The Partners by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

2

Felicia lay awake for an hour beside the sleeping body of her husband. It was a deep sleep, induced by cocktails, shaken by snores. It represented the simpler side of his nature, similar to the nature of an air force pilot who can catch twenty winks before a raid. She remembered reading of an aviator who had walked out of the flames of his crashed plane with a normal pulse. Had he been, the article had queried, heroic or neurotic?

But that was just an article. She knew that Marc was neurotic. She had long recognized as a symptom of his ailment the compulsion to keep on doing the thing that he happened to be doing. He hated, for example, to stop playing tennis or golf, or to leave a drinking party, or to turn off television. He could even be a bore in the length of his lovemaking. Friends had observed that it was fortunate that such persistency should have found its ultimate outlet in law, for that otherwise Felicia might have found herself, on his behalf, consulting a heart specialist or Alcoholics Anonymous. But she was not sure. She feared and distrusted the dark cloud of industriousness that seemed increasingly, as time went by, to envelop him. She thought she could even make out that it had nothing to do with his professional ambition or with his love of the law. It appeared to her more a miasma exhaled by some fetid, evil presence, some agent of a disdained, malignant deity. It seemed to have darkened the air between them so that he could hardly distinguish any longer, if he still cared to, her pleading eyes, her outstretched arms. He was drawn instead to the gaunt spectral figures of his mother and grandmother, looming in the background, stripped of their individuality by the same arcane curse but still endowed with power to lure him to their fate.

So anyway she was dreaming when she awoke with a gasp to discover that it was brilliant morning and that Marc was still asleep. She dressed quickly, ate her breakfast alone downstairs and then drove over to visit her mother. Letitia Bruce, separated from her third husband, spent her weekends alone in a small white cottage attached to a large greenhouse where she cultivated begonias. During the week she worked as feature editor of a fashion magazine. She was a big, plain, gray, simply dressed woman with a crinkled face and intelligent eyes which offered a sympathy that she seemed never able to deliver. She sprayed her pots as Felicia told of her plan.

“Work in Washington? With the children here?” Both hands being engaged, Letitia mumbled through a cigarette. “You’ll crack.”

“It’s only for a couple of months.”

“What does Marc say?”

“He doesn’t like it. But he hasn’t said no.”

“Would it make any difference if he did?”

“Oh, Tish.”

Letitia shrugged. “Well, I never can tell with your contemporaries. Not that I can boast about my own success with husbands—that’s for sure. But at least mine all left me.

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