Another Marvelous Thing (3 page)

The Delielles employ a feckless person called Mimi-Ann Browning who comes in once a week to push the dust around. Mimi-Ann hates routines and schedules, and is constantly changing the days of the people she works for. It is quite something to hear Billy on the telephone with her.

“Oh, Mimi-Ann,” she will say. “Please don't switch me. I beg you. Grey's awful cousin is coming and the house is really disgusting. Please, Mimi. I'll do anything. I'll do your mother-in-law's tax return. I'll be your eternal slave.
Please
. Oh, thank you, Mimi-Ann. Thank you a million times.”

Now why, I ask myself, does my mistress never speak to me like that?

In the sad twilight on the way home from our week together, I asked myself, as I am always asking myself: could I exist in some ugly flat with my cheerless mistress? I could not, as my mistress is always the first to point out.

She said that the small doses we got of one another made it possible for us to have a love affair but that a taste of ordinary life would do us in. She correctly pointed out that our only common interest was each other, since we had such vast differences of opinion on the subject of economics. Furthermore, we were not simply lovers, nor were we mere friends, and since we were not going to end up together, there was nothing for it.

I was silent.

“Face it,” said my tireless mistress. “We have no raison d'être.”

There was no disputing this.

I said: “If we have no raison d'être, Billy, then what are we to do?”

These conversations flare up like tropical storms. The climate is always right for them. It is simply a question of when they will occur.

“Well?” I said.

“I don't know,” said my mistress, who generally has a snappy answer for everything. A wave of fatherly affection and worry came over me. I said, in a voice so drenched with concern it caused my mistress to scowl like a child about to receive an injection: “Perhaps you should think about this more seriously, Billy. You and Grey are really just starting out. Vera and I have been married a long, long time. I think I am more a disruption in your life than you are in mine.”

“Oh, really,” said Billy.

“Perhaps we should see each other less,” I said. “Perhaps we should part.”

“Okay, let's part,” said Billy. “You go first.” Her face was set and I entertained myself with the notion that she was trying not to burst into tears. Then she said: “What are you going to do all day after we part?”

This was not a subject to which I wanted to give much thought.

“Isn't our raison d'être that we're fond of one another?” I said. “I'm awfully fond of you.”

“Gee, that's interesting,” Billy said. “Just last week you broke down and used the word ‘love.' How quickly things change.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Whatever our status quos are,” Billy said, “they are being maintained like mad.”

This silenced me. Billy and I have the world right in place. Nothing flutters, changes, or moves. Whatever is being preserved in our lives is safely preserved. It is quite true, as Billy, who believes in function, points out, that we are in each other's life for a reason, but neither of us will state the reason. Nevertheless, although there are some cases in which love is not a good or sufficient reason for anything, the fact is, love is undeniable.

Yes, love is undeniable and that is the tricky point. It is one of the sobering realizations of adult life that love is often not a propellant. Thus, in those romantic movies, the tender mistress stays married to her stuffy husband—the one with the mustache and the stiff tweeds—while the lover is seen walking through the countryside with his long-suffering wife and faithful dog. It often seems that the function of romance is to give people something romantic to think about.

The question is: if it is true, as my mistress says, that she is going to stay with Grey and I am going to stay with Vera, why is it that we are together every chance we get?

There was, of course, an explanation for this, and my indefatigable mistress came up with it, God bless her.

“It's an artistic impulse,” she said. “It takes us out of reality and gives us an invented context all our own.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “It's only art.”

“Don't get in a huff,” Billy said. “We're in a very unusual situation. It has to do with limited doting, restricted thrall, and situational adoration.”

“Oh, how interesting,” I said. “Are doting, thrall, and adoration things you actually feel for me?”

Naturally Billy would never deign to answer a leading question.

Every adult knows that facts must be faced. In adult life, it often seems that's all there is. Prior to our weekend together, the unguarded moments between us had been kept to a minimum. Now they came more frequently. That week together haunted us. It dogged our heels. It made us long for and dread—what an unfortunate combination!—each other.

One evening I revealed to her how I sometimes feel as I watch her walk up the stairs to the door of her house. I feel she is walking into her real and still fairly young life. She will leave me in the dust, I think. I think of all the things that have not yet happened to her, that have not yet gone wrong, and I think of her life with Grey, which is still fairly unlived.

One afternoon she told me how it makes her feel when she thinks of my family table—with Vera and our sons and their friends and girl friends, of our years of shared meals, of all that lived life. Billy described this feeling as a band around her head and a hot pressure in the area of her heart. I, of course, merely get a lump in my throat. Why do these admittings take place at twilight or at dusk, in the gloomiest light when everything looks dirty, eerie, faded, or inevitable?

Our conversation comes to a dead halt, like a horse balking before a hurdle, on the issue of what we want. I have tried my best to formulate what it is I want from Billy, but I have not gotten very far. Painful consideration has brought forth this revelation: I want her not ever to stop being. This is as close as grammar or reflection will allow.

One day the horse will jump over the hurdle and the end will come. The door will close. Billy will doubtless do the closing. She will decide she wants a baby, or Grey will be offered an academic post in London, or Billy will finish her dissertation and get a job in Boston, and the Delielles will move. Or perhaps Vera will come home one evening and say that she longs to live in Paris or San Francisco, and we will move. What will happen then?

Perhaps my mistress is right. A love affair is like a work of art. The large store of reference and jokes, the history of our friendship, our trip to Vermont, our numberless phone calls, this edifice, this monument, this civilization known only to and constructed by the two of us will be—what will it be? Billy once read me an article from one of Grey's nature magazines about the last Coast Salish Indian to speak Wintu. All the others of his tribe were dead. That is how I would feel, deprived of Billy.

