Fellow Passengers by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780547970479
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1989-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Well, Althea’s second marriage did last a year, but when it broke up it did so in a manner more sordid than even Adrian could have foretold. Once established in her dream house in Bedford Village, she not only resumed her heavy drinking, she started coming into the city without Jeeks and was seen by various friends in some low dives in rather louche company. Finally, she did not return to Bedford, but moved in with a painter and his wife in the Village. Rumor could not decide which one was her lover. Or both?

Even the most radical of her old friends felt sorry for Jeeks. Yet when I lunched with him, at his invitation, he seemed more baffled than agonized. He might have been an Endymion ravished by a moon goddess. What had happened to him was not in the course of human events.

“When we had our last talk,” he complained, “she looked at me as if I were a stranger. The place she’s living in is almost a slum. And you know how trim she used to keep things! I don’t know what her new friends are like—they had the decency not to be home when I came—but I suspect the worst. When I asked if she wanted a separation or a divorce, she simply shrugged and said, ‘Whichever.’ I talked about some sort of settlement, but she wouldn’t take a penny. Not that I offered much, after the way she’s behaved. But still, I don’t want her to starve.”

“Oh, she’ll sell a story, never fear.”

“She will if she writes one. But how can she do that if she’s gassed half the time?”

“In the other half. A real writer always finds the time, and she’s certainly that. I’m glad she won’t take your money. At least that shows a remnant of style.”

“What would you do then? Go ahead and divorce her?”

“What else? You owe her nothing. You must try to forget her and get on with your own life.”

Which sensible advice he took—unless, as I suspect, he had already decided on that course. But Althea went from bad to worse. She quarreled with her painter and his wife and left them for a cheap hotel. She quarreled, it appeared, with most of her friends, about whom she then spread reckless slander. She did not quarrel with me, but then our paths no longer crossed.

One day Adrian called me at my office and asked me to come to his flat for a drink that evening. “You’ll find an old friend of yours here.” I guessed that it would be Althea. She seemed wonderfully pulled together and very much her old self, except that she was drinking iced tea in a tall glass, constantly replenished by our watchful host. She offered no explanations or apologies, but simply picked me up where she had left me. The three of us passed an agreeable hour, and I took my leave when she explained that she was on a new and rigid schedule and that Adrian was about to take her home.

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