YOU’RE SHOCKED, she said, I can see it in your face. I’m wearing trousers, and I’m not made up.
She did look terrible, her face pale and haggard, the pallor accentuated by her dark lipstick.
You are lovely, he replied, and why wouldn’t you wear trousers to Sunday lunch unless you had been to church?
She smiled. We don’t go to church much in France, except for christenings, marriages, and funerals. She bit her lip and added, There was an Episcopal service for Sophie before she was buried in the family plot at Verplanck Point. Tim is buried there too. The same priest said the mass. I’m going to be cremated. My mother didn’t want it because of Auschwitz, but I don’t think that’s a good reason. Cremating the Jews they killed was the least of what the Germans did to them.
Schmidt was going to say something signifying agreement, but noticing his hesitation she broke in. Forgive me, she said, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I can’t get yesterday’s conversation out of my mind, but I want to. And I’m not sure I can or should go on with the story. What a splendid room this is! she added inconsequentially, looking around her.
Too much marble for my taste, but the food is good, said Schmidt. Let’s order our lunch. I have to admit, though, that I would be disappointed if you did not finish what you have begun to tell me. She nodded and said, I’ll try. I’ll see.
She ate and drank with frank enjoyment, and, not wanting to press her, Schmidt found himself doing most of the talking. He explained that the foundation he worked for had been founded by his country neighbor and now friend Mike Mansour, the billionaire Egyptian Jew who came to the United States with his parents as a young boy. The parents prospered making and selling curtains. Mike parlayed that small prosperity into a huge fortune and, having left Ronald Perelman behind, was ascending smoothly to the highest sphere of Forbes’s list of billionaires. He created the foundation to support democracy, the humanities, and capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe and former member countries of the Soviet Union.
So far I’ve rather liked preaching the gospel of democracy and the humanities, he continued. That of Ayn Rand and joyous market capitalism is another matter. On balance, though, I’m truly grateful to Mike. He’s gotten me out of the house, I’m working again, and I’m traveling on business to places I’d never go to on my own. You probably know that I retired early, when Mary got sick with a cancer that spread pretty much everywhere. I wanted to be with her, and it was the right decision. All the same, losing both her and my life’s work left me in a desert—without direction.
Oh, I didn’t know that Mary was dead, she said. That’s how cut off I am from the firm. I did notice, though, that there was no mention of her in your letter, and I wondered about the reason. She was so very nice. Of all those partners’ wives she was the kindest to me and the funniest. I remember her making huge round eyes and rolling them when we sat across from each other listening to Mrs. Wood give a little speech at one of those firm functions for wives. I had trouble keeping a straight face.
Schmidt nodded. Making round eyes had been one of Mary’s special accomplishments. She had been famous for it at Radcliffe and at the publishing house.
After a minute or so of silence he added, Alice, please go on with your story. I am eager to hear it, even if it’s very painful.
All right, she said, but it is painful. More than painful—devastating. Let’s see, the morning after Sophie died Tim arranged for her funeral in Verplanck Point. There was no difficulty about doing it the following day so we all drove there, behind the hearse. Five of us in a limousine, Tim, Bruno, the au pair, Tommy, and I. The drive was a nightmare, and once we arrived it was even worse. It was impossible not to stay at the big house with Tim’s parents and the sister and her husband without making a public row, so in addition to all our pain and all our regret we had to face the Verplanck wall of meanness and dislike and horrid insinuations. Mrs. Verplanck actually said Tim and I were at fault. Considering the risk of infections at summer camp we shouldn’t have sent her to Horned Owl. I didn’t reply, but Tim flew into a rage and yelled. Have you ever heard him yell? It wasn’t a nice sound. We didn’t stay for the lunch after the funeral—none of us could face it—and after having a bite to eat at a mall got back into the limousine. We spent the night in some motel, and in the morning drove to Bar Harbor nonstop, except to let Tommy and Bruno—yes, Bruno too—pee at the side of the road. We were a mess when we got home, and the next day I allowed myself to sleep late and to lie down in our bedroom after lunch. Tommy and the au pair were taking a nap. I tried to go to sleep perhaps for half an hour but couldn’t, and finally I got up and went to the window. It was a gorgeous, cruelly gorgeous, afternoon. The