Men and Angels (11 page)

“That would be great,” Anne said. “And think of the wonderful gossip it will create: me out with the beautiful Adrian and my husband thousands of miles away.”

“Oh, it won’t excite gossip. Everyone in town knows Adrian’s type. You’re about fifteen years too old.”

She laughed at Barbara as they walked back to the Foster house, but felt unsettled. Did people think of her as no longer young? Certainly when she was a teenager, people of thirty-eight seemed distant, formidable, immune from romance or real change. But when she was a teenager, thirty-eight-year-old women
were
different. They wore girdles, hats; the children of their friends called them Mrs., they didn’t own jeans or sit on the floor at parties. In relation to Laura, for example, she felt terribly young. She felt painfully the absence of authority behind all her domestic requests. But perhaps Laura thought of her as old. Perhaps young men did. Perhaps even Adrian did. She wondered. She would never dare to ask him. Barbara would, about herself, and he would tell her. But between Anne and Adrian there was a formality, a tenderness protected by restraint. So he would sense her fear and calm her with a compliment. She wouldn’t know the truth.

Ed Corcoran came up from the basement, writing figures on a clipboard. He smiled when he saw Barbara.

Barbara lowered her eyes, stepped backwards, shifted her weight. Anne had never seen Barbara so off center. Then she understood: Barbara found Ed Corcoran attractive. Anne looked over at him. He was nice-looking; he had nice eyes, nice hands, his air of amused puzzlement was likable, and the way he spoke to his son. But his shirt strained over his belly, he had had a lot of dental work, his hair was quite peculiar. If he were a woman, he would never be found attractive. She thought that was unfair.

He passed Anne the sheet of paper he had been writing on as if it were bad news.

“Everything’s so expensive, it’s just terrible. But I think I’m giving you a good price.”

Barbara snatched the paper out of Anne’s hand before she was able to make sense of the numbers.

“A very good price,” she said, smiling over the top of the paper like the younger, clever daughter in a movie about Victorian England.

Anne looked at the paper. It was a terrible amount of money. She had no way of knowing whether it was fair. But she would hire Ed Corcoran. He was such a nice man; he brought his son with him, and Barbara would be furious if she asked for an estimate from anybody else.

After the movies, Anne sat next to Adrian in the booth across from Barbara and Howard at the Captree Tavern.

“How’s life?” he asked. “I never get to see you.”

“You never
come
to see me anymore.”

“I do, but you’re never available. Your baby-sitter says I mustn’t disturb you when you’re working. Maybe she thinks I’m a dangerous influence. She always invites me in for coffee, you know.”

“Do you come in, Adrian? Have you been in my house while I’ve been there without my knowing it? How awful. I suppose I’ve made such a point of telling her I’m not to be interrupted that she’s taken me too literally. I must tell her always to interrupt me for you.”

“No, love, you mustn’t. She’s right. You’ve got more important things to do than talk to me because I’m too neurotic to work in the afternoons.”

She leaned against his arm with pleasure. Adrian’s regard was a soft pillow that made her feel secure and bolstered. His friendship was a great joy to her. As a lover, she knew, he could only bring a woman grief. She knew more about his love life than she wished she did, for he never confided in her, and he tried to be discreet, but Selby was a small town, and he should never have lived in a small town. He was always having to step over his own sexual history like a defeated general pacing the field. He’d explained his sexual theories to her. What, he’d asked her, is of all human relations the most volatile, the least dependable? The sexual, of course. And what do people put the greatest hope for lasting happiness into? What a foolish investment. One should never be sexually involved with anyone one genuinely cares for. A sexual relationship almost guarantees a loss.

