Family Secrets (55 page)

Perhaps that was the main reason Paris preferred her married lover. It was fun to feel wicked, but it was more fun to be able to feel human and act warm and affectionate without being worried every minute that you were committing a social gaffe. Of course, she never mentioned marriage. That was the death knell, that word.

She knew that because her friend Rima, who was also working in New York (and commuting to her parents’ home in the suburbs), had an older married lover too, her second. The first had fled when Rima suggested that if his wife was as horrible as he always said and didn’t care if she ever saw him, why didn’t he divorce her so they could get married.

“You don’t want me,” he had said to Rima then. “You just want to get married; you want a house with chairs in it. Go find someone else, someone who’ll buy you chairs.”

“What did he mean, ‘chairs’?” Rima had asked Paris. “What’s so awful, so symbolic, about chairs?”

“I don’t know.”

Paris and Rima met for lunch or dinner and a movie once a week. Paris’ mother didn’t like Paris wasting her time going out at night with girls when she could be home getting phone calls from boys. “All right,” her mother would say coldly, “go, but you’ll miss an important phone call.”

“So you can take a message.”

“You should be
here
.”

Rima had taken a speedwriting course, and was a secretary to a television executive. She had wanted a job in publishing, but so far there was nothing available. Both she and Paris were surprised that hardcover publishing houses were so small, with so little staff. All your life you read books, knew there were more books published than you could ever manage to read, and all that was put out by a handful of lucky editors. Paris had taken the job at the paperback company, Paperback Originals, because she had applied everywhere and it was the only one offered to her. She was a reader. She made fifty dollars a week, which after withholding taxes gave her thirty-six dollars to take home. The girls she knew who had their own apartments all had roommates or were older than she was, making more money, and living in one room in a scary old walkup with garbage in the halls. Close as they were, best friends, even having similar affairs, it never occurred to Paris and Rima to leave their parents and get an apartment of their own to share. They were still afraid, and Paris’ family was violently against it. None of their friends’ daughters left home until they were married. Even the sons who left home—after all, a boy was different—came home to their mothers nearly every night for a good home-cooked dinner, and always brought their dirty laundry with them. If you came from out of town, all right, you had to live away from your parents if you wanted to work in New York, but if you came from New York, why leave? What would people say? They would say you couldn’t get along with your parents, that you were wild, neurotic. Everyone knew that a girl took her own apartment for only one reason: to sleep with men.

Paris didn’t agree. She thought it would be nice to have a place of her own where she could cook if she wanted to, eat when she wanted to, play her records as loud as she wanted, have a drink, ask friends in, and never have to date anyone she didn’t like. It would be nice to have furniture that belonged to her, that she had picked out herself. Maybe Rima’s ex-boyfriend had been right about the chairs. But it didn’t mean you had to be married to have them.

Rima’s new married boyfriend was an executive in the company where she worked. She said that all the young girls she knew who were going with married men had met these men where they worked. Married executives were always chasing the young girls. It was easy to feel popular. It was funny, Paris thought, after worrying all through college that she’d never have another date when she got out, here were all these married men flirting with her, trying to impress her, almost waiting on line for her to become available again. This was what her mother feared. But there was just as much danger from the single ones. There were a lot of single men who would never ask a girl out again if they discovered by the second date that she would never go to bed with them. By never, they meant a month or so. None of them had time. Where was someone who wanted to
know
her? Paris didn’t feel like a person at all any more, she felt like a thing, a dating doll, dress it up, wind it up, and send it out until it runs down. Tick tock.

Grandpa and Etta had gone to Florida for the winter. Their old cook, Henny the chain smoker, had deserted them, preferring to stay north. She had promised to come back to Windflower, though, for the summer, so Etta didn’t mind. Grandpa always paid such good wages that Etta never had any trouble getting help. Henny’s daughters had stayed north with her. To this day, Paris couldn’t keep them straight—there were so many of them and they kept appearing and disappearing. She wondered how many children Henny actually had.

