My Summer With George

by Marilyn French

  Thursday morning, George called. He sounded irritable. Bad morning he said: a thousand interruptions, lousy writing by a person who should know better…Just one of those days.

  “We on for lunch?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be by at noon, then. See ya.”

  By the time he arrived, his mood had improved. We wandered over to our usual lunch place on Lexington, in pleasant conversation, his smile as warm as ever, his eyes sexy and intense and focused on me. I was telling him about my novel, and a question I had about the conclusion. I had reached the penultimate point, at which my heroine rejected the villain. She had pushed him away and run, because the man’s embrace and kiss overpowered her, made her feel smothered, small and powerless. She did not recognize that his behavior showed he cared only about his own desire, not hers, or that this was a sign of his evil nature. On the contrary, she felt apologetic toward him, because his aggressiveness had also aroused her somewhat, and she suspected that her sense of insignificance was a result of her own weakness, was a flaw in her character. She felt that, having failed him, she owed him something.

  Now he, of course, being a villain, was going to take advantage of her apologetic attitude toward him to kidnap and rape her. (You must realize that in romances, as in eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century novels, a woman’s virginity is a great prize, which can be won only once and, once lost, is irrevocable. I know it seems silly, but that’s the convention. You just have to accept it, the way you do chess moves.) My question was, how would the hero feel if he thought that the villain had succeeded? (Of course, he would not succeed. He would be thwarted by the heroine herself, a gutsy little thing called Lila.) But the hero would think—for a while at least—that the villain had accomplished his dire purpose, and his response was the revelation of his character.

  Smiling, I asked George, “Do you think that in this day and age, a man of thirty-odd would turn against his fiancée if she was kidnapped and raped? You know, reject her as spoiled, used goods?”

  “How old is this fiancée?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “She’s twenty-five and still a virgin?”

  I laughed.

  “That seems completely unrealistic to me.”

  “Well, it is nowadays in urban circles. But it’s conceivable among some people. And anyway, this is an unrealistic literary genre. What do you think the man would feel?”

  “It might just as well turn him on,” George said.

  “Whoa!” I stopped in my tracks. “That’s a new one! You think a guy might get turned on…?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? Why not? It’s as possible as anything else.”

  I laughed again. “I can’t use that for my hero, but I’m going to file it away and use it for a villain in some future novel.”

  “As long as the villain isn’t based on me.” He smiled.

  “It’s your idea,” I said. “You came up with it.”

  He stopped then. He looked at me seriously. “You’re not going to put me in one of your novels, Hermione, are you? Promise me not!”

  I giggled. “You’re too old! My cast of characters comes from the nursery! And much as I’d like to cast you as a hero, I’m afraid you aren’t one. Nor are you a villain. So what role could I give you?”

  “Woman-hater,” he muttered darkly, and started walking again.

  I ignored that, firmly refusing to ask what he meant. We reached the restaurant, ordered, sat sipping iced tea.

  “So, Hermione, what do you want? You want to get married again, or what?”

  My heart leaped a little, but only in a Pavlovian reaction. His tone of polite inquiry had no intimacy in it.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. No.”

  “So you want to live with someone?”

  “No. In the ideal—if I could have my druthers—I’d like to live separately. Maintain separate households but see each other regularly, several times a week. Spend most weekends together. Travel together. But still have separate social lives. I think that’s ideal. What about you?”

  “Me, I hate women.” He bit into his sandwich.

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “I mean it, I really do. I don’t understand them…it’s all beyond me.” He stared off into the restaurant, chewing doggedly.

  There was nothing to say. I stared off into space too.

  He told me about a quarrel at the newspaper among a group of editors, about a split infinitive. He wondered how I felt about split infinitives; he seemed seriously interested. So I, too, treated it seriously, explaining that being of the old school, of course I disapprove of split infinitives; they invariably hit my ear as crude and déclassé. I offered my old-fashioned opinion for what it was worth, and he launched into a series of grammatical questions that plagued the editorial desk at Newsday. As he paid the check, I remarked that it was impressive that the editors would argue about such high-flown subjects. I thought grammar was no longer of interest to anyone except a few linguists talking to each other by E-mail, I said. We walked out of the restaurant; it was eight minutes to one.

