David had always fought not to think about Madeleine Hartley, ever since he had hired her. The mixture of blood and cultures which made her such an asset for the bank certainly seemed to him exotic, but at first he thought it was an obvious chemistry that he could easily resist. He slightly knew Madeleine’s father, a conventional English merchant banker—successful, rapacious, clever, womanizing, well-known, well-connected. Once David had even seen Madeleine’s mother who was more difficult for him to peg; she was chic, haughty-looking, and beautiful; Madeleine’s CV told him that her mother was half-French and half-Vietnamese. David was just well enough aware of the parents to feel that he should look after Madeleine, despite the fact that she had earned her job without a lick of special pleading because she spoke French, Chinese and Japanese, and had been through Oxford and then Yale School of Management.
He told himself that Madeleine was not much more than a child, what the English liked to call a Bright Young Thing. Jeunesse dorée. He noted, as he did with most women, her physical charms, and he took pleasure in them privately but forthrightly. He imagined she had an interesting social life, and he briefly considered what it must be like to be a spoiled only child with actual talent. At the end of her first week at the bank, Madeleine went off to have supper with her father at Harry’s Bar, and David felt a twinge of envy. At the time, he couldn’t have said whether he envied Madeleine or whether he envied her father. But he knew he would have liked to be at that table. He saved himself from further pain by deciding, They’re English. The English need their comforts, their treats in the school holidays. Then he placed a call to New York where, at that time of the day, the stock market was still open and important things were still happening.
Madeleine was born on an inside track; socially, financially she could have had everything most people would want without ever lifting a finger. But she gave no indication that she wanted to stay on the inside track. In fact, she seemed to regard her privileges as a launching pad; they set her free to do as she liked, to leave the race altogether, to take chances. She had traveled a fair bit on her own, worked in Paris and Marseilles, and taught French and English in Shanghai before going to Yale. She was candid, spirited, apparently fearless. She also seemed completely at home in high heels and a tight skirt; she moved easily in her neat little suits, using them carelessly and roughly, like a school uniform. She bought herself a house in Brixton because she found it convenient and anonymous.
David couldn’t stop himself from adopting Madeleine, even though she wasn’t an orphan. She was a feather in his cap. After she’d been at the bank for just a few months, he was including her in most of his important meetings, and he liked to get her opinions. There was an air of liberty and self-confidence about her that moved things along. She was quick to get to grips with any industry, and quick to step back and see the bigger picture, the interconnections and the long-term view. She carried a lot of factual information in her head, kept it very clear, could use it well without seeming pedantic. She was also intuitive about clients. She could tell what would make them feel comfortable, and she could tell what they really wanted. It was a social skill, but she used it professionally and demurely.
Madeleine was also an unbelievably hard worker. It was more than stamina. She thrived on the difficulty and excitement of working at full stretch. Despite that trip to Harry’s Bar, David found that she often stayed in the office to run numbers through the night because she wanted to see how they would come out if she did them a different way—say from the point of view of some other bank, or some other client, or in drastically changed market conditions. Sometimes he would go into work in the morning with a new question that had occurred to him overnight, and she would already be there finding out the answer, seemingly not because she was pandering to him and some guess that he would want to know, but because she herself wanted to know.
David had been around women all his life; although he thought of himself as a connoisseur, he did not think of himself as a predator. And he had been around women investment bankers long enough to recognize some of the worrying types—the brain masquerading as a bimbo to infiltrate the boardroom, the bombshell masquerading as a brain to infiltrate the bedroom. Madeleine wasn’t masquerading as anything. Maybe her whole generation just didn’t need to do that, David thought. Maybe they are the first ones for whom sexual politics in the office could be deemed sort of normal. Or maybe that’s just how Madeleine is, he thought, just a smart, beautiful woman doing a job she loves.
He allowed himself to feel spruced up by her glamor, but he was perfectly aware of the way in which this could corrupt him. He’d seen it happen. David had a subtle, wary mind and he had intense focus on what he was doing; he was neither frivolous nor self-indulgent by nature. He made a point of taking Madeleine very seriously. Maybe too seriously; sometimes he treated her a little coldly. She coped fine with his astringency; she never revealed toward him any attitude at all except willingness to work. She was calm, dignified, and, despite the fact that he tried to pretend she was a child, very grown-up.
The two of them became easy with one another, friends of a sort. Despite his occasional brusqueness, there were jokes and sometimes a little gossip, but only as filler when they might be genuinely waiting for something to happen, a client to get off the phone, an elevator to arrive. They were both conscious of time, using it well, getting things done. And if they did gossip, it was all about work and the City, or at a stretch a play or a film. They never talked about their private lives, ever. In this predictable atmosphere of rectitude and mutual respect, trust built up. They were completely certain of one another. They were completely earnest.
After a year or so, they were working together so constantly that one fresh April morning David confidentially let it be known to his middle-aged, married secretary of eight years, Bernice, that he didn’t want any more meetings abroad with Madeleine unless there was at least one other person along from the bank. He made no reference to Elizabeth; that wasn’t his point.
‘I don’t want any other junior people to get their noses out of joint,’ he said. ‘I don’t want jealousy and I don’t want insinuation. Don’t make any arrangements that could compromise her. She’s too valuable to the bank, and she doesn’t deserve it.’
‘Does she know?’ Bernice took a kindly, cautious tone.
