Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.
—HELEN ROWLAND
THERESA
Manhattan, later that night
YOU KNOW, if it weren’t for Man o’ War, the Boy and I might never have found each other again. Imagine that: a racehorse decides your fate.
I think it must have been about a week after our unsuccessful encounter at the van der Wahls’ swimming pool, the one that nearly reduced me to tears. Naturally I put the whole episode behind me and plunged into a relentless week of—well, of whatever it is I did, before the Boy and I became lovers. I visited friends, I read books, I swam in the ocean, I went to every damned cocktail party between West Hampton and Montauk Point. I believe I competed in a horse show—if memory serves—on my favorite mare, Tiptoe. We won second place over the jumps. The ribbon’s hanging in the stable somewhere.
Anyway, we got to talking afterward, me and the horsier set, and the subject of Man o’ War came up. Had anyone seen him race yet? It turned out nobody had. We consulted the evening edition and discovered, lo and behold, that the champion was due to start in the Dwyer Stakes at Aqueduct the next day. Or rather—since dawn was nearly breaking—today.
So we went home to our respective houses and slept and changed clothes, and then we drove west in Ned van der Wahl’s Buick all the way to Queens, arriving just in time for the third race on the day’s card. The Dwyer was the fourth.
The place was jam-packed, as you might imagine. I later heard that forty thousand souls occupied the stands that day. The clubhouse was already full, so we proceeded through the sweaty and unfamiliar grandstand instead, past the long lines of common folk at the betting windows until we hit the fresher air—I speak in relative terms—on the other side. The entrants for the third race were just then emerging from the paddock to parade onto the track, and the bugle called crisply, making my blood stir. As the last notes floated over the heat, someone said, “Hello, isn’t it that kid staying with the van der Wahls?”
And it was.
The Boy stood not twenty yards away, leaning his elbows on the rail by the finish pole, visible in flashes as the crowd shifted between us. He wore a light, wrinkled suit and a boater of pale straw low on his forehead against the burning July sun. A folded Racing Form dangled from his left hand, and a cigarette from the right, and he had fixed a ferocious concentration on the animals now jogging down the track.
We called him over, and he straightened and stared at us in perfect astonishment. Even twenty yards away, I noticed the paleness of his eyes against his tanned face. He tucked the Racing Form under his arm and forced his way to where we stood, adjoining the winner’s circle, and my blood, already awakened by the call of the bugle, just about boiled in my veins.
He kept away from me at first. He told me later that he was afraid to come close, because he thought the others would notice something. Because I was, after all, Mrs. Sylvester Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, and he was nothing but a Boy just back from France.
But Nature will have her way, I’m afraid, and by the time the horses had assembled behind the long elastic webbing that marked the starting line, we stood somehow next to each other by the rail, a few yards short of the finish pole, while our friends talked and laughed nearby, not the least bit interested in the race about to begin. Ned van der Wahl’s patrician voice floated out confidently among the broad Brooklyn vowels turning the air blue around us. The Boy had put out his cigarette, and the Racing Form now occupied both hands, though he was really looking at the horses. His cheeks were pink. I thought of his abrupt departure when I saw him last, and I wondered if perhaps I’d misread the reason.
“Do you have a favorite in this race, Mr. Rofrano?” I asked.
“I put ten dollars down on Number Four to win.”
“It sounds as if you’re a regular.”
He fiddled with the Racing Form. “My dad used to take me to the track on weekends, when I was a kid. I saw Colin win the Belmont in the middle of a rainstorm. That hooked me.”
Here on the rail, you could actually hear the faint shouts of the jockeys and the starters, as the horses milled around behind the webbing. It looked like Bedlam. I didn’t know how they were going to make a race of it. A minute passed, and another, and the Boy and I didn’t say anything, just stood there side by side along the rail, pretending absorption in the spectacle up the track while the sun beat down on the brims of our hats and the crowd hooted and spat. And then, for a strange and pregnant instant, all went still.
The barrier went up.
