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

were making progress. The man’s hand was in the girl’s shirt. She had swiveled; her bare legs lay across his lap. Their eyes were closed. I whispered enviously: “Thy willing soul transpires / At every pore with instant fires …” As though on a signal, they sprang up and, hand in hand, hurried to a Central Park West exit.

IV
    B Y THE TIME she returned from Paris and met Thomas at her brother John’s wedding reception it had become clear to her, Lucy said the previous evening after we had moved into the library, that it was all over between them. The thing was doomed. Of course, she should have told him so right away, but too much was going on around her and in her head, and she couldn’t face the argument and the explanations. Besides, she didn’t have to. In two days, on Monday morning, she was returning to Paris; then, as soon as she closed the apartment and repacked her suitcases, she would leave for Geneva. During the dinner that followed the reception, Thomas had begged her to smuggle him into her room and let him spend the night, but she had refused. Even if she had wanted him, which was not the case that evening, she was dead tired and didn’t like the idea of his sneaking around the corridors in the morning. The house was filled to the rafters; she’d be risking embarrassing gossipand a blowup with her mother. But she did finally agree to meet him the next morning on the dunes. All he wanted was sex, anytime and anyplace. He’d never gotten it into his head that he had to make it so that she had to have him, had to have him the way you must have food and drink. He was an oversexed capon! As usual, he came too fast and tried to make up for it by going on and on. It was no use. She felt distant—distant and detached—from what he was doing to her body and in her body. The odd thing was that he didn’t realize it. Probably he liked it better when she was passive and just let him concentrate on himself, which was all he wanted to do anyway.
    You weren’t invited to the wedding, she continued, there was no reason why you should have been, but if as a novelist you had wanted to get an idea of how those things were supposed to be done that was the one wedding to attend. Edie, the little goose my brother John married, had been an orphan since the age of ten, when her parents and the pilot were all killed going from one of the British Virgins to another in an absurd single-propeller plane, and the cousins who were her guardians were only too happy to have my parents give the wedding at the big house in Bristol. Not that a reception in San Francisco would have made sense. Edie had gone to Miss Porter’s and Smith, and all her friends were on the East Coast. It being John the heir, the parents pulled out all the stops. The house, the lawn, the garden, had never looked better. Lester Lanin came himself and made a little speech about still remembering the time he played at my parents’ wedding reception, which was one of the first big society functions hehad gotten to do. Veuve Clicquot flowed like a river. John Chafee and Claiborne Pell were both there. Given the competition between them, that was a real coup and said a lot about Father’s clout. JFK and Jackie canceled at the last minute, but Lee came, and the president sent a cable that Father read after a fanfare. Naturally, all the family and old family friends were in attendance, as well as a big contingent from San Francisco and John’s Harvard friends. Your pal Alex van Buren was there with his wife, that awful Priscilla, and the rest of the van Buren clan. All in all, it was a truly memorable party. But wherever I looked, whom did I see? Thomas Snow in the blue blazer I had bought for him to wear in Europe and, if you please, some sort of white trousers. Perhaps even white flannels. Can you imagine the kid they’d all seen pumping gas dressed up like that? He stuck out like a sore thumb. You couldn’t miss him.
    Good Lord, I thought, what had she