‘No.’ David was caught off guard; his impatience was obvious.
‘It might be a difficult adjustment.’ Bernice paused. ‘And she—well, she would have every right to feel upset. As a professional, I mean.’
Now David regretted bringing it up. Plump, blue-eyed, patient Bernice who sat in the office day after day, whether David was there or not, answering his phone, booking his flights, opening his mail, thanking his clients’ wives, Bernice had an opinion about Madeleine. And Bernice’s opinion was right on the money.
Of course Madeleine would be upset if he suddenly turned her into a double act. She knew about all his deals; she could run them by herself. What on earth would she think if he started bringing spare personnel to every meeting? Madeleine would be the first one to notice the waste of resources; she was the one who told him when they did need extra help, and she usually knew exactly who it should be. She ran the younger people in and out of all their deals with great efficiency. She’d be stunned if he started trying to manage the personnel himself, or—Oh, my God, if she thought Bernice was trying to do it! He had never actually heard anyone criticize Madeleine’s role; he got the impression she was good at sharing information with the others. She didn’t act big; her talents were obvious.
Why this sudden access of protectiveness, David wondered? I certainly can’t go and discuss it with Madeleine, either! The thought embarrassed him to the point of pain: Madeleine’s response to his advice that they should no longer travel together without a chaperone. What on earth am I doing? he asked himself. And then, Can I ask Bernice for advice? I can’t just walk away from it now.
‘Well—what do you think, Bernice? Am I just starting trouble here?’
Under her hair-sprayed cap of gold, Bernice colored ever so slightly. She adjusted her red, white and navy Hermès scarf, stroking the folds back up onto her shoulder and patting it down.
‘You might be.’
‘Am I the only one who has thought of this problem?’
Again Bernice colored. She looked down at her manicured pink fingers lying on her keyboard and repeated, ‘You might be.’
Then she looked at him in what seemed to David a rather tender, maternal way. Although Bernice was always solicitous, David hadn’t ever noticed that sort of concern on her face before.
‘Damn. Forget it, Bernice; forget I ever brought it up.’ David brushed his hands over the surface of his hair, holding them arched as if to hide under them, and turned back toward his office.
‘Yes. I think that’s for the best,’ Bernice said quietly to his back.
But David found that he himself couldn’t forget. The conversation with Bernice proved to be a turning point, although he felt there must have been subtle turning points before it which he couldn’t put his finger on. He was the one who had made the very insinuation in question, and he quickly became obsessed with a completely new, tinderbox version of his relationship with Madeleine. He couldn’t be near her without feeling a surge of excitement; he couldn’t be away from her without feeling bored and impatient. He was waiting for the whole thing to flame up and consume them both; he felt it was inevitable every time Madeleine looked him in the eye to explain how things were going with this or that client. But he dreaded the flames, tried to hold out against them, struggled to postpone their arrival.
And whenever he saw Bernice, he remembered that look on her face and thought with astonishment and alarm, She knew what I was in for. And she felt for me. How did she know about this anguish? About trying to survive—day in, day out—the onslaught of passion?
One way to survive it, and David knew this was the obvious, good and right way, was to spend more time with his family. Spring swelled to summer—the last summer, as it turned out, before the move to Virginia, the last summer of the house in Nantucket, the last summer before 9/11. Hope was three; Gordon was six. Big enough to have fun with. So David left London in July, earlier than usual, to join them for ten days of vacation, and he planned to travel back and forth as much as he could during August.
In Nantucket, he ran hard every morning, took the children to Quidnet or Dionis to swim and dig in the sand, and began teaching Gordon to sail. Some days he played tennis at the yacht club, though there wasn’t much competition around except over the weekends. Once or twice he went fishing. For all his joy in the blue days, the deep, exhausted sweat and the blessed, bleached sensation of exposure to the elements, he could find no peace. The island seemed tiny. When the night came, his blood beat darkly, and he sensed around him in the moist, salt air something about to happen: guests assembling for a party, rock music starting up in the distance, a feeling that he should be ready, that he should hurry.
At the house, sequestered in a quiet garden up a little lane on the west side of town, he insisted on keeping every window open so he could feel as nearly as possible that he was living outdoors. Fog slipped through the screens, swelled the pages of the newspaper lying on the kitchen table, curled the covers of Elizabeth’s neglected music books, sent the piano wildly out of tune. It was as if he was waiting to hear something, a plane landing, a change of heart. And he felt himself longing for a crisis, a disaster that would wrest things from his control, release him from his self-imposed discipline. The clouds of hydrangeas jostling one another on the lawn went on blooming their startling blues and pinks, creamy, fluorescent, serene.
Every day, sometimes every hour, he had to tell himself again, Give it time. Give it until tomorrow; things will get easier. The fantasies his mind threw at him continued to be so vivid, so fevered, that he sometimes wondered whether all the exercise was strengthening them and building them up. But he couldn’t get through a day without doing four or five miles on the Madaket bike path; anything less and he thought he would go crazy.
Whenever he noticed Elizabeth, he felt surprised that she was there with him. He couldn’t think of anything to talk to her about. He wanted to talk about Madeleine. And, in fact, he didn’t even want to talk. He wanted to brood. Everything else seemed trivial, a disruption. He couldn’t concentrate on where he was; he was obsessed by where he wanted to be or by the thing he continually felt he must urgently do. The real world had become phantasmagoric. He was engaged with something deep, intimate, and completely out of the question. But London was three thousand miles away, and so, for long spells of time, he let himself revel in his distraction, even though he knew he had to clear it out altogether if he didn’t want to be destroyed.
