The One In My Heart

“Remember I’m Mrs. Asquith’s favorite young hooligan. At this point I’d say I know a lot about Larry and Zelda’s relationship, probably more than you do.”


My lips twisted. Why did he have to be so well connected to my life? “I didn’t like how he micromanaged her illness or how he just up and left.”

He turned toward me. His eyes met mine in a green, level gaze. “Don’t you think that despite your objections, the choice of whether Zelda and Larry de Villiers will get together should be left to them?”

I made no reply. Part of me wanted to explain my actions, but a different part said that it would be no use. He couldn’t possibly understand.

“I won’t presume to know how you feel,” he said. “I can only tell you what I know: Moira suffered from fairly debilitating depressions—the can’t-get-out-of-bed kind.”

“She did?” His Lolita-esque love affair was turning out to be nothing like what I’d imagined.

“All her life—since she was a teenager. She never hid it from me. In fact, before I left Eton, she told me that she wasn’t well. But, of course, I thought she was down because she missed me. I thought the moment I showed up she’d be fine. Better than fine.

“I showed up. But the stress of dealing with my parents only made things worse. Even after they left, she didn’t get better. I was ignorant and impatient. I pushed her to go out, to invite people over—I didn’t understand depression then, didn’t know that it had a power of its own. I thought she just needed cheering up.

“Then, when I did understand, I panicked. I’d given up everything to be with her, and she was too lost in this bleakness to care that I was there.”

But I saw a picture of you guys around that time, I almost said, at a picnic table with Rob and Darren and a bunch of other people. You looked happy.

I knew as well as anyone did that depression wasn’t a uniform experience. Some days were more manageable; some days a woman in the grip of clinical depression laughed and enjoyed herself. But that didn’t mean she’d seen the light at the end of the tunnel. The next day she could very well be in a pit of despair again, with no way out—and no way for someone who loved her to reach in.

“I almost left,” said Bennett. “Almost threw in my towel and admitted I got in way over my head.”

Shock slammed into me. “When was this?”

“About two months after I got to Berkeley.”

Somehow I’d come to view their relationship as a gradual decline, the thrill and sexual fascination of the initial attraction slowly dissipating over time. I’d never thought of the rough patches they must have overcome along the way. “But you stayed.”

“I didn’t leave—there is a difference. And I didn’t leave because, one, I didn’t have any money; two, I didn’t have anywhere else to go; and three, I was too proud to have my new life collapse so soon after I told my parents that they were too bourgeois to understand the depth and intensity of my great transcendent love.

“So I hung around, essentially. I found a job, made sure she ate, and cleaned up her house because I didn’t know what else to do. And then she got better and our life got back on track. I mean…you’ve been there; you know the cycle.”

I tried to imagine him in the role I knew all too well: that of the caretaker, the one who worried, prayed, and waited. “This shatters the mental image I had of you guys boinking like bunnies once you got to California.”

He smiled slightly. “Don’t worry. We more than made up for the initial lack of boinking.”

That smile did possibly illegal things to me. My fingers tightened on the blanket on my knees. “Of course you did.”

He looked at me for a second before he said, “Larry de Villiers is a man of action. My dad and my brother are both men of action. Men of action feel themselves responsible for everything under the sun and find it excruciatingly difficult not to take charge and attack all the issues head-on. My mom had to divorce my dad before he understood that she really meant it, that he had to back the fuck off and let her handle her own life. To Larry Zelda’s problem was his problem. He’d have gone about it the way he’d gone about every other problem in his life, full-tilt and damn the torpedoes. And when he realized it wasn’t a problem he could solve, no matter how much he threw himself at it, he still had to do something, even if that something was a permanent break he’d always regret.

“I, on the other hand, was a kid. Moira and I had a totally different dynamic—I was never the one expected to make everything all right. In the end, that was what made the difference—that I managed to stand not being in charge of our destiny long enough to have a say again.”

He shrugged. “Of course, this would be a better story if Moira and I had actually stayed together until the end. But my point is, we don’t know everything that happened back then. Maybe Larry quickly realized he’d made a mistake—but couldn’t do anything because, ironically, he was a man of action and he’d already married someone else.”