Manhattan Monologues (16 page)

"But, my dear boy, these things, as you know, are very explosive. It's impossible to keep them secret."

"Difficult, certainly. Not impossible. But that's not the point. The point I'm making is that
if
one can keep them secret, they're no more immoral than an act of masturbation."

"Please, dear! I'm not as liberated as you."

"No, but you're getting there. Look, Ma. You know there's some sense in what I'm saying. You know I'm not an immoral person."

"Yes, I do know that. And you never have been. I remember as a boy how you blew your poor sister up when she kept library books out overtime."

"She kept dozens! And for months, too. I tried to impress on her that we weren't that kind of people."

"Everything's wrong but free sex? Is that it?"

"Well, isn't most people's moral code that everything's right but free sex?"

"Right?"

"In the sense of all right. Or not so bad. I leave out felonies. I'm talking about the moral code of the people we know. They put up with much more than I'm willing to: lying, cheating, exploiting, getting ahead of each other any way they can, pushing, shoving, showing a minimum of compassion or generosity. But when it comes to sex, whoa!"

"What would your father say to all this?"

"I wouldn't be having this talk with Dad. He's been broken by the system."

"You mean by me!"

"By you operating within the system. You're a victim, too, Ma. Only you know it. That's your salvation."

"Or my damnation. However, watch out, my child. What you believe could land you in serious trouble. And I won't have that, because I love you." She glanced at her watch. "And now you'd better go if you're going to catch the four o'clock to New Haven."

***

I sometimes fancy that society used Olivia, as the Philistines used Delilah with Samson, to betray me to my enemies. She was a Philadelphia girl, from Chestnut Hill really, of one of the oldest families, the Peytons, and she concealed, beneath her large but superbly shaped torso and her large handsome Grecian features, a conservatism that was all the fiercer for its studied suppression. A radiantly smiling Olivia gave the convincing appearance of being wide open to a new world and a world of new things. I met her at the Yale prom in my senior year, when she was Newt Chandler's date. Newt, with his usual excessive generosity, made no objection when I hardly left their side during the entire weekend. I was enchanted with Olivia from the beginning.

Newt and I had one of our frankest talks when the weekend was over and Olivia had returned to Chestnut Hill.

"No need to apologize for being such a buttinsky," he assured me coolly. "I am quite inured to your grabbiness. As a matter of fact, I invited Olivia with you in mind. She and I are old summer pals from Northeast Harbor, and there's never been anything between us but the best rapport. It occurred to me that she might be just what the doctor would order for you."

"And what gave you that idea?"

"I thought she might civilize you. She's too good and too clever for you to dismiss her in that scornful way you do most of the girls of your background. And too physically attractive not to grab an old lecher like you."

"So that's what there's in it for me. What's in it for her? Isn't there bigger game at home? Aren't there any Drexels or Biddies available?"

"I think she needs more of a challenge. I'll miss my guess if she doesn't want to lead the truculent Robin Belknap around the ring of her admirers with a ring through his nose."

Well, that was pretty much what she accomplished, despite the warning given by my friend. I fell in love with Olivia, and she returned my feeling, at least to the extent to which she was capable, which had its limits. We met every weekend in New York, New Haven or Philadelphia, and I found her exuberantly willing to share whatever activity I suggested, from sailing on Long Island Sound to taking roller-coaster rides in Coney Island. She was never tired, never in low spirits. She was willing to neck, even enthusiastically, but she firmly resisted any effort on my part to promote greater intimacy. She did not resent it, however; she regarded it as conduct to be expected of a male but to be checked by a
jeune fille à marier,
as she put it, only half-mockingly, in French.

I had the prospect of a good job in a bank that was a client of my father's firm, and when I proposed that we marry right after my Yale graduation, she agreed, but I found that she could be very definite about her conditions.

