Memories of a Marriage (16 page)

So that’s the end of what Thomas told me that afternoon, Alex said. Now it’s back to me, Alex.

What should I do? Thomas asked me, after he’d ended his story. Pretend I don’t know? Let Reading come to dinner tomorrow—if he is willing to—and have him at most give Lucy a wink while I’m getting her another scotch? Or shall I leave her, which is what I want to do? If I leave, I think I have to leave today. I don’t want to spend the night with her.

I told Thomas these were questions only he could answer.
However, I said that, if he chose to stay and pretend the conversation with Reading had not taken place, he might as well assume that Lucy would see through him. She’d know that he knew. Why would Reading decide not to tell you? I said. You’re still close.

Yes, Thomas answered, and not just because of business. We see each other whenever he’s here or I’m in London. And yes, I’ve put that same question to myself. She might think Reading decided not to say anything because that other time the warning he gave me had no effect except that it almost destroyed our friendship. I know that ever since he has felt awkward when Lucy is around. He could have said to himself, I won’t interfere again, it can only get me in trouble.

That’s possible, I said.

Thomas shook his head. It doesn’t matter. I can’t pretend I don’t know. I can’t live with her as though it hadn’t happened. And I wouldn’t be able to believe her if we had it out and she promised never to do it again. Really, it comes down to Jamie. How can I leave him with her? How can I live without him?

This is when I asked Thomas: Will you be really leaving him? Won’t he be leaving you, going away to school? Don’t you think that she’ll agree to some reasonable arrangement about visits and that sort of thing?

Thomas said that if he could be objective about the situation he’d reason just as I had: Jamie was graduating from Buckley; a young master from St. Bernard’s who’d been a combination tutor and babysitter, taking him after school for the last three years, had agreed to be with him this summer in
Little Compton, since Lucy had declared she’d only be there for three weeks in August and he wasn’t sure of being able to take all of July; and, indeed, starting in the fall, Jamie would be at Exeter. And then he asked me whether I thought he could—or should—simply go to the apartment after he’d left me, pack his stuff, say goodbye to Jamie, and go to a hotel. He’d thought of the Harvard Club or the Paddock, but he didn’t want to be where he’d run into people he knew.

I told him he was in for a bad time, but he had better get on with it. Then, as I was imagining what the scene over there at their apartment would be like, it occurred to me that he shouldn’t be alone that evening, and I asked him to have dinner with us. Drinks at the apartment, we’ll go somewhere or other afterward. Can you imagine it? Thomas got very emotional, and he said he would like that, that he had always known he could count on me to protect him. This is how I got the story of what happened when he went home that very evening.

Lucy was there, Thomas told Priscilla and me, as were Jamie and the St. Bernard’s fellow, his name has just come back to me, Hugh Cowles,
entre nous
someone we’d met any number of times, good family and all that, who has the looks and manner of a fairy but in fact is a rather active ladies’ man who’d been briefly married to one of the Phipps girls. Lucy put down the receiver—she’d been on the telephone in the library when Thomas arrived—and said, My my, you’re home early, or something like that. Are you sick? He didn’t reply, got his bag out of a hall closet, and went into the bedroom to pack. But he found he really couldn’t. He was in a coffin
made of glass, dead although perfectly conscious and capable of speech, and conscious of the pointlessness of every action. Nevertheless, he threw in the suitcase his toilet kit, with sleeping pills in it, a couple of shirts and pairs of underpants and socks, and one suit. He added the photographs of Jamie from the dresser. All the while Lucy was screaming, Don’t do it, Thomas, you’re making a dreadful mistake, what that bastard Reading told you is nothing, it will never happen again, and he could hear and understand what she was saying but couldn’t answer. She was far away and he in his coffin. Still in the coffin, he went to Jamie’s room, waited until Cowles had left, told Jamie, and tried to comfort him. The kid cried and cried. And still in his coffin, he pushed Lucy aside when she tried to block the front door. I really wanted to hit her, he said, and not just once, but I didn’t. So he got into the elevator, had the doorman hail a taxi, and drove to the Hilton on Sixth Avenue.

What a ghastly business, I said.

