by Susan Rieger
At Broadway and Fifty-Eighth, Jim got out. Anne had her driver pull over and gave him twenty dollars. Jim walked slowly across Fifty-Eighth, on the south side of the street; Anne followed on the north side, five feet behind, clutching the Post. At Sixth Avenue, as he waited for the light to change, Jim started whistling. Above the traffic, Anne heard the wistful strains of “These Foolish Things.” Jim often whistled as he walked down the street, but not love songs, not with her; with her, he whistled jaunty airs, marches, anthems, snappy show tunes from Oklahoma! or Guys & Dolls. Is this madness? Anne wondered as she skulked past the Plaza Hotel. “Am I going off the rails?” Jim stopped under the marquee of the Paris Theatre. He looked around expectantly. Anne lurked at the edge of the fountain across the street. Jim looked at his watch. She looked at her watch. It was three fifteen. They waited.
At three twenty-five, a woman came up to Jim. They didn’t kiss or shake hands but stood facing each other. Even at a distance, Anne could see he was excited and happy to see her. His body leaned toward hers, his face alive with emotion. Anne turned from Jim to the woman and recognized her as the girl on Madison Avenue, all those years ago, less beautiful but still beautiful. She felt tears rising. Jim bought tickets and they went in. Anne crossed the street. The Story of Adele H. was playing at three forty. She waited a few minutes for Jim and the woman to settle, then followed them in. They were sitting on the first floor, in the middle section, toward the back of the theater. Anne went upstairs to the balcony and took a seat in the front row. She could see them clearly from this perch. The woman wasn’t less beautiful. She is the peonies, Anne thought, she is the tulips.
The movie, a story of hopeless, desperate, unrequited love, ending in madness, was wrenching for Anne. As she watched, she felt tricked and exposed, as if Jim and the woman, knowing she had followed them, had picked this movie with the pitiless intention of humiliating her. It was the last foreign movie she would see for years. They’re too smart, she thought. Years later, watching Fatal Attraction, a thoroughly American movie of mad passion, she found its violent ending satisfying, reassuring. She told herself it was the husband’s fault, all of it, not the crazy girlfriend’s. He was craven, guilty, egoistical. Of course, the wife would be the one to kill the girlfriend, she thought. They’re all Dimmesdale. I would have had to do it for Jim too. She caught herself. Unless, of course, I was the one to be killed. She laughed dully. Even then.
The movie let out at five thirty. On the street, Jim and his companion talked briefly, then parted. The woman walked west; Jim looked after her receding back for a good minute before turning east, toward home. Anne followed the woman, keeping thirty feet between them. They walked across Fifty-Eighth, then up Central Park West. At Sixty-Seventh, the woman went into the Hotel des Artistes. Anne followed her into the building’s lobby, as if she were going to Café des Artistes, the restaurant on the ground floor. She heard the elevator operator greet the woman. “The boys are home, Mrs. Falkes. I heard Jack playing.” Anne walked to the café door, then stopped, as if she’d thought of something. She shook her head and turned around to go. “Can I help you, ma’am,” the switchboard operator asked. “I had the time wrong,” Anne said.
Anne caught a cab to East Eightieth Street and stopped at E.A.T. to pick up takeout. She got home at seven. She showed surprise at seeing Jim. “I thought you’d be late,” she said. “I have food for me, but not for you.”
“Let’s go out,” Jim said.
“Only if the food is better than E.A.T.,” Anne said. “How about Caravelle?”
Jim looked at her. “It’s very expensive,” he said.
“On the Lehmans,” Anne said. “My father has a house account.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Jim said.
Anne didn’t say anything.
“Let’s go there,” Jim said. It was very expensive. He paid.
—
Anne stayed up late reading the Manhattan phone book. She started with “FA.” She tried “FAW” and “FAU,” before she thought of Lieutenant Columbo. “Falkes, Rupert, 1 West 67th Street.” The name sounded familiar, as if it belonged to someone she should know but didn’t. She got out the wedding list. There it was: “Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Falkes (Eleanor Phipps).” Anne thought about Jim’s movie date with Mrs. Falkes. There had been nothing in Eleanor’s behavior that gave off any scent of romance. There had been no kissing, no touching, no intimate smiles. They might have been third cousins. She’s going to break his heart again, Anne thought, what’s left of it.
