“You look like twins,” I said—the first casual remark I’d made all day. It brought a spurt of laughter from Daphne.
The rest of that day is a blur of yearning and dread: yearning to have had a different life, to have been Daphne, and grown
up in that house; dread of the moment when politeness would compel me to make my farewells, and retreat to my dreary little
apartment in Springwell. I volunteered to make the gravy, and to my surprise, my offer was accepted. Nancy complimented me
on its smoothness. Despite being so skinny, Phil Perry, then already in his third year in the psych department, ate twice
as much as anyone else, and was congratulated for it. The girl with the bangs in the plaid skirt told a long, boring story
about her father losing his dog.
As for Ernest—he got drunk, and while everyone else was gathering in the living room for coffee, he cornered me in the kitchen
and tried to kiss me. This didn’t surprise me. In those years, men took what opportunities they could get.
“Such a pretty little thing,” he said, nuzzling my ear.
“Dr. Wright, please!” I said—more because it was what I thought I
should
say than because I objected, or even cared particularly.
“When you typed that article for me last week, what did you think? You know the one I mean—”
“I just type. I think about typing.”
“Say the title.”
“ ‘Female Masturbation and the Electra Complex.’”
“Do you get excited when you read those words? ‘Female masturbation’? Say it again. Please.”
Ben came in, and we separated. I don’t know if he saw us. He gave his father a murderous stare.
Straightening my skirt, I returned to the living room. Ernest and Ben followed. Later, I drove back to my apartment in my
new Dodge Dart. I had a lot to think about: not merely Ernest’ come-on, but Nancy’ weird avidity to win me as a friend. Why
were they so interested in me? I was just a secretary. True, in other arenas of my life, I could conduct myself with confidence
and grace, but back in those early days, interacting with members of the faculty made me shy. After all, these people had
doctorates from grand universities—while I had only a high school diploma. Later, I would cease to be so easily impressed—I
would learn that Ph.D.’ from Harvard could be blithering idiots, just as secretaries could be geniuses—but back then I was
still naive. And so as I opened the door to my apartment, I found myself not only reviewing the events of the evening, but
wondering whether behind the kindness the Wrights had shown me there might not lie some nefarious motive; might I perhaps
have been the subject of some psychological experiment, my every action and reaction recorded, analyzed, assessed? Hidden
cameras, Dictaphones in the potted plants, Glenn and Phil taking notes: Lying in bed that night, I let paranoia get the better
of me. Probably the Wrights simply liked me, I reminded myself. Or felt sorry for me. I would have to get to know them better
before I could say for certain.
Monday I was back at the office. I worried that Ernest might make some reference to our clinch in the kitchen, but he acted
as if nothing had happened. “So I’ll be seeing you on Saturday mornings from now on?” he asked.
“If you’re home,” I said.
He was home. While Nancy and I played, he puttered around in the study, ostensibly fixing the stereo and alerting us every
time one of us hit a wrong note, which was often. This time Nancy was less patient. As I would soon learn, the role into which
she had conscripted me was one for which several professors’ wives had already auditioned and been turned down. Why I succeeded
where they failed I still don’t know. Perhaps I simply buckled under more willingly to her domination; or perhaps she really
did love me in a way she loved few others. Certainly in those early days of our friendship it seemed that her wish was to
nurture and cultivate me, to bring me along in the world as if I were another daughter of that house. Nor can it be denied
that each week she treated me more like Daphne. “Careful, Denny!” she’d shout, if I accidentally turned two pages at once;
or if I had trouble with octaves—"It’ so simple, just look!” she’d say, and grab hold of my hands, smashing them into position
against the keys. “I see now,” I’d say, and we’d try again, and again I’d fall apart.
“You’re just not concentrating. I never had these problems with Anne. We played so perfectly together, the harmonies—they
were almost magical.”
“You must miss her.”
“We were the same size, we could wear the same clothes.”
“What did you talk about while you played?”
“Husbands. Things.”
There was no way I could have gotten into Nancy’ clothes. Nor could I talk with her about husbands, as I had none.
As the weeks passed, more and more Anne became the principal topic of our conversations: Anne and, more specifically, my failure
to live up to Anne in almost every regard. In Bradford, she and Nancy had played five days a week—Mozart, some Brahms waltzes,
a stab at Schubert’ “Grand Duo.” Because I worked, I could only manage Saturday mornings—a source of some annoyance to Nancy,
though clearly not enough to induce her to go off in search of a partner with more time on her hands. Soon I began to catch
on that my function was not, in fact, to improve. My function was to exalt, by my very incompetence, the true friend, Anne,
swindled away by distance and Ernest’ ambitions. The race was fixed. By losing, I fulfilled my part of the bargain, and received
as payoff a sense of inclusion that I pocketed as greedily as any bought jockey does the profits of his corruption.
