Memories of a Marriage

by Louis Begley

  It got worse when classes at the business school started and he had to prepare the course he was teaching in addition to doing the research. You’d think he deserved a medal, because everything he did was so special and he was doing it all so well. Meanwhile I was trying to fix Jerzy Kosinski’s manuscript, and that was difficult not only because I was putting it into real English but also because Emily was stuck on the idea that it was basically a true account of what had happened to him during the war in Poland that should be published as a memoir and wouldn’t back off, even though it was clear, if you asked questions about it without spooking Jerzy, that the book was a brilliant, inspired invention that could only be published as a novel. The truth is that Jerzy liked me. Not only the way most men usually did, thinking of sex, but because of how I helped with the manuscript. There was nothing between us, but when Thomas finally met Jerzy at Emily’s he went into one of his lockjaw-and-withdrawal routines, hardly able to speak, because right away he had sensed the attraction. Of course, Jerzy saw exactly what was going on and picked on him. That happened every time he and Thomas were together, and it was too bad because when we moved to New York, Jerzy was one of the very few interesting people we knew, and through him we could have met everybody.

  For a while I tried hard to create a world for us away from the business school and Thomas’s colleagues. Most of them were dreary, and the ones who weren’t liked me, but when they did Thomas would act like a spoiled brat or make a scene after they left if we had them over or when we came home from wherever we had been. I got in touch with some Radcliffe classmates living in Boston or the suburbs. One had also been at Farmington with me. I had the idea that old friendships could be revived. Since I felt constantly drained from fatigue, it wasn’t an easy thing to do, but I made the effort. The response of a couple of them—one living in Dover and the other in Cambridge—was wonderful. It made me remember that being Lucy De Bourgh had its good sides. They genuinely wanted to see me, to meet Thomas, to introduce us to their friends. But after a weekend dinner or lunch at their house, followed by a meal at our apartment or at an Italian restaurant in the North End, I could see it was no use. They’d gotten married soon after graduation to men a few years older. One was a lawyer. The other was working for Raytheon in some scientific capacity. They’d all had proper weddings with nice Shreve and Crump invitations, bridesmaids, and ushers; they had children in kindergarten or first or second grade; they played indoor tennis. The men had sloops they kept in Marblehead. If the weather was right, they sailed on weekends. For summer vacation they’d take their boats up to Maine to stay with parents on Mount Desert, where the whole clan would gather. It was the same story with my Borden and Hubbard cousins in Boston. They liked Thomas all right, whatever that meant, perhaps he amused them, but he didn’t sail, he didn’t ski, he was younger, and he was self-important. There was no place for him when they got their friends together on Saturday evening to dance to records. Or for me. The wives, perhaps the men too, sensed that something had gone wrong with me. What had come of all that time I had spent in Paris, hadn’t there been a problem at Farmington, although they couldn’t remember just what it was about, was there trouble between my parents and me, where had I found Thomas and who was he anyway, why hadn’t they been invited to our wedding, had we in fact been married in Bristol? You can imagine this sort of thing. My old classmates and cousins with their well-run lives, their routine of dinner parties, and once a month, or however often it came, time to twirl around the dance floor at the waltz evening. My cousin Bessie actually invited us twice. Thomas didn’t have tails, but that was all right, he wore his dinner jacket, which he’d bought alone so it had the wrong cut and anyway didn’t fit. The real problem was that he didn’t know how to waltz. He hardly knew how to dance! Where would he have learned? I didn’t try to teach him. It was pointless, because you really had to dance very well or on that floor you were a nuisance. I liked to waltz, I liked those evenings, and whether Thomas knew how to dance or didn’t made no real difference. But Bessie stopped inviting us. Perhaps this wasn’t a new development, but the truth is that I was only then becoming aware of a simple fact. Lucy De Bourgh was déclassée, no longer someone you kept on your list once you had them on it. On top of that, I was less and less well. Dr. Reiner didn’t think I was making a sufficient effort during our sessions; once more he talked of sending me back to McLean; he had me evaluated by a colleague on Marlborough Street, an awful man who talked of trying an electroshock treatment. I escaped from his office in tears. The next day when I saw Dr. Reiner he said the Marlborough Street man should have perhaps explained how far ECT had progressed and that it was only one of several possible therapies. Nevertheless, I should be aware that he, Dr. Reiner, considered our failure to move forward troubling; he was taking it very seriously. He asked questions about my work, which was actually the only thing in my life going well, and as usual about Thomas. I told him the truth. The marriage had been a mistake; I disliked Thomas; I was sinking into a bog. Dr. Reiner had no answer. He was wrecking my life and emptying my bank account pretending to look for one.

  She began to cry, for the first time since our first meetings. We were sitting on a park bench. I put my arm around her shoulder and patted her, unable to find words of comfort.