The awful day will doubtless come. It is like thinking about the inevitability of nuclear war. But for now, I continue to ring her doorbell. Her greeting is delivered in a bored monotone. “Oh, it's you,” she will say.

I will follow her upstairs to her study and there we will hurl ourselves at one another. I will reflect, as I always do, how very bare the setting for these encounters is. Not a picture on the wall, not an ornament. Even the quilt that keeps the chill off us on the couch is faded.

In one of her snootier moments, my mistress said to me: “My furnishings are interior. I care about what I think about.”

As I gather her into my arms, I cannot help imagining all that interior furniture, those hard-edged things she thinks about, whatever is behind her silence, whatever, in fact, her real story is.

I imagine that some day she will turn to me and with some tone in her voice I have never heard before say: “We can't see each other any more.” We will both know the end has come. But meanwhile she is right close by. After a fashion, she is mine. I watch her closely to catch the look of true love that every once in a while overtakes her. She knows I am watching, and she knows the effect her look has. “A baby could take candy from you,” she says.

Our feelings have edges and spines and prickles like a cactus, or porcupine. Our parting when it comes will not be simple, either. Depicted it would look like one of those medieval beasts that have fins, fur, scales, feathers, claws, wings, and horns. In a world apart from anyone else, we are Frank and Billy, with no significance to anyone but the other. Oh, the terrible privacy and loneliness of love affairs!

Under the quilt with our arms interlocked, I look into my mistress' eyes. They are dark, and full of concealed feeling. If we hold each other close enough, that darkness is held at bay. The mission of the lover is, after all, to love. I can look at Billy and see clear back to the first time we met, to our hundreds of days together, to her throwing the towels over the shower curtain rod, to each of her gestures and intonations. She is the road I have traveled to her, and I am hers.

Oh, Billy! Oh, art! Oh, memory!

Frank and Billy

At a perfectly ordinary cocktail party given by the
Journal of American Economic Thought
for its staff and contributors, Francis Clemens was introduced to the author of some articles he had admired on the subject of medieval capitalism. Her name was Josephine Delielle (nicknamed Billy) and although it slipped right by him at the time, he fell in love with her at once.

She had lank brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a deadpan mug. Her expression ranged from a frown to a somewhat grudging grin.

“Oh, how nice to meet you,” Billy said. “You had an article in last month's issue. Aren't you the guy who writes about economics and architecture?”

Francis noticed that her bottom teeth were slightly crooked, and asked her what she had thought about this article.

“I thought it was a little goofy,” she said. Francis surveyed her further and saw that her shirttail was hanging out on the side.

“Oh, yes?” Francis said. “Which parts did you find especially goofy?”

In the ensuing conversation, it was made clear to Francis that she found all or most of his article goofy. She explained why she felt this way, and then she said: “Don't you think this is the most boring thing you've ever been to?”

“Not by a long shot,” Francis said. “But then I'm considerably older than you.”

Billy gave him a hard stare—the look of an appraiser at a diamond. This clear, naked child-gaze of hers made it difficult for Francis to guess how old she was. These days it was hard for Francis to tell how old most women were, and Billy could have been anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-nine. She looked older than his oldest son's girl friend, who was twenty-six, but younger than his wife Vera's partner in her interior design business, who was forty-two.

Billy was speaking, but Francis's attention had wandered. He felt a kind of inward lurch, as if he were having a dream about falling off a ledge. The air in his chest felt sweet as it does after a long laugh or when a headache has finally gone away. He felt as if he and Billy were standing in thick hazy sunshine. He heard the word “husband.” Her husband, Grey Delielle, was at a conference in Switzerland—he was the economic adviser to a small foundation. Francis had heard of this foundation and his head cleared further. Vera was in San Diego redoing a beach house. It occurred to him that Billy might be lonely for company at dinner. He suggested they leave the party and go off to a restaurant.

“Swell,” she said, and they went to get their coats.

At dinner Francis discovered that Billy taught two classes a week at the business school, and Billy discovered that Francis had resigned from his banking firm several years ago and now consulted to clients on the telephone. He was also writing a book on the relationship of architectural and financial trends. Billy revealed that she was working on her dissertation, the subject of which was the effect of the medieval wool trade on a Cotswold village. A long conversation about English architecture ensued.

Francis spoke a little about his wife, Vera—Billy must meet her—and his two grown sons, Quentin and Aaron. Billy said that Grey, her husband, was sort of a genius but she did not say that Francis must meet him.

It was a lovely night in early May. Francis walked Billy home. She and Grey lived on two floors of a brownstone into which Billy invited Francis for a drink or cup of tea. He asked for tea and it was several months before he realized that he had chosen it over the drink he really wanted because its preparation might keep him with Billy for a few minutes more. He also realized that one of the reasons he had found her living room so ugly was that it is perfectly normal for the lover to hate his or her beloved's place of legal and habitual residence.

Francis did not know that he was embarking on a love affair. He went home and slept peacefully, after making himself a strong, bracing drink. In the morning he remembered Billy's saying that she had been looking for a certain book, a book he owned. He dispatched it to her at once, and she responded by sending him an article
he
had mentioned which she happened to have in her files. They met, not entirely by chance, at the
Journal
office. It was just around lunchtime and so they went around the corner for a sandwich. A week later Francis just happened to be near the business school and he just happened to bump into Billy after her class.

After several months of meetings and luncheons, Francis became familiar with Billy's uninspired wardrobe and her array of faded sweatshirts, shapeless turtlenecks, and worn corduroy skirts and frayed boys' shirts.

One day he said, looking at her brother's old sweater and a skirt that might once have been olive green: “You're the one girl, Billy, whom you dread to hear say: I'm going to slip into something more comfortable.”