sea was so brilliant that after a moment I had to turn my eyes away from it. I looked instead down at the garden, and there, next to the gazebo, directly in my line of vision, were Tim and Bruno, absorbed in a conversation I couldn’t hear over the pounding of the waves. I was about to call out to them when suddenly I realized the import of what I was seeing. They were holding hands, which in itself surprised me, because it wasn’t Tim’s style. I had never seen him hold hands with a man. But then Tim put his arms around Bruno and kissed him on the mouth. I mean really kissed him. They were near enough for it to be impossible to doubt that Tim’s tongue was deep in Bruno’s mouth. After a moment came a gesture: Bruno thrust his hand into the front of Tim’s trousers and caressed him until Tim drew away and, still holding hands, they ran into the house. I thought I was going to howl, but I didn’t make a sound. I wondered whether I’d ever recover the power of speech. Gasping for breath I turned in little circles in the room, fighting against the need to fall on the floor and writhe. Suddenly, I understood what I must do. I went out into the corridor. It was covered by a heavy, dark red carpet that smothered the sound of steps. But I was taking no chances and tiptoed to the big guest room where we had put Bruno. The door was closed. I still burn with shame when I remember what I did next: I put my ear to the keyhole and heard them. Fucking and moaning. Schmidtie, I knew one of them was buggering the other. What else could it be? I wanted desperately to know who was being buggered—as though that mattered—but I didn’t put my eye to the keyhole. I didn’t dare, I just couldn’t.
She began to cry, softly and sadly. Her pocketbook was on the little taboret beside her chair. She found her handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. I’m making a spectacle, she whispered, I’m so sorry.
Her other hand was palm down on the table. Schmidt patted it. What was he to say? All he found was: I am terribly sorry. He added, Let’s have some coffee, and perhaps a brandy. It will do you good.
No brandy for me, she said. I’ll have a sip of yours if you have one.
The dining room emptied while they drank coffee until they were the last remaining guests.
It’s a beautiful warm afternoon. If my ankle weren’t in such bad shape I would suggest walking over to the Tuileries and finding a couple of chairs somewhere in the sun. But I don’t think I can do it; my ankle is worse today than it was yesterday. I’ve got two ideas. One is that we move to the lobby or the back bar. The other, more revolutionary, is that we go up to my suite. It’s one that Mike Mansour keeps all year round. It has a terrace—you can imagine the view—and a large living room if you find the air on the terrace too cool. But I don’t think you will. The afternoon sun is so pleasant.
She actually laughed. I don’t think it will compromise me to go to your suite. Let’s try the terrace.
He had called room service and ordered coffee, and this time also a brandy. The thought had occurred to him while the waiter was busy with the tray on the terrace that she might have mentioned her apartment as a less racy alternative to his suite. He dismissed its implications. She was distraught, he was no Mike Tyson, and if his ankle was to be spared, they would have had to take a taxi and face the complications of getting him back to the hotel. No, she had made the right choice: it would have been downright foolish to forgo soaking up the sun, with a magnificent panorama of the great square, the river, and the Left Bank stretching out before them. He raised the snifter and tasted. It’s good, he said, holding the glass out for her, I doubt I’ve drunk any that was better.
She took a big sip and then another.
I keep on saying to myself that what happened cannot be repaired, she told him, so I might as well be good to myself. You’re right about the cognac, and you were right to ask me to come up here. Do you wonder why I’ve told you so much, and why I’m going to tell you even more?
He told the truth: no, he hadn’t; he had thought his questions were ones that someone who had known Tim and liked him very much would naturally ask. And he hoped that she would go on. What he had learned thus far was horrible, but it didn’t explain either Tim’s retirement at such a young age or his death so soon after.
Oh, Schmidtie, you’re such an adorable old-fashioned square. Let me have another sip from your glass, and I’ll tell it all. I’ll also tell, even though you aren’t curious, why I’ve told you already as much as I have. I think you’re nice and kind. You must have been one of those nice and very square Harvard boys I liked when I was at Radcliffe.
If I were fifteen years younger, I would have been there, said Schmidt. I certainly was square, and it’s even possible that I was nice. Seeing that she gave no sign of abandoning the snifter, he called room service and asked for two more. Just in case, he told Alice.