He became very physical with the children, wrestling with them in the sand, hurling them around in the salt water until they shrieked and choked on mouthfuls of it, taking them everywhere he went. He found their eagerness and their predictability reassuring. He was safe with them and he felt innocent, collected back into the habits of his own childhood summers. Still, he knew that the energy he was directing toward them was almost hysterical, and he knew they could feel the hysteria, and that it was somehow almost too much for them, day after day. It was indecorous.
Even when the weather was cloudy and windy, he dragged Gordon and Hopie to the beach with a picnic lunch so he could avoid the sensation that he was just marking time. Sitting still felt to him like some form of sin. After supper he would chase them on the lawn, racing and crashing crazily, and then walk them down to the marina where they strolled over the weathered, uneven boards, ogling the lit-up motorboats with their televisions and flower arrangements and their inmates on show. They would sit eating icecream cones with their feet dangling over one side of the pier above the drifting nibble of inky water. Night after night, the harbor was still and black, with lights bobbing and flickering in the distance all around them, halyards softly clinking, and a carnival roar from the town behind them. The light at Brant Point winked red then stopped, winked red then stopped, steadily. David found the light as reassuring as he found the children, like windshield wipers in a bad rainstorm on an unfamiliar highway, something certain, indifferent, that might get you through.
On his last night, a hot one, the sun was setting like bloodshed, and he took them to walk on the beach near the Jetties. The white sand was still warm, and they demanded to swim. So he let them wade in, partly in their clothes, partly in nothing. The water was lighter than the sky, and he could just make them out by their shadows on the dark silver waves. Suddenly he realized that he mustn’t let them get one step further away from him in the wide, sucking ocean. He called to them sharply, frightening them. Hopie turned too quickly and fell, then cried out, and all at once the three of them were like a school of sharks rushing and feeding off their own fright. In daylight, the splashing and lunging would have been a game David could control; in the dropping dark it was terrifying. By the time he hauled them both onto the beach, Gordon was shouting, enraged and insulted, and Hopie was crying. They ran over the dunes all the way back to the car because they hadn’t brought towels. David carried Hopie who clung to him with her whole bare little being, her face buried in his shoulder. In the car, he turned on the heat full blast, and the children rolled around in the pile of their sandy clothes on the back seat, laughing with relief and tiredness.
At the end of those first ten days, David didn’t go back to London. It seemed like too big a risk. He flew to New York and saw some clients there. Bernice arranged everything. When he returned to Nantucket, Elizabeth surprised him by meeting his plane at the airport.
‘Wow!’ He tried to sound pleased when she greeted him with her bony embrace.
‘The children wanted to come, too,’ she said in her desiccated whisper, ‘but I feel as though I never see you.’
‘It’s the beach, isn’t it?’ David felt self-conscious. ‘And you not liking the sun.’
‘I like it fine.’ She sounded cheerful. ‘I’ll come with you all tomorrow, okay?’
‘Okay.’ He was filled with dread. But some part of him knew that he had to make contact with Elizabeth again, however dry the prospect seemed; the desert of hours with her had to be crossed. That was why he was here, why he had avoided traveling to London. He found himself wondering how great figures of history—Louis XIV, Dickens, FDR, JFK—had negotiated the return from their mistresses to the company of their wives. There were no self-help books on coping with this particular agony. Everyone kept it secret, never acknowledged its existence. It took enormous discipline and subtle skills of dissembling and double-thinking. Perhaps there were books by French authors, he thought. But I don’t even have a mistress, except in my imagination.
‘I made a reservation at the Summer House in ‘Sconset,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I thought it might be nice to eat on the veranda there tonight. It’s so hot out, and—we used to have nice times there.’
She reached for the little black satchel that he used as a briefcase and overnight bag. ‘Why don’t I carry one?’
David let go of it slowly, absentmindedly gripping the strap of his carry-on bag. He didn’t know what to say. In fact, he felt afraid. He suddenly sensed that Elizabeth was pursuing him, that she knew something was up. Why else would she pelt him with attention? Why else the wistful reference to nice times in the past?
‘You don’t usually have two bags, do you?’ Her voice was casual.
‘I—no. No. Usually just one. But I—thought I might suddenly need to go to London and then the little one wouldn’t have been enough.’ He had kept the idea of London before him the whole time he was in New York, poised. But he had resisted it.
‘Oh. I didn’t realize.’
They walked out of the little terminal and across the parking lot in silence. David felt frantic; how could he feel so alarmed by his own wife? She had every right to care about his luggage, his personal habits, his daily needs. He shouldn’t suspect her questions; they were a form of tenderness. At the beginning of their marriage she had done his packing for him; even lately she sometimes asked him if he’d like her to have one of the maids do it.
Elizabeth had brought the jeep. She hated the jeep. Once, David had told her that the sand in the jeep was nearly as precious to him as the sand in her eyes when she woke up in the morning. Well, that was a long time ago, around the time of his first, failed proposal of marriage. And he couldn’t have counted the times since then when Elizabeth had referred to it, caustically, as ‘your precious sand’.
