—
Anne, unlike her mother, had been educated by Vassar. She studied biology, chemistry, and physics along with the literature of hopeless love: Villette, The Age of Innocence, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, The Spoils of Poynton. After graduation, she got a PhD in neurobiology at Columbia. She met Jim finally when she was twenty-seven and he was thirty-three. She was working at Presbyterian Hospital, doing research on the brain’s limbic system. He was finishing a cardiology fellowship. A friend introduced them. At last, karma, she thought. They got along. They went out. They were almost a couple. Jim didn’t say he loved her, but he liked her immensely and he liked her company. She knew from Jim’s friends there had been an early love affair that ended badly, shattering Jim—the girl wasn’t Jewish, no more needed to be said—but by the time they met, he would speak of it only as his “Romeo and Juliet moment”; he seemed recovered. They had been dating for two years when she proposed the first time. “I don’t want children,” he said. Anne went home and wept. In proposing, she had cast herself as Leah, the unloved, wrongfully supplanting Rachel, but finding consolation in her “open womb.” She had anticipated her marital happiness lying with their children, three of them, dark and beautiful like their father, Rebecca, Simon, and Benjamin named for the Justice. She retreated for three months, then came back and proposed again. “No children,” he said. She submitted. I am the beater and the beaten, she thought.
Jim bought Anne a beautiful ring, a large, good, square-cut diamond. After their engagement party, she asked him why he agreed to marry her. “We have nice times together. We have friends in common, interests in common. You understand my work, I understand yours. And no more holidays with my parents.” He laughed when he said this. He referred to his parents as Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, “but less loving.” He was genuinely fond of the Lehmans, “not a rotten one in the bunch,” he would say. “The real question,” he said, “is why you want to marry me. You could do so much better.” She shrugged. “Sheep love,” she said, looking up at him with tender eyes. He tousled her hair. “I forget to mention,” he said, leaning down to whisper in her ear, “you’ve got wonderful breasts.” It was the only compliment he regularly gave her about her looks. She saw the two of them as a New Yorker cartoon of a couple, the lump of lignite coal standing on the wedding cake with the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
Jim had had a vasectomy when he was thirty-five, not long after he met Anne. Starting in college, he’d always taken precautions, carrying condoms in his wallet, a gesture that passed for gallantry. When women asked him whether he minded using a rubber—most of the men they knew did—he’d shake his head. “Look, it’s not as good as sex without one,” he’d say, “but don’t let anyone tell you it’s bad.” Pre-pill, he didn’t want to rely on ill-fitting diaphragms or coitus interruptus. Post-pill, in his prowling years, he didn’t want to rely on the women he slept with.
Jim told Anne about his vasectomy only weeks before the wedding. He’d always insisted on using condoms. Anne was stunned and hurt by his deception. He didn’t apologize, he explained. “It’s not about you. I made this decision before we decided to get married. The condoms were for protecting you against possible diseases.” Anne hadn’t reckoned on a vasectomy, but on the usual, less reliable methods of birth control, the kinds that failed. She had wondered, before Jim had boxed her in, or out, whether down the road, had the responsibility been hers, she would have lied to him about taking the pill. He would be angry if she had gotten pregnant, she knew, but she’d have the baby. “A vasectomy was the only fair way,” he said with an air of magnanimity. “The burden shouldn’t fall on you.” Anne’s temper flared, the only time in three years. “Will you still use a condom after we’re married?” she asked. “No,” he said, “I was tested for STDs. I’m clean.”
—
Anne didn’t recognize Eleanor at the wedding. The reception line moved with breathtaking alacrity. “There are six hundred hands to shake,” Mrs. Lehman said as the bride and groom came into the Harmonie Club’s great hall. “Let’s keep things moving. No kissing except relatives of the first degree.” She had hired twice the usual number of waiters and they were everywhere, carrying trays of Veuve Clicquot and Perrier. Along the walls, she had placed four well-stocked bar tables and four lavish hors d’oeuvres tables, mostly trafe. She knew her crowd. Half the guests went for the shrimp over the line, knowing that the bride and groom would circulate during dinner. Rupert insisted they go through the line. His good manners were often more annoying to Eleanor than his bad manners. He knew in some way that Jim was an old boyfriend but he didn’t mind. Who was going to run off on his wedding day with the mother of five young boys, the oldest thirteen and deep into sarcasm, the youngest still occasionally wetting his bed?