  “Well, it was sure interesting to this woman I met on the plane,” he said, as we started back to my apartment.

  I cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “This woman was sitting next to me on the plane coming back here, and we got talking. She was real nice, I thought—at first, anyway. She’d been a grammar teacher. Years ago. Was all agitated about the grammar in a column in the Louisville Herald—my paper! I was insulted! Actually”—he laughed—“the columnist is a kind of dumb bunny and he writes this sentimental slop, but he’s the most popular writer on staff, so we can’t discipline him. I wouldn’t be sorry not to have to deal with him again…”

  “Why would you not have to deal with him again?”

  “If I didn’t go back. If I stayed up here. Oh! I didn’t tell ya! They’ve offered me a job here, fabulous money.” He peered at me. “Of course, I suppose it wouldn’t seem like a lot to you.”

  My heart stopped, weakly started again, then perked along at a snail’s pace. I tried to get my head clear. I said nothing.

  “So we were having a nice talk, everything was fine, and then she asks me where I’m staying in New York. And I said I was being put up and didn’t have an address, and she said, Well, I can always reach you through Newsday, can’t I. And I am sitting there frozen. Reach me through Newsday? What for? And she says, You know I’d like to see you again, and she puts her hand on my arm, and I’d like to die. I thought we were just having a nice conversation, and here she was…I didn’t expect to see her again, I’d just been talking to talk, to make conversation on the trip, the way you do. This happens to me over and over! Over and over! I tell you, it just keeps happening! That’s why I hate women! I really hate women!” He glared at me. “You tell me! What was I supposed to do?”

  “Oh. I guess we’re all sometimes approached by people we don’t…have interest in,” I said in a thick voice. “You learn, don’t you, over the years, how to deal with it…” I examined his face, tried to read it. He looked like a teenage boy in a state of outrage.

  “Well, I don’t know what to do. I just hate women!”

  We had reached my building. I stood there, not knowing what more to say. “Well…”

  He glanced up. “Oh! Well, I’ll call ya. Bye,” he said, and walked off; then, turning back to face me, walking backward, he said, “Take care, Hermione” and “I’ll call, okay?”

  My body was quite still inside, even as the outside of it went through its motions. Not letting myself feel anything, I brushed my teeth, I sat down at the desk and read the mail, I got up and fetched a glass of cold water, then I sat on the chaise in my study, leaning back my head, letting it rest in its throbbing numbness.

  What was this now? What was he telling me? Did he mean me? Then why did he call me at all, why did he keep asking me to lunch, why did he keep promising to call?

  The weather had turned hot and humid, and the apa
rtment felt sticky and mildewy. I should turn on the air conditioners, which I hated. But at least their roar would blot out the sounds in my head, the dull beat beat beat that seemed to interfere with my vision.

  I didn’t want to see anyone, which was just as well, since most of my friends had left town for the summer. I would finish the novel tomorrow. I should go back out to Sag Harbor. After I’d recovered a little, I’d think about traveling abroad. I needed something other than Paris. Africa was the thing. Maybe Victoria Falls again, or Great Zimbabwe; I’d never been there. I dragged myself back to the desk, and forty-odd years of discipline kicked in.

  George called on Friday. Edgar Allen was in town and wanted to have dinner with us, and George wanted me to meet an editor he worked with at Newsday, Darcy Meeks. The plan was for Darcy to meet us at the place where we usually ate lunch. It was an inexpensive bistro, okay for lunch but not for a good dinner. I didn’t demur, though, didn’t suggest that another restaurant might be better. I wondered what would happen to me if George and I did get together. Would I lose my personality? Would I submerge myself in him? Would I lose the power to say no? Would I go along with whatever he wanted? I realized with a surprising serenity that I didn’t care: I didn’t care if I had to eat overcooked pasta and dried-out fish at cheap restaurants for the rest of my life; I didn’t care if we went only to mainstream movies and plays, and I had to sneak off with one of my friends to see anything interesting. I didn’t care if he never went to a museum or an art gallery with me, or to a concert or lecture. I just wanted him to love me. Just that: I asked for no more. I wanted it so ravenously, so fiercely, that nothing else existed. I wondered if that was how Ilona Markovich felt about Guy Kislik, Betty Margolis about Jack O’Reilly, Nina Brumbach about her Garson. It was a sobering thought.

