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Praise for Memories of a Marriage
“Among contemporary novelists, [Begley] may be the wryest, most devastating critic of class in American society.”—The Washington Post
“Engrossing . . . Louis Begley gives us a chance to see into . . . the most private recesses of another couple’s marriage.”—The New York Times Book Review
“This delicious, dazzling novel about the rise and fall of a great American debutante kept me up all night.”—Susan Cheever
“A consummately constructed monument to human imperfection.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“[Begley is] an elegant stylist with a dry wit and a merciless eye.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A fiendishly clever, Fitzgeraldesque tale about marriage, friendship, gossip, and self-justification.”—Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780385537483 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/09/2013 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 1,054,909 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
One evening in May 2003, not many days after George W. Bush’s astonishing announcement that the “mission” had been accomplished, I went to the New York State Theater to see a performance by the New York City Ballet company. I had hoped to find an all Jerry Robbins program, and there was, in fact, such a program scheduled for later that month. Unfortunately, the date was inconvenient—I had accepted a dinner invitation from a newly remarried classmate—and I had to settle for a performance that included the official premiere of Guide to Strange Places, one more of Peter Martins’s empty creations. The music by John Adams left me indifferent. If only, I said to myself, Martins had allowed us to go on thinking of him as the magnificent dancer he had been in his prime and being grateful for his management of the company, instead of giving us again and again occasions to deplore his choreography. Unable to concentrate on the movements, brilliantly executed by the cast, that seemed to me to lead to nowhere, I allowed my thoughts to turn to Jerome Robbins. He had been my wife Bella’s and my dear friend, regularly inviting us to rehearsals. We would watch him go over each segment of a ballet tirelessly: scolding, correcting, and cajoling, until a mysterious change, often imperceptible to Bella and me, signaled that the music and the dance had come together and now corresponded to his vision. He would clap his hands, turn to his assistant Victor, and say, That’s it, the kids have got it, let’s go and eat. Jerry was ravenously hungry after rehearsals. We would tag along with him and Victor to Shun Lee, a Chinese restaurant on West Sixty-Fifth Street, where Jerry, so abstemious in daily life, devoured one after another the mild Cantonese dishes that were his favorites. He died in 1998, fifteen years after George Balanchine, and the curtain went down on a great era in ballet history that their work had defined. I was grateful to have seen so much of it while they were still alive, danced by dancers they had formed. Would the company for which they had created so many masterpieces continue to perform them in high style? I hoped it would, at least for the remainder of my years.
At the intermission, I got a whiskey at the bar and, the weather being mild, went out on the open terrace. The fountain in the center of the plaza had not yet been redesigned and programmed to keep time to a beat as intricate as Fred Astaire’s steps and no easier to decipher, but I liked it anyway and never tired of looking at it. I was bewitched. How wonderful, I said to myself over and over, how glad—really how happy—I am to have come back to live in this city! For much of my life I had dreaded admitting to myself or others that I was happy. To do so, I was certain, was to invite the gods to strike where I was most vulnerable. Not my own person, but Bella or our little Agnes. Alas, the full measure of punishment had already been meted out, leaving me diminished but invulnerable. We had been living between Paris and New York, with longer stays abroad because of Bella’s family, all of whom were there. Soon after the beginning of one of our New York sojourns Agnes was killed—instantaneously—by the falling limb of a tree in Central Park, which also gravely injured the nurse who was taking her home from the Children’s Zoo. Our grief was extreme. Unable to speak about the disaster for two years or more, we suffered in silence and, without need for discussion, concluded that we would not have another child; Agnes’s place could not be taken, and we did not wish to give another hostage to fortune. We stayed away from New York as much as possible, learning to live for each other and for our work. We were hardly ever apart. I am a writer and so was Bella; we designated as our offices two adjoining rooms of every habitation we occupied, whether in New York City or the house on a rocky hillside outside Sharon, Connecticut, I inherited in the fifties from a maiden aunt or the apartment in Paris near the Panthéon.
