by
Susan Taubes
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She wasn’t sure what he meant; she remembered that the little boy Petie was very important to the little girl she was. His face hadn’t changed much; the same skinny boy grown very tall; she is still surprised by the wide shoulders and his big feet; he is another person now and just like any other young man with whom she does not know what she feels or should feel. The same strangeness with Peter as with every other man, waiting for something to happen, to change in her, or change between them; never having known any other feeling; asking herself, “Can I love this man?” waiting for some impossible revelation or simply for a man to take hold of her and make her will-less.
“I don’t know what stories you’ve heard. Naturally I had many affairs. But it was all right, your father wanted it.”
“That’s very strange.”
“I’m serious. He encouraged me. I hope you will forgive me for saying that your father was a little neurotic. The first-generation Freudians, you know, were not properly analyzed. It gave him pleasure that I had affairs. He wanted to be the husband of the woman who had the most admirers.”
“And you?”
“I couldn’t help it, my dear,” Kamilla tells her sadly. “I went to the best psychoanalysts in Budapest and they told me that I had to have affairs to prove to my mother that I could have all the men. When I was a child my mother told me that I was so ugly no man would want me; therefore, you see, I had to make every man desire me, even though I had the most wonderful husband. This was the tragedy of my life. You can’t imagine how much I suffered. I was in analysis for fourteen years. We can’t change our nature,” she sighs. [...]
On Sundays he belonged to her; they did wonderful things together. Going on walks was what Sophie enjoyed most, more than going to the theater or the amusement park. She pulled him or stopped him. She marveled at her power over someone so much bigger, a man who earned money, owned a house—was this what the dog felt when she took him on walks?—this mad joy in running, jumping on and off all the ledges? Why couldn’t he run? The dog and she both went after his walking stick. They could ruffle him, they weren’t afraid. Could he make the dog behave at least? He made solemn and threatening faces, trying to get her to listen. He wanted to show her things, explain things. She wanted to play; she didn’t know what explanations did. He wanted to talk. She asked questions, why and what then and so what—made him grind out answers just to exercise power over him. Power and curiosity and wonder that this big man with a walking stick and bushy eyebrows who smoked cigarets could be pushed and pulled and made to talk and buy things for her, and she was happy till he spoiled it for her by putting it in words. “...why do you think I spend the one free afternoon of my week with you and buy you things, and why do you think I love you?” On and on about all that he did for her. And why? Why did he do all this for her? Because he was stupid. He put the words in her mouth. No, she only thought it and he said it. It was all right, he said and spoke about the laws of nature, the selfishness of children; they were all instruments of nature but he was resigned to it, he said, making it sound sad. Then she hopped and skipped and ran till she got rid of her anger.
Sanity depends on order. Within a month of leaving the Hotel Caiette and arriving in Jonathan Alkaitis’s absurdly enormous house in the Connecticut suburbs, Vincent had established a routine from which she seldom wavered. She rose at five a.m., a half hour earlier than Jonathan, and went jogging. By the time she returned to his house, he’d left for Manhattan. She was showered and dressed for the day by eight a.m., by which point Jonathan’s driver was available to take her to the train station—he repeatedly offered to drive her to the city, but she preferred the movement of trains to gridlocked traffic—and when she emerged into Grand Central Terminal she liked to linger for a while on her way across the main concourse, taking in the constellations of stars on the green ceiling, the Tiffany clock above the information booth, the crowds. She always had breakfast at a diner near the station, then made her way south toward lower Manhattan and a particular café where she liked to drink espresso and read newspapers, after which she went shopping or got her hair done or walked the streets with her video camera or some combination thereof, and if there was time she visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a while before she made her way back to Grand Central and a northbound train, in time to be home and dressed in something beautiful by six p.m., which was the earliest Jonathan would conceivably arrive home from the office.
She spent the evening with Jonathan but always found a half hour to go swimming at some point before bed. In the kingdom of money, as she thought of it, there were enormous swaths of time to fill, and she had intimations of danger in letting herself drift, in allowing a day to pass without a schedule or a plan.
a proposed answer to the question of how wealthy women without jobs spend their time
Her contract with Jonathan, as she understood it, was that she’d be available whenever he wanted her, in and out of the bedroom, she would be elegant and impeccable at all times—“You bring such grace to the room,” he’d said—and in return for this she had a credit card whose bills she never saw, a life of beautiful homes and travel, in other words the opposite of the life she’d lived before. No one actually uses the phrase trophy wife in conversation, but Jonathan was thirty-four years older than Vincent. She understood what she was.
What Vincent’s mother probably wouldn’t have imagined: a life—an arrangement—in which Vincent wore a wedding ring but was not actually married. “I want you close,” Jonathan said, at the beginning, “but I just don’t want to get married again.” His wife, Suzanne, had died only three years earlier. They never said her name. But while he didn’t want to marry Vincent, he did feel that wedding rings created an impression of stability. “In my line of work,” he said, “managing other people’s money, steadiness is everything. If I take you out to dinner with clients, it’s better for you to be a beautiful young wife than a beautiful young girlfriend.”
She left the boutique with the gloves in her handbag and found her thoughts drifting a little as she walked. Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she’d quit working at the Hotel Caiette and returned to her old job at the Hotel Vancouver before Jonathan arrived, for example, or where he decided to get room service that morning instead of sitting at the bar and ordering breakfast, or where he did sit at the bar and order breakfast but he didn’t like Vincent; an alternate reality where she still lived in the staff quarters of the Hotel Caiette, serving drinks to wealthy tourists all night, years passing. None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.
(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. Later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion.)
:/ no
When everyone was gone, the lawn seemed enormous, a twilight landscape of round tables with flickering candles on wine-stained tablecloths, plastic cups glimmering in the trampled grass. “You’re so poised,” Jonathan said. They were sitting by the pool with their feet in the water, while the caterers blew out candles and folded tables and packed dirty glasses into crates. That’s my job, Vincent didn’t say in return. Calling it a job seemed uncharitable, because she really did like him. It wasn’t the romance of the century, but it didn’t have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone’s company, she’d been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don’t mind sleeping with them, isn’t that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like friendship? She spent more time thinking about this than she would have liked, which suggested that it was an unresolved question, but she felt certain that she could go on this way for a long time, years probably. The Fourth of July was a feverish night at the peak of a heat wave.
:/ again no
She was watching the shimmer of lights on the surface of the pool. When she looked up, one of the caterers was watching her, a young woman who was straightening deck chairs. Vincent looked away quickly. She had studied the habits of the monied with diligence. She copied their modes of dress and speech, and cultivated an air of carelessness. But she was ill at ease around the household staff and the caterers, because she feared that if anyone from her home planet were to look at her too closely, they’d see through her disguise.