Memories of a Marriage Read Online Free PDF

They were, I said, though not necessarily in that order, love and ambition and betrayal and fear of the ravages of old age. Told through events transpiring in New York and New England, with occasional forays by my personages to places I knew best in Western Europe. She smiled and said there were noother serious themes, except perhaps death itself and retribution and forgiveness. I agreed. Retribution could be found tucked in my work. Forgiveness? It was a subject that had seldom engaged my attention.
    We came to a spot where I could safely park the car, got out, and made our way through the scrub. Soon we were in the open, surrounded by a sea of low vegetation alive with chirruping crickets and inhaling the rich smells I had remembered with such longing.
    This is pure heaven, said Bella. I am so happy you thought of doing this and let me come along.
    My reply was going to be some meaningless compliment, but, suddenly emboldened, I told her that Guy had mentioned publishing her book—which I regretted not having read but would read in Paris—and a new book she was writing. Would she tell me the subject?
    I’ve only done preliminary research, she said, but I think I’ll keep going and probably write something. It’s about an unusual moment in the history of the émigrés who fled the Reign of Terror. The time spent in the United States by Chateaubriand and Talleyrand, who did not stay for long but saw a great deal and wrote down their impressions, and by Marquise de la Tour du Pin, whose memoirs are wonderful. In Chateaubriand’s case, of course, we owe to that voyage
Atala
and
Les Natchez
.
    Those were works I had read, I told her, and had some idea of their influence. I also said, trying to be as modest as possible and at the same time invite her interest, that shortlyafter college, when I began to think about my first book, I steeped myself for a while in late eighteenth-century American history; I had been particularly interested in what was going on in New England and New York.
    Then we must have lunch in Paris, she said, if you ever have time. I would like so much to test some of my theories—no, they’re not quite that. They’re only some assumptions.

III
    T HE MISSION in Iraq having been “accomplished,” I had half seriously allowed myself to suppose that the next step in that poor country’s 2003 march toward happiness and democracy would include the early restoration to Iraqis of self-rule. Instead, the morning after the ballet I saw on the front page of the
NYT
a photo of our proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, and his predecessor Jay Garner looking as though they had each swallowed a particularly pungent meatball, and an article to the effect that the United States and Great Britain had decided to delay self-rule. Allied officials—presumably Mr. Bremer—would remain in charge indefinitely. The telephone rang as I was pondering the implications of that high-handed move. It was Lucy, calling to invite me to dinner that very evening. She said she was still at the Park Avenue address. Dinner was at eight. The weather having continued to be unusually mild, I decided to walk there and crossed the park at Seventy-NinthStreet. Eighth floor, the doorman told me. She’s expecting you. The door is open.
    The apartment was as I recalled it from my first visit, soon after Thomas and Lucy came to live in the city: large, with a profusion of fine early nineteenth-century American furniture, rather-less-good portraits of unsmiling men, women, and family groups who had to be ancestors, because why else would one display them in one’s house, and beautiful Oriental rugs. I had assumed, and saw no reason now to change my view, that it all came from Lucy’s family. Although at the time of my first visit her parents were both alive and presumably intended that the big house in Bristol and everything of importance in it should go to her older brother John, she had probably been left all sorts of things by her De Bourgh