  That’s all right, she said, thank you. Or no, it’s not all right. You know how they fuck you up, your mom and dad, they don’t mean to, but they do? Of course, you do. They sure fucked me up, or if it wasn’t them it was the men who had used me, Thomas included, or all those goddamn De Bourghs and Goddards who had handed down the wrong genes. I have not had the life I had expected. I’m sure I’ve told you that ten times already, but saying it again doesn’t make it less true. Or the life I deserved. Anyway, even Thomas could tell I was sick. He asked what Dr. Reiner advised me to do. I lied and said he was sending me back to McLean. I’d never told him about having already been in that place, after I returned from Geneva, so this came as a jolt. He knew I was damaged goods, but now he really knew he’d married a crazy woman. Probably he was scared, and he offered to go to see Dr. Reiner and talk about what should be done. I said he didn’t need to bother. There was nothing Dr. Reiner could do for me beyond taking my money and writing prescriptions. I knew better than anyone else what I needed: it was to change the way I lived. Otherwise I’d break. He could count on it. They’d lock me up for good.

  That night, when we were in bed, and I was going to get up and put in the diaphragm, he said, Don’t. Let’s make a child. That’s the change in your life you need. You’ll see. You’ll be happy and you’ll be well. All the while he was touching me just the way I had told him he should, and as I came I had a vision of what a baby of my own would be like, how I would love it, how I would do everything to make sure everything was right for him, a vision that was so strong that I said, Yes, do it, and drew him inside me. We fucked all night. I don’t know how many times he came. The crazy thing is that I didn’t get pregnant right away. I had my period, and then another and yet another. Finally I missed a period and had the test. The child was there. And during all that time, I talked to Dr. Reiner about it and what it would be like to have the baby and bring it up and how everything would turn out well, and he let me babble on like that and never said the one and only sensible thing, which was that a child has never fixed a bad marriage or cured someone like me. Of course, Thomas and I should have known that ourselves or should have gotten different and better advice. So Jamie was born, and he was the most beautiful child, the most perfect beautiful little man anyone had ever seen, and he was a very good boy too. Then I had two miscarriages, one after another. Why were we trying to have another child? We’d gotten used to doing it without a diaphragm. He liked it, and I did too. Then the depression settled down on me heavier than ever. Do you understand now? Do you see how idiotic it is to talk of me working? I was in bad shape when we moved to New York. The apartment was freshly wallpapered, the curtains were new, but I was in tatters. That’s how you
saw me on your first visit.

  I said that if that had been the case she had put on a very good show.

  The memory of your complaining about the apartment being north of Seventy-Second Street and on the wrong side of the avenue and so forth, I told her, had made me wonder for a moment whether you’d just stepped out of a Peter Arno cartoon, but otherwise? You and Thomas had seemed the epitome of a young Wall Street investment banker and his Mayflower-or Arabella-descendant wife, a picture only enhanced when the nurse brought in Jamie, and he was scurrying around the living room in his Carter’s pajamas with feet.

  I’m glad you thought so, she replied scowling. For your information, my Warren cousins came on the Mayflower and my Dudley cousins on the Arabella. The De Bourghs and the Goddards were latecomers. Whatever kind of impression we may have made on you, life was pure hell, and it got worse. I did have a new doctor who was really quite helpful, at least in the beginning, and the nurse, the one who looked like Aunt Jemima, was very good, the best we ever had. But she quit; she couldn’t stand hearing Thomas and me fight. I was lonely, I was wretched, and when I finally met people I liked through Penny Stone, who’d come back from Paris and was living in New York—you probably remember her, she was a photo model then—Thomas was odious about them. There were some others, the old crowd. A faggot poet I’d known in Paris who double-crossed me later, a painter. People who had talent and were beginning to be recognized and anyway knew how to be amusing. Thomas put the kibosh on it. It was just the way he had been with Jerzy! He said they were louche; the fact is that he felt threatened by them. He wanted to be with society people, you know, friends of my parents, distant cousins, and so on, or with his colleagues and clients. That all changed, of course, when he became a big deal and started to move in intellectual circles with all the people who he was goddamn sure mattered. But that was later, after we’d split up, once he’d teamed up with that dreadful Jane Morgan!

  There was no way she could realize it, but she’d just given me the opening I needed.

  You mean after you got him to agree to a divorce, I asked.

