The Liar's Wife (32 page)

“Now I know everyone really wants the pigs in blankets, but fears that will reveal them as déclassé, forcing them to select what they in fact do not desire, but resist the impulse, follow your bliss.”

Tom laughed much too loud at this. Theresa thought it wasn't that funny. Would she have to introduce herself to Amaryllis? Shouldn't Tom have done that? He wasn't a good host, she thought, even her limited experience of host behavior told her this.

“Mrs. Ferguson, I'm Theresa Riordan,” she said, not holding out her hand because Amaryllis was holding a tray and she didn't want to make things awkward for her.

“Oh yes, the Titian,” she said, looking Theresa up and down. “But you're not working on Titian, you're doing those boyish Madonnas, aren't you. Working against type.”

Why had she called Theresa the Titian? What had Tom told her?

“The great movie stars of the thirties were all androgynous,” one of the undergraduates said. She herself was pencil-thin with a shock of straight black hair. She was dressed entirely in black except for a pair of orange suede boots, high-heeled with toes so pointy they made Theresa's own toes ache. Theresa thought what she said about the movies was in response to Amaryllis's comment about boyish Madonnas.

The mention of movie stars—or was it the martinis—suddenly engendered a kind of conversation that reminded Theresa of puppies falling out of a basket.

“Garbo, Hepburn, Katharine I mean, Dietrich. All a bit iffy in the femininity department,” said another undergraduate, whose name, Theresa remembered, was Tristan, and whose father was a diplomat.

“Of course we really don't know what we mean when we say ‘feminine,' ” said the woman with the impressive boots.

“Oh, get off it for one minute, Camilla,” said Tristan. “Stop playing more feminist than thou.”

“Well, anyone's more feminist than thou, Tristan,” Camilla said.

“It's an interesting distinction, though, isn't it, the difference between the words ‘womanly,' ‘feminine,' ‘female,' ” Tom said.

He was the professor, so everyone nodded and waited for the next thing he would say. But Theresa knew he was talking about her, talking to her, sending encoded messages that meant
you are desirable.

“I mean to say,” he went on, “you wouldn't say Marilyn Monroe was feminine. But she certainly was female. But would you say she was womanly? With all that implies of the maternal, the protective. She always seemed so in need of protection, impossible to imagine her mothering anyone. But female: absolutely, absolutely that.”

“With his usual brilliant incisiveness, my husband has jumped to the heart of the matter. Asserting that Marilyn Monroe is female. Absolutely top drawer, darling,” Amaryllis said.

“Thank you, darling, for the spousal vote of confidence.”

And Theresa was thinking: You are all talking about the bodies of women, but none of your talk is real. What is real is his desire for my body, which, whether or not he loves me, is absolutely real.

“Your mother was an actress, wasn't she, Mrs. Ferguson?” Tristan said.

“Yes, but she'd never have wanted to be called a star. She loathed the whole Hollywood star system. She simply thought of herself as a professional. Acting was what she did. It was her business, her livelihood. She never took herself too seriously. Or anything else, for that matter. My God, she could make mincemeat of my father's colleagues who thought their little ivory tower was the world, and that the center of the world was Princeton.”

“She was someone who was able to portray both intelligence and desirability,” Tristan said.

“Oh, God, yes, my mother had no trouble broadcasting sex, in her hypercivilized way. Believe me, I know more about my mother's sex life than I ever wanted to.”

Theresa was mortified, but the others seemed to be enjoying the revelation and they all laughed. She was disturbed by both Tom's and his wife's habits of saying critical things about their parents. In public. To strangers. She would never have dreamed of saying anything critical about her mother, never have dreamed of saying that now she looked like a third-rate country-western singer and her new husband was a bore and a slob. Or that she didn't know what a fellowship was. She would never have exposed her mother in that way; her life had been too hard. And it would have been unthinkable to say anything critical about her father, whose life had been a ruin. But perhaps criticizing
their parents in public was something Tom and Amaryllis had in common. Maybe criticizing their parents brought them closer. They had, Theresa reminded herself, been married over twenty years. But although she was his wife, and got to have a life beside him and to call him hers, Theresa didn't envy her. Amaryllis Ferguson was not a desirable woman. Tom would never say to her as he said, over and over to Theresa, “I adore your body. Yours is the body I adore.”

