Alternate Side(52)
Of course she had moved to New York, too, and from time to time she would see him, or hear of him. What were the chances that she would be at a party with a friend of a friend at an artist’s loft three years after graduation and see his black-and-white photograph on the bedroom wall, shirtless, laughing, beautiful? It turned out things like that happened in New York all the time. Things like what happened to the artist happened all the time when they were young, a big success, then no new paintings, then the obituary, age forty-one, dead of AIDS. Nora couldn’t help it; when she had seen it in the Times, part of her had been oddly, shamefully glad: her replacement was gone. Then she’d gotten tested, been negative, which managed to convince her that James had not been sleeping with the artist and her at the same time. She and Jenny had the kind of friendship in which they told each other everything, and yet it had taken her nearly two bottles of Chardonnay atop two margaritas to tell Jenny that. “Oh, honey,” Jenny had said, stroking Nora’s forearm. “Here’s the thing: he didn’t really break up with you. He broke up with the lie that was his life.”
“I had no idea. What sort of woman am I, that I had no idea?”
“Lots of the women I know slept with gay men in college, before they knew they were gay. Or before they admitted they were gay. One of my colleagues said it was the best sex she ever had.”
“Oh, thanks a lot, Jen. That bodes well for the future,” said Nora, who was already with Charlie by then.
In retrospect it seemed that American colleges were the opposite of English boarding schools, where boys who would wind up married to women and surrounded by children were said to try it on for a time with other boys. All of her female friends now talked about the men they knew at Williams or Columbia or Oberlin who had had college girlfriends before they realized, or acknowledged, that they were not really interested in women in that way at all. Nora sometimes thought that if only she and James had been young fifty years earlier, they would have married and had children and been as happy as most people and she would only wonder sometimes why he had run out of steam in the sex department and took so many business trips (which was no different from being married to a straight man, if it came to that). Instead they had had the good fortune—or the bad, from her perspective—of meeting at the dawning of the age of enlightenment. But when she’d said that to Jenny that drunken night, her friend had looked at her sternly and said, “You need to check yourself, Nor. That’s just crazy. There’s a reason those kinds of arrangements went out of style.”
“Flexual,” Rachel had told her some of her friends at school called themselves, which she supposed meant whatever. James wasn’t whatever. After the artist there had apparently been a fellow architect, and then an actor. From what she had heard from their mutual friends, each relationship lasted less than the length of time theirs had. She wondered if any of them had gone home with him to Gladwyne, and suspected not. If his father had been contemptuous of art history, the likelihood was small that he’d welcome a young man starring off-Broadway in a play that required him to have his hair dyed blond.
Nora had run into James several times over the years, when she was pregnant with the twins at the screening of a documentary, at a restaurant in midtown, she arriving for lunch, he leaving. “How is your sister?” Nora asked. “You have a sister?” said the man who was with him. Nora couldn’t help but notice that James was aging oh so gracefully, but as he got older, the guys stayed the same age, just slightly older than the age he’d been when he’d broken up with Nora. What had been a charmingly unstudied urbanity when he was in college had hardened into something approaching a performance. Nora hadn’t needed Jenny to tell her that one of the things that had drawn her to Charlie was that he was the un-James. When Nora met Charlie he had never even seen Casablanca.
It infuriated Nora that the sound of James Mortimer on the phone, just a single word, still gave her that telltale and shame-making frisson. Nora had married Charlie on the rebound from something else, something impossible and profound that probably would have become just as everyday as everything else. She knew, had always known, had always told herself, that she had made the right decision. Even today Charlie would say or do something, usually with the kids, that would remind her of why she’d chosen him. He had always been a good father, not one of those who handed off a baby when the odor of full diaper shattered the potpourri air of the living room. He genuinely liked amusement-park rides and Saturday-morning cartoons and tossing that Frisbee around. He was happy to play in the father-son game, which had been changed to the father-son-daughter game, then to the parent-child game because not everyone has a father. Some of the upper-school girls had later decided that the word child was demeaning but by upper school their kids didn’t want to have anything to do with sports events that included their parents. It was bad enough having them stand on the sidelines. “Mom, I can hear you!” Rachel had said after one basketball game at which Nora had thought she’d been relatively contained.
She could almost see James in front of her as she sat with the phone in her hand, although she suspected that he might be a bit more weathered since she’d seen him last in person. “This is a surprise,” she said, and even she thought she sounded a bit harsh.
“Now, now,” he said. “How would that nice husband of yours feel if I was calling you all the time?”