We kept quiet as the contest took shape. It was a mile, a stakes race for two-year-olds, and it didn’t take long, a minute and a half, but it seemed longer. It seemed epic, horses taking the lead and falling back, someone else surging up. As the pack shifted its way down the backstretch, I felt the gradual increase in the Boy’s state of tension, nerve by nerve. They rounded the final turn. The rumble of hooves drew nearer and larger, and as the flashes of colored silk clarified in the haze, my own fingers tightened unconsciously into fists, and the Boy’s body, arranged by my side, coiled into a live wire. The gamblers roared behind us. The horses thundered by in a fleshy cloud.
I turned to the Boy, a little breathless. “Did he win?”
“Yes, Mrs. Marshall.” He smiled. His cheeks were still pink, but this blush had a different fundamental quality to the one before it. “Yes, he did. Shall we go collect my winnings?”
Apparently there’s a euphoria associated with winning a bet on a horse race, a kind of invincible glee. I think that’s why the Boy made me this reckless offer, at this particular minute, when he had tried so hard and so sternly to stay away before. He wasn’t stern now, nor even diffident; he couldn’t be stern or diffident when he had just won a ten-dollar bet on a horse at eleven-to-one odds, and I got all caught up in the smoke of his elation and smiled back.
“That sounds divine,” I said.
We slipped invisibly past our friends and pried our way through the grumbling grandstand crowd to the betting windows, where the Boy collected his hundred and ten dollars and secured them with a plain silver clip in the inside pocket of his jacket. He looked at his watch. “They should be getting ready in the paddock now, Mrs. Marshall. Do you want to take a look at him?”
“At whom?”
“Why, Man o’ War.”
I had forgotten all about the big red racehorse. Can you believe it? I followed the Boy through the grandstand gates to the paddock, which was thick and crowded and buzzing. I held my hat and craned my neck, trying to see above all the heads before me, but it was no use, and I shouted in the Boy’s nearby ear that we should go back to the track and wait for the great horse there.
“Now, Mrs. Marshall, that’s no way to get things done,” he said. “Come with me.”
He dragged my arm around his elbow and proceeded to slice his way through that crowd, person by person, earning us any number of angry looks and spiteful ejaculations, but I didn’t care. The Boy’s arm was young and strong beneath my hand, like a green oak, and euphoria still drenched us. By the time he landed against the paddock rail, dragging me with him—or rather against him, because there really wasn’t room—we were both laughing. And I don’t think I’d laughed (a real laugh, I mean, not those brittle false laughs drawn out of you by cocktails and by the merciless demands of the social contract) in two whole years.
The Boy extracted his arm from between our compressed bodies and pointed his right index finger at the open stalls before us. “Look, there he is.”
There he is. I don’t know if there’s been a more magnificent horse, before or since. If there has, I haven’t seen him. That beautiful ruddy animal could make you forget anything, could make you forget the war and the communists and the Boy wedged against you. On this hot July day of his fourth year, nineteen hundred and twenty by the Christian calendar, he was a giant. He held his head at an improbably high angle, king over us all, and his chestnut coat was built of fire. He didn’t want to be saddled, but saddled he must be, and they got the leather on him, I don’t know how. He settled down a bit then, just kicking out a hoof now and again, to remind everyone not to get too friendly. It didn’t even occur to me to look at the other horse.
“Isn’t he a beauty?” said the Boy, very soft, next to my ear.
He stood right up against my back, pressed there by the crowd around us, so that we couldn’t help the indecent proximity, could we? I felt all shameful and electric, like a radio crackling with static. My buttocks fit neatly into his thighs. I could smell his perspiration.
“He’s magnificent,” I agreed.
The jockeys went up; the horses headed out to the track. There were just two of them, because Man o’ War, four races into his three-year-old season, had already scared away everybody else and won each contest under what the Racing Form called a “stout pull,” or “eased up,” or some other form of sportsmanlike restraint. (How they managed to restrain the colt at all, I couldn’t imagine; as he charged furiously into the tunnel, he reminded me of a locomotive.) Today, his lone challenger—so the Boy informed me, as he released me from my intimate prison—was a talented chestnut colt named John P. Grier.
