“ ‘Country club country. I love being made over, wined and dined, fussed. I never get used to it. I don’t think I will.
“ ‘Lunch turns me on. Tennis-togged women, ladies in tank tops. I like to take off their sweat bands. I love those little bracelets of the untan, the wrist hair where it’s been pressed down under the elastic. I love the way it smells, sweat running with perfume and the better soaps. I like their jewelry, their diamond rings and great gold chains. I love the way their jewelry smells. You know what, Cornell? I can make out the karats, the troy grains in pearls. You believe me? It’s true. The expensive like a whiff of sachet. I can smell money in a purse, coins, even checkbooks, the stamps in their passports, plastic on charge cards, a Neiman-Marcus, a Saks.
“ ‘Christ I’m a bastard. I cheat on my wife. If I had a dollar …’ he tells me. (And I listen to this stuff, who got lucky maybe a dozen or so years ago, and that with a drunk, a woman under the influence, who may have been a little crazy behind the alcohol. But who celebrates the occasion — March 19—like some dear anniversary.) He tells me this shit. Me. So I tell you. You can’t cheat on your wife, you cheat on your friends.
“ ‘We’ll have left early,’ he says, ‘gone separate ways to the parking lot. She gets in my rental car or I get in hers, but I love when they drive, when they take me ’cross bridges and she grabs the toll. When she picks the place, where we can go. Listen, it’s Cairo, what do I know? It’s Cairo, it’s Russia, it’s somewhere South Seas. It isn’t the money, you know that, Cornell. I’m the one being fussed. I’ve published the paper, made the keynote address.
“ ‘And maybe they are nurses, or were before they married their husbands and became doctors’ wives. Hell, I suppose lots of them were nurses, most of them maybe. But up from the nursery and doctors’ wives now. So it’s all right, it’s okay.
“ ‘Because I’m this snob of betrayal, this rat of swank. Your fop of collusion, your paste asshole. And nothing against their husbands. On the contrary. They’re pals, I like them. Every professional courtesy. I second their opinions. We wave on the slopes.’ ”
So Messenger told Mills of Losey’s code.
“Code?” George said. “He’s got fuckall to do with the Hippocratic oath, he’s got a code?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Messenger said. “He goes out of town. He makes love on the beaches, on cruises, off shore. Everything handled, you know, discreet. Shit, Mills, I don’t know. Maybe there are gentlemen’s agreements. Maybe they don’t go to each other’s papers. I don’t know how it’s done. A guy tells me he’s been with a groupie I don’t ask to see the matchbook from the restaurant. I’m an old-fashioned guy. People get laid it’s a wonder to me you don’t read about it in the paper. It’s amazing there’s no extra or the programs ain’t interrupted. Someone makes love … But that’s just the point. That’s Losey’s code. You can wing it like birdies, do anything, everything. Just don’t fall in love. Though that’s the part I don’t understand. I’d wonder who’s kissing them now.
“ ‘The family,’ Losey says. ‘The family comes first. The home.’
“It’s the long view, you see. The long view he takes. Marriage like principal. Not to be disturbed. He’s a doctor, a surgeon. He hates a complication. Side effects spook him, they give him the willies. Sure, that’s got to be it. The principles of science carried over into life. Well, why not? What the hell? I’m glad we had this chat, George. It’s clearer to me now.”
But not to Mills.
“Well,” Messenger said, “he has trucks.”
“Trucks.”
“And an interest in freight cars.”
“I don’t—”
“That he bought with some guys, that he leases back to the railroad.”
“I don’t—”
“Because a lot of this shit must have been in her name, joint tenancy, something sufficiently complicated so that even if he’s audited and they find against him it’s probably a judgment call. And, oh yes, meanwhile he gets the use on the money, the interest compounding against the penalty even if there is one. A divorce could … Well, you can see for yourself. And maybe that’s what he means by ‘home.’ Maybe it’s only his pet name for tax shelter. The horror, the horror, hey Mills?”
Who wanted names and dates, the places of these horrors, whose own interest was compounding now too, but in a different direction, so that when he again asked “Then what happened?” Messenger only looked at him. “What happened?” he repeated.
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know, that it got out of hand.”
“It was his idea that Nora become a graduate student.”
“I see,” Mills said, but didn’t.
“He even picked the discipline. And picked it mercilessly, pitilessly. Architecture. She’d need math, she’d need mechanics. She’d need drawing skills. She’d need calculus and physics, statics and dynamics, and a knowledge of mechanical systems. She’d need to know stresses. She’d need acoustics and drafting, axonometrics and isometric projections. She’d need to know project financing. She’d need a knowledge of real estate and whose palm you greased to get round the zoning codes. So she’d need political science, and a little law too. You see?”
“But—”
“Medical school would have been a breeze, compared.”
“But why did—”
“Because he really is your paste asshole, your rat of swank. Only I didn’t know he was so clever. Christ, he must have studied the catalogue like a doting daddy. He must have pored over that fucker. He must have laughed his ass off when he had to look a term up.
“But I don’t know. I don’t know why he did it. Maybe it was only that same hierarchical predilection for profession that put nurses off limits but drove him into their arms once they were doctors’ wives. Maybe that’s why he married her in the first place, maybe it’s why he loved her. Maybe he was just showing off. Because once he got his license to practice he could, by the simple act of marrying her, take any girl off the street and turn her into a doctor’s wife. Any girl. A typist, a beautician, someone in trade school.
“Maybe excitement quits on you. Maybe it pales. Maybe pride is the least complacent of the qualities, and it’s true what the songs say — the thrill is gone, the blush off the rose. Passion like the seasons, like land that gives out.”
“Maybe he didn’t want her around at those doctor conventions,” George said.
“Symposiums, conferences,” Messenger said. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think he’s better than that. I take him at his word. I believe he really is this rat of swank, that he has this toney, back-of-the-book vision. The couple — she’s a brain surgeon, he sits on the Supreme Court; she skydives for relaxation, he’s into archeology; they swig tiptop scotch and lie around listening to old 78’s — that has it made. The best condo at the fanciest address, who weave great salads and whip up Jap foods which they eat off the carpet before great open fires. (He gets closed-circuit TV, pulls big Vegas bouts from his dish in the yard.) Because he really thinks like that. And what I think, what I think, is that he was honestly trying to make her over. Take this perfectly nice, ordinary girl whom he’d already turned into a doctor’s wife pretty as any he screws in Europe, well dressed as any, tricky as any in bed, well heeled and knowing as any, and go for it. That’s why he chose architecture to be her fate. Out of love and an honest pleasure and pride in just more gracious living. And that could explain Jenny Greener, too.” Mills looked at him. “Think about it.” Mills shrugged. “They’re classmates. They’re classmates, George. She came to your house. What did you think?”