Truth and Consequences

by Alison Lurie

  Meanwhile, the news of Alan and Jane’s separation had made a considerable stir locally. Acquaintances, including a couple of single women whom he hardly knew, invited him to dinner and attempted to pump him for details and motivation; friends sympathized and attempted to give advice. Bernie and Danielle Kotelchuck gave him roast beef and beer and suggested that he try to make it up with Jane, who, they said, was essentially a very good person. Gilly and her husband Pedro gave him stir-fry and marijuana and suggested that he and Jane go together to a very good crisis mediator they knew. Public opinion, largely, was on Alan’s side. Jane, after all, had deserted an invalid husband—a cruel, selfish act. She had also walked out on someone who was beginning to have considerable artistic success—a foolish, impulsive act, possibly motivated by envy. If she had supporters, they did not speak to Alan.

  Early in February Jane asked Alan to have lunch with her on campus and suggested that they file for divorce. She didn’t think they would be getting back together, she said—and he had to agree. She also declared that she wanted to be fair about everything. They had already split the checking and savings accounts, and she didn’t want any part of Alan’s TIIA/CREF, which his salary had paid for.

  Jane didn’t want the house either. She knew Alan loved it, but she never had, really. Yes, it was old and historic, maybe even beautiful, she said. But it was awfully hard to take care of, all those little rooms and steep narrow stairs and low ceilings. It was drafty and badly insulated too, with the plumbing and heating always breaking down, and the soil in the garden was mostly clay. All she wanted was half its assessed value, not counting the follies, so that she could buy a newer, more modern house nearer to town, with good soil and a chimney that didn’t smoke. And, if it was all right with him, she’d like to take the furniture and china that had been her grand-mother’s, and her Cuisinart and all the cookbooks and garden books.

  And then, Jane said, when the frost was out of the ground, and she’d found a new place, she’d like to come and dig up some of the plants from her garden: the peonies and daylilies and some of the myrtle, and the asparagus and the raspberry and blackberry canes and the rhubarb.

  “Sure, you can have them all, take anything you like,” Alan had said, amazed and relieved by the modesty of her demands, and especially by the news that he would not lose his beloved house—wondering if this leniency was in part dictated by the consciousness of public opinion.

  After this, when they met at the Unger Center, relations between Alan and Jane remained cordial though cool. Considering what had happened to a couple of his colleagues whose marriages had ended, he felt very fortunate. But he was stunned when, in mid-March, Jane announced that she was planning to marry Henry Hull. In the surprise and heat of the moment, Alan spoke unsympathetically of Henry, calling him a loser and a layabout and asking how she could even consider marrying someone like that. “Yes,” Jane remarked in a low, strained voice, “that’s what Henry thought you would say. It’s what he thinks everybody will say, but it’s not true. He has a perfectly good well-paying job, with more editing work than he can possibly take on.”

  Yes, she admitted, her mother had been kind of upset by the idea of the marriage at first, because she disapproved of divorce, but she’d come around. She liked Henry, and so did Jane’s dad, and they could watch sports together. Anyhow, it was what she wanted to do, what was right for her.

  Alan could not bring himself to congratulate her. He felt insulted, injured, and worst of all, made to look ridiculous. Naturally he wanted Jane to be happy, or at least content—it was what any reasonable man would want for his ex-wife. He had already hoped that she would meet someone suitable, someone dependable, someone more like her, eventually—but not right away. If she found someone first, it would look as if he, Alan, had been rejected. Of course, really he had found Delia first, but nobody knew that. And now, when Delia returned to Corinth, probably in a few weeks, and their relationship became public, they would be a joke. People would speak of wife-swapping. At the thought, Alan shuddered. Though he knew it to be a weakness, he still had a horror of being laughed at. It was a weakness Delia didn’t share: she didn’t care if people laughed, she had said once—it just showed how limited and stupid and conventional they were. Sometimes Alan wished he were more like her. Maybe one day he would learn to be.

