Manhattan Monologues

by Louis Auchincloss

  “There are certain things that you and I will have to get straight,” she informed me. “I sense in you, dear, a tendency toward independence, toward your own values in life as opposed to those of the world in which you were reared.” Her tone was decisive but not prim; she was trying to be fair—I see that now. She always tried to be fair. “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t give a hoot about what you believe in or don’t believe in. Creeds don’t exist for me. You could be an atheist or an anarchist, for all I care, as long as you don’t scream it from the rooftops. Or a nudist, as long as you don’t make me go to a nudist camp. I expect to lead an ordered life centered in one civilized place. New York will suit me fine, if we have a decent apartment in an area of good private schools and neighbors who aren’t drunks or weirdos.”

  “Well, that sounds reasonable enough. We’ll live, in other words, as we’ve always lived.”

  “Precisely. I just want to make sure that you won’t suddenly tell me we’re moving to Kalamazoo. I want a solid home, a faithful husband and well-brought-up children.”

  “Isn’t that what every true American girl wants?”

  “You needn’t be sarcastic, deary. The difference is that this girl means to get it.”

  I should have realized then that I was up against a woman of steel who would never be deflected so much as an inch from her chosen path. But I construed her open and amiable manner as a manifest of her primary devotion to me, and so we were married.

  For three years things went along well enough. I was content with my work in the investment counsel department of my bank, which I did competently enough. Olivia was a cheerful and even-tempered mate, amused by the mild social gatherings of our mutual friends, always ready to go to a movie, play or concert, or to sit home with a detective story if I had to work late. Our quarrels were few and slight, and it didn’t bother me that she took less interest in my philosophic or sociological opinions than she had done before we were married. I reflected that she was not, after all, gifted with a particularly interesting mind and that she had little to add to or to stimulate my thinking on questions not concerned with our daily or family life. But it was beginning to concern me that such things scarcely existed for her.

  A greater problem lay in our sex life. It wasn’t that Olivia failed to be willing, even a vigorous partner in this, and two sons were born to us in the first three years of our marriage. Nor was it that she took the view of some of her contemporaries (more, of course, in her mother’s generation) that love-making was a male prerogative to which a dutiful spouse had patiently to submit. No, Olivia participated fully in our intercourse, but—how shall I put it?—in a curiously dispassionate way, as if, for hygienic purposes, she were engaged in a regular calisthenic. This ultimately diminished my libido to the point where I became a mere Saturday night performer. Olivia never commented on this.

  And then came the war. Olivia thought I should go in the navy, like most of our friends, but I preferred what I fancied the “real thing”: shooting at men you could see or engaging in hand-to-hand fighting, rather than firing at boats. This was again the angry, the truculent side of my nature, perhaps the immature, but I can hardly leave it out of this memorandum. I became a second lieutenant, ultimately a captain, in the infantry and fought in North Africa, Italy and at last in Germany. My sons know all about my war record and Silver Star, so I needn’t go into that. What I have to stress here is what combat did to my character and personality.

  It is often said that there are men who actually like war, not just the skillful planning and execution of military strikes but the bloody filthy combat itself. I don’t say that was true of me—I had my moments of hell, and I don’t use that word carelessly—but I also had my moments of undoubted brute ecstasy. I had learned at boarding school to be ashamed of my impulses toward violence, but the war seemed to be offering me a vindication. The Germans were fiends, and to punish them was not only a sacred duty; it was a blissful joy. When I tramped through their shattered homeland, there was a song in my heart.

  A reaction came when I saw the devastation wrought everywhere on people who had had no voice in the making of wars and when I heard of the two terrible bombs on Japan. I wondered if, had I been born in Tokyo or Berlin, I wouldn’t have sprung to arms as enthusiastically as any Japanese or German youth. I began to see the whole war less as a crusade against evil and more as a sharp statement of the wretched human condition. I looked back at my appetite for battle as something sickening, and I found myself in the grip of a severe depression.

