My Summer With George by Marilyn French


  But if George could not rest in love, had not ever in his life been able to trust it, he would never love me.

  I dismissed this thought.

  I tried to remember whether any of my husbands had enjoyed talking about their childhood. Charles had. Of course, he was Italian. I’d known a number of Italian men who were honorary women. But none of the others had, that I could remember. So maybe George’s reluctance had no profound meaning.

  But then, how to explain him?

  I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. I held myself apart from myself. It occurred to me that I needed help.

  I sat up and dialed Molly.

  “You’re there!”

  “I’m here. I had an auction yesterday that spilled over till today, and I couldn’t get away. I’ve been on the phone all morning. It was just settled ten minutes ago, and I’m sitting here wondering whether it’s too late to go up to the country. So I’m here. How come you’re here?”

  “Mary Smith’s birthday party was last night. And I had a lunch date today,” I said.

  “Oh. How was the birthday?”

  “Fine. Stay here, okay? In New York. Don’t go to the country. Have dinner with me tonight.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m upset. I need to talk to you.”

  “Of course I’ll stay. What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Where shall we eat?”

  “Alison on Dominick?”

  “Great.”

  “What time?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “I’ll make the res. See you.”

  Molly Baum is my agent, but she is also one of my best friends and has been for over twenty years. I started out with a male agent, forty years ago, but in 1968, dear old Harry Horn had a coronary and died. Molly is a quick, decisive woman who nevertheless thinks about things, questions them. She doesn’t settle for surfaces. Molly claimed she knew what was good for me even when I didn’t, and there was considerable evidence that she was right. She had warned me against marrying Andrew, she said he would abandon me, and she was right. Of course, she warned me against marrying Mark on the same grounds. Well, I suppose she was right again, but even if in the end they do both abandon you, there is a difference between a man who leaves you for a younger woman, after stealing your money and your house on Twelfth Street, and one who dies of pancreatic cancer.

  Like me and my friend Mary Smith, Molly is self-created. Her mother had been pregnant a dozen times and had had seven children when Molly was born. She had more children than she wanted or could feed—she worked in a sweatshop to support them—and Molly had to fend for herself from the beginning. When she was ten, her mother died, and the next year, her father did. The three younger children were tossed from married sister to married sister in the next few years. Molly was miserable. What she wanted above anything else was an education, but she didn’t see any way of getting one where she lived.

  Molly was smart and determined, though. She saved up money from baby-sitting, and when she had thirty dollars, she left Gary, Indiana, and came to New York. She was fifteen, and beautiful, and she got a job modeling in a wholesale fur house. She was subjected to the harassment young women in such a situation are always subjected to, but she was already tough, and got tougher. She let no man get within a foot of her—and in time won the respect of all the guys in her industry. Earning enough to support herself and go to school at night, she managed to get through college. Then she went to work for a magazine: she’d always wanted to be a writer.

  Over the years, she drifted into agenting and into marriage. She’s been married—and divorced—three times and has three kids. For twenty-five years, Molly has had her own agency; she sells mainly romance novels, even though she no longer believes in romantic love. After her last divorce, she said she was giving up love, sex, and men forever, and she’s stuck to her word for the last decade. She says that women always get shafted in their relations with men, and that once they reach the age of sense (I think she means menopause), they should avoid them. She doesn’t object to men falling in love, and she treats her married friends pleasantly, but I know she is more comfortable with women who are alone, like her.

  Molly is short and blond, with a wild head of curly hair and a tinkly little voice that can give you a false impression if you don’t know her. Men who haven’t dealt with her before sometimes treat her like a flake, imagining they can bulldoze her into a deal. But she has no compunctions about putting people down, albeit diplomatically. And she has absolute integrity—something you can’t count on finding in an agent.

  We embraced and made chitchat, Molly glancing carefully at my face but asking nothing. I know I looked bad, tense and shadowed. I ordered a mâche salad and, my favorite at Alison’s, a braised lamb shank with white beans, a dish I could never finish. I always took the remains home with me, to zap in the microwave some other night. We ordered wine. While we drank it, we discussed business matters. I have twenty different publishers worldwide, so there is always a lot to discuss. I waited until we’d finished our main course before I launched into George.

  “I’ve met a man,” I said.

  “No!” She slammed her cup into its saucer. “I don’t believe it! At your age! Don’t you know better by now?”

  “Come on, Molly, I need help. I really care about him, but he’s driving me crazy.”

  “I can’t believe you…” She was shaking her head from side to side, in despair.

  “Well, I did, okay?”

  I told her the whole story. It carried us through cappuccino and the brandies we ordered afterward. It carried us through the ice water we drank after that. The restaurant was beginning to empty before I finished. After I had recounted this morning’s events—his momentous question and his immediate precipitous departure—I stopped, just stopped, my voice dwindling off…

  After a silence, Molly asked, “Is that it?”

  I nodded. I could barely speak.

  “I’m sorry, Hermione,” she said quietly, “but I don’t understand what you see in him. I mean, he’s mean. He’s thoughtless and inconsiderate, and he doesn’t care about you. He toys with you.”

  “You really think so?” My eyes blurred.