Sometimes things got contentious between us. Nancy would ask me to help her load the dishwasher and then chastise me for not
adequately rinsing the plates beforehand. “How many times do I have to tell you, Denny? If you don’t get every little bit
of food off, what’ left will end up caked on. Look at what you missed.”
I made a remark to the effect that if you ended up having to wash the dishes by hand, what was the point of owning a dishwasher
in the first place? This did not go over well.
“At this rate, I shudder to think what kind of household
you’ll
keep,” Nancy said, “that is, assuming you ever get married.”
On another occasion—a propos of nothing—she said, “Anne had such a lovely figure! Slender waist, graceful neck. You should
lose a few pounds, Denny. Then you might get a boyfriend.”
It was the same as with Daphne and her hair—or so I told myself, as I tried to swallow back my hurt. For that was my method
of justifying Nancy’ cruelty. If such abuse was simply part of how mothers treated daughters, then I should be grateful for
it. This was what I had missed, and longed for. This was what it meant to be a daughter.
Still, I cannot deny that in my own subtle way, I gave as good as I got. Ernest was the linchpin in this. One Saturday in
February, when Nancy had had to run out to deliver Ben to a make-up fliigelhorn lesson, he cornered me a second time, near
the percolator.
“Such a plump little thing,” he muttered in my ear. “With all that filthy stuff you type for me, you must have dirty dreams.
Won’t you tell me your dirty dreams?”
Of course, I could have pushed him away. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to push him away. But I didn’t.
Instead I turned, placed my lips against his ear, and whispered, “I dream about you.”
O
NE OF MY duties as Ernest’ secretary was to edit—in fact, to rewrite—his articles and grant applications under the guise
of “typing” them. He would hand me a wad of illiterate notes, and I would transform it into a coherent piece of prose, which
I would hand back to him. Then he would praise my “typing” skills. At first his ineptitude as a writer shocked me—I’d always
taken it for granted that to get as far as he had in academia, you’d at least have to be able to craft a decent sentence—but
then I asked myself why the gift for generating ideas should necessarily go hand in hand with the capacity to express them.
If I had a greater facility with English than Ernest did, it was simply further proof that my own talents were of a purely
clerical—and therefore limited—sort. Only later did I come to question this assumption, to look back at those books of Ernest’
that I’d edited—no,
written
—and recognize the degree to which my improvements and refinements had really changed his ideas, making them as much mine
as his. At the time, though, it would never have occurred to me to ask for any kind of credit. I was a secretary. “Typing”
was my job.
One Saturday, after Nancy and I had finished playing, Ernest asked me to come up to his office above the garage to look over
a manuscript with him. Nancy didn’t object; I suppose she thought me too fat and unattractive to take seriously as a rival.
Off she went to the supermarket (a Saturday ritual for her). Ernest led me out of the kitchen and into the garage and up the
narrow staircase to the converted attic where he saw his patients. This was a cramped little space under the eaves, with ceilings
and walls that bled into each other, so that you could hardly say where one began and the other ended. There was an Eames
Case Study daybed upholstered in nubbly red fabric—presumably it was upon this that Ernest’ patients lay while he probed their
childhoods—and over it a picture of Freud, and over the desk, which faced the one window, a few model airplanes on strings.
Ernest sat at the desk, and I sat on the daybed. Already we had a certain routine down for this sort of work: He would give
me a manuscript, and I would read it aloud. (This one concerned Patient X, who refused ever to drink water; she even brushed
her teeth with Coca-Cola.) Then I would read, and as I did, he would periodically interrupt me to amplify some thought, or
grope toward a clarification—my cue to suggest, ever so delicately, a means of making his point more cleanly. Nor was it only
a matter of writing; sometimes I would be emboldened to call attention to some half-baked supposition, or to propose a more
persuasive interpretation. And yet between his natural ego and my natural diffidence, we were able to pretend that all I was
doing was taking a complicated form of dictation. Whether privately he recognized the true extent of my contribution I’m still
not sure.
After we had finished, Ernest stood up from his chair and sat next to me on the daybed. I said not a word. At this point it
had been almost a month since the grope in the kitchen; if anything, I wondered why he had waited so long to make another
move. I tried to make it clear, from my expression, that I was ready and willing, but he seemed reluctant to touch me, and
finally, out of impatience, I put my hand on the back of his head and pulled his mouth toward mine. Everything happened very
quickly then; his lovemaking, on this occasion as it would be on others, seemed to be a kind of payback for the help I had
just given him—payback in the sense of vengeance as well as reward, for mixed into his passion were distinct tones of both
gratitude and punishment. I didn’t mind. I’d never had much of an appetite for namby-pamby sex. Then we sat together, half
undressed, and he talked a little: about how irritating he found Ben’ food phobias, and about Daphne’ lack of respect for
her parents, and about what he called, using the parlance of the day, Nancy’ “frigidity.” This last accusation, I would later
learn, is one to which husbands often resort when they feel the need to justify, after the fact, an extramarital dalliance.