Good planning, Alice replied. My head is turning, but I’ll try to be coherent. As you can imagine—no, you can’t; I couldn’t imagine it myself—I resisted the impulse to burst into that room and curse them and then wake Tommy from his nap and get into the car with him and the au pair and flee. Go somewhere we would be safe. To my father’s house to be with him and my dying mother. Instead, I took a long shower, got dressed normally, and put a pad outside that bedroom door with a message: I expect to see both of you in the library. Then I told the au pair to keep Tommy busy when he got up and, when it was time for his dinner, to drive over to the luncheonette and take him to the movies after they’d eaten. I had noticed that Star Wars was playing when we drove through the town. After that I went into the library and tried to read the paper and keep images of Tim and Bruno out of my head. Time dragged on. Around six, I heard a car on the driveway. That was the au pair and Tommy. Perhaps a half hour later, the cook came in and said she had prepared a cold meal so she could serve it anytime. I told her to lay it out in the kitchen and take the evening off; I would put the food on the table and clean up. That’s right, I was emptying the house of witnesses. Not to my crime, I could see that the roles were inverted, but to my shame. At last—it must have been past seven—I heard them on the stairs and then in the hall and then they came in the room. They too had taken showers. Anyway, their hair was wet. They sat down, and Tim spoke. They had been asleep; it wasn’t a case of not wanting to face me. But they were both prostrate before me. They had been so very careful, had tried so hard to be discreet and to preserve our life together. They knew it was the worst imaginable time for me to find out, but they hoped I would understand that it was grief and despair that made them lose their heads and fall into each other’s arms. At that point Bruno broke in and said the same things all over again. It was grotesque: Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Do you want to know something strange? I did believe that they had been unstrung by grief, that otherwise I might never have found out. I was so naïve, I knew so little about that side of life, but they had managed to fool even my father, who is anything but naïve! Then Tim said that although the timing was appalling it might be altogether best that I know everything. They’d been lovers almost from the first, and they really loved each other. I asked Tim whether this had always been so, whether he knew he was homosexual—I used that word because I couldn’t bring myself to say “gay”—when he was taking me out, and later when he began to sleep with me and asked me to marry him, and he said no, not at that time, it had been a part of him since senior year at high school and afterward, but he took out girls too, and by the time he got to W & K he was sure that he had changed enough to be serious about me. I interrupted him there and asked whether after we had gotten together he was still going with men. He hesitated and answered very slowly and very carefully as though he were walking on eggs that it happened occasionally, there was a boy in the office with whom he’d gone to bars and to baths, and that it began to happen more often after Tommy was born, he didn’t really know why. He wanted to and couldn’t help himself. That was really it. I had become more distant, so completely a mother. That might have been a factor.
I felt life was draining out of me, but I couldn’t cry. Perhaps it was because of Bruno. His presence seemed to me atrocious, obscene, and I said to Tim, Does he have to be sitting here? Tell him to get out.
They both began to talk at once, as though they had rehearsed, about how all three of us were in it together, how Bruno loved Sophie and loved Tommy, and loved me too, and how Tim and he had no secrets. I was too beaten down to protest. So I asked, knowing that I was repeating myself, and that it was a stupid question anyway because there was no doubt about the answer, Do I understand that all the while you were having sex with me you were also having sex with men? How could you? Tim replied that he liked sex, and he liked me, but he really needed the other thing. The way he needed Bruno and couldn’t live without him. Haven’t you heard of husbands who have affairs and wives who have affairs? Do you think those husbands and wives don’t have sex with each other? I nodded, which was a lie. Of course I knew they did. Yes, you do, Tim replied, just think of some of our friends. It’s all the same thing. And what about Bruno, I asked, now that you’re with Bruno, do you and he have sex with other men as well? Once again they both talked and talked. It boiled down to how they had realized right away that they were in love—that was Bruno’s expression—and how that was all-important to them, so now they were monogamous, faithful to each other. Much later, when I was less naïve, I asked them whether they were lying to me. From what I had been told, promiscuity was the rule. I was to hear a lot on that subject from both of them, all sorts of explanations of how gay love doesn’t need to be exclusive because it’s a celebration of the body, and on and on. But that did not apply to a relationship such as theirs. As I said, all that was later. For the