Memories of a Marriage by Louis Begley Read Free Book Online Page A

come back?
    I do want to hear any part of your story you want to tell, I said. As your friend, not some sort of ethnographer, but I really mustn’t stay late.
    Let’s leave all this on the table in that case and move intothe library, she answered. And I’ll have another highball: like the one you made before only stronger.
    I went to bed almost immediately after I got home. The highball had turned into three for her and two for me. Perhaps because I was no longer accustomed to drinking after dinner, I slept badly. The next morning I worked for about three hours, getting nowhere. My prose was flat. I had no verve. When I called it quits it was lunchtime. Once again the weather was perfect. I decided against the cheese and salami in my refrigerator and had an egg-salad sandwich instead at a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue. Afterward I went to the park and sat down on a bench on which my face would be in the full sun. Thoughts of Lucy’s monologue oppressed me. That beautiful, intelligent, wickedly funny girl, always ready for a new thrill, had made such a hash of it. I shook my head, as if that gesture could free me of the past, and looked around. The park, as I had observed each time I had found myself in it since I returned from France, looked fresh and lovingly cared for, a condition that not so long ago one would not have thought attainable. In its way it was as good as the best French public gardens. On a bench on the other side of the path, at a forty-five-degree angle from me, sat a young Hispanic couple. The girl was attractive, but I was repelled by her companion’s short pointed beard. They were deep kissing, either unaware of my presence or indifferent to it.
    A great sadness descended on me. Lucy was old; I was old; Thomas and Bella were dead, along with so many otherswhose presence I had taken for granted. Bodies rotting where they had been interred or already absorbed into the loam, ashes of others scattered here and there. I had buried Bella at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris alongside her mother and grandparents. Her father, still alive at ninety-one when she died, joined them three years later. Even if there was room in the plot, of which I wasn’t sure, there was no one left whom I could decently ask to see to my being put to rest there as well. I couldn’t imagine saddling my cousin Josiah with a transatlantic burial. I would be cremated, a task either the lawyer who had my testament in his safe or someone in his office could see to with little effort. If my cousin Josiah was alive, he would bury my ashes in the garden of the Sharon house I was leaving to him, under the huge rhododendron outside the window of Bella’s office. If he died first, perhaps one of his daughters or granddaughters would do it. Fear of death didn’t perturb me, and I no longer worried about the mess I would leave behind: manuscripts and files, mementos, and other wretched personal possessions. My papers would go to a university library that had agreed to house them. The rest could be cast to the four winds. Thus far aging, which I had feared, had not been a great trouble. Except for my full share of childhood diseases, colds that lingered longer and longer, and a nasty bronchitis some years ago, I had never been sick. With the aid of an occasional steroid injection into my back, I could still walk to most destinations I wanted to get to, and at a good clip. My memory was unimpaired. Reading glasses had become a necessity, cataracts were a recent development I was about to deal with, and I had lost someacuity of hearing. The irremediable loss was that of ardor. My sporadic couplings with this or that relatively attractive lady after Bella died had been Pavlovian responses to unvarying stimuli: the lady’s availability and the facility of the transaction. I brought each of those sour liaisons to a prompt and I hoped dignified end.
    As I pursued those thoughts I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that the young lovers