I'll Take Manhattan (14 page)

Lily stopped wearing lipstick, saying that she had become allergic to it; she carried a tiny hairbrush in her handbag at all times and a small bottle of perfume and carefully folded wads of Kleenex. She kept a small traveling toothbrush and a miniature tube of toothpaste in the same bag, and they both used it when they could, but if they weren’t near a bathroom they drank some brandy as soon as they joined any group of people. They were both mad with lust, but not so mad as not to realize that they must smell of sex.

Lily grew addicted to the postponed satisfactions; she gloried in not knowing what he was going to do to her. She refused herself any gratification no matter how he had frustrated her, so that she was melting, fluttering with desire at every hour, particularly as she was dressing to go to one of the many parties to which they were all invited, since Cutter had quickly become a part of the group of people the Ambervilles saw almost every evening of that New York spring season. Whenever she crossed her legs she had a short, quick orgasmic spasm.

Lily dropped out of almost all of her committee work with vague excuses, and refused all lunch dates so that she would always be free to meet Cutter at his apartment if he called. He could take the subway back and forth to Wall Street and still have time enough to spend a long half hour
with her in the middle of the day, and that became the only time they would lie totally naked in bed together. But he rationed this pleasure unnecessarily, saying he had to go to business lunches, because he far preferred the chances they took in public places to the shelter of his bed; preferred the dominion over her that he had by merely touching her elbow, taking her away from a cluster of people, particularly when Zachary was part of that cluster. Sometimes Cutter would stand next to Lily, queenly silk-clad, Lily, Lily in her splendid jewels, with her sheaves of hair flowing down her back, for she would wear it no other way now, and talk business to Zachary for three-quarters of an hour, knowing that she was waiting for him to signal her. Then he would walk away with barely an excuse and talk to somebody else. Those were the best moments of all, those evenings when he would deny both of them, when he would merely brush her cheeks with his lips at the end of the party, knowing that at any minute during the past hours he could have had his brother’s wife kneeling at his feet, her lips open to receive him.

Ever since Maxi was born, the Ambervilles had owned a summer house, a great shingled mansion that overlooked the Atlantic from its perch above the Southampton Dunes. Lily enjoyed those lazy summers. There was something almost English about the quality of utter leisure, the taking of tea, the cutting of roses, the croquet games, the daily visits to the Maidstone Club to play tennis in an atmosphere of protected, soft-voiced, well-mannered distance from the New York crowds. She found more time for her children during the summers and on the weekday evenings, when Zachary was rarely able to drive out for dinner, she often
chose not to see anyone, but to eat alone. After dinner she would sometimes walk by herself on the beach, feeling the sand still warm under her bare feet, thinking about nothing at all, and find herself almost happy.

Now as she faced the summer of 1958, a July and August that would separate her from Cutter except for the weekends, Lily tried frantically to find a reason to stay in the city. But there simply wasn’t one: she could hardly send Toby and Maxi and the servants out to the beach by themselves while she camped in the city house with a skeleton staff on the pretext of not wanting to leave Zachary alone … everyone would find that most unusual and unnecessary, Zachary above all.

It was still mid-June but she thought of little else than the impossible summer ahead. She went through the motions of her life without allowing her preoccupation to become visible, as once she had danced with bleeding feet and a brilliantly fixed smile, until, in the middle of one spring night, she woke up in a state of alarm from a nightmare that she couldn’t remember a split second after she opened her eyes. Her heart was beating so heavily that Lily pressed her hands over her breasts bearing down on her fright, unable to sort out her thoughts. Her heart began to slow down as she tried to recollect the dream. What could have so terrified her? She lay still, searching, her hands still cupped comfortingly around her breasts, taking deep breaths, when suddenly a message passed from flesh to flesh and her heart lurched again into a violent rhythm. Only twice before in her life had her breasts felt like this: sensitive, warmer than usual, with a hint of the fullness to come.

There was no question of whose baby it was. She had allowed Zachary to make love to her a minimum of times in the last months, only often enough to prevent any possibility of a confrontation, and each time she had taken every precaution not to become pregnant. With Cutter she had forgotten the meaning of caution just as she had forgotten everything else in her recklessness.

Joy, a joy that accepted none of the problems of reality, invaded her. The fear she had awakened vanished totally as Lily, deeply happy as she had never known she
could be, said over and over to herself, “Cutter’s baby,
our
baby.” She was too excited to stay in bed even though it was not yet dawn. She went to her window and looked out at a city which, for a few minutes, was as close-to-quiet, as close-to-dark, as it ever became in any twenty-four hours, no longer a strange and lonely citadel of hard, bright towers, a city now imbued with the color of her only love, her once and forever love. Here she had first met Cutter, here she had conceived his child, here she had become a woman.