“The poor sacrificial lamb,” I said, as we pushed our way back under the grandstand toward the track.
“Well, he’s got a fighting chance. He’s only carrying a hundred and eight pounds, and Red’s carrying a hundred and twenty-six.”
“And that makes such a terrible difference?”
“As a rule of thumb, Mrs. Marshall, the track handicappers generally figure a pound of extra weight equals about a length lost in speed, so I guess you could say that Red’s giving Grier a head start of eighteen lengths. He’s a Whitney colt,” the Boy added, as if that made a difference.
“Oh, does Harry own him?”
“Bred him, too. By Whisk Broom, out of a Disguise mare. Care to place a bet?”
I let him put down ten dollars on Man o’ War for me, and he put down the rest of his winnings on John P. Grier, just to give the little colt a break. By the time we fought our way back out to the track, the horses had reached the starting line on the other side of the infield. Or so we presumed; we couldn’t see a thing, and we hadn’t a hope of reaching our earlier position on the rail, let alone finding our friends. The crowd was so densely packed, you couldn’t move an inch, except the Boy somehow did: shoving one person aside and then another, selfishly winning us closer to the action.
A roar swept the throng: they’re off.
“But I can’t see!” I shouted, and the Boy actually elbowed a man off on a nearby bench.
“Say!” the man said angrily, lifting a fist.
“Make way for the lady,” said the Boy. The man took one look at the two of us—vigorous Boy, lady of a certain age—and turned away, smashing his hat down on his head until his crown nearly burst through the straw.
The Boy put his hands around my waist and hoisted me up.
Well, I can tell you, that unexpected and gallant action nearly took my breath. I gripped the Boy’s steadying fingers with one hand and shaded my eyes with the other—the sun was full on my face—and strained to see across the infield to the galloping horses beyond.
“What’s the story?” the Boy shouted.
“I can’t tell! I don’t see the other horse. It’s just Red, I think—no, wait!” I rose on my toes, swaying wildly, clutching the Boy’s fingers. “It’s the two of them! They’re running together! They’re coming into the turn, they’re side by side! My God!”
The roar around me was like a wall, like I could have flung out my arms and supported myself by sound alone. Strange that so many lone voices could amalgamate into a uniform frantic din. I realized that my own shout was among them, that I’d given up on sentences and begun screaming a primitive Go! Go! into the barrage, and I didn’t even know which colt I was urging on. Both of them, maybe: the great red horse and Harry Whitney’s scrappy challenger, barreling around the turn toward the long, smoky homestretch, flinging themselves recklessly forward and forward, as closely matched as if they were pulling a single carriage.
They say it was one of the greatest races ever, that Dwyer Stakes run in the first year of the new decade after the war. I haven’t been to many horse races, so I can’t really say one way or another. All I remember is that I came back to life in those last thirty seconds or so: that my cold little heart burst free from its ribs and climbed all the way up my throat to the roof of my mouth, as John P. Grier hung gamely on, taking perhaps two strides for every one of Red’s, and they bobbed closer and closer and no one was winning, neither colt had beaten the other, and they couldn’t possibly keep this up. They would kill themselves. They would kill me.
On and on, back and forth, my heart throttling my breath, and just as they flashed past the eighth pole (or so I understood later, for I didn’t notice that pole at the time) Grier stuck his head out in front.
You wouldn’t have thought it possible for that crowd to yell any louder, but it did. We screamed and screamed. The little colt’s nose poked out bravely from behind Man o’ War’s big red body, just about the only thing you could see of him—just that game, game head, taking the lead from the immortal champion.
In the next instant, Red’s rider reached back with his whip and struck Man o’ War’s side.
He hadn’t been touched with a whip all season, I believe: not since a single dramatic race the year before, the only race he’d ever lost, and that one because he was boxed in throughout. He’d never been challenged; he’d won all his races handily, rated by his jockey so he wouldn’t win by too many lengths and humiliate the Whitneys and Belmonts and Astors who sent their horses against him. No one had ever looked Man o’ War in the eye, and now Grier looked him in the eye, Grier pushed his head out in front, and Red’s jockey went to the whip.