  If Jane and Henry were to marry after he and Delia, it might be seen as the slightly pathetic union of the two rejected, less successful partners—yes, maybe then he could endure it. He had therefore tried to persuade Jane not to announce her plans for six months, suggesting that it would look better. But she had refused. “I don’t care anymore if things look good,” she had said. “If you pour chocolate sauce over an old cake of soap it will look good, but you wouldn’t want to eat it.”

  The only silver lining to the whole disaster had been the news that Delia had never been married to Henry Hull. This would not only make things simpler for her and Alan, it proved that she had had the self-respect and the good sense not to tie herself legally to someone like that. And indeed, when Jane’s plan to marry Henry Hull finally became known, she was further condemned, and so was Henry, especially by the many on-campus fans of Delia Delaney, who of course did not know that Delia loved Alan and that they would soon be together.

  Yes, but when? Time was passing: the coarse, gritty, porous heaps of snow by the driveway and in the parking lots at the University were beginning to shrink. Early in April Jane asked Alan if he wouldn’t like to move back into his original office at the Center, with its north light and view of the lake and big green sofa. “No, I don’t think there’s any point in that,” he had told her. “After all, it’s almost spring now, and Delia should be back soon.”

  “I’m not sure she will,” Jane said.

  “Why not?” Though he tried to control it, Alan’s voice rose a bit. “Have you heard something?”

  “No, nobody has. But Bill Laird thinks she’s never coming back, and she hasn’t answered any of the official letters I’ve sent her.”

  “But that doesn’t mean anything. Delia hasn’t answered anybody’s letters, Susie says.” (Except mine, he thought.)

  “No,” Jane said sourly. “And what that means, if you want to know what Bill thinks, and I agree with him, is that Delia doesn’t want to admit she’s not coming, because she’s on medical leave, and she wants the University to keep sending her paychecks.”

  “Oh, she wouldn’t do that,” Alan said. “She wants to be in Corinth as soon as the weather’s warm enough for her to stay well.” He tried to speak firmly, reminding himself that Jane didn’t know the main reason Delia wanted to be there—but something in his voice wobbled slightly, unbalanced for a moment by doubt.

  “Maybe,” Jane said. “Maybe not.”

  She knows something—Henry’s told her something, Alan thought. And for a moment he felt panic. But once he was back in his office, he lifted the brown paper that covered his drawing board and slid out Delia’s three note cards. “Your downcast Dilly,” he read, and “You are in my thoughts always,” and the doubt and panic passed.

  All this had been hard enough. What was worse, what was intolerable, had happened early last month. On a sunny Monday morning, Davi Gakar came into the Unger Center carrying the Style section of Sunday’s New York Times. Horribly, unbelievably, it contained a wedding announcement headlined “Delia Delaney, Wallace Hersh.” Below this was a photograph of Delia looking beautiful and Wally Hersh, the Corinth trustee, looking like a large, fat, old, bald hamster. This was followed by the disgusting, improbable news of a marriage in Palm Beach, where Mr. Hersh lived. He also, it appeared, lived in Manhattan and in Rye, New York, and was the chairman of something called Hersh International Manufacturing, sixty-four years old, and a widower.

  Alan’s first reaction was that the whole thing must be a hoax of some sort, a hideous joke by a former fraternity brother or business associate, for instance, who wanted to embarrass Wally Hersh. Or someone who had it in for De
lia, some crazed fan. The announcement gave her age as fifty-one instead of forty-five, clearly a malicious lie. But then Lily Unger sidled into the Center, looking smug, and said she’d known it all along, or anyhow for a couple of weeks. She had even been invited to the wedding, and would have gone if it wasn’t so far and the planes so unreliable at this time of year.

  “I predicted it. And of course I was the one who introduced them,” Lily said, preening. It was at this point that Alan had had to go upstairs and shut himself in his office, and try not to break anything that would show or make the kind of noise anyone could hear. He slammed his fist into the wall a couple of times, but Matthew Unger’s father had built well, and he managed only to dent the plaster and bruise his knuckles badly—there was still a dried smear of blood there by the window.