"There are certain things that you and I will have to get straight," she informed me. "I sense in you, dear, a tendency toward independence, toward your own values in life as opposed to those of the world in which you were reared." Her tone was decisive but not prim; she was trying to be fair—I see that now. She always tried to be fair. "Don't misunderstand me. I don't give a hoot about what you believe in or don't believe in. Creeds don't exist for me. You could be an atheist or an anarchist, for all I care, as long as you don't scream it from the rooftops. Or a nudist, as long as you don't make me go to a nudist camp. I expect to lead an ordered life centered in one civilized place. New York will suit me fine, if we have a decent apartment in an area of good private schools and neighbors who aren't drunks or weirdos."

"Well, that sounds reasonable enough. We'll live, in other words, as we've always lived."

"Precisely. I just want to make sure that you won't suddenly tell me we're moving to Kalamazoo. I want a solid home, a faithful husband and well-brought-up children."

"Isn't that what every true American girl wants?"

"You needn't be sarcastic, deary. The difference is that this girl means to get it."

I should have realized then that I was up against a woman of steel who would never be deflected so much as an inch from her chosen path. But I construed her open and amiable manner as a manifest of her primary devotion to me, and so we were married.

For three years things went along well enough. I was content with my work in the investment counsel department of my bank, which I did competently enough. Olivia was a cheerful and even-tempered mate, amused by the mild social gatherings of our mutual friends, always ready to go to a movie, play or concert, or to sit home with a detective story if I had to work late. Our quarrels were few and slight, and it didn't bother me that she took less interest in my philosophic or sociological opinions than she had done before we were married. I reflected that she was not, after all, gifted with a particularly interesting mind and that she had little to add to or to stimulate my thinking on questions not concerned with our daily or family life. But it was beginning to concern me that such things scarcely existed for her.

A greater problem lay in our sex life. It wasn't that Olivia failed to be willing, even a vigorous partner in this, and two sons were born to us in the first three years of our marriage. Nor was it that she took the view of some of her contemporaries (more, of course, in her mother's generation) that love-making was a male prerogative to which a dutiful spouse had patiently to submit. No, Olivia participated fully in our intercourse, but—how shall I put it?—in a curiously dispassionate way, as if, for hygienic purposes, she were engaged in a regular calisthenic. This ultimately diminished my libido to the point where I became a mere Saturday night performer. Olivia never commented on this.

And then came the war. Olivia thought I should go in the navy, like most of our friends, but I preferred what I fancied the "real thing": shooting at men you could see or engaging in hand-to-hand fighting, rather than firing at boats. This was again the angry, the truculent side of my nature, perhaps the immature, but I can hardly leave it out of this memorandum. I became a second lieutenant, ultimately a captain, in the infantry and fought in North Africa, Italy and at last in Germany. My sons know all about my war record and Silver Star, so I needn't go into that. What I have to stress here is what combat did to my character and personality.

It is often said that there are men who actually like war, not just the skillful planning and execution of military strikes but the bloody filthy combat itself. I don't say that was true of me—I had my moments of hell, and I don't use that word carelessly—but I also had my moments of undoubted brute ecstasy. I had learned at boarding school to be ashamed of my impulses toward violence, but the war seemed to be offering me a vindication. The Germans were fiends, and to punish them was not only a sacred duty; it was a blissful joy. When I tramped through their shattered homeland, there was a song in my heart.

A reaction came when I saw the devastation wrought everywhere on people who had had no voice in the making of wars and when I heard of the two terrible bombs on Japan. I wondered if, had I been born in Tokyo or Berlin, I wouldn't have sprung to arms as enthusiastically as any Japanese or German youth. I began to see the whole war less as a crusade against evil and more as a sharp statement of the wretched human condition. I looked back at my appetite for battle as something sickening, and I found myself in the grip of a severe depression.