And of course Amaryllis couldn't understand his work. “She takes a kind of pride in not being intellectual,” Tom had said. “Growing up as she did, she's fed up to the teeth with it. Of course, she's highly intelligent. But she puts more stock in the intuitive, and what she calls the intelligence of the hand.”

“What movies do you like?” Camilla asked Theresa. Theresa knew she was trying to be kind, trying to include her in the conversation. But it was always the case when anyone asked her a direct question—her mind went blank.

“I don't go to the movies much,” she said.

“Yes, well, there is something premodern about Theresa, isn't there?” Tom said.

“Maybe she's been alive for hundreds of years,” said Camilla, giggling. “Maybe she's a vampire.”

Was she drunk? Theresa wondered. Was she trying to be friendly, to include Theresa in a joke? Or was she being aggressive because she thought Tom favored Theresa? The last, she believed.

“Maybe we should stay away from her during the full moon,” Tristan said.

“Vampires are the new locus of the sexual imaginary,” said Leif Erikson, who hadn't spoken.

“As long as it's just imaginary,” Amaryllis said. “The curry needs me. I hear it crying out, Help me, help me, I'm ready.”

Where had they learned it, all of them, this way of talking, this exaggeration, this leaping from branch to branch like frantic monkeys, not knowing if any branch would hold or, if it broke, what the damage might be? Tom was following his wife into the kitchen, carrying two trays.

Theresa couldn't taste anything. Lamb curry, she'd been told, but
it might have been anything. She had said nothing through the whole dinner. She wondered when it would be possible for her to leave.

Amaryllis tapped her wineglass with the edge of her knife.

“Those of you who've been here before know that we always end every dinner party with a ritual. I'm afraid we're boringly famous for it. Everyone must sing for his or her supper. One song, a song from your childhood, or whatever you consider your home.”

Apparently, they'd all been here before. None of them seemed surprised. They all seemed ready. Camilla sang a song from the Auvergne, where her parents had honeymooned and where, she said, she may very well have been conceived. Leif sang a sea shanty; his father loved to sail. Tristan, of course, sang a melody from
Tristan und Isolde.
Tom and Amaryllis made a duet of “Foggy, Foggy Dew.” Theresa was in a panic. She couldn't think of a single song. There had been no singing in her family; there had been no family dinners. Only the problem of getting her father fed and ready for bed, and then Theresa and her mother settling down in front of the TV, eating their dinner off trays. Because of her father, they didn't join her mother's sisters and their families for holidays. It was too difficult to get help on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and, quite soon, they never even thought of it.

“I really don't sing,” she said. “I have a terrible voice.”

“Nonsense, we're all friends here,” Amaryllis said. “Nobody's judging you. It's all just good fun.”

The table went silent. Everyone's eyes were on her. Fun, she wanted to say. You think this is fun? I think it is simply hell.

He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at his plate. She didn't want to embarrass him; she didn't want him to find her wanting, pathetic. She thought of Joan of Arc. A song came to her. She would sing it now.

“Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea,” she began.

But the minute the words were out of her mouth, she saw that she had made a mistake, that in trying to save him and herself from embarrassment, she had embarrassed him even more. It was a ridiculous song. They had invoked Auvergne, Wagner, the Appalachian, the great Atlantic. She had invoked her own impoverishment, her own lack of right to be where she was.

“Wasn't that supposed to be a song about marijuana?” Tristan asked.

“Well, they didn't tell us that in Catholic school,” Theresa said, and everybody laughed, as though she had at least been witty. But she had simply told the truth. She understood that the necessary ingredient in all their talk was mockery; self-mockery was fine if it included a mockery of one's own past, one's own family, one's own education.