  She was supposed to be working so hard she couldn’t see anyone or answer anyone’s letters,Alan thought. But all along she must have been writing to Wally Hersh and seeing him. Maybe, even probably, he came to the cabin in the woods, which Alan had only once seen a photograph of, but fantasized about often. He should have suspected it, or something like it. After all, Delia had betrayed Henry Hull with Alan, so what was more likely than that she would betray Alan in his turn? Of course she didn’t love Wally Hersh—she had married him for his three houses and his wealth, which (according to Lily Unger) was considerable. Maybe she really was fifty-one years old: the Times ought to know, they had files going back years to when she wouldn’t have wanted to lie about her age. Bitch, whore, liar.

  And she never even wrote to tell me, Alan thought. She’s a coward too. Or maybe worse, she had just forgotten him and couldn’t be bothered. He recalled something his dealer, Jacky Herbert, had said. “Delia’s not capable of multi-tasking. When she’s working, she doesn’t notice anything that happens around her. Or if you manage to interrupt her, then she turns her attention on you—her complete attention, like a high-powered spotlight, though usually not for long. People are drawn to it like moths, they flutter frantically against the glass, and then the spotlight is turned off and they fall to the ground, scorched.”

  The next few weeks were agony, both physical and psychological. For a while Alan allowed himself to indulge in fantasies of confrontation, accusation, injury, and even murder. But finally he realized that the only thing he could do now was to curse Delia as a liar and a bitch and a gold digger and then forget her completely—never think of her again. Easier said than done. His back pain flared up, he drank alone in the evenings, and slept badly, the first few hours in a drunken stupor, the rest of the night in nervous fits and starts. At three and four a.m. he stumbled into the kitchen and broke things, mostly glasses and plates, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose, while the lizard hissed and clawed in his back.

  He couldn’t, of course, tell anyone what was the matter, but his friends noticed that he was looking ill and miserable; they suggested false causes and useless cures. The only thing that helped, finally, was work. Cursing Delia, he also remembered something she had said to him once. “It’s not important for an artist to be good, or to be happy. If you’re serious, you have to give all that up. If you don’t, if you keep wanting those things, every time you pick up a pen you’ll make the wrong choices.”

  His back was starting to ache seriously; he needed another drink, Alan thought now, and he looked toward the house to see if anyone else was coming to inspect the tower up close. No—yes, a figure had just detached itself from the crowd on the terrace and was starting across the lawn: a blond woman in a long, filmy white dress. The declining sun was full in his eyes, and for a moment he thought it was Delia. Over the past six months he had imagined that he saw her so often—in New York especially, but also, stupidly, in Corinth. More than once in the past six months he had followed some innocent female stranger down a street or across campus. He blinked hard, impatient with the persistence of his illusion, his obsession.

  Then, with a sensation of having been struck hard in the chest, he realized that this time it was not a mirage. Approaching him was the person in the whole world he most and least wanted to see.

  While he watched, she came nearer, becoming realer and even more beautiful than he had remembered, with a kind of faultless elegance he had never seen before. The Delia he’d known had been always just a little untidy—her mane of golden hair loosely and seductively disordered, her trailing thrift-shop skirts and fringed scarves slightly creased or disarranged as if she had just gotten out of bed. Once he had quoted to her Herrick’s poem, which she of course knew, that begins, “A sweet disorder in the dress . . .” Now her hair had the braided and curled and puffed perfection of the Botticelli portrait he had been reminded of the day they met, and her dress was an elaborate designer’s confection of silk chiffon with layered floating pleats. As she came nearer Alan could see that she was carrying a wineglass in each hand.

  For months he had rehearsed what he would say to Delia when and if they met, though the script had changed over time, from passion to interrogation to accusation to rejection. Now he could remember none of the lines, and stood tongue-tied.

  “I brought us some champagne,” she said, holding out one hand. The familiar sound of her voice, the low, caressing Southern accent, broke Alan’s daze, and he struck out, knocking the glass onto the lawn. Almost any other woman—especially Jane, with her instinctive domesticity—would have exclaimed, would have stooped to pick up the broken pieces. Delia paid no attention—she merely set the remaining glass of champagne on a bit of artificial ruined stone wall and gazed at him with her dark-fringed gray eyes.