  Everyone at home was most sympathetic and understanding. The bank welcomed me back; Olivia was all soothing smiles; the old friends and relatives treated me as a hero. But nothing was quite right. My two sons regarded me as something of an intruder on a home settled to suit themselves; my work at the office bored me; and Olivia, after the first year of peace, showed definite signs of impatience that I was taking so long to “snap out of it.” What she particularly minded was my inclination to be silent and sometimes morose at dinner parties, and it did not lift my spirits to note with what forced gaiety and laughter she sought to counteract my dull effect on the evening cheer. Indeed, she often became the life of the party, and I could well imagine the departing guests confiding in one another about that “poor lovely woman” and wondering why she had thrown herself away on that “dreary crank.”

  It was inevitable that what then came into my life should have come, and I met Cornelia Tate at one of those dinner parties to the revelry of which I so scantly contributed. She was a fine woman, large and still and calm, in some ways like Olivia, but far less animated, and her large, serene gray eyes bespoke her indifference to the trivialities around her without implying the least condemnation of them or condescension. She lived, one could infer, in a world of her own, a world that satisfied her without making her smug. But that night she appeared to betray an interest in mine.

  “They say you’re hard to draw out,” she began.

  “Who says so?”

  “Does it matter? Are you?”

  “I can talk when I want to.” I gazed at her for a moment. “I think I might like to talk to you.”

  “Let’s try, then. Where shall we begin? Well, why not with where we are now? You hate this party, don’t you?”

  “Yes, and so do you. Isn’t that it? Why did you come? I came because my wife brought me. Did a mate drag you here? And, by the way, which is he?”

  “He’s not here. We’ve separated, actually. I live childless and alone, and I go out when I’m asked—which is not often—because I’m afraid of getting too fond of loneliness. One can, you know. Or don’t you?”

  “Is it such a vice?”

  “Anything can be, I suppose, if carried too far. Your adopted air—will it offend you if I call it moodiness, or semi-truculence?—might lead you down some unexpected paths.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, you probably think it makes you unpopular.”

  “And it doesn’t?”

  “Not with women. Your remoteness, your air of inaccessibility, may have a Byronic aspect to some. Added to your reputation as a war hero.”

  “What guff! Anyway, I think Olivia doesn’t find it so.”

  “But she knows very well that others may. Oh, she keeps an eye on you!”

  I looked at Cornelia with greater interest. “Does my Byronic air, as you quaintly put it, find grace with you?”

  Her answer was flat. “Yes, Mr. Belknap, it does.”

  The conversation at the table at this point became general, and I had no further opportunity to chat with Cornelia alone, but when I called her the next day from my office and suggested that we have lunch, she immediately agreed. At the restaurant of my choice, one where we would not be likely to be seen by anyone of my acquaintance, I learned that she was a freelance writer who reviewed books and hoped to make a name for herself with a novel that she was composing about her girlhood as a missionary’s daughter in the Far East. Her husband was a lawyer in
town from whom she had parted on amicable terms. She was the easiest person to talk to I had ever known, including my mother. She was perfectly willing to follow with utter frankness in any direction our colloquy pointed. She seemed afraid of nothing.

  When our friendship, formed over several such lunches, matured, as we both obviously wanted, into an affair, our noontime trysts at her garden apartment in the Village, blessed with a separate entrance, were frequent, eminently satisfactory and utterly secret. I had no wish to hurt Olivia, and Cornelia professed an interest only in the immediate present. We had no plans; we were both, as I saw it, properly civilized individuals. But she cared more than I knew. And so, perhaps, did I.

  Everyone benefited from our affair. My temper improved, as did my work at the bank; I got on much better with Olivia, who was delighted at what she termed my “pulling out of it”; and I spent more time with my little boys. And Cornelia maintained that her novel, which had had its sticky points, was now progressing smoothly. When Olivia and I went out to dinner parties, where we sometimes met Cornelia, I joined in the general mirth of the evening. Life smiled.

