My Summer With George

by Marilyn French

  A few years after I left Bert, I fell in love with a man I was crazy about, sexually—although I didn’t reach the peak of sexual desire until I was nearly thirty. In 1954, when I was twenty-three, I met a man at a party, Charles Murano, a freelance artist. We married within a few months and in 1955 had twin sons, James and Girard. Charles did beautiful work and often made high commissions, but there were lean times too. So we lived on my income and reserved his for special treats, like trips to Mexico and Italy or renovations to our house. When I met Charles, I owned the two bottom floors of a brownstone on West Twelfth Street. Charles got a huge commission from Vogue in 1956, and we bought the third floor and fixed it up as the children’s floor—just in time for Stephanie, who was born in 1957. When he got another windfall in 1960, we fixed up the garden behind the kitchen. We made a patio of huge terra-cotta stones and surrounded it with shrubs and trees and an herb garden. We had a wonderful life. But in 1961, Charles died of a heart attack. He was only thirty-six. I was thirty.

  It is dismaying how quickly hearts mend. In 1963, I fell in love with and married Andrew Lindsey, an investment banker who knew everything about money and how to sweep a girl off her feet. (We still called ourselves girls back then, even at thirty-two.) He took me dancing at discos and riding at Montauk. He took me and the children out on his sailboat for weekends. I was swept away by him, really. It was with Andrew that I finally understood what it meant to be sexually vanquished. We married, but Andrew proved that sex was not a good ground for marriage. I adored and trusted him, and by the time he left me for a younger woman, in 1968, he had his own company, most of my money, and my brownstone. I had to start over again, almost from scratch, this time with four kids. It was a bitter experience.

  I shut my mouth and forgot about having fun—and I worked, come to think of it, exactly the way my mother had in the bakery, literally day and night, turning out novels under three different names. Three years later, I was able to buy the apartment on Fifth Avenue. I hired the architect Mark Goldman to redesign and decorate it. The job got a six-page, full-color spread in Architectural Digest; it made his reputation, and along the way, we fell in love. Neither of us wanted more children: Mark was divorced, with a grown daughter. He was very social—we traveled and went to lots of parties. We had almost eight great years together before he fell ill with pancreatic cancer. He died in months, terribly. His death—the way he died, not the fact of his death—made me feel I didn’t want to marry again, didn’t want to be close to anyone again.

  And by the time Mark died, I had had too many losses, too many sorrows. I worked at shutting off my feelings, just soldiering through. My goal was not to feel. I’ve been alone ever since. That was 1979, this is 1991: a shockingly long time. Maybe I needed to fall in love.

  No, Molly was wrong. My feelings for George were unique, an experience I’d never had before, one I was unprepared for. It was as if I was finally reaping the punishment for my bad character, or paying the price for having had such a lucky life. Maybe I’d finally let myself feel something I’d denied throughout my life. Maybe I’ve deceived myself about my emotions all these years. Maybe the punishment for that is being thrust back into adolescence, forced into the humiliating experience of love and longing, here on the edge of the grave.

  Friday morning, the phone rang. It was Molly. She was at her country house, upstate, in Garrison.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “And I’m way up here and you’re way down there.”

  “We both have cars.”

  “Is that an invitation? Okay, I’ll come for the weekend. I’ll leave in an hour or so. See you tonight.”

  “Bring your suit!” I yelled, but she’d already hung up. I knew my bathing suits would not fit Molly, she was so small. But maybe there was a spare left behind by some tiny person. Not worth calling her back for. If she didn’t have a suit, she’d skinny dip.

  I dressed quickly—I was still in my bathing suit—and drove to the fish market and bought some fresh swordfish. I’d marinate it in soy sauce, hot sesame oil, and mustard, and broil it. I’d serve it with pasta. I wouldn’t cook a sauce, just toss the hot pasta into chopped tomato, garlic, basil, and olive oil. Molly would like that—it was her recipe.

  I was humming as I prepared the marinade. I was happy Molly was coming. Maybe, I thought, I’d been a bit lonely.

  It was dark by the time she arrived, and I served dinner almost right away. We ate heartily, chatted, sipped wine. We were always easy together. I told her about my lunch with Nina Brumbach and her strange story. She told me about a split between two close friends of ours.