  “Wh-what are you doing here, what the hell are you doing?” he stuttered.

  “I came to see you,” she murmured. “I made Jacky invite me. I had to come, I had to see you.”

  “Yeah, well, hell.” Alan swallowed. “You could have tried to see me before. You could have written, at least, to tell me you were going to marry Wally Hersh.” His voice had strengthened and he pronounced the name with all the scorn he could manage.

  “I couldn’t, I didn’t dare. I was afraid you’d try to stop me. I knew you could stop me.” She gazed at him helplessly.

  “Oh, shit,” Alan said with feeling.

  “I thought—I hoped you’d understand.” Delia moved nearer; he could smell her subtly flowery, presumably expensive, perfume. “You have to understand. I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t.” Her voice wavered, and her huge pale eyes seemed to fill with tears. But Alan was unmoved. Yeah, maybe I could have stopped you, but you didn’t give me a chance to stop you, he thought. Or, more likely, the whole thing is a lie.

  “You’re not going to tell me you’re in love with him?” he said.

  “I’ve been so frightened, always,” Delia said, disregarding his question and thus, Alan realized, answering it. “You don’t know. All my life.”

  “Yeah? Frightened of what?”

  “Of everything. Of losing everything, being nothing and nobody.” She looked at him innocently, helplessly. But she’s not innocent, she’s not helpless, Alan reminded himself.

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re famous. And you’re beautiful,” he said, painfully aware of how true this was as she stood before him, the tendrils of her hair and the thin gauze of her long sleeves fluttering in the wind.

  “Yes, now I am,” Delia admitted, putting one soft hand on his arm and speaking low and intensely. “But that could end anytime. Suppose suddenly I couldn’t write anymore. The world forgets so fast; it always wants something new. Everyone knows how it goes. You don’t write anything, but you still get a little grant or a little prize here and there, and then pretty soon you’ve had most of the grants and prizes. You try to make it on readings, but they come less and less often. Soon you’re one of those sad former writers you meet at art colonies, living from one residency to another. Then you wake up one morning and you can’t even get into a colony, you’re old and ugly and poor and mostly forgotten. All you have is a leaky log cabin in the mounta
ins and a lot of used clothes and dead manuscripts. I couldn’t bear that. I had to do something.”

  “But—Wally Hersh—he’s—” Alan swallowed the angry words. He did not believe that Delia could ever be old and ugly and forgotten, but he believed in her irrational fear of this future.

  “He’s very sweet, really.” She smiled, sweetly, as if to demonstrate.

  “Sweet.” Alan tried but failed to say this word neutrally.

  “He loves artists and writers. When I took him to the Academy lunch last month and he met John Updike and Dick Wilbur he was really happy. His favorite course in college was English literature.”

  “So?” He felt rage rising in him.

  “You don’t understand,” Delia almost wailed. “It’s different for you, you can always teach and support yourself. And I can’t—I’ve tried, but it destroys me, it destroys my work. You have tenure and health benefits and retirement—you’re safe.”

  “And now you’re safe too,” Alan said, half in sympathy, half in scorn.

  “Yes. You don’t know, it’s such a relief. It’s as if, all my life, I’d been holding my breath, dreading the mail because I know it will be full of bills, maxing out credit cards, giving readings in awful places when I was coming down with the flu, being charming to awful people to get them to help me, fighting through migraines, lying sick as a cow in motels—” She gave a great sigh, then a wonderful smile. “But now I don’t have to do any of that. When you have enough money, you can hire people to do whatever you need done, and you don’t have to pay them in kisses and compliments—or if you do, it’s a bonus for them.”

  “You have to pay Wally Hersh, though,” Alan said flatly, fighting a crazy impulse to grab her and crush her elaborate white frills. “But I suppose it saves time, like consolidating all your debts with a single credit card company.”