Memories of a Marriage by Louis Begley

Author:Louis Begley [Begley, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385537469
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

VIII

I HAD TAKEN to seeing Lucy almost daily, in the afternoon at her apartment over tea or at dinner at the Lexington Avenue bistro. The uneasiness her narration had caused me had dissipated, but for a variety of reasons, including my desire to avoid late evenings and excessive consumption of alcohol, I stuck to my resolution to decline invitations to drinks or to dinner at her place. Occasionally, we took advantage of the fine weather and talked in the afternoon on a bench facing the Central Park boat basin. One day in the park, she asked me point-blank, and with only the thinnest smile, whether I was writing a book about her and Thomas. Was that the purpose of our interviews? Wasn’t that what they really were, ever since I first came to dinner at her house? I told her the truth: I was working on something quite different, a novel set in my native Salem, but after I had finished, if I lived long enough and hadn’t lost my marbles, I might want to write a book about the breakup of a marriage. A marriage, I stressed, a fictional character’s marriage, not hers and Thomas’s. Naturally, everything I learned in the course of our talks would be part of my experience and my store of knowledge and observations and could have an impact on the story I’d tell. But the book would be a novel, not a memoir or reportage.

A novel. She snorted. And you’ll put me and what I’ve told you into it. I’ll murder you!

That’s one of the hazards of a novelist’s profession, I answered, just as finding some aspects of yourself in a novel is a risk you run by palling around with a novelist—or merely allowing yourself to be in his field of vision.

She wasn’t laughing, so I added that if I did write the book neither she nor anyone else would recognize her or Thomas in my characters or have grounds to argue that the book was about them. They’d be seeing a mosaic, made of slivers of glass or stone, some picked up as I went along and some I had fabricated. I don’t write romans à clef, I said.

She snorted again and to my great relief kept talking. Our conversations continued over what remained of that week and much of the following week, with time out for the weekend, about which I told her a fib. I said I would be visiting my ailing cousin Hetty in Philadelphia. In reality, I had accepted an invitation from Jane Morgan to spend the weekend with her and her husband in Water Mill, getting wind of which, I hadn’t a doubt, would send Lucy into orbit. As I had expected, the information Jane was to give me proved precious.

Getting married, setting up a real household, not feeling adrift, Lucy said, that was in some ways what I had always wanted. At the same time, after that awful wedding—it wasn’t objectively awful, nothing at that house

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