Two Lives

12

After that morning’s walk I knew what Francine was.

Francine was a disruptive; she couldn’t help herself. Francine had seen him and had desired him. Francine considered Celeste Adele a nobody, with her too-sweet manner and her looks and her bird-brain. ‘I want Tom Riversmith,’ Francine said aloud, although there was no one in the room except herself. ‘God damn that silly bitch to hell!’ Francine had lost her own husband because he’d been playing around. Fourteen years of marriage, three children conceived and born, and still he came home with someone else’s smell. A girl in a panty-hose department – one o’clock in the morning, he’d confessed to that. Francine didn’t ask him how he’d come across a panty-hose employee. She only wondered if it was true or if he was getting at her by making her second best to such a person. She’d stopped caring years ago.

That was why she was alone when she discovered she was on a wavelength with Tom Riversmith. Celeste Adele gave itsy little cocktail parties because she liked to play at being a hostess. She handed round Japanese crackers shaped like sea-shells; she made Tom cut slivers of lemon and use a shaker. He did his best among the real-estate people she invited, the lawyers and art-gallery people, all of them off-campus, not his type at all.

‘Now join us,’ Celeste Adele would welcome in a sugary gush as soon as you stepped into the room, where the chatter was already like a tumult. She loved noise. Later, when the party really got going, she put on Big Band music. ‘Having a good time’, she called it.

Francine had been taken to the first such occasion by a man who’d once invited her to the movies, and once to the Four Seasons for dinner. She knew that nothing was going to come of the relationship. Over ribs at the Four Seasons he’d talked about a wife he’d left and how he regretted that now. ‘It’s always a gas at the Riversmiths’,’ he promised, adding that Celeste Adele Riversmith loved to see new faces. On the way, driving with the radio on, he extolled the virtues of his ex-wife, so tediously that Francine moved away from him as soon as they reached their destination. ‘I’m Tom Riversmith,’ her host introduced himself, finding her alone.

Vaguely recognizing her from the campus, he was interested in her presence at a party of his wife’s. (Later Francine learnt that Celeste Adele never invited university people to her parties because she considered it did her husband good to mix what she called ‘the real world’.) Francine was working on the newly discovered Kristo papers at the time and he was fascinated: four years of Kristo’s research, thought to be lost in the swamps of Cambodia, had come to light in the safe of a New York hotel.

‘You’re fortunate.’ He sounded envious. For more than eleven years, since Kristo’s death, there’d been the mystery of the missing notes, with nothing to indicate where they might possibly be. Kristo, who’d trusted no one, had been notorious for jealously guarding every detail of the evidence he turned up.

‘Yes, I have been fortunate.’

She liked his reticence. She couldn’t imagine him blustering like the man she’d married and had spent so long with, a campus flop if ever there was one. She couldn’t imagine him lying, or being caught with a girl in the back of a sedan. He’d be grizzled when he was older – grey and grizzled, and that would suit him.

‘I will always despise you for this,’ his sister said when several months had passed.

She stood there, a woman Francine had never seen before, a woman who’d travelled three thousand miles to make that statement. Tom needed Celeste Adele, their marriage was a perfectly satisfactory one. Tom and Celeste Adele were oppo-sites, but as often as not opposites belonged together, and they did in this case.

‘You’ve smashed your way in,’ his sister bitterly accused. ‘You’re taking what you can get. You’re only thinking of yourself.’

There were tears then, but they weren’t Francine’s. They ran, unchecked, on the other woman’s cheeks. Francine didn’t attempt to argue.

‘She’s done so much for you,’ his sister pleaded with Tom. ‘You couldn’t give her children. You used up her best years. Please, Tom, you mustn’t turn around and tell her she doesn’t matter.’

He shook his head. He hadn’t told Adele that.

‘What you’re doing says it.’

She begged him, while Francine watched and listened. He’d never been like this, his sister said, and then repeated it. He’d always had a heart before.

‘It’s best,’ he quietly muttered.

Hopelessly now, she disagreed. More spurts of tears came, but then she calmed. She blew her nose and wiped at her cheeks. Francine thought that with all this guff out of her system she’d accept the inevitable, would realize she’d gone too far and say so. There was a moment for an apology, for a mumbled effort to repair unnecessary damage. But no apology came.

‘You foul bitch,’ his sister snapped, like ice cracking. Then she went.