  I dressed with special care, wearing clothes that would not stand out in the kind of restaurant we were patronizing yet in some way flattered me. I chose black linen pants and a black-and-white-striped linen shirt, with black sandals—not city evening clothes, but they would pass. Yet compared to George, who picked me up at seven-thirty, I was overdressed; he wore a shabby pair of chinos and a wrinkled summer shirt. The night was balmy, a relief after a terribly humid day, but he was disgruntled.

  “Edgar will be late, he’s always late,” he complained as we walked over to Lex. “I don’t know where he is; he doesn’t leave a number, he’s always running around seeing people—got to be with this one, that one!” He stopped in exasperation, walking with his hands thrust into his pockets.

  “And I told Darcy to be there at seven-thirty; he’ll be having kittens. Edgar won’t be there, and the whole point of this dinner was so Darcy could meet Edgar, he’s keen to meet him, he saw him in The Little Merman. But Edgar didn’t answer the phone when I called, god knows where he is—he may not even show up after all this!”

  His eyes were a little wild. He kept sniping at Edgar during our walk to the restaurant and began to mutter, in the same tone in which he had muttered that he hated women, that he hated Edgar. “God, I hate that Edgar—he drives me crazy. I don’t know why I hang around him; I hate unreliable people! Actors! Always have to stop for one more bit of gossip—doncha know, darling,” he finished in a mincing mimicking tone.

  Yet I knew from his frequent references to Edgar during earlier conversations that Edgar was really a friend to George, his only friend, that they talked every few nights on the telephone and had for thirty-odd years. It seemed clear to me that George loved Edgar. I held myself taut and silent, refusing to think about who the object of this rage really was.

  George was right: Darcy Meeks was at the restaurant, waiting for us, sitting at an outdoor table with a glass of red wine and reading the editorial page of Newsday. But he appeared relaxed, not at all annoyed. He seemed to have cultivated composure. He was a warm reddish brown, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache and eyeglasses. Unlike George, he was well dressed, in a smart lightweight sharkskin suit. George introduced us and immediately lit into Edgar again. Darcy Meeks’s eyebrows rose a bit; he glanced at me questioningly, but I was no help and just shrugged. George calmed a bit when the waitress arrived and took our drink order, and Darcy tried to make polite conversation with me.

  “George tells me you’re a writer,” he said.

  I knew what he would think of the kind of books I write. I smiled. “Yes, I write romances.”

  His eyebrows went up again. “You know, my sister reads those, goes through ’em like Kleenex. And she has a Ph.D. in anthropology.”

  “They should be right up her alley, then.” I laughed. “They are studies in American culture.” When literate people are trying to be nice about my writing, they always bring up some Ph.D. or nuclear physicist they know who reads romances.

  “I guess maybe I ought to try one,” he said, graciously.

  “Men tend to be wary of romances. My theory is they’re afraid they’ll get hooked and feel unmanly ever afterward.”

  He laughed. “Probably true.”

  George was fuming, fussing, swiveling his head around, paying little attention to our conversation. “Where is that Edgar? God, I hate actors. As much as I hate women.”

  Darcy gave me another questioning look. I met his gaze but kept my face impassive.

