Saints and Sinners (13 page)

We went back into the room and surprised Mr. Coughlan, who was wolfing the sandwiches. The moment he saw us he made some apologetic murmur and bolted. Mama whispered to me that there was a strong smell of drink off him and said that no one ever knew the skeletons that lurked in other people's cupboards. She removed the fire screen and out of habit poked the fire and put a sod on it, and then she vetted the contents of the room more carefully, estimated the cost of all the furnishings, and said if she could have one item it would be the tea trolley and perhaps the mirror with the little candelabras on either side, but that she would not give tuppence for the piano. Then, as if I were absent, she said aloud to herself that there was no swelling and no rash, and that for a woman to wish to go to the doctor at that hour of evening was fishy, decidedly fishy.

"I adored her silver shoes," I said, trying to sound grown up.

"Did you, darling," she said, but she was too busy cogitating matters such as how much did he drink, did husband and wife get on, and why were very young children in a boarding school, and why did the sister, the ex-nun, live with them.

The doctor was something of a ladies' man, and though Mama did not refer to it, it was known that he kissed young nurses in the grounds of the hospital and had taken a student nurse once to Limerick to the pictures, where they stayed canoodling for the second showing, much to the annoyance of the usherette. She conceded that though the green georgette dress and the shoes were the height of fashion, it was not the kind of attire to wear when going to a doctor. At that very moment and like a lunatic, I imagined Drew lying on the doctor's couch, he leaning in over her, patting her lip, perhaps with iodine, she flinching, her complexion so soft, a little flushed, and how both, as in a drama, had a sudden urge to kiss each other, but did not dare to. We sat for a bit and helped ourselves to some biscuits.

When they got back they showed real surprise at our being still there. I even think that Drew was irked.

"Nothing serious I hope," Mama said, and Effie flinched and said that Drew had been given an ointment and also a tonic, because she was very run-down. He had, it seems, checked her eyelids for anemia. Drew looked different, as if something thrilling had happened to her, and was gloating over the fact that the doctor and his wife were on first names with her, as if they'd all known one another for an age. It seems they had to wait in the hall as the doctor was tending to an epileptic child, and while they were waiting, his wife came through and chatted with them, offered them a sherry, and insisted that they call her Madeleine. Mama's hopes were thus dashed. The doctor's wife used to know us, used to visit us, which was such an honor and meant that we were people of note. Mama did things for her, like sew and knit and bake, and always kept a baby gin in a hidden drawer so that she could be given a tipple, unbeknownst to my father, when she came. Then she stopped coming, and much to Mama's bewilderment—we were never given a reason, and there had been no coolness and no argument. Months later, we heard that she told the draper's wife that our milk had a terrible smell and that she would not be visiting again. It had so happened that on one occasion when she came, the grass was very rich and hence the milk did smell somewhat strong, but being a town person she would not know the reason.

Effie then said that Drew should go straight to bed, and Mama concurred and asked if we might be excused. She was too conciliatory, even though she was rattled within.

"So glad you could both come," Mrs. Coughlan said, but it lacked warmth—it was like telling us that we were dull and lusterless and that we were not people of note.

"Well, now I can say I met the grand Mrs. Coughlan," Mama said tartly as we walked home, and she repeated her old adage about old friends and new friends — when you make new friends, forget not the old, for the new ones are silver, but the old ones are gold.

We were in a gloom. The grass was heavy with dew, cattle lying down, munching and wheezing. She did not warn me to lift my feet in order to preserve my white shoes, as she was much preoccupied. There was no light from the kitchen window, which signified that my father had gone up to bed and that we would have to bring him a cup of tea and humor him, as otherwise he would be testy on the morrow.