A single blow, and Man o’ War shot forward. In a few strides, he was half a length in front; the jockey hit him again, and Grier was beat. I don’t think I’d ever screamed like that. I jumped up and down on the bench, yanking on the Boy’s firm hand. Six seconds later, Man o’ War streaked past the finish pole, a length and a half in front of gallant John P. Grier, setting a whole new American record for the mile and an eighth, and they say Grier was never the same. His heart broke right down the middle that afternoon, and while he was still a good colt, maybe even the second-best of his generation, he was never again a great one.
Man o’ War went on to smash several more records that year, and won every race.
Afterward, we couldn’t find the others, and the Boy offered to drive me back to Southampton in his secondhand Model T, though he expected it might be dark by the time we reached our destination, Mrs. Marshall.
I said yes.
AS SOMEBODY MENTIONED EARLIER, THE Boy was staying with the van der Wahls that summer, the summer he got back from France, right before he took the job selling bonds at Sterling Bates. Ned van der Wahl had once worked with the Boy’s father at Morgan bank, I believe, and though the Boy wasn’t quite of the same social caliber as the van der Wahls—too new, too dark—old Ned was always a gentleman, always the kind of man who’d offer to put up an old colleague’s war hero son in his guesthouse for the summer, without regard for the vowel at the end of his surname.
So the Boy has a few connections in our little world, here and there, and I’m always a little anxious that we might bump into each other at some gathering or another, the way we did at the van der Wahls’ swimming pool, the way we bumped excruciatingly throughout the rest of that summer of 1920 out on Long Island, pretending we were just the Boy and Mrs. Marshall, exchanging pleasantries regarding the weather and the quality of the company. Anxious and perhaps more, because it is a bit of a thrill, those accidental bumpings: an absolute nerve-zapping thrill, to see the Boy’s sleek head appear without warning in somebody’s drawing room, and his white collar against his golden skin. To talk about stock prices when we really want to talk about sex. Sometimes I think he does it on purpose, just to warm up my blood, to wind up the anticipation for what comes after the party, when we’ve left the rest of the world behind us.
But he doesn’t appear this evening at the Schuylers’ Park Avenue apartment, even though I’ve dropped the details of the affair in his ear more than once. Instead, as I stir my way through the living room to bid farewell to my hostess—I’m a woman of the quaint old manners, you understand, and hostesses must be attended to, even if they were formerly secretaries—I find I am entirely alone, though surrounded by faces I’ve known my entire life, in drawing rooms and ballrooms and clubs and ocean liners, and the fact of my isolation presses against my temples and my chest in such a way that I’m finding it difficult to breathe. Or maybe it’s the smell of cigars drifting from the library.
I discover my host first. “Philip, love,” I say, “I’m looking for your charming wife.”
“She’s putting the baby back to bed. Apparently all our noise woke the poor little tyke, and she wandered into the dining room just as my aunt Prunella toppled into the punch bowl. Can I be of assistance, perhaps?”
I like Philip Schuyler. I like him a great deal, in fact, for I suspect he’s a man of fundamental decency, for all that he’s nearly as fond of the sauce as he is of his pretty new wife. He has polished blond hair and a face poised handsomely on the verge of ruin, and should one arrive on his doorstep in one’s time of trouble, he would undoubtedly deliver up gin and sympathy by the bucketful. He crushes out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray and offers me a look of expectant impatience: a host with countless demands on his attention, but he still makes time for you.
To which I shrug. “Just wanted to pay my respects before I left.”
“I’m happy to convey them to her.” He lifts his glass, but it turns up empty, and his expression of abject, blue-eyed disappointment would soften the hardest heart.
“Do that, love. Tell her I had a smashing time and all that. The food was divine, the company sensational.”
He rubs one temple with his thumb. “Did young what’s-his-name find you?”
“My brother, you mean? Yes, he did.”
“Not your brother. The other fellow. Ned’s protégé, the pilot.”
