She Made Me Laugh by Richard Cohen

Author:Richard Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I can only assume that the night at the British embassy had gotten away from Carl. I was there, Barbara was there, Peter was there, and, most important, Nora was there—and Carl’s inamorata, the future Baroness Jay of Paddington, was playing this salacious, suggestive song. Did Nora notice? I don’t know. But I do know that she was a fervid non-dancer, someone who eschewed the dance floor, preferring the sidelines, the anteroom, where the music was distant and she could do with repartee and wit what the dancers were doing with their bodies.

Nora did not dance and for all her humor about it, she was deeply insecure about her attractiveness, her sex appeal. And here was Margaret, for all her ungainliness, exuding a kind of Old Vic ribaldry and having, for all her lefty credentials, that upper class proprietorship of sex. It was theirs. They had long ago disconnected it from love or marriage because what mattered most of all was consolidating and safeguarding property. Marriage could be just a business plan.

Indeed, at that very moment, Peter Jay was himself carrying on with his children’s nanny, by whom he would have a child. In due course, Peter was chauffeured out to the Washington suburbs, where he met with a psychiatrist associated with the famous St. Elizabeth’s Hospital who had earlier met with both Carl and Margaret. I, too, had sought her counsel—her Patient Zero having been a Washington Post colleague of Carl’s and mine. Nora enlisted her as a character in Heartburn, in which she became “a Guatemalan shrink over in Alexandria” named Dr. Valdez, who had a Chihuahua named Pepito.

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