moment I felt sick, or perhaps dead, anyway more and more as if I weren’t there, as if that conversation had been taking place elsewhere, which didn’t prevent me from seeing and hearing, but in some other place from where I was. After a long while I interrupted and asked Tim what we were going to do now that all this had happened. Were he and Bruno going to leave first and let me and Tommy and the au pair make our way to Paris or my father’s house, I hadn’t yet decided which, after they had left. Or would they let us leave first? Once again Tim and Bruno had an answer ready to go—they were already like those married couples who answer every question together, as though it had been asked of both, and always say “we” instead of “I.” The gist was that we mustn’t expose Tommy to a second loss and for his sake we must all four stay together. We really can, Tim assured me. They didn’t want it to be known that they were gay; for all sorts of reasons they weren’t coming out, they would continue to be discreet, please let’s avoid a divorce or even a separation. What about him, I asked, pointing at Bruno. Does he have anything to say about it. He agrees, Tim told me. You know he loves Tommy. But is he going to be around, I insisted. The answer was Yes, couldn’t we go on as we have before, with Bruno like a part of the family? Tommy would miss Bruno. He and Bruno love each other. At that point, in that beautiful baritone of his, Bruno chimed in about how much Tommy meant to him, how he admired and loved me like a sister, and how we had achieved a rare equilibrium. The way he put it was so elegant that I didn’t begin to feel nauseated right then. That came later. But I did say that I wanted Tim out of my bedroom. My husband agreed with such alacrity that even then, in my beaten-down, abject state, I realized I had made myself ridiculous. I don’t know how they kept themselves from laughing. So we packed up, Bruno helping as though nothing had happened, and traveled together to Paris. In retrospect I see that the loss of Sophie was a blow that had anesthetized me. If I hadn’t been so numb, I can’t imagine I would have stayed so eerily calm after finding out, just like that, one sunny afternoon, that Tim was a goddamn queer who’d been fucking Bruno and God knows how many other men before and since—and what kind of men!—and then getting into my bed. Probably fucking them even when he was making me pregnant with Sophie and Tommy.
She was crying and, it seemed to Schmidt, shivering from cold. Let’s go inside, he said, the temperature has dropped. You’ll be more comfortable. He led her by the hand to the sofa, closed the glass doors to the terrace, and, somewhat embarrassed to be calling room service again, ordered coffee, petits fours, and two cognacs.
You’re getting me drunk, she said morosely. No, I’m getting me drunk, and yes, I don’t care, and no, you don’t care. I’ll just keep talking. Do you think it’s worse to find out your husband is sleeping around with your girlfriends, his secretary, the au pair—the mention of sleeping with the au pair stung Schmidt who had done just that and had been caught by both his wife and daughter—with call girls, and on and on, or to find out he’s a pansy? Banging boys in gay baths! Getting them to fuck him! What do you think?
I don’t know, he replied. I’ve heard it said that it’s less damaging to be left by a partner who discovers he’s homosexual or she’s a lesbian, because you’re not in competition with the person they left you for. It’s more like a mutual mistake. But really I don’t know. Perhaps it’s different from case to case.
I don’t either, but it was awful. Do you read Balzac?
He shook his head and, correcting himself, added that he had read Eugénie Grandet in his last year of high school French.
It must have been a good school. I’m not sure that happens today. I think Cousine Bette is probably his best novel. The story revolves around Baron Hulot, an incorrigible trousseur des jupons; someone who’s always getting into women’s underpants. His wife is very beautiful and très sage—a model of virtue and goodness. When Hulot becomes completely besotted by a horrible little woman, the wife of a glorified clerk in Hulot’s ministry, and the expense of keeping her is ruining the family, Madame Hulot, who’s still in love with her husband and desperate to save her family, really at wit’s end, cries out, What is it that they do for men, those filles? I guess you’d say: “those whores.” Why can’t I learn it, whatever it is. I’ll do it for him if only I can make him happy, if only I can keep him! She doesn’t succeed, any more than I did. What should I have done for Tim? Anal sex? I did it, though I hate doing it. But now I’m convinced that what he was looking for was different, not just sticking it up some anus, and that what he needed neither I nor any other woman could give to him. He wanted a man. It’s somehow different, even though the mechanics seem the same. My father, who is very worldly and wise, and never let me down during that awful time, said something that opened my eyes. He told me to stop blaming myself. He said that men who think their wife is frigid or don’t like the sex they have with her for whatever other reason don’t go to other men for better sex. Not unless they’re homosexual. Straight men, if they’re dissatisfied, go with other women, call girls if necessary.