She’d never known if he was being merely courtly, explaining, without saying it, his failure to seduce her. She knew he found her attractive, and that was part of his great value to her as a friend—his obvious, public desirability only heightened the effect. His appreciation of her was, of course, partly sexual—with Adrian it couldn’t be otherwise. But it contained no hunger to possess or to diminish: she could bask in the rather florid light in which he bathed all women whom he thought attractive, but on her the light fell muted, cooled. And she could allow herself a minor and entirely benign stirring of sexual feeling without worry. They would never be lovers, but she could lean against his arm, she could take his hand or playfully embrace him as she could not have done had she not been sexually attracted to him in just this right way. Tonight, she was surprised, though; the stirring was the slightest degree stronger. Sexual hunger had added an edge to her pleasure so that she could not, as she customarily did with Adrian, quite relax. She was distracted, but having felt this slight disturbance, she was determined not to betray the beat that she felt had been missed.

“Only you would have this kind of luck,” said Barbara, not kindly. “The rest of us, when we’re twenty, get picked up by wholesale rug dealers. Anne gets picked up by a famous art historian.”

“Barbara, it was hardly a pickup,” Anne said. She rarely defended herself from Barbara’s attacks, but her friendship with Ben was precious to her in a way that heightened its fragility. She’d known Ben longer than anyone in her life she still kept up with, except her family.

She thought of the time that she had met Ben, eighteen years before, in London. The English summer had seemed strange to her. Strange for it to be July and not to feel the sun at noon with the American insistence that suggests that some appropriate new action, seasonable, transitory, must at that one moment be performed. At home she had never felt totally relaxed in summer. She was incapable of those long sustained torpors that American teenagers who like their summers are born to inhabit. So she was happy walking the London streets, a sweater over her shoulders, wearing stockings, as she had never been entirely happy in the summers at her parents’ home.

She had been to college for two years, but in London she felt that she was really alone for the first time. The other Radcliffe girl who had got the same grant she had, but whose course was on Constable and Turner, had moved out of the room she had next to Anne’s in the Bloomsbury student hostel. She had met a Lebanese student at the Tate who had invited her to share his flat in Kensington. So she didn’t see the other girl again until they sat together on the plane ride home, and the girl, guilty at having deserted Anne for greater luxury, sat silently reading
The Fountainhead
(the Lebanese had been studying architecture) throughout the seven-hour flight.

For two weeks Anne spoke to almost no one. The people in her class, also foreigners, were as reticent as she. And she knew after a week that she hated the Elgin Marbles, all that cool perfection, that imperial restraint, and she was afraid that if she talked too much to her colleagues this would be discovered, and her feeling that she was fraudulently taking money—studying something that she had no interest in, that she would never pursue—would be exposed.

The days were very long, and she often felt that if someone, even a shopkeeper, said a kind word to her, she would burst into tears and beg the person to take her home for supper. Her room at the hostel was bare and anonymous. She bought postcards of the museums she went to and propped them up against the deal-framed mirror, but they didn’t help. Her bed was too narrow, the chenille spread had been mended too often, the knobs on her dresser looked menacing if her eyes fell on them in the middle of the night.

The evenings were the worst. She didn’t have much money, and her meals were paid for at the YWCA on Great Russell Street. But sometimes she went out anyway—she would go to one of the trattorie run by Sicilians for spaghetti and a glass of wine. That summer, she read Faulkner—it was
Absalom, Absalom!
the first two weeks, and she would bring her book with her to the dark restaurant, thinking how grateful she should be for this opportunity. Once a week she went to a movie, often an American film she would never have dreamed of seeing if she were home. But it was comforting to hear the accents, to see New York or Chicago backgrounds. Often she cried at the movies, wondering how she could endure six more weeks of this life, the life her friends were, perhaps at just that moment, envying her for leading.

Her only real pleasure was the reading room at the British Museum. She had been issued a reader’s card because of the course, and every day, after eating her sandwich on a bench in Tavistock Square, she would come back to the museum. Sitting under the high blue dome, she felt happy. The air was light, the atmosphere of concentrated attention made her feel attached once more to things; the smell of the books, the look of the eccentrics—the woman who ordered twelve books a day on Scottish farming and spent her time sleeping on the pile of them, the tiny Indian whose books were all on Jewish history—made her feel less marginal. They were young, handsome men and serious-looking women, mostly American, who seemed obsessed with some terribly important work. They wrote things fiercely on index cards and walked with small, frantic steps to the catalogue. They never looked at Anne, and she wouldn’t have thought of trying to catch their eyes; they were engaged in something essential, and she was merely sitting there, only just legitimately, taking dilatory notes on Roman history and reading a biography of George Eliot.