Alex nodded. Awful. One moment of comedy: when Thomas told me that evening as we were having drinks that he was down to two suits, the one he was wearing and the one waiting in the hotel, I said that was all for the best. It was time he stopped wearing those Brooks Brothers standard-issue numbers and let my tailor make him some grown-up clothes. But that will never do, he replied, Lucy has always said I’m not white enough for Anderson and Sheppard and never will be.

Alex and I had another whiskey and left the club together. It was the hour when taxi drivers turn on the
OFF DUTY
sign
and head for meeting places somewhere near the Queensboro Bridge and switch with drivers working the next shift. It’s hopeless, said Alex, I’ll toddle off. I asked whether he still lived at the River House. Indeed, he told me, whereupon I offered to walk him home. It took us longer than I had expected. The arthritis in his right knee was getting worse, and he leaned heavily on his cane. He planned to have the knee replaced after the summer. Priscilla and I play tennis all winter, he told me. I’ll be rushing the net again in no time.

As we were parting he asked me: Do you understand them better?

Not yet, I told him.

Well, said Alex, let me add to your confusion. A month or so after that day of drama, when Thomas already had an apartment and had moved into it, we had lunch at the club. We chatted about Jamie and the difficult time he was going through and how he, Thomas, in his mind had been going over and over the breakup and the chronology of his awful marriage. I was commiserating with him, conscious, I must say, of the role I had played in that affair, when all of a sudden Thomas said, Stop, Alex! I’m going to tell you something that may make you think I’m crazy. If I had my life to live again, there is still no way I could stop myself from marrying her.

T
HERE WAS TO BE
no immediate attempt on my part to find an answer to the question Alex had asked while we were saying goodbye. No, I wasn’t sure I understood Thomas and Lucy better, and I wasn’t sure that I cared. A great impatience had overcome me. The moment I got home, without even checking telephone messages, I sat down at my desk and started work on the real book, stored in my laptop, that was nearing completion, and banished all thoughts of Lucy and Thomas. Their book, I had told myself as I walked west and then uptown after I had dropped off Alex, was a pipe dream; and in comparison with the crisis faced by the characters I had invented, the travails of Lucy and Thomas, however real, were unconvincing, perhaps even lacking in authenticity! Had Tolstoy ever said that all unhappy marriages are alike? If he hadn’t, he should have: I felt I had stumbled on an important truth. Whether or not I had, I worked hard that afternoon and early evening,
didn’t allow my mind to wander, and by nine o’clock I had overshot my daily target of twelve hundred words. Tired and drained of ideas, I had a bath, put on a CD of Haydn sonatas, a recent present from a German friend, and made myself a dinner of scrambled eggs, soft Vermont goat cheese, two peaches—the first ripe ones I had been able to find at the supermarket—and a half bottle of Côtes du Rhône. I ate at the kitchen table. In the state of relaxation induced by the music and the wine, I surrendered guiltily to my fixation on Lucy and Thomas.

Alex had told me that the last time he saw Thomas was toward the end of January 1998, less than two weeks before the accident in Bahia. That put it less than a year after my own last meeting with Thomas and Jane, in Paris, in mid-April 1997. Thomas claimed that the Supreme Court had made a fatal mistake by ruling that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton while he was still in office. They’ve opened a true Pandora’s box, he said, and put the country on the road to a wholly unnecessary constitutional crisis.

Jane found Thomas’s position unprincipled and shocking. If there is anything to the story that woman has told under oath, why should he get away with that sort of behavior just because soon after it took place he was elected president?

No reason, he answered, except that there will be no end to the way he will be harassed. Don’t forget that this fellow Kenneth Starr has all the right wing nuts in the country egging him on. He’ll put every piece of Clinton’s dirty laundry on public view, all of his mostly revolting sexual peccadilloes,
and do serious damage to his presidency. It’s all right with the American public if the president wastes his time on the golf links. But sex! They’ll crucify him for it, even though it’s a pastime that takes less time and is probably better for you than golf.