Then one winter, which for professional reasons we were spending in New York, Bella, who had never complained of an ache or a pain, who never caught colds or allowed jetlag to upset her sleep pattern, whose digestion triumphed over every cuisine, began to suffer from lingering sniffles and strange little infections; red blotches appeared on her skin. She joked that if either of us were a drug addict sharing needles or sleeping with fellow addicts she would think she had AIDS. But in her case, she said, she had simply been beaten down by the interminable New York winter. I thought she was right. For the first time in our lives we went south in search of the sun, to Barbados, the only appealing island where a place to stay that met our requirements—those indispensable two offices and close proximity to the beach—was immediately available at a price that was not outrageous. The beach house in St. James turned out to be perfect. We worked at our desks starting in the early morning. Before lunch, we luxuriated for an hour or two in the sun and the caressing Caribbean Sea that regaled us with an unending fashion show of fish darting about the coral reef, and then went home for lunch and the postprandial nap that was our moment of choice for making love. Afterward, until late in the evening, we worked again. After a week of this paradisal existence, Bella told me, as we were leaving the lunch table, that for once we would have to rest quietly during our nap. She hurt everywhere and, it seemed to her, particularly down there. She had noticed some strange bleeding. Would I mind? Immediately, I told her that we must book seats on the next available flight to New York and see our family doctor and whomever else he thought appropriate. She refused categorically, insisting that we stay on the island through the remaining two weeks of our lease. There was no reason to sacrifice even one moment of our idyll. It didn’t take long, however, after we returned to the city to learn that there had been reasons aplenty. Bella’s symptoms were those of acute lymphoblastic leukemia that had attacked her bone marrow and was methodically, implacably subverting it. Increasingly draconic treatments would be followed by perhaps a month’s remission. The cycle was repeated over and over, leaving Bella ravaged and exhausted, with no hope of cure or longer-lasting remission, according to her hematologist, other than a successful bone marrow transplant. Bella’s only sibling, her older brother, was eager to be the donor. The consanguinity and the resulting near perfect match of their blood types reduced considerably the risk of rejection. After considering the protocol she would be required to observe following the transplant, and the benefits she could expect, about which she was stubbornly skeptical, Bella decided against the procedure. I don’t believe this cancer will leave my body, and I don’t care about gaining a couple of years, she said. They won’t be good years. We’ve had such a splendid life together. Let’s not settle for one in which I will be so horribly diminished. Neither of us wants that. There was no hiding of the fact that I agreed. With the help of opiates we had saved up she died in my arms, peacefully, some six months later. And what can be said of me? I am on a rack, but I still have my work. I do it conscientiously and modestly for the pleasure it gives me, expecting no other award. And I have my memories. Dante’s Virgil was wrong to tell him that there is no greater sorrow than to remember past happy times when one is in misery. Memory is a solace. Perhaps the only one. Memory is also the best of companions.
My reverie was interrupted by a voice I knew, although I didn’t immediately identify it, calling out my name: Philip! I turned and saw a tall slim lady in her late sixties or per haps early seventies, strikingly good looking and turned out in a black suit I attributed to Armani and black pumps. A black pocketbook hung from her shoulder on a gold chain. I blinked as I realized who she was. Many years had passed since I had last seen her. How many I couldn’t immediately calculate. But yes, without doubt, it was she.
Reading Group Guide
Love Is All You Need
by Louis Begley
Memories of a Marriage was born out of years of brooding over the marriages of the few college classmates I have kept up with and of other friends and acquaintances more or less my age.
