Memories of a Marriage: A Novel - Couverture souple

One evening in May 2003, not many days after George W. Bush’s astonishing announcement that the “mission” had been accomplished, I went to the New York State Theater to see a performance by the New York City Ballet company. I had hoped to find an all Jerry Robbins program, and there was, in fact, such a program scheduled for later that month. Unfortunately, the date was inconvenient—I had accepted a dinner invitation from a newly remarried classmate—and I had to settle for a performance that included the official premiere of Guide to Strange Places, one more of Peter Martins’s empty creations. The music by John Adams left me indifferent. If only, I said to myself, Martins had allowed us to go on thinking of him as the magnificent dancer he had been in his prime and being grateful for his management of the company, instead of giving us again and again occasions to deplore his choreography. Unable to concentrate on the movements, brilliantly executed by the cast, that seemed to me to lead to nowhere, I allowed my thoughts to turn to Jerome Robbins. He had been my wife Bella’s and my dear friend, regularly inviting us to rehearsals. We would watch him go over each segment of a ballet tirelessly: scolding, correcting, and cajoling, until a mysterious change, often imperceptible to Bella and me, signaled that the music and the dance had come together and now corresponded to his vision. He would clap his hands, turn to his assistant Victor, and say, That’s it, the kids have got it, let’s go and eat. Jerry was ravenously hungry after rehearsals. We would tag along with him and Victor to Shun Lee, a Chinese restaurant on West Sixty-Fifth Street, where Jerry, so abstemious in daily life, devoured one after another the mild Cantonese dishes that were his favorites. He died in 1998, fifteen years after George Balanchine, and the curtain went down on a great era in ballet history that their work had defined. I was grateful to have seen so much of it while they were still alive, danced by dancers they had formed. Would the company for which they had created so many masterpieces continue to perform them in high style? I hoped it would, at least for the remainder of my years.
 
At the intermission, I got a whiskey at the bar and, the weather being mild, went out on the open terrace. The fountain in the center of the plaza had not yet been redesigned and programmed to keep time to a beat as intricate as Fred Astaire’s steps and no easier to decipher, but I liked it anyway and never tired of looking at it. I was bewitched. How wonderful, I said to myself over and over, how glad—really how happy—I am to have come back to live in this city! For much of my life I had dreaded admitting to myself or others that I was happy. To do so, I was certain, was to invite the gods to strike where I was most vulnerable. Not my own person, but Bella or our little Agnes. Alas, the full measure of punishment had already been meted out, leaving me diminished but invulnerable. We had been living between Paris and New York, with longer stays abroad because of Bella’s family, all of whom were there. Soon after the beginning of one of our New York sojourns Agnes was killed—instantaneously—by the falling limb of a tree in Central Park, which also gravely injured the nurse who was taking her home from the Children’s Zoo. Our grief was extreme. Unable to speak about the disaster for two years or more, we suffered in silence and, without need for discussion, concluded that we would not have another child; Agnes’s place could not be taken, and we did not wish to give another hostage to fortune. We stayed away from New York as much as possible, learning to live for each other and for our work. We were hardly ever apart. I am a writer and so was Bella; we designated as our offices two adjoining rooms of every habitation we occupied, whether in New York City or the house on a rocky hillside outside Sharon, Connecticut, I inherited in the fifties from a maiden aunt or the apartment in Paris near the Panthéon.
 