The service at the restaurant on avenue Montaigne to which Thomas had invited me because of a review Jane had read praising the genius of its celebrity chef was desperately slow. It being a Tuesday, when French museums were closed, Thomas had arranged for them a private visit of the royal apartments in Versailles. They were running late, and our meal ended in slight disarray, with promises to get back together before they left Paris but no concrete plan. On the way back to my apartment, walking first along Cours Albert 1er and then the quays, I wished I had eaten less and renewed my vow to avoid gastronomic lunches with visiting Americans, even those I liked a lot. In fact, we didn’t see one another again during that visit. I would have normally looked them up when I came to the States for the summer, but I flew nonstop to the West Coast, where I taught a class in a creative writing program at Berkeley, and from there I went directly to Sharon. I called when I finally passed through New York on my way back to Paris, but they were out of town. That missed opportunity was the last one; when I next traveled to New York, he had been dead for months. The obituary ran in the
Herald Tribune
as well as the
New York Times
, and there were substantial articles in the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Economist
. All of them included a vivid description of the accident. Thomas had been swimming off a Bahia beach
and was killed by a speedboat with a water skier in tow. The driver, alone in the boat, had been steering with one hand, his head turned in the direction of the skier, whom he didn’t want to lose from sight. Both the boat and the skier ran over Thomas, the boat most likely killing him at once, while Jane, who had waded deep into the water as the scene unfolded, wailed and wailed.

These random memories, as in truth everything I recalled about Thomas, were vivid, but it occurred to me that because of the fascination Lucy held for me, and perhaps also because I remembered Thomas so well that I could, in a sense, take him for granted, I had been focusing almost exclusively on her. I had liked him and had enjoyed his company; that seemed to wrap it up. But it was becoming clear that if I was going to understand what had happened to him and Lucy as a couple, I had better try to think about him more analytically. Whether I was up to it I couldn’t tell, for reasons not unrelated to how I read and write. For example, I’ve never thought I knew what a novel—somebody else’s or mine—is “about,” a failing that has made it difficult to earn a modest supplementary income as an occasional book reviewer or to answer journalists wanting to know what message readers should take away from my most recent book. My stock reply to that last question—one that is in fact quite sincere and not a lame attempt to coin a koan—is that a book is about what it says. Similarly, my characters are the sum of their actions and words as reported by me, so that a string of defining epithets—handsome, intelligent, ambitious, courteous, shy—doesn’t add much that a reader would find valuable. If a further
gloss of that sort were required, I doubted that I could do better than something on the order of “godlike Thomas, beloved of Hermes and swift to climb.”

For the truth was that Thomas had climbed with rare skill, and few people could bear witness to his ascent more authoritatively than I, who had invited the polite and garrulous GI on leave to what must have been his first Parisian cocktail party and, some forty years later, was his guest at the hottest restaurant in Paris and saw him offer to Jane, whom a gossip columnist might have termed, however unjustly, a trophy wife, golden apples from the highest branch of the tree of success. I am not thinking only of the suite at the Ritz, the black BMW driven by a chauffeur in uniform that had brought them from the hotel to the restaurant, and into which they climbed en route to a palace normally overrun by tourists and schoolchildren that they would visit in peace and quiet accompanied only by a senior curator. Those were perquisites of a very rich man, of whom there are so many, and Thomas had indeed become very rich. I supposed he had made handsome gifts toward the restoration of the château, perhaps he was on the board of the American association that had done so much for Versailles. It was also possible that in his case it was sufficient to be who he was. But the day before, he and Jane had lunched at the Élysée Palace with the president, who wanted to quiz Thomas about the root causes of the Mexican debt crisis of the 1980s and the restructuring that followed and more generally the lessons it held for banks lending to Russia. And two days later, Jane and he were having dinner with the head of the Banque de France, someone
Thomas had gotten to know well who was interested in some of the same issues. It was clear, and indeed it had been clear to me for a long time, that through unusual gifts and force of personality Thomas had risen to a sphere that was frequented by only the rarest of financiers and that he had ascended as a self-made man. I thought of his occasional accounts of the crisis that had engulfed first Mexico and then one country south of the border after another, the conclusions he had drawn, and the process of making his ideas sufficiently acceptable to government officials who were his clients for them to take the actions he thought necessary. They were intellectual and dispassionate, and very unlike the war stories told by other high-level investment bankers—for instance, my cousin Josiah—those heroic boasts about huge deals whose fate had hung on a thread before they were rescued by a telephone call they had made in the dead of the night. Once in a while I had heard Thomas as well speak about the human aspect of his business exploits, but the hallmark of his anecdotes was invariably wistful self-deprecation.