  “What do you see in him?” she asked.

  “Oh…” I considered. “He’s smart,” I said. “He doesn’t speak well—he’s too busy sounding like a good ol’ guy—but in fact he has an elegant mind. One day at lunch he discoursed on Clarence Thomas’s career; not only did he know all the facts, but he had a perspective on the man, saw his strengths and weaknesses…”

  She gave me a look. “Puh-leeze.”

  “Look.” I was embarrassed. “When we first met, he made me feel—I can’t believe it was only last Sunday!” I gasped. “It feels as if an eon has passed since then. Anyway, he pursued me so intently…he looked at me with such excitement…he made me feel desirable. I haven’t felt desirable since Mark died.”

  She gave me a look.

  “Well, all right. For ten years, though.”

  She nodded. “You’ve been alone a long time. As long as I have.”

  “And don’t you feel…a little shrunk? A little dried up, less alive?”

  “No! I’m much too busy. Besides,” she admitted, “there are always these flirtations going on…”

  “Okay. So maybe there have been a few men in the past few years who’ve acted interested…”

  “Lots. Remember Wally Bedell?”

  “Oh, please!” I protested. “That’s what I mean. They weren’t people I could feel desire for. You know, you get to our age…well, my age”—Molly is five years younger than I—“and you feel desire for damn few people. Practically nobody. Who’s attractive? They’re all old, fat, sloppy, bald, and gray, they’re failures wanting to whine or successes wanting to brag! Is there a single man you know that you could feel something for?”

  “Not me. And that’s fine with me. It’s a relief.”

 
“Well, I feel—I can feel—I do feel desire for George. In fact, I’m so hyped up with desire, I can’t sleep…”

  Molly sagged, both her body and her mouth. “Well, I’m sorry. Because I can’t see—well, what do I know? Who knows. Maybe he’ll come back, maybe he’ll call, maybe you’ll live happily ever after, for god’s sake.”

  “Oh, that’s the worst part! Never, never in my life…Well, you know, you were there when I married Andrew, when I married Mark…You remember how tentative I was, how unsure that I was doing the right thing. I said, I remember—I told you just before the judge arrived—that I couldn’t picture growing old with Andrew, and you said, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t!’”

  We both giggled.

  “But this time! I can’t sleep, I keep having these fantasies, I see the two of us together, our families together, spending holidays traveling, spending the summers in Sag Harbor together, me spending time in his house in Louisville—”

  “He has a house in Louisville?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. He lives there. I put him in a gorgeous modern glass-and-wood ranch, all jutting angles and levels, with views of the forest. I put him in a two-story colonial, white with black shutters. I put him in a grungy apartment that needs immediate redecorating. By me. I put him—”

  “Okay, I get it.” Molly held up her hand to halt me.

  “I put us in an apartment on Central Park West, floor over floor. I put us across town from each other, me on Fifth, him on CPW. I put us in a house on Twelfth Street, occupying all four stories. Shall I go on?”

  She shook her head.

  “This has never happened to me before. I never had such fantasies before.”

  “That’s only because before, when you were interested in someone, he was interested in you too. You didn’t need to fantasize. You had reality.”

  “You think?”

  “You’ve probably always had these fantasies. Without knowing it.”

  I shook my head. “No. No.”

  “Hermione!” she cried. “Consider how you make your living! How can you write these romances if you don’t believe in them? Of course you believe in the fantasy of happiness ever after!”

  I bristled. “I write them,” I said coldly. “I don’t believe in them. What do you think I am, an idiot?”

  “Oh, come on.” She placed her hand over mine, resting on the table. “I’ve outlawed romantic love from my life, but I sell romances, don’t I? We all believe in that fantasy. All women.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s the way we were raised,” she argued, trying to take the sting out. “It’s our background. Our socialization.”

  “Not me.”

  “What? You were different?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t raised the way other girls were. I wasn’t raised to be dependent on a man. I never imagined living happily ever after; I was never allowed to entertain such a fantasy. Our lives were too hard.”

  “So where do your novels come from? Nobody could write them as well as you do without believing that stuff…”

  “Don’t try to butter me up,” I muttered.

  She gazed at me sympathetically and sighed. “I’m tired,” she said, gathering her shawl about her shoulders. “I’ve been up since five, and it’s after midnight.”

  “Molly, what should I do?”

  “Forget him,” she said.

  Sunday morning early, I called the garage and asked one of the doormen to fetch my Porsche. I made it out to Sag Harbor in two and a half hours, with a stop for breakfast; eastbound traffic was light on Sundays. But my body was tense and my driving jerky and distracted. I came close to having a couple of accidents.

  George drove out with me. He’d never been to Long Island before and attended to my brief history of the place with interest; he leaned back and relaxed, listening to my tape of the Brahms clarinet quintet. He rested his hand on top of mine, holding the gearshift. We smiled at each other without speaking.

  As soon as I drove into the Long Island village with its huge shade trees and quiet streets, my body began to relax. My house, a seven-room cottage, was on an inlet off Gardiners Bay. It had a screened porch along the back; beyond that, the lawn extended to a dock. The house was surrounded by meadows and trees, so that I had no visible neighbors. By then I’d lost George. I unpacked the few things I’d brought out (including the leftover lamb shank from dinner the night before), then stripped off my clothes and threw myself into the water. After my swim, I sprawled naked on a chaise.