Anne got up at six the next morning. She called the Y to reschedule her session with Ted until the evening. At seven, she made her way crosstown to the Hotel des Artistes. At seven fifty, Eleanor emerged with five boys. They all looked like Jim, especially the oldest, who she guessed was thirteen or fourteen. He and the next oldest took off on foot toward CPW. “We’ve got practice till five, Mom,” he called out. Eleanor hurried the other three into a waiting black car. Anne couldn’t move. Rooted to the ground, she watched the car drive away. She was unsure what to do next. She felt light-headed. She knew she couldn’t tell a cabbie to follow a car filled with children. She’d look like a stalker, a pervert.
The next morning, Anne rented a car and drove across the park to West Sixty-Seventh Street. At seven fifty, Eleanor and her sons came out of their building. As the two oldest boys walked toward CPW, Eleanor called after them, “Harry, Will, don’t forget the dentist.” “Harry, Will,” Anne said to herself. “English kings.” Anne followed the cab with the younger boys up Amsterdam to the Trinity School. Watching them walk in, she felt a rush of blood to her head. I am a pervert, she thought. I am a stalker.
Over the next week, Anne staked out Trinity at the start and end of each day, trying without success to catch the younger boys’ names. She saw that the two oldest boys carried tennis racquets. JV, she guessed. She looked up the schedule.
All fall, Anne spied. She hung around the Hotel des Artistes in the mornings; she watched Trinity JV tennis games in the afternoons; she scoped out Jim’s studio in early evenings. JV tennis was hands down her favorite. Often, she went to practices. She traveled to away games, to Riverdale and Brooklyn. There were few regular spectators, a handful of mothers, a nanny or two, one old man. At first, she felt conspicuous, but no one seemed to pay her any mind. She didn’t talk to anyone. She watched the Falkes boys closely but never cheered or clapped. After a month, she gave up on West Sixty-Seventh Street and Jim’s studio. She’d lost interest in everyone but the two boys.
When spying had begun to take over her afternoons, she took unpaid leave from her job. She said nothing to Jim and didn’t change her phone message. “Health reasons,” she said to her chairman, who thought it was female trouble and didn’t want to know more. “Of course,” he said. “But don’t forsake us.” To encourage her return, he put in a promotion for her from associate research scientist to research scientist. She was very useful to him; she had drafted his last two successful grant proposals.
At the last away game of the season, the old man, the only person she recognized, approached her.
“I’ve seen you at all the games,” he said, sitting down next to her. Anne froze. “You come to watch my grandsons, don’t you?” He nodded toward Harry and Will.
“I’d never hurt them,” Anne said quickly.
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
They sat silently side by side for several minutes, not looking at each other, watching the game. The boys were playing doubles, against each other. Will aced Harry.
“Harry won’t like that,” Anne said, giving herself up.
“No,” the man said. They resumed their silence.
“I’m Edward Phipps,” the man said.
For a split second, Anne thought of lying.
“Anne Cardozo,” she said.
“Jim’s wife?” Mr. Phipps said, looking directly at her for the first time.
“Yes,” she said.
“You have no children of your
own,” Mr. Phipps said. Anne couldn’t tell whether he was telling her or asking her.
“No,” Anne said. She sat still, not wanting to disturb the molecules between them. She felt a sense not exactly of relief, more like release in the old man’s company, in his knowing who she was and what she was doing.
“Do Harry and Will suspect anything?” she asked. Her heart seized as she waited for his answer. She had refused until now to think about what they might think.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “They’ve never said anything, and they’re boys who say what they’re thinking. So far.”
When the game finished, she stood up. “I won’t come to any more games. I’ll leave your family alone.”
“I’m sorry for your unhappiness,” Mr. Phipps said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for talking to me. Thank you for not calling the police.”