Tim a queer! Schmidt thought. How totally unlikely. He had nothing of the pansy about him, nothing that connected with the stereotype. Were there other queers at the firm at that time? That “boy” she had mentioned, whom Tim took to gay baths, was he literally an office boy, or was he another lawyer? An associate, because at the time he surely wasn’t speaking of a partner! To be astonished and shocked that such things were true twenty-five years ago, he thought, had nothing to do with W & K today: he knew of one homosexual partner (but did everyone else in the firm know?) and two or three associates. But it could be that there were many more. He had been out of touch ever since he retired. The only gossip he knew was what he picked up at the occasional firm function he attended out of a misplaced sense of duty and what he heard once in a while from Lew Brenner and, yes, also from his own son-in-law, Jon Riker, before that ornament of the bar had been forced to withdraw from the firm and deploy his legal talent elsewhere. But back then when Tim was an associate? At college, Schmidt had been dimly aware that a small group, really a handful of his classmates and other contemporaries, were the subject of jokes about being effete, limp wristed. There were a couple of tutors around whom they orbited. He hadn’t precisely disliked them, but they used to make him feel awkward and uncouth. Some of them, whom he had continued to see here and there, were out of the closet, as were the homosexual writers whose books Mary had edited, the two known gays among her colleagues at the publishing house, and the shifting, ever renewed contingent of queers in occasional attendance at Mike Mansour’s lunches, dinners, and parties, many of them the acolytes of a musician of genius over whom Mike happened at the time to spread his protective wing. But Tim! Old Dexter Wood must be turning over in his grave.
The waiter brought the order. Schmidt found a hundred-franc bill in his wallet and gave it to him, apologizing for driving him crazy.
They drank their coffee in silence, until it was broken by Alice. My father thought I should see a psychiatrist to have someone to talk to, and so did one of the few friends I still had in Paris. We had been at the lycée together, and she had also lost a child. To leukemia. She recommended a very nice woman who had her office on boulevard St. Germain. In good weather, it’s a nice walk from where we live, across the Tuileries. She gave me a prescription for a tranquilizer and sleeping pills, and being able to talk to her probably helped, but nothing she said and no effort I made to be reasonable got me over the feeling that he had defiled me by doing to me the things he had either just done or was about to do with other men, with Bruno. I would lie awake in my bedroom, knowing that Tim was awake or asleep in what had been our guest room—I couldn’t bring myself to tell him to move into Sophie’s bedroom—and think about it. He and Bruno continued to use my house at Chantilly for weekends and they tried to have Tommy come out with them. They meant well, but it was a prospect I hated. I needed his presence. Besides, although I was certain that Tim and Bruno would be totally discreet and look after him as well as I or better, I worried about other men who I supposed joined them in the evenings. What kind of men? Fortunately, Tommy had so much homework on most weekends that he couldn’t, or anyway didn’t want to, go to Chantilly. When he did go, I usually went too. Can you imagine those weekends? Tim, Bruno, Tommy, and I, each of us in his or her room. Tim and I didn’t share a bedroom at rue St. Honoré, but at least Bruno wasn’t in the apartment; they weren’t sneaking from one bedroom into the other. During school breaks and at Christmas and Easter I made it a rule, and got Tim to agree, that Tommy and I would go skiing alone or to Antibes to stay with my father. All the precautions in fact turned out to be pointless. There isn’t much you can hide from a thirteen-year-old. Tommy figured out what was going on before his father got sick. How he articulated it for himself, I don’t know, and we never discussed it. He made no move to do so. Probably I should have started a discussion, but I didn’t know how, and for all sorts of reasons I had stopped seeing the psychiatrist and had no one to advise me. My father had been a great help at first, but after my mother’s death, when he became fully aware of the loss, grief overwhelmed him. Later he became too absorbed by the relationship he was forming to be able to concentrate on Tommy and me and set me straight. Apropos of figuring things out, I finally understood why my friends had been so closemouthed from the outset when we kept on taking Bruno to their parties and inviting him to our house every time we gave a dinner. Paris is a small town, and they either knew him or knew about him. He was deep in the closet, but people less stupid than I understood what was going on in my ménage. If my parents had been living in Paris when we moved there, they would have been able to warn me.