  We moved out to the porch after dinner. I leaned back in a chaise, and Molly lay stretched out on the daybed. Although there was light from the moon ascending through the clouds, the porch was very dark. We could barely see each other’s faces, except as a pale blur. The blackness was consoling, a curtain draped over us, soft as fog.

  “So what’s happened with George?” Molly said into the dark.

  “Nothing. He withdrew. It’s over—the flirtation, or whatever it was. He told me I blindsided him. He said he couldn’t fight me, but he could run, and he could certainly hide.”

  “Fight you?”

  “I know. Why would anyone want to fight someone who loved him? Unless he didn’t love her back, in which case, why keep calling? Eventually, of course, he stopped.”

  We sat in silence for a while.

  “Are you all right?” Molly asked finally.

  “Not great. It’s painful. I came to feel I couldn’t live if the dream wasn’t realized, if we didn’t get together in this great ecstatic burst and find ourselves perfect companions, agreeable together in everything…The dream came to seem the only purpose of life, the only possible reason for existing…I know how absurd it is, but that’s how I felt. Feel.”

  “I’m sorry.” She paused, then added, “You know you can’t help it. Having that dream, I mean. Don’t blame yourself, don’t feel absurd. We’re all raised on it, and even if we deny it, it’s there.”

  “You can’t avoid the entire spirit of an age.”

  “You think today’s girls will be different? With the kind of violent music and movies they’re being raised on?”

  “Oh, who knows!”

  “You think women in India, or in Africa, don’t entertain the same sick fantasy?”

  “I’m sure not! And anyway, in this country, men have it too. I’m sure of that.”

  We sat in silence again. The cicadas sang, a comforting sound. Molly’s presence, too, was comforting.

  “But it’s not just a fantasy, a sick sentimental dream, is it? Isn’t there something true at the heart of it, something real, something worth wanting?

  “You know,” I added softly, “lately this image popped up in my head, an image from long ago that won’t go away. Once, when I was in Oxford, over twenty years ago, or more, I saw two people walking together up the High Street. They were a working-class couple, short and stocky and graying and shabbily dressed, he in a jacket and cap, she in an old wool coat and tieup shoes with mid-heels, the kind elderly women wore when we were young. And their faces were lined; both their faces had worried a lot. But they had kind faces.

  “The thing about them that caught my eye is that they were holding hands. They weren’t walking arm in arm; they were holding hands. British couples didn’t, on the whole, walk down the street holding hands. Still don’t. They’re too proper, you know? But this couple—there was such trust and easiness between them, it was like an aura surrounding them. Their lives hadn’t been easy, but they’d wrested something fine out of them.”

  Tears dampened my cheeks.

  Molly said nothing. The evening grew cooler, and I was about to get up and fetch myself a sweater, when she murmured—in such a low voice that I had to strain to hear her, “All my life I have wanted, more than anything in the world, someone to take care of me. Someone who would draw my bath and bring me
a cup of tea in bed, who would rub my back when it’s achy, and even sometimes maybe cook a meal…”

  “But you do those things!” I exclaimed. “You always do things like that for me when I visit you, or when we travel together.”

  “I know. I do them because I want them done for me.”

  “Has no one ever done them for you, Molly?”

  “Armand did, a few times. My last husband. But then I think he forgot about it. I never told the first two I wanted them: I didn’t have the nerve. It felt so wrong to ask for something you wanted. It felt illegitimate. And it felt as if—if you had to ask—it wouldn’t be a genuine gift, you know?”

  “I do know.”

  It was growing cool. August. In a field nearby, a huge gaggle of geese was chattering away. Autumn was here.

  “I’m getting chilly, Molly. How about you?”

  “Yes. And I’m tired too. I was up at five.”

  I stood. “Molly. May I draw you a bath?”

  I could see her smile in the darkness. “Thanks, lovey. But I’m just going to throw myself in bed. I’m too tired for a bath tonight.”