One of my shoulders has escaped my coat. I turn my attention to the errant mink sleeve and say, “Why, no. Was Mr. Rofrano here?”
Philip snaps his fingers. “Rofrano! That’s it. Yes, he was. And not in a social frame of mind, I’m sorry to say. Peppered me with all kinds of indecent business questions, and then charged off in your direction. You’ve got to teach him some manners, Theresa, or he’ll never fit in.”
“I don’t need him to fit in.” Rather coldly. And then: “What sort of questions?”
“Oh, I don’t remember. Something to do with an old client of mine, which of course I couldn’t discuss. Confidentiality.” He taps his temple, this time with a well-tended index finger. “Very bad form, as the English say.”
“How strange.”
Philip shakes his head and stares down into his empty glass, and for an instant I imagine he’s actually pondering something. “Funny, though. I hadn’t thought about that old case in years.”
“What old case?”
He looks back up, and a bit of shrewd lawyerly suspicion shapes the squint of his eyes. He picks up my hand and kisses the gloved knuckles, like a man who does that kind of thing often. “Now, why don’t you just ask him yourself? Two good friends like the pair of you.”
I extract my hand and gather up my pocketbook. “Trust me, love. Friendship has nothing to do with it.”
I have begun the evening alone, and alone I remain as I travel down the elevator directed by one red-coated attendant and allow another red-coated attendant to hail me a taxi from the frozen street outside. The coldest day of the year, the cabbie informs me, setting off down Park Avenue toward the beckoning lights, and I tell him I’m not surprised to hear that.
I’ve never felt colder.
“THERE YOU ARE,” I TELL the Boy, when at last I slide atop a neighboring stool at the Christopher Club, the place next door to his apartment. Our usual haunt. I set my pocketbook on the bar and signal the proprietor, all of which serves to disguise my relief at the sight of the Boy’s heavy black hair, gleaming under the lights.
“Here I am.”
“I thought we agreed to meet at your place.”
“I got a little restless. I figured you’d know where I was.”
I accept the martini between my fingers and nod my gratitude to Christopher. The musicians are taking a break, it seems, and the Boy’s dear voice is rather eerily audible, in the absence of trumpet and saxophone. “You might have left a note, just to be sure.”
“I guess I might.”
The martini is pure corrosive and peels my throat. One of these days I’m going to die of gin like this. I set down the glass and cover the Boy’s hand with mine. “Let’s not fight, hmm? It’s much nicer for both of us when we don’t fight. Give me a kiss.”
He turns his head and kisses me, but his lips are hard and his heart’s not in it. I ask him what’s the matter. Have I done something awful?
“No.” He fingers his glass. There’s an ashtray at his elbow, filled with the sordid remains of perhaps five or six cigarettes. Another one decorates his hand, half-finished. He lifts it to his lips.
“Has someone else done something awful?”
“Maybe.”
“Come on, now. Talk to me, Boyo, or nobody gets to have any fun tonight.”
The Boy drinks the rest of his whatever-it-is—whisky, I guess—and signals for another. “It’s nothing, okay? How was your evening?”
“My evening was delightful. You’ll never guess who turned up. Ox’s little bonbon, just as sweet as could be.”
“Sophie was there?”
“Is that her name? I’d forgotten. Anyway, she was just darling. She was wearing the prettiest little dress, all in pink. It brought out her round sweet cheeks. Like a doll, really. I can see why Ox is so smitten, aside from the money, of course. I think they’re perfect for each other.”
“He’s far too old for her.”
“I don’t think he minds.”
“I meant her. She should mind. A used-up old bachelor like him.”
“Boyo, darling, are you casting aspersions on my brother?”
“He’s got the brains of an orang-utang and the morals of an alley cat, and you know it.”
The gin doesn’t burn so much now. Indeed, it’s rather refreshing. I drain the chalice and ask the Boy if he’s got another cigarette. “I never heard you object to poor Ox before,” I say, as he lights me up.
“He’s never tried to marry an innocent young girl before.”
