The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  “Your mother’s a saint to keep everything up,” Sister Peg had said to her, when she was ten years old. She was the first to tell her, but by no means the last, “You must never let her down.”

  She had understood that. She had never given offense, never failed, taken every honor. She treasured the half smile on her mother’s face with the news of every prize, every time her name was called for special recognition. Her abashed pleasure when Joan Gallagher had said to her mother, “She’s the real thing, your daughter. The real thing.”

  It was Joan Gallagher who had put her in the path of Tom Ferguson. They’d been graduate students together at Penn. Sometimes she wanted to shout at Joan Gallagher, “You ought to have kept me from him. You ought to have known.”

  But it was no one’s fault but her own. Tom Ferguson was a weak man; she’d been the one to make things happen. It was all over now and no one was the wiser. She was grateful, at least for that. And if she’d gone through what she’d gone through because Joan Gallagher had put her in Tom Ferguson’s path, well, she was here for the same reason, on the train from Pisa to Lucca.

  When, leaving for New Haven, Theresa had thanked Joan Gallagher for everything she’d done, she’d said, “It’s in my interest. You’ll come back here, teach in the department next to me, we’ll keep something going. We’ll make sure it’s not all lost. But you’ll go farther than I, I can tell. You’re not so distracted by ordinary life as I am.”

  Theresa had been hurt by that. She had wanted to say, “Ordinary life was a luxury my mother and I couldn’t afford.” She had read Tom Ferguson’s Italian Sculpture 1300–1500, in awe of the daring, the bravado, so different from Joan Gallagher’s careful exigent prose. She couldn’t believe she would be studying with him.

  “First of all, Theresa, you’re a wonderful student, fantastically well qualified. And second, Tom Ferguson will do anything I tell him. I’ve known him since he was twenty-two, straight out of the University of Illinois. Before he met the lovely Amaryllis. He was the son of someone who owned a stationery store in Normal, Illinois. Parents who loved him but thought it would be better if he went in for something practical. Oh, how he rails against his parents, even now, twenty years later, compares them with Amaryllis’s fabulous forebears. It makes me quite sick, and I tell him that. I think he likes it that I keep him in line. When he doesn’t resent it, that is. He’s made all the right moves, married a rich woman, tenure at Yale. The fact that he’s lost his soul in the process seems to be, to him, neither here nor there. Nevertheless, he has a first-rate mind. Nothing’s affected that.”

  “I’ve come a long way, a very long way. You and I, we know about something that a lot of these others don’t,” he’d said to her in bed one night. Perhaps he was tired, or had had too much wine. Usually, he made no allusion to his past.

  For a while, she believed the choices he’d made had rendered Joan Gallagher’s pathetic. He’d pushed his way to the front. Were his initial gifts superior to Joan’s? She knew they weren’t, but they weren’t inferior, she couldn’t diminish his accomplishments, his learning. His Latin was the envy of all the classicists. His memory for images was so great he could use it as a party trick. And he could understand all the theoreticians, although, on the whole, he dismissed them. Learning that there were treasures to be explored in Budapest, he was teaching himself Hungarian, a language everyone agreed was impossible.

  And yet everyone sort of knew that the kind of career he had was partly due to his marriage.

  The face of Amaryllis Ferguson is suddenly on the Italian train. Leave now. Don’t you see what I’ve done to be away from you. I am in Italy. You can’t follow me. But the words didn’t sound right in her ear. Theresa wasn’t the kind of person for this overwrought diction. For crying out, even in the privacy of her own mind. Particularly crying out to a woman sitting comfortably in her living room in Stonington, Connecticut, listening to bluegrass while she sat at her loom. “We can’t afford that kind of dramatics,” her mother would say if Theresa ever seemed upset about something.

  She made herself focus on the silver leaves of the olive trees. She made herself listen to the women gossiping in the seat behind her, trying to make out their Italian. I will not, will not, she told herself, think of Amaryllis Ferguson. Or her husband. Because that is who he is.