Still, by bringing the jeep, she got through to him. It released something deep inside him, pure sentimental nostalgia. A summer afternoon. The open, salt-corroded car. And she let her beautiful hair whip recklessly around her head as they sped along toward town. It wasn’t until they rounded the rotary that she collected the knotted strands back into her fist and combed them with her fingertips. Even then, she had a smile on her face. David looked over at her as he shuddered through the gears, his feet pumping.
‘You have a little tan, don’t you?’ He was genuinely surprised.
‘I went swimming with the children today. It was fun. Now they’re bigger, it’s not as hard to get them organized. They carry their own stuff.’
‘Thanks for picking me up, darling. That was a nice surprise.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Everything felt awkward between them. David liked it. It was a new feeling, a sign of something.
‘I get bored here if I don’t do anything at all,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Yeah, well. Can’t have that.’
And there it was again, the smile. Both of them smiling, in fact. It made David feel tired and sad, but it also made him feel hopeful.
The veranda at the Summer House was like a stage, David thought. As they walked up the path in the dark, with the ocean at their backs, it looked like a huge proscenium, two stories high, lined with white clapboard and green shutters, set with white-draped tables and flickering candles, as if for a little light comedy, summer stock.
They were seated beside the outside railing, overlooking the thickly growing garden. Their only audience was the dark.
‘I’ve always liked it here,’ Elizabeth said. ‘The southern feeling, you know?’
‘Yes.’ David could remember her saying that often before. And he looked out at the weeping foliage, which, he could also remember, made her think on a misty night of Spanish Moss. ‘It’s the impression it makes of Spanish Moss, yeah?’
Elizabeth half-smiled and looked at her plate. They had had this conversation again and again from year to year; this was the first time this summer.
‘Would you like some champagne? Or maybe a Kir Royale?’ he asked.
‘No thanks. I won’t have anything. But you go ahead.’
David felt his spirits dampen a little at this piece of self-control. He was still trying to gauge the tone of the evening. He didn’t know whether Elizabeth had anything particular in mind when she had planned the dinner, or whether she was ticking off a list of ritual summer activities.
‘Are you sure you don’t want anything? Fizzy water, maybe?’ Why did he find it hard to feel at ease with the idea that Elizabeth preferred not to have a drink? Why did it always seem to him as if she were, in fact, denying herself the drink? And by implication, that she frowned on his having a drink? For years, David realized, this had affected him. In some subtle, tireless message, he felt, she was telling him that he was an uncontrolled, rutting pig. But she had never said anything at all like this out loud. So whose message was it? David wondered. Have I invented for her this atmosphere of appetites repressed?
But she didn’t relent when she ordered her meal. ‘I’ll just have a little piece of fish,’ she told the waiter. She said it in a soft, uncomplaining tone which seemed intended to carry the additional message, Don’t go to any trouble over me. I can make do with whatever nobody else wants.
In fact, just a little piece of fish wasn’t on the menu. And in the end there had to be two trips backwards and forwards to the kitchen to find out what kind of plain, white fish was available that was not already coated in flour or egg and could be grilled without butter or oil. Even then, when the fish arrived, Elizabeth asked David to send it back so that the potatoes could be taken off the plate.
‘They’re swimming in butter,’ she confided to him, as if he, too, would feel affronted. ‘I just want some plain boiled ones.’
She leaned toward him as she said this, with a sweet, open look on her face, shrugging her shoulders, knowing he would understand. It occurred to David that Elizabeth had complete faith in him; she trusted him to share her view, and to see instantly that a piece of plain grilled sole should not be served on the same plate as an overbuttered potato.
Maybe I’ve spoiled her, he thought to himself. Maybe I’ve done too much to make life easy for her. She’s not used to anything at all anymore, except her silken world. Ease does not necessarily bring happiness. Maybe I should have challenged her more all along the way.
He felt a twinge of regret, and he looked at her as he might have looked at Hopie; he felt responsible. She seemed like a helpless, unsuspecting child. Then on top of the twinge came a wave of confusion and remorse. It was so unfamiliar to David, the sense that he didn’t know what was happening with his life, that he had lost control even of his own thoughts. His feelings for Madeleine were so strong that he sometimes imagined that Madeleine could save him from all that had gone wrong, that she could pluck him out of the mess of his life if only he could get to her. But at other times he felt that Madeleine herself was exactly what had gone wrong, and that he had to expunge her altogether from his mind and from his heart.
Elizabeth was his fate; she was his wife, the one he had chosen. And what had Elizabeth become? Who was she? David forced himself to look at her, to think about her, to try to feel something about her. All he felt was guilt at his lack of ability to focus. What would I say to her now, for instance, if she were a client’s wife? What would I say if she were Hopie? he wondered.
‘I’m sorry you’ve been bored,’ was what he came out with, trying at the same time to think of some treat he could offer her which would make up for everything.
‘It’s not that bad, David. I like having time to myself.’
Of course, she isn’t Hopie, David saw. Hopie would never say anything like that.
‘Besides, there’s plenty going on with the foundation,’ Elizabeth went on, ‘and, in fact, I could be doing a lot more with the foundation if I wanted to. Not on the telephone, though—I mean not from here on Nantucket. And I can’t leave the children.’
David held his forkful of seared tuna suspended in midair for a second, looking at her.