On Sunday nights, when their cook was off, Paris and her parents went to a restaurant with Aunt Melissa and Uncle Lazarus. Paris’ parents had finally bought a television set for the apartment, and then Aunt Melissa got one too, a store-bought one, not one with an open back like Everett had made that would kill you. Sometimes after dinner they would go back to Aunt Melissa and Uncle Lazarus’ hotel apartment to watch TV.

“Look,” Aunt Melissa said during a commercial for false teeth fixative, “I know that actor!”

“How come?” Paris’ mother asked.

Aunt Melissa turned pink. “I mean, I knew him once, not very well. He went to school with me.”

There he was again, doing a soap commercial. Paris remembered having seen him in several other commercials too, something for colds, and another one, she forgot what. He looked just like anybody and it was easy to forget him. That was probably why he was such a big success doing commercials, he was everyman.

“He struggled for so many years,” Aunt Melissa said. “He wanted to be an actor. I’m glad he’s doing well now.”

“You call that stuff ‘well’?” Uncle Lazarus grumbled. “That’s not acting.”

“It’s a job,” Paris’ mother said.

“What’s his name?” Paris asked.

“Oh … Scott Brown.”

Life certainly was different today for young women, Paris thought. There was Aunt Melissa, so thrilled that a boy she’d gone to school with a million years ago was doing a false teeth commercial that she even remembered his name. She probably thought he was glamorous. She herself had already met so many interesting people that she wouldn’t even be awed if she met a movie star. She would be very pleased, but not awed. Poor Aunt Melissa, dating all those dull boys on the block, meeting Uncle Lazarus, thinking he was the cat’s pajamas, as he would say. How she would faint to know about her niece’s double life.

But no matter how hard she tried to control her life and her feelings, Paris discovered that it was not possible. It had been fun and nice to be the one who was loved in her affair instead of the one who loved, but eventually she found she was in love with her lover, or at least it seemed so. She had never cared so much about any man before. And, being honest and feeling secure, she told him she loved him. His attitude became noticeably cooler after that; although he still called her every morning at her office and whined baby talk into the phone he said he had to work late, or he had to go home more often than he had before. She supposed she had made a great mistake, that he liked only girls who didn’t like him, but there was no point in pretending if she loved him; after all, wasn’t honesty the only thing that made love worthwhile? To get someone to love you because you played games and lied was what she hated about dating. She couldn’t let that same falseness come into her affair or it would be worth no more than just her casual dates. She started phoning him. It was now equal; he wasn’t chasing her.

Then one evening in a dark, romantic bar, she made the fatal mistake, the one she had vowed never to make. She said, “If your wife is so horrible and she doesn’t care if she never sees you, why don’t you get divorced and marry me?”

He looked at her in horror. “You’re crazy. You know that, don’t you? You’re crazy. You ought to go to a psychiatrist. Pick out a psychiatrist and I’ll pay for him.”

“Why am I crazy?”

“To want me.”

“But you wanted me to want you,” she said.

“That was different. You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

Instead, he drove her home, in his commuter’s car, made her get out on the corner near her parents’ apartment, and sped off to the safety of his “horrible” wife and five children in the suburbs. He never called her again. Paris called him every day for two weeks but he was always “out,” so she gave up. She told herself that he was a masochist, that she would indeed have been crazy to want him, but her heart felt broken, it actually hurt. She walked down the street with a pain in her heart, she sat in her office in a daze or stared out the window at the street twenty-six stories below, and her pain was all she knew. Other girls had the same problem of being ditched by their boyfriends, she knew that, but their boyfriends hadn’t been married and so they could talk about it. Thank God for Rima. She had been through the same disaster. The two of them felt like pariahs. It was funny how guilty you felt, how used and victimized, when the good part was over.