“Not tried to marry.” I blow out the smoke in long gusts. “Is marrying. She’s agreed to marry him, very much of her own accord. That was your doing, remember? She looked awfully jolly at the party, by the way. Smiling the whole while, just as pleased as could be. She’s wearing her manacle. I made her take off her glove to show me. Made such a fuss over her. It’s a shame you weren’t there.”
“Yeah, a real shame.”
“Of course, I still have my reservations about that curious father of hers, and how he got his money, and how much he’s really got. But if you haven’t found out anything awful . . . Have you, Boyo?”
“Have I what?”
“Found out anything awful about the Fortescues.”
Christopher—not his real name, by the by, but then I expect you already guessed that—Christopher slides by and presents the Boy with another drink. The Boy takes the glass between his fingers and sort of rotates it on the surface of the bar, clockwise, making wet little interconnected circles in the wood. (The Boy usually drinks his whisky neat, but tonight there’s ice for some reason, ice on the coldest day of the year.) The hum of voices around us is more subdued than usual, the mood less reckless and more maudlin, as if everybody’s stayed home because of the frozen streets, the smell of impending snow in the air. The instruments sit abandoned on their chairs in the corner of the room, and I’m beginning to wonder if their owners are planning to return.
“Boyo?”
“Yes?”
“The Fortescues.”
He picks up the whisky at last and takes a drink, maybe half a glass in one gulp. The ice clinks and falls. “Still asking around.”
“Well, let me know what you find out, won’t you? Before too much longer. Not that I’m not coming around to wonder whether it matters. These are modern times, aren’t they? Love conquers all. Who really cares if the old man’s hiding a skeleton or two? My God, haven’t we all got skeletons!”
The Boy winces slightly, and I’m not sure whether it’s my words, or the brittle quality of the laugh that goes with them.
I continue. “It’s a lovely ring, isn’t it? The Ochsner family ring, I mean. Did you know that my—”
“You know what, Theresa?”
“What’s that, darling?”
“I think I’m going to call it a night.” He slings back his whisky and rises from the stool.
I stub out the cigarette in the ashtray, attend to my drink, and follow him up. “I was just going to suggest the same thing.”
“I mean alone, Theresa. I’m sorry. It’s been a long week.”
A few notes wobble softly from the trumpet behind me. The musicians have returned after all, it seems.
I say lightly, “The coldest night of the year, and you want to sleep alone?”
“I’m sorry. Maybe I’ve got a flu coming on, or something. I’m tired as sin.”
“Ah, but not so tired that you couldn’t make an appearance at a certain party uptown, isn’t that right?”
The Boy’s eyes widen a little. His mouth tenses at the corners, and admits defeat. “I looked around for you. You must have been hiding.”
“Who, me? I was in plain sight, I thought. Unless I just fade into the background for you now.”
“You know that’s not true.”
The saxophone’s joined the trumpet, and a bass player thrums a question. I lift my hands into the Boy’s hair and pull him down for a kiss—kissing’s so much easier than talking—and for a second or two he obeys me, opening his mouth, allowing me a taste of himself. Relief! Triumph! I still have my Boy; he’s still mine, God knows why, warm and green and relentless, the source of all life. His lips are charged with whisky, and it tastes better than gin. Better than anything. I test his tongue, and he pulls away.
“Not here, Theresa.”
“Then let’s go.”
“I said not tonight. I’m not up to it.”
I step backward. The band has begun to play in earnest, filling the air with noise, noise. My throat hurts. Not up to it.
“All right. Find me my coat and a taxi.”
“I’ll drive you back.”
“That’s not necessary. After all, you’re a tired Boyo tonight. Tired as—what was it? Tired as sin.”
He brings the coat, and a moment later we stand silently on Seventh Avenue, examining the approaching cars while the wind whistles along the brims of our hats. One of the vehicles swerves toward us. The Boy opens the door for me.
“Good night, then,” I say.
He bends down to kiss me. “Good night.”
“And Boyo?” I reach up and touch his icy cheek with my thumb. “You’re going to have to learn how to lie a little better, or you’ll never get on in this world.”