‘You’re enjoying that, are you? Giving away money?’ He laughed just a little, his eyes almost dancing. Then he put the tuna in his mouth and chewed it. It tasted good to him, satisfying and tender; the pungent wasabi exploded up his nose, making his brow moisten with the heat. ‘Are you sure you won’t have some wine? It’ll be nice with that fish.’ He nodded toward her sole.
‘Okay. Maybe just a little.’ She sounded unconvinced.
David looked around in vain for their bottle, then picked up his glass and held it out to Elizabeth. ‘Have mine. The waiter’ll pour me another in a minute.’
She accepted the glass, and their fingers touched as she took hold of it. She sipped it.
‘Why don’t we share it?’ she said, almost as if she was flirting with him. Then she took another sip and eased the glass down onto the tablecloth between their plates. ‘It’s nice wine, actually.’
‘Should be,’ David said, and he continued to watch her as she peered up at him through her brown eyelashes, her ice-blue eyes wry and playful.
‘You think you’re married to a dried-up old stick, don’t you?’ she suddenly burst out.
David sat up with a grunt of surprise. Then he smiled and laughed slightly.
‘That’s not a dried-up stick type of question,’ he said, avoiding a real reply.
‘I wish you had more time to spend on things we could both take an interest in.’ She said this with a sigh, wheedling just a little, daring him to take her on.
‘What? Like the foundation?’ David asked.
‘Wouldn’t you like to work together? Think what we could accomplish. And we’d have fun.’ She was really drawling now and twinkling at him intensely.
‘I don’t know if it’s realistic, Elizabeth. I mean—I’m glad the foundation’s there, and I’m really glad you’re enjoying it. But aren’t you already doing it for us both, really? That’s how I think of it—you’re my charitable arm.’ He leaned across his empty plate, reached out and patted her bare arm, then gave it a gentle squeeze. ‘Aren’t you?’
Elizabeth pouted. ‘It might be more fun if the right hand knew what the left hand was doing.’
‘Don’t be silly! I know exactly what you’re doing. I’m proud of you. And I trust you. So tell me more. Tell me what you’re so excited about.’
‘Well—okay.’ She looked shy as she began, ‘I like sponsoring the young musicians, just for instance, because music is something I know about. I’m not saying what’s important; I’m just saying what I like and what makes me feel useful. I’ve been thinking we could do more of that. And we might invest in some instruments we could lend them—rare ones, old ones, where it’s appropriate. Because, if they’re really so good, these kids, they ought to be playing new Steinways or old Stradivarius violins or whatever. Another thing I’d like to do is commission some original music for them. I’ve been thinking about composers. And there are some young composers out there, too, that we could be helping. And then maybe, from time to time, they could play together with one another, in some sort of festival program—’
‘Sounds good. What’s it going to cost me?’
‘I’m not done yet!’
They both laughed.
‘So what else?’
‘Oh, David, if I could get you buttered up just right, you’d put in a lot more money. We’ve got great advisors working with us. We could do you proud. But maybe you don’t want to have to listen to all this. Maybe it’s boring for you.’
‘It’s not boring. I’m listening. What else?’
But then just as she started to speak, he held up his hand right in front of her face and said, ‘You want dessert?’
‘No,’ she said apologetically. ‘I really don’t want dessert.’
To David, her tone of voice sounded yielding, nearly affectionate, and it made him feel that Elizabeth knew everything that was wrong between them and everything that could be right. She bowed her head and dropped her eyes to the tablecloth. Clearly she understands, he thought guardedly, how it drags on my spirits when she doesn’t share my appetites or when she doesn’t indulge them.
Just then David couldn’t recall whether he had ever told Elizabeth exactly how her lack of appetite made him feel, but her intuition was sharp and profound, he thought, and he had always sensed that telling her was beside the point. When she wanted to notice something about him, she noticed more than most people ever could. In fact, after nine years of marriage, they shared a lot of understanding about one another which was never articulated, but which, if they tried, they might be able to use to make one another happy. He wanted to get into harmony with Elizabeth; he yearned toward a time when there had been a harmony. Hadn’t there once been a harmony? he wondered. There must have been.
Now she was starting to look pensive, slightly wistful, as their waiter hurried across the veranda. It didn’t occur to David that she minded the fact that he wasn’t listening to her or even giving her a chance to speak.
‘I’ll have the chocolate thing,’ David said to the waiter. Then, solicitously, ‘Maybe you could talk my wife into something light.’
Elizabeth looked embarrassed. ‘I’ll have a canarino,’ she said delicately. ‘You know what that is? Peel of lemon, slightly crushed, in boiling water?’
‘Do you want sugar with that?’ the waiter asked.
‘Good lord, no,’ said Elizabeth very quietly. ‘No thank you.’ Then she turned away and stared sadly out over the railing into the dark garden.
It stirred something in David, canarino. It was Elizabeth’s drink; it seemed to sum her up. A piquant sluicing of warm liquid. Nothing at all. Or at least most people couldn’t see what it was, their waiter for instance. And yet, David thought, for Elizabeth it was acquiescence, a sigh. Stay like this. This is perfect. This is enough. That’s what she meant by ordering it. It was unfair to think of it as a denial, David thought; he knew and understood this profoundly.
But David could never stay still with anything. He always needed to move on to something new, something more. What could he do for Elizabeth? What could he give her?