  Until Olivia found out. How did she? From a typewritten anonymous letter. She has never to this day discovered who wrote it, and when I learned who it was, I could hardly believe it. It was my mother. I had told her of my affair in one of our deep confidential discussions, because that was the kind of relationship we had, and I trusted her discretion absolutely. But when my divorce proceedings took a nasty turn, particularly in the questions of alimony and custody of the children, Mother was stricken with remorse and made her confession to me.

  “I had no idea you’d be so forward in justifying what you’d done!” she protested after a fit of tears. “It never occurred to me that you’d scandalize the court by championing free sex!”

  “I didn’t. Olivia got hold of my correspondence with Newt Chandler and gave it to her lawyer.”

  “It’s the same thing! How was I to know that you and he were writing letters about your unconventional notions? I merely expected that the awful Olivia would get a common or garden type of divorce and that my darling boy would then be able to marry the woman he loved.”

  “I never knew you felt that way about Olivia.”

  “Because I took care that you shouldn’t. After all, there she was, your wedded wife, and you showed no sign of being ready to shed her—not until I learned that you’d finally met a woman who understood you and loved you. Oh, I loathed Olivia from the beginning! I loathed her because I saw that she was what I’d been, a castrating female. You needn’t stare at me like that. You’ve always thought I castrated your father. But I was determined that I’d make it up to you by never touching your manhood. You were going to be a complete man, my man, if there was anything I could do about it. And then that bossy Olivia had to get her claws on you!”

  “But what induced you to stoop to such a thing as an anonymous letter? So unlike you, Mother!”

  “Because I remembered how moral you could be about your obligation to others. I knew you’d never upset Olivia by asking for a divorce. The only way you’d get your freedom would be if she asked for hers! I counted on her pride and her temper and her greed. If she got everything she wanted, she’d be willing enough to let you go. Only I never thought she’d get as much as she did!”

  Which, of course, was my fault. When Olivia followed up the tip of Mother’s anonymous letter by hiring a detective to confirm its allegations and then faced me angrily with his report, I defended myself, claiming I had done her no wrong. Had I groveled before her as she demanded, she might have forgiven me, but when she heard my argument in rebuttal, her fury knew no bounds.

  She sued for divorce in New York on the grounds of adultery, which I did not contest, and then asked for custody of our boys on the grounds that my correspondence with Newt, which she had purloined from my desk, revealed a moral character unfit to be trusted with the rearing of children. This I contested, but did not deny any item of my individual creed. I ended up with the scantest visitation rights and the loss of three-quarters of my income.

  The only good thing to come out of the whole mess is that I can now marry Cornelia when she obtains the divorce that her easygoing husband will not deny her.

  “And then we shall see,” she assured me with a smile that was nothing if not enigmatic, “how 7 will behave when you find your next girl.”

  “Will you be another Olivia?”

  “Much worse. For I shall kill you.”

  Nearer Today

  The Treacherous Age

  SOME SAY that a woman’s dangerous age is forty; for me it was delayed by a decade. I had already lived half a century by the year 2000, having entered the world early in Harry Truman’s second term, and on my birthday I thought, to put it as boldly as I then dared to, that I had obtained just about everything that my world had to offer.

  What were those things? Well, to being with, I was a successful decorator, and had been the subject of feature articles in Vogue and Architectural Digest. My work, noted for its nostalgic return to Edwardian and late Victorian models, was reputed to be relieved from the stuffiness of pomposity of such eras by my eye for color and light and chintz, by my sense of space and air and cheerfulness, and my hand has been seen in some of the finest rooms in New York, Greenwich and the Hamptons. My husband, Augustus (Gus) Barker, to whom I have been harmoniously wed for twenty-six years, was a member of Harrison Levy, internationally known investment bankers, and made a fortune of I don’t even know how many millions. We lived in a splendid penthouse on Park Avenue and a thirty-room “cottage” on the beach in Southampton. Our two children were happily and substantially married, my daughter to a junior partner of her father’s and my son to the daughter of a former governor of New York. I had managed to preserve both my health and my figure, was considered an exceptionally handsome woman for my age and had once been listed in Style magazine among the ten best-dressed women in Manhattan.

