Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (8 page)

Over the years, of course, he did come to think he was indispensable.
RN had already passed from resembling Bill to becoming Senator Nixon, and was on his way to becoming President Nixon. And his wife always knew he could do it. It was just that she didn’t want him to. She looked at the world as Elaine did: as inherently full of possibility, whether or not she saw it through the happy filter of being in love. The stand she had to take was against her own conflicting impulse toward being unencumbered, free. There was no father figure with whom to collude, no mother to oppose her. Some wondered about the man she agreed to marry, but her brothers weren’t going to stop her. She said no to her other suitor, a doctor who’d proposed, because she’d never romanticized him.

You tend to be out there on your own if you’re not a romantic. And in spite of her fond notes and little gifts to RN, and their rather spontaneous wedding, Mrs. Nixon’s early life had informed her that there were no guarantees. She didn’t have romantic notions about what life could bring her. She was determined to experience life, though, even if she did not subscribe to extreme behavior: domestic life versus flapper.

RN’s romantic notion of himself was that he was a realist. Mrs. Nixon seems to have known herself better, and merely to have joined forces with this realist. She was hopeful, but not deluded. He stayed close to her, so that, unlike with Bill, there was no issue of his having to come back. He never left through the window. Though the law did come knocking, finally, and then he had to walk out the door of the White House.

A
gift from Mrs. Nixon to Mr. Nixon, during their courtship: two books, to which he responded, “I have always wanted to read Karl Marx in order to be familiar with it. De Maupassant writes the best short stories the world has ever read.”

Mr. Nixon dodges the issue of what’s to be made of Karl Marx: it boggles the mind, the young Nixon receiving a book by Marx—from his sweetheart, no less, and during wartime. In thanking her, he stayed on safe ground, choosing the lesser of two evils to opine about Maupassant’s stories. Since he goes into no detail, it’s possible he really held the opinion expressed, though anyone who has written a thank-you note knows about telling white lies: who really wants a loofah, or a musical can opener?

Maupassant, a figure from the late nineteenth century, is remembered more as a writer of short stories than for any particular story he wrote. When read at all, his work is usually in an anthology. Now, he would seem rather didactic, with plots that teach a lesson. There was a time, though, when—as with every other occupation—the short story had a job to do. Part of that
job was cautionary, showing people how their base desires might lead to disaster. Fairy tales pointed in the same direction, and with many of Maupassant’s stories, one senses some of the same underlying messages—ones we’ve heard before, now directed at grownups.

Let’s imagine that Mr. Nixon read one of Maupassant’s betterknown stories, “The Necklace.” (I have no idea what story the Nixons might have read; I’m choosing an often-anthologized piece.) Let’s say he found it one of the best stories in the world.

Mr. Nixon would have been reading a story about a man married to a woman, Mathilde, whose vanity and yearning define her. She is the opposite of Mrs. Nixon, who was not materialistic, and who lived in the world that surrounded her, making the best of it, working hard, but trying to have some fun. It was never very important to her to have a beau. She had an independent streak (maybe two brothers were enough). But—back to Maupassant’s story—once presented with the possibility of being entertained and acquiring the accoutrements of social stature, Mathilde is immediately caught up in the prospect of having a really wonderful evening. Her psychology is so transparent that we understand she has been thinking all along about the issue that arises: she seeks to induce guilt in her husband that they have been invited to a social occasion which she cannot attend because she does not have fancy clothes. (This is a game women play with themselves all the time. Visa depends on it.) She protests that she cannot go, that the dress she has is inadequate, and furthermore—though her husband provides a new dress and raises the point that fresh flowers are perfectly appropriate as embellishment—she feels she needs some significant jewel to wear with her new finery. He seems sensible, though more than a little dull and easily manipulated; she is someone who has always had her eye on a more glamorous future,
and she feels her discontent is rooted in her relationship with her insufficient husband. Mr. Nixon would never have proposed to such a woman. She is a type much feared by men: superficial, manipulative, materialistic, angry.