If you fell in love with a bachelor and made the mistake of proposing, as so many of her school friends had done, and then he ran off in fear, at least you could say you had tried and now you wouldn’t be wasting any more of your valuable time on him. These were supposed to be your few good years; every one that passed made you a little less desirable in the husband hunt. But if you fooled around with a married man because you weren’t looking for a husband, and then you fell in love with him and changed your mind, that was stupid. Paris had learned that lesson.

With free time and a broken heart she devoted herself to her writing. Writing made her forget her humiliation and feel like a person again. She sent stories to magazines, and now they were coming back with encouraging letters from the fiction editors themselves. Finally she sold her first story to a national magazine. It was a detailed, funny story about one of her horrible blind dates. Her parents were very proud of her. She got two hundred and fifty dollars, more money than she’d ever seen in her life. How wonderful it would be to sell a story every month and not have to go to that office!

She liked her job and her boss, but there were things she did not like. She hated that the men in her department who weren’t as smart as she was got paid more money just because they would have to support wives someday. She hated that she wasn’t given an expense account because her boss said authors wouldn’t respect a young girl and wanted to be taken to lunch by a man or a much older woman. Everyone assumed she was going to leave when she got married and so she had to fight for every little raise, every little step up in status. It didn’t bother her to have to go into the boss’ office and ask for a five-dollar raise; after all, they thought she was a sweet little kid and a joke, so she could ask for anything she wanted to. She asked for a raise regularly every six months. She was so underpaid to start with that they always gave it to her with no trouble.

Writing stories regularly, she sold two more within six months. She got five hundred dollars for each of them. This was incredible! She really could live as a writer if her luck held out. But so many stories were rejected, and there were so many articles she wrote that brought her only fifty dollars. It certainly wasn’t a secure life. Her father put every cent she made into the stock market for her. They both agreed that if she was going to be a writer she would have to have an income from somewhere else.

“After all,” her father said, “you might want to marry a nice boy who doesn’t have any money of his own.”

“A boy going to medical school,” her mother added quickly. “An investment. Or a professor who might win the Nobel Prize someday.”

Then why did they make her go out with those horrors? None of them was ever going to win anything. “He might have a nice friend,” her mother would say. Didn’t she know horrors never had nice friends? Her mother told her over and over how superior she was, how beautiful, how talented, and yet her parents were willing to see her sold off to some terrible boy she couldn’t stand, who didn’t want her to be a writer. Her parents didn’t see what it was like on a date; only she did. They thought those boys were nice because they put up a good front in the living room. Her mother kept nagging her to quit her job, which was supposed to be throwing her into an unsavory environment, and stay home to write full time. That would be the kiss of death. When she became a full-time professional writer, Paris knew, it would be to attain her complete independence.

Meanwhile she drifted into another affair with another married man, eighteen years older than she, a writer. It started with lunches and graduated to lunches in borrowed apartments. He told her she needed an agent and got her one. He told her she was exceptionally talented. His stories and books were published all the time. He actually lived off his income as a writer. He was both lover and friend to her. This time she knew enough never to mention the forbidden word.

SIX

That winter Andrew was forty-seven years old. His round, boyish eyes that looked at everyone so appealingly now seemed incongruous in his lined, serious, adult face. His hair was completely gray. He tried to eat very sparingly of the delicious desserts their cook made for them every night but still he was no longer slim—not fat, but he had what Papa called “a corporation,” and Andrew hated it. He had his suits made by the best tailor to disguise it, and was glad that he could afford to indulge his fastidious taste in clothes. He was nearly fifty, nearly old. No matter how he tried to disguise what age had done to him, his life was more than half over. What had he done with it? He had a lovely wife whom he loved very much, three good children, popular and devoted, a spacious apartment in the city that was a showplace, and an estate in the country that grew more beautiful every year. He had a responsible job in the family business, Papa’s right hand so to speak, a six-figure income, and he was respected in the community for his work in behalf of charity. He should be happy that he was so lucky. But he was miserable.