“I suppose by the time you came along, they'd completely given up the Latin and all the wonderful traditional trappings,” Amaryllis said. “I don't suppose you learned Gregorian chant? Such a perfect form, so simple.”

“Theresa's a fabulous Latinist though,” said Tom.

“Sweet to think of you among those little nuns,” Amaryllis said.

She wanted to say: They're not little nuns. They visit people on death row. They hire ex-cons to do their yard work, and face up to their neighbors' complaints. They stand up to the bishops, who could ruin them financially. One of the “little nuns” you think you know something about is traveling around the country with other “little nuns” gathering support to resist an imposition of male authority, restating the Vatican's order that they have a male cleric supervising all their meetings. What have you ever done that takes one tenth their guts? she wished she could say. But after all, she was implicated in the woman's betrayal; she was her husband's lover. She could only be silent as Amaryllis Ferguson made a crude parody of the lives of women she loved.

“Well, she's a protégée of Joan Gallagher's, Ammie,” Tom said.

“Oh, my Lord, the terrifying Joan. It always took me a week to recover from an evening with her. Such an exhausting display of intellectual energy. Positively Amazonian. I had no choice but to take to my bed afterwards. That is, when I worked up the courage to encounter her. Usually I just hid. You can imagine my ecstasy when I learned she'd married a podiatrist. I adore imagining what kinky things they get up to with corn plasters and arch supports.”

Theresa wondered how Joan Gallagher would have behaved at this table. But Joan Gallagher would not have had Theresa's secret. That hers was the body the host adored.

And she wouldn't have had the other secret that washed over her
when her mind wasn't entirely engaged. That her period was six days late.

“Your wife knows about us,” she said, the next time they were together in the Days Inn near Bridgeport.

“Don't be an idiot,” he said. “That's just your Catholic guilt.”

“She knows about us, Tom. I can tell.”

“Even if she did, we have an understanding, and we have for years.”

The words sickened her. She always knew she wasn't the first. But now he'd made it clear.

“You're lucky I'm addicted to you, or I'd say you were too much of a silly goose to waste my time on. And I have a bit of good news. Amaryllis is going to a crafts fair in Vermont all next week. So we have a bit more time. And we can stop throwing away the family fortune on this hideous room with the blankets made of some petroleum product.”

I love this room, she wanted to say. This room and all the other rooms exactly like it. Because it is where I am with you.

When she was with him, she felt she was inhabiting a world as full and beautiful as any of the paintings she loved. A world that had the intensity of Bellini's skies, the vividness of Mantegna's apples, the richness of Bronzino's draperies. It had nothing to do with the rest of their lives. With his wife or her mother or Joan Gallagher or Sister Maureen or Sister Imelda. It had nothing to do with the past or the future. They were together. They were happy. The time they had was the only time.

“I wouldn't feel right being in your wife's bed.”

“Neither would I,” he said, “there's a foldout couch in my study.”

“Can we spend the night?”

“Can't risk it,” he said, kissing her shoulders. “Nosy neighbors. One day I'll take you somewhere fabulous. For more than just one night.”

“Promise,” she said, knowing she sounded like a child. She put her arms around his neck.

She felt odd sitting on the toilet that she knew his wife had sat on. On the rack across from it, a bra and underpants were drying. She knew
it was wrong, but she couldn't stop herself touching them. They were white cotton, stiff from the wash. She picked up the brassiere. The cups were small; she checked the size: 34A, it said. She stopped herself from holding her own bra against it so that she could compare.

“What's happened to you in there? Are you all right?”

Did he know she might not be all right? Did he know how many times she went into the bathroom to check if her period had come? It was nine days late. She told herself she would wait till day ten, then buy a pregnancy test at the drugstore.

He was sitting at his desk in the study. He'd put what had been their bed together; now it was an innocent monkish couch. For the first time, she looked at what was on the walls; they were covered with pen and ink drawings. A woman with the body of a bird carried the tiny body of a terrified-looking man in her beak. In another, she pecked at his intestines. In another, the bird carried wool in her beak, the remainder of what she'd used to tie up the helpless male.