A Certain Age (11 page)

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.

In love, somehow, a man's heart is either exceeding the speed limit, or getting parked in the wrong place.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

A little earlier that evening

S
OPHIE SEEMS
to have misplaced her fiancé. Well, it wasn't her fault! One minute he was standing by her side, introducing her to some willowy pillar of society, and the next minute he's gone, vanished, leaving Sophie to gamely invent small talk with a woman whose mouth looks as if it's been washed in hot water and shrunk to half its original size.

Five minutes later, Jay has not reappeared, and Sophie's run out of observations on the weather—
Brrr!—
and the lady's relationship to the host—
cousins,
always
cousins
—and that book everyone's been talking about—
indecent.
At some point, Sophie realizes she doesn't even know her companion's name. She faintly remembers hearing Jay's voice as he introduced them, but—oh, so horribly raw and tenderfoot!—she was fixing her attention too raptly on the face now before her, which bears such mesmerizing traces of former beauty that Sophie can't quite figure out where it's all gone wrong. Her skin is still smooth, after all, except for a few crinkles around the eyes. Her hair hasn't gone gray. Maybe it's that constipated mouth, from
which the shrunken little words squeeze reluctantly, one by one; or else the fact that she isn't wearing any cosmetics at all, not even a bit of lip rouge to pinken her conversation. Her colorless face just disapproves of them all. Even Sophie. Especially Sophie.

“Oh, I didn't find it indecent at all,” Sophie chirps back. “I thought it was wonderfully daring. After all, it's only what everybody thinks inside, but doesn't say out loud.”

“
I
don't think those things,” the lady replies, her longest sentence yet.

“Maybe you're only suppressing them.” Sophie smiles kindly. “You know, the very
first
requirement of mental health is—”

“Why, Sophie, darling!” A pair of arms encircles Sophie's waist, and a sticky kiss finds her cheek. “I've been looking all over for you, and here you are, all tête à tête with my own sister!”

“Your
sister
?”

“Yes! Isn't it grand? Christina, Sophie's going to marry Jay Ochsner, the lucky thing.”

“So I understand,” says Christina, and now Sophie remembers where she heard that voice before: in the elevator of Bergdorf Goodman's, full of marbles.

Julie continues. “The thing is, I desperately need to borrow Sophie for just an instant, if you can
possibly
spare her. A friend of mine who won't believe Jay's engaged unless she actually sees the ring. Not that I blame her!”

Christina's mouth adjusts to a tense and insincere smile. “Not at all. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Fortescue.”

“A pleasure, Mrs.—”

“Dane,” says Julie's sister, just before she turns away.

“You've got to forgive her, I suppose,” Julie says, as she drags Sophie in an experienced serpentine through the closely packed drawing room. “Her husband came back from the war an absolute wreck, and I can't seem to persuade her to find a substitute. I don't think she's had any fun since nineteen seventeen.”

“How dreadful for her!”

“Isn't it?
Now
you see what I mean about suppressing the sex-instinct. The damage it does to your psychology!”

Julie's fingers bite into Sophie's hand as they writhe through the crowd, reaching a pocket of air at last. She lifts a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and hands it to Sophie. “Here you are, darling. You look as if you need it. That was really unhandsome of Jay, leaving you with my sister like that, all tender and unarmed. Was she perfectly awful to you?”

Champagne at last. Sophie tilts her chin and takes a
long
sip, and it's just as lovely as she remembers, tickling her throat and her brain both at once. “Not too awful,” she says, thinking of Mrs. Dane's tragic husband and her suppressed sex-instinct. Would Sophie turn out like that, some day soon? After all, the sex-instinct doesn't seem to run high in her, either, except perhaps during those first kisses, or when reading indecent novels, which hardly counted. So maybe her unconscious suppression is already so steely that—

“You're too sweet, darling. Say what you think. My sister's a sad old Mrs. Grundy, and you're indebted to me for rescuing you.”

“Rescuing me?”