At her husband Loisel’s urging, Mathilde approaches a friend who is better off than she. Might she borrow some jewelry to wear for the special evening? Done. Her costume complete, the evening passes without the reader really participating, since the characters themselves hardly do. The party scene is described this way: “She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness composed of all this homage and admiration, and of that sense of triumph which is so sweet to woman’s heart.” Stories used to tell us such things, in such language. They were stories
telling a story
. Some elegance in storytelling was required. So: we have waited anxiously during the time leading up to the evening; we’ve read an eloquent but controlled description of an ostensibly wonderful brief scene that sweeps us along (and out); then we spend time with the characters after the party. Mathilde, about to admire herself for the last time as the Cinderella she has briefly been, suddenly realizes that the necklace is gone.

But before this happens, there has been a brief scene—one filled with neutral descriptions that make it seem as if nothing out of the ordinary happens—in which husband and wife hurriedly exit the event. He worries aloud that she may catch cold; her motivation is to flee before other women realize she does not have an expensive fur coat, as they do. (One cannot help thinking of Mrs. Nixon’s Republican cloth coat to come.) “When they reached the street they could not find a carriage and began to look for one, shouting at the cabmen passing at a distance.”
Finally they find “one of those ancient night cabs which, as though they were ashamed to show their shabbiness during the day, are never seen round Paris until after dark.” Even objects are personified: the cab has a personality, much like Mathilde’s. Even cabs have a sense of shame at not being fine enough. Mathilde enters the vehicle, one contains the other, and—though she does not become ill with a cold, as predicted—she soon falls into a worse situation, having to make restitution for the lost, borrowed diamond necklace.

They work hard for ten years (a long time, in fairy tales), and eventually they have enough money that the necklace—or one closely resembling it—is returned to the owner. During this time, we understand that Mathilde and her husband, Loisel, have suffered and lost strength.

Ironically, the borrowed necklace was never real. It was “paste.” The story ends with Mathilde explaining what happened to the woman from whom she borrowed it, who sets her straight and also expresses pity for her.

When Mathilde first encounters her old friend, it seems surprising that she decides to confess all. In the confession is also a kind of aggression, an insistence that the other person not be allowed to think things are fine when the storyteller has, in fact, suffered. This shows Mathilde’s boldness: but while her confession is intended to exert her moral authority over the owner of the necklace, she only ends up being pitied. The wealthier person triumphs and, amusingly, manages to do so because someone of another class has misunderstood her, assuming that, if the woman is rich, she would of course have a real diamond necklace.

Moral lessons abound.

“What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How
such a small thing is needed to make or ruin us!” To the fiction writer the “Who knows? who knows?” is a more normative alternative in a parallel universe, a story often not worth writing. Most of the story is off the page, just as the necklace, itself, is missing. The important evening is discussed in one paragraph, so lushly writerly in execution that we wince. The ten years that pass do not take anything near ten paragraphs to recount. By the end, it is as if two disparate stories, past and present, suddenly collide, leaving the reader stopped at the moment of impact. Though at first it seems obvious that a moral lesson has been enacted for the reader, it’s also true that no one within the story seems likely to respond to the wisdom of that lesson. Mathilde’s character is set: her confrontation with the necklace’s owner is not expansive but self-absorbed. Mr. Loisel (he has no first name) represents and maintains society’s expectations. Madame Forestier, too, will no doubt go through life being Madame Forestier, seeming like a friend but really a bit inscrutable and, like her fake jewelry in its real box, not quite what she seems. She won’t change. Things are working fine for her.

As readers, we increasingly see through the characters, yet there is no moment when they acquire insight and act on it to change their lives. What is said to Mathilde clarifies, but the clarification itself is a kind of punishment that cannot undo what has happened.