Everyone at home was most sympathetic and understanding. The bank welcomed me back; Olivia was all soothing smiles; the old friends and relatives treated me as a hero. But nothing was quite right. My two sons regarded me as something of an intruder on a home settled to suit themselves; my work at the office bored me; and Olivia, after the first year of peace, showed definite signs of impatience that I was taking so long to "snap out of it." What she particularly minded was my inclination to be silent and sometimes morose at dinner parties, and it did not lift my spirits to note with what forced gaiety and laughter she sought to counteract my dull effect on the evening cheer. Indeed, she often became the life of the party, and I could well imagine the departing guests confiding in one another about that "poor lovely woman" and wondering why she had thrown herself away on that "dreary crank."

It was inevitable that what then came into my life should have come, and I met Cornelia Tate at one of those dinner parties to the revelry of which I so scantly contributed. She was a fine woman, large and still and calm, in some ways like Olivia, but far less animated, and her large, serene gray eyes bespoke her indifference to the trivialities around her without implying the least condemnation of them or condescension. She lived, one could infer, in a world of her own, a world that satisfied her without making her smug. But that night she appeared to betray an interest in mine.

"They say you're hard to draw out," she began.

"Who says so?"

"Does it matter? Are you?"

"I can talk when I want to." I gazed at her for a moment. "I think I might like to talk to you."

"Let's try, then. Where shall we begin? Well, why not with where we are now? You hate this party, don't you?"

"Yes, and so do you. Isn't that it? Why did you come? I came because my wife brought me. Did a mate drag you here? And, by the way, which is he?"

"He's not here. We've separated, actually. I live childless and alone, and I go out when I'm asked—which is not often—because I'm afraid of getting too fond of loneliness. One can, you know. Or don't you?"

"Is it such a vice?"

"Anything can be, I suppose, if carried too far. Your adopted air—will it offend you if I call it moodiness, or semi-truculence?—might lead you down some unexpected paths."

"Such as?"

"Well, you probably think it makes you unpopular."

"And it doesn't?"

"Not with women. Your remoteness, your air of inaccessibility, may have a Byronic aspect to some. Added to your reputation as a war hero."

"What guff! Anyway, I think Olivia doesn't find it so."

"But she knows very well that others may. Oh, she keeps an eye on you!"

I looked at Cornelia with greater interest. "Does my Byronic air, as you quaintly put it, find grace with you?"

Her answer was flat. "Yes, Mr. Belknap, it does."

The conversation at the table at this point became general, and I had no further opportunity to chat with Cornelia alone, but when I called her the next day from my office and suggested that we have lunch, she immediately agreed. At the restaurant of my choice, one where we would not be likely to be seen by anyone of my acquaintance, I learned that she was a free-lance writer who reviewed books and hoped to make a name for herself with a novel that she was composing about her girlhood as a missionary's daughter in the Far East. Her husband was a lawyer in town from whom she had parted on amicable terms. She was the easiest person to talk to I had ever known, including my mother. She was perfectly willing to follow with utter frankness in any direction our colloquy pointed. She seemed afraid of nothing.

When our friendship, formed over several such lunches, matured, as we both obviously wanted, into an affair, our noontime trysts at her garden apartment in the Village, blessed with a separate entrance, were frequent, eminently satisfactory and utterly secret. I had no wish to hurt Olivia, and Cornelia professed an interest only in the immediate present. We had no plans; we were both, as I saw it, properly civilized individuals. But she cared more than I knew. And so, perhaps, did I.

Everyone benefited from our affair. My temper improved, as did my work at the bank; I got on much better with Olivia, who was delighted at what she termed my "pulling out of it"; and I spent more time with my little boys. And Cornelia maintained that her novel, which had had its sticky points, was now progressing smoothly. When Olivia and I went out to dinner parties, where we sometimes met Cornelia, I joined in the general mirth of the evening. Life smiled.

Until Olivia found out. How did she? From a typewritten anonymous letter. She has never to this day discovered who wrote it, and when I learned who it was, I could hardly believe it. It was my mother. I had told her of my affair in one of our deep confidential discussions, because that was the kind of relationship we had, and I trusted her discretion absolutely. But when my divorce proceedings took a nasty turn, particularly in the questions of alimony and custody of the children, Mother was stricken with remorse and made her confession to me.