and then on Saturday head up north, stopping for a few days at Big Sur on the way. And the best part is, Anne and I will have plenty of time to play. Finally we can take another crack at the Grand Duo.”
I pretended both surprise and pleasure. It was obvious that Nancy needed a sounding board for her fretfulness and planning impulses; also an assistant in what was clearly going to be a redecoration project of considerable scope. And so that very afternoon, along with Daphne—whose outrage at being thrown out of her room Nancy had managed to quell, somewhat, by promising to let her to pick out the sheets—I was taken to Macy’, first to the furniture department, where Nancy arranged for immediate delivery of a new Serta Perfect Sleeper, and then to the whites department, where Daphne, after much debate, settled on a set of “Vera” sheets decorated with bright orange sunsets and blue rainbows in the style of Peter Max. Here the trouble began. Nancy didn’t like the sheets. She worried that Boyd—a novelist, after all—would mock them in one of his books, follow a description of their psychedelic gaudiness with some insulting witticism, something like, “I had to wear sunglasses to bed.” For Nancy, in addition to biographies of crowned heads, was an avid consumer of novels in which adulterous men and women parried rude remarks over martinis, and though she had not yet read any of Jonah Boyd’ novels, she took it for granted that they would fit into this category. “Really, honey, couldn’t we get something more subdued?” she asked Daphne, who had inherited her mother’ stubbornness, if not her taste.
“But you said I could choose!” Daphne said. “You promised. After all, these people are only going to sleep on them two nights. But I have to sleep on them practically the rest of my life!”
In the end, to avoid a public scene, Nancy gave in on the sheets. Bags in tow, we hastened back to Florizona Avenue, where we found Ernest and Glenn in the study, smoking cigars and listening to Mahler’ Fifth Symphony on the HarmonKardon stereo. Glenn and Daphne greeted each other with the studied casualness of people who don’t want anyone to guess they’ve recently been in bed together; I could tell, because that was just how Ernest and I greeted each other.
As no dinner invitation appeared to be in the offing, I said my good-byes and went home. Back then I still lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Orechusetts Drive. My complex—essentially a stucco rectangle with views of the 420 freeway—was called Eaton Manor. Nearby were Cavendish Hall, Hampton Estates, and Chatsworth Court. Most of my neighbors were fellow secretaries, some of whom were also having affairs with their bosses. On Sunday afternoons, Ford LTDs and Oldsmobile Cutlasses filled the parking lot, taking up the empty spaces between the Chevy Novas and Dodge Darts. At this point, my relationship with Ernest had not yet settled into the durable bond that would later prove so sustaining for us both; it was still an off-and-on thing, fretful and fitful. Some Sunday afternoons he would arrive unannounced at my door, pinion me to the wall or push me onto the bed, where we would make rough love. Afterward I would give him tea or Coca-Cola, and we’d look at the television until dusk fell, when he’d leave with as few words as he had come, and I’d move to the window, to watch his car pull out of the parking lot and imagine what, back on Florizona Avenue, Nancy was up to: feeding the cat, or baking a ham, or knitting. I admit that at those moments I envied Ernest, with Dame Carcas to have to hurry home to.
Much has changed in the field of psychoanalysis during the years since Ernest practiced it in the office above his garage. Freud is no longer totemic, and today, if a therapist were to say to his patient, “Well, it’ obvious: Even though it was the husband you were having the affair with, the one you were in love with was the wife,” the patient, though she might agree or disagree, would hardly be shocked. And yet at the time, such an idea wouldn’t even have occurred to Ernest, not because he rejected lesbianism as a category, but because he had yet to conceive of a universe in which men didn’t always stand at the very center. Thus he would never have guessed that