One afternoon, instead of going to the reading room, she went to a gallery that was having a small exhibit of the watercolors of Raoul Dufy. In the large, rectangular room the paintings glowed on the walls, the blue skies, the silvery green olive trees. She stood in front of one of them and imagined herself in that landscape, imagined the fragrant air, the smell of lemon, of basil, the bright pink streaks of sun in the evening sky. She was interrupted by a voice, shockingly loud, behind her.

“Are you at all interested in pictures?”

It was the first personal question that had been addressed to her since she had left America. She turned around to see who had spoken to her. It was a tall man in his late fifties with a large head, light blue eyes and a long thin nose, the kind of nose she had, in her imagination, granted only to Europeans. He told her he had organized the show and walked her around the room, stopping not at every painting, only at the ones he gave her to believe merited her singular attention. He knew everything about the pictures, and about Dufy’s life. For the first time she had the sense of what it was to be intimate with a painter, and a painter’s work, as intimate as one was with one’s family. There was no formality in the way this man spoke about the paintings; he didn’t change his voice, as so many of her professors did, he didn’t get the glazed look they adopted to indicate reverence. Everything he said was spoken in that same rather embarrassing boom with which he had first addressed her. She thought how unfair it was that people accused Americans of being loud when no tourist could have come near the volume of this man’s voice. But she knew, although she couldn’t say why, that his loudness was proprietary, rather than unconscious, the loudness born of giving orders, not of shouting over the noise of machinery. She wanted him to go on and on. But they came to the last of the paintings, and he turned to her and said, “Quite enough of that, don’t you think?”

“Oh, no,” she said, “it’s been such a long time since I’ve been so happy.” And she began to cry.

He took her into his office and had his secretary make her a cup of tea. She told him about the girl who had taken up with the Lebanese, about her bedspread, her hatred for the Elgin Marbles, and the greengrocer who wouldn’t speak to her.

“What a perfectly wretched little life,” he said. “We must do something about that.”

He invited her to dinner. But first, he said, he would show her London.

He was always making large insupportable statements like, “London was nothing after the eighteenth century,” and “There’s no sense ordering anything to eat in the West End but an omelette.” He took her to the Wallace Collection, to George Eliot’s house in Cheyne Walk, to Regent’s Park to look at the Nash buildings. Every day they had their sandwiches together. He seemed interested in every part of her life; he learned her sister’s name, the name of her street, the names of her professors and her dog. Early on he had explained about his wife. “We’ve no end of respect for each other, but we lead quite separate lives.”

Four weeks after she met him, it was time for her to go home. She spent hours wondering how she would do it, how she would declare her love on their final evening. Or perhaps she would wait till she got home and then write him, passionately but with measure. On that last night, he was more than usually talkative. He suggested that she turn in early so she wouldn’t be tired for her flight. He gave her an ivory miniature, a likeness of a fair woman in a low-cut blue dress; he said it had been in his family since the 1780s. He kissed her cheek, as he always did; he told her she must write to him faithfully, must work on her French, must have a wonderful year and have ten smashing boys fall in love with her before Christmas.

She said she would work on her French, she would write him, she would miss him very much. She gave him her farewell gift: a collection of Emily Dickinson. It was the only American thing she could think of that seemed good enough for Benedict. Then she embraced him, kissing him shyly just above the collar.

“I must say you do make the world warmer and brighter,” he said.

She wanted to say, “I am dying with love for you,” but said instead, “Do you really think you’ll have the time to write me back?” He was going to Paris in September to research his next project, an exhibit of Vuillard.

“Of course. Now, you really must turn in,” he said, and headed toward a rank of taxis.