likes what he’s doing. Sure, Thomas helped him, and the money he left him has taken the pressure off. What’s wrong with that? What is a father supposed to do with his money? The truth is that he liked what Jamie wrote and understood how stupid it would have been to say, Listen, kid, you should write better or be more commercial, or If you can’t write better and earn more money then at least learn to count and I’ll take you into the firm! Thomas and Jamie had a really good relationship. Jamie trusted him. Some of that has rubbed off on me. He trusts me too. And you know what? I wish he were my son.

  We had ordered our lunch. Jane’s choices amused me: a mixed-green salad followed by a Caesar salad, both without dressing, and a Perrier. So that’s what going out to lunch was about. Small wonder that the owner of my own favorite French restaurant, the last of the breed that could trace its ancestry to the 1939 World’s Fair, had trouble hanging on to his middle-aged clientele, never mind acquiring a young one. I wasn’t going to play Simon Says. So I asked for pâté de campagne followed by a hanger steak—rare—and a glass of Côtes du Rhône. I guess she had found my order amusing too and remarked that I hadn’t lost my Parisian habits. That too would be right up Ned’s alley.

  I bet she gave you the Thomas-the-monster routine, she continued, especially if you haven’t seen her since he died. Don’t let her. You knew him too well to buy that sort of crap.

  Jane was wrong there. I had genuinely liked Thomas and had had a good opinion of him, but I also knew that wife beaters and child molesters often come across as nice guys. It all depends on the frequency of your contacts and the angle of vision. But my curiosity, mixed with regret, had been aroused, and I intended to learn more.

  Yes, I did hear that he was a monster, I told her, and doubtless it’s not the last time if I see her again, which I think I will. But Lucy mostly talked about herself. I think the point was to explain why she married Thomas in the first place—when she knew all along it was a mistake. The monster part had to do with his having used her money and, I guess, social position to climb and never giving anything back. And of course, anyway at the start, with his having been so wrapped up in his work that he left her to cope with Jamie alone and so forth. But principally it was about having been used.

  I was going to continue, although naturally without mentioning the complaints about sex, but Jane raised her hand to stop me. Look, she said, Thomas put up with a lot of craziness, and I mean real craziness. By all means, listen to her and reach your own conclusions and, if you don’t mind, share them with me if ever the time comes. I’ll give you my own take. For now, just two things. First, he wasn’t a closet Frankenstein monster. Second, don’t go for lies and fabrications about how Thomas and I got together. I didn’t have an affair with him before he and Lucy split. Thomas and I knew each other socially because Horace Jones, my first husband, was—and he still is—a partner in a law firm that worked on a lot of Kidder’s M-and-A deals, including Thomas’s deals, when Thomas was still at Kidder. Afterward, when Thomas and Tim Carroll started the new firm, they kept on giving work to Horace. But there was nothing between Thomas and me. Zero. And it’s a lie that I left Horace because I had my eye on Thomas. I left him because he’d had one office romance too many. Perhaps you wonder why the law firm didn’t boot him out on account of the office hanky-panky which, by the way, according to my moles over there, continued? That was, in principle, what the firm did at the time. The reasons are that at first they didn’t want to lose the Kidder business, which they thought, because he did so much work for Thomas, depended on his staying at the law firm and, later, after Thomas left Kidder and founded his own firm together with Tim Carroll, because they didn’t want to lose the Snow Carroll business. That’s right, Snow Carroll business. Thomas and Tim talked it over when Thomas and I started going out, and they decided to keep using Horace. Thomas was very clear about it. I’ve got Jane; Horace has lost her; he does a good job; why should I want to punish him? So don’t forget to say hi to Lucy!

  Saying hi to Lucy had to wait. I packed some clothes and the indispensable minimum of books, took the train to Wassaic, where my car was in storage, and, my sense of anticipation and disquiet mounting, drove over the Connecticut line to Sharon. The house looked good, and so did the garden. During a quick tour of the property, I checked as always first the trees and flowering bushes that I considered Bella’s, planted by her or at her instigation. They had survived well the winter storms that had hit the valley. So had the peonies, Bella’s favorites; for the first time since she died, I wasn’t missing the moment of their greatest glory. Inside, the house was cold and naked, Peter Drummond and the composer had removed their photographs and knickknacks, and my personal possessions were still in the locked guest-room closets, but otherwise it was fine. On the kitchen table I found a note from the real estate agent, asking me to call. I’ll come right over, he said when I reached him. It turned out that he had news from Peter. Renting from me had worked out well, and he and Ezra Morris—he reminded me that that was the composer’s name—had gotten to like Sharon and the surrounding area so much they’d been looking for an affordable house to buy. Recently, the Browns’ place had come on the market, Sally Brown the widow having died of a stroke in December. The contract with the estate had been signed, and they expected to take possession in mid-June. So in the end it was Peter giving me notice rather than the other way around. The agent said I shouldn’t worry about being stuck without a tenant for the winter; he was sure he could find a replacement, perhaps another academic. I told him the truth: I felt relieved. Since I was going to live in New York, it seemed right to be able to use the house all year, the way Bella and I had done, and now I could carry out my plan without guilt feelings about taking it away from those nice people.

  The other side of the coin, which I obviously didn’t mention to the agent, was the incipient panic into which the news of Peter and Ezra’s departure and the consequent reality of what I intended to do had thrown me. The heating bills, and plowing out my driveway weren’t the real problem; I had decided not to bother about them. The totality of the undertaking unnerved me. It was one thing to think idly about how nice it would be to leave the city and go to Sharon on crisp fall and wint
er weekends, perhaps even over Christmas and New Year’s, and another to face the implications: seeing to the cleanup and planting in the spring, worrying about the marauding deer, putting up netting to keep them off the flower beds, deadheading and weeding, the fall cleanup and putting the garden to sleep for the winter—I had let it all go since Bella died, having immediately asked the real estate agent to find a responsible tenant who’d relieve me of all those tasks. It wasn’t the need to do the work that troubled me: I was capable of doing some of it, although Bella’s fondness for gardening had led her to take most of it off my hands. And I knew perfectly well that the landscaping firm that mowed the lawn and the two meadows and had always done the spring and fall cleanup and planted trees and the larger bushes for us would happily take full charge of the grounds. Just as between Mrs. James, my veritable pearl of a housekeeper, and Bob the handyman, all my other creature comforts would be seen to very nicely. The house would be spick-and-span, and its grounds carefully tended, my laundry done, and my clothes cleaned and mended. In fact Mrs. James, aided by Doris, her elementary-school-teacher daughter, would probably like nothing better than to do the shopping and cook my guests’ and my food. It was a cinch, provided tutti quanti received checks on time and in the appropriate amounts. Yes, those very good people, whom I’d known and trusted over so many years, who had loved Bella and been so kind during her terrible last year, were still my friends. They’d make sure I received the finest care in my hospice built for one. The checks weren’t a problem. Unless I lived far too long, my savings would be sufficient, and if they were exhausted, the Sharon, Connecticut, hospice would close its doors, and Medicaid, if it still existed, would have one more old geezer busting a hole in its budget. No, it wasn’t a question of money; it was the utter futility of my existence, the books I was writing included. I realized that I was trembling and said to myself, Stop it, Bella would be ashamed of you. You’ve managed all right here in the summers. If using the house the rest of the year doesn’t work out, you’ll put it on the market and get your fresh air in Central Park.