—
Edward Phipps had a life full of regrets, beginning with his parents. His parents didn’t care for him and, isolated by their remoteness and indifference, he grew not to care for them. By the time he was seven, he gave up the wish that they would change, that they would talk with him, eat dinner with him, tuck him in at night. The one good deed his parents did him, inadvertently, was to send him to Bovee. It was cheaper than St. Bernard’s. Bovee was for its day a progressive school. It admitted Jews and forbade hazing, a linkage Edward would make for the rest of his life. It was also traditional. Operating under Gradgrindian principles, it believed in drills and recitation. Edward’s lessons in mathematics, Latin, and geography stayed with him all his life. On his deathbed, he recited the rivers of northern Europe, including the Volga. “Moscow is Europe, barely, but still,” he said to Sam, who, with his archival tendencies, appreciated more than his brothers his grandfather’s recall. “What did you like best about Bovee?” Sam asked. “The Bergdahls,” his grandfather said, his mind drifting with the Volga. As early as first grade, Edward saw that some boys had much better parents than his, attentive, kind, even affectionate; he decided to shop for a new set. He found them in the third grade, the parents of his friend John Bergdahl. Starting that year and until he went to prep school, he spent more time at the Bergdahls’ than at home. They were warm, funny, generous, intellectual. Rumor had it Mrs. Bergdahl was “Jewish, or part Jewish, or Russian, or maybe Czech,” but she was so charming and rich, no one who knew her cared. Years later, Edward saw Eleanor’s relationship with Clarissa Van Vliet’s family as a replay of his relationship with the Bergdahls. He knew it was not to his credit.
After Bovee, Edward went to Andover and then to Yale. He met Virginia Porter Deering at a Christmas ball. He was twenty-one, a senior; she was nineteen, home for the holidays from Smith. She was breathtakingly lovely, with black hair, pale skin, and dark blue eyes. Later, in his own defense, he would say, “Vivien Leigh hadn’t a patch on Virginia.” Still, he knew he had been Lydgated into marriage. After six months of seeing her only in groups, he recklessly pursued her one evening, down a dark hall in her house, and clasped her tightly to him, kissing her neck, her lips, her shoulders, her bosom. She submitted rag-doll-like until he finished, then said in a bright, clear voice, “Are we engaged?” He stammered, “Yes,” and threw away all possibility of marital happiness. For the next twenty-five years, he submitted to her will, rising up only when Eleanor brought Rupert home. He would think of that hour as “the changing of the guard.” He saw that Rupert would protect Eleanor from Virginia, where he had failed.
Edward didn’t think to object when Eleanor at twenty had fallen in love with a Jewish boy from Yale. He had had Jewish friends at Bovee and Yale and he worked with Jews at his bank. He knew Jim couldn’t join his clubs but he didn’t think that mattered to Eleanor. His wife disabused him of his complacency, clubbing him with the marriage’s impracticalities. “We may not mind, but our friends and relations will, and Eleanor will find herself moving in entirely different circles from us. We couldn’t have them for holidays, no more Christmas or Easter. Her children will be thought of as Jewish by our side, and gentiles by Jim’s. According to Hebraic law,” Virginia said, “the mother must be Jewish for the children to be Jewish.” She then struck with her deadliest blow. “His parents are also dead set against it. His family will never accept her. They’ve threatened to disown him. They will be outcasts. Bohemians. They’ll be poor too. We couldn’t support them under the circumstances.” Edward persuaded Eleanor to give Jim up. In later years, he would come to think of that conversation as his most cowardly act, made more shameful, more exploitative, by the benefits subsequently accruing to him from Eleanor’s marriage. He loved Rupert and his grandsons more than he could ever have imagined. In her marriage to Rupert, his daughter gave him the family he had longed for.
Edward first met Marina Cantwell on his forty-first birthday, at a dull party in his own home. She was then the very young wife of a colleague at the bank. She asked his opinion and laughed at his jokes. In her easy laugh and enthusiasms, she reminded him of Mrs. Bergdahl. He fell in love. They had an affair for a year, the happiest of his marriage. When he couldn’t bring himself to leave his wife, Marina gave him up. After Virginia’s death, Edward could only marvel at the hollowness of his life: he had forsaken himself, his daughter, and his lover, but kept faith with Virginia. The Bergdahlian fantasy resolved itself into dew. He had not escaped his blighted childhood; he had perpetuated it. Struck by this insight, he had to face a second, more complicating, one: perhaps his parents hadn’t so much disliked him as each other. A feeling of sympathy for fellow sufferers stirred in him. He wished he could steel himself against this insidious thought, knowing it would allow him to forgive himself, but he could not. He was a self-forgiving man and if a quieted conscience required forgiving his parents, he knew he would do it, regretfully perhaps, but inescapably.