Many, perhaps most, of these marriages have failed, some early on and some not so long ago. If a reason could be identified, it has usually been a spouse’s unwillingness to tolerate the infidelity of the other, or (alternatively) a spouse’s insistence on leaving for someone else—for someone of the same sex, in several cases of late-blooming self-discovery. There has been nothing as threatening among my friends as physical abuse by a spouse, or one of the spouses’ alcoholism, drug addiction, or compulsive gambling, or falling afoul of criminal laws. I have, however, observed marriages such as that of Lucy De Bourgh and Thomas Snow, the central figures of Memories of a Marriage: marriages that have disintegrated, ostensibly without a compelling reason, amid the debris of silent hostility or recriminations. Marriages of nice prosperous people, no sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, but somehow or other you know that their marriage is not happy. One day they invite you to dinner or Sunday lunch at their apartment, or perhaps to spend the weekend at their place in the country, but, when you see them some weeks or months later, they abjure any thought of living with that Monster! And pretty soon one or the other of them makes it amply clear that the war between them isn’t only over money, or the custody of the children (if, as it too often happens, there are children in the picture young enough to be fought over), or that comfortable apartment or house in the country, or the art they’ve collected together, but also over friends. You’re with me or against me. Forget about seeing me if you go on seeing him—or her—becomes the battle cry. Don’t you realize that the Monster has wrecked my life?
We are all, of course, amateur psychotherapists, and, aided by hindsight, we zero in on the hidden reason. It was inevitable, we say. She’s unstable, he’s a compulsive control freak, all she knows how to do is shop, all he’s good for are all-nighters at the office, he’s depressive, she’s bipolar. . . . In the old days, before the advent of no-fault, it all came down to incompatibility and mental cruelty, those were the workhorse grounds alleged by rote in quickie Reno divorces. Those diagnoses may not be wrong, but what went on between Joe and Jane or Dick and Dawn during the years when they seemed just fine and had the children? There are answers to that question, which likewise may not be wrong: They got married because they were lonely, or because of the great sex, or because they wanted children, or because Dick had hoped to use Dawn (or was it Dawn who intended to use Dick?) as a stepping-stone to a better life. It was all a big mistake, but they had been hanging in, trying to make a go of it. Finally something inside one or both of them snapped. Not infrequently, suddenly having more money than in the past has made it easier to decide it was time to call it quits.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments . . . ,” Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 116. In that context, steadfast in allegiance, faithful, and loyal are probably the most relevant definitions of “true.” Were Lucy’s and Thomas’s minds “true”? Shakespeare went on to throw down his gauntlet: “If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” Does what he said hold if among the “impediments” is real or fancied inequality between the lovers? Do lovers who are “true” overlook or rise above it? Is it possible that in this instance the Bard was wrong? Or were Lucy’s and Thomas’s minds not “true”: hers because she was incurably snobbish and ungenerous, and his because the catnip that drew him was not only sex with her, but also her wealth and social position? Inequality in marriages has ever been grist for novelists’ and playwrights’ mills. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these questions have been swirling in my head.
For all the traditional reasons—her family’s importance in the history of Rhode Island and of the nation, and its wealth and distinction—Lucy believes she is at the summit of American society. If she had thought of it, she might have said she was an American orchid. For equally traditional reasons, Thomas, the son of a garage owner and his bookkeeper wife, belongs to the lower class. To add insult to injury, the garage is in Newport, the most elegant of summer resorts, only a hop, skip, and a jump from the De Bourgh ancestral mansion in Bristol, R.I. This makes Thomas, who might have gassed up the fancy cars of Lucy’s friends, a “townie,” a disqualifying and faintly ludicrous condition that his Harvard College, London School of Economics, and Harvard Business School degrees and his good looks and good manners can at best mask from eyes less discerning than hers. A point not to be missed in this equation is that, until he finally leaves her, Thomas tacitly accepts Lucy’s assessment of their relative status. I added, for good measure, other irritants such Lucy’s low opinion of Thomas’s sexual prowess and his being a square with hardly any interest in the arts. But I have the impression that Lucy would have been more tolerant of such failings in a man of her own caste.
What would have been required, I asked myself, for Lucy to come off it, to stop snubbing her own husband, to forgive the garage and the aluminum siding on Thomas’s parental home? I am aware that the class system in which Lucy and Thomas grew up is no longer the American norm, but my inquiry is not moot. Couples continue to face the impediment of inequality in other forms, some old as the world and some new. Among the old: disparity of fortune, education, and looks (a conspicuously handsome spouse married to an ugly duckling). An inequality that Lucy perceived: One partner is a sex athlete, and the other is an underperformer. A new form of inequality that afflicts more and more couples is that of uneven advancement in the spouses’ respective careers. It used to be that husbands had careers and wives took care of the children and made sure the household ran to the husband’s satisfaction. Or, if the wife had a job, her job was understood to be the source of a second income rather than to represent a career that counted. That time is past; two-career families are rapidly becoming the norm, and the woman who succeeds better than her husband, rising higher in business or a profession, is no longer a rare bird. Stay-at-home dads are a recognized species. Why do some couples shrug off—or adjust to—these disparities while others, like Lucy and Thomas, founder?