Cutter sat on the edge of the bed and put his arm carefully, protectively, around her bare shoulders. Lily was like an undetonated bomb that might go off at any minute and blow his life sky-high. From the instant she had told him she was pregnant he had been seized by a cramp of such panic that he had barely been able to react. Wordless by necessity he let her bubble on in her lunatic joy as he scrambled in his mind, considering the import of her news.

At her first words he had withdrawn deep inside himself, understanding suddenly but absolutely that she and he were thinking and feeling on two planes that could never meet. Cutter loved Lily as much as he would ever be able to love a woman. She had all the qualities he admired and her inborn sense of superior aristocracy flattered his needy nature. She seemed to be made on purpose for his private pleasure. She was a marvelous sensual adventure, and his lust for her did not lie only in the fact that she was a means of taking hidden, gloating revenge on Zachary. But publicly she was taboo. Lily was his sister-in-law, a married woman with two children, and the fact that she was now pregnant by him was enough to make the past months of fascinated passion vanish from his mind. The only emotion he felt was utter fear and the determination to get out of this situation no matter what he had to do.

“Darling, what do you intend to do?” he asked calmly.

“ ‘Intend’ … I don’t have any intentions. I thought that you … that together we …”

“Would somehow get married and live happily ever
after?” His words were gentle but his hands were balled into fists.

“Yes, I suppose that’s more or less what I thought. Oh, Cutter, I can’t think … I’m much too happy to think. I love you too much to even try.”

“Darling, look, one of us has to be sensible. I want a child with you, Lily, I want lots of children with you—but, what about Toby and Maxi? Have you considered them?”

“Toby and Maxime? Well, naturally they’ll be with me. We’ll all be together—they won’t suffer, Zachary would never let them down in any way and eventually things will sort themselves out, the way they seem to in this country.” Lily gave a carefree shrug.

Cutter looked at her, his fear growing. This insanely romantic, infantile madwoman could ruin him unless he could control her. Still he controlled his voice.

“The Zachary you know is a doting indulgent husband, more than ten years older than you, who gives you everything you want, my darling. Nevertheless there’s no way to predict how he’ll act when he finds out what’s been going on. If I were in his place I think I’d try to kill you. Certainly I’d try to take away the children. Do you imagine he got where he is because he lets people take things away from him? Do you believe that he lets anybody make a fool out of him? You don’t really know your husband, beloved, but I do.… I’ve known the greedy bastard since I was born. He might, eventually, let you have a divorce, because he’d see that there was no way to keep you, but it would take a very long tough time.”

Lily shook her head violently. Nothing Cutter said was right. Nobody could prevent her from having what she wanted. Cutter didn’t understand Zachary as well as she did … he didn’t know that Zachary had never been able to make her love him. It was
all Zachary’s fault
 … all those years and years without love—all those fruitless, arid, passionless nights. She’d been so patient, so innocent. She had given Zachary enough of herself, she thought bitterly, and now it was over.

“Lily, listen to me. There are only two ways we can make things work for us. Either you have to wait to get a divorce until after the baby is born or you have to have an
abortion now … no,
stop
that, Lily, stop and listen! You can go to a good, perfectly legal clinic in Puerto Rico or Sweden, or to a dozen different Park Avenue doctors, the same ones your friends go to. God knows, sweetheart, I can’t stand to think of you having to go through an abortion but there isn’t any other alternative.”

“I will not have an abortion,” Lily declared, her face set in an expression of absolute disdain and defiance.

“I understand why you feel that way but …”

“No, you don’t. If you did you couldn’t possibly, suggest it. It’s utterly out of the question. Nobody can make me. I’m going to have our baby.”

Abruptly Cutter got up and crossed the room and consulted his watch on his dresser. If he listened to her for another minute, laying down the law, so confident in her selfish, shortsighted, childlike stupidity, he’d hit her. There was no telling what she was capable of, what scandal she might unleash, but one thing he was sure of now was that she was fully capable of destroying his career without even realizing what she was doing. He’d be out on the street in five minutes if his firm heard about this, disgraced everywhere in his world, every man he’d ever known snickering at him, stuck with the responsibility for a married woman and her brat at twenty-four, when his life was just beginning, because this God damned bitch hadn’t had the ordinary common sense to use a diaphragm.

“Darling,” he said, “I’m late for work already. I have to rush. You go home and relax and leave this to me. I’ll find a way for us to be together. It’s as important to me as it is to you. Now get dressed … I’ve got five minutes to shave and shower.”

“When will I see you?”

“Tonight there’s that business dinner I told you about and tomorrow is my class reunion at the University Club. Hell … it all couldn’t come at a worse time but I’m scheduled to make a speech. Look, I’ll get away from the dinner as soon as I can and I’ll meet you back here. Zachary will still be in Chicago so we can spend the whole night together. Just let yourself in with your key and wait for me.”

Smiling, Lily slid out of bed. She didn’t mind this enforced separation. It would be lovely to have a little time
alone to gloat over her happiness. Men were so preoccupied with details.

A letter was waiting for her on Cutter’s bedspread when she arrived the following night.