Private Lies (10 page)

"I don't dream much anymore," she said, wondering
if it was true.

"I do. Certain things never go away." He tapped
the side of his head. "As Maggie would say: 'It's in the RAM.'"

Carol tapped her head to mimic him. "And that's where
it must stay."

"We had a high tide in our lives. Too short. But it
sure had power. How many people have that?"

"In a lifetime it was nothing more than a wink,"
she said.

"Maybe one wink like that in a lifetime makes it all
worthwhile."

Was it really that good, that special? Would she be here if
it wasn't? She felt some distant disturbance, like a brewing storm. The old
images flooded back again, vivid, all-encompassing.

He took her hand and brought it to his heart. "Feel
that. The old pump is raging."

Their eyes met and he brought her hand to his lips, kissing
her palm.

"My God, Ken." She pulled her hand away. But the
simple act had sent shockwaves through her, triggering conflicting emotions.
She felt herself trying to assemble an expression of indignance, but without
success. Being here was a mistake, she decided.

"I'm sorry, Carol," he said. He shook his head.
"You can't go home again. Everybody knows that. And the fact is, that I've
been a good and faithful husband. It was very stupid of me."

Her coffee had gotten cold and she had covered her cup when
the waitress came to refill it.

"I just thought it was important for you to know all
this, Ken." She hoped it would sound a concluding note.

"And I appreciate it. Now the four of us can be
friends." She caught the sarcasm in his tone.

She looked at her watch. Eliot would expect her to be home.
A brief tremor of resentment washed over her. But she knew the meeting could
not end, not yet. There was still something left unsaid. She hesitated,
gathering her thoughts.

"What is it, Carol?"

"I'm not sure I can ask this of you," she said.
"And of myself."

"Ask away."

"I would like this to end it."

"End it? We did that more than twenty years ago."

"I mean all references, all talk, all acknowledgment
of our previous life. I know that the four of us will be together again and I
would like your promise."

"To block out the past. Pretend we never met ...
never..." His voice trailed off into a chuckle.

"Like we met the first time last week at
Pumpkins."

He was silent for a long moment.

"I promise," Ken said, lifting his right hand.

"I'm serious, Ken." She felt his eyes studying
her.

"I never saw you before in my life," he
whispered.

She inspected his face, searching for sincerity. Yes, she
thought. He will not betray me.

"Well, then. I appreciate our chat. And I feel better
for it."

She stood up. He did as well, then stepped forward as if to
offer a farewell kiss, but she moved away and put out her hand instead. He took
it, pressed it.

"You have nothing to fear from me, Carol," Ken
said.

"I know that now," she said.

What did one more lie matter?

"I'M SO GLAD we're all getting along so splendidly,"
Maggie said, applying makeup remover as she sat at the dressing table in the
bedroom of their Park Slope row house in Brooklyn.

Ken lay in bed, fatigued by his four-month effort of
dissimulation, wondering why he was putting himself through this torture of
denial and proximity. But Carol's presence in his life was pervasive, crowding
out all other thoughts and ideas, exaggerating the trivial aspects of his work,
and emphasizing the shame of his surrender.

They had come back from yet another evening together. They
had seen
Phantom of the Opera
. He had sat next to Carol throughout the
performance, fighting the urge to place his leg next to hers, to kiss the
beauty mark on her white swan's neck, to smother her with his embrace. The
fantasies were becoming too vivid to tolerate and it took all his energy to
exercise self-control.

They were, as always, appropriately polite. An observer
might say they were actually visibly disinterested in each other. That had been
the agreed-upon conduct. But it was getting increasingly difficult for Ken to
abide by the game plan.

Worse, Eliot appeared to him to be even more pompous and
authoritarian every time they met, although, considering Ken's growing but
secret animosity toward the man, he suspected he might be reacting unfairly. He
even admitted to himself a slight tinge of jealousy, an embarrassing
misapplication of emotion since its root was not Maggie's interest in Eliot but
Eliot's interest in Carol.

Maggie and Eliot always enjoyed these evenings. They seemed
to be tapping into an endless well of interests and enthusiasms, especially
baffling since they were spending a great deal of time together during the day
working on Eliot's ever-growing data base.

"No more hopping and churning with Eliot's data,"
Maggie told him. "We're integrating everything. And it's one helluva job.
This fellow has a claptrap mind and a mountain of interests."

"And he pays on time."

"Yes, he does," Maggie agreed. "But he's
getting value received, state-of-the-art computerization. Well worth it from
his point of view."

The financial aspects of the relationship were not to be
ignored. Nor was the cost of these evenings. Ken insisted on paying his and
Maggie's share of all checks, which usually meant sharing costs down the
middle, submitting two credit cards for the proprietors to split between them.

