The Counterlife (43 page)

“That was the idea.”

“I missed you, Maria.”

“Did you?”

“I appreciate you, you know.”

“That's a very strong card, that one.”

“Well, it's so.”

“I missed
you.
I tried very hard not to think of you all the time. When will I begin to get on your nerves?” she asked.

“I don't think you have to worry tonight.”

“The bracelet is perfect, so perfect that it's hard to believe it was your own idea. If a man does something very appropriate it's usually not. It's lovely, but you know what else I want, what I want most when we move? Flowers in the house. Isn't that middle class of me? Mind you, I have a very long list of material desires, but that's what I thought when I saw the builders there today.”

After that, it simply wasn't in me to yield to the impulse pressing me to blurt it out, to say to her, outright, without embellishment, “Look, your mother's a terrific anti-Semite who expects us to have our child baptized—true or false? And if true, why pretend you're oblivious to it? That's more disturbing than anything else.” Instead, as though I felt no urgency about what she knew or was pretending not to know and expected to hear nothing to dismay me, as though I weren't disturbed about anything at all, I said in a voice as softly civilized as hers, “I'm afraid breaking through to your mother is still beyond me. When she regroups her forces back of that smile, I really don't know where to look. She was nothing tonight if not glacially correct, but what precisely
does
she think of us? Can you figure it out?”

“Oh, what everybody seems to be thinking, more or less. That we've ‘traversed enormous differences.'”

“‘Traversed'? She said that to you?”

“She did.”

“And what did you say to her?”

“I said, ‘What's so tremendously different? Of course I know that in one sense we could hardly be more different. But think of all the things we've read in common, think of all the things we know in common, we speak the same language—I know far more about him than you think.' I told her I've read masses of American fiction, I've seen masses and masses of American films—”

“But she's not talking about my Americanness.”

“Not solely. That's true. She's thinking about our ‘associations.' She says all that's been obscured by the way we met—a secret liaison in New York. We never met among friends, we never met in public places, we never met to do things, so that we could never exasperate each other with visible signs of all of our differences. Her point is that we got married there without ever really allowing ourselves to be tested. She's concerned about our life in England. Part of these things, she tells me, is how one's group perceives one.”

“And how
do
they perceive us?”

“I don't think people are terribly interested, really. Oh, I think that if they bother at all the first thing everybody thinks, when they hear about a thing like this, is that you're interested in a young woman to recharge your batteries, and maybe you're interested in English culture, that might be possible, and the shiksa syndrome, of course—that would all be obvious to them. On my side, equally obvious, they'd say, ‘Well, he may be quite a lot older, and he may be Jewish, but my goodness, he's a literary star and he has got lots of money.' They'd think I was after you purely for your status and money.”

“Despite my being Jewish.”

“I don't think many people bother much about that. Certainly not literary types. Along the road where my mother lives, yes, there might be one or two mutters. Lots of people will be quite cynical, outrightly, of course, but then that would be true in New York as well.”

“What does Georgina think?”

“Georgina is very conventional. Georgina probably thinks that I have sort of slightly given up on what I had really wanted in life, and this is a frightfully good second best and has much to recommend it.”

“What have you given up on?”

“Something more obvious. More obviously the sort of thing that sorts like me are after.”

“Which is?”

“Well, I think that would be … oh, I don't know.”

“My advanced years.”

“Yes, I think someone my own age, more or less. Ordinary people are profoundly disturbed by these age differences. Look, is this a good thing, this kind of talk?”

“Sure. It gives me a foothold in a foreign land.”

“Why do you need that? Is something wrong?”

“Tell me about Sarah. What does she think?”

“Did something happen between you two?”

“What could happen?”

“Sarah is a little ropey sometimes. She sometimes speaks so quickly—it's like icicles breaking. Snapping. Bu-bu-bu-
bup.
You know what she said tonight, about my wearing pearls? She said, ‘Pearls are a tremendous emblem of a conventional, privileged, uneducated, unthinking, complacent, unaesthetic, unfashionable, middle-class woman. They're absolute death, pearls. The only way you can wear them is masses and masses of very large ones, or something that's different.' She said, ‘How can
you
be wearing pearls?'”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I said, ‘Oh, because I like them.' That's the way you deal with Sarah. One just doesn't make too much of a fuss, and she eventually clams up and goes away. She knows lots of peculiar people and she can be very peculiar herself. She's always been completely fucked-up about sex.”

“That puts her in good company, doesn't it?”

“What did she say to you, Nathan?”

“What
could
she say?”

“It
was
about sex. She's read you. She thinks sexual nomadism is your bag.”

“‘And I upped my tent and I went.'”

“That's the idea. She thinks no man is a good bet, but a lover as a husband is worst of all.”

“Is Sarah generalizing off of vast experience?”

“I wouldn't think so. I think that anybody in his right mind wouldn't try to have a sexual relationship with her. She goes through long periods of just disliking men in principle. It isn't even feminist ranting—it's all her very own, all these internal battles she's got going on. I would think that the experience she's generalizing off of has been very meager and sad. So was mine meager and sad till not long ago. I got very angry, you know, when my husband didn't speak to me for a year. And when I spoke he insisted on stopping me, smashing me all the time whenever I tried to say anything. Always. I thought about that when you were away.”

“I actually enjoy listening to you speak.”

“Do you, really?”

“I'm listening to you now.”

“But why? That's what nobody can figure out. Girls raised like us don't ordinarily marry men interested in books. They say to me, ‘But
you
don't have intellectual conversations, do you?'”

“Intellectual enough for me.”