I had this insatiable longing for tinned peaches, but Mama said it would be an extravagance to open a tin at that hour, while promising that we would have them some Sunday with an orange souffle, which she had just mastered the recipe for. Mixed in with my longing was a mounting rage. Our lives seemed so drab, so uneventful. I prayed for drastic things to occur—for the bullocks to rise up and mutiny, then gore one another, for my father to die in his sleep, for our school to catch fire, and for Mr. Coughlan to take a pistol and shoot his wife, before shooting himself.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT OR thereabouts. The heat belching up from the grids in the pavement, trumpet, or was it trombone, and the hands of the homeless, the fingers thin and suppliant, like twigs, outstretched for alms. We were relative strangers to each other and strangers in that lively, pulsing city.

To leave a party that was held in your honor we risked the odium of the ever-wrathful Penelope, but yet we did, a knowing glance and a nod, even as a coven of women had swarmed around you in evident and gushing admiration. Your scarlet cummerbund was much remarked upon.

On the stairway we accidentally kicked some marbled boules balls that were there as ornament and that came skeetering down along with us. Nor was that our only miscreance. In the pocket of your dinner jacket was a coffee cup, severed from its fragile handle, which had somehow affixed itself to my little finger. In order to avert a crisis, you simply put both in your pocket and mum was the word. It was a turquoise-colored cup and white handle with gold edging, which with a nicety you placed courteously by the foot scraper at the top of the flight of steep steps.

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been. There is the stone bench, for instance, where we sat that night to quench our thirst, but really to call it into existence, and a wall with two water nozzles cemented together, metal tubers bearing the trade name "Siamese." A bit of concrete wall against which you threw me cruciform-wise to press your ebullient suit.

"Is there a place for me in some part of your life?" was what you asked. Yes. Yes, was the answer. We walked uptown and down, not knowing what to do with ourselves, not knowing whether to part, or to prolong the vertigo and sweet suspense. I asked what you thought of the tall, brown building that seemed to tilt like a lake above us, a brown lake of offices, deserted at that hour and poised as if to come heaving down into the street. You admired it but said you would have varied the cladding. I found the word so quaint and teased you over it. By asking for a place in the margin of my life, you were by inference letting me know that you also were not free, that you were married, something I would have assumed anyhow.

Only fools think that men and women love differently. Fools and pedagogues. I tell you, the love of men for women is just as heartbreaking, just as muddled, just as bewildering, and in the end just as unfinished. Men have talked to me of their infidelities. A man I met at a conference described to me how he had been unfaithful for twenty-odd years, yet upon learning of his wife's first infidelity, went berserk, took a car ride, beat up his opponent, came home, broke down, and sat up with her all night thrashing out the million moments and nonmoments of their marriage, the expectations, the small treacheries, the large ones, and the gifts that they gave or had failed to give. Then, weary and somewhat purged, they had made love at dawn and she had said to him—this unslept, no-longer-young, but marvelous wife—If you must have an affair, do, but try not to, and he swore that he would not, but feared that somewhere along the way he would succumb, yield to the smarms of the Sirens.

Of all the things that can be said about love, the strangest is when it strikes. For instance, I saw you once in a theater lobby in London and you struck me as a rather conventional man. I thought, There is a man with a wife and undoubtedly two motorcars, a cottage in the country to which he repairs at weekends, one car stacked with commodities, wine, cheeses, virgin olive oil, things like that, a man not disposed to dalliances. Maybe like my friend you have sat up with a wife one entire night, atoning, and maybe it seemed as if everything was forgiven, but something always remains and festers.

Of course, I knew you by reputation and read complimentary articles about your buildings, those wings and temples and rotundas that have made you famous and bear the granite solemnity that is your trademark. Between that austerity and your wine-red cheek, where the blood flowed in a velvety excitement at the dinner party, I saw your two natures at odds, your caution and your appetite.

We walked and walked. The truffle hound and his moll, chambering. Chambering. Then we stood outside my hotel and looked at the display in a glass case of the larger bedrooms, which were decorated in gold and apricot shades, with bright chintz upholstery. You did not come up. But it was a near thing, holding each other, unable to let go, and melting.