At the time, though, it was totally new to me. I took it at face value, and felt as sorry for Ernest, whose needs Nancy obviously
refused to satisfy, as I did for Nancy, condemned by her own coldness to miss out forever on the wild pleasures of sex.
I was always rather fond of Ernest’ office above the garage. I liked the way the nubbly red fabric felt against my back, just
as I liked the portrait of Freud, gazing down on us like some benevolent saint, and the smell of typewriter ribbons and wood
and paper. Indeed, we might have gone on for years like that, our affair confined to those Saturdays and that daybed, had
not Nancy decided rather capriciously one Saturday to forego her weekly trip to the supermarket and make lunch instead. Perhaps
she suspected something, or perhaps she was starting to feel left out, or perhaps (this seems most likely) her decision had
nothing to do with us, and was made in response to some shift in her own cosmos of which we knew nothing. In any case, after
that Ernest stopped asking me up to his office, and we took to meeting at my apartment, usually on Sundays. In this way Nancy
contributed, albeit unknowingly, to the intensification of our affair.
I suppose at this point I am obliged to offer some detailed explanation of what I felt about my situation at that time, as
for most readers the ease with which I alternated between such seemingly incompatible functions—efficient secretary, available
mistress, best friend to wife—must seem peculiar. For me, though, it was not peculiar at all. It was natural. Call me immoral,
but as I typed out Ernest’ correspondence outside his office each weekday, I felt no need to block from my memory the afternoons
we spent making love. Nor when we made love did I feel stabs of guilt in recalling the mornings I played piano with Nancy.
I moved easily among these roles. Of course I recognized the risks—among them the certainty that if Nancy ever found out about
Ernest and me, I would be banished forever from Florizona Avenue, and have to quit my job—and yet I attributed those risks
entirely to the narrowness of other people, and figured that so long as Ernest and I played our cards right, and no one found
us out, there would be nothing to worry about. After all, he had as little wish for Nancy to discover our affair as I did.
He was not one of those men who uses his mistresses to get back at his wife. He didn’t want to leave her for me, and I didn’t
want to marry him. I adored them both. And so we proceeded fairly harmoniously, although I would be dishonest if I did not
admit to sometimes experiencing a sense of emptiness in the aftermath of his departures, something akin to what one feels
when one arrives home alone after a Thanksgiving dinner. For there
was
one thing that I would have liked (not that I ever could have had it), and that was to have a bed of my own at that house,
if not Daphne’ then some other bed, specifically designated for me. Not a bed I would sleep in every night, and certainly
not Nancy’ half of the huge bed with the slub linen spread: I still treasured my independence. Yet was it too much to hope
that someday my role within the family might be legitimized?
Marriage remains, for me, a mysterious institution. For instance, Ernest and Nancy often argued in my presence. If our practice
session was going late, and he needed my help with a chapter from his book, he would feel no compunction about striding into
the living room and shouting, “When the hell are you two going to be done?” To which Nancy—not missing a measure—would reply,
“Hold your horses,” and continue playing. Ernest would storm out again, only to reappear a few minutes later to repeat his
demand. She yelled, he left, he returned. With almost blithe disinterest they threatened and rebuffed each other, their voices
rising, the level of tension escalating—and then we would finish, and it would be as if nothing had happened. Nancy would
announce gaily that she was going to Safeway; Ernest and I would head up to his office. “Like water off a duck’ back,” as
my mother used to say, which made me wonder if this was the secret of marriage: to develop—no, not a thick skin; rather, a
down at once fragile and light, by means of which you could shake off, in an instant, any unpleasantness and go about your
business. Yet it would protect you, too. Marriage protected. I wished I could have known that feeling of safety, a safety
so deep it meant you could say anything, and never have to calculate all that you stood to lose.
Just before Thanksgiving of 1968, Nancy received a letter from Anne Armstrong in which her friend announced that she had left
her husband, Clifford, and was living in a rented apartment with a novelist called Jonah Boyd—recently hired as writer-in-residence
at Bradford. Nancy took the news hard, and would not say why. Perhaps the casual ease with which Anne had abandoned her marriage
made her wonder if staying with Ernest all these years had been a mistake; or perhaps the discovery that Anne was having an
affair ignited some fear in her that Ernest might be doing the same thing. All I know for certain is that the Saturday Nancy
got the letter, for the first and only time in all the years I knew her, she could not play. Her fingers shook so badly she
could barely form them into a chord. At last, pleading a headache, she asked if I’d mind forgoing our weekly session this
one time.