At first, Eliot had tried to pay for everything, but Ken
would have none of that. He was certain that passive acceptance of Eliot's
largesse in any form would diminish him in Carol's eyes. To be fair, Maggie
would never have allowed that either. But it was telling on the Kramer
exchequer.

It never ceased to amaze Ken how what had once seemed like
fairly high incomes still left them tight financially, with little left to put
away for the proverbial rainy day. He supposed they could manage better if they
tried, but that would only add parsimony to their already stretched lives. And,
after all, weren't they the get-it-now-by-living-on-credit generation? It
wasn't admirable, certainly not noble or practical, but it sure beat the shit
out of penny-pinching.

They were, in fact, sitting on a pile of mounting debt, and
the truth of it was that it could only get worse. College was on the horizon
for the girls, who were this summer on the obligatory chaperoned teenage tour
of Europe.

"Every generation must boost the next," Maggie
told him, "whatever the cost." When he offered her his occasional
protests, especially on indulgences for the girls, she turned a deaf ear. Not
that Maggie was blind to their financial realities. She was, after all, a
practical midwestern girl. And she did represent more than a third of their
earnings. But she believed, in apparently boundless optimism, that things could
only get better.

"We're no longer Yuppies, we're Brokies," he told
her often. Maggie did not dispute him, adopting the philosophy that their
income must rise to meet the standard, not the other way around. Between them
they were earning nearly $225,000 a year, and Ken was paying more taxes in one
year than his bookkeeper father had earned in two decades.

They owned their own row house near Prospect Park and had borrowed against the equity. The girls' school tuition was costing more than
twenty thousand a year and college tuition would be much higher.

They hadn't realized it at first, but the truth was that as
the children grew older, their life-style was eroding. They were falling more
and more behind. The old measures of financial success no longer applied.

Even the comfortable rationalization that Ken had applied
to himself, the idea that he had somehow sold out his artistic ambitions for
money and creature comforts, did not apply. He was, indeed, a failure on both
counts. The brutal fact was that an after-tax income of approximately $150,000
a year no longer bought the quality life-style that such a number suggested.
Unfortunately, the illusion persisted far beyond the reality.

His father, long gone, who had lived through the Great
Depression, would have laughed at him for complaining. He had come through an
era in which to earn ten thousand a year was Valhalla, and when his son was
earning three times that much, he assumed that his greatest hopes for his son's
success had been fulfilled. What a laugh.

It was as much of a disappointment to Maggie as it was to
Ken, to be earning what had once seemed like big money only to discover that it
was like a price tag before the mark-down at a fire sale, a label that did not
represent the real cost.

Still, they had both agreed not to take the children out of
their schools, not to be deterred by tuition costs at the better colleges, not
to cut down on the other amenities that city life had to offer, such as the
theater, concerts, restaurants. After all, they had to live up to their
upwardly mobile status. The important thing, they had concluded early on in
their marriage, was to understand the ideals of an ethical life. Such ideals
protected you from those other values, the empty ones you lived by, the hollow
little hypocrisies.

It was true, he told himself, that Carol had failed in her
bid to be a prima ballerina, but at least her failure had ended in a soft
financial landing. That was something, not much in the context of artistic
idealism, but something, or, more to the point, better than nothing.

Carol's pep talk about it never being too late for a writer
had briefly sparked him into channeling his thoughts into more than bravado and
fantasy. He began to think again about stories, characters interacting, plots,
ironies. To further inspire him he had returned to reading Hemingway. But the
physical act and the financial reality of starting to write again was daunting.
His life was bogged down with responsibilities. And there was the drain of his
job at the agency, his ersatz "creative" life. Carol's presence had
simply added more weight to his many burdens.

"Frankly, I was worried that Carol and you would have
little to say to each other," Maggie said, obviously to deflect the
attention from the cost of the evening.

"She's okay," Ken murmured. Oh, God, deliver me
from such faint praise, he cried in his heart.

"At first you seemed absolutely antagonistic toward
her. You actually ignored her. But I'm glad you're giving her a chance. She's
really a lovely person."

"Why concern yourself? Eliot is obviously the star of
that relationship," Ken said cautiously, showing his loyalty to Carol's
wishes.

"He's a very intriguing man, don't you think?"

"Yes, he is," Ken lied. It was hard enough
keeping his true feelings about Eliot repressed to himself in the man's
presence. "And a good pay," he added. It was as far as he dared go
with Maggie. His opinion of Eliot as a tight-assed boring snob would have
raised her hackles, set off Maggie's silent antagonisms. No upside in stepping
on that mine, he decided.

"Carol seems to have an interesting background. A
prima ballerina," Maggie said. "That's quite an achievement. If only
she wasn't so withdrawn."

"I guess we should try harder to get her out of her
shell," Ken said, in a saccharine tone of concealed insincerity.