Your gift arrived the next afternoon, after you had left to go home to England. It was an orchid that stood in a cake box, the pot filled with pebbles, gray-white pebbles that recall wintry seashores. The white-faced petals high on the thin slender stalk suggested butterflies poised for flight. Flight. Have you fled from me? I imagine not. Unable to sleep at night, I look at it, and from the slice of light that enters where the curtains do not meet, it looks somehow spectral.

You had put me in such a flowing state of mind and body that I determined to befriend all those whom I met. A tall black wraith of a man with one missing eye put his hand out imploring and I gave, liberally. He launched into an irrational spiel of how he had fought in the Civil War, to defend the right of God and man, had been there alongside Ulysses S. Grant. The fawn flap over the missing eye was pitiful. He walked along with me, unwilling to cut short his lament.

Strange how suited we were. The right height, the right gravity, the right tongues, and oh, idiocy of idiocies, the right wall. Does something of us remain there, some trace, like the frescoes in caves, scarcely visible? You asked if we might make love in all the capital cities throughout the world, if we might go to them in secrecy and return in secrecy, hoarding the sweet memories of them. We would not enter into a marriage that must by necessity become a little stale, a little routined. Yes, yes was the answer. Yet the friend Paul who saw us leave Penelope's gathering said that I looked back at him disconcerted, like Lot's wife before she was turned into a pillar of salt.

An affair. It is a loaded word. A state of flux, fluxion.

So many dire things happen, plus so many transporting things. Letters get opened by the wrong party or the gift of a trinket gets sent to the wrong address by a novice at the jewelers'. A woman I know secretly read the list that her husband's newest mistress had jotted down for her Christmas stocking—Krug champagne, lingerie, a bracelet, and last, but by no means least, a baby. Yes, in capitals—A BABY. The wife went into action. She took him to the Far East on a cruise, to various islands, all very rustic, remote, wooden boats with wooden chairs, huts to sleep in, dancing girls and garlands of gardenias put around the necks of this mistrustful pair. Before they left home, the wife had done something rather clever and rather vicious. She had sent the predatory young woman copies of other letters written by other women, enabling her to see the graspingness and the similarity of these missives, reminding her that unfortunately she was one of many. A touch of the Strindberg. Another woman told me that she first got a whiff of her husband's affair not from rifling his pockets, but from the simple fact that when his mistress came to their house for cocktails, she brought her rival a bunch of dead flowers. Carnations. Later that evening, when they had all repaired to a restaurant, she saw husband and mistress in cahoots, then remembered the dead flowers, stood up, and made her first ever, somewhat pathetic, scene— "I am going to the bathroom now and then I am going home" was what she said. He did not follow immediately, but soon after he did, and found her on a sofa eating the flowers as if they were coconut shreds, then spitting them out, and he simply said that he hated scenes, women's scenes, then went out onto the balcony and walked up and down, but stayed, as she said, stayed.

Clarissa calls me from the West Coast most days. I met her after I had given a lecture out there and she sensed that we had something in common. A little thing happened to unite us. The contents of her bucket handbag fell out and I said, "What's wrong, Clarissa, what's wrong," at which she turned and asked if I believed she was having a breakdown. She is seeing a trauma specialist. Her mother, whom she scarcely knew, has recently died, and in the wake of this death, a mountain of troubles has assailed her. Her mother's death has opened a trapdoor into the unknown. Her mother, who was beautiful and also rich, never really discussed things, and this now is causing Clarissa to drop handbags, oversalt the food, and have a sherry in the morning, she who does not even like drink. She wants to ask her dead mother a key question about a naked man in her bedroom. She was a toddler who had ambled across a landing, whereupon the mother shouted at her to get out. The man must have been an old flame. At camp, to which she was sent aged twelve, she saw a photograph of a woman who resembled her mother and kissed it when others were out of sight. She kissed it, and at home she smelt a nightgown that was hanging forlornly in a wardrobe. It smelt of mother. She has something important to tell me, but she does not know how to say it. She trusts me because of the debacle of the handbag.