She had finished her cognac and asked if she could have what was left in his glass.
Alice, Schmidt said, why did you stay in the ménage à trois? Why didn’t you divorce?
She answered, speaking as clearly as before but more slowly. That was the subject of a great debate involving me, my father, and the psychiatrist while I was still seeing her, and of course Tim and Bruno. I thought from the first that we couldn’t go on together and shouldn’t try and that Tim and I should divorce. Tim was against it. It was always the same refrain. The loss of Sophie was about as much as Tommy could bear. The two children had been so very close. We shouldn’t make him lose his father and his home on top of that. That was also Bruno’s opinion. I know they were absolutely sincere. They both loved him. What made it easier for them to take that position was that, as I’ve told you, neither of them intended to come out. Bruno said it was private and cozy in the closet. He was ready to lead a march of one hundred thousand gays straight back into it. So maintaining the status quo didn’t interfere with any plan of theirs. The psychiatrist told me that was all wrong, that inwardly Tommy knew the marriage was broken, even if he didn’t quite know or couldn’t name the reason, and that this explained some aspects of his behavior. She thought he would adjust rapidly to his father’s departure. Of course, I should have listened to her. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I would have decided to do if my father had not come out strongly on the side of our staying together for the time being. It was too hard for me to go against his advice. Then I too began to prefer to maintain the façade of our marriage.
She paused and said, That’s a whole other story that I’m not even going to try to tell. Tim’s story becomes even more painful, but if I have enough strength to go on with it you’ll get the answer to your questions. All I knew about AIDS, she continued, was what I was reading in the newspaper, and that wasn’t much. I certainly noticed when Tim, who in all our years together had never been sick, not even with the flu or a cold, began to complain of sore throats, sleeplessness, headaches, and diarrhea, and that this seemed to be an unending series of ailments. I said I noticed those illnesses, which sounds cold, but I can’t say honestly that they upset me. I had quit as a wife. I no longer loved him. Instead, I felt indifferent and annoyed. Slightly hostile. It’s possible that, ignorant as I was, I would have read the figure in the carpet if I had still loved him and had been concerned about his well-being. I’m not sure. For one thing, I think I was fooled by Bruno, who was then and has remained perfectly healthy. It’s a primitive sort of reasoning: why one and not the other? On some level, I probably suppressed such knowledge as I had or was acquiring because I didn’t want to get involved or to be forced to feel sorry for Tim. So let’s say that for a long time I knew nothing and suspected nothing. Then at the beginning of 1989, when Tommy and I got back to Paris from skiing during the Christmas vacation—we had gone to St. Moritz—the housekeeper, Madame Laure, whom you’ve met, told me that Tim was at the American Hospital with a nasty case of pneumonia. Bruno had put him there and had been looking after him. A week or so later, Tim was discharged, and Bruno brought him home. He recovered from the pneumonia, but he had no energy, he was losing weight, and he claimed that he had almost constant diarrhea. He looked like hell, but that August he went to Bar Harbor with Bruno anyway. I had refused to go; that was the second summer I had done so, and Tommy and I once again spent almost the entire summer in Antibes, this time with my father and my mother’s friend, who had moved in by then. She is a wonderful woman, and all four of us got along very well. Father was able to get Tommy into a sailing club in Cap d’Antibes, and Tommy loved it. He felt like a real native.
When we got back to Paris we found that Tim was already there, having cut short his stay at Bar Harbor, and a couple of days later he and Bruno very formally asked to speak to me together and told me, for the first time, that a couple of years earlier he had tested HIV positive. The doctors put him on drugs that they said would keep the illness at bay, but as we could all see, they hadn’t. He had to face the facts: the time had come for him to withdraw from the firm. He wasn’t up to running the Paris office. In fact, he didn’t think he was up to doing any sort of work as a lawyer. Now you know why he retired from the firm so early. Of course, I became desperately worried that he had infected me—there was no reason why he wouldn’t have. I had one test for the virus, which was negative, and then two more just to make sure, and then finally the doctor convinced me that since the last time I had sex with Tim was just before Sophie died, in July 1985, there was no chance that the virus was inside me, hiding. I didn’t tell Tommy about my worries. But he was extremely bright, and he saw for himself his father’s condition. He too read the papers. One day after school he asked me if I thought that I too was going to come down with AIDS. Can you imagine his anguish? That’s when I am afraid we made the second big mistake about Tommy. He was scheduled to start at St. Paul’s that fall, but we kept him at the lycée in Paris. I thought—I suppose Tim did too—that it would be better for him to stay here than to throw him into that very competitive and unfamiliar environment. I was afraid it would be more than he could take.