I climb swiftly into the taxi and slam the door all by myself, so he won’t have a chance to answer me. Not that he seems to have anything plausible at the ready, though, judging by the stricken young expression on his face as it slides past my frosted window.
I HOPE I HAVEN’T GIVEN the impression that I don’t get on with my husband. Quite the contrary! We’ve been good friends for over two decades, ever since I walked into his dressing room, asked his valet to leave, and demanded to know whether the author of a certain spiteful anonymous note (spiteful and anonymous do tend to go together, I’ve always found) had her facts absolutely straight.
He remained calm. He asked to see the note, and I obliged him. He said that it was true, that he had, in fact, conceived a child with another woman shortly after conceiving Tommy with me; moreover, he still kept this woman and her baby under—as we quaintly called it in those days—his protection. He didn’t say whether he was actually still fucking her, but then it hardly needed saying, did it? A lovely word, protection. Means ownership. And if you own something, by rights, you are allowed to fuck it.
I then asked, rather tremulously, whether he was in love with this woman. For some time, he considered his answer. He poured me a glass of sherry and made me sit on the little settee he kept there. He was very kind. He sat next to me and took my hand and explained that he did love this woman, but not in the same way he cared for me; that in fact I was not to feel threatened at all by these little adventures of his. Perhaps, one day, I would like to have adventures of my own, and he was a fair man, a very fair man, and he fully understood that he had no grounds to object to my adventures, provided I conducted them prudently.
I told him I wanted a divorce.
Very well, he said. If I wanted a divorce, he would give me a divorce, but he asked me to consider the consequences. After all, we had a very pleasant life together, didn’t we? Nothing had materially changed between us. We got along well. We made each other laugh; we enjoyed many of the same interests; we had the same ideas of how life should be lived. We were of the same kind. We had a son together, a handsome and brilliant boy who was the light of Sylvo’s life; he looked very much forward to the forthcoming birth of our second child, and it was his dearest hope that we should have even more together. Our partnership was the central fact around which our pleasant life revolved. Did that mean nothing to me?
He said all this in such a sincere voice, and I found—well, maybe it was the sherry, too—that he did make a great deal of sense. I did care for him. I didn’t want to live without him. I didn’t want to deprive our children of their father. I simply wanted him all to myself, and wasn’t that, in a sense, ungenerous of me? Did I really require his devoted presence every moment of the day? Did this mistress of his make him any less attentive to his family, did it subtract in any way from the thousand personal qualities I knew and liked about him? If he had slept with other women before our marriage—and of course he had—did it matter, logically, that he slept with other women now? Would I not perhaps like to have the promised excitement of my own lover one day, while maintaining the perfect security of a tranquil marriage?
And—let’s be honest—were not most of our own friends married under similar understandings? Did I think I was somehow immune to this particular disorder?
At Sylvo’s urging, I went away to think about these things. It was nearly summer, and I took Tommy and went out to the house on Long Island, though nobody else had yet arrived in town. We played on the beach and splashed in the cold May currents, until one afternoon, when the sun was hot and a few other families had begun to appear on the shore, Tommy stood up on his fat little legs and began to cry. Papa, he said. I want Papa.
Now, you must understand what an adorable infant Tommy was, and how I worshipped him. Sylvo and I both did. In my childish enthusiasm, I’d insisted on nursing the baby myself, and even now—especially now—I spent every spare moment in his company, to the nanny’s bemusement. He was so handsome, such a dear little lad. He had the funniest ways, the most heart-melting expressions. He stood there in the sand with his little red pail in one hand, and his little red shovel in the other, and the tears streamed down his little red cheeks. And I thought, I must find a way through this. I must give Tommy what he needs.
I scooped him up and called for the nanny and told her to pack his things, because we were going back to the city. We took the train and arrived by dinnertime. Sylvo was there, preparing to dine alone; he had promised me not to visit this woman while I was considering the matter of our marriage, and he was a man of his word. He stood at once when I entered the room, and I realized then that he had kept his promise. A small thing, maybe, but it decided me.