  So why have I been struck by a nagging little doubt that has grown as rapidly as a malignant tumor and landed me at the gates of a nervous breakdown? I’ve tried to attribute it to advancing age, to a delayed change in life, to a puritan sense of having been too long the darling of fate, or to some inevitable rebalancing of scales tipped too far in my favor, but I keep coming back to one thing: my marriage.

  Not that Gus has become in any way uncongenial or been unfaithful or deficient in expressed affection. In everything we have done together, he has always had my full concurrence. Let me try to put it this way: he created me. Or, better yet, he fitted me into the setting of his life as adroitly and seamlessly as a great stage director might fit a vital prop into the scenery of his drama. Now what’s wrong with that if the show succeeds? And ours has succeeded—you might say, with standing room only. Aren’t I the beneficiary as well as he? Ah, yes, but it is always his show, never mine. I have a life, yes, and what many would call a very good one, but is it mine? Can I say that I have really lived?

  The psychiatrist whom I have consulted suggested that it might help me—and her—if I wrote up a short summary of what I considered the salient facts of my biography, which, of course, is what I am doing now. In novels and short stories this kind of exercise is made interesting if the reader is able to note passages where the writer is evidently under a delusion, or where he or she is consciously or unconsciously altering facts to justify or vindicate past doings. But there will be no reader of this memorandum unless I decide to show it to the doctor who suggested its preparation. I cannot be sure that I am always telling the truth, but I can certainly be sure that I am trying to, for it would be curiously foolish to pick up my pen in order to fool myself. Yet people do it, one knows. In any case, I must make a start.

  ***

  I was born Alida Schuyler, to a younger branch of the great clan that Lyman Horace Weeks designated, in his Prominent Families of New York, “one of the most distinguished in the United States.” The ambitious and “upwardly mobile” Alexa
nder Hamilton had chosen his bride from a senior branch as a way to cloak his illegitimate birth. Through the generations, we replenished our diminishing coffers by marrying into the families of the new and newer rich, and few young men started life with more advantages than my father, who had good looks, money and a venerable name—Livingston (Livy) Van Rensselaer Schuyler—though it sounded like the take-off of an old New York moniker in a Harvard Hasty Pudding show. But what good could all that do a man if he was born an ass?

  That was the question I put to myself again and again as early as the age of sixteen, as I watched our fortune dribbled away by Daddy in such ill-advised investments as gaudy “epic” movies and awkwardly situated amusement parks, lured by big-talking touts who hopped cheerfully from bankruptcy to bankruptcy until they finally hit the jackpot—after leaving Daddy far behind. They gambled for the fun of it, but Daddy did it to make money, which is always fatal. When he was reduced to a small but life-saving trust fund that he couldn’t invade, he retired from business to divide his life between the golf course and the bridge table, at both of which he excelled and to which he should have devoted himself from the beginning.

  Mother, beautiful, languid and of simpler origins, (Daddy, unlike his wiser forebears, had married for love), thought she would have no further trouble in life after she became Mrs. Schuyler, but when the unrestricted money was gone, she showed herself unexpectedly efficient in taking control of the trust income—Daddy had been shamed into submission—and using it with enough dexterity, plus her sagacity in cadging favors from rich friends and relations, to preserve a niche for her family on the fringe of the “best” society. Huddling under its precarious covers, she may even have felt a species of happiness.

  Such content, if content it was, was not for me. I had observed my parents’ world critically and assessed its value—accurately, I think. It still had some of the old trimmings of its former high status; few of its members had fared financially as disastrously as my father; a goodly number were richer than their parents had been. What happened to them was simply that they lost their monopoly; their clubs and private schools and exclusive resorts were not taken from them but had now to be shared with those once rejected. There was enough money for both old and new rich, though the new appeared to have the lion’s share of it, and no one was more conscious of the destiny of that share than Miss Alida Schuyler. I realized that my name was no longer an honor card, but it was still a card, and you can win a trick with the two of clubs if it’s a trump. It’s a question of playing every pasteboard in your hand for its maximum value. My parents exhausted all the mental skill they had at the bridge table. I preferred a larger sphere of action.