  “How long have you been at Newsday?” I asked, as if George had not spoken, and we launched into a civil private conversation, talking above George’s occasional muted explosions. We talked until Edgar tore up, pink-faced and breathless, full of apologies. George muttered and grumbled at him, exploding, “I hate actors!” which Edgar ignored. He was bubbling over, excited with theater gossip he’d just picked up. He’d met with the producers and director of a new musical in the process of being cast, hoping to get a part, along with others who were reading. “They didn’t call it an audition, they couldn’t, how insulting—you can’t ask Edith Hoppe to audition, can you! So they just asked us to read together, but we all knew what was really happening, it was all right, it salved our pride, and it was so fun to dish with all of them.”

  And it was fun to listen to Edgar repeat it for us, to hear about Morrie’s divorce and Lee’s affair with no less a star than Mark Hosmer, and the terrible squabble between Angela Grigg and Helena Hope, and the fallout from it…Edgar’s relish for gossip and his high style in conveying it carried us through our rather poor meal, George’s persistent muttering, and Darcy’s and my confusion about just what we were doing there. Edgar’s wife, Beenie, a costume designer, worked more regularly than he and so knew even more gossip. So when he had run through all his own, he launched into hers, which took us through cappuccino. Perhaps he sensed the stiffness of the evening; he certainly was aware of George’s foul mood. So although it was George’s party, it was Edgar who played host, who took control and saw us graciously through an evening that without him could only have been remembered—by both me and Darcy Meeks—as seriously unpleasant. I’d always been fond of Edgar, but that night he went up several notches in my estimation.

  After the cappuccino, I wanted to go home, but I felt immobilized. I could not act on my own. I had to wait for George’s signal, his command. I was no better than a dog, I thought, thinking about the instruction manual written by that middle-aged Parisian Ménagier for his fifteen-year-old bride, suggesting she model herself on a little dog who fawns on its master no matter how often it is scolded or kicked…

  It is much harder to extricate oneself from an unpleasant party than a pleasant one. Everyone is reluctant to break the spell cast by misery, as if to announce that one is leaving would be to admit that the event has been a disaster. We all sat on, tied in knots to the chairs. In the end, Darcy’s good manners came through. Looking at me, he apologized, explaining that he had work to do that night; looking at Edgar, he said he had to read a new government report; looking at George, who seemed to know what he was talking about, he described a thousand-pager that had to be read by tomorrow. George stood, shook hands, and was gra
cious for the first time all night. But after Darcy left, he collapsed in his chair as if exhausted from carrying the entire evening alone on his poor shoulders. Darcy’s departure liberated me from my stupor: I was able to stand up, murmuring that I, too, had to get home. Edgar, sweet and generous as a woman, exclaimed how good it had been to see me, such a long time since we’d really had a chat, I must come out to the house the next time I was visiting the Altshulers, Beenie would love to see me, maybe they could have a dinner party, invite the Altshulers and the Wallachs or Hume and Jessie—I was fond of them, wasn’t I? Would that be fun?

  I assured him it would be fun. We were all standing by now. Edgar hugged me hard and kissed my cheek (I returned his hug feelingly). Then he turned to George.

  “I’m grabbing the Lex uptown,” he said cordially. “Talk to you later, George,” and he set off toward the subway.

  I began to walk down the street. George followed. I thought of telling him not to bother to see me home, but I knew he’d insist, and it seemed martyrish game-playing somehow. He was subdued, and his body was in its most dejected posture. It did not even enter my mind to ask him what had been going on with him that evening. I knew absolutely that I would not get a coherent answer, that he himself probably had no idea. I wasn’t even sure he understood he’d behaved badly. It seemed likely that he was feeling miserable, but at the moment, I didn’t care.

  However he looked, he acted as if nothing untoward had occurred. “Sure is a nice night,” he said pleasantly, as we walked along. “How’d you like Darcy? Nice guy, isn’t he? Smart too; we have some good talks. He’s one of the better people there. He handles all the edgy stuff—you know, the veiled racism—really well. And that Edgar! He sure knows what’s going on with these theater people. Course, I didn’t know half of who he was talking about, did you? Well, of course you did. You know all about those things, don’t you? Do you like Beenie? I really don’t. Oh, she’s okay, I guess,” he retracted, glancing sidelong at me. “A little pushy, maybe. I hate pushy women.”