  He was a cheat, she answered, a very clever, slippery cheat. You can’t imagine how tired it made me. I should have asked for a divorce a hundred times. Each time I said, I know what you’re doing, he’d put on this dumb blank expression or fly into a rage. He’d say, If I have done something wrong and you can prove it, tell me about it, and I’ll tell you whether it’s true or not, I’ll give you all the explanations you want, I’ll admit what’s true, but don’t you dare accuse me of things you can’t prove. I was afraid of him, afraid that he’d kill me. Of course, I couldn’t prove any of it, he was far too sneaky and careful, but that didn’t matter to me. I just knew. My intuition has never been wrong. One way I could tell was that he wanted new kinds of sex. He’d try them on me, usually when I was almost asleep. Somebody was showing him things I swear he hadn’t known, and he missed them when he was with me. If I said, Why are you doing this, it’s not what married couples do, not unless normal sex no longer works for them, he had the effrontery to claim he was only doing what he had noticed really excited me. Finally I realized what was going on: it wasn’t sluts he paid or the pornography he was watching on Eighth Avenue. I knew all about that; he’d made me sit through Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. It was Jane Morgan. Why else were we with the two of them all the time, her and that awful husband Horace she threw over as soon as she knew she’d harpooned Thomas? There was no other reason. Other lawyers at that firm and other law firms worked for Thomas, and he wasn’t always asking them and their wives to dinner with him and me at this or that restaurant. He just had to be with her. It didn’t matter whether I or that man were there too. I even caught them playing footsie under the table. I talked to my doctor about it, and he said, If that is so, you should consider bringing that relationship into the open and making everybody assume their responsibilities. I did just that. I called Horace at his office and said, There is this one little thing you should know: your great friend and client, Mr. Thomas Snow, is fucking your wife. Perhaps you need to talk to her about it. He hung up on me without saying a word, and when I called back his secretary said he was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed. No wonder. See no evil, hear no evil: he didn’t want to know anything that would complicate his relations with his most important client, perhaps even get him fired. So the next day in the morning, just as Thomas was setting out for the office, I told him what I had done, and I could tell that I had really gotten to him, right where it hurt. He turned white and left the apartment without one word. I supposed he’d come home in the evening and get violent. He’d hit me earlier that month over nothing. He’d taken a table at the Metropolitan Museum dinner where Al Gordon was being honored, he’d invited some of his usual business friends, including of course the loathsome Jane and her husband, I’d said I’d go, and then something happened to me. I was all dressed up, but I couldn’t go, I couldn’t leave the house; I sat down on the floor and screamed. All right, he’d have to rearrange the seating at his table, but otherwise it wasn’t a big deal. He said, Stop this noise or I’ll call your doctor. I didn’t stop, I didn’t even want to. All right, he told me. I’m making that call. I got there before he did. It was a telephone connected to the jack by a very long wire, so we could move it around the living room. I threw it at him hard, aiming at his chest. But it was a bad throw; it hit him in the face. He checked whether his nose was bleeding—of course it wasn’t, it had just cut his lip—and then slapped me, really hard; it left a red mark on my cheek. So you can see, I had reason to be scared.

  But he came back to the apartment much earlier, in the midafternoon. I was in the library. He didn’t say a word. I didn’t either. In a few minutes I saw him with a suitcase in hand. He must have gone to the closet where we kept them. This time I followed him as he carried it into the bedroom, and he threw in his toilet kit, photos of Jamie from the top of his dresser, and a suit. Perhaps some shirts and stuff like that. All in perfect silence while I watched. As soon as he’d finished he went into Jamie’s room. Again, I followed. Jamie was just finishing his homework, and Hugh Cowles, the St. Bernard’s master who worked with him in the afternoons, was leaving. Thomas said goodbye to Hugh in his normal voice. Those were the first words I’d heard him speak since he came home. Then the moment Hugh was out the door, that monster told Jamie he wasn’t going to live with us at the apartment anymore, but they would see each other a lot, and some other nonsense of that sort, and anyway once Jamie got to Exeter in the fall it would be a whole other ball game. Jamie wasn’t to worry. How did the monster know I’d let him near the kid? As you can imagine, Jamie cried, and when Thomas tried to shush him he said—I’ll never forget Jamie’s saying that, he was such a good kid at the time—I love you, Daddy, I so wish you would stay with Mommy and me!

  I can’t remember what kind of answer Thomas gave. He picked up his suitcase and walked out without one word for me. I didn’t even know where he was going. Later his secretary called to say that he could be reached at the Plaza, but only—I still remember the thrill in her voice when she said it, that woman hated me so—in case of a real emergency. Can you believe it? That bastard never came back to the apartment, didn’t even clear out his stuff. Maybe a month later, when his secretary called to give me his address and telephone number at an apartment he’d gotten on Seventy-Third Street, I said I would have all of it put in boxes and sent to him if he paid the mover. She said she’d check and get back to me. She did, the next day. Mr. Snow suggested that I have the rear-elevator man get rid of whatever I didn’t want for my personal use.

  We had been talking over tea at her apartment, and I found that being there, as it were, on the scene helped me visualize the events she had described. As one might expect, she was upset, and so was I, and I broke my self-imposed rule and asked her whether we could have a drink of something stronger than tea.