Very well, I said. I won’t ask for a divorce. I won’t ask you not to have lovers, so long as you are discreet, and so long as you present no further bastards on my doorstep, and so long—here my voice broke, and the tears gathered in my eyes—so long as we remain first in your life.
For a moment, he stood quite still, saying nothing. I remember that, how his lips pressed together, and I remember thinking that I had made a terrible mistake with my demands. That I was only twenty years old, after all, and he was nearly forty. I had no power over him at all. First in his life? What a hoot.
Then he began to move. He pushed back his chair and walked around the end of the table in my direction, and when he reached me—I was trembling now—he took both my hands and thanked me for my generosity. And I don’t know how it was, but I took my seat at the table as if nothing had happened. I ate my dinner and conversed with my husband. Our lives simply resumed, carrying this new understanding between us. Oliver came along, and then a stillborn girl, and then darling Billy, and I received no more anonymous notes in the morning post. No whispers from well-meaning friends. Sylvo could not have been more courteously discreet.
Indeed, it wasn’t until I was nursing Billy that I noticed Sylvo paying particular attention to a pretty young widow of our acquaintance, and by then—rather to my surprise—instead of tasting jealousy, I knew a kind of dry compassion. After all, I now possessed such a supreme confidence in our importance in Sylvo’s life—in my own beauty and power, aged twenty-six—that his sexual interest in a pretty widow didn’t bother me at all. Let him enjoy himself while I devote myself to my baby son, I thought, and I’m positive that he did exactly that, although he kept his promise and enjoyed himself just as a gentleman should.
So it went for many years, and though our marriage ebbed and flowed in a natural human rhythm—we had, to be perfectly honest, more ebbed than flowed in the past few years—we continued to honor the agreement we had made that evening, and our home was always a refuge of professional friendship into which, by unspoken consent, no transient loves could penetrate.
Tonight, as the taxi at last approaches the familiar stretch of Fifth Avenue, and our apartment building that grows like a limestone monument from the pavement, I find myself inhaling a deep measure of ice-cold relief. These are natural human rhythms, I think, like the ebbing and flowing of a marriage, like the joys and heartbreaks of life itself. So the Boy was cross tonight. So his attention’s been temporarily diverted to an unspoiled girl of nineteen; so he hasn’t been quite honest with me about something. He’s young and virile—exceptionally virile—and he certainly can’t go to bed with this innocent and affianced Sophie. Within days, he’ll crave me as before. Maybe more, because he will have gone without sex all that time, and his hopeless desire for the bright little Sophie will sublimate into desire for me. (I am up-to-date on all the latest psychology, even if I don’t go in for it myself.)
In the meantime, I have this apartment, and this comfortable life, and this husband and these sons, and while the apartment’s probably empty at the moment—husband in Sutton Place, sons grown and gone—it’s still mine. It’s my emptiness. And old Sylvo will be back by morning, and the boys will visit eventually, and the Boy will return to me. Thanks to the Boy, nothing’s so bleak and lonely as it seemed a few years ago, when Billy left to prep and the place was empty—thoroughly, echoingly empty—for the first time since we moved in.
I greet the doorman and the elevator attendant as cheerfully as I possibly can, and peace settles over me as we trundle upward to the fourteenth floor, which belongs entirely to us: twelve rooms and a substantial terrace overlooking the park, the most beautiful metropolitan sunsets in the world. I fish for the key in my pocketbook. The car arrives with a clank; the attendant opens the door and the grille and wishes me good night, even though it’s actually morning.
I say Good night, Val.
Inside, the apartment is quiet, the housekeeper and maid in bed, but to my surprise a light shines under the door in the library, as I pass by on my way to the bedroom. I push it open, thinking wildly that maybe one of my boys has come home at last, my God, maybe it’s even Tommy.
But it isn’t Tommy, or his brothers. It’s Sylvo, who rises from his desk and kisses me tenderly, and then sits me down on the leather Chesterfield sofa, hands me a glass of cream sherry, and tells me he wants a divorce.