  “You can’t imagine how impressed I was by her family,” he’d said, when they had hardly been lovers for two weeks. “I owe them so much. I was a lump when I met her, a lively lump, but a lump nevertheless. The original overachiever. The original overachieving boy. My God, then I thought everything was exciting.”

  And now, she wanted to say, you think nothing is.

  He explained to her, making sure that she understood the significance, that when he met Amaryllis her father was the Sterling Professor at Princeton. “Author of the landmark, and I mean the landmark, Theresa, you can’t understand how important his work was then, the landmark book on the Rococo. A period that still isn’t given its due: He was a real pioneer. A most remarkable man, my father-in-law. After a while, I think, he grew to like me, though I know for a long time he thought I was a pretentious upstart. Just before he died, he said to me, ‘You know, Tom, I’ve spent a life studying the decorations of a frivolous and wasteful people. Was it a frivolous and wasteful pursuit, would you say? A frivolous and wasteful life?’ I think it meant a lot to him when I said, ‘Oh now, John, what you’ve done will live after you. Will live forever.’ ”

  But would it? Theresa wasn’t sure what would live forever; she wasn’t sure if anyone would even be reading books in twenty years, by the time she had children, to say nothing of grandchildren. And was it something that was worth a life, analyzing the social implications of things almost no one cared about? But she wouldn’t say that. Not to Tom Ferguson, whom she so admired. With whom she was in love.

  “And of course the marriage was a great romance,” Tom said. “You know who Amaryllis’s mother was?”

  “I don’t,” Theresa said apologetically. Although she didn’t know why he was telling her all about his wife’s parents when he was in bed with her. When he had just become her lover. Her first lover, though she believed he didn’t know that. What had happened to her hymen? She’d been afraid of the pain of her first encounter, but it hadn’t arrived. Had she fallen off a bicycle? Had she been born a freak? Or was it just a lifelong habit of stoicism that made her not notice what other people would call pain?

  “You’ve heard of Millicent MacCarthy?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t,” she said. Shame at her ignorance caused her to cover her breasts with the sheet.

  “I’m sure you’d recognize her face. She was a great star in the thirties. British of course. Playing opposite Alec Guinness and that lot in the early Ealing films.”

  “The Alec Guinness that was in Star Wars?”

  “God bless your limited little brain. Is it that you haven’t seen anything produced before nineteen seventy? No, that’s not true, you’ve seen quite a lot produced before sixteen hundred. But my God, my darling, there are serious gaps. Which I’m thrilled to be filling in.” He made a comic lascivious face.

  “Of course,” he said, “you’re streets away from some of your cohort, who believe that because they’ve seen every film noir ever made, it doesn’t matter that they haven’t read Dante.”

  “I’ve read Dante in the original,” she said, and then was mortified at how she sounded, how ridiculous it was to be saying this when she was naked in her lover’s bed.

  “Of course you have, my darling,” he said, nuzzling her. “I used to think they’d done you a terrible disservice, keeping you in that backwater little college. But I had to understand that, intellectually, you’re better prepared than almost any student I’ve had. But it’s as if you were some sort of princess of a minor country, educated in the palace, but forbidden to walk the streets. Joan, of course, crammed you with an incredible amount of good stuff. But you’ve never taken part in the rou
gh-and-tumble, the scrimmage with your peers that’s so good for sharpening and toughening the mind. So in some ways you’re a sort of innocent savant, aren’t you. Luckily, you have the skin and breasts of a Titian so I’m entirely at your feet.”

  “Rapture” was the word that went through her mind as he put his mouth on her breasts. I am feeling rapture. And she could hear her mother’s voice saying, “Rapture is not something the likes of us can afford.” But her mother’s voice was quite soon very easy to drown out.

