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party in New York. He took me out to dinner, I took him home to bed—which could describe the beginning of most of my affairs at that time; I’m the wronggeneration for singles bars, and too shy besides. In bed Derek was a great surprise; or I must have had some idea that Englishmen were always unremarkable in that way. He liked me too; he thought our screwing was terrific. “My girl, you’re quite amazing” is what he said.
    What is it that is so seductive about being praised in an English accent? Maybe because the clipped sounds don’t go with the words? It is basically not an accent for enthusiasm?
    Derek came back to New York the next weekend, and a couple of weekends after that he invited me up to Boston to see him, in his comfortable shabby flat on Chestnut Street.
    We began to spend most of our weekends together, but not all, and we never saw each other for longer than a weekend, except on that fatal trip to Paris—six whole days of being together.
    Since we spent much less than all our time together, it was assumed between us without any explicit statement that we both saw other people sometimes. “Saw” in that context meaning fell into bed with, fucked. With me that was not the case. I went out for an occasional dinner with an old friend, usually a woman or some nice gay man. Never to bed. In a sexual way I was completely addicted to Derek.
    He did see other people, and what was cruel and unforgivable was that he let me know all about it, in his cryptic, half-drunken English way.
    For example, about six months after our relationship began, I became aware that he was “seeing” a Radcliffe girl. During one of my Boston weekends, it struck me that we were spending an unusual amount of time driving around Harvard Square, going to mediocre restaurants in Cambridge: those were the earliest signs. Then he asked me why I had gone to Wellesley; why not Radcliffe? Later he remarked that he hadn’t known until recently that Californians hadaccents. “Curious, rather unlike other American speech.” And so there she was: a Radcliffe girl, from California.
    One night in bed he asked me if I had ever minded having such large breasts. I did not say, as I wanted to, You dumb jerk, of course I’ve minded. But I thought, Oh, hers are small, and no doubt perfect.
    He had given me a whole girl, with whom I could torture myself.
    At another time it became clear that he was seeing someone Spanish.
    Of course, if I had confronted him with any of this, he could have thought and said that I was crazy. Delusional.
    His delusion, a real one, was that I wanted to get married. Any slight complaint of mine, any hint that our getting along was less than perfectly satisfactory to me, and he would sigh, “Ah, well, my dear, I’m afraid what you really need is a proper husband, and you know that’s not my niche.”
    I wonder if much younger women have this problem too, that of convincing men that they don’t want to get married. I really hope not.
    And although I genuinely did not want to get married—I had not liked marriage to Marshall at all, and I had never wanted to have children—it did occur to me that my clinging to Derek, despite all that he did, probably had in it a marital element. I was like a wife who will put up with anything in order to save the marriage.
    I considered going to a shrink, but all the shrinks I had ever met in a social way had been so dull and flat, so unshakable in their self-esteem. Instead I talked to friends; sometimes I would call Agatha in San Francisco. Once I said to her—very insightfully, I thought: “You know, when a man is really treating me badly I’m afraid to leave him; he might do something worse.”
    “Well, I
guess
that makes sense.”
    At another time, a rather coarse friend, a man, an unsuccessful writer, said to me, “You know, Daphne, you remind me of a man who puts on a tuxedo to take a crap.” I didn’t quite understand that, but I caught the drift.
    I was, however,