“Yes, I talk intellectual? Do I really? Like Kierkegaard?”

“Better.”

“They all think I'd make a marvelous housewife—one of the last terrific ones around. Frankly, I've often thought that maybe that is my métier. I see my two sisters going out to work, and I think, I'm now twenty-eight, nearly thirty, and since university I've achieved absolutely nothing, aside from Phoebe. And then I think, What's wrong with that? I have a delightful daughter, I now have a delightful husband who does not smash me all the time whenever I try to speak, and I'll soon have a second child and a lovely house by the river. And I'm writing my little stories about the meadows, the mists, and the English mud that no one will ever read, and that no one
will
ever read them doesn't matter to me at all. There is also a school of thought in the family that says I married you because ever since our father walked out I was always going around looking for him.”

“According to this school, I am your father.”

“Only you're not. Though you do have fatherly qualities here and there,
you
are definitely not my father. Sarah is the one who sees us as three grossly fatherless women. It's a cherished preoccupation of hers. She says the father's body is like Gulliver—something you can rest your feet on, snuggle up in, walk around on top of, thinking, ‘This is mine.' Rest your feet on it and step off from there.”

“Is she right?”

“To a degree. She's clever, Sarah. Once he was gone we never saw him that often—a day at Christmas, a weekend in the summer, but not much more. And for years now not at all. So, yes, there probably was a sense of the world being very thin at the edges. The mother can be as competent and responsible as ours, but in our world the value was entirely defined by the father's activity. Somehow we were always out of the run of ordinary life. I didn't realize until I was older some of the jobs that women might do. I still don't.”

“You regret that?”

“I told you, I have never been happier than being this preposterous, atavistic woman who does not care to assert herself. Sarah is working at it all the time, trying so hard to be assertive, and every time an opportunity is presented to her, a serious opportunity and not just badgering Georgina or me, she goes into a terrible gloom or a terrible panic.”

“Because she's a daughter whose father vanished.”

“When we were at home, she used to go around every March eleventh like the character at the beginning of
Three Sisters.
‘It's a year ago today that Father pissed off.' She always felt that there was nobody behind us. And there
was
something uneasy-making about Mother having the ambition for us. Wanting us to be well-educated, putting us through university, wanting us to get good jobs—that was all quite unusual in Mother's world, it had something vicarious and compensatory written all over it, something desperate, at least for Sarah.”

*   *   *

It was while we were eating our dessert that I heard a woman loudly announcing, in exaggeratedly English tones, “Isn't that perfectly disgusting.” When I turned to see who'd spoken, I found it was a large, white-haired, elderly woman at the end of our banquette, no more than ten feet away, who was finishing her dinner beside a skeletal old gentleman I took to be her husband. He didn't seem to be disgusted by anything, nor did he seem quite to be dining with the woman who was, but silently sat contemplating his port. I took them at a glance to be very well-heeled.

Addressing the room at large, but looking now directly at Maria and me, the woman said, “Isn't it, though—simply disgusting,” while the husband, who was both present and absent, gave no indication that her observation might be relevant to anything he knew or cared about.

A moment earlier, convinced by Maria's customary candidness that it was not she who'd been trying to delude or mislead me but “ropey” Sarah all on her own, reassured by all she'd said that between us nothing was other than as I'd always assumed, I had reached out to touch her, the back of two fingers lightly brushing her cheek. Nothing bold, no alarmingly public display of carnality, and yet when I turned and saw that we were still pointedly being stared down, I realized what had aroused this naked rebuke: not so much that a man had tendered his wife a tiny caress in a restaurant but that the young woman
was
the wife to this man.

As though a low-voltage shock were being administered beneath the table, or she had bitten into something awful, the elderly white-haired woman began making odd, convulsive little facial movements, seemingly in some kind of sequence; as though flashing coded signals to an accomplice, she drew in her cheeks, she pursed her lips, she lengthened her mouth—until unable apparently to endure any further provocation, she called out sharply for the headwaiter. He came virtually on the run to see what the trouble was.

“Open a window,” she told him, again in a voice that no one in the restaurant could fail to hear. “You must open a window immediately—there's a terrible smell in here.”

“Is there, madam?” he courteously replied.

“Absolutely. The stink in here is abominable.”

“I'm terribly sorry, madam. I don't notice anything.”

“I don't wish to discuss it—please do as I say!”

Turning to Maria, I quietly told her, “I am that stink.”

She was puzzled, even at first a little amused. “You think that this has to do with you?”

“Me
with
you.”

“Either that woman is crazy,” she whispered, “or she's drunk. Or maybe you are.”

“If she were one, or the other, or both, it might have to do with me and it might not have to do with me. But inasmuch as she continues looking at me, or me with you, I have to assume that I am that stink.”

“Darling, she is mad. She is just a ridiculous woman who thinks someone has on too much scent.”

“It is a racial insult, it is intended to be that, and if she keeps it up, I am not going to remain silent, and you should be prepared.”

“
Where
is the insult?” Maria said.

“The emanations of Jews. She is hypersensitive to Jewish emanations. Don't be dense.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous. You are being absurd.”

From down the banquette, I heard the woman saying, “They smell so funny, don't they?” whereupon I raised my hand to get the headwaiter's attention.

“Sir.” He was a serious, gray-haired, soft-spoken Frenchman who weighed what was said to him as carefully and objectively as an old-fashioned analyst. Earlier, after he'd taken our order, I'd remarked to Maria on the Freudian rigorousness with which he'd done nothing to influence our choice from among the evening's several specialties whose preparation he'd laconically described.