  She had never been happier. Part of her joy came from the element of surprise. She had never thought of this happening to her. When she thought of her future in relation to men, she felt hopeless. She had no model into which she could fit herself in relation to a man. Sometimes she thought it would be nice to be married to someone like Harrison Ford. But what would it mean to be married to Harrison Ford? She hardly knew any men. Her father hardly qualified as a man. And she’d gone to school apart from men and boys until Yale.

  She knew she didn’t want a marriage like Joan Gallagher’s; she was married to someone she couldn’t talk to about her work. Her husband was a podiatrist. Tom had said she’d married him just because she had an instinct for the perverse. “I think it’s because her father was an undertaker. Actually made a fortune in funeral parlors.” Theresa didn’t know what the connection was. But she would never have wanted to be part of a marriage that anyone could so easily mock.

  Without even knowing how to dream of a man, she realized that Tom Ferguson was the man of her dreams. A partner in looking. A man who looked at her with the same joyful attention with which he looked at great works of art. As she looked at him.

  She was the one who’d made the first move. She waited until she was no longer taking courses with him, waited until the summer after her first year. At first he resisted, but she knew that it was just a gesture; he rather easily gave in. She knew all about his wife. She knew he could never be hers, not really. But it didn’t matter. For now, they shared everything important. And she knew she was important to him, was giving him something his wife couldn’t give. Hadn’t he said to her, “It’s like a miracle, working with you, guiding you, bringing you along. It’s brought me back to life”? Hadn’t he said, “It’s as if we saw with the same pair of eyes”? He sent her a postcard from the Art Institute of Chicago; he was in the city for a conference. It was of a Titian Danaë: a nude stretched out, yearning, her eyes fixed on the gold about to be showered down upon her from the invisible god in the sky. On the back of the postcard he wrote, “Ever think about acquiring a little dog? But don’t worry, I’m not asking for a golden shower.” It was only then that she noticed, beside the Danaë’s bed, a small brown dog curled up like a mushroom. She didn’t know what he meant by a golden shower, so she Googled it, and was shocked that such a thing existed, and very glad that he didn’t know that she’d had no idea what the phrase meant.

  She understood that by sending her the card he meant to say he thought her beautiful. Oh, he’d said she was beautiful, but by comparing her to a Titian he was saying her beauty had the importance of a great work of art. So she began to look at herself in a new way. She’d always liked her hair, but now she began to admire it. Her breasts, which had been nothing but a vexation, now seemed a prize. She wondered what she could do to highlight her eyes’ greenness.

  For the first time, she was really living away from home, and not in a dorm down the street from the nuns. She felt lucky in her roommate, Leila, who knew about clothes and makeup. Lucky that their coloring was similar. She asked her about eye shadow. Leila was glad to advise and then began to invite Theresa out for evenings with her friends at a student bar. So now Theresa was part of a crowd of people her own age. After a while, she grew bold enough to ask Leila’s advice about where to get sexier underwear. She was embarrassed at her sensible underwear, which, as she told Leila (hoping to make a joke of her inadequacy), could have belonged to her high school principal, who was a nun in her seventies.

  “Who’s the lucky man?” Leila asked.

  “No one you know,” Theresa said. She could tell Leila was disappointed not to be taken into her confidence. Leila was studying physics; she’d never have heard of Tom Ferguson, wouldn’t have recognized him if she saw him on the street.

  He wasn’t a popular teacher. Medieval sculpture, 1300–1500, wasn’t, as he said, a sexy topic. As a lecturer, he was both dry and sarcastic. Students felt he was reading the same lecture over and over; she’d heard them say that. His graduate students were more complimentary, but he was only working with one other besides Theresa. Graduate students didn’t want to work with him because he wasn’t a departmental star; he’d written only the one book, which, though highly praised, was thought to be a bit arrière-garde by the more theoretically minded. She liked to think that most people didn’t appreciate Tom as she did, that she was the one who saw his greatness, treasured his brilliance, understood the full implications of his thought. He wasn’t afraid to show his enthusiasm for the things he loved, to use words like “greatness” and “beauty.” Even “purity of form.” He had introduced her to Civitali, shown her the polychrome sculpture An Allegory of Modesty, which was part of Yale’s permanent collection, but not on view. She had seen it, and her heart had been on fire. The seated figure, her knees apart, her face confident, even mocking, her delicate hands indicating a calm certainty, a balance, a sure sense of who she was. She had felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up when she saw it, and the words came to her, “This is mine.”