Where is he now? asked Schmidt.
At Yale, she told him, majoring in mathematics. He did brilliantly at the lycée, passing his baccalaureate exam with an honorable mention and getting a gold medal in mathematics in the national contest. Now he’s doing just as brilliantly at Yale. Unfortunately, he had distanced himself totally from us even before he left. A wall went up. Who can blame him? Tim, my father, and I, none of us had measured how corrosive life with Tim and me would be. In his sophomore year he came back from Yale during his winter vacation to see Tim when he was dying and stayed until the end, but that was the first time he had come to Paris since he had left for New Haven. He has spent his vacations with the Verplanck grandparents, at their place in Cold Spring, their apartment in New York, or the house in Bar Harbor. My father has tried to get him to Antibes. He turned him down cold. He prefers the monster Verplancks! They ignored Tim during his illness and didn’t come to the funeral, although it was practically next door. Lew Brenner had been in touch with them, and he told me later that they rejected all suggestions that Tim was gay and had died of AIDS. So far as they’re concerned, he died of a runaway metastasizing cancer, and I refused to take care of him. The sad thing is that Tommy too has adopted the line that I refused to take care of his father. But I don’t know how I could have cared for him, even if I had still loved him. There was no room for me. Bruno and Tim decided he would live in Chantilly with a staff—all men, every one of them homosexual—assembled by Bruno. Bruno even offered to buy the house from me! The most I could do was to go to see Tim, which I did. It dragged on so horribly, Schmidtie, with stuff like lesions or small cancers on his skin, pneumonias, then cancer of the lungs that spread to the liver and the brain. In that house full of firearms, why neither Tim nor Bruno took a shotgun out of the gun closet and ended it I will never understand. The way he finally went was such a cheat. He had wanted badly to read and write during the time left to him after he retired, and he couldn’t do either. There weren’t many days when he was able to concentrate.
So Lew knew, Schmidt mused.
Yes. Nobody else at the firm. Tim asked him to tell no one.
She had been calm during that last part of her story and, it seemed to Schmidt, supernaturally lucid. Now her self-control left her. She curled up on the sofa and cried softly, like a child. Schmidt sat down beside her and stroked her hair. He didn’t know what to say to comfort her. At last she stopped sobbing and asked for the bathroom. When she returned she said, You will have to forgive me, I used your toothbrush. But I washed it carefully afterward. You don’t mind, do you?
He looked at her and wondered whether he had ever seen anyone so beautiful. Her pallor and eyes swollen from crying gave her face an aspect of tenderness and tragic nobility. Alice, he said, you will perhaps think I am raving, but I know I’m not: I’m falling in love with you, I want you to know it, and I don’t care what happens next provided I can be with you. Always. Honest Injun, he added, feeling increasingly stupid.
Oh, Schmidtie, she said, holding out her arms, you don’t really want to have me with you always. You hardly know me! But you can kiss me if you brush your teeth first. When he returned, she held her arms out again. I’m drunk, she told him, I’ve drunk all that remained of the cognac. I taste of cognac. Will you mind that?
He sank on the sofa beside her. She kissed imperiously, her tongue sweeping his, her arms strong and clinging with the force of wisteria. A sacred terror took hold of him, such as, it is said, possesses a novice at the doorstep of a temple where mysteries known only to the high priestess of the place are revealed. The gestures were ones he had accomplished and repeated countless times, but their meaning, he sensed, would be new and fraught with unknown dangers. She was ripe and irresistible, like a golden pear. By what right would he thrust into her? Thrust and ejaculate. Did this beautiful and tormented woman know what she was doing? His own part seemed ordained. With his arm around her waist, he led her into the bedroom.