The full story came out over the course of the next several Saturdays—details, background, and Nancy’ mess of a reaction,
as Anne kept her abreast of developments through letters and phone calls, and Nancy passed the news on to me. She had no one
else in whom she could confide. That Anne’ life, since the Wrights’ departure from Bradford, had taken such an eccentric if
not downright self-destructive turn was something for which, it appeared, Nancy blamed herself. Perhaps if she had stayed,
Nancy speculated, and thus not deprived Anne of the outlet that their piano playing provided, Anne never would have left Clifford
in the first place. For without her, Anne had nothing in Bradford. No children. No friends. Only Clifford, a well-meaning
if remote mathematician.
I learned more about Anne. She was younger than Nancy by five years. Because she came from Brooklyn, she often expressed a
longing for concerts and restaurants and galleries—all categories of experience in which Bradford, especially in the sixties,
was sadly lacking. All Bradford had was a coffin factory. Anne never fit in easily with the other faculty wives, their malign
chitchat, the bridge afternoons over which a cigarette haze hung, as well as a faint stink of gin. Clinking noises: ice against
glass, glass against tabletop, engagement ring against wedding ring on fingers the nails of which were lacquered the color
of plums. On these occasions, Anne sometimes drank. Too much. She never managed to pick up the finer points of bridge. She
was tranquil only with Nancy, who somehow kept her recklessness in check. On her own, without Nancy to supervise, Anne became
obstreperous. She had her ears pierced, and started introducing the word “orgasm” into bridge table conversation. (Usually
the context was Clifford’ failure to give her any.) Not that there was anything wrong with Clifford to look at, Nancy said.
He was big and hirsute and possessed of a sort of blond, bland handsomeness that Nancy, at least, appreciated. And yet the
very qualities that had attracted Anne to him when they had married—his even temper, his tactfulness, the reluctance ever
to raise his voice that had seemed so refreshing to her, after her loud Brooklyn childhood—began, soon enough, to bore and
then to vex her. She had a need for stimulation that Clifford could not fathom. “Entertain me! Amuse me!” she would beg when
he came home from school, and he would tell her about the Fibonacci numbers, a sequence in which each entry is the sum of
the two that precede it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .) “The Fibonacci numbers,” he would say, “are often repeated in the
floral patterns and leaf arrangements of plants.” Then he would show her a fir cone, ask her to examine its spirals. “As if
I was one of his goddamn students,” she complained to Nancy, who tried to placate her, telling her that she should be more
patient. Clifford meant well. He was trying. But Anne would have none of it. “I keep expecting him to say, ‘There’ll be a
quiz on this afterward,’” she said. “I tell you, I cannot bear it anymore. I cannot bear it.”
Anne and Nancy had this conversation in 1966. Later that year, the Wrights moved west. It was then that things really fell
apart. Deprived of Nancy’ cautionary influence, Anne started going braless in public. She took to wearing hoop earrings, satin
blouses in hot colors, and wraparound, tie-dyed skirts. Also sandals. She was a protohippie faculty wife at a time when not
even the most rebellious female undergraduate would have dared anything more bohemian than tights. Nor did Anne cut a bad
figure, according to Nancy, for she had a sort of gypsy prettiness that these outfits accentuated. Her hair fell in waves
over her breasts, which were high and ample. To make it more red, she washed it with henna. To make her eyes darker and rounder,
she smeared the lids with kohl. She was a graceful dancer, when she got the chance, with agile feet. (Also hands—hence her
talent for the piano.) Yet she rarely got the chance. Clifford, “with his big clodhoppers,” got in the way. He was like a
bear, and when he danced—which was rarely—it was with the grim, embarrassed dedication of a dancing bear.
In September 1968, Anne went to a party in Bradford, a regular event hosted by the provost to welcome the year’ crop of new
faculty. Clifford, who had a cold, stayed home. Here she was introduced to Jonah Boyd. At this point, Boyd was in his late
forties; he had just published his second novel, and it had gone down, in his own words (which Anne quoted), “like a lead
balloon.” But then a friend had gotten him a gig teaching creative writing to undergraduates at Bradford—"as if such a thing
could be taught,” Anne quoted him as saying.
“Creative
writing.
What would Byron have made of such a term? What would Pope have made of it? Mockery. All ‘creative writing’ means is a chance
for the brats to indulge themselves.”