“I don’t want to characterize anything, I want –”
“We’ve been pretty lucky.” His brand of humility took in the apartment, Shell’s closet of dresses, the plans for the second floor of the house, which were laid out on the desk and to which he was anxious to return.
“Do you want me to thank you?”
“That wasn’t becoming.” He allowed her to know he was angry by speaking with a slight British intonation. “Let’s try to understand the process of marriage.”
“Please!”
“Don’t get hysterical on me. Oh, come on, Shell, let’s grow up. A marriage changes. It can’t always be passion and promises….”
It never was. But what was the use of shouting that? He fictionalized an early storm of flesh and wildness from which they had matured. He believed it or he wanted her to believe it. She would never forgive him for that dishonesty.
“… thing we have now is extremely valuable …”
Suddenly she didn’t want the doctors, didn’t want to save anything. She watched him speak with that terrible scrutinizing attention that can make a stranger of a bed-mate. He felt that he spoke to her from a far distance. She was a cub reporter in the audience. It was too late for easy married mumbling or intimate silence. He knew she was pretending to be convinced, was grateful to her for the pretence. What else could she do – weep, burn down the walls? She was in a room with him.
Later she said, “Well, where should we put the partition?” and they leaned over the house plans, playing house.
Breavman often reviews this scene. Shell told it to him a year later. He sees the two of them bending over the oiled desk, backs towards him, and he sees himself in the corner of the antique room, staring at the incredible hair, waiting for her to feel his gaze, turn, rise, come to him, while Gordon works with his sharp pencil, sketching in the bathroom, the insult of a nursery. She comes to him, they whisper, she looks back, they leave. And in some of the versions he says, “Shell, sit still, build the house, be ugly.” But her beauty makes him selfish. She has to come.
When she decided to change her job Gordon thought it was a good idea. She was glad to get back into the academic atmosphere. It was a tracking-back, Gordon said. She could re-establish her bearings. Shell simply couldn’t stand another day at Harper’s Bazaar. Watching the cold bodies, clothes.
A friend of hers was doing a couple of afternoons a week of voluntary work at World Student House, hostessing at teas for foreign students, hanging decorations, showing America at its smiling prettiest to the future ministers of black republics. She informed Shell that there was a job open in the Recreation Department. Since a friend of the family was a director and benefactor of the organization her application and interview were formalities. She moved into a pleasant green office decorated with UNESCO reproductions, which looked over Riverside Park, much the same view as Breavman’s, though less elevated.
She did her work well. The Guest Speakers Programme, the Sunday Dinner Programme, the Tours Programme were better run than they had ever been. She emerged as an expert organizer. People listened to her. Perhaps a creature that lovely wasn’t supposed to speak such sense. Nobody wanted to disappoint her. Success terrified her. Perhaps this was what she was meant to do, not love, not live close. Nevertheless, she liked working with students, meeting people her own age who were planning and beginning their careers. She walked into the spring atmosphere, she found herself making plans.
It was strange how friendly she felt to Gordon. The construction of the house was fascinating. Every detail interested her. They rented a truck to pick up panelling from an old country hotel which was being demolished. Gordon saw his study in oak. Shell suggested one full wall for the living-room, the other three left in brick. She was puzzled by her own concern.
Then it occurred to her that she was leaving him. Her interest was exactly the kind displayed to a cousin with whom one has grown up and whom one does not expect to see again for a long time. One clamours to hear everything about the family – for a little while.
When she slept with Med it was merely the signature to a note of absence she had been writing for almost a year.
He was a visiting professor from Lebanon, a remarkably handsome young man who was an expert in these matters, who, in intimate circumstances, would admit to his companion that the constant proximity of “desirable little things” was what most attracted him to the academic life. He was over six feet, thin, hair black and carefully wild and swept back, eyes black and always slightly squinted as if he were looking over stretches of sand for high deeds to perform. He was a T. E. Lawrence Bedouin with an Oxford accent and theatrically exquisite manners. He was always so obviously on the make, so captivated by his charm and indisputable good looks, so dedicated to his vocation, so phony that he was altogether delightful.
Shell allowed him to court her extravagantly for three weeks. He was not in his best form because he really believed her beautiful and this intruded on the perfection of his technique.
He gave her a filigree brooch shaped like a scimitar which he claimed belonged to his mother but which she wouldn’t have accepted if she hadn’t been sure he travelled with a bag of them. She accepted a transparent black nightgown like the ones advertised in the back of Playboy, the kind he seriously believed every American girl coveted – she was delighted with his naïveté.
Deprived of sweet sexual fiat for so long, indeed never having known it, she righteously defended the