  In September, I set off on my journey, which I cut a little short for Stephanie’s sake: she wanted to hold a big family Thanksgiving dinner in her house in Kent, Connecticut, and she wanted me there. The twins—my sons, not my characters—were flying in from California, and Lettice was coming from Chicago to be there. So of course I came home early. I was tired, anyway; I can’t take long journeys the way I used to. I had enough information on every place except Singapore, which was difficult to get hard facts about. But I had the name of someone who had been in the American consulate there and had retired and now lived in New Milford, who might be willing to talk to me. I’d been told that the only way I could get someone to tell me how bad things were there was by finding someone who no longer worked there. At some point, pinning down the facts of the place began to seem like too much trouble, and I considered dropping Singapore from the plot.

  But then I considered the suspense it would generate: the heroine, Nina, and the twins, Whitman and Walter, one of them deeply in love with her, the other, driven mad by a dose of LSD the CIA had secretly given him years before, projecting neurotic hatred for his mother onto the innocent girl, all of them trying to escape from Singapore with highly secret information about its military industry. Therefore, the government and its industrial complex are tracking them all down, and like all totalitarian systems, it has tentacles reaching everywhere…No, I decided to keep Singapore. It didn’t matter whether the facts were true. If I didn’t have hard facts, I’d make them up. I could give Singapore a fictional name if I wanted to.

  That’s the great thing about being a writer: you can make everything up.

  Except your life.

  Try as I could, I wasn’t able to make up a happier ending for my…what was it? not an affair…my encounter with George. He remained with me, though, he lingered for months in my body and longer in my heart. One of these summers, he may disappear. He may even be supplanted.

  Now, I can’t deny that the pull of romance is powerful in me. It is not something I can have a surgeon cut out of me like a wart or unwanted fat or the bags under my eyes. I wonder if it will be with me until I die. Suppose I should by some fluke live to eighty or ninety: will my heart still soar whenever I hear great romantic waltzes, like Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales or the waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier? When I hear them, my senses dip and rise so powerfully, my whole body seems to dip and rise. It twirls as the basses boom the beat, the cymbals crash, the violins swirl… and I am young and slender, in a ruffled white ball gown, in the arms of a young soldier wearing blue and red and gold, and we circle the mirrored ballroom in an ordered frenzy of passion. And contained as it is by the beat, by the three-quarter time—the oom-pa-pa, oom pa-pa—the passion spills over with longing and loss and the terrible knowledge of the impossibility of satisfaction. This waltz lies at the very heart of my heart, and magnificent and terrible and tragic and terrifying as it is (how the cymbals threaten! how the rhythm speeds up! we swirl faster and faster, nearly out of control! we are approaching chaos, madness, we are liquefying!), it is for me also the dance of life, which is love and sex and body and music…

  Maybe most of my mistakes in life were efforts to dance a waltz only I could hear. So maybe they were not mistakes at all but simply me dancing my own dance. Or maybe I was hurling myself, blindly and without thought, into a vivid teeming mirrored room where the drums and basses boom out my own pulse, the violins emerge from my own throat and the woodwinds from my heart, as all the world swings rhythmically in pairs, forever.

  I do not know how to think about the fact that I may reach some great age, my face skeletal beneath the wrinkled folds of flesh pulled away from the bone, my eyes sunken into dark pockets of pain, my walk tottery and unsure, my body a tattered coat upon a stick, and still be on the lookout, have an eye out for, be seeking always and ever, a certain voice and eye, a certain look, a hand reached out, breath swiftly drawn, a catch in the voice, an invitation to the waltz. Do I imagine that I will live happily until I die, beloved and embraced? It is humiliating. A better poet than I demanded to grow old in dignity, to transcend need and desire, to become a golden bird—a goal I scorned, despite my honor for the poem. But now I face the fact, the sorry fact, or is it triumphant? There it is, there it remains: my spirit is still a girl’s, trapped inside a deteriorating container. The unending drive, the geyser spurt of desire that is life, goes on and on, will not be stilled, in body or spirit. Till death do us part.

  About the Author

  Marilyn French was a novelist and feminist. Her books include The Women’s Room, which has been translated into twenty languages; From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World; A Season in Hell; Her Mother’s Daughter; Our Father; My Summer with George; and The Bleeding Heart. She died in 2009.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1996 by Belles-Lettres, Inc.

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  978-1-4804-4493-5

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  EBOOKS BY MARILYN FRENCH

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