  I lay there in the warm sun with my eyes closed and tried not to think about George. I tried not to feel the nervousness that had infected my entire body like a virus, the uncertainty and dread and fear that warred with my desire, my sense that he desired me.

  My skin throbbed and my breasts ached. My body was clamorous, it tingled all over. I felt like a sick person whose body is crying out for water. Mine was crying out to be pressed against another body. I tried to escape into sleep, but I dreamed about George. Waking, I pulled myself up slowly. I felt like a horny adolescent. It was humiliating.

  I sat up and, feeling chilled, pulled the towel around me and ran to the shower behind the garage. I stood there letting warm water pour over me, wondering if Molly could be right, if I had learned a Cinderella view of life as a child. I had always thought of myself as having been forged into steel by my early life. From the day I decided to take the scholarship to Mount Holyoke, I had seen myself as selfish and willful, a woman who succeeded because she refused to sacrifice for others. If I ever made sacrifices for my kids, it was because I preferred the result of the “sacrifice” to the result of not making it. For example, I preferred to work hard and write an extra novel so the kids could go to camp summers rather than hang around New York City, bored and maybe in trouble. That wasn’t a sacrifice; it was a choice. Still, I suppose my mother could have said the same about her life. Anyway, being willful and selfish seems to rule out having a soupy romantic view of life and love. Doesn’t it?

  Maybe not.

  Part II

  6

  NORMALLY, I SETTLE QUICKLY into the different rhythm of my life in Sag Harbor. In the city, I work mornings and give my afternoons over to pleasure. After all, why else live in Manhattan? After lunch at home or out with a business associate or a friend, I go to a gallery, a museum, or an art exhibition. If I’m with a friend who loves window-shopping, we might walk down Lex or Madison, gazing in shop windows and occasionally buying something. Most nights, I meet friends to attend a concert or ballet or play or movie or lecture. I almost always have dinner out. My New York life is exactly as I had pictured it, dreamed it, back when I was seventeen and imagining a life not dominated by misery. It was packed with social and cultural stimuli, wonderfully rich if a little exhausting.

  On Long Island, too, I spend my mornings writing, but then, before lunch, I always go for a swim—even in the rain. After lunch I garden or run errands: I have no assistant in Sag Harbor, so I do my own marketing, go to the dry cleaner, pick up books from the bookstore. I do not only my own errands but my own cooking. I could of course hire someone to do these things for me, but the whole point of being in the country is to do them myself and enjoy the luxury of being alone in my house. It’s a pleasure to touch the fresh vegetables at the farm stand with my own hands, to feel the firmness of eggplants and tomatoes, to smell the melons and cucumbers and basil. It’s lovely to prepare a fine meal and eat it with only a good book for company. I find my country life restful, and there is no problem keeping in touch with affairs in New York. My assistant, Lou, who is a wonder of efficiency and sweetness, is as close as the telephone. When she takes her month’s vacation, a friend of hers takes over.

  I had instructed Lou to give George my Long Island number if he called while she was there, but I did not expect to hear from him right away—although it would have been nice.

  Still, even without high expectations, I couldn’t settle down to my usual country routine. I cou
ldn’t find a restful place in my mind. After years of experience, I usually could write even when I was upset; after Mark died, I was paralyzed and unable to write for only a month or so. But now I worked on the novel ploddingly. Though it was nearly finished, I couldn’t dredge up the slightest interest in my heroine or her plight. I had to force myself to sit down at the computer every morning—a far cry from my usual driven writerly self. My mind kept manufacturing scenes for a different narrative, one starring me and George. Unfortunately, I was still uncertain about the plotline and, above all, the conclusion of this narrative. So much depended on whether George was a hero or a villain: I had no sense of his motivation. And motivation, after all, is the only real difference between a hero and a villain. And here I was, after all these years, still unable to figure it out.

  I would get up from my desk, throw myself on the chaise, and stare out at the trees. I’d lie in the warm sun after my swim and gaze out at the water, my body throbbing like a huge metronome.

  Desire was constant in my life. I moved and walked in an erotic cloud. When I touched something, my hands tingled with the touching; I was keenly aware of the surfaces of things, the way you are when you are choosing a fabric. I felt the air around me, touching my body, my arms in my sleeveless blouse, my neck, kissing my face. I was a walking throb. This went on day and night. I could not sleep. I bought myself a sleeping mask. I took sleeping pills. I even got up and poured myself a gin and tonic one night. But my mind whirred on with these scenes, and nothing I did could stop it.

  I kept seeing George and me, our mouths permanently swollen from kissing, full and soft as overripe plums. Our eyes were electrically connected; they set off sparks when their gaze met. Our short, shallow breathing was fast and uncontrollable. Our bodies were constantly aware of being alive, tingling with knowledge. George smelled musky, dusty, like dried peaches, and his damp skin felt oiled, perfumed. He leaned over and kissed my neck with his open mouth, and I wanted him to devour me.

 
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