Julie's found her own champagne by now, and she gestures with the glass. She's beautifully dressed in a shimmery low-waisted frock that flatters the modern angularity of her figure, and her lips are a dark and dangerous scarlet. The exact symmetry of her blond curls leaves Sophie feeling faintly frizzy. “With my mythical friend, remember? The one who wants to meet your engagement ring.”

“Oh! I'd forgotten about her.”

“It doesn't help that you're keeping the pretty bauble under wraps like that.”

Sophie examines her left glove. “I already had to show it off once this evening, to Jay's sister.”

“Oh, to the great Mrs. Marshall! Do tell.”

“Tell what?”

“Well, what was she like? I've never met her, though I've seen her from afar. The Queen Vamp.”

Sophie peers between the beautiful bodies and says absently, “She's very lovely. Much kinder than your sister. She's going to throw us an engagement party.”

“There you are, then. An engagement party on Fifth Avenue! You've arrived, my darling, truly arrived.” Julie looks one way and another. “Where's the lucky fellow, by the way?”

“Actually, I haven't the slightest idea. He disappeared about half an hour ago.”

“Even better. You're coming along with me.”

“Where to?” says Sophie, following Julie's immaculate blond curls once more, thinking they're headed for another room, more private; or else a terrace of some kind, overlooking Park Avenue, where Julie could indulge in a cigarette or a cocktail without any matronly disapproval dampening the experience. Not that much disapproval circulates in the Schuyler drawing room at the moment. Giggles, lipstick, tobacco, juice of juniper. But not disapproval, as if the new modern tempo has even beat its syncopated rhythms into the salons of the Upper East Side, and nobody gives a damn about anything any more.

Julie turns her head just enough to display the neat ripple of her hair, winging past the upper curve of her ear before it meets the knot at her nape. “Downtown, of course. I've fallen in love again, sweet Sophie, and I'm in desperate need of a chaperone.”

THE THING ABOUT JULIE, SHE
doesn't give a damn. Sophie, who grew up inside the claustrophobia of the house on Thirty-Second Street, hardly dreaming of escape, can't quite comprehend the audacity with which Julie departs from Park Avenue, hails herself a taxi, and drags Sophie inside: never asking for permission, never bidding farewell to her hostess, never informing Sophie's luckless fiancé where they've gone.

“He deserves it, for abandoning you to my sister,” Julie says, when Sophie raises this point of etiquette, above the sputtering engine of the taxi.

“That's true.”

“Anyway, you're not joined at the hip, just because you're engaged. That's the old way of doing things. It's a new world out there, kiddo, waiting to be explored.” She taps the window of the taxi with her short, lacquered fingernail.

“But why?” asks Sophie. “Wasn't the old world good enough?”

“God, no. Look at our parents. Look at the war they foisted on us, all that nonsense about honor and duty and sacrifice. What did that ever get anybody? Dead, that's all. Dead with nothing to show for it. Or else like my brother-in-law, coughing up each poor lung, bit by bit, trying to get the poison out. We're free now, Sophie,
free
. We've got the vote, we've got cars and jobs and freedom.”

“But you don't have a job.”

“Well, I
could
have one. I
should
.” Julie reaches into her pocketbook and produces a cigarette case. “I've been thinking about it, actually. It's all the rage, don't you know, having jobs. Cousin Philip's a lawyer. I'm thinking of asking him to take me on.”

“But you haven't studied the law, have you?”

“Oh, I imagine he'd find me something.” She lights the cigarette and hands it to Sophie, who shakes her head. “The only trouble is you've got to be awake so awfully early in the morning. But that's not a problem for
you,
is it?”

“Me? But I'm getting married.”

“All the more reason. It never does any good to sit around the house, waiting for your man to arrive.
That's
the old rules.”

Julie crosses her legs, displaying an extraordinary amount of stocking. Sophie thought that hemlines were supposed to be going down again, after the shocking excess of the past couple of years, but Julie's calves don't seem to care what the fashion editors say. Her stockings aren't white or decorous black, but the color of skin.

“I can't imagine what I could do,” Sophie says. “I didn't learn anything especially useful at school, just English and French and mathematics and all that, and Father wouldn't hear of sending me to college.”