As he watched Anne Cardozo leave the playing field, he thought of Jim and, for the first time, the unhappiness he had inflicted on him as well as Eleanor. He had liked Jim, and Eleanor had been madly in love. He had thought they were having sex. After they broke up, he hoped he was right; he wished them that happiness. He didn’t like to think of the reasons propelling Anne to stalk his grandsons. He knew he was implicated. He turned his attention back to the game. Harry hit a scorching backhand neither of his opponents could get a racquet on. Edward stood up and cheered. Harry gave his grandfather a quick nod. Edward wished he had a cigar, to make the moment perfect.
—
Anne stopped spying on Harry and Will. She went back to work. She threw herself into her exercise regimen. Ted said he’d teach her squash. “You were built for squash,” he said, laying emphasis on the verb, making her feel she was built for danger. She began seeing him seven hours a week, five mornings for weights and machines, two evenings of squash. Cheaper than therapy, Anne told herself, and more acceptable. Often after squash, they’d grab a sandwich at the Madison Deli. He made her eat whole wheat bread. “Your body is a temple,” he told her.
“What’s going on?” Jim asked. “You’ve become this demon exerciser.”
“I’m getting ready,” she said.
“Ready for what?” he said.
“Anything,” she said.
One morning after her workout, Ted met her at the front door of the gym. “Don’t go to work yet,” he said, breathing into her neck. “Come home with me.”
For three months, Anne went home with Ted almost every weekday morning. Often, they skipped the workout and met at his apartment. “One workout a day is sometimes all I can manage,” Anne said. It was the best sex of her life: illicit, secret, athletic. Ted was new, experienced, generous, and tireless. Every time she left his apartment, a sense of sorrow settled on her; their mornings together were numbered. She tried to have sex with Jim every time she had sex with Ted, to allay her happiness, but she couldn’t always keep up. Jim warmed to her new openness and availability. He had liked her French silk underwear. He had liked removing it. It had given her a youthful, v
irginal quality that had aroused him. But he liked the new underwear more. It played to darker fantasies. He liked it half on, half off.
“Who are you?” Jim asked one night as he lay beside her, spent.
“Would you like to tie me up?” she said. “Or down? I’m never sure of the right locution.”
Anne told Ted she couldn’t see him anymore outside the gym. He wasn’t surprised or disappointed. “You don’t have to give me up entirely,” he said. “We’ll stay friends. We’ll play squash. And every now and again, you’ll come over to my place. It will be good for you.”
She cut back on her training sessions. Another woman, short, athletic, and blond, took her hours. Anne liked that she was Ted’s type. This is a very well-run gym, she thought.
—
Anne and Jim had dinner with her parents on most Sundays. Her sisters and brother and their families came also. Anne wondered if parents without wealth could regularly summon their children to a weekly weekend dinner. She loved her parents; they were good parents, affectionate and kind, but still she wished she could spend Sunday afternoons wasting time her own way. Her childlessness had metamorphosed after two years of marriage from a matter of interest among the family to a matter of concern. She was regularly scanned walking into the house, and her intense exercise regimen, which had thinned her out, had them all talking. “She’s no spring chicken,” her mother told her father. “She better get on with it. I had all four children by the time I was her age.” Mr. Lehman told his wife not to say anything to Anne, and Mrs. Lehman held off; his demands on her were so few, perhaps two a year, she believed it her wifely duty to submit. Her demands on him were many; those he didn’t care for, he ignored. “My batting average with your father is almost as good as Ted Williams’s,” she announced during one of the Sunday dinners. All the children immediately understood.
When Anne showed up in late fall rounder and glowing, everyone noticed. There were murmurings during cocktails but no one said anything to Anne or Jim; they waited for them to share their happy news. Throughout dinner, the conversation stalled, no one wishing to miss the announcement. When dessert had come and gone and nothing had been said, Mrs. Lehman lost patience.
