Alternate Side(51)
“My sister calls me Nonnie,” she said.
“That’s different,” he said. “My sister calls me Manchild. Mannie for short.”
His sister lived in London, his parents in the suburbs of Philadelphia, or that’s what he called them, which sounded fine until he and Nora had started up the long driveway on a snaky street where none of the houses were visible from the sidewalk. Nora was too young to know then what she knew now, that on the outskirts of every American city there were areas in which the houses were invisible from the road, and that that was where the richest people lived. Grosse Pointe, Bel Air, Buckhead: during her years raising money for museums and schools she’d been to almost all of them. The Mortimers lived in Gladwyne. They were stereotypical bad parents, almost stock characters from a film, which might have been one reason their only son so loved old movies. She drank, he screwed around. She shopped, he managed their investments. At dinner in the morning room, which had wallpaper that looked like a trellis and a table that sat only six, as opposed to the dining room, which could hold twenty in a pinch, they had both been pleasant enough, although when Nora had mentioned that she and James had met in an art history class Mr. Mortimer rolled his eyes. He said that the town where Nora had grown up had a decent golf course, and Nora agreed that it did, and Mrs. Mortimer asked if her parents lived on the water, and she said unfortunately not. The food all tasted somehow like canned vegetable soup, even the salad. It was awful, and there wasn’t enough of it.
Nora had been given a guest room with yellow walls and white furniture, but it was right next to James’s room, which still had a pennant from his boys’ school above the twin bed, and she’d barely gotten under the covers before he slipped in next to her. The guest room had twin beds, too, but they were used to it from the dorms. Nora could remember it all so well, better than she remembered what she’d done yesterday, how smooth and warm his skin had felt against hers. She’d realized that that was how life was, that certain small moments were like billboards forever alongside the highway of your memory. There was a strip of moonlight through the curtains that moved across James’s back—waist, shoulder blades, waist, shoulder blades—as he moved. And then suddenly she heard a thud, thought for a moment that they’d knocked the bed frame loose, and he stopped, and she heard shouts and doors and other sounds that couldn’t be identified but that sounded like pitched battles from one of those old movies he had taught her to like, My Man Godfrey or The Philadelphia Story, which James said was about a family who had lived not far away from his parents’ house. It went on for a long time, and after that James didn’t finish, went back to his own room.
“Now you know why I’ll never get married,” he’d said after an hour-long silence in the car. Nora stared out the passenger side window and let the tears fall onto her barn jacket, but deep inside she was thinking, I’ll change his mind.
Almost two years together, three more disastrous visits to his parents, one visit at school with his sister, who had said, “You took her to the house?” as though her brother had exposed Nora to a communicable disease. Dinners with Nora’s father and Carol and Christine, who all loved him. “No wonder you are the way you are,” James said after the first such dinner. “Which is what?” Nora said, hoping for “wonderful” or “irresistible.” “Uncomplicated,” James said, and somehow it seemed like an insult. It still felt that way, the few times Nora remembered it. No one in New York ever said about anyone interesting, Oh, yes, that So-and-so, she’s uncomplicated.
“What a dick thing to say,” Jenny had said one night when Nora had gotten drunk and told her about it, and about James, and everything that followed, while Jenny held the tissue box.
The truth was, she had been uncomplicated, and na?ve. Would she know even today, nearly thirty years out, that a good-looking young man who at twenty swore by French cuffs, who spoke much of the time in the language of old movies, and could sing all the lyrics to “I’ll Be Seeing You” might not be suited to be her boyfriend, or that of any woman? She imagined Rachel describing him, bringing him home, and alarms ringing between her ears as though the house were on fire. But perhaps that was just retrospective. Or stereotypical.
He had already graduated, moved to New York, put off her two scheduled visits to him there over the summer. She remembered the day in early August when he drove up in his VW convertible and took her to a nondescript local place for lunch, not the inn where they’d had dinner on Valentine’s Day, and she wanted to say, No, no, the choice of restaurant a door slamming in her face. James was incandescent. When he finally spoke, it was not only as though he’d rehearsed his words, but as though he was jubilant at being able to deliver them.
“I love you, Moneypenny,” he said. “I’ll always love you.” Even in everyday life James had a tendency to talk like a movie, perhaps one with Ray Milland or Dana Andrews. They’d watched Laura at least half a dozen times.
Then he added, “And I like sleeping with you. But I really want to sleep with men.”
“How do you know if you’ve never done it?” she sobbed.
There was a long silence, and it contained so many things that she didn’t want to know that it took years for her to color in all those lines, one terrible realization at a time, one suspicion, one acquaintance, one prep-school friend, one swim-team member. Finally James said, “I just know.”