“No, I imagine not. But you have lots of interests, haven't you? What do you especially like?”

“Well, I—nothing, really. Nothing I could make a living at. Books and art, mostly.”

“But there's something else, isn't there? You hesitated.”

“It's nothing.”

Julie takes her hand. “Darling, you've got to learn to let these things out in the open. You're going to fester from within, and then where will you be? An old festering housewife, like my sister.”

“I like machines.”

“What's that? Don't mumble it, like a ninny. Say it out loud! I . . . LIKE . . .”

“MACHINES!”

“
Machines
?” Julie's so surprised, she drops Sophie's hand into her lap, kerplonk. She points out the window, where a nearby taxi putters alongside. “Do you mean . . . well, engines?”

“Not just engines, I guess. Everything. I like . . . well, I've always liked to figure out how things work. Since I was a child.”

“Like a . . . a
mechanic
?” As she might say
prostitute.

“Like my father.” Sophie makes a watery laugh and returns her fingers to her own lap. “I used to help Father in his workshop, when I was younger. He showed me how to fix the car and that kind of thing. He said I had a knack for it.”

“A
knack
for it? How very . . . well. Why not? Apples not falling far and that kind of thing. Only . . .
really
? More than, say . . . oh, magazines?”

“I wanted to be just like him when I was little. I didn't have a mother, you know.”

“Oh, your
mother
! In that case, it makes tremendous sense, now that I think about it. A withdrawal of maternal attention can have the most awful effect on your subconscious. You attached yourself to your father instead, and—well, goodness me, it's a wonder you weren't dressing yourself up in short pants.” She opens up her pocketbook and rummages inside. “I sup
pose that's awfully useful, though. A little
oily,
maybe, but useful. Do you go about the house, fixing things?”

“No. Father does all that, and anyway, he doesn't let me help him anymore. A thing of the past.”

Julie produces a cigarette and lights herself up. “Because it's not ladylike, I suppose?”

“Something like that.”

“Well.”

“Yes.
Well.
” Sophie laughs again. “Not really a suitable job, is it? Can you just see Jay's face?
I'm off to the garage, darling.
”

“Well, it wouldn't have to be a garage, would it? Dirty things, garages. What about a nice clean . . . you know, a place where you could still”—Julie twists her fingers about, fitting some imaginary bolt—“but without the . . . well, without spoiling your hands.”

Sophie turns to the window. The lining of her chest is raw, as if she's swallowed a sword or a blunt razor. “Never mind. It's just an old hobby, that's all. I've grown up now.”

“Yes, you have, thank God. Still, it's a talent, isn't it? I'll ask around and see what I can find for you. Maybe a place with an architect, or—well, those men who design things.”

“An engineer.”

“That's it.”

“But I really—”

“No objections. It would do you all kinds of good.” Julie waves away the smoke with her elegant, ungloved hand. “You can start when you're back from your honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon?”

“Yes, honeymoon. Everybody takes them now. You should go away for two or three weeks at least, get it all out of your system.”

“Get what out of my system?”

“Darling,” Julie says pityingly. “Sex.”

Sex. A year ago, Sophie hadn't even thought about sex, and now it's all
around her, right out in the open. It's all anyone can talk about. The films are full of it, and so are the books and theaters. It's as if a dazzling new color has suddenly been added to the rainbow, and you didn't realize what you were missing before, except that sometimes it's a little
too
dazzling, isn't it? You sort of wish that the landscape would calm down a bit, from time to time. To give your eyes a little rest. To think about something else. But nobody else seems to feel the way Sophie does. Nobody else seems to want to rest their eyes a single minute. Nobody wants to think about anything else.

They arrive at their destination, a plain brick-fronted house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Julie trips right up to the door and rings the doorbell, and a few seconds later a small window slides open and Julie leans forward and says something across the dark rectangle. Sophie shrinks inside her coat. The air is terribly cold, colder even than it was when they left Park Avenue, and tiny snowflakes are swirling like dust beneath the streetlamp on the corner. The door opens, and Julie drags her inside.