  And later, when they were lovers, it was a joke between them, that Modesty had brought them together, that Modesty had brought them to abandon, to extravagant pleasure, rapturous bodily joy.

  With Leila’s help, she bought a peach-colored underwire bra, half lace, half satin, and matching bikini underpants.

  “Jesus, you’re lucky to have those tits,” Leila said. Theresa was shocked to hear someone use the word “tits” in relation to her body.

  “They can be a real pain,” Theresa said. “I could never really run without real discomfort.”

  “Oh, spare me,” Leila said. “Any woman with half a brain would give her eyeteeth for what you have.”

  “It’s not true, Leila. I have a terrible time buying clothes that fit.”

  But they both knew Theresa didn’t really mean it. Once she would have. But not now.

  She wasn’t very good at going out with people her own age. Some of Leila’s friends flirted with her, but she had no idea how to flirt back and Leila agreed that she was, “for some reason, sort of hopeless at it. You just have to relax.”

  But it didn’t matter. None of those boys mattered. They were boys. She had Tom Ferguson. He was her lover, the man who called her a Titian. Who said the two of them saw with one pair of eyes. She slept with his book next to her bed. When she was lonely for him, she ran her fingers over his name, embossed in gold on the book’s spine.

  How could weedy graduate students with earrings and ponytails compare, with their pitiful come-on lines? (“Shall I tell you a dream I had about you last night? I’m afraid it was X-rated.”)

  He never said he loved her, and she respected him for that. He made a point of it. “I can’t stand saying those words. ‘I love you.’ They always sound false, as if I were doing something expected of me. The expected thing. And I’ve had a bellyful of that.”

  He said that was the thing about his parents that was unbearable to him. Why he only went back to Normal, Illinois, once a year. Even the name, he said …

  “What drove me around the bend about my parents, what makes them so incredibly different from Amaryllis’s parents, is that they assume there’s only one way of doing things, one right way, and either they know it or they’re terrified that they can’t figure it out. It always made me feel suffocated. Whereas, the first time I had dinner with Amaryllis’s parents, it was like heaven. People talking about ideas, people from all over the world, in and out of their home, taking their pla
ces at the table, living such immensely various lives. The range of possibilities they represented! The range of responses.”

  “But of course your parents wouldn’t have had the opportunities of your in-laws,” she said.

  “There speaks the little democrat, as always in the voice of truth. But my dear, you see, however right you are, and I don’t deny for a moment that you are right, nothing you say can stop my sense of suffocation when I’m with my parents, or my sense of pleasure when I’m around intelligent, sophisticated people. However inferior they may be in the eyes of God, who has the good fortune never to be bored.”

  She took his words about suffocation to heart. She knew she must be on her guard: never to bore him, never to make him feel suffocated. If she saw that happening, she would make the move to leave, as she had made the move to become his lover.

  He often talked about his wife. “She hasn’t had an easy time of it. She often feels she was a disappointment to her parents. They were such stars, you see, in every way, in so many worlds. And I’m afraid that Amaryllis felt she couldn’t keep up. It’s only recently that she’s really found herself. With her weaving.”

  “Weaving?”

  “Yes, she’s wonderful at it, absolutely wonderful.” And he talked about her summers away in Maine, working with “a master weaver.” And Theresa thought: If she’s away in the summers, he’ll have more time for me.

  “It does her a world of good, I think, getting away from here, going to a place where she’s her own person, where no one’s even heard of her parents. Or me, for that matter. I don’t want you to think of Amaryllis as pathetic. She’s not pathetic, you know. She’s quite a going concern.”