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said energetically, ‘I’m going to resign from the board of the foundation, and let you run it. How’s that? You be the chairman of the board. You pick your musicians and buy your instruments and do what you like. I’ll back you.’
Elizabeth was silent.
‘I think you need the challenge. You’ll love it.’
‘Well, that’s not exactly a project we’d be doing together, David.’ She seemed taken aback, so that David suspected he had said the wrong thing. Maybe there was something else that Elizabeth wanted from him. What could it be?
‘Well, we’ve got the kids; we’re doing that together,’ he said tentatively.
She blinked and opened her eyes wide. ‘Together?’ she asked quietly.
A moment passed in silence.
And then suddenly she dug in. Whatever it was she might have wanted, some unrealistic idea of working together, she decided to accept what he was offering. ‘Okay,’ she said in a businesslike voice, and now moving fast, ‘lots of people give money to charity. We’ve talked about this before, David. There’s endless need. But you can’t make a mark unless you choose something specific and focus on it—even if it’s not something obvious, the way cancer research and orphans are obvious.’
He interrupted her argument; they both knew that they already agreed about this. ‘Elizabeth, look. I’d like you to keep giving money to all the places I went to school. Apart from that you can make the decisions. If you don’t want to go on contributing to the things we’ve chosen in the past, then I don’t want to either. I really don’t. I’d like to see where your—your sensibility, your aesthetic, your training can take you. Let’s find out. Let’s really cut you loose.’
He felt her searching his face with her eyes, puzzled at first, and then looking through him in a way that created a slight pressure in his chest, a missed heartbeat of anxiety. What did she see, if she didn’t see him? Now all at once, she broke out in a smile. At last.
‘I’m going to need a lot of your money.’ The smile was the warmest one David had seen in a long time—really engaging, sparkling. ‘I’ve got big ideas, you know—for this festival. I’m thinking of a place to have it, too—one day. Some place historical. There are some old family houses down south that are just rotting away, board by board. Important places, neglected—’
David smiled indulgently. ‘Maybe you should take it year by year, darling. Just focus on a handful of things, and then build on them.’ He stopped himself; he realized he sounded condescending. ‘Anyway, there’s plenty of money. And I can set you up with more next year. I’ll give you everything you don’t spend on housekeeping. Everything. I promise.’
When they got up to go, David stood behind Elizabeth and helped her into her little white silk coat. He rested his hands on her shoulders for a minute, pressing her delicate bones in his brown, rope-chafed fingers. She seemed more like a breakable object to him than like a companion; something he had acquired with great effort, at great expense, unmatched, unmatchable. He felt as though he had been carrying this breakable object so carefully and for so long that he had forgotten just how hard it was to carry it, and how attentive he needed to be. He had grown used to Elizabeth, and yet she continued to be a difficult, demanding burden. I can still carry her, he thought, I know how, if I really want to do it.
She was, without question, extremely beautiful, with a thin, swanlike, white-feathered perfection. And as they crossed the veranda to make their exit, people turned to look at her, women as well as men. The women perhaps because they noticed her coat, perfectly cut, spotless; it was Paris at the beach, absurdly out of place but irresistibly elegant. And David knew that Elizabeth enjoyed the effect she created; why else dress like that? She had always enjoyed it. She stood up straight, walked with a gracious, almost imperceptible swagger, tossed him a smile and a throaty, vaguely sexy thankyou just before they stepped out of earshot of the other diners off the edge of the veranda into the dark.
Elizabeth was perhaps at her best, at her most available, when she was on show. David could remember that some of their warmest, most connected moments together had resulted from concerts and runway shows and parties all those long years ago in New York. Public events used to excite Elizabeth. They drew her out, so that some inner being came to light, the true life in her.
Would it be possible now, to break through to this peerless creature? To find in her some pocket of warmth, of vitality? All the way home, on the long straight road from ‘Sconset, David thought he could remember what it had felt like once, before the children were born, to be in love with Elizabeth, to desire her, and to make love to her. He tried to concentrate on the feeling. He tried to recall what had once been an insistent urge to undo her poise, her self-control, to undress her, body and soul, to make her place herself in his hands, and to push her over the edge. It was hard work recalling it, and he might have laughed at himself trying to fan a flame that wouldn’t build, except for the fact that he felt it was so important. He wanted to be in love with his wife, to feel passion for her; this was what he believed in. And he felt an incipient panic at the bleak truth, that he was not in love with her, that he could not feel the right, the appropriate, feelings. And worse, that he was no longer sure that he had ever felt them
His thoughts drifted to Madeleine just the way the car seemed to want to drift off the straight, seven-mile stretch of highway lying between him and town. He imagined how easily and smoothly the car would roll over the white line edging the asphalt, and how pellmell, how catastrophic, how bloody the impact would be when the car hit the scrubby pine trees hidden in the fog just beyond.
But in the dark, David thought, it might as well be Madeleine in the seat next to him. And he had had just enough to drink that he allowed himself to slide into a blind, corrupting daze in which he fantasized that he was with the woman he wanted to be with, and that he was going to make love to her as soon as he got her home. And that she wanted him to.
One thing led to another. David knew that Elizabeth was relatively happy tonight. They had had their most genuine conversation of the summer so far. There had been a real communication between them, and she was, in some sense, gratified. She had told him about her project; he had agreed to fund it. This was an interaction which had been performed between them with success many times over the years. She had always been very good at spending his money, and it had always given both of them pleasure. So like a sophomore on a first serious date, having shelled out his cash, he tried to kiss her in the front hall to see whether she would invite him upstairs for coffee.