Then one winter, which for professional reasons we were spending in New York, Bella, who had never complained of an ache or a pain, who never caught colds or allowed jetlag to upset her sleep pattern, whose digestion triumphed over every cuisine, began to suffer from lingering sniffles and strange little infections; red blotches appeared on her skin. She joked that if either of us were a drug addict sharing needles or sleeping with fellow addicts she would think she had AIDS. But in her case, she said, she had simply been beaten down by the interminable New York winter. I thought she was right. For the first time in our lives we went south in search of the sun, to Barbados, the only appealing island where a place to stay that met our requirements—those indispensable two offices and close proximity to the beach—was immediately available at a price that was not outrageous. The beach house in St. James turned out to be perfect. We worked at our desks starting in the early morning. Before lunch, we luxuriated for an hour or two in the sun and the caressing Caribbean Sea that regaled us with an unending fashion show of fish darting about the coral reef, and then went home for lunch and the postprandial nap that was our moment of choice for making love. Afterward, until late in the evening, we worked again. After a week of this paradisal existence, Bella told me, as we were leaving the lunch table, that for once we would have to rest quietly during our nap. She hurt everywhere and, it seemed to her, particularly down there. She had noticed some strange bleeding. Would I mind? Immediately, I told her that we must book seats on the next available flight to New York and see our family doctor and whomever else he thought appropriate. She refused categorically, insisting that we stay on the island through the remaining two weeks of our lease. There was no reason to sacrifice even one moment of our idyll. It didn’t take long, however, after we returned to the city to learn that there had been reasons aplenty. Bella’s symptoms were those of acute lymphoblastic leukemia that had attacked her bone marrow and was methodically, implacably subverting it. Increasingly draconic treatments would be followed by perhaps a month’s remission. The cycle was repeated over and over, leaving Bella ravaged and exhausted, with no hope of cure or longer-lasting remission, according to her hematologist, other than a successful bone marrow transplant. Bella’s only sibling, her older brother, was eager to be the donor. The consanguinity and the resulting near perfect match of their blood types reduced considerably the risk of rejection. After considering the protocol she would be required to observe following the transplant, and the benefits she could expect, about which she was stubbornly skeptical, Bella decided against the procedure. I don’t believe this cancer will leave my body, and I don’t care about gaining a couple of years, she said. They won’t be good years. We’ve had such a splendid life together. Let’s not settle for one in which I will be so horribly diminished. Neither of us wants that. There was no hiding of the fact that I agreed. With the help of opiates we had saved up she died in my arms, peacefully, some six months later. And what can be said of me? I am on a rack, but I still have my work. I do it conscientiously and modestly for the pleasure it gives me, expecting no other award. And I have my memories. Dante’s Virgil was wrong to tell him that there is no greater sorrow than to remember past happy times when one is in misery. Memory is a solace. Perhaps the only one. Memory is also the best of companions.
 
My reverie was interrupted by a voice I knew, although I didn’t immediately identify it, calling out my name: Philip! I turned and saw a tall slim lady in her late sixties or per haps early seventies, strikingly good looking and turned out in a black suit I attributed to Armani and black pumps. A black pocketbook hung from her shoulder on a gold chain. I blinked as I realized who she was. Many years had passed since I had last seen her. How many I couldn’t immediately calculate. But yes, without doubt, it was she.
 
 
 
 
 

"This delicious, dazzling novel about the rise and fall of a great American debutante kept me up all night. Begley knows everything about the secret lives of the American aristocracy, and he tells all." —Susan Cheever

"Absorbing ... [Begley] tells this tale with all the archness — and yearning — of a voyeur looking in ... His evocations of glistening mahogany in New York’s club rooms, of summering in the Hamptons, of oysters and whiting at the Paris Savoy have the clear ring of truth. He has observed the relevant mannerisms, and he garnishes his scenes with all the glee of a name-dropping arriviste ... Begley proves he is a master dissector of the American character. Among contemporary novelists, he may be the wryest, most devastating critic of class in American society ... Begley delivers a literary stiletto to what Tiffany or Crate & Barrel might blithely call 'the Gatsby set' ... Read it and weep." —Marie Arana, The Washington Post

"[E]ngrossing ... Begley gives us a chance to see into two different, often obscured worlds. One is the most private recesses of another couple’s marriage. The other is high-WASP society — though most people don’t usually even know where that particular unmarked door is, let alone get a chance to have it quietly shut in their faces ... The pleasures of this novel reside not so much in where the 'truth' lies as in its context. The world of the highly entitled at play and at work — seen traveling the globe over the decades, installing themselves in European hotels and joining exclusive men’s clubs and marrying into families made up of 'very much our kind of people' — remains irresistible." —Meg Wolitzer, The New York Times Book Review

"[A] consummately constructed monument to human imperfection." —San Francisco Chronicle

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"Sharply observed and subtly nuanced ... It could pass as a novel from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s later decades, if Fitzgerald had lived so long."—Kirkus Reviews