Those who think of this as an old-fashioned story would probably point to the revelation at the end that implies a lesson learned. Yes—but it’s a lesson that, once revealed, won’t do anyone any good. Did the Bad Guy (Mathilde) learn a lesson? Ten years are very real, and when time passes, it has passed. The last sentence, with its revelation that instantly interjects irony, rings hollowly, and nothing follows: “Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste!
It was worth at most only five hundred francs.” It so rarely happens in life but so often in stories: someone suddenly announces a stunning fact, and is heard with crystal clarity, because a train does not clatter by at just that moment, muffling the final words. Nor does the character who is directly addressed make some rejoinder. In stories, people get their perfect moment, no matter how painful that moment is. It’s allowed to be undisturbed, frozen for all time amid white space. The subject of “The Necklace” is power, and the story concludes with someone asserting power. The ending establishes the author’s power, as well.

What might Mrs. Nixon have thought of the story? That it was about people in situations that brought forth one’s worst imaginings? That a fairy tale, or a story with elements of one, has always been popular as a way for writers to take readers back to childhood, with the grown-up children just as eager to credulously experience the ride? Perhaps she prided herself on her common sense, confident that she would never face ten years of secret shame for a terrible mistake, a failed secret.

What if Maupassant had written a story about a woman who, perhaps against her better judgment, marries a man who promises to go places but who has a secret flaw, a sense of wounded pride. She is aware of his tendency to overthink things, to think of people as potential enemies, to speak in ways that may seem authoritative initially, but that often depend on devious strategies of entrapment. Yet she stands by him as he weathers a series of setbacks at the hands of those he comes to identify as his implacable foes, people he must undermine and destroy in order to survive. As his machinations become more obvious, she wonders whether he has always been defined by his own demons. He triumphs, but in battling his perceived enemies, he does something shameful, and harbors a terrible secret, one she sees, or wants to see, only in her
peripheral vision. After his downfall, they remain in limbo, trying to repay the debt he barely admits owing. Might such a story have had experiential force, registered as a warning, or is fiction just fiction, a made-up tale? (Nixon’s personal physician during his exile in San Clemente, Dr. John C. Lungren, writes: “Nixon’s growing self-awareness would later deepen into dreadful self-recognition that would reach a catharsis of confidence during the seminal David Frost interviews of March 1977. As he confronted his own actions, the consequences flowing from his own fallibility would fill Nixon with great sorrow and deep contrition.”) The moral—in both Maupassant’s story and Mrs. Nixon’s life—is undermined by the fact that awareness comes too late, that both women have spent their lives with men who will never learn the right lessons, will never change.

Short stories could hardly exist without the way power shifts within them. This is often, but not always, subtle, and balances are tipped incrementally. (In James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy, a complicated and hubristic man, comes to understand that his wife is, and has been, a person independent from him; he condescends to Gretta in assuming he understands the
essence
of things. He finds out that he does not. In Richard Yates’s “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” one friend is subservient to another, who
almost
gains awareness and asserts himself, though in the end both decide it is easier to remain complicitous and to play their familiar roles.) This shift in power might have been something Mr. Nixon noticed, reading Maupassant, if he wasn’t too horrified to begin with by his worst nightmare, Mathilde. He would not have identified with Loisel, who worked hard but did not want to be noticed, and was henpecked besides. In selecting Mrs. Nixon, Mr. Nixon saw her beauty but also her reticence. This was not the sort of woman who would expect a diamond necklace.

I think Mr. Nixon appreciated her gift and wrote an enthusiastic note of thanks, but I’m not sure he ever read Maupassant.

One last consideration: Mr. Nixon gave her a clock and a paperweight. I suppose she could have chosen to give him a barometer and a shoehorn.

I
f you want to see complications in a story, you can always see complications. Nobody ever said life was easy. One of the nice things about reading is that you can close your eyes and take a few minutes to think things over, while there’s often no way to pause during a conversation and not keep up your end of things.