Elizabeth kissed him back, but only in a tasting sort of way, as if the phone were ringing or one of the children were calling her and she had to pull free and deal with it.
Still, it was a kiss. David couldn’t even recall the last time they had really kissed. Sex—well, that had been off the agenda for a long time, although not in any official way. There had been only a few occasions since Hopie’s birth. Somehow, for much of the last four years, it had continuously seemed as though Elizabeth was recovering from the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth and the exhaustion of being a new mother. From month to month, she silently communicated to David that she was not yet ready for sex. They had never discussed it; but they both knew.
There were a thousand little ways that she signaled to him her chaste, embattled state. She would turn off all the lights and go to bed before he got home from the office, or nap in the afternoon and then stay up late reading downstairs so that he fell asleep without her. She would retire into her bathroom to change her clothes, and she kept the door shut anyway if she was having a bath, so that he never saw her naked, or indeed, never saw her less than perfectly groomed. She managed not to travel anywhere with him alone; a weekend away in Venice was unfair to the children when they saw him so little, she said righteously, and besides, she was never really comfortable in a strange place like a hotel. If they did find themselves alone in bed, she would introduce some topic they needed to talk about urgently, a purchase of furniture for the house, vacation plans, the children’s schools. Or sometimes she would suddenly pick up the telephone and make a late-night call to the States, where everyone was still awake and the stores were all open. Otherwise, she was tired: bone-tired, overtired, exhausted, worn out, upset, unsettled, and maybe even coming down with something. She needed as much rest as possible. David had put off thinking about sex, put off bringing it up as a subject of conversation, and even tried to put off wanting it.
Now he wondered if they hadn’t reached some sort of crisis. Maybe sex was all that was really wrong in their marriage. Maybe sex was the key. However reluctant she might seem, however reluctant she might feel, maybe Elizabeth needed him to insist.
Upstairs, when she disappeared into the bathroom, David waited patiently in their bedroom. In London, he had his own bathroom; in this house, they shared. He sat on the folded patchwork quilt at the foot of the bed, and listened for a long time to the taps running in the sink, maybe for ten minutes, maybe longer. The old pipes screamed and shuddered when Elizabeth adjusted the hot water.
The night purred at the open windows, and once or twice a puff of air batted the plain white blinds against the peeling window frames and made the white net curtains belly like a filling sail. He could hear voices in the distance and laughter as people walked the late summer streets. He expected to hear the toilet flush, but it never did. At last he went to the third floor to the children’s bathroom, used their toilet and brushed his teeth with, he thought, Gordon’s toothbrush.
When he came back down, Elizabeth was in bed and the lights were off. He swallowed a curse. It was humiliating and enraging that she could reduce him to this, a grown man, forty-six years old, married for nearly a decade, uselessly scheming to get his own wife to have sex with him, running up—and downstairs in the dark, sweating bullets, brushing his teeth with a Spiderman toothbrush and bubble-gum-flavored toothpaste so he could be ready, lying in wait, at just the right moment.
David knew that if he remarked on his hopes and her dashing them, Elizabeth would disdain his forthrightness. How could he be so unrefined, she might say, so lacking in subtlety? Women don’t like that; it isn’t romantic; you make it sound like an itch that wants scratching. It’s not something you can just talk about, she would say, as she avoided speaking the actual word, sex. It’s mysterious.
God, he thought, stripping off his khakis and stomping them into the rag rug beside the bed, she could be so tricky.
Carefully, he got into bed next to her. He tried not to shake the mattress, not to make a cold breeze by lifting the covers too high, as he settled himself beside her. When at last he was lying down on his side with his head safely resting on the pillow, he put one hand on her chiffon hip; she had her back to him. Elizabeth didn’t move. She can’t be asleep, David thought, and she’s too dignified to try to fake being asleep.
He stroked her hip gently and inched closer to her across the mattress. Still, she didn’t move. The suspense was palpable; for a moment, David was afraid that he might burst out laughing. Would she laugh, too? he wondered. Maybe not. Mechanically, he slid his hand around onto her belly and spread his fingers over its flatness. He was tentative, detached, alert to her every breath.
She made no sign of enthusiasm, but she also made no sign of resistance, and David began to feel a pulse in his blood and a heat in his groin. He moved his hand to her breasts, pendulous, softly drooping toward the inside of her arm which was curled underneath her. She fidgeted now, restless with his exploring, but she let him. For a few moments, he gently fondled her breasts. Maybe he could hear her breathing, he thought. Maybe she liked it.
He wanted to touch her more intimately, more probingly, he wanted to move her somehow so that she would express some involvement with him, so that she would reveal a need—desire, craving, greed—anything at all. She had always been for David the most remote, the most inaccessible of women, and he had always continued to pursue her because he was never sure that he had caught her, even after they were married, even after they had children. There was always something that Elizabeth held back, some distance between them, some place inside herself that she retreated to and where she hid. He had never reduced her to ashes, yet even now he still felt that maybe he could.