Steadfastness and loyalty (and I would add generosity): I’m not sure that Lucy, of whom I’m very fond because I have a soft spot in my heart for wild girls, possesses those qualities in great abundance. And then there is the formulation offered by Alex van Buren in the course of his long interview with Philip, which is that, fundamentally, Lucy didn’t like Thomas. Without simple affection, says Alex, not sex but simple affection, a marriage can’t work.
For my part, I believe that Alex is far from wrong.
1. Memories of a Marriage opens in May 2003, “not many days after George W. Bush’s astonishing announcement that the ‘mission’ had been accomplished.” Why do you think the novel is set when it is? How does this historical moment—with its questions of whether politicians tell us the truth, and when to believe them—resonate with the story that Philip is about to tell?
2. We learn early in the book that Philip and Bella lost their only child, Agnes, in a tragic accident—and thereafter avoided New York City, where she died. How do you think such a loss would affect a marriage? Do you understand their decision to leave?
3. Lucy comes from privilege and a well-connected family; Thomas’s family operates a garage. But by the time the novel begins their positions have reversed. Thomas died rich and vastly successful as an investment banker. Lucy’s fortune hasn’t kept pace, and she thinks of herself as “an unglamorous boring old woman” whom no one wants at their table. Do you think their changing fortunes represent a bigger shift in American society? How do we measure success and status today, as opposed to when Lucy and Thomas first met?
4. When Philip visits Lucy at her apartment, she tells him that she’s lonely, and that her life is not “what I had once expected.” What do you think she imagined for herself? Does her disappointment make her a more sympathetic character?
5. As Lucy tells Philip about her marriage to Thomas, she also describes her long-standing, passionate affair with Hubert. This is not the only adulterous love mentioned in the novel; when Philip falls for Bella, she is married to another man. Is adultery ever acceptable? What do you think of these relationships?
6. Philip is an author. When he first meets Bella, he tells her that his novels explore “love and ambition, and betrayal and fear of the ravages of old age.” Do you think this is a good description of Memories of a Marriage? If you’ve read other books by Louis Begley, do you see an overlap between Philip’s work and Begley’s own?
7. Near the end of the novel we learn the title of one other novel Philip has written: The Happy Monsters, a roman à clef set in Salem, Massachusetts. Why do you think Begley reveals the title and subject of this particular novel? What is a “happy monster,” and do any of the characters in Memories of a Marriage fit that description?
8. To whose marriage do you think the title refers? Lucy and Thomas’s—obviously the subject of Philip’s investigation—or Philip and Bella’s, which he mentions throughout?
9. Lucy and Philip had a brief fling in France, before she met Thomas. At the end of the novel, she suggests reigniting their affair. Why do you think Philip turns her down?
10. Philip discusses Lucy and Thomas’s marriage with many people: Lucy herself; Jane, Thomas’s widow; Jamie, Lucy and Thomas’s son; Josiah, Thomas’s acquaintance and Philip’s cousin; and Alex Van Buren and Bill Taylor, mutual friends. Do you trust any of these confidants? Why or why not?
11. When Philip renews his acquaintance with Lucy he is shocked to hear her refer to Thomas as “that monster.” By the end of the novel, do you think Philip believes her? Do you believe her? Why do you think her marriage with Thomas fell apart?
12. What makes a good marriage? Are any of the couples in the novel—Lucy and Thomas, Jane and Ned, Philip and Bella, among others—models for a strong marriage?
13. What do you think happens after the novel ends? Has Philip learned everything he wants to? Does he write his book about Lucy and Thomas’s marriage? Are we to think Memories of a Marriage is that book?