Indiscretion. Charles Dubow

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СКАЧАТЬ is a question I have never asked, had never thought to ask. The answer, to me, is blindingly obvious. Who would not love Madeleine?

      “Of course,” I answer. “Theirs is one of the great love stories of our age.”

      It sounds flip, but I mean it. Not in a tragic, fatal way, where love is denied or thwarted, as one might read in a romance novel. They are not Tristan and Isolde, or Abelard and Héloïse. I can think of no heroes of literature who would fit their paradigm. Their story lacks the obstacles to passion. They met and fell in love. It is one of the simplest and, at the same time, most difficult things to do. The drama of their lives is that they know how to keep love alive. And they are not selfish about their love. They share it with so many people. It is what draws the rest of us to them. It’s not that he is a respected author or she a great beauty, or even that they occupy a charming cottage near the beach, or any of their many other attributes. It is the strength of their bond that draws us and inspires us. We look at them and want to be them. I say as much to Claire. I am probably a little drunk and slightly embarrassed by my loquacity.

      Later, on the ride back to my house, I make a pass at her.

      “Walter, please don’t,” she says. “Let’s not complicate things.”

      I apologize. The idea of forcing oneself on a woman is repellent. Maybe if I felt otherwise, I would have been kissed more.

      After a few moments, she says, “I hope you don’t mind.”

      “Not at all,” I answer gamely. “I felt it was the polite thing, to have at least tried. Didn’t want you to feel insecure.”

      She laughs, briefly placing her hand on my knee. “Thank you, Walter. You made me feel much better.”

      We are friends again.

      At home, the house is silent. She has never been here, I realize. The center of the action was always at Maddy and Harry’s. “Would you like a tour? I promise I won’t pounce.”

      “I’d love it.”

      The house was built by my great-grandfather. He called it Dunemere. All houses then had names, but it has been a long time since anyone called it that. Back then people rarely built on the beach. Instead, they preferred to be closer to town and arable land, and away from the storms that periodically devastated the shoreline. It was at the end of the nineteenth century that wealthy New Yorkers began to buy beachfront property, where they built enormous summer homes, only to desert them each year shortly after Labor Day.

      In the 1960s, my father had the place winterized, primarily so we could spend Christmas here. He insulated the walls, which had been filled with nothing but old newspaper and beer bottles left by the original builders; he also installed a furnace in the basement and radiators in the bedrooms, but it wasn’t until after my parents died and the house fell to me that it really came to be used all year round, though I do shut it up in January and February and drain the pipes so they don’t freeze.

      Unlike many of the modern houses in the area, the interior is dark, its dimensions modest for a house of this size. There is no media room. No family-style kitchen. Real estate agents out here would call it a teardown because the new crop of home buyers would find it too old-fashioned. The design is Italianate; cream-colored plaster on the outside, something that would not have looked out of place in Lake Como or Antibes. In old black-and-white photographs, there are striped awnings over the windows. Inside you walk into a high-ceilinged center hallway covered in the dark stucco that was once so fashionable. The stucco keeps it cool. The walls have family portraits and a large, faded Gobelins tapestry my grandfather brought back from the First World War. Straight ahead and out a large door is a wide brick patio, where my parents held their wedding reception. It runs the entire length of the house and overlooks a lawn that slopes down to the large brackish pond that leads to the ocean. Flanking the door are matching life-size portraits of my great-grandparents. My grandfather, a little boy in a sailor suit, stands next to his father, bespectacled and stern. Opposite, my great-aunt, dressed in crinolines, her hair long, leans on her mother’s lap.

      A long table takes up most of the left side of the hallway, and on it sits an old leather-bound visiting book. The book is almost full. The first entry is nearly as old as I am. The older books are in the library, full of spidery script and long-dead names.

      “Please sign your name if you want to,” I say.

      She does. I have never seen her handwriting before and am not surprised that it’s clear and elegant. My handwriting, like most lawyers’, is appalling. She writes her name and date, and then “You have a lovely home.”

      To the right of the table is the door to a large formal dining room, the site of many endless dinners I was forced to endure as a child when my parents were present, spooning soup and eating heavy meals prepared by Genevieve and served by Robert. The walls are covered in Zuber wallpaper depicting El Dorado. I love that paper. It is a gateway to a different dimension, and on the rare occasions when I throw a formal dinner party I am still capable of losing myself in its magical jungles, canoeing down the Amazon or fighting off Indians with my trusty revolver.

      There are eight bedrooms on the second floor. The largest was my great-grandparents’. It is known as the Victorian Room. I think I will have Claire sleep here. The canopied bed is too short for me, but it is where I always put first-time guests. The ones whom I like, at any rate. I still sleep in the same room I occupied as a child, over the kitchen in what had been the nursery wing.

      Finally, there is the playroom on the third floor. The biggest in the house, it contains an old pool table, bookshelves crammed with popular novels of my parents’ youth—Kipling and Buchan, Ouida, Tom Swift and Robert Louis Stevenson—and chests of drawers filled with exotic costumes brought back over the years by relatives and friends that we used to wear for fancy-dress parties. Along the wall is my great-uncle’s oar from Henley and window seats where I would curl up with a book on rainy days.

      “We should do a costume ball,” says Claire. She is rummaging through the drawers. She pulls out a Pierrot costume I had worn as a child. It would just fit her. Then a burnoose my father used to wear that made him look like Rudolph Valentino. I had always admired it most because it had a real dagger. “That would be such fun.” It has been a long time since our last costume party.

      For a second I almost make another pass at her but think better of it. Maybe she would have said yes this time. Expensive real estate can be a powerful aphrodisiac.

      We go back downstairs, and I lead her to her room. It is large, with windows facing over the pond. I imagine it is probably bigger than her entire apartment. The bed is just to the right as you enter, the French linen part of my great-grandmother’s trousseau. Matching bureaus, a dressing table with my great-grandmother’s silver-backed Tiffany hairbrushes still on it, a fireplace, an escritoire, a pair of Louis XV armchairs. Silvered family photographs. My grandfather in his uniform. My grandmother’s three brothers. Heavy, pale damask curtains. A wide stretch of carpet, a chaise longue, and a table with an old-fashioned upright telephone and an equally ancient radio, neither of which has worked in years but which remain in place because that’s where they’ve always been.

      “What a wonderful room.”

      “It was my great-grandmother’s. It’s something, isn’t it? You know, back then husbands and wives rarely shared a room. My great-grandfather slept next door.” The room as spare as a Trappist’s cell.

      “And where do you sleep?”

      “On the other side of the house. In the nursery. СКАЧАТЬ