"Eliot truly wants us to have a long couples
relationship." She looked at him and smiled benignly. "So do we. We
owe ourselves a couples relationship."

"What does he think of me?" Ken asked, ignoring
her enthusiasm. Did he care, he wondered, what the pompous prick thought of
him?

"He finds you very interesting," Maggie said
without conviction. "I told him about your wanting to write novels."

So now she was selling him as something more than the
creator of Slender Benders. Suddenly he regretted the lip service he had given
to his writing ambition, although it had gained him some credibility with
Maggie, especially in the early days of their marriage.

"I wish you wouldn't," he protested.

"He was very impressed," Maggie said, putting the
finishing touches to her pre-sleep ablutions. "Might be of some help
getting you published someday. Eliot has connections."

Ken felt his stomach flop over. He would rather be tortured
on the rack in Macy's window than use that man's connections.

"It's you and he that are the real soul mates,"
Ken said, instantly sorry for the statement, which might be interpreted by her
as a husband's indignation.

"In a way, I suppose," she said, studying herself
in the mirror, oblivious to his indignation. Then she turned to him and smiled
gently. "You can't be jealous?"

"I'm not," he told her truthfully.

"He's a close colleague and, as you can see, very much
married to a lovely girl."

"I think they're a great couple," Ken muttered.

"It's nice to have couple friends."

"Especially rich ones."

"That's unfair. They're substantial in other ways as
well."

"Of course they are," Ken backtracked, fearful
that any further antagonism on his part might inhibit their social relationship
with the Butterfields. To be deprived of being with Carol, however painful, was
better than never seeing her again. Above all, he didn't want that to happen.

There was a practical consideration as well. Eliot was also
Maggie's client, a dispenser of dollars for their family coffers. Ordinarily,
Ken would have consented to the obligatory friendly get-together with the man's
spouse. But a superior self-righteous prig like Eliot would have been tolerated
for one time only, and despite all pleadings, Ken would have rejected any
second meeting out of hand.

Maggie also rejected any corporate-wife bullshit with Ken's
co-workers, except for the occasional command performance with the
powers-that-be. But, then, Ken avoided all corporate political entanglements,
relying on his so-called "creativity" to generate enough mystique to
make him a neutral asset in this small-time corporate game.

Aside from their client relationship, Maggie and Eliot did
have common links. They were both wide-ranging intellectual generalists with
gourmet tastes and sentimental attachments to causes and movements. Ken was
actually proud of Maggie's interests, her deep-thinking quick mind, and,
despite her less than efficient command of their financial matters, her
marvelous stewardship of their daughters' education and emotional well-being.

Maggie was, above all, an organizer. She had forced an
outward organization of Ken's life, leaving him to the sometimes dubious luxury
of a messy, fantasy-ridden, and secret interior life. Sometimes he felt
claustrophobic, in tow. She chose his clothes, his food and entertainment,
planned their vacations, and looked out for his health concerns, his exercise
routines, and what she believed were his sexual and romantic needs, most of
which could be defined as unlimited access to her big, beautiful breasts.

Maggie, he was certain, could never jump off the cliff of
emotional stability into the whirlpool of sexual obsession and romantic excess
that had characterized his episode with Carol. As for Maggie's physical needs,
they were, he suspected, somewhat less than what she revealed. Her programmed
sexual enthusiasms were always suspect, however energetic his technique and
vocal her exclamations of pleasure. She had, he suspected, developed a
repertoire of mechanical bedroom moves that, combined with his active
imagination and her well-cared-for body, was enough to carry the moment. It
wasn't exactly passion, but it wasn't masturbation either.

Marrying her was one of Ken's more rational acts. He had
once included his breakup with Carol in that category. An artist, he had
consciously decided, needed a stable outer life to counter the turmoil of his
self-absorbed creative inner life. Excess, as he had learned, was dangerous and
destructive. And his relationship with Carol had been both.

Maggie, on the other hand, was "state of the
art." From the beginning it seemed the operative description, from the
moment she walked into BBD&O's copy-writing bullpen, where he was a
fledgling "sell-out," which was the way they referred to themselves
in those days.

"This is Maggie Nielsen," a BBD&O
vice-president, nameless and faceless in his memory, had announced. "She's
going to computerize us."

What struck Ken most about her was the air of openness and
good humor she exhibited even when subjected to the smart-alecky comments of
his brash co-workers, who, like himself, were determined to resist the computer
and all it portended as the enemy of creativity.

"I am going to give you state-of-the-art
support," she had pledged, offering her big-toothed smile. There was
something unflappable about her with her long blonde hair and concentrated
energy. There was also something unexpected about her. From afar her clean,
blonde Scandinavian good looks indicated that she was sure to have blue eyes.
They were gray.