From the moment I got into Mrs. Nash’s car my life changed. Oh, it changed!
* * *
—
And then I met William.
* * *
—
I want to say right up front: I still get very frightened. I think this must be because of what happened to me in my youth, but I get very scared very easily. For example, almost every night when the sun goes down, I still get scared. Or sometimes I will just feel fear as though something terrible will happen to me. Although when I first met William I did not know this about myself, it all felt—oh, I guess it just felt like me.
But when I was leaving my marriage to William I went to a woman psychiatrist, she was a lovely woman, and she asked me a number of questions that first visit and I answered them, and she told me then, slipping her glasses up to the top of her head, a name for what was the matter with me. “Lucy—you have full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder.” In a way, this helped me. I mean the way naming things can be helpful.
I left William just as the girls were going off to college. I became a writer. I mean I was always a writer, but I began to publish books—I had published one book—but I began to publish more books, this is what I mean.
* * *
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Joanne.
About a year after our marriage ended, William married a woman he had had an affair with for six years. It could have been longer than six years, I don’t know. This woman, her name was Joanne, was a friend of both of ours since college. She looked the opposite of me; I mean she was tall and had long dark hair; and she was a quiet person. After she and William married, she became very bitter, he had not expected that （he told me this part recently）， because she felt she had given up her childbearing years in being his mistress—though this was not a word used by either of them, it is the word I am using now—and so when they settled into their marriage she felt always upset by his two daughters that he had had with me, even though Joanne had known them since they were very young. He found it distasteful to go to the marriage counselor with Joanne. He thought the woman counselor was intelligent, he thought Joanne was not especially intelligent, although it was not until his time in that office, with its dismal gray-cushioned couch, and the woman sitting across from them in a swivel chair, with no natural light in the room, the one window having a rice paper shade to block out the view of the building shaft it looked upon, it was not until he came there that he understood this about Joanne, that her intelligence was moderate and that his attraction to her all those years had simply been the fact that she was not his wife, Lucy. Me.
He had endured the counseling for eight weeks. “You only want what you can’t have,” Joanne had said to him, quietly, one of their last nights together, and he—his arms crossed in front of him, is how I picture him—had said nothing. The marriage lasted seven years.
I hate her. Joanne. I hate her.
* * *
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Estelle.
His third marriage is to a gracious （much younger） woman, and with her he fathered a child, although he had told her repeatedly when they met that he would have no more children. When Estelle told him that she was pregnant, she said, “You could have had a vasectomy,” and he never forgot that. He could have. And he had not. He realized that she had gotten herself pregnant on purpose, and he immediately went and had a vasectomy—without telling Estelle. When the little girl was born he discovered this about being an older father to a young child: He loved her. He loved her very much, but the sight of her, especially when she was young, and then even more as she grew, reminded him almost constantly of his two daughters that he had had with me, and when he heard of men who had had two families—and he supposed he himself had—and who had more time with the younger children and the older children resented the younger ones and so on and so forth, he always secretly felt, Well, that is not me. Because his daughter Bridget, daughter of Estelle, made him almost crumple at times with a nostalgic love that seeped up from the depths of him for his first two daughters, who were by then well over thirty years old.
When he spoke to Estelle on the phone during the day there were a few times he called her “Lucy,” and Estelle always laughed and took it well.
* * *
The next time I saw William was at his seventieth birthday party, thrown by Estelle for him in their apartment. It was toward the end of May, and it was a clear night but chilly. My husband, David, had been invited as well, but he was a cellist and played in the Philharmonic and he had a concert that night and so I went, and our daughters, Chrissy and Becka, were there with their husbands. I had been to the apartment twice before, an engagement party for Becka and a birthday party for Chrissy another time, and I never liked the place. It is cavernous, room after room unfolding as you go in, but I found it to be dark, and it was overdone to my taste, but almost everything is overdone to my taste. I have known others who came from poverty and they have often compensated by having rather gorgeous apartments, but the apartment I lived in with David—and still live in—is a simple place; David came from poverty too.