He remembered her sparkle at supper, when he promised her the money that she wanted for the foundation. Was that all he could get from Elizabeth now? Was that the only thing that thrilled her? He wanted her to sparkle for him, for just him. And David thought, There must be more, there must be sexual feeling inside her still, the possibility of physical joy. He reached for her nightgown, sliding it up along her legs as far as he could until it caught on something and wouldn’t come clear of her thighs. She didn’t help him. Still, he nestled his hips against her small soft buttocks, feeling himself grow hard against her, feeling the flimsy chiffon dry and crinkled along her flesh. He closed his eyes, giving in to the sensation of it, the yearning for more, abandoning his conscious stratagems.
And then, suddenly, there was Madeleine, in the dark, like a hot invitation; he didn’t try to pull his mind away from her. It was as if he saw Madeleine’s body in parts, the parts he knew and the parts he didn’t know, and he began to lose himself in the curving splendor of her, the ripeness and the freshness he imagined beneath her clothes, her dark skin, a broad nipple he’d once seen harden through a thin shirt.
Maybe he went a bit crazy. Blindly, he seized Elizabeth by her hips and rolled her over toward him, kneeling up over her, trying to wedge himself between her legs. But his own legs were tangled in the filmy chiffon of her nightgown. He struggled to get free of the fabric, and she struggled, too. It was a few seconds before he realized that she was struggling to get free of him. And by then, he felt that he was beyond letting her get free. He felt that he had had enough of her coyness, her resistance; she needed this as much as he did.
The sheets were twisted around them, binding them down, binding them together. Elizabeth was fighting him, but it was easy to ignore her. Her arms and legs flailing on the bed were frail little branches; he could pin both her arms with one hand, he could hold her legs between his thighs. His breath was coming hard. He reached between her legs with his free hand, trying to force her legs apart, pushing his knee between them, rummaging for the place on her where he knew she liked to be touched and needed to be touched.
But as he moved his legs, and her legs became free, she began kicking and rolling her hips about. And he couldn’t find the place, couldn’t reach it, and he felt his nail rake her flesh, somewhere tender, slippery, private, gouging it by mistake, so that she now cried out with an uncanny savage cry of pain and unhappiness.
Then she shouted at him. ‘I don’t want this! I don’t want to do this, David! Stop it. What are you doing? You can’t do this to me! You can’t! Just take it somewhere else!’
Her outcry shocked him to the core. Elizabeth, who never raised her voice above a whisper, was screaming her head off, hoarse with rage and fear.
And now, suddenly, everything that was happening shocked him. He felt horrified and bewildered by himself, sprang up from the bed, a madman recovering his senses, drenched with shame.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said lamely, still not really understanding what had just happened between them. And although he felt sorry, he also felt angry. He couldn’t help feeling that somehow Elizabeth had driven him to this, and yet he knew without reflection that being driven to it was not an excuse for using his superior strength to try to make his wife submit to him.
He wanted to slink away, to get out in the night and let his head explode in the open air. He didn’t want to face her.
But she turned on the light and caught him in a graceless scrounge for his trousers. For a moment they just stared at each other, she stunned, her pupils wide and trembling in the narrow rim of light-blue iris, her cheeks ragged with tears; he like a beaten dog, backing away, his face a pool of darkness, chaos, unspent passions. Neither one of them spoke.
Then David noticed that Elizabeth was bleeding onto the sheets. The crimson splotch drew his eye and when he looked down, she looked down, too.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. And she bent closer. Then she pulled her nightgown around her. ‘What have you done to me?’ she hissed at him.
Again he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then, more practically, ‘Does it hurt?’
Elizabeth didn’t answer. She slid from the bed, a little awkwardly, keeping her knees close together as if that would stem the bleeding, and started to cross to the bathroom door.
‘Do you want me to look at it?’ David said with real sympathy.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she replied, and slammed the bathroom door behind her.
Well, what else would she say? he thought to himself. Why would she trust him to help her now? He collapsed on the foot of the bed and waited. The patchwork quilt had fallen on the floor; he hunched over it, staring at the bright squares, hating himself, hating his wife, trying to decide whether this was a point of no return. He still wanted to get out into the night, but if she needed to see a doctor, he would have to take her. That visit will be embarrassing, he thought.
Suddenly, he pricked up his ears for the children. He looked toward the bedroom door, wondering if he should go and check on them. Norma must have heard Elizabeth screaming, he thought. What on earth had she made of it? And the neighbors, too, probably half the town.
He heard the shower start in the bathroom and the racket of the pipes. She must be okay, he decided, if she’s taking a shower.
He stood up and buttoned his trousers. Where’s my shirt? he wondered. Then right away he pictured it upstairs, in the children’s bathroom, hanging over the old metal towel rail. Back he crept to the third floor. The light was on now in the hallway and the children’s bedroom door was slightly open.
Norma’s been checking things out, thought David.
He looked around the door at the slight forms in the narrow beds. The pale blue, satin-trimmed blanket covers were smooth, barely disturbed apart from the turtle-like lumps near the fold of crisp white sheet at the pillows. He could see the round of Hope’s cheek, her open mouth like a bird’s, waiting, as she breathed with abandon. Gordon turned his face away from the light as the door creaked wider, then settled again with only the back of his head showing; it glinted like so many curled threads of gold.
To them, David thought, this is a family home; something that authentically exists day in and day out. He whisked his shirt from the towel rail and buttoned it as he descended the stairs to walk out, barefoot